Nine Fingers (4 page)

CHAPTER 5

Vinnie Amatucci

Waiting at Midway

Thursday, January 9 / Friday, January 10

I was drifting through the vastness of space, slowly spinning in a weightless void. I could tell it was a dream—there was
a languor in my limbs and a rattle to my breathing—but I just stayed quiet, watching it flow through me. There was no joy,
no sadness, no feeling at all, just a smooth alpha state, bathing me in warmth, as I slowly sidestroked through the emptiness
of deepest darkest space, my head back, my neck loose, letting it all flow in. But in my dream, space was reversed: the black
vastness was a dull white, the stars, random dots of burnished black. My breath came deep and slow. The cold silence embraced
me.

Then there was a honk. A honk? In the middle of the vastness of space? I jerked awake.

I tried to focus my eyes—the white space and black stars came clear to me: I was sitting in cab number 691, staring at the
ceiling—little black holes in white leatherette.

The honking seemed to be coming from behind me. I looked around; the windows were an opaque white. I leaned forward and tapped
the wipers. The cab was covered with snow, but as the windshield cleared, I saw I was in the cab lot at Midway Airport, and
the cabdriver behind me was trying to get me to move up. I had fallen half asleep, zoned out.

And I was cold. Freezing fucking cold.

I cranked up the engine and set the heat to Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell. I reached down below the right-hand seat on the
front, pushed aside the detritus that had collected there and found the scraper—gotcha! I popped open the door and got hit
with a gust in my face.

I hauled out and started scraping the windows. There were about six empty spaces ahead of me, and the line in front of that
was only four or five rows from the front.

The way the cabstands work in Chicago—both Midway and O’Hare—is that you drop off your incoming passenger at departures, circle
around, and enter the cab lot. Each lot is eight to ten columns wide, ten to thirty rows deep (O—Hare’s is bigger by far,
for obvious reasons). You pick a column (I’ve always been a Bernoulli’s theorem kind of guy; I head for the edges), pull up,
and wait. A row at a time gets called up to the terminal, in single file, and as you pull out you get a ticket from the cabstand
master, which he or she time-stamps. This is so cabbies don’t “poach,” drive in off the street and cut in line, which—I’m
shocked,
shocked!
—has been known to happen. At the airports, in a rare exhibition of egalitarianism, you have to wait your turn. Once you get
to whatever terminal has called you up, you pull up at the curb and wait in line again. Eventually, the starter whistles up
a handful of cabs at a time, until it’s your turn. You get no choice in passengers, they get no choice in drivers. Finally,
the fare gets in, tells you the address, the starter takes your ticket, and you’re on your way.

The cab business in this town
lives
on trips to the airport. Ninety percent of the time it’s O’Hare, and that can run thirty-five to sixty-five bucks, not counting
the ever-important tip, depending on the traffic and the weather and the time of day. Any gratuity less than a ten is egregious
penury. It can also take from thirty minutes to an hour and a half to get out there, depending again on traffic and weather
and the time of day, so when you
do
get out there, it usually makes sense to get a fare back. Double your money, double your fun. One of my optimal flow patterns
for the day starts with a fare to O’Hare, and then a quick fare back downtown, starting the day by tucking a C-note’s worth
of confidence into my pocket before breakfast.

The catch is that there are times when you can wait for an hour or three to get a fare back to town. This is true of O’Hare,
which is huge, and also of Midway, which is slow. In the summer you’ll bake, in the winter you’ll freeze. So it’s a gamble—you
get there, appraise the situation, and make your bet. Should I stay? Should I deadhead back to town? The weather, the flight
schedules, the other cabs in front of you all get factored in.

They do have a great feature here they don’t have everywhere, which changes the equation significantly: a short-trip ticket.
Say you’re at O’Hare and you wait for two hours and get some joker going to DesPlaines, five minutes away. Shit! That’s a
five-dollar fare, instead of the real money you’d be getting to go downtown. Get two or three of those in a row and you’re
losing your ass. So they have an irregular radius drawn on a map. Any address inside that radius and you get a short-trip
ticket. It’s time-stamped, and if you can get to where you’re going and zip back to the lot in thirty minutes, you get to
go to the head of the line. Before they had this, cabbies would refuse fares and would get into fights: “
You
go to fucking Downer’s Grove.
I’ve
been waiting here all goddamn day.”

To me, a short trip is actually a good deal. I look forward to them. Plus, at the edges of the radius, it can be a challenge.
Keeps it interesting.

I had finished giving the windows a wipe, and jumped back inside to recalibrate myself.

My first fare after the shooting, at eleven, the guy got in and said, “Midway Airport.” At night. In the snow. Great.

