The Newspaper Man Is Defunct - Crashed Cabs and Good Vodka

By TRB

This guy was after me; you know how you know it.

He's being cute and changing lanes when you're changing lanes. And you can see the blue bubble right up there on the dashboard of his standard issue piece-of-crap Ford, painted the color with no name. But I am a bit on the stoned side today and I am capable of just about anything. Really. I also don't have any plates on the car. Actually I was on my way to pick them up, or at least that was what I was prepared to say.

Some of us are crazy when we are young. Some wait until they get older to got nuts. Then there are those people who just always live right there inside of their brain with their own kind of noise. And on a good quiet day when there's no weather, you can mosey on up to a nut of this type and you can put your ear right up to the confused-one's forehead and you can hear that noise. It sounds like bees buzzing in the distance. Makes you want to leave before they get there. I was always smart enough to leave.

Now I can look in my rearview and see this cop. He is wearing a uniform. He's in an unmarked wearing a uniform. A moron. Maybe my lucky day. I am leaving the city and there's a restaurant called "Howard Johnson's" (remember those) just ahead. And if I jam the brake and go over the sidewalk managing to clear two cars parked closely together, I am golden.

And I am golden and I am giving the cop the finger as he is trying to get to me against the one-way traffic, an impossibility. I drive into a large field where it's easy to score perfect or near-perfect weed. I am 17 years old. It is 1967. I don't even have a license to drive. My hair is a chestnut color and it is down to my butt. I have recently entered the crazy years of my youth.

Today, as I write this the field is gone and in its place stands a strip mall that is so dirty and so dangerous I would literally not take my dog to it. Anyway, going back now, I score, Not much. I am living in an enormous apartment, actually a four story brick house right next to the turnpike and the university. My roommates are strange as is everything and everybody on the cusp of those two years. In '68 Martin is gunned down. Some guy named Sirhan kills Bobby out in Los Angles. LBJ has turned the Vietnam War into generation whip-down. Fifty thousand of us are already dead in this loopy battle over nothing.

And suddenly Richard Milhous Nixon is President.

Many of my friends switched to hallucigens when that happened. Somehow it seemed easier to believe you were imagining it all. And also that you were subject to an occasional flashback, and those were free.

We didn't have what you would call "newspapers" for our generation - we had "statements," statements on the war, women's rights, freedom of assembly. And Peter Townsend's sophomoric line about "I hope I die before I get old," actually made sense to us.

The newspaper, or "pretty prop," (that is what I always called our underground rag) at which I worked was run in the old fashioned way, of course. Men controlled everything. We were cool and we were hip and all that, but we were as sexist as our fathers, just better at covering it up. It was no accident that every woman who worked at our paper could have, probably would have, been a model had she not been led in through our doors where our personnel director was eager to hire anyone whose looks would qualify her for a Playboy shoot.

I was just a kid then. I had become a young man during the sexual revolution. Like most young men I didn't have a clue. But I did have an ace in the hole, as it were. Downstairs from my aparrtment lived a writer, her name was Tracy and I had been told that she was a lesbian. I was downstairs at her place one night helping her make some kind of dinnner. Anyone who was ever really a "hippie" will tell you we always ate "some kind of dinner." It usually involved pasta or maybe fish. I don't remember.

I do remember that Tracy asked me if I was doing okay with the ladies. I took this as an intimidating question coming as it did from a woman with a PhD (forgot to tell you that) who was maybe ten years older (that too). Straight out she asked me if I would like to learn more about the birds and the bees. I thought. What the hell, we have the time.

And right there, in her comfy two-cat apartment, Tracy taught me everything that ever made her feel good in her life. It took all night. We didn't sleep. I got back to my own place at 6 AM and fell into my bed exhausted. Tell me that doesn't sound like bull, or some loser fantasy. It's true though. A lot of what sounds like bull today was true back then.

