...
If the impossible so long yearned for
Tapped at the window, like a robin with a
frozen
heart,
Who would get up to let it in?
O.
V. L. Miloscz Symphonie
de Septembre,
Juanita
asks, “How’s
business?”
“Oh,
its all right.”
She
leers at me playfully,
“What can I do for you?”
“I’ve
got more women than I can handle, Juanita.”
“I wouldn’t charge you nothin. How about a little...” She makes a motion with her hand, smiles
again. Her teeth are rotten, but she is
in her twenties, and pretty. She has
thick chestnut hair and a full, well-proportioned body. Her skin is white and soft.
Trying
to change the subject, I say,
“I’ll bet you could tell me a lot of stories.”
“I
was going to ask you somethin.”
“What?”
She
hesitated for a moment, sizing me up.
“Well, I wonder if you would do any baby sitting for me?”
I
assume that she is insulting me: telling me that since I don’t do anything,
maybe I’m only good for baby-sitting. I
get embarrassed. I say sarcastically, “Sure, I charge a
dollar an hour.”
“You don’t do nothin.”
I
don’t have the slightest idea what she really means. She seems to be very nice and I’m thinking
that she doesn’t have a mean bone in her body: she can’t even insult me with
feeling.
I
try to let her know that I’m not a eunuch, “I do things.” Silence. I continue awkwardly, “I’ll bet you do everything.”
No
response.
“Do
you ever get any women customers?”
She
laughs. “That’s a funny story. I mean the first time. I thought she was checkin
out the room for her husband or boy friend or somethin. I kept saying, ‘Well where is he?’ She just said ‘let’s get started.’ And I kept waitin
for him to show up. I couldn’t believe
it. She almost had to hit me over the
head. I never did nothin
like that before.” She paused and coyly
pursed her lips. “I was so nye-eeve.”
“What
happened?”
Silence.
She
asked, “Do you
like shows?”
I
get embarrassed again. I think she is
insulting me again by changing the subject to the movies. We arrive at the motel. A truck driver, who is
standing by some bags, waves.
He
yells, “I
called a cab about a half an hour ago.
I’ve got a truck waitin for me. I’m in a real big hurry.”
I
wave good-bye to Juanita and she walks towards her daughter who is standing in
front of an open motel door. The girl is
about 8 or 9 years old and is staring at me like a thirty year old whore.
I
decide to take the truck driver, risking being accused of stealing a fare. Just for conversation I say, “I hear you guys make a fortune.”
He
looks at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Yeah, we don’t do too bad but we’re never
home.”
Silence.
I
ask, “Is it hard to get a job driving truck these days?”
“Stay
away from it. Are you married?”
“No.”
“Well
I used to be. I worked 80 hours a
week. I made sixty, seventy thousand a
year sometimes. I bought her a beautiful
house, a boat, a cabin. I sent her daughter
through college. I don’t even know my
daughter. We’re strangers. I was never home.”
“Shit. It sounds bad.”
“I
found out she was cheating on me all of those years. She divorced me and took the house and the
cabin.”
The
fist is in my guts again. He gives me a
large tip and tells me to stay away from the trucking business.
Then
I get three bars in a row. Two stumble
bums and a raucous bitch who’s about seventy, with bright, dyed, henna hair who
wants to take my head off because I’m young, good looking and don’t find her
attractive.
I
decide to deadhead to the airport. Stand
710, by the Edgewater West Hotel, is empty.
I check in on the radio and sit for twenty minutes. The radio is dead. Nothing, all over the
I
pull up in front of the main entrance, the only cab in a crowd of people. I turn around and see a large man about fifty
waving at me. It’s Ted Williams. I can’t believe it. He is with a smaller, beefy blond man. They get in the cab.
“Edgewater
West please.”
I
want to say, “Yes
sir, Ted, whatever you say,” but obviously that won’t do. So I start off, trying to think of something
more dignified to say. But it’s too
late.
Ted
says to the smaller man,
“I never chased women when I was playing. Just led the clean life. It pays in the end.”
I
can see them in my rear view mirror. The
smaller man is smiling like a mischievous little kid being disciplined by his
father: When he gets away he’s going to do it all over again but he has to
pretend to be listening while the old man talks.
“Some
people said I was square. Hell, I hardly
even left my hotel room. I used to have
hamburgers sent to my room. I never ate
any of that fancy food.”
The
smaller man is still smiling with a barely concealed smirk that says, “This guy is really stupid, I mean this
isn’t even believable.” He looks out of
the window.
“I’m
going to tell you one thing Denny. Don’t
listen to those good-time guys. With the drugs and the fast women.”
