by Jack Clark
river there was a string of leather tanneries loaded with Mexicans breathing chemical fumes, probably glad to be getting minimum wage.
We went over the river, under a railroad viaduct, and past more factories. We were the only car around.
"Where the hell are we?" the girl said, bringing me back to the present.
"This'll bring us right into Bucktown," I said.
"I feel like I'm in a movie sometimes."
"Where're you from?" I asked.
"Kansas City," she said.
"What brings you to town?"
"I just started a new job," the girl said. "Everybody's coming to Chicago. It's so cool."
"Where do all the jobs come from?" I asked. "I don't get that."
Factories seemed to close down every other week. Big plants with good, union jobs. Oscar Mayer. Stewart-Warner. Procter & Gamble. But these kids kept coming; suburban white kids for the most part, from Michigan and Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio. And they kept finding jobs. Good jobs. White-collar jobs down in the towers of the Loop. Were they new jobs or were the natives being bounced? I hadn't been able to figure it out.
"There aren't any cabs in Kansas," the girl said as I turned left on Damen. "Here, you just raise your arm in the air and one stops. It's so cool."
Back at Clybourn Avenue, a movie was letting out and I was the only cab in sight. There were people on every corner yelling and waving their arms around. I stopped short of the intersection and watched the race.
The winner was a suburban-looking kid in a college sweatshirt. "Hold on," he said, sliding in. "I've got a friend out here somewhere." Then he shouted out the door. "Hey, come on. I got it."
A young guy in a sport coat slipped through the crowd. "I didn't know where you went." He sounded amazed.
"You've got to be fast in the big city," his friend said.
"Where to?" I asked.
"First I want to drop my colleague here at the Sheridan Plaza," the guy in the sweatshirt said. "Then I'm going to Fullerton and Clark."
"Be cheaper to do it the other way," I said.
"Let's do it my way," he said. "Take Clybourn, okay?"
"It's your money." I started down Clybourn Avenue, an old industrial street that had evolved into a shopping and entertainment strip.
We passed a row of tiny frame houses. There were some black people sitting on a porch under a large FOR SALE sign. A block down, a longtime black saloon had been transformed into a nightclub, full of white kids dressed in black leather.
Just past Ogden Avenue, the guy in the sweatshirt whispered, "This is it."
"What?" his friend wanted to know.
"Cabrini-Green," the guy whispered.
"Jesus," his friend said. Now he was whispering too.
We were skirting the northernmost point of the project. In front of a bleak-looking highrise, two black kids were jumping up and down on a pile of discarded mattresses. Nobody else was around.
The guy pointed to a boarded-up building on our left. "That's the only McDonald's to ever go bankrupt," he said.
"Why?" his friend asked.
"Because of all the crime," the guy said. Then he began to whisper again. "They killed a cabdriver in here last night."
"And you told him to go this way?"
"I come by here all the time," the guy said.
"Jesus, it's scary looking." His friend was impressed. "I wish I had my camera."
"I'll tell you one thing," the guy whispered, "you'd never catch me driving a cab."
"Boy, that's a relief," I put my two cents in.
"Were we talking to you?"
I slowed down a bit. "Why don't you get out right here, show me how tough you are."
"Why don't I write your number down and report you to the city?"
"Sure," I grunted. "Go ahead." It wouldn't be the first time.
They were right, of course. It was a scary looking place even on the brightest of days. What an ugly place to die, I thought, and I wondered again how Lenny had ended up down here.
For some reason, Rollie's words echoed in my mind. Some people got no heart, man, no heart at all. The kid had been right on the money.
In a window about fourteen floors up, a blue neon beer sign blazed away, the brightest light in all of Cabrini. I wondered if someone had an illegal bar up there for drinkers too petrified to leave the project.
If I saw the same sign in a Lake Shore Drive highrise I would assume it was some college student's room. But here, I figured anyone smart enough to make it to college would also be smart enough not to make their window such an appealing target.
If they were really smart they'd get the hell out completely.