With him snoozing in the back and me fighting the snow in the front, we slid down the Eisenhower past the pluming smokestacks
out to Cermak Road, then waddled south about fifteen blocks, from the high Fifties to the low Forties. It’s desolate out here,
semi-industrial all the way out, and near the airport it’s strip malls with check cashing on every other block, which ought
to give you a hint. This airport used to be close to dead, but then they revived it, because O’Hare was growing to roughly
the size of Mesopotamia, and nowhere else wanted to give up their tacky suburban homes for a new runway. But bringing Midway
back did
not
bring the neighborhood back. The middle-class folks getting ready to move out of the heart of the city hopped right over the
West Side and out to the new suburbs around I-294. And Midway was left just about as it had always been, except for more traffic
and more noise.

It was almost midnight when I got there, so I figured that since there were not going to be any fares to be found on the streets,
I’d try the lot and see what developed. I had heat, I had music. I wouldn’t even mind some rest, I remember thinking at the
time.

Which is what I guess I got.

Now that I was awake, I kept the wipers on intermittent and tried to clear the cobwebs from my head. I was still in the fourth
row, but we had all bunched up in anticipation.

The Fat Man’s cabs are something special. He has three of them. One of them he drives, when he’s in the mood, and no one else
touches it, ever. The second he leases to two guys, twelve-hour shifts each. The third, the one I’m in, is eight-hour shifts,
three of us plus a floater. I’m the usual day guy, but I do some graveyard shifts, like tonight. All three taxis are old Marathon
International Cabs, the old Yellow/ Checker type, the big, bulbous beasts they stopped making almost twenty-five years ago.
They’ve got to have a million miles on each of them, easy. They get about twelve miles to the gallon, but they go through
anything, and they never quit. And when other drivers see these old beasts bearing down on them, riding way up high, let me
tell you: they get the fuck out of the way.

They’re huge inside, even with the bulletproof partition, which he’s had motorized so you can actually roll it down and out
of the way. Great heat, great visibility, new paint. The Fat Man keeps them in mint condition and people get a kick out of
riding in them—like a blast from the past. They’re a lot more distinctive than what the big cab companies mostly use today,
which is those stupid Chevvies or the rear-wheel-drive Ford Crown Vic’s, the same ones they use as cop cars, except without
the big police engine and without the decent suspension.

The Fat Man has juiced these up a bit, too. Double overhead cam multi-port V-8s, tuned suspensions, a little extra turbo boost,
fat new Pirellis, glove-leather interiors, bitching CD / cassette eight-speaker stereo with a sub woofer under the seat; not
at all the way they were delivered. And outside, not a nick or a dent or a scratch anywhere. “You be putting a fucking dent
in my fucking cab, I be putting a fucking dent in your fucking head!” is what he tells his drivers when they come aboard.
And he means it.

I looked around. There was a stirring around up front. I flipped on the parking lights, flicked the wipers again, moved up
a row. Now three rows to go. Time for a systems check.

Cash money? Check.

Trip ticket? Check.

Cigarettes? Let me see…Check.

Weed? Where did I put the weed?…Fumbling around here…Ah-Ha. In my kit bag, tucked between the front seats, where
it’s supposed to be. Take the pipe out, tuck it back in the kit bag. The canister’s in there already. OK. Check.

No wonder I was floating through the deep vastness of outer space.

It would be nice, I think, to get a fare back to town, then work the hotels and the clubs and the hospitals the rest of the
night, downtown, where the roads will be plowed and the people will be awake, doing something, going someplace. Well, some
of the people. There are no radios in the Fat Man’s cabs, no dispatcher sitting someplace warm, pouring money into your ear.

I asked the Fat Man about this once, early on. He gave me his standard-issue Marine Corps stare, and asked, “How much you
have to pay the dispatcher at Yellow, when you was there, get you some calls?”

“The bribe? The kickback? The
baksheesh? La mordita?
”

He nodded. “Yeah, that.”

“Ten, fifteen a week,” I said.

“That get you all the best calls? All them long, good rides?”

“Well, no, not really…”

“How much you ’spect you gotta pay to get them
sweet
rides?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe twenty-five? Thirty?”

“That all?” he said.

“I don’t know. Forty? Fifty? You tell me.”

He looked away, coughed. “Sixty?” he asked. “Seventy, eighty?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s the point?”

“ ‘What’s the point?’ ” he asked, mimicking me. “Point is, you don’t know. I could be keeping my hand out, and you could keep
filling it up, until you be giving me more to get you the good rides than you be making on them good rides. You need somebody
telling you where to go, what to do? Go back to Yellow. You be working for me? You on your own.”

