TAXI !!

My final college job was the best and, in fact, was probably as educational as all those years in university classrooms. One day I asked a taxi driver in Tempe how hard it was to get a job driving a cab and he told me it was easy. He wasn't lying. Basically all you had to do was show up with a chauffeurs' licence and then spend a day riding around with an experienced driver. The next day I was out on my own. 

This is not to imply that it was easy to make a living driving a taxi. As usual, I had asked the wrong question. Working 10 hours a day six days a week you could make decent money but you had to figure out the game. No one put fares in your cab and if you didn't have any fares you didn't make any money. There was no guaranteed salary just a percentage of the meter plus tips. A substantial percentage of new drivers didn't survive the first week because they couldn't find the business. You had to learn to get to your radio calls quickly before another driver scooped you. You had to learn where to hang out to find the rare flags (people on the street flagging you down) or just to be in the area where radio calls would be coming in. You had to learn to work with the dispatchers so that they would give you valuable calls. And you had to learn when to go to the airport (locally known as "sitting on the Harbor") and when to avoid it like the plague.


I loved it. I loved listening to the radio, especially when I worked the overnight shift and there were so few cabs on the road that you could imagine where everyone was and what they were doing. I loved the cranky camaraderie of the experienced drivers. I learned so much. Where the massage parlors were. Where the hookers hung out. Where the call girls lived. That Phoenix had Gay bars. I carried groceries into the projects and helped wealthy drunks into their private clubs. One night I dodged through a wino bottle fight to get my money from a fare. I transported Vietnam vets back and forth to the VA hospital starting when they had a leg amputated and ending with their being fitted for a prosthesis. I chased a guy, who had run out on his fare, with a tire iron and later thanked god I didn't catch him. 

One night, around 3 am, I sat on a cot in an ancient downtown hotel while my ancient fare reminisced about the good old days with the guy he had come to buy bootleg liquor from. I learned that most people don't need bookshelves because they don't own books. I learned that people who call a taxi to move out of their current residence will probably have a drunk spouse or lover on hand to yell with. I learned that the girl from my high school biology class who dropped out of school after her sophomore year had already sunk to the second lowest rung of the prostitution hierarchy.

It's a pity taxi driving is so dangerous as otherwise it should be required of all college students to give them an understanding of what the real world is like.

Speaking of danger: We only had a few female drivers but this one really gained our respect when one of her fares grabbed her one night (when she was driving in the darkened stretch of Indian Reservation between Scottsdale and Mesa) and she braked the car so that he was tossed out onto the pavement. He didn't come-to until the Reservation police had arrived. This was late at night and we (or at least I) kept an ear out for the women drivers and came by to check on her when I heard the traffic on the radio. She was better than fine.

I also need to say a few words about our vehicles. We only drove Checker cars. The company got a deal on a bunch of stretched Checkers from a failed company in Detroit (these had a glass partition and jump seats) but most of our cars were the basic Checker in the same livery as Chicago Checker cabs. These cars were a bit under powered, but aside from the air conditioners, which never worked, they were great to drive and they had lots of room.

Some of our cabs at the airport. (My B&W photos)

We had to pump the gas. Note state-of-the-art facilities.

I would be lying if I said that, as a barely over 21 male, I wasn't intrigued by the sex scene. It was a very stratified world with (sometimes stunningly beautiful) call girls at the top and street walkers working for their next fix on the bottom. In the middle, just above the girls who worked in actual "houses", were the massage parlor girls who were a varied lot but often quite pretty. 

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the fantasy of all this was ruined for me because I often had to pick these girls up at their, modest, homes (often mobile) and drive them to work. Most of them had children they were trying to support. Because of local laws and jurisdictions, all the parlors were located on county land in a ring around Phoenix. My favorite cluster of massage parlors were located in a bunch of mobile homes parked in the middle of cotton fields on the west side of Phoenix. They reminded me of circled Conestoga wagons. I brought a guy to one of these places and he asked me to wait, so I sat with the other girls in their little living room watching TV. They were not seductresses, they were just simple girls who would have preferred to be at home with their kids, but that didn’t stop them from giggling and gossiping with each other.

Another memorable scene, in the area where the street walkers did most of their business at night, was an all night restaurant called Carrows. This place was surreal because, after maybe 2am, it was the only place to take a pleasant break. So you would walk in and all the seats would be filled with cabbies, police, pimps, and drug dealers. It was like everyone agreed to call timeout.

One aspect of the taxi business I haven’t mentioned was the driver’s relationship with the radio dispatchers. There were very few places around Phoenix where you could find your own business (the airport, a few hotels) so as a driver you were dependent on the dispatchers giving you calls. I developed a good relationship with most of the dispatchers: The usual evening guy was excellent and the guy, also a driver,  who filled in so the regular dispatchers could take time off was a friend of mine who gave me the nickname “Plato.” I even got along with the bitch who worked the main day shift because she eventually realized I would find any strange call she would give me (dispatchers sent me all over the place because I was good with maps and stubborn. Once, I was sitting on a hotel in downtown Phoenix on a sweltering night -- this was after 1am -- and the dispatcher sent me to Gilbert which was a farm town way south of Tempe and Mesa. Driving through the irrigated fields, that surrounded Gilbert back then, it was so cold I had to roll up my windows.) 

