The Sorrows of
Sharp Fate[1]
I’ve
always had a certain knack for picking my people. Don’t ask me how—it’s all by feel…
Like
one night (seems too long ago now) when I was hacking a cab still. I’d gotten a call in what’s known, in cabbie parlance, as “short
East Oakland.” The dispatcher had
tossed up the call over the air as a “101.” My Zen and the Art of Cabdriving instincts—upon which not only my money but too
my safety usually depended—told me jump, so I did.
Clicking
down the button on my two-way radio mike (clutched in the right hand, like a
cabbie’s St. Christopher cross), I said, “Cab 68, 101.”
What
I was hoping to snag was a “paper run” out of the Walgreen’s on East 14th Street; we had a
delivery account for housebound prescription drug recipients and the meter
averaged fifteen to twenty dollars a run.
You
were taking your chances, however, because you could get a wingnut being released from Highland Hospital’s Psych Ward.
You could get a tweaker from one
of the crack cocaine “safe houses” (the locations tended to change but the
neighborhood was the same). Or you
could just get somebody who saw cabdrivers as an “instant ATM withdrawal.”
What
I got was an old rundown Victorian with a chain link fence. Porch light on, but no interior lights. I was debating about just rolling
off—like a fox who lives to old age, unlike, say, a young one in the
wintertime bounding across a pond fresh with ice, the Rule I learned from the
Old Cabbie who taught me is never honk the fucking horn unless for some God-forsaken
reason you really like attracting trouble—when
my fare appeared from the other side of the street and tapped on the rear
window to get my attention. Black
dude, lanky build, dreadlocks, soft yet intense eyes.
The
night was slow, I popped up the lock and let him in.
“Let’s
go to the Kwik-Way on Lakepark. You had any dinner yet?”
I hadn’t, as a matter of fact. “No, but I’m due.” I
started a U-turn back towards
I-580.
“You
gonna hit that meter or what? Here’s a twenty to hold for deposit.” As we
cleared the curb and got underway
I turned the meter on, took the bill he proffered over the seat. Rule
1, according to Old Cabbie, was Never
be in a hurry to hit the damn meter. Some of these greedy hacks got it running
before the customer has even gotten in the cab and shut the door—guy sits
down, sees that, and even though he might not say anything, what do you think
that fool is going to get for a tip…Nada…Goose egg…You might have chump-changed
him outta twenty cents or so, but you gonna cost yourself the three or four
dollars back outta a twenty on an airport run, capiche?…
We ran down MacArthur,
parallel to the six-laned freeway.
As we glided down the overpass into the district adjoining Lake Merritt,
he said, “Man, look at all these fools.” Beneath us streamed headlights of cars
both sides of the divided highway.
“Back and forth like they got somewhere to go. Hell, this place been
nothin’ but a ghost town since World War II.”
I laughed in agreement. I lived in the adjacent
town, Berkeley, but for a couple of years I lived in a pretty tough hood
between downtown and West Oakland.
When I would jog down to the Lake to do the big lap around, to warm up
for my workout at the Gold’s Gym on Lake Park, people in the hood looked at me
like I was from another planet.
“Man,
you sure you want to eat at that Kwik-Way?”
Cabbies always had the inside info on where to eat and man did I have the news
on this place. “Another cabbie
told me they served up a deep-fried mouse in the french fries the other
day—didn’t even notice the little sucker.”
Now
he laughed. “Yeah, you right, that place is toe up. Let’s go down to Nation’s Burgers in the Square.”
I
shrugged, kept going around the lake. When I started to turn down a timed
one-way street leading through the twenty-block downtown to Jack London Square,
he said, “No, go up to Broadway. I
like going down Broadway.”
“Okay,”
I said, “It’s just that Franklin is faster, you catch all the lights in
sequence. Broadway hangs you up at
the lights. Costs you more money on
the meter.”
“Don’t
worry about it.”
We
turned the corner onto Broadway. “Look at that!” He was indicating a restaurant
called the Hof Brau. “Look at that dude
holding the beer mug. right outta
some 1940’s Walt Disney thing—Fantasia.”
