It should be noted that I worked as a cab driver in Pinellas County, Florida, during the 1990s.
“WAIT’LL YOU HEAR THIS ONE”
by Robin Shwedo; 2009
©: Robin Shwedo, 2009
Think bartenders have heard it all? There’s a good chance that cab drivers have heard and seen even more!
“So I’ve got these two guys in my car, right? The younger one just turned 21, this is the first Friday he can legally drink, so his buddy’s taking him to Carly’s. They’re both talking ‘bout how nothing impresses them anymore, right?”
Kevin Carter slows down for the light up ahead, hitting the brakes hard when someone in the center lane cuts him off on the way to the turn lane. It’s Friday afternoon — “Idiot Friday,” he calls it, but in more colorful language, because, as he puts it, “Everyone on the road turns to idiots (or the more colorful term) on Fridays” — and he misses the car by a good foot.
“So, anyway, we’re sitting in the right-hand through lane on 49th Street, waiting for the light at Park Boulevard. Suddenly, this jet black Mercedes with a moon-roof zooms up in the center lane. Guess who’s driving?” He waits for me to ask who, then answers, “’Macho Man’ Randy Savage. The two guys in the back seat are like all excited, because there’s Macho Man.”
I laugh, and Carter goes on.
“Macho Man yells over, ‘Yo, cabbie, is this Park Boulevard?’ So I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ and he goes, ‘I need to hang a right here. When the light turns, mind if I cut in front of you so I can hang a right?’ And I tell him, ‘Yeah, sure, man.’ Just then, the light changes, and he yells, ‘Yo, thanks, man! You’re cool!’ And he takes off.” Carter laughs, “And here’s these two guys who’ve said that nothing impresses them, totally freaking out because Macho Man Randy Savage and I actually talked!”
Kevin Carter
Kevin Carter has driven for Yellow Cab for a little over twelve years. It was supposed to be a stopgap job, something to do between “real jobs.” Like many other drivers, though, it didn’t take long to become hooked — or come up with a million stories.
“If I knew when I first started driving what I know now, I would’ve picked up at least a good tape recorder,” Carter maintains. “Some of the things you hear out here…”
One story involves a former cab driver — a woman — who had picked up the same drunk from the same bar every night for almost three weeks. The last night she picked the man up, he slammed the car door on his leg “at least five or six times.” She finally had to grab the man by the shoulder to stop him. After telling him to put his leg in the cab, then shut the door, the man looked at her through bleary eyes and said, “Honey, if you ever need a good man, I’m it.”
When the woman refused to give her inebriated fare her phone number (“Sorry, Bud, I’m still using it!”), he insisted she write down his number. “So, when do you think you’ll call me?” he asked, to which she responded, “When Bella Abzug becomes Pope!”
“Cool!” the drunk proclaimed.
“The man had no clue that it’d be difficult for a Jewish Congresswoman to be Pope — and when the remark was made, Bella’d been dead for maybe six months already!”
When Carter first started, the cabs were voice dispatched; dispatchers had to drive cab for a while before training for the job. Cabs now get their calls on computers; anyone off the streets can apply to dispatch.
“You wouldn’t believe the message I got on the computer,” Carter laughed one day. “It said, ‘Body in the middle of road, US 19 and Thirty-eighth Avenue. Body still moving. Traffic tied up. Please avoid.’” Another laugh. “Avoid what? The intersecttion? Traffic? The body?” A shrug. “Rookie dispatchers.”
Paul Middleton retired when his eyesight started to fail. One of the dispatchers nick-named him “the Rookie,” as he’d driven Cab “for only 37 years.” He frequently maintained that if anyone wanted to study psychology, it would behoove them to drive cab.
One of Middleton’s favorite stories involved a scruffy-looking gentleman he’d picked up one evening near the end of his shift.
“I’d been hauling him for the better part of a week,” Middleton recalled. “He was staying in a cheap motel off Haines Road, using a cab to go back and forth to a lawyer’s office in St. Pete, sometimes do a little shopping on his way back to the motel.” The man had inherited a tobacco conglomerate several years earlier; Middleton never found out what he was doing in St. Pete, or why the cut-rate accommodations.
At the end of the week, a wad of cash in his pocket, the man called the cab company and requested Middleton to pick him up.
“Could you pop the trunk?” was the first request. In went two double barrel shot-guns. “We need to stop at a convenience store,” was the second request. After buying two bottles of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine and several Snickers and Three Musketeers, he stated his destination: Key West. Upon learning that the flat rate was usually cheaper than the meter rate, “The man told me just to turn the meter on. Paid all the tolls along the way, too.”
Just outside Miami, the man insisted on stopping in a J. C. Penny’s so he could pick up a few things for the place he’d bought in Key West. “Do you need anything?” he inquired. “Come on, there must be something you need.”
Middleton conceded that his alarm clock had died the previous day. Half an hour later, the fare came back carrying two large bags. Just before placing them in the trunk next to the shotguns, he pulled out an am/fm radio alarm clock. “Best one they had on the shelf,” he told Middleton.