But after I graduated, when I was continuing to drive full time pending developments, we got a new dispatcher on the late night shift (replacing an obnoxious lesbian who was also a friend of mine). Not only was this guy a dick, but he couldn’t even do his job. I can’t remember if it was at Christmas or New Years Eve when he got so overwhelmed he just went off the air and hid in the bathroom. I switched to driving days to get away from him. But that decision came back to bite me in the ass as there is much more street traffic during the day. After the second time I nearly rear-ended a car because I wasn’t paying enough attention, I quit.

The woman who answered the phone passes a message to the "good" evening dispatcher.

5:00 am - Waiting

Since writing the above I've continued to remember more stories. Here are three that have to do with starting or ending work at 5:00 am -- a time when I'm usually safely in bed.

There's an important shift change for cab drivers around 5:00 am when the over-night drivers come in and the morning drivers go out. When I first started driving I was working the day shift and as a new driver I had the least priority for getting good vehicles. I drove the oldest, most battered cabs that no one else particularly wanted and that the company wouldn't miss. Except for number 60. Cab 60 was as old as any but it ran like a charm. Not only was it trouble free but it positively purred. I tried to drive it every day, even when offered a newer car. I didn't want others to know what a sweet ride it was, so I just said it was lucky for me.

If you've ever seen those WW2 American-bombers-over-Germany movies or TV shows, you know the scene where the people back at base are waiting the following morning for the bombers to return. They listen to the radio to get clues as to who's survived and what kind of shape they're in. Well, waiting for the over-night drivers to return was just like that only we were hanging out in the dispatch office. The drivers and vehicles were all tired. People would run out of gas or break down. I heard one driver report another cab running into a streetlight after the driver fell asleep at the wheel.

In the movies the ground crews are concerned about the flying crew members but I was just preying that 60 would make it home safely so I could gas her up and take her out again.

5:00 am - Returning

Months, then years later, I'm one of the over-night drivers fighting sleep to get home. The first incident happened the first summer I was driving. South of downtown (such as it is) Phoenix, there are railroad tracks you have to pass over or under in a car. But maybe a block away from these tracks is a very wide street with siding tracks. This area was part skid-row and part industrial. The street had few traffic lights or stop signs so it was a great place to make time, especially when you're just trying to get home fast. One morning I'm heading home and making good time (speeding) on this street dodging what traffic there is and some parked rail cars when I nearly hit a locomotive head-on because I thought it was parked when it was in fact coming toward me against street traffic. I was awake then.

The second incident was much later when I was a more experienced driver. Several times that night the car had started wobbling in a strange way I had never experienced before. The first time it happened I pulled over and checked all the tires and wheels, but everything looked fine. The second time I called it in and asked for advice: They didn't have a clue and told me to just be careful. The third time the front left wheel just came loose and jammed in the wheel well so that I couldn't steer at all. So I'm going 40 MPH or so and all I can do is come to a gradual stop as the car goes in the direction (to the left) that it is headed.

There had been so many times that night when this would have killed me, but when the wheel finally came off I was driving through the ASU campus just after dawn. There was no traffic at all when I rolled across two lanes of on-coming traffic and ended up sitting in a vacant lot. There wasn't even a curb. And when I did finally stop and was able to convince myself that I was really awake and not dreaming, I got to call in on the radio and tell the dispatcher, and whatever drivers were listening in, that my wheel had just fallen off and that I was going to need a tow truck and a ride.

Epilog: 2000

When my programming work petered out at the end of the 1990s, I thought about driving taxi again as a change of pace and because I remembered enjoying it back in college. Starting to drive in San Francisco was much more complicated than it had been in Arizona. There was a week of training classes (I could do a better job), you had to be cleared by the police, and then you had to find a job with a cab company. But the entire business model is different here, instead of getting 40% of the meter like in Phoenix, in SF the driver leases the car for a set charge, say $80, and then has 10 hours to made that money back. The company makes it's money regardless of how the driver does. It's a shitty model and the companies put too many cabs on the road at slack times because it works for them and the drivers are just happy to get a cab to work.

I worked for one of the few companies that were GPS dispatched at that time and this was great (the central computer receives the GPS info for all available cabs and assigns the call to whichever cab is closest to the call, no dispatcher is involved). On a number of occasions I received a call in the very block I had just dropped someone off. And there were many more flags on the streets of SF then there had been in Phoenix. Another new aspect of the business was ramp cabs for the disabled. I signed up to drive these specially equipped minivans on two of the four days I worked every week. You have to strap the wheel chairs in securely so they don't flop around going up or down SF's hills. I also now know where all the dialysis centers are in the area. 

My Tuesday ramp cab.

In retrospect, I should have worked the night shift again, but I had forgotten that lesson and why I had stopped driving before. I managed to get into two minor (and stupid) accidents in my first six months and that was it. But, again, I learned the city so much better. I now see it differently and navigate differently when I'm in a car.