I
can’t believe it. He’s talking to Denny
McClain, the first pitcher to win more than 30 games since Dizzy Dean. I feel like saying, “Yeah Ted, you tell him Ted,” but I’m
not ten years old. There is a painful
silence. It feels like I’m supposed to
say something appropriate. My mind is
whirring. I’m thinking of something to
say like, “The
Senators are really going Ted,” or, “Are
you going to win thirty games again this year Denny?”
Everything
I think of sounds inappropriately juvenile and intrusive. There is a heavy silence. In the rear view mirror, I notice McClain
looking longingly at a group of private airplanes to our left. He says,
“I’d rather be flying today Ted.”
Silence.
Ted
says, “Flying
airplanes interferes with baseball Denny.
I didn’t let anything interfere with baseball. Baseball has to be your whole life.”
McClain’s
face is burning with suppressed rage.
Clearly he wants to tell Williams to stuff it but he’s holding himself
back. He can’t wait to get out of the
cab. We arrive at the Edgewater West
Hotel, and I still can’t think of anything to say. Williams gets out of the cab and makes a
large fist outside the window, motioning impatiently for me to roll it
down. I stretch across the front seat,
roll down the window, and smile up at him.
He glares menacingly at my boyish smile and my face drops.
“Keep
the change.”
A thirty-five cent tip from the greatest baseball player that ever
lived.
McClain
has already disappeared into the hotel and has obviously ditched him.
I
went back to the airport and picked up a very angry-looking black man who had a
large Afro and was wearing a very expensive-looking beige suit. He had a large and heavy suitcase and he
stood by impatiently while I loaded it into the trunk and bashed my thumb
against the license plate. I took him to
the Lakeside Hotel and decided not to go back to the airport. I bought a National Inquirer for laughs, and
ate my lunch, which consisted of a smashed tuna fish sandwich and two large
carrots.
I’m
sitting in the cab reading The National Inquirer.
“Man
Wakes Up after Thirty Years sleep.” Turns out to be an article
about L-dopa. It is supposed to
be a miracle cure for Parkinson’s disease.
The article talks about the flu epidemic of 1918. The flu virus caused some people to fall
asleep and never wake up. L-dopa
supposedly cures them. After thirty years
of sleeping they wake up into a world of the future. The article says that after ten years the
virus vanished as mysteriously as it appeared.
No one knows why. Killed more people than World War I. 50 million people!
It’s
incredible... Johnson
never would have been elected to the Senate and never have been President if
they hadn’t dug up 200 votes in Alice,
Kennedy. The Secret Service was worried about security
because he stopped to screw women he’d never seen before while the agents
waited outside the door. His mistress
says she smoked marijuana with him in the White House and he wouldn’t smoke a
third joint because he was afraid Khrushchev might call on the Hot Line... Mary
Meyer was her name. Murdered
a year after Kennedy’s assassination.
The murderer never caught. Her
secret diary was turned over to the
Anyway,
after August 15, I’ll be 26 and too old for the draft. And I have two more appeals left. No problem.
Too old! Too old and I can still
run the hundred in maybe ten-five. Well,
for sure under eleven flat. And I can
bench press close to 250 pounds. Too
old!
“158 are you anywhere near 202 yet?”
“Yeah
I’m as close as I’ll ever be.” I had
been sitting on the stand for a half an hour.
“Get
room 13, motel Funk.”
“Very fun-ky. Where is motel Funk?”
“Sorry
158, that’s motel Lakeside.”
I
had knocked on the motel door and I was about ready to go back to my cab when a
woman opened the door a crack and peered at me from the darkness of her room.
She
said, “Get me a bottle of wine.”
A
taffy colored face with the features of a fashion model, puffy eyes, very
thick, curly blond hair, no makeup, large, almost athletic body, stood in the
doorway.
I
asked, “With what?”
“I’ll
pay you when you get back.”
Her
eyes pleaded and commanded at the same time.
She was a woman who was used to getting men to do things for her. It cost her a great
deal to show even hint of need. She was
about 35.
“What
kind do you want?”
“Oh,
it doesn’t matter. Something
cheap.”
I
thought Ripple, but didn’t say it. Then
I thought about the rubber that I carried with me in my wallet for so long that
it made a ring on the outside of my wallet and when I finally took it out of
its wrapping, a rotten smelling fluid oozed out and the rubber disintegrated in
my hands.
She
must have thought I was considering turning her down. Anyway, it seemed like she was looking at me
like I was a chump who didn’t know a good deal when it was staring me in the
face: a bottle of Ripple for a piece of ass.
“Sure,
I’ll be back in a few minutes. But I’ll
have to leave the meter running,”
Jack didn’t want her to think that he was
making an exchange.
