Probably the most famous song ever about taxi driving, Harry Chapin's 1972 song, "Taxi."
It was a Monday or Tuesday evening, some time in the mid-2000's. I worked so many hours, 7 days a week, from 2003 to 2007, that the years and days blend together. I think it was 2003 or 2004. I pulled into a kind of lame shopping center in Huntington Beach, at Beach and Atlanta. I dropped a passenger off at Tumbleweed's, a country/redneck bar, less than a mile from the beach in Surf City. An early summer evening, maybe 7:00 pm, and it was still plenty light out, though the shadows were getting long.
As I drove back out of the shopping center, rolling slowly in front of the stores, I saw movement far off to the left. In the shadow of a big rig truck, parked in the corner of the parking lot, there was haggard looking, overweight woman waving frantically at me, and yelling "Taxi!" I noticed about four large trash bags sitting next to her. A homeless woman. OK, I was living in my taxi at the time, technically homeless myself, but I was also working 80+ hours a week in the cab, and making money. I didn't want to pick her up. I just didn't want to pick up some crazy, smelly, old, crazy woman, take her a mile, and have her bitch about the $4 fare, and then not tip me.
That was my first thought. My stereotypical reaction, like most people's reaction, to the image of that woman with the trash bags. Then came the reality of the moment. It was a Monday (maybe a Tuesday), early evening. I just dropped off a call I got from dispatch. I wouldn't get another call for at least an hour, it was just a slow time of the day, and of the week.
Another thing about taxi driving was that we actually spent most of the time waiting. That gave me time to be a good guy now and then, so I had a new thought. I decided to roll over, pick up the sketchy looking homeless woman, and just give her a ride. There's a certain kind of karma in the world of taxi driving, as shady as most taxi drivers are, good deeds often come back in the way of fares in the taxi world. It's a thing we had all experienced. Every driver had times when they took a ride they didn't want, and as soon as they got to the destination, they got another fare for $100, or five rides in a row for $90 total, or something like that. So the taxi driver in me decided to give the woman a ride, since I wasn't doing anything else anyway.
So I turned up a row of cars, and rolled up to the old, homeless woman in the shade of the big truck. She opened the back door, and I sat there as she hefted the four trash bags full of lord knows what, into the back seat. She didn't smell that bad. But not very good, either. The woman looked like she could be your grandma, if your grandma smoked crack from the age 19 to 64. Stringy hair, dirty T-shirt, some kind of worn jacket.
"Where you headed?" I asked. "The Filling Post," she said. I knew the bar, kind of a dive bar, 5-6 miles up Beach Boulevard, towards the freeway. I pulled out of the parking lot, didn't turn the meter on, and headed up the road. I didn't feel like talking, and the homeless woman didn't say much, so we had a quiet ride up Beach Boulevard. I turned into the shopping center that housed the Filling Post, and pulled up near the curb, in the empty parking lot. I put the cab in park, and waited for the woman to get out.
She asked, "How much?" I said, "Don't worry about it." The homeless woman repeated, "How MUCH?" Again, I said, "Don't worry about it," feeling good for be a really cool guy, and doing my good deed for the day. Taxi driving was usually, all hustle, all day, continually asking myself, "How do I make $125 in fares today?" So I felt good about taking a little time to be a good guy, and giving this homeless woman a free ride. Then she yelled, "HOW MUCH IS IT?"
"Damn," I thought. "It'd be about $13-$14," which was a true statement. I may not have been the the most profitable cabbie, but I was fair. The homeless woman in the back seat, behind me, the 60-something woman who looked like she'd been on a bender for a year and a half, reached into her bra, which tripped me out, since I was looking at her in the rear view mirror. I looked away from the mirror. Her hand came back out of her bra, as she asked, "You got change for a hundred?" My head snapped back up, looking into the rear view mirror again, where I saw her fanning out four brand new, crisp, $100 bills. Mind blown.
Now, taxi driving is all about making money. You don't drive complete strangers around, seven days a week, and deal with drunk idiots every night, because you like people. Taxi driving is about MONEY. Suddenly, I wasn't a smug good guy. I was a taxi driver again. "Uh...no," I answered her question. "I'll go get change in the bar," she said.
Since I suddenly knew she had money, a lot of money, she was my new best friend, for the next 3 minutes, anyhow. Taxi driver mentality. She stumbled out of the cab, and waddled into the bar. I launched my 350+ pounds out of the driver's seat, ran around to the open back door. I picked up each of her garbage bags, and treated them like they were vintage Louis Vuitton luggage. I placed each one of them neatly on the curb.
