Immediacy

by Joe Donohoe

The worst thing that has ever happened to me in the taxi cab I drive (knock on wood) was having an ice pick put up to my eye and loosing the $100 I had painstakingly scraped out of the last night of the work week which had begun for me on September 11th, 2001.

This was, understandably, a very hungry week. All over the City of St. Francis people were partying in the streets as they had been since the commencement of the dot com era, only now the vibe was even more desperate than in the months succeeding the market crash. The various hipsters crowding the sidewalks outside of the city's hot spots for cigarettes, ...bald tattooed hedonists and preppie garage software types -- resembled German tycoons tipping bubbly with Eva Braun as the Russians closed in on Berlin--or so it seemed to me... One thing was certain, while people weren't tee totaling, they weren't taking cabs either... And those who were would talk to me about gloomy subject matter such as the possibility of terrorists initiating airborne anthrax attacks. Nevertheless I picked up anyone who looked like they wanted a cab. I had bills to pay. Financially speaking I could barely afford to take the BART to Oakland, let alone afford to grab family and friends and homestead in British Columbia if worse came to worse (I lacked faith in our government, corporations and institutions to handle things should the shit keep hitting the fan. I mean are you gonna call the cops or write your congressman if the apocalypse happens?)

I picked up the thief on Valencia Street early in the morning, ignoring the feeling that told me not to. He flagged me from a shadowy door front wearing a hooded sweat shirt. I was sure I could make just a little bit more money with just one more fare, even if I got an untrustworthy vibe from this one individual. He told me to head for Bernal Heights.

He told me to stop by the woodsy top of the hill. He called me "homes," and instead of giving me my money, he took mine, knocking my glasses off my face from behind me and extending the ice pick from his hand in a practiced movement I wasn't ready for once I had parked.

"Give me your money or I'll cut you," he said.

As I handed him a roll of money that looked like it had been through the washer a couple of times he said, "Better be all of it homes or I'll cut you."

"Yeah that's all of it," I said wishing I had a .357 under my seat rather than money. After he exited I wanted to run the fucker down but he knew what he was doing. By the time I found my glasses on the passenger side floor board he had lost himself in the trees. A month later the SFPD managed to get him, shooting him in the leg during a stake out on Chavez after he stabbed another cab driver in the neck. I never got my money back, but I never bothered to try.

When I would tell people about this incident they would ask me why I wanted to keep driving and not do something else. I would tell them because it was interesting. The cab job allows you to live in the stories of San Francisco, including the crime stories, which are, after all, compelling. Also I wasn't going to let a little brush with violence and death make me run for the suburbs.

I don't think it is possible to have a crime free world. At any rate you can utilize the bad to the end of entertainment, if nothing else. As a taxi driver, or as they tell us to think of ourselves, "an Ambassador of San Francisco", I try to be entertaining. Give people their money's worth and then some. When I first started driving a cab, if ever I found myself getting bored I would tell tourists and conventioners about the city's most beloved felonious sons and daughters. I would tell them about the Zebra Killers, psycho black Moslems who loved to off whitey. I would point out where the Manson family stayed in the Haight. I would tell Conservative Midwestern middle Americans about Jim Jones and Dan White and about the Zodiac, surprised when people didn't remember these stories.

Part of my tour package would involve pointing out the soil testing lab window in City Hall that Dan White used to get covert access into the building during broad day light and, of course, the site of the infamous People's Temple.

The Zodiac was a serial killer whose modus operandi or mode of murder, was to prey on lone couples allegedly dressed as different characters in the Zodiac. He would send cryptic letters to the SF Chronicle with teases as to his real identity although he was never caught.

Actually I don't like talking about the Zodiac since he killed an SF cabbie in Pacific Heights. A little bit too close to home there.

At any rate I like to share the lore of our beautiful city, and gratify the curiosity of visitors, although people don't always appreciate it. Some people just simply aren't curious.

As a more experienced cab driver I really don't indulge myself in crime stories so much these days. I don't chortle at how pathological behavior gleefully explained bothers people. I'm just trying to work for a better tomorrow and have a little fun on the side, you know? But I'm still in the cab and I still get reminders on the value of caution. Life is always precarious. I just work in an industry that doesn't make it easy to forget this

Having a icepick put to your eye was a visceral experience--dirty, dangerous, nasty, terrifying. Having a machine gun pointed at you doesn't feel quite real at all.

This happened to me in the Tenderloin one night

I was parked at this red light when this kid hit the hood of my taxi. He was steadying himself from falling after making a left turn parabola onto Ellis from the uphill side of Hyde Street. I saw him for an instant. Right behind him came another kid. The other kid was an Asian in his early twenties. He had long hair coming out of a beanie and baggy clothes that could have been accidentally trendy. This second kid had a cold focused look on his face. He stopped right in front of my cab and looked through my windshield, past me and my two passengers, at the kid he was chasing. The quarry was cowering behind my cab, hugging the trunk. Then the second kid reached into his waistband and pulled out something blue black and metallic that looked like a Maglite, those heavy aluminum alloy flashlights that police and private security use for both defense and illumination

"Is that a gun?" I stupidly asked my passengers.

"Yeah I think so," the guy behind me said. In fact the object was a modified semi-automatic pistol. What I think they used to call a "Saturday Night Special" but the Windows 2007 version, owning the kick of a submachine gun. The kid in front aimed at the kid behind and, unfortunately, we were in the middle. In the doorway of the corner liquor store a plump girl was screaming.

My two passengers were a punkish yuppie couple in their thirties. I picked them up at a combination sushi restaurant wine bar near Union Square. They wore dark clothing and maybe worked in the media. Perhaps they liked Radiohead and Mike Leigh films. They were the type of people I sometimes envied.

They wanted to go to the Mission so I drove down Ellis away from the expensively safe Union Square to the 'loin where the ghost of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op detective eternally shoots out the kneecaps of murderous thugs. At the corner of Ellis and Jones six police rollers with cops inside of them looked bored with the gentrification process and sat idly in their Ford Interceptors.

"What's going on with all those cops?" the girl asked me.

"Maybe a woman was breast feeding in public," I said.

In the Tenderloin, when the light is right, you can feel the spirits of long ago Prohibition flappers lit on coke and opium and race music and all things jazz modern. Then the light will change and all you see are cracked out prostitutes, discarded humans, pimps, lonely looking old people, peeling lead paint, competitive rats and the odd posse of sexy club girls who made the wrong turn. There are also, and this is not so obvious to the outsider, plenty of people there who are proud to call the place their home and some of these are right as rain.

I could tell by looking at the clip the kid had rammed into his gun that he could have killed me, my passengers and the kid behind us and had some change left over. The girl in front of the liquor store kept screaming. She was obviously not a smoker. The American Lung Association could have recruited her as a role model. Finally the light changed and the kid with the gun disappeared and so did the kid he had been chasing. The girl screaming in the door of the liquor store stopped. No one died. The assassin was a conscientious young killer: he wasn't going to cap civilians. I made a left onto Hyde and saw him running downhill parallel to us stashing his gun back into his waistband.

It seemed like the responsible thing to do to dial 911 even if it's something I hate doing and won't do unless somebody looks like they're going to die. I rang it up on my cell phone: Metro PCS -- the service that doesn't run credit checks. By the time I reached Market Street I got a prerecorded message.

"Su llamar is muy importante. Si necessita ayudar presa uno, por favor. Para ingles presa dos." I pressed two and waited. My passengers were quiet. Occasionally we would say something meaningless to each other. An instrumental Madonna song played on the emergency dispatch line.

By the time we reached 24th and Portrero, about ten minutes later, I got through to the 911 dispatcher on my cell phone and she asked me if I wanted to talk to the police.

"Aren't you the police?"

"No, I'm just the dispatcher for the highway patrol."

"Is this an emergency?"

"Well I guess. Some kid's running around Ellis and Hyde with a machine gun, and he looks like he wants to put this other kid in the ground. Maybe he will before the night is over. He aimed his gun right at me and my passengers."

"Are you still there?"

"I'm talking to you,"

"I mean are you at Ellis and Hyde?"

"It didn't seem prudent to hang out."

"Do you want to talk to the police, it will take a minute to get through."

I've been told by my nephew who is a surgeon at Walter Reed that when you are shot by a AK-47 or similar such automatic firearm it's a role of the dice which of your body systems gets taken out but usually it's a whole system, like you're entire respiratory system, or your nervous system, or your physical mobility period.

In other words, I'd have bled to death by then.

"Nevermind," I said.

I let my fares out. We didn't say anything and I drove off. I had about seven more fares that night.

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