“Sure, anything. Just
get the wine.” She shut the door in my
face. I felt safe in my thoughts about
VD as I drove to the liquor store: if I got it myself it wouldn’t be so bad, I
reasoned, but I had a date to go out with Florence and I didn’t want to give it
to her. That would be too much. I couldn’t buy a rubber,
there wasn’t a drugstore open in town.
But my ribcage vibrated in anticipation anyway. When I returned, she wouldn’t open the door.
“Goddammed bitch.” I
didn’t say the words, but I banged on the door.
“Well fuck a duck.”
It
was one of Turnbull’s expressions. For
some reason, it seemed appropriate. A
voice came from inside,
“Just a minute.”
By
the time she answered, I had already been standing there for a minute. I was relieved that I hadn’t been
stiffed.
She
opened the door and after a clumsy attempt to tie the cord of her housecoat,
let her hands drop to her sides, pretending not to notice that she hadn’t
succeeded. It settled slightly open,
partially revealing magnificent bare legs and a sheer nightie. Her black bush was visible through the
lingerie, in the light from the street lamps.
“Come
in.”
“Sure.” She shut the door behind me.
“Three
dollars and thirty cents,”
I said.
“I
can’t pay right now.”
Stiffed.
“They
threw me out. I’ve been here for a
week. I don’t have any money. I’m sick.
Feel my forehead.”
She
grabbed my hand and put it on her forehead.
It was very hot and clammy.
“You’ve
got a temperature. Do you have a
thermometer?”
“I
don’t need no thermometer.”
“If
your temperature gets over 105 you could die.”
“Don’t
She
eyed the bottle of Ripple. I grabbed its
neck, pulled the bag from around it, and handed the bottle to her. She took it, and her eyes darkened. I noticed that her hands were small and
delicate and I thought she looked like a white woman trapped in an African
body. Her cantaloupe breasts were
burgundy tipped, and her bush was just, well, “there.” It had nothing secret or mysterious about it,
it was simply there between her legs.
Her hands and shoulders and feet and face were almost white and her eyes
seemed to say that they weren’t hers; that they belonged more to me, a white
man, than to her and I could have them and take them with me if I wanted to;
that she didn’t need them. But the hair
was hers. It was blond and thick and
sweaty, and I wondered what it would be like to plunge my fingers into it and
nuzzle against it, just behind her ears.
She
handed me a plastic cup and unscrewed the cap of the wine bottle. She started to pour the wine and then said,
petulantly, “No, you pour it for me,”
and handed me the bottle. She put the
back of her hand to her forehead, like a southern belle, and lay back on the
bed. She allowed her housecoat to
arrange itself so that I could see all, closed one eye firmly, and peered slyly
out of the very slightly opened one.
When I noticed her looking, I poured Ripple on my hand.
She
said, “I’m
sick, I feel so bad. You’ve got to help
me.”
“Maybe
you ought to go to the hospital.”
She
pulled her housecoat together indignantly and sat up in bed and stared
malevolently at me. “I ain’t goin to no
HOSPITAL.”
I
thought, “Nigger talk
again.”
“Don’t TAKE me to no hospital.”
I
felt like an ambulance driver. “I’m not
takin you anywhere.
If you’re sick, you ought to go to the hospital.”
She
looked down, composed herself and answered in a soft, white voice, “I’m afraid to go
to the hospital. They’ll tell me I’m dyin and I don’t want to know.”
She
sank down onto the bed, carefully covering her body. I could see sweat in her hair and on her
neck. She seemed resigned. Then she started in again. “You’ve got to help me. They threw me out. I don’t care about HIM, but SHE is in on
it. He’s fucking on her. They threw me out two weeks ago. Out of my own house.” She moaned, pulled her knees to her chest,
and rocked her body back and forth.
“Who
is SHE?”
“My daughter.”
“He’s
your boyfriend?”
“Nooo.” She rocked back and forth again and moaned.
I
heard myself ask, “He’s fucking on his own daughter?”
“I’m
gonna kill myseff.”
I
watched her thrash back and forth on the bed.
“Why
don’t you have a drink.” I handed her a glass of Ripple. She composed herself as quickly as she had
fallen apart, took the glass from my hand and drank it down in one gulp. I poured her another one and poured one for
myself.
“How
old is she?”
“Fifteen. I knew he
was fuckin on her.
But now they done threw me out of my own house. You got to help me.”
I
didn’t know what she wanted. I went over
to the bed and put my hand on her forehead again. It was burning. I didn’t say anything. There were beads of sweat in her hair, which
was a perfumed fleece that covered her head and neck like wool.
Are you not the oasis where I dream, and
the gourd
From which I draw in long draughts the
wine of memory?
