Book II: The Ride of the Night

I’d been feeling as blue as blue can get. No one uses that term since the fifties but blue was what you’ve got left when life has nothing in it but emptiness.

The bars were closed and I was cruising… not even looking for a ride. It was what I call “The Magic Hours” between three and four AM. It’s “the Blue Hour.”

Red’s the company’s radio code for when you pick up a fare. Green’s for when you’re free for the next one. Purple was universal code for entirely something else. But Blue… well Blue was a special code I have between myself and the dispatcher for, “leave me the fuck alone a minute”. The Blue Hour was when the lonely hearts, the drug dealers, the drug users, and people going to the hospital E.R. with real or fake ailments… fake or real pain to get a shot of something good. It had been a couple of months since I got off the bus in Santa Barbara. I no longer hoped for a new start. At best, I hoped to merely plod through the night and blot out the memory of Celeste, Ariel and even Kuka. B.B. King was on the C.D. player: “Born under a bad sign… if it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all…”

An old man flagged me down. I didn’t want to pick him up but the cab had a mind of its own. The guy got in the back seat and I immediately recognized the smell.

“Take me to the California Hotel, young man.”

“Sure thing,” I answered as I hit the button to roll down all the windows. “Do you remember me?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

I was sure it was the same old man from the bus so I ventured to refresh the impish old-fart’s recollection, “The Greyhound… the bus?”

A blond with a short skirt and legs to match it a block away from the California Hotel gave out a loud, New York City-style-cab-hailing, whistle that could have cut through time and space a half-mile away.

“Never been on a bus. You can pull-over now… stop.” He paid the fair plus a five-dollar tip saying, “Here, buy yourself a drink when you get off.”

I pulled over to the curb at Rocky’s where the long legs were standing.

She slipped into the back-seat of my cab. Gracie, I thought, she did it so gracefully. She was pretty as Grace Kelly but sexier. I flipped the flag: actually, pushed the button, as meters no longer had flags. The meter’s running nonetheless. The usual questions… destination and so on. Some anonymous chit-chat… It usually goes like that… fare after fare through the dark night lit by headlights and neon… shady corners of alleyways leading into brick and concrete canyons of obscurity… dumpsters, cardboard blankets on shadow people, eddies of Mac wrappers whirling at the end of ambushes in dead-end alleys. I knew all the bars, hotels, no-tell motels, where whores could be found and where a pint might be obtained from the back of liquor stores after two-am… but you wouldn’t want to ask me where the schools and churches are. I was a graveyard driver and I preferred it that way. The sunrise told me when it was time for a drink and I drank to chase away, or to dive morosely into the pool of memories of a life that once meant something to the Somebody I once was. I rarely drank those days for the mere joy of letting go.

“So,” she says, “What do you do when you aren’t driving cab?”

“Nothing much…” I answered and wondered whether she really wanted to know, or was she just bored, making a stab at wiping out the tedium of ending a night, alone in the back seat of a cab. For her sake I added, “I sleep after a few brews in the morning.”

“That’s it? You don’t look like you think that is all there is to your life.”

“And what does my thinking ‘look like’ to you … Gracie?”

“I don’t know… maybe like you might be writing a book or something… maybe a screenplay,” she answered.

“Naw… I just eat, drink and sleep, Gracie? May I call you Gracie …as in Grace Kelly?” I wanted to change the subject. If the truth was told, I did have a novel in me but I didn’t want to let that demon out. No, I’d save that for later.  I said, “Hell, this is Southern California. Every cab driver has a novel or screenplay in him.”

“Yeh, sure… call me whatever you want.  Anything but Last Call is fine with me.”

She was getting more interesting. I leaned over to the back seat to get a look at her thighs… her short skirt glowing white flesh, flashing neon reflections of the passing lights, “What do you do, Gracie, if you don’t mind me asking? Do you have a book of poetry or something more interesting going on? You know, other than living vicariously through an anonymous cab driver?”

“Hey, watch the road.” She laughed. I liked that. It is far better to laugh at maudlin sarcasm than be insulted by it. She squinted, leaning forward, to get a name off the cab license clipped to the dash, “You ain’t anonymous now, are you Max? I don’t have much going on either.  You know where I can get a schnapps or something better?”

“Something better, eh? I like you well enough… don’t get me wrong, honey, but I have a lease to pay on this cab and I have a flea-bag hotel room a week behind on the rent.”

She climbed over back of, and into the front seat with her butt two inches from my smile on the way over. I laughed, “Yeh, sure, name your poison. You can call me Mickey. You know, as in the Mick.”