The
sign advertising the place indeed had a pasty-faced man with black eyes like a
Disney cartoon. Many other
businesses in downtown Oakland had the same motif—the Park View Dry
Cleaners, which we’d passed, with some elderly bespectacled gent, looking for
all the world like a Norman Rockwell drawing, cheerfully working a sewing
machine; the stores offering “Foot Clinic” or “Chiropractor” or “Beauty Salon”
or even Linoleum in quaint, modest,
1940’s style letters painted on
the display windows.
“The
day cabbies call this area the Bermuda Triangle,” I said. “You pick up the old
ladies at the residential high-rises we just passed, you take them to Pill
Hill”—I jerked a thumb back behind me, where, about ten blocks up
Broadway, the three major hospitals of Oakland sat atop a small hill—“you
take them to the Bank of America in the Lakeside Kaiser Center—every
single one of them banks there—you take them to the beauty shop, then
back to their towers. Once you get
in the circuit—and the fares are all like two and three dollars max—you
never get out.”
He
laughed. “You don’t see nothing
like that nighttime around here.”
He
was right. I’d switched from day
driving to night a bit back, and the difference was like being in another
world. Instead of coming on shift
at seven in the morning, trying to hustle up some “suits with luggage” as the
slang went (meaning a businessman flying home, i.e., a lucrative trip to the airport), I started at six
P.M., as the sun set gleaming orange and crimson off the sleek facades and
photo-sensitive window panes of the new office high-rises downtown.
[Kaiser
aluminum and concrete/ the buildings—white stone dulled with
age—with Florentine turrets on the corners, a big elongated vee of a
sunlight on top/ 50’s feeling of the car dealerships on Broadway, all offering
“Special Financing” in signs atop the brightly-tinselled guy wires
criss-crossing their lots/ Reno and Tahoe gambling buses/ necklace of lights
strung from old-fashioned street lamps with elongated loops hanging
*Neighborhoods,
contrast with downtown*
Downtown
was just starting to be revitalized.
Pastel colors/aluminum-framed glass/contrast with the smokey small red
bricks of San Pablo, “Flint’s Bar-B-Que” /Jack London Square—contrast
with the author
*Girlfriend/exotic
dancer/didn’t make a move*
*Conversations,
quiet of the early morning, summer heat still cooling on the sidewalks*
Conversation
about dating difficulties, dirtbag monopoly, n-word to the n-th degree
The sidewalk outside Nation’s
shimmered still with summer heat. Neon buzzing from the sign above took
the place of flies.
“You
take a look around down here? I
mean, they be trying to get all these little business to lease space in this
fucking overkill Jack London Square. I
mean, you know who Jack London was, don’t cha? A tough-ass white dude like
yourself. too self-respecting to
be caught dead in this f-ing circus.”
“Another
era, my friend…Long gone…”
“Damn
straight. Hey, now look at this
building here.” He was indicating the old stone corner building in the vee between
Broadway and Telegraph. Just
kitty-corner from the 14th and Broadway plaza, the more modern
buildings—all smoothly cantilevered reflective curves—this turn of
the century structure, replete with elaborate, Florentine cornices and turrets,
stood out as highly incongruous.
“Like I
said, another era…Long gone.”
“You
see that big skylight on top?” He was referring to a fifteen-foot elaborate vee.
“That’s a greenhouse that this guy had the
architect design for the people who were to use his offices.
I’ll
tell you; I was thinking of fixing up the place, you know—it’s not really
mine, my sister owns it—so I looked into what it is you gotta do. Like they did over in San Francisco. Man, I found some good shit, like, this
newspaper editor, in the 1890’s, he was railing on about the painted faces of the women thinking they be high society with their rouge and enamel to counterfeit
charms…The Victorians—especially
those fancy “Queen Anne” ones with the curved window corners and
turrets—he termed painted ladies, like the others, making San Francisco The City of Shams.”
The
counter girl brought us a fresh plate heaped high with steaming French
Fries—which my friend promptly covered with ketchup.
“You
know in the Seventies the San Francisco Fire Department did a training exercise
by setting one of the more overgrown ones on fire—I think it was because
the hippies out in the Haight had taken to painting them with these Day-glo colors that made ‘em look like some kinda wagon in a
freak show…”
“Some
of them real-estate speculators made a whole hella lot of money doing that in
the 80’s, my friend—problem is what with all the fog alternating with
sunshine the strong colors fade fast and in this splotchy way…”
“Well,
I’ve been over to places like Noe Valley, and it’s all different now. All these
designer pastels not colors—fushcia, amber, pale lime, peach… I was looking for the house where I used to have
this Buddhist girlfriend somehow I’d decided I was really missing. She lived in a real monstrosity all
right. All this overwrought
woodwork—these cornice brackets with dragons and griffins, a bizarre
confluence of geometric ornaments carved in relief between windows…
Anyway, I couldn’t find
it—the whole neighborhood had been yuppified to the point where my memory had no landmarks...
