Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (8 page)

Some of the craziest guys I met were
actually the other drivers. One of them was a homeless crack
addict. He drove an old black 2-door Chevy Camaro that he had
bought a long time ago, during his better days. Now he slept in
that car. And he drove it as a cab. When he picked people up, they
had to move the front seat back to climb into the backseat, which
was covered with his dirty laundry.

One of the other drivers was a retired cop.
Later I found out he didn't really retire. He was fired for
stealing cocaine from the evidence storage. He told me that one of
his regular taxi customers was an old man, who paid the retired cop
to have sex with the old man's hot young wife in the cab, while the
old man watched.

Another driver, Will, was mentally ill. When
he took his medications, he seemed to be high functioning. Or at
least functioning well enough to drive people from point A to point
B. But when he didn't take his meds, you could tell that there was
something seriously wrong with him. He would stand in the middle of
the room at the taxi home base, and bop back and forth, shifting
his weight from his toes to his heels. And he was convinced his
wife and daughter were being raped by aliens, and that the aliens
had implanted tracking devices in their brains through their
noses.

One of the other drivers was friends with
Will and went over to his house every now and then. One time, when
he got there, Will opened the door and whispered: "Shhhh, they're
here!"

"Who's here?" the other driver asked
him.

"The aliens!" Will replied with a
whisper.

The other guy followed Will into the house.
He looked around, but the living room was empty.

"I don't see anyone."

"Shhhh! They're invisible!"

A few weeks later Will boarded up the
windows and doors on the first floor and then jumped out of a
second story window. That's when his wife decided enough was
enough, and she called 911 to have him committed to the mental
health ward at Bellvue Hospital.

Will jumped out of the driving ambulance and
ran away to Florida.

About a month or so later, he suddenly
showed up for work again, like nothing happened. Since Lou was
always short on drivers, he didn't ask any questions and just told
Will to go pick up some people and drive them to wherever they had
to go.

So these people were being driven around by
an escaped mental patient. Literally. Food for thought for the next
time you take a cab.

Another driver was this young latino kid who
was a gang member. He had robbed a mall with a machine gun. He was
arrested and went to prison, but hid the money. When he finally got
out of prison, he invested the money into opening up a flower
store. But business wasn't going so well for him, so he ended up
driving a cab to make ends meet.

He was playing Tomb Raider at the time. I
was playing it too, and I was farther along in the game than he
was. There was this one spot he couldn't get past, so one day he
said: "You're coming to my house tonight and you're gonna get me
past that spot."

I really didn't want to. I figured if I
don't get him past that spot, he's gonna get pissed and stab me or
something. And if I don't go, that's gonna piss him off, too, and
then he's gonna stab me for that. So I went home with him after
work at 2 am. He turned on his Playstation. I was sweating bullets,
but I got him past that difficult spot in Tomb Raider without too
much trouble. Then he said, "Thanks, you can go now."

This other driver was a member of the mob.
Or maybe he just pretended he was. He was this little old Italian
guy who looked and sounded a lot like Joe Pesci. He had been in
prison for check fraud for a couple of years. All the other old
time drivers knew him, but I was the new kid. When he got out of
prison and started working at the cab service again, he kept
staring at me, while we were sitting in the base, waiting for
calls. I kept looking back at him, wondering why he was staring at
me. It was getting uncomfortable.

Then he said: "Why are you looking at
me?"

"Uhmm, I'm not."

"Why not? What? I'm not good enough for you
or something? You think you're better than me?" He really did sound
a lot like Joe Pesci.

"Uhmm, no. Look, I don't want any trouble.
I'm just trying to make some money."

But he didn't let it go. He just kept making
these confrontational comments. He really was trying to start shit
with me for no damn reason. It was getting kinda scary. He was
about a foot shorter than me. I'm sure I could have taken him in a
fight if I had to. But who knows if this nutjob has a gun or
something?

Finally Jim, the dispatcher, told Joe Pesci
to back off: "Leave Oliver alone. He's a good kid."

Joe Pesci backed off immediately: "Aww, come
on, I was only kidding." He gave me a big grin and slapped me on
the back. Fucking douchebag. We ended up getting along pretty well
though.We drivers were one big crazy family of misfits.

Jim the dispatcher liked me a lot, because
he thought it was cool that I was a cartoonist, and because I ran
personal errands for him inbetween my calls. Jim weighed about 350
pounds and had no teeth. Well, no, that's not true. Actually he had
one front tooth left that was holding on for dear life. Most of the
errands involved returning a couple of pornos each night, that he
had rented from the video store the previous night. He rented a LOT
of porn.

In return, he always tried to help me out by
giving me the best calls of the night, even when it was really
someone else's turn to get the next call. Airport calls were
usually the best kind, because people who go to the airport tend to
give big tips.

Short one-way trips within our neighborhood
were only $3.50 back then. Short round-trips were $7. Sometimes
people had to make short round-trips to go buy drugs. Jim knew all
the local crack houses, so if someone called for a round-trip to
one of the known drug hotspots, he charged them $20 instead of $7,
because of the risk involved.

I didn't want to get arrested with drugs in
my car for lousy $20, so I asked Jim to never send me on any of
these drug runs. He promised he wouldn't.

Then, during a particularly slow night, with
hardly any calls at all, Jim sent me on a round-trip with this
girl. She kept sniffling a lot while she was sitting in the car
next to me. We drove to some really shitty part of town. She ran
into some wretched house, came back out 2 minutes later, and handed
me $20 when I dropped her off at her home. She was obviously a coke
addict and we had just been on a drug run.

When I got back to the base, I was mad at
Jim and asked him why he sent me on that call, when I had
specifically told him to never send me on a drug run. He said he
felt bad that I wasn't making any money because it was such a slow
night, so he figured he'd throw me a bone. He said he was just
looking out for me. I told him I appreciated that he had the best
intentions, but that I really really did not want to do these kinds
of runs. After all, I was driving my own car, without a taxi
license. So if the cops pulled me over with drugs in the car, I
wouldn't be treated as a cab driver who had nothing to do with it,
but as an accomplice in a crime.

A few weeks later it was another very slow
night. Jim sent me to pick up some guy who lived near the base. We
drove to some shitty part of town, and he ran in, ran out, and
handed me $20 when we got back. It was another drug run!
Motherfucking Jim!

When I got back to the base, I told Jim
again that I didn't want these types of calls. He grinned his
toothless grin and said: "Stop complaining. You just made some easy
money, and nothing happened."

I went on another call and when I was about
to head back to the base, Jim called me on the radio and told me
not to come back just yet. I asked him why not. He said because my
previous passenger, the guy who had gone on a drug run, had lost
his drugs in my car, and was freaking out.

He was at the base, screaming that I had
stolen his drugs. Jim tried to calm him down and told him that I
didn't do any drugs and I didn't have his stuff, but the crazy guy
kept screaming and freaking out.

Finally he left and I went back to the base.
I was sitting in the back room, where we drivers sat and waited for
the next call. People who walked up to the dispatcher's booth
window could not see into the back room.

Suddenly the crazy drug guy came back into
the base and started screaming at Jim through the window of his
booth. He yelled that he knew I was there, because he saw my car
parked out front. Jim told him that I had gone home for the night,
and that I left my car parked in front of the base because I lived
right around the corner. The guy wouldn't stop. He was going nuts.
He was really fiending for his fix.

After screaming at Jim for about 10 minutes,
he walked outside, to my car. He unzipped his pants, pulled out his
dick, and peed all over the hood of my car. What the fuck?! I guess
that was his revenge for me "stealing" his drugs.

That night I had a few more calls after that
little incident. Then I went home and parked the car. The next
morning I was going to go to the grocery store. I got into my car,
looked in the back, and there were the drugs, lying right there on
my backseat, in plain sight! I couldn't believe that the passengers
I picked up after the crazy drug guy didn't say anything or take
it.

So now I had a handful of white stuff
wrapped in cellophane. I tried to figure out what to do with it. It
looked like a lot. He had probably spent his whole paycheck on that
stuff. I was so clueless about drugs, I didn't even know if that
was cocaine, crack or heroin.

What to do, what to dooo? I was thinking
about trying some of it. Just to see what it's like. But I was
scared, so I didn't. Then I thought about selling it. I sure could
have used the money. You don't make a lot of money driving a cab.
After you pay for the gas and the base fee to rent the two-way
radio, and pay the base their share of the night's earnings, you
basically walk away with nothing, if it wasn't for the tips.

I had seen a news segment about racism. The
news crew wanted to show that New York cab drivers were racist,
because they would rather pick up a white person than a black one.
The news crew had hired a black professor, and a white convict. The
black professor tried to hail a cab, but virtually all of the
yellow cabs passed him to pick up the white convict a few feet up
the road.

But now that I was a cab driver myself, I
knew the truth: It had nothing to do with them being black or
white. They could have been yellow and purple. The simple truth was
that white people usually tipped the driver, and black people
usually didn't. And if you depend on tips for your survival, of
course you're going to try to pick up as many tippers as
possible.

Most of the other drivers drove 12 hours
shifts, from 6 at night until 6 in the morning. And then they slept
all day. But since I drew cartoons in the day time, and I had to
get some sleep at some point, I only worked until 2 am. Those
missing 4 hours made a big difference, because I still had to pay
the same expensive rental fee for the two-way radio as everyone
else. Some nights I came home with $20 or less. Things were so bad
that I actually had to resort to eating dog food one day. That was
probably the lowest point of my life.

Donna's dad owned the house we lived in, and
he gave us a break on the rent, because he knew we didn't have any
money. But even the little bit of rent that we did have to pay was
hard to come by. And then there were the bills. After everything
was paid, there usually was almost no money left for food. And when
I applied for my green card, Donna and I had to waive our rights to
getting any kind of public assistance for the next few years. So we
couldn't even apply for food stamps.

I couldn't ask my parents for help, because
they thought I was the black sheep of the family and I was nuts for
moving to New York. I didn't even talk to my parents at all for the
first two or three years after moving to the States. Donna was
worried that if I talked to them, they would try to talk me out of
being with her and convince me to move back to Germany, so she
didn't want me to talk to them at all. And we didn't want to ask
Donna's parents for any more help, because they were already
helping us out by charging very little rent, and they thought I was
some sort of nutjob for trying to make a living drawing silly
little pictures.

Donna and I usually didn't eat anything
during the day, and when I got off work at 2 am, I stopped by a
24-hour grocery store on my way home. I picked up two cans of Dinty
Moore beef stew and that was all we ate. Occasionally Donna's mom
gave her $20 to babysit her senile grandmother for a few hours.
Those days were like Christmas, because we used that money to buy a
family bucket of fried chicken and french fries. On those days we
feasted like kings!

Whenever I came home with almost no money
after work, we tried to find quarters between the couch cushions or
in the change jar her parents had in their apartment above ours. If
we were lucky, we could find enough quarters to buy two cans of
stew. We didn't want her parents to know how bad things really
were, because we were ashamed and embarrassed. And we didn't want
to hear them lecture us.