 Old Men Like to Talk About Their Troubles... sometimes You'd Rather Not Know -Alex Farr It was a new year. I'd grown sick of being reminded about how
hopeless the upcoming generation of children seemed, so I'd gone Business still sucked though, which had been a large part of the reason I'd started "teaching" in the first place, so when I woke up painfully hungover (which was quickly becoming pretty near every other night) I was often really tempted to just say 'The hell with it!' and go back to sleep. But, in the interests of paying my rent, I'd decided to re-invent something of the old discipline I used to have, back when I held one of those jobs where they actually care whether or not you show up any given day. I'd decided to go out and drive at least 4 days a week. A fifth was optional. I was getting a lot of reading done. Every once in a while though, I couldn't help getting bored with a book (I was to the point where I was reading Balzac and Homer...), or just plain restless. I found myself killing more and more time: buying $.99 chicken sandwiches to snack on, doing laps around the cab to stretch my legs, taking a nap, or occasionally I'd get lucky and manage to take a dispatch call that I might not normally have bothered to chase after. So one Tuesday Morning that's exactly what happens. I was so far back at the MacArthur BART cabstand that I could barely even see the front of the line, when a call comes up for downtown... and I managed to yelp enough that the dispatchers gave me the call. It was only about 28 blocks away, no big deal... So I went cruising through the very light traffic, and I pulled up and stopped in the middle of the street out front of the apartment building (and I mean in the MIDDLE of the street, because this place has a bus stop in front, and the sheriffs in the fair city of Oakland will give a cab a $250 ticket if it stops in a bus zone long enough to sneeze), and slowly out of the apartment comes waddling this fat little old man. "Fucking marvelous..." I'm thinking to myself. In fact, the old guy took so long waddling across the sidewalk, and out into the middle of the street that I had time to think it several more times. "Fucking marvelous..." And, once he's in, I get his destination out of him- he's headed to the Center for Elder's Independence about 5 blocks away. They're paying there, with a voucher (which the company redeems for me at 90% face value). "Fucking marvelous..." So I'm driving him, and I'm half listening to his monologue as I try to fiddle with the stereo controls, trying to find just the right fade balance so that I can hear it if a fare says something in one of those 'important' tones of voice, but otherwise I won't be bothered... when I suddenly catch his explanation of why he needed my services. "Yeah, I was just there, but they wanted me to go home. They wanted me to take a shower..." I nodded. I was good with that, I'm no big fan of the 'old man' smell. "Cool." I answered. "Yeah... I was having a problem with body lice." Uhhh... not so cool. "You were huh? So, did they give you something for that?" I asked, hoping like hell that they had... and hoping that I couldn't catch his lice from handling his walker. "Yeah... they gave me something. I had to take a bath..." I tuned out the little more he said. It was a short ride, and I was too busy not thinking about little lice crawling their way past the bullet-resistant shield to get me, to be bothered with whatever else he might've said. So then I pulled up, and I fished his walker out of the trunk with 2 fingers, set it up for the old guy, and left him to his own devices while I went in search of my voucher. The lady inside had no idea what I was talking about. She looked at me like I was crazy. I explained things to her slowly, using small words, like she was stupid. It took about 10 minutes of consulting with various idiots for the story to come out. Dude wasn't supposed to come back to the Center at all. He was supposed to stay the fuck away, and wash his lice to death. "Fucking marvelous..." So, eventually, I managed to get a voucher out of them... but now I had to take him home too. It would double the fare. It would put his lousy ass back in my cab though. It would double the fare... "Fucking marvelous..." So I folded up his walker with those same 2 fingers, and I cheered him on as he crawled into the cab, from a safe distance. And then I drove him back to his apartment, and I unfolded his walker for him in the middle of the street, and the cab blocked traffic but I got the hell out of the way. And I cheered him on from a safe distance again. And the moment he made the sidewalk I got the fuck out of there and had me a cigarette to try to soothe my nerves. The meter had come to $10 and change, all because of old dude's stupidity. That was fine, but I just had to hope that he hadn't displayed the same stupidity with regard to the directions for the de-lousing. Or just not think about it. "Fucking marvelous..." This time I'd earned the $3.60 I'd padded the voucher, that was
for damned sure.
the New Waybills there's No Place Like Home... You gotta be shitting me Alex |