I turned left on Division, a street that led to the biggest bar strip in town, and we left Cabrini behind, just a dim reflection in the mirrors.
Sitting at the light at LaSalle, I found myself thinking about Rollie. The kid was all right, I decided. He could probably run a pretty fair hustle. He had the smile, that gleaming gold tooth, and the easy chatter. But instead, there he was playing it straight behind the counter of a convenience store.
And just like that, it hit me. I hardly knew Rollie, and here I was thinking of him like some long lost cousin. Christ, had he pulled some similar routine on Lenny? Was that what had happened? Was he the one who had conned the Polack down to the Green?
"Fuck," I said softly. I got sick of waiting for the light to change and made a right on red and headed south on LaSalle.
"Hey, where're you going?" the guy in the sweatshirt wanted to know.
"The Sheridan Plaza," I said.
"Why didn't you go straight to the Drive?"
I lifted my hand in a too-late-now shrug and turned left on Maple.
The meter read $5.70 when we pulled up in front of the Sheridan. "I'm getting out here too." The guy in the sweatshirt broke my heart. He handed me six dollars and waited for the change, then slammed the door.
I cruised north, thinking about Rollie.
Maybe I didn't remember picking him up because I'd never seen him before. It didn't take a genius to figure out I was a cabdriver. Not when I'd pulled up to the front door of the 24-Hour Pantry behind the wheel of a Sky Blue Taxi.
And if Rollie really did get off work at midnight, that's right when he'd need a cab. A few minutes to clean up, a few more minutes to bullshit with the overnight shift, and right about then Lenny would be walking through the door to pick up a newspaper, or maybe a six pack of beer. "Hey, Polack, remember me? I'm the guy who bought you that cup of coffee last week. You mind giving me a ride home?"
It would be hard to say no.
I exhaled, as if I'd been holding my breath all day, then relaxed in the seat. Maybe it was just a crazy theory but then again, maybe it wasn't.
Maybe the reason Rollie had decided not to drive a cab was because he'd figured a way to get the same money without the bother of actually getting behind the wheel.
At Division and Dearborn, a Yellow was angled towards the curb, picking up passengers. I was going around when the light changed. I stopped halfway into the crosswalk, a couple of inches over the center line.
An American-United Cab, making a left, was having a heck of a time trying to fit through the space I'd left. The driver, an old white guy with long, stringy hair, and the face of a heavy drinker, finally managed to line the cab up, then he crept forward slowly with both hands tight on the steering wheel. He had about a foot and a half to spare on either side.
As he pulled abreast, he looked my way. "Typical A-rab," he said, and he continued past.
All my relaxation went right out the window. "Hey, fuck you, you senile motherfucker," I shouted. "I could put a Mack truck through that hole."
His cab came to an abrupt stop and then started to back up. I grabbed the mace. A limousine, following the cab, laid on the horn.
The cab stopped, the driver still a couple of feet beyond me. He stuck his head out the window. "Who you calling an old motherfucker?" he shouted. Brother,
this was one ugly cabdriver.
"Who you calling an A-rab?" I asked.
"You drive like one," he said.
"And you drive like an old motherfucker, pal. You better find a new line of work."
I saw he was warming-up to spit, but I had the green light by then so I stepped on the gas and got the hell out of there. "Dumb motherfucker," I said to myself.
I went up Dearborn until it ended at the foot of Lincoln Park, then switched over to Clark Street and continued north, the park on my right.
The cab business was not the business to get old in, I knew. I wondered how long the old guy had been driving. Thirty or forty years, I guessed, and now his reflexes were shot. His vision was almost gone and his judgment had taken the same one-way trip. He probably got robbed once a month and had passengers run out without paying every other night.
It was a glimpse of my own dim future, I decided. If I didn't figure something else out soon, or if someone--like my new friend Rollie--didn't shoot me first. Was that his game? I wondered. Was he setting me up with small talk and free coffee?
I kept driving but my heart wasn't in it. I couldn't keep my mind off Lenny, Lenny and my new friend Rollie.