I
patted her head and said, “I wish I
could help you some way,”
and smiled down at her. A
horrified look came over her face and her eyebrows tensed into a menacing
frown.
“You
one of them JESUS freaks?”
My
face turned red. “No,
of course not.” I said to
myself, “Fucking hypocrite. Since you’re afraid to fuck her you’ve
decided to help her.”
“Get
out of here,” she
said in a tone of voice that didn’t really mean what it said.
I felt like a fool with a red face trying
to look nonchalant. I looked at my
plastic cup and sloshed the wine around and probably said something to myself
like, “What in
the fuck would Humphrey Bogart do in a situation like this?” I started to say, “Not until I finish my drink,” but I
knew that she wasn’t in a position to tell anybody anything.
She
fell back on the bed and began moaning again.
I knew that she wanted me to fuck her now, but, as Mick Jagger would say, it was pointing straight to the
floor. I had a vision of
She
said, “I got to go to the bathroom.”
She
got up and went into the bathroom. She
moved her hand to close the bathroom door, but then didn’t. She undid her nightie
and slid down onto the toilet seat with a quick glance to make sure that I was
watching. Her breasts jiggled and her
bush grew up into her belly and I thought I could see the wine red lips of her
vagina laughing at me, standing there with my finger up my ass. I wanted to bury my face in her bush
but my body swayed towards the door.
Her head fell and her breasts sagged and she pissed loudly into the
bowl.
I
was heading towards the barn, even though it was just a little past 11, when
the dispatcher asked,
“158 are you anywhere around downtown?”
For
no particular reason I answered truthfully,
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am.”
“Why
don’t we give you a better fare this time. He’ll be standing at the entrance to the
I
wondered how he knew the last fare was a lousy one. “This one better be good.”
“We
try to please, 158”
“I
noticed.”
The
guy was dressed in a dark suit. “The image of Conservatism.” I thought.
“Can
you take me to the
“No
problem. Where’s your suitcase?”
“Oh,
it’s just me. No suitcase.”
“Sure,
no problem, get in.”
He
was probably in his early thirties but he looked younger. Just looking at him made me
weary of driving cab. I wished
that I had been a straight arrow, had got a normal job, and married the girl
across the street, even though I knew for certain that I would have... I killed
the thought.
I
asked, “What’s a guy like you doing
going to the airport in the middle of the night?”
“If
I told you, you wouldn’t believe it.”
He
sounded like a regular guy, open, uncomplicated. For some reason it seemed like I could
unburden myself and he would understand.
I
said, “I could have been a straight
arrow. I was one of the best students in
my high school. I was a really good
athlete. But I had to be a rebel. A philosopher. I really envy guys like you sometimes. You probably have a beautiful wife. A great job.
“Don’t
count on it. If I’m so happy why do you
think I’m in a cab in
I
wasn’t expecting an answer like that.
He
continued, “I do have a good job. Better than I ever thought I would.”
We
were approaching the toll gate of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
“I
work for the Executive branch of the government.”
He
had an open face and sounded like one of the guys that I used to play football
with.
“Oh yeah? Do you ever
get to see the President?”
“I
see him every day.”
I
was stunned but I didn’t want the tone of the conversation to change so I
pretended that I wasn’t.
I
said, “They say Nixon is such a
bastard. But he doesn’t really seem that
bad to me. I mean he seems like an
intelligent man trying to do an impossible job.”
“Don’t
believe it. He is the coldest
son-of-a-bitch you’d ever want to meet.”
He let it sink in. The
“I
mean I see him every day almost, and he never says anything personal. He’s all business. He’s the coldest son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever
known in my life.”
“That’s
too bad.” My voice was meek. Like a little kid who’s been told there’s no
Santa Claus. “I’m not going to argue
with you, you ought to know.”
He
continued, “Sometimes
I wish I had a life like yours. Without complications.
It may have its drawbacks, but maybe it isn’t so bad being a
philosopher. I wish I had time to just
sit back and think. Things happen so
fast that I never have time to analyze anything. I’m in the fast lane and I can’t get
out. I have no choice.”
“I’m
definitely in the slow lane. I get to do
a lot of thinking but no one listens to me.”
It
seemed that we had defined ourselves and there was nothing more to say. The enormity of his position was beginning to
take effect; I felt us sliding into a tense silence. I was practiced at doing that and he had
probably ridden in almost as many different cabs as I had. We rode in silence the rest of the way. When we got to the airport he gave me a very
generous tip and shook my hand.
“Good
luck. I hope you figure it all out.”
“Thanks. Good luck to you. I hope you find some time for yourself- to figure things
out too.”
“So long.”
He
turned and walked towards the airport.