People had to get to know me… close friends, taxi dispatchers, and great cab fares, knew me as Max. Casual cab fares on first introduction were given any one of my fiction characters’ names, the Mick, Mickey.

 “Sheeze, Mickey sounds like a mouse. I like Mick. Mick sounds like a gangster, I like it.”

Ah, the way she said, “I like it”,  arose from her throat as juicy as a ripe tomato... Ahhhh, I surrendered.

I told my friend Jimbo about her as we took another toke during a break at the taxi stand, saying, “I'm no Humphrey Bogart and she’s… well, she’s as close to Lauren Bacall or Grace Kelly as I’m ever going to get.”

Jimbo laughed, “Yeh, film noire. I’m surprised you don’t know her. She’s the patron saint of the graveyard shift.”

“Nadya? You know her?”

“Sure, just haven’t had a taste of it yet.” Jimbo pointed to the gold band on his finger and continued, “Be careful, Two-O and Six-two both fell head over heels for her. Six-two went broke keeping her in cola.”

The patterns of light cast on the wall told me it was late afternoon. I was alone and Nadya was gone. My wallet was still there… it must have been love. Naw, it was just a break in the isolation. A note was held down by an ashtray on the dresser, “Max, I’ll be in L.A. a week or two. It was fun… Maybe we’ll get together when I get back.”

I've Kafka-ed myself into a
cock-a-roach

I knew we weren’t likely to get together. At least in the form of any plan. It was a one-night stand for both of us.  Still, I was impressed with her. She had no inhibitions at all. At one point that night she had to take a leak. She could have gone down the hall to the can but she just climbed up on the corner sink, squatted Japanese style and let it flow. The acrobatics of this simple action was one thing but it was the contrast that intrigued me. Of course, I couldn’t imagine Grace Kelly doing that… but it was brazen boldness of it that I admired.

“Sheet,” I moaned when my fascination caught up with me, “I’ve Kafka-ed myself into a cock-a-roach.”

“What Hon? Here’s a roach.” She lit it and passed it to me and poured two fingers of Jack into the plastic cup that served as an amenity in the Virginia Hotel.

“I need a greasy hamburger to calm my guts,” I changed the subject.

“I don’t suppose they have room service here.” She clung to me like an innocent child as we passed out for the rest of what was left of night.

The morning after the next day I went straight to the bar after my shift. It must have been two in the afternoon before I got back to my flop. I had a tacit agreement with Claire, the bartender. She called, Last Call! For me if I stayed until two in the afternoon on the nights I planned to work. That way I’d at least get enough sleep to take the night shift and show up reasonably sober… well, as sober as anyone like me might expect. I wasn’t so sure my blood-alcohol-level ever got below point oh-eight before midnight in those days, but, I usually made my way into the hack by nine PM regardless.

I got to the flop after my shift, pulled back the covers, and curled up in the fetal position. My heart ached from the isolation and the cold emptiness of it all. Worse than that was the knowledge of the certain reality of knowing that life was going to be nothing but downhill from there. This was the best, the absolute best, I could’ve hoped for… after all, hadn’t I gotten good and drunk and laid the night before. There was nothing else I wanted. I shoved up a prayer to the void, “Damn you... You Bastard… leave me alone!”

Whatever they want to call it…. God? I don’t know what that is but I did know that this prayer was answered long ago. The Koi, that beautiful bottom feeder, was indeed alone.

At the Remington I poemed a dream:

Woe to you, humankind. You have lost your aspirations and thus your wings.

Now, psyche plucked and feather-bare, with no legs to compensate where glory flew above the tedium of earth-bound mediocrity, you crawl in sulfur fumes… exactly like a worm.

Exactly like a worm…

Devouring the putrid waste and wasting what is not.

Genius dead and mourned

You’ve become a democracy of worms…

   wingless, legless, writhing twisted masses,

   mired inside of computer banks and throttled

   by tentacles of robot-mothers serving up

   toxic memories

   of a castrated deadbeat father.

Be not afraid. Poor genius is not dead and still owns wings.

A worm is no worm if it owns a set of wings… tattered or not.

With’s and with-outs… Doubts,

Fears, Loves, and Hopes.

“Oh, Christ! The Devil is Old,” says the sage,

“Grow old and know him!”

Wingless and full of woe, charging headlong on rubber legs… iron willed… Upon this molten rock I’ve found my principle, if only for the sake of endurance… I die.