I hardly saw my passengers. They were just people heading home from work, or out for the night. People complaining.
"Driver, shouldn't we have turned back there?"
"Driver, wasn't that a twenty I gave you?"
"Driver, where the hell you going?"
"I'm going to 1300 Grand Avenue, just like you told me."
"Granville," he shouted. "I said 'Granville.' "
"Oh, Jesus Christ," I said, and I flipped the meter off and made a U-turn.
Chauffeurs shall not solicit patronage for any restaurant, night club, cabaret, dance hall, hotel, public resort, place or amusement, nor solicit any person for transportation to any prostitute or house of ill-fame or disorderly place nor transport any passenger to any place other than the destination to which the passenger has requested transportation.
City of Chicago, Department of Consumer Services, Public Vehicle Operations Division
The roundtable started early that night. When I pulled up, around twelve-thirty, there must have been twenty cabs parked in front of the pancake house.
The back table was full. Ace and Ken Willis moved over to make room. I slid a chair from a second table where the overflow sat.
"What's going on?" I asked. "There's still plenty of business out there."
"Some strange reason nobody wants to work," Fat Wally said. There was a pile of empty dishes in front of him and he was drinking straight from one of those metal milkshake canisters. It looked like a baby's bottle in his huge hand. We weren't dealing with any metabolism problem here. Wally liked to shovel it in.
"I still don't believe it," Ace said. He was a tiny old Jewish guy with a bald head and a neat, grey mustache. He'd known Lenny as long as anyone. "Christ, if they can get the Polack "
And he left it dangling there.
"He fucked up," Willis said.
Ace shook his head. "Somebody conned him."
"But he fell for it," Willis said.
Ace lit a cigarette, the first one I'd seen him smoke in months. He was one of those guys who could never quite quit. "Kenny tells me you saw Lenny last night," he said.
"Right around midnight." I nodded, and I described the brief encounter out on Lake Shore Drive twenty-four hours before.
"Well, you're the last, so far," Ace said. "Jake saw him about eight, heading into O'Hare."
"Escrow." I winked.
Jake smiled back, and tipped an invisible cap. "Edwin Miles," he said. "The cabdriver's cabdriver."
"Morning, Eddie." Clair dropped a cup of coffee in front of me, then went around topping off the other cups. She'd just come on duty at midnight.
"Decaf," Tony Golden held up a hand.
"Oh, hell, you can't tell the difference," Willis said.
"Man, if I drink too much of this stuff," Golden held up the nearly empty cup. "I start throwing 'em out of the cab."
"Give him a double," somebody at the back table suggested.
"I was up along Ridge earlier," I said, "trying to figure out what might get Lenny to stop."
"Don't go looking for trouble, Eddie," Ace warned.
"There's that 24-Hour Pantry up there," I said. "I thought he might have stopped there on his way home."
"Not the Polack," Ace let me know. "He didn't like paying convenience store prices."
"Yeah, but say he just needed a loaf of bread or something," I went on. "This black kid works there. I asked him if he saw Lenny, you know, about 12:15, and he says
no, he gets off at midnight. But what if he stood around talking for a while, and then Lenny comes in and the kid asks him for a ride home. I mean, if Lenny's in there all the time, he might do it."
"He wasn't in there all the time," Ace said.
"Here's the funny part," I kept going. "The kid comes up with some bullshit how he knows me. Says I picked him up one night when nobody else would. But I'll be damned if I remember him."
"Sounds just like you," Willis said, and he got the biggest laugh of the night. "You probably took him down to the Taylor Homes or something stupid like that."
The Robert Taylor Homes, on the South Side, were bigger and badder than Cabrini. And I'd been in there more times than I cared to remember. But some of the guys had never made the trip. Some of them went out of their way to avoid picking up black passengers. That included Tony Golden, the only black driver in the group. One of his favorite sayings was the punchline to Lenny's joke: "I don't go south."
