Charlie Brown Summer

She was unpleasant, whined and puked a lot.
She also taught me a couple of lessons.

By: The Sceptic | 01June2001

For reasons that bear no relationship to the events in Totalitarian Burger, I recently changed my "career path", moving up the food chain from a reasonably lucrative day job in a corporate American burlap cube to driving a taxi cab at night. Although I may not be able to afford to keep at it (it takes time to build up loyal customers who ask for a specific driver), I am seeing and experiencing events that will provide story ideas for months to come, more of which may appear here. Those experiences -- and the lessons I'm learning about human behavior -- make it worth my while, at least for a little while. Most of my business is centered around inebriated persons...tipsies, drunks, sloshes and alcoholics, the happy mellow ones and the loudly belligerent ones. I drive them home when they (or the tenders) know they've had enough and (if they are smart) I also drive them to the pubs at the beginning of the evening, which saves them having to retrieve their cars later. I drive customers who want a change of scenery from one bar to another. Sometimes, two cabs are dispatched for a "car and driver", in which one of us drives the customer's car home and the other follows to get a meter reading (which is multiplied by two, compensation for each driver) and to take the driver back to his/her cab. Smart drinkers know you can buy a lot of cab rides for the cost of an expensive -- and potentially embarrassing -- DUI. Besides driving around people, we also pick up from grocery and liquor stores and even fast food for deliveries. "Who's got enough money for three 12-packs for a delivery on Allumbaugh" the radio dispatcher will ask. After about seven weeks of driving, I've lost count of the number of times I've delivered a "cheapest bottle of vodka" or bad antifreeze wine to one of the low-rent wetbrains who regularly need their fix. One wonders why someone needs a large can of ravioli and a six-pack of Sprite delivered to their home at four in the morning. One evening, I made two deliveries of expensive alcohol -- $50 worth each time, not counting my fee -- to a wake in a house with dirt floors. I didn't even know there were inhabited houses within the city limits with dirt floors. I never would have guessed that I would ever have a job in which the more sots I encountered, the happier I would be...happiness being measured, of course, in the difference between the lease on the car for the shift, and the fares I took in. Besides the experiences and stories I'm accumulating, there is the independence. The closest thing to a boss I have is the driver who owns the car I lease. The one "corporate meeting" I've endured took three minutes, through adjacent car windows, in a 3am parking lot. (He wanted to know how I was doing, and to give me a few hints about how to get more business.) Drivers don't discuss how much money they've made, at least, not in specific numbers, primarily because we compete for the same clientele. I suspect -- being mostly a cash business -- that the IRS doesn't know the exact figures either. The most startling thing I've seen (so far) happened during an early morning delivery of $25 worth of Jack-in-the-Box. That much food at that time indicated that a party was still happening at the home to which I delivered. The bearded guy who answered the door was wearing a black dress, panty hose and (if the straps were any indicator) a brassiere. "I lost a bet", he explained. "I wasn't going to ask", I replied. He tipped me pretty well, too. Some nights, I'm so busy, my idea of heaven has become where there's always time and places to take a piss. Other nights, I play video games on my cell phone and sleep in the car with the radio turned all the way up. Only once, however, have I taken in less in fares than the cost of the car and refilling the petrol tank. For the privilege of driving a car for twelve hours, I owed $15. Discouraging! There are a lot of details about the mechanics of driving a taxi cab -- "standing" (parked in an area you hope will be close to some business), calming belligerents and dealing with they won't settle down, telling people that of-course-I'm-running-the-meter-while-you-stop-at-the-store-for-a-minute, having your dispatched runs stolen by competing cab companies who use radio scanners (which is illegal as hell, but hard to prove) -- that may or may not fascinate the average reader, but I won't go into at this time. Suffice it to say, the taxi business is probably more complicated that you think. Consider the above to be excessive introduction to an event that occurred during my second or third week of driving, the story of Charlie Brown Summer. Charlie Brown's is the name of a drinking establishment. Summer is the woman I was sent to pick up there, just before the 2am bar closing rush. The next day, I was advised by a cop to write down exactly what happened (I was too busy to bother, and I guess I didn't need a written account anyway), but the story is a worthy one anyway because Charlie Brown Summer taught me two lessons about the cab business. But I've gotten ahead of myself. It began like most of them, with the dispatcher checking the 20's (as in '10-20', radio-speak for location) of the available cabs to see who was closest. [When a cabbie "stands", s/he tells the dispatcher where, so said dispatcher doesn't have to ask each time. Some drivers move around a lot, so when a customer calls in, the dispatcher goes through the list of cruising availables, calling and simultaneously asking for their location by saying each driver's number. For example, dispatch asks "45". Driver number 45 replies with his/her location, like, "Roosevelt and Rose Hill". Inquiry: "69"; Reply: "Vista Village". "Boxcars"; "Capital, University". When the dispatcher determines who is closest, he doesn't give the full address and name (if there is one; sometimes the name is "check with the tender") of the pickup. To slow down the scumbag cab companies who listen in on our frequency with scanners, the dispatcher will give only a general location. When the driver gets close to the area, s/he asks for the rest of it by his driver number, followed by "20". For example, 23 is sent to "Broadway, Warren". When he's within sight of that location, he gets on the radio and asks "23-20", which might elicit a reply, "Broadway Bar for Adam". The protocol is designed to make efficient use of the time spent on the radio.] I don't remember where I was cruising, but I was closest, and was sent to "Curtis, Overland". When I got close, the full "-20" was Charlie Brown's for Summer. Being close to closing time, there were several people in the parking lot, some of them waiting for cabs. A youngish man asked me who I was sent for. When I told him, "Summer", he replied, "Thank God. Good luck." That should have been an indicator of trouble, not that I