“You realize it would’ve been cheaper to fly,” Middleton told the man a little later, as they pulled into his driveway.
“Yeah, but this was a lot more fun,” his fare stated, handing him $400. “Keep the change.”
“To this day, if he hadn’t shown me the paperwork, I would’ve sworn he was some day laborer. And here he’d inherited this huge tobacco empire!” He laughed, adding, “Nothing like a hundred-dollar tip.” (1)
Back in Kevin Carter’s cab, heading home from school, I hear another story.
“You know Joan, right?” I nod. Joan is another of Carter’s regulars. “Okay, you know her grandson A. J. lives with her. Well last week, A.J. and one of his friends are playing. The friend’s older brother has an exercise room in the garage. A. J. and the friend are eight years old and they have all this energy, right? So the brother says, ‘Why don’t you two pretend to box? I’ll show you some basic moves. But you have to be careful.’ So they put on the eight-ounce gloves and pretend to box.
“Well, the brother leaves and the friend goes, ‘I got this loose tooth. How ‘bout hitting me and knocking it out? I’ll give you half the money I get for it. It’ll look cool: you hit me and I spit out the tooth!’ So A. J. hits him like three times and the tooth still doesn’t come out, so he grabs the eighteen-ounce gloves and knocks the tooth out with that.
“Now his friend is all mad now because he didn’t realize it was gonna hurt, so he yells, ‘Payback time!’ And he grabs the heavy gloves and goes Wham! upside A. J.’s head!
“’You kidding?’ I ask him, and he goes, ‘See? Look at this!’ Sure enough, he’s got this knot on the side of his head.” Carter quietly chuckles before adding, “Joan said A. J.’s not allowed to play at his friend’s house for a week. A. J. says she’s being mean.”
While most calls are cash calls, many drivers do carry “paper, ”charges that the cab companies extend for various reasons. “I don’t do paper,” Carter maintains. While many charges are metered-paper, others pay much less.
John, an ex-driver, carried paper for several years. There was one weekly charge that he always tried to get. “Ethel and her buds,” he called the group coming out of Sun-set Mobile Home Park. Two or three cabs would carry eight to twelve women from the park to the nearest Publix and back.
“It was great,” John admitted. “Eighteen bucks to the store, eighteen back, plus a buck from each lady on the return trip.”
His favorite part was listening to the residents, most of whom were in their seven-ties and eighties, talk about other residents. “Who are we picking up?” the first pick up in the park would ask. “Oh, Betty, Jane, and Ethel?” The women instinctually knew which order the pick-ups went, and would talk accordingly. “Did you hear about Betty? No? Ooh, she kicked her husband out! Caught him flirting with a woman at the pool. He claimed he had something in his eye…” By this time, John would be pulling into Betty’s driveway. Once in, the first woman would relay, “We’re picking up Jane and Ethel.” Immediately, the gossip started.
“The gossip was always better on the way back,” John reminisced. “They were worse than a bunch of teenagers! And funny…I never would’ve guessed old women could be so wild!”
I’ve called for a cab, and Kevin Carter pulls into the driveway. Before we’re even on the road, Carter is shaking his head. “It’s going to be one of those days, I just know it.”
What happened, I ask.
Turns out, he got a call to pick up at a Circle K. “Usually the person’s waiting outside the store, but I don’t see anyone. I stick my head inside and the only person there is the clerk. So I ask if someone called for a cab. ‘Yeah. He’s in the bathroom.’ So I go to the bathroom and knock on the door. I holler, ‘Cab,’ and the guy calls back, ‘Be right out.’
“By now, the clerk is standing next to me, whispering, ‘He ain’t dressed right.’ I just go, ‘Oh?’ ‘Yeah,’ the clerk says. ‘Just wait. You’ll see.’
“Just then, this Sheriff’s Deputy comes into the store and the clerk tells him, ‘Please stick around. I think the guy in the bathroom needs help.’
“So it’s me, the deputy and the clerk all hanging out next to the bathroom, when out comes the guy, dressed in nothing but a hospital gown, a pair of socks and an IV port still hanging out of his arm. He points to me and goes, ‘If you’re the cabbie, I’m ready to go.’ The cop and me, we’re just looking at each other like, ‘We’re not really seeing this, are we?’ and the cop says, ‘Hey, man, I think we need to talk.’
“The guy says that he left the hospital and that his girlfriend left earlier with his clothes and money, which is why he’s dressed this way. So the cop asks for the girl-friend’s phone number, and while he’s trying to call her, the guy bolts. The cop calls for backup and starts chasing the guy. So the guy vaults over this wrought-iron fence around some storage units, giving everyone a show. Finally gets caught on the other end of the units where there’s a boggy area. Course, by now there’s like eight or ten cruisers there.
“Never did find out what his problem was. Never got paid for the fare. But what can you expect on Idiot Friday?”
(1) This story, relayed from Paul Middleton, happened during the late 1960s - early 1970s; the cab fare from Pinellas County, on Florida's west coast, to Key West would now be a whole lot higher.
Kevin Carter, who I rode with while going to USFSP, retired around early 2015, and has since died.