The woman came back out, didn't really look up, and handed me $25. "Need change?" I asked, completely dumbfounded. "No" she muttered. "Can I help you with your bags?" I asked. "No," she answered again, " I got 'em." I shook my head, got back in the taxi, and drove off, completely baffled by what just happened.
If the story of the homeless woman ended right there, it would still be one of my favorite taxi tories. But that's not where the story ends. A few months later, I went to pay my lease one Monday morning at the taxi office. Next to the payment window, there was a flyer that said, "Taxi Driver Art Show." I asked the woman in the window about it. She told me Richard, a taxi driver who worked mostly inland Orange County, had a little, indie art gallery, and that he was asking if any other taxi drivers wanted to make some art for a show. I'd talked to him a few times, so I knew who he was. I called his cell, and asked about the show. He told me about his gallery, and said I should come by and check it out that Friday, when they had bands play, and it was open. I could check out the scene, look at the gallery, and decide if I wanted to make something for the show.
That was a year or two before I started doing my Sharpie scribble style drawings, but I drew some pen and ink stuff now and then, and goofed around with markers and made collages, as well. That Friday, I swung by the gallery, in the early evening, before it got too busy in the cab. The gallery, AAA Electra 99, was housed in a small office unit near John Wayne (aka Orange County) airport then. Electra was far from your typical gallery, the kind with lots of white wall, and very few pieces of art, spread far apart. The little gallery had all kinds of art, weird sculptures, paintings, drawings, many flavors of creativity, crammed in every nook and cranny. It was like a huge pile of art exploded in the small space, and got stuck everywhere.
I saw Richard, and he told me about the place, and told me to wander around. The bands, which seemed to be two or three teenage garage bands, set up on the walkway in the courtyard area, right outside the gallery door. As I wandered through Richard's section of the gallery, I saw two, 8" X 10," black and white photos, set between Richard's punk rock flyer looking marker drawings. One photo was an old woman passed out in the back of a taxi. The other was a photo of the same woman, hazy eyes looking at the photographer, also from the taxi's back seat. It was the homeless woman I gave a ride to a few months before, the one who pulled the four $100 bills from her bra. Mind blown again.
I found Richard and said, "The two photos, I had that same woman in my cab once." I told him about the ride, and the $400. He said, "Yeah, that's Sally, she's a prostitute, she hooks up with truckers." I suddenly remembered that I picked her up next to a semi truck. I had thought she just stopped there to rest in the shade. Richard told me he used to driver her to her main hooking bar in downtown L.A., where she'd meet truckers to screw. He also said, Sally always had money, and always tipped well. Richard's former girlfriend had been along on a ride once, and snapped the pics of Sally, the old, haggard prostitute.
Like I said before, taxi driving is all about money. When you pay the taxi company $550 to $600 a week to rent a cab, then have to put $300 worth of gas in the car, that meant the first $850 to $900 a week in fares was just to break even. The average fare then was about $12, and if we wanted to actually make money, we had to hustle day and night to find every ride we could. We had good days, but making good money was never easy. It was always a constant hustle. When you found someone who took long rides, always had money, and tipped well, you wanted them to call your cell phone every time they needed a ride. So Sally had been a regular fare for Richard for a couple of years, until he found a weekend driver for his taxi, and just worked days.
A month or so later, I was sitting in the taxi line in downtown Huntington Beach, the 3rd or 4th taxi in line. An old woman turned the corner of the trendy bar district, pushing a shopping cart, with a trash bag in it, towards us. She looked looked to the first driver in line, one of the Arab guys. He looked at her, and said, "I'm not driving you, go away old woman." I saw it was Sally. The second driver also shooed her away. I jumped out of my cab, ran around to the passenger's side back door, and yelled, "Sally, right here, I'll give you a ride!" The other drivers thought I was an idiot. They only saw an old homeless woman, just like I did, months earlier, in the shopping center parking lot. Sally got in , and I gave her another $15 ride, this time running the meter, and she paid me $25 again.
I got back to the taxi line. The same driver was still in the first spot. It was early evening, and it wasn't busy yet. I pulled up, with $25 more in my pocket, and waited for the next fare. I did the same thing, a handful of other times, giving Sally a ride when other drivers turned her down. Taxi karma. Heh, heh, heh. Just another reminder, to quote Tolkien, "Not all that's gold glitters, not all who wander are lost." And try to remember not to judge a book by its cover. I never had a problem with Sally, and always got decent rides, she always tipped well, and there was never any drama. She smelled a little funky sometimes. But so did I after sitting in the cab for 14 hours. Nothing a quick spray of ozium couldn't cure.
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