could have done anything about it. If you turn down a call, you're done for the shift. When I put the car into park and walked into Charlie Brown's, the bouncer didn't bother checking my ID, since he recognized me to be a cabbie. It's the sort of almost slimy establishment what doesn't mind sharing a building with Erotic City, one of the very few strip clubs in a religiously and politically conservative (which is pretty much the same thing, isn't it?) small western city. He asked who I was picking up, then pointed her out for me. Summer was a well-fed woman, probably in her early thirties...although I find it difficult to guess someone's age when they have been drinking to excess...and I'm watching them fall onto the floor. One of her friends -- a woman who wasn't quite so shit-faced -- asked if I was there for Summer. "Yes," I yelled over the music. "You'll need help getting her into the car", she screamed back. "Here, hold her purse for me." I took it and then watched Summer's drinking companions get her approximately to her feet and start towards the exit. When I realized that it was going to be a lengthy ordeal, and since I had made contact with the customer, I went to my car and started the meter. [The meter has two modes and both rates are determined by the city. It starts at $2.40, and -- in the mileage mode -- adds $1.80 per mile, ten cents at a time. Since a cabby's time is also worth something -- especially when there are runs holding for whoever is next available -- when a customer asks us to wait ("I'll be out in a second. I need to lock up." or "Can we stop here? I need to pick up smokes."), the meter goes in the time mode. Running the meter while a customer will "just take me a second" pisses some of them off more than anything else. I've tried to explain that if it's really going to take "just a second", then at thirty-five cents per minute, it won't even add another dime. Reasoning with a drunk -- or even just a full-time simpleton who thinks s/he ought to get something for nothing -- is mostly a waste of time. A few nights ago, I left a hostile asshole standing in front of the house I was sent to, because he said I couldn't run the meter on him while he needed "just ten minutes" to finish yelling at a woman.] I went back into Charlie Brown's, and Summer was sitting on the floor. I couldn't say for sure whether she had fallen again (unlikely, given the other woman and two men attempting to help her to the door), or was using the tactic my four-year-old niece tried a few times, when she didn't want to leave. As I got closer, I was hearing more than one voice yelling things like, "It's time to go home, Summer. The bar is about to close. Your cab is here." This went on for about ten minutes. They had barely managed to drag her just outside the exit when she informed them that she had to get to the restroom. She said she had to throw up. I sat in my cab for another ten minutes, meter still running, listening to other runs being dispatched on the radio, to see if I was missing anything more lucrative. I decided to go back inside and check on the status of Summer. When I entered, the bar was mostly empty and another guy (not the regular bouncer) told me it was closed. I said I was a cab driver. "Who you here for?" he asked. "Summer", I said. "Check next door. That sounds like a dancer's name." "Trust me, she don't have the body for it", I said. "I was in a few minutes ago and she wasn't ready to leave. She's probably in the restroom, puking." Presently, Summer and the other woman came back out. The woman said, "Good, you have her purse" when she saw I was still holding it. We made it all the way out to the car that time when Summer said she needed to go back in again. "Can you lock these doors", her friend asked. "Yes, but I won't", I said. "I've got to get out of here", Summer yelled. "I'm going to throw up again." She didn't make it back inside that time. I didn't care. It wasn't in my cab and the meter was still running. Summer got back in the car and immediately passed out. I asked the friend, "Where am I taking her?" She gave me the name of a trailer park with which I wasn't familiar, near a street I did know. "I don't know that park. How about an address or something? A space number might be useful too." She couldn't do that, so she suggested I check her driver's license. I told her to stick around a minute. If I had to get into a stranger's purse, I wanted a witness. Eventually, I found both an address that seemed to coincide with the street that the friend mentioned, and a $20 bill. I figured, given Summer's condition, I ought to get it out while I could. I put the twenty in the dashboard cup holder. The meter had reached $15 before we left the parking lot. Half-way home, Summer woke up and muttered something about throwing up again. I barely got across an intersection and stopped before she managed to open the door and blow some more chunks. When she was finished, I went around and checked to make sure she didn't get any in the car, then closed the door for her. (Throwing up in our cabs costs a minimum of $35.) Before I found her home, she woke up enough to start complaining about the meter. Standing in front of her house, it was up to nearly $25. "It costs $12 to get home," she whined. "Sorry, but it took you a while to get into the cab. I ran the meter, of course." "Well, I don't have that much. Besides, it isn't fair." At that point, I had endured quite enough of Charlie Brown Summer, so I said, "So what do you think the ride was worth, with me waiting for you to get in, and stopping so you could puke?" "$15." "Here's your change", I said, handing her a fin. "Get out of my cab."   The next afternoon, my sleep was interrupted by the telephone. It was a member of the local Pee Dee, and he seemed friendly and apologetic on the phone. He said he'd got my name and number from our office, and did I remember taking a woman home the previous night from Charlie Brown's. "Sure. Why do you ask?" "She is accusing you of stealing $50 out of her purse." "Well, technically I did take a $20 from her purse, but it was for a $25 fare and I cut her a break and gave her $5 back. Want to hear about it?" I told him everything I could remember. He said he didn't think a prosecutor would make anything out of it, but that I should inform my boss (I did), and that in case something did come up, I should write down everything I told him (I didn't, until now). I hadn't been driving long, but I'm a reasonably quick learner. The experience was both amusing and unpleasant, but I learned two lessons from Charlie Brown Summer. I learned to never take responsibility for a stranger's purse, no matter how reasonable it seems. More importantly, I learned to never give a falling down puking souse a price break, no matter how much whining they do. It won't make them grateful, so you might as well get every penny they owe.

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