I was writing a lot of music reviews. Mountain, Iron Butterfly, Ultimate Spinach, Orpheus. Hippie groups and one hit wonders like Vanilla Fudge, who turned a simpy Supremes (You Keep Me Hanging On) song into one of the first heavy metal classics.

I traveled to Woodstock and got back stage in '69, where I learned that Janis was genuine, and very short, The Who could be tedious and even bad on stage. Sometimes their playing was just plain terrible. Crosby was probably the most stuck up and uptight hippie/musician I had met in my life, and Jimi was having second thoughts about his career as "Mr. Otherworldly Guitar Player." I also learned that Grace Slick was one of the coolest people on the planet. She just didn't know it yet. I probably learned 100 times that, but sometimes it is good to have your brain free for other things. Woodstock was just one thing.

I got home and immediately got my hackney license because writing music reviews for underground papers was like having a lemonade stand. This is where I met my sailor from some Eastern Europen nation. I call him "mine" only becasuse he inadvertently changed my life. I was looking for some fares in the Flesh for Fantasy district one night and he waved me down. Couldn't speak a word of English. Handed me a piece of paper with his ship's name and dock number on it.

So we get to the ship and he is waving me to come aboard, and you know how all of us sort of stupidly believe we are intelligent? Well I have this figured out. His money must be onboard and he is asking me to follow him so he can pay me. But no. That wasn't it at all. He was broke in fact. All he had was photos of this family who looked like they were all on steroids and a high-grade bottle of the most delicious Russian Vodka in the world.

Outside in the parking lot was the cab company's newest cab, which I had signed for earlier. I don't believe it had been there a week. I do remember that the Russian vodka acted as an interpreter for us and I pretty much knew everything about his life and he about mine when I staggered off the ship three hours later, still without the fare.

As Mick might say at this point "Well what can a poor boy do . . "

Yes, I had to stagger into that cab and somehow get it back to the shop in one pristine piece. But it didn't happen like that. I can just barely remember taking this cut-off I was convinced would bring me right back to the cab company. But it wasn't a cut-off. I had somehow gotten all turned around and was headed down an underground electric trolley tunnel.

Yes I was.

Several feet in, the tracks came up to meet the bottom of the brand new taxi cab and literally tore it to shreds. There were major pieces of that cab strewn all over that trolley tunnel for perhaps two whole miles. They had to shut it down. Menwhile I was out like a light on a gurney, my stomach was pumped. Cops and firefighters would walk into my hospital room and laugh every now and then. But for some reason, probably the drugs they loaded me with, I did not have a care in the world.

Suddenly the door opened and a very well dressed and very tough-looking old man walked in. I knew who he was. He owned the cab company and everything else that wasn't tied down in the city. He also owned the government from the Mayor on down. For several minutes, he just looked at me. then he said:

"The dispatcher trusted you with our best cab, and what did you do, What happened?"

I told him everything about my life, leading up to the drunken sailor, his family of professional wrestler candidates and the vodka. He was actually laughing occassionally. I asked him what I would be charged with.

Nothing

I asked him who would pay for the damage to the trolley tracks.

It's not your worry.

I said, of course they will take my hackney license. My cab-driving days were over,

No they're not, he said, explaining that I was going to drive a cab for him for as long as it took me to pay off the price of the one I had destroyed,

I said, Don't you have insurance?

He laughed again.

In less than a week, I was driving a cab again. At the end of that week I went to the dispatcher's office to see what i would get for a check. Would it be anything?

It was a check, a full check and there was a letter attached to it. It was written in the hand of the old man who owned the place. It said in so many words that I had given him a wonderful story, worth much more than the car. And that I should stay the hell away from trolley tunnels. A simple repeating of the facts, as I remembered them, had saved the day. Right then, I decided that writing news for a living couldn't be all that bad. Even if the news did take some strange turns now and again.

The owner of the taxi company died years ago I took one of his cabs to his funeral. Everyone was there. Even the Mayor.