The lights ahead of me flicked on. Up to the second row, I jammed my hat on my head, grabbed the brush and scraper, and hopped
outside to scrape off the snow again so at least it
looked
like I could see where I was going. Some of your customers will appreciate gestures like this, and tip accordingly. Some won’t
care in the least; you never know. I even cleaned off the roof and the hood and the trunk. I was Mr. Thorough.

I was giving the rear window a final swipe when I heard a loud bang, and the sound of breaking glass. I dove for the ground.
I heard it again, on my left, and flinched again, edging under the rear bumper. I looked up, combing the snow out of my beard.
Drivers were throwing bottles at a Dumpster twenty feet behind me. I saw another one, a pint of Smirnoff, sail through the
snow and miss the edge of the Dumpster, splintering against its side.

I was panting; my eyes were wide. The whole scene of the guy getting killed at the club flooded back in precise detail: the
shattering of the glass, the bullet hole in his head, the cold wind on the back of my neck, the EMTs, the cops, the chaos.
My pulse was pounding loudly in my ears.

Deep breaths, Vince, I told myself. Get a grip.

There was another set of honks, and the cabs around me revved up. I brushed myself off and jumped back in the cab. I closed
the door, clicked on the belt, and my row pulled up to the front. We started revving our engines in time with our heartbeats.
I had a long pull of water and popped two Certs. Then the starter waved us on to Terminal B, handing each of us a ticket to
a fresh encounter, a new mystery.

I could only hope that my own encounter would be uniquely interested in the deep and profound mysteries of life…especially
of life back in the direction of downtown.

CHAPTER 6

Vinnie Amatucci

In the Fat Man’s Cab

Friday, January 10

The fare who got in wasn’t sure he wanted to get in and wasn’t sure he wanted to be a fare. He was a good-looking guy, maybe
mid-forties, around six feet, a thinner-than-medium build, trimmed salt-and-pepper hair. He got in the cab carrying one bag,
a funny-shaped kind of carry-on, with a zippered bottom to it.

“Chicago…” he kept muttering, “Chicago…”

I didn’t drop the flag right away—I was thinking that this guy was going to bug out and I’d have to eat the fare. Whenever
that happens there’s paperwork. Lots of paperwork.

“Where to, sir?” I asked.

He still didn’t look up, his two hands tented over his mouth and nose, his index fingers massaging his nose. The guy seemed
to be way down deep. His eyes were fixed on some middle distance, staring.

I’ve had people before who didn’t want to go where they have to be going—wives heading to the county lockup to visit, older
folks heading to the hospital for just one more test—and this one had all the signs.

The starter came up—we were holding up the line by now—and waved me forward a little. I rolled up, hit the switches and brought
both left-side windows down. He came over to the left side and leaned down. Skinny tall black guy, skinny little company jacket—freezing
his ass off, his shoulders hunched against the wind.

“What’s the problem, man?” he asked.

“The problem,” the fare says, pulling his hands away from his face but not changing his posture, “is that I’m in Chicago,
stuck in a snowstorm, and I don’t want to be in Chicago, stuck in a snowstorm, and I’m being somewhat petulant about it.”

Surprise, surprise; he was actually lucid. No tone, no edge to it, just self-observant. Maybe a level or two removed from
current sensory reality.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“You don’t got no choice,” the starter said back. “Airports ’re shut down, both a them, shut down all day tomorrow, too. Talking
ice storm. Same with the trains, not going nowhere, accident down in Indiana. If there’s someplace else you need to get to,
hunh-unh, not gonna happen. You stuck here. Let’s make it painless, aw’ight?”

The fare didn’t budge. The starter leaned down and inside a little, breathing our warm stale air. “You got the cash for this
here transaction?” he asked. This was a courtesy he was doing for
me,
and I appreciated it, because I never ask. It’s one of my more noble failings.

The fare looked up, reached into his front left pocket, pulled out a gold money clip, showing a couple of hundreds and some
smaller bills. His eyes tracked the roll and then rotated up to look at the starter.

The starter leaned back, took a step forward and leaned into my window. “Let’s expedite this here shit, aw’ight?” and slapped
the side of the cab as he walked back, blowing his whistle.

“Sorry to put you through this,” the fare said, “is there a hotel near here?”

“Well, not one you’d want to stay in unless you want to pay by the hour…if you know what I’m saying. You’d probably
do better downtown. Where are you trying to get to?”

He jumped right in, but took it in another direction. “What about O’Hare? What hotels are out there?”

“That’s good thinking. You can get to almost anywhere from O’Hare. Midway here is mostly short hops to second-tier cities
…” Good move, Vince, you just implied he just flew in from some shit hole. “Of course, all the good hotels up there have
Midway vans, every hour or so, if you need to get back here.”

Go ahead, make it worse.

“Is there a Marriott?” he asked.

“There are two, actually. I’ll take you to the better one, near the airport. I know that one pretty well—we play there all
the time. As a matter of fact, we’re playing there tomorrow night.”

He locked onto my eyes in the rearview mirror for a full second, the first time we had really seen each other. There was something
there, no, there was a
lot
there, but I had no context to help it make sense.

“OK,” he said, “Let’s do it,” and sat back into the seat.

I hit the button, craned my neck around, nudged the gas pedal and we were out into the traffic and the slush, heading toward
the Cermak Road exit about half a mile away. The snow had piled up since I had arrived. I turned up the wipers and cranked
up the heat.

I usually let the fare know my intentions up front, and to let them have a say in which route to take. Hey—if you’ve got a
preference or a plan, it’s better you tell me now than after we get there. If I want to go back roads and you want to go Tri-State,
and I just heard on the box that the Tri-State is all fucked up, I’m going to tell you. But it
is
your nickel.

“Here’s the plan, and if you have a different preference, let me know, OK?”

I made a point of pausing here, looking back in the rearview. He looked up.

“We’ll head a mile or two north to the Stevenson, take that west to the Tri-State, head north to DesPlaines Road, then about
two miles east to the Marriott. There are more direct routes, but it’s getting sloppy out there, and I think we’d do better
to stick to the highways.”

“Sounds sensible,” he said, and off we went.

Cermak was a mess, only one lane open each way instead of the usual three. We were poking along in deep ruts, skidding whenever
we hit a cross-rut. This kind of driving is like cross-country skiing: you can’t really stop or go on command, but if you
work at it you can control the sliding. It also helps to have a good car, and the Fat Man has made these as solid as possible—great
tires, plenty of pull when you want it, brakes that, if you really want to stop, you can kick and they’ll catch. I even heard
a rumor that the Fat Man’s own Marathon was a custom four-wheel-drive job, with a tranny lifted from an Audi Quattro.

The fare was looking out the window, his face close to the glass.

“Does this Marriott have the shuttle buses you mentioned?” he asked.

“Yup, to both airports—O’Hare every fifteen minutes and Midway every hour. They have all the amenities—decent restaurant,
room service, indoor/outdoor pool. Cable, HBO, nice lounge. The other one is a Marriott Residence Inn, and you…you didn’t
look like you were ready to take up residence…”

He looked up at this, a wry grin creasing his face, just a tease of a smile, but something, finally. His left arm was still
around that funny case. Either it’s the world’s worst-designed hidden-bottom case, totally obvious, or it’s designed for something
special, I thought. He turned away from the window and glanced at the case, his hand lingering on it.

Without looking up he said, “You said you ‘play there’? ‘Play there all the time’?”

“Oh,” I said, “Oh, yeah. I’m with a band that has a regular gig there, on Fridays, every second or third one, like tomorrow,
in fact, from nine ’til midnight.”

“You’re ‘with the band’? What do you play?” he asked.

“I play piano, and I’m like their manager, their agent,” I stumbled.

“ ‘Like their manager, their agent’…?” he echoed.

“I was one of the original members, about four years ago,” I said. “It started as a bunch of U. of C. students just having
a good time. Man, some of the early gigs we had…”

“ ‘U. of C.’?” he echoed, again.

“University of Chicago,” I spelled out. “We had a six-piece band, jazz, Dixieland, standards, that kind of thing. I played
piano. Sorry, I already said that. We had a trombone player who had the time-sense of a Tourette’s patient, a clarinet player
who played in the key of H, a bass player who thought he should be playing lead and everyone else should be playing ‘under’
him, a drummer who, when he took a solo, sounded like someone kicking a drum kit down two flights of stairs, and this trumpet
player who we found totally out of the blue and who had never played anything like this before in his life.”

Vince, I said to myself, you’re babbling. Take a fucking breath.

“What was this band called?” he asked.

“Man, we had a lot of names, ‘South Side Strutters,’ “Chicago Dixie Kings,’ ‘Hyde Park Ramblers’—for an extra ten bucks you
could call us anything you wanted. Lately, we seem to be called ‘New Bottles.’ ”

“…?” He didn’t even have to ask, just a twist of the head.

“For a while our trumpet player was calling it ‘Old Wine, New Bottles.’ You know, like playing the standards, but maybe in
a different way.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Yeah, it was. I’m too young to be talking about ‘way back when,’ but we had a blast. Man, some of the gigs we played—” I
reminisced.

