Saint Patricks Day

San FranPatricks day has not been on a Friday in 7 years. On the holiday when it was on a weekday it became a sordid lunchbreak that turned into a raucous suits and suds melee. Or something like that. But tonight is a friday. And its not raining and an 8k pharmicist convention is coming into town. First fare is lady hanging out another cab in opposite direction on Cezar Chavez and s.v.n. He was trying to take her to Evans st. to his cab compound for it was the end of his shift and he had to have his cab back and he tried to pass her off to one of his company brothers and she was having nothing of it because she was born here and her moms from NY and what the fuck i need a cab in the right direction and she yells at me with arms flailing out of only a half lowered window. I pull into el cheapo gas station and soon i am swept up into a sexy drunk unhappy loftwifes intentions of having a good st. paddies day (she's an eigth irish.) we need to pick up her friend and would i like a guiness? aw c'mon have a beer. you can have a beer. its the start of my shift, i protest. YEAH, first one, CHEERS. She likes me and offers me pot and cocaine. I defer. I get her short story, twice. Her friend is interested too and soon enough i am dropping them off at Shanghai Kellys and shes begging me to go in for a drink. I cannot and with 20 bucks in hand i search for my next asses. Three EU'ers going to the Hilton. The hotel doorman has a line back into the foyer and i have a ride to Fishermans Wharf, where i greet some tired country folk from farm in Monterey. The kids were especially impressed with the ride on Jones st from columbus to o'farrell. ON and ON it went, a mix of tourists and green hatted sloshkies, going from one side of Russian Hill to the other and over to the front side of Tendernob. I got gladhanded and invited to partake and participate with 4 different female fares. I survived 3 possible puker rides. I got every imaginable thing yelled at me. I got taunted and provoked, cursed at and gestured towards, glared at and leered on, swerved at and swerved from to avoid, confounded and profounded, and sured and not sured. I made less than new years and halloween, but not more than valentines. I'm glad i didn't get run into and thats worth the 10% less i made because people were so drunk they made for inefficient passengers. Scene: two guys snoring as their buddy took forever to get a bottle form a bodega 4 minutes before 2.

March 4

Its been a while since i've posted. I moved from Lower HAIGHT to Mclaren park and its been tough moving and finally getting DSL. No excuses though, laziness pervades the soles of my feet.

Last night was busy. 7000 dermatoligists in town for a convention. They tip for shit, especially the foreigners. Exact change from 5 straight fares, that hadn't happened in my 9 years driving. After getting 2 slices from Arnells on Valencia, a very cute girl from Montreal gets in and we talk it up all the way to the Triton. She is asking me lots of personal questions and laughs at my lame jokes. As she gets out she tells me to watch out for the Dermos and i say for her, as well , to watch out for them and i notice a large zit on her chin and i hope she didn't misunderstand me.
Over a thousand fratters and such were racing in an urban dogsled drink fest, groups of 6 or 7 costumed fools pulling shopping carts laden with alcohol all through the city. I had 4 fares of these people and they were all wasted and wanting to drive their cars out of parking garages.
Didn't get to stop by the Mesh party at Rickshaw but in my few drive-bys it looked like a good crowd. Hot chicks read Mesh. Anyway, another big storