Chapter 10. Gracie and the Fedora

Late night cruising… light rain drizzling… just enough to keep the wipers going… pull over to the curb… they were arguing… young couple… they almost took the door off its hinges taking the backseat…he jumped in first… a real gentleman… and she slammed the door behind her.

“What the hell were you talking with him for?” he demanded.

She fired back,“What, I have to answer to you?” 

They ignored me, I'm only the driver. I tried to get a word in edgewise, “Where will you be going?”

“Just drive! Don’t worry, I tip well.” The dude in a fedora shouted over her protests.

“Anywhere?” I patiently cut in.

She was too involved to hear me, “I’ll dance with whoever I feel like dancing…”

“It’s, whomever, I believe,” I quipped. But to them I’m not there.

The Fedora finally acknowledged me by condescending… took off his hat and put the fedora on my head.  He continued with her, “You were on him like a bitch in heat.”

The rudeness of this turd pissed me off. I turned around, put a hand on Fedora’s shoulder and said, in my best Jack Nicholson…. “I hate to interrupt, but I’d like to know where I’m takin’ you?”

The touch caught the prick’s attention, “Valerio!”

“Okay, Chief.”  I didn’t care anymore. What the hell… the meter was running and I could dump this pain-in-the-ass a.s.a.p. I was busy most of the time with trying to cut a path through the jungle in my mind. It just didn’t matter to me at all whether anyone was going to fight or fuck in my backseat as long as the meter rate was paid at the end of the ride.

Her voice was familiar. I took a furtive glimpse through the rearview mirror… then I recognized her, Oh, fuck… beautiful… it’s Nadya! Now I took an interest in the argument. Gotta figure she’d hooked up with another asshole.

She smiled…recognized me too… “Hey Max! Long time no-see, Kimo-sa-be!”

Fedora looked pissed. Now his bitch is flirting with the cabbie!

I thought, hell, it's going to be an entertaining ride after all. It ain’t my fight but I can take sides. “Yeh, what have you been up to, Gracie?” I threw in my nick-name for her just to piss off the Fedora some more and let him know we go back some.

“Do you know him?” Fedora spat out, him, like a cat coughs up a hairball.

“Gracie and I had a moment, didn’t we Gracie?” I dug into the turd a little deeper.

“Sure did…” from her smile I could see that Nadya loved this moment too.

Fedora wasn’t taking it… “Her name ain’t Gracie. So just drive asshole!”

“It is, if Mick calls me Gracie!” she fired back.

“Shut the fuck up, cunt!"”

That did it… the C-word. It has a history with me.  I checked the rear-view mirror to make sure she had her seat-belt on and the Fedora didn’t. There are times when service workers can’t abide rude, condescending, pricks any longer. The waitress snaps; dumps a pie ala-mode and all, on the patron’s lap and walks away: the bartender points out the door: the cabbie slams on his brakes! 
“Fuck you. Punk!” The cab braked, tires screeched and skidded over on the drizzle-slicked pavement in a perfect drift to the curb… “Now, you walk.”

Fedora wasn’t used to cabbies doing this sort of thing to him, “Who in the fuck do you think you are?”

Smiling, Jack Nicholson took over again and told him who I thought I was, “I believe I am the one with the brakes and the gas-peddle. In cases like these, it doesn’t matter who I think I am. It's what I think you are.” Still grinning, “Now, I’m askin’ politely, get the fuck out of my cab, asshole.”

I got out of the cab, opened the rear door on the driver’s side, and winked at Nadya.

Looking up at me from the rear seat, Fedora demanded, “Gimme my hat back!”

“Consider it the good tip you promised.” I doffed the hat gentlemanly.

Fedora was out on the street.

“I know your boss. I’m reportin’ your fuckin’ ass!”

I got back in the cab and hit the button that locked the doors as the Fedora reached for the rear-door handle.

I opened my window half-way, “I don’t have a boss.”

“Then, I’m callin’ the police. I’ll have your license!”

I threw my card out the window to the wet pavement, “Here’s my card. Be sure to get my name right.”

Pulling away, I looked back in the side-view mirror. A man, clearly out of his element, was standing in the middle of Santa Barbara Street… in the soaking drizzle… matted hair… less one fedora, and cursed by cosmic forces beyond his control. He wasn’t getting laid tonight.

“Hey, thanks.”

The meter shut off, I gave her another wink, “It was nothing… Where’d y’ meet that fucker?”

“Oh, we go back a ways.”

“Sorry to hear it.” I drove up the hill past the Saint Francis Hospital.

“Yeah, he’s one of those Montecito trust-fund babies…”

“Town’s full of ‘em.”

“I know… I’m one of them too. I went to Cate School with him… went separate ways after that…then he was off back East to college.”

“Old flame?”

“Sorta… he was a nice guy back then. I don’t know what happened at Brown but he’s a jaded jerk now.”

“Life can do that to a guy, even in the Ivy Leagues, eh?”

“You look ridiculous in that hat, Max. It’s too small for your head.”

“Maybe I’ll get a haircut”

“He dirt-grabbed it at the bar anyway.”

Nadya had moved to a small apartment on Santa Barbara's Riviera overlooking the town sparkling with jewels of light at night. I stopped by when my shift wound down between three and four A.M. I’d bring a taste of coke and we chattered like teens on a date that was going well, but, like high school, it never ended in sex. Cocaine made sure of that. I loved her but wasn’t in love. I harbored a hope that somehow she would transcend the coke and part the Red Sea between her thighs for me once more. It would not be so.

Since Kuka, I was in that purgatory of “Just Friends” with damned near every woman I’d met and now it was Nadya. I knew from bitter experience that, once you crossed the Rubicon into the Provence of “Just Friends”, there was no turning back. The hotel room way back then was my introduction to what I was going to be missing out on for the rest of this relationship and that it was all I was ever going to get. To make things worse she asked me to sleep with her now and then, but still no sex.

Nuzzled up under the covers… spooning up to her round, soft and luscious ass, I tried again and again, “C’mon girl… what gives? I can’t take too much more of this.”

“I’m tired… get some sleep…” the finality of the order killed my libido… worse than killing me, it was an excruciatingly cruel form of castration. However, I’d no longer the drive of a teen. When a woman said, “No”, not only was it the correct response to answer, “okay,” but to agree that it was a good idea. Our relationship, if you want to call it that, evolved into more of a brother/sister one that was parented and fueled by cocaine and the tease of false hope. This was the first of a series of these blue-balled experiences and I wondered what had changed in me to become a middle-aged forty-three-year-old eunuch and a magnet for frustration of this kind.

I tried to break away from Nadya but she would call for my cab whenever she dated another of her latest in a string of assholes. She’d even track me down mornings in the bar to tell me about the current jerk she was with. She could really pick them too. I eventually cut it off completely with her when she married one of them. The groom was a member of a British rock group and she had just inherited the rest of her daddy’s money. That Brit figured out how to cash in, knock her up, leave her with a darling little girl, and, skip out and off to England after the money was nearly gone. I considered the justice harsh but it was justice.