We had pulled over the top of a ridge, and down below there was a car half-flipped in the median, an SUV, a Stupid Useless
Vehicle, and people were stomping their brakes as they tried to get an eyeful, swerving side to side, their red taillights
leaving trails like tracers in the night. I found a slot to the right of the pack and rode quietly around it. I found a clearing
in the flow and quietly surged to fill it, then eased back, safely ahead of the fishtailing gawkers.

That’s what real driving is all about: anticipation, timing, rhythm.

“So anyway,” I continued, droning on in spite of myself. “We had a great time and then people started to leave and graduate
and shit. We learned a lot of new stuff that all the new people brought with them. I’m not talking formal arrangements or
anything. By this point everybody in the band could sight-read, but pretty soon, nobody would need to. People brought in their
own styles, their own approaches. We started getting better gigs, better money. We evolved almost chronologically, that’s
the tautological logic of it, and pretty soon it was classics and swing and even three months or so of some Western swing—we
found a sax player who thought he was a Texas fiddler—and then, of course, bop, the new thing, fusion, whatever.

“Now here we are, four years into it, we’re all in the fucking union, and the only original ones still with the band are me
and the trumpet player, and man has he changed some in that time. I mean, not who he is, I don’t think that’ll ever change,
but what he can play is just in a different league. The rest of the guys have evolved around him. We’ve got a pretty tight,
mellow group, maybe one more piece needed to complete the puzzle, but that’s just the critic in me.”

A typical Vinnie conversation—all poured out in a big one-sided rush and no one’s paying attention.

“Like I said, I manage the band and act as their manager. I record most of the gigs and do the telephone thing with the clubs
and the radio stations and the free papers like the
Reader,
” I continued. I added one of my stock lines, “I’m having almost as much fun doing that part of it. Suits my entrepreneurial
nature,” I added with a flourish.

I paused. Our exit was upon us. I hit the directionals, nudged right, and eased around a big slow curve and up to a red light.

“Well, it sounds like—”

“We’re about two miles away, at this point,” I said. “A straight shot.”

He nodded.

I paused just a little too long. “Hey, sorry. I must have been on autopilot. You were saying something, all I caught was ‘it
sounds like…’ ”

“It sounds like you’re having an interesting experience of the music business,” he said, and with that comment, cryptic as
it was, it was over.

We cruised east on DesPlaines, just plowing along. The snow up here was about seven inches deep, and piling up. I was thinking
that maybe it was becoming the kind of night to deadhead
to
O’Hare, a rarely attempted maneuver, and see if I could pick up some scraps—people finally giving up, airport staff who didn’t
want to drive, whatever.

I was also thinking about why I was jabbering on and on to this perfectly strange stranger about my perfectly strange hobby,
if that’s what it was, and why I was feeling so this-way-and-that-way about it, when up ahead loomed the Marriott. I swung
in along a path of lights glowing softly through a thick coating of snow. We pulled up under the canopy. I stopped the meter
and gave him the total, about twenty-two bucks. He pulled the money clip and handed me a twenty and a ten, said “Thanks. Keep
it.” That half-smile again. I handed him a receipt, and he snaked it into his pocket. He tucked that case under his arm, pulled
his coat closer around himself, placed his hand on the door handle, then turned and said, “Good luck with the music. And play
your piano, every single day, no matter what,” and was gone out the door. I could see him wave off the doorman, politely,
as if it were some failing of his that he wasn’t yet frail enough to need help; then he went in through the revolving doors
and was gone.

Interesting fare, I was thinking, when one of the doormen blew his whistle directly in my fucking ear—me turning to face front
as he swiveled to face me. I hear you, I wanted to shout. I fucking hear you.

I pulled forward a few dozen feet. I looked through the window and it wasn’t snowing, it was raining. Big fat drops splattering
on the windshield, increasing in intensity as I sat. I turned the wipers from intermittent to full. What was this shit?

Suddenly there was a knocking on the driver’s window. I rolled it down two inches. It was the doorman again. “You can’t park
here. If you’re going to wait you have to move it over to the cabstand there, on the other side of the circle,” he said, swinging
his arm.

“Yeah, I got you,” I said, like this was news or something. “What’s with this rain? Is it going to wash all this snow away?
Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Not gonna happen,” he said.

“Say again?” I asked.

“Temperature’s dropping. They say it’s gonna rain for an hour, then drop into the teens and freeze,” he said. Curious—he sounded
strangely happy telling me this. What, like he wasn’t going to be outside in this mess chipping ice while I was sliding all
over the roads? Where was the fellow feeling, the salary man’s solidarity?

“Sounds like lots of fun for all of us,” I said, sarcastically.