Fat Wally would pick up anybody and go anywhere but he was a special case. His front seat was pushed as far back as it would go and it was so bent out of shape that when you got in his back seat you found Wally sitting right there with you. There wasn't enough room to sit behind him. He'd stretch his huge arm along the back of the seat and it would be inches from the passenger's face. Wally had been driving for almost ten years and he'd never been robbed. But people were always ducking out without paying. There, Wally didn't stand a chance. It took him about five minutes just to work his way out of the cab.
"How come it's got to be a black guy?" Tony Golden wanted to know.
"Not a lot of white guys robbing cabs," Alex the Greek said from the second table.
"Shit," Roy Davidson disagreed. "They're the only ones ever get me. The last son-of-a-bitch was wearing a suit and tie."
"It's kind of hard to believe it was a white guy got the Polack into Cabrini," Willis said.
"You've got a point there," Tony Golden said.
I tried to tell them about my trip into Cabrini to Hobbie Street but they never let me finish.
"Eddie, what the fuck's wrong with you?" Willis interrupted.
"It was early," I tried to explain.
Tony Golden shook his head. "You ain't never gonna learn."
"Tony if you're so goddamn afraid, why don't you find another line of work?"
"Afraid? What do I have to be afraid of?" Tony shouted. "Nothing. 'Cause I stay right where I belong, and out of those shitbag neighborhoods."
"How many kids from Kansas can you stand?"
"What the fuck are you talking?" Willis wanted to know.
"Don't you get tired of tourists?"
"The trouble with you, Eddie," Ace started in, "you're still trying to work the old city. Forget it. The old city's gone."
"If it wasn't for tourists," Willis cut in, "we'd all be on welfare."
"The workable area of town is almost nothing," Ace went on. "It's a tiny little sliver. Figure it's from Irving Park down to the Loop, and from the lake maybe a mile inland. I'll bet the whole area ain't as big as Des Moines, Iowa. And that's how you've got to think of yourself. You're a Des Moines cab driver, and if you get a trip out west or south and you can't get out of it, it's like being in Des Moines and going out to the countryside. When you drop your fare, you lock your doors and head straight
back to Des Moines. No fucking around in between. Somebody tries to flag you, you drive right by. Sorry, buddy, I'm a Des Moines cab. You better call one of them West Side cabs out here."
"Amen," Tony Golden said.
"I've been telling you for years, Eddie, you take too many chances."
"Yeah," I said, "The Polack used to tell me that."
"Eddie, you may think you're smarter than the Polack," Ace suddenly sounded pissed off, "but I'll tell you something, whoever got Lenny could have gotten any one of us. The Polack was one very street-smart hack."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"Hell, I remember one time " Fat Wally began.
But we never got to hear the story. "It's not so funny anymore, is it?" Paki Bob said.
"Don't start this up again," Willis said.
"It was all so funny when only foreign drivers got killed," Paki said.
"Come on, Bob," Ace said. "You know that's not true."
"My name is not Bob," Paki said.
"Yeah, well mine ain't Ace either but that's what everybody's been calling me for forty years."
"And I am not Pakistani," said Paki Bob, who was in truth a Berber from Algiers. When he'd first gotten in the business everybody had assumed he was Pakistani and someone had hung the nickname on him. By the time he'd had the nerve to correct them it was too late. This was the first time I'd heard him complain about the Bob part of his name.
"In my country," Paki said, "no one would ever kill someone for money. For politics maybe. For money, never."
Willis laughed. "In your country nobody's got any money."
"Oh, you lead such sheltered lives, you Americans."
"I like to be in America," Alex sang.
"How much you think Polack died for?" Ace asked.
"What's this about Lenny?" Clair asked as she pulled up with the pot of decaf.
"Don't you ever read the newspaper?" Willis asked.
"Dear Lord," she said softly, "that wasn't Lenny?"
She looked around the table. No one said a word.
"Oh, goddammit," she said, and she set the pot down way too hard and the glass shattered. The steaming coffee rushed out across the table. We all jumped to get out of the way, but Clair just stood there crying, the handle of the coffee pot, with a couple of jagged pieces of glass still attached, dangling there in her hand.