“Couldn’t find her
either?”
“Of course not. She and I were years ago. See, when I moved back out to this
coast from New York I had a strong Buddhist network—people with whom I
did sitting meditation. The City
had an especially social sangha; at one
of their get-togethers I met her—dark hair, pale skin, intense eyes. We had a brief conversation before she
flitted off, then, maybe fifteen minutes later she comes up to me—talking
within a group about the controversial teacher who founded their
organization—slides her and into mine and says, C’mon, we’re leaving...”
“I get the picture.”
...
“Okay, I got one for
you. Now, I’m in kind of a cynical
phrase, dig? But I swear this much
is true—I just had a woman completely blow my mind. She’s an exotic dancer, over in The
City...”/escort service, arrogant male mindset/ “I mean somebody be training
these arrogant little peckerwood heads
for too many years that the world gonna bend over for ‘em if they toss enough
money around. I see it at clubs at
times. New foo on the block comes in and he be tossin’ tip money at
the waitress and thinkin’ that mean he own her like a ‘ho or something.”/ one gets in his face over the
girlfriend—she’s doing the escort business, he wants to know if he’s her
pimp and offers to buy him off—no deal—clincher is when he
confronts her she owns up and admits she’s bisexual, too, and “not sure if
she’s into men anymore so don’t get upset with me”
...
/money the women can
make/power they want/love don’t cut it
“I’ll
tell you a good story—you probably won’t believe, but it’s true.”
“We’ll
see, I’ve got a good built-in bullshit detector, as one of yours, Hemingway,
used to say.”
“You
gotta remember how I grew up. Not
only was I the city kid with the chip on my shoulder, but my elementary school
years were punctuated by the Kennedy assasinations. Third grade—I mean, the image is indelible—our
Phys Ed. instructor emerged from the side of the school gym as were walking
back towards class, in our nice little orderly rows of two, and, using a yellow
‘Wiffle Ball’ plastic bat as a mock-rifle, demonstrated somebody drawing a bead
then firing, and said, ‘They just shot the President’...”
[comment]
“Sixth
grade pretty much the same thing.
Shake my hand.”
Warily,
with a trace of an expectant grin, he extended his hand.
“Now
I could pull my grandfather’s trick on you—in a mock brogue—Lad,
you just shook the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan—you know the bare-fisted Irish prizefighter
from ‘back in the days’…
“Your
grandfather fought him?”
“Not
exactly. Shovelled the shit of his
racehorse collection as his stableboy.
But Sullivan was a generous man known to take care of his own and gave
him a substantial scholarship towards his college education…”
“Interesting—but
what’s that got to do with…”
“Getting
there. My famous handshake was
with Bobbie Kennedy—believe it or not, for some reason he scheduled a
whistlestop of a speech in my little town on his way West that year; I heard
about it at the last minute from a classmate and conned our sixth grade teacher into riding along. Now, here’s the interesting part. My buddy and I go to the bathroom, we
come back and by a mixup I wind up in his aisle seat. RFK walks down our aisle
shaking hands afterwards and I get to shake his—he seemed cold and gray
already, almost a man who knew he was going to die, but one undeterred in
purpose. My buddy never forgave
me—all the way through High School.
And that Sirhan character did shoot RFK in San Francisco later that
speaking tour…”
*Contrast with
upstate New York/people marginalized in a different way*
_________
END
Head
leaned back into the worn woven strips of the old rocking chair, Buck didn’t
even notice his Lab Jake until the nuzzle of wet nose upon his forearm. Buck scratched the top of the large
black dog’s head—jowls resting flat against the chair’s arm, eyes
contentedly aglow in the dark. Buck folded his hands over his belly, settled
back into the chair. For a moment Jake raised his nose, cocked a silky ear.
From the field alive with unseen crickets a breeze gently stirred.
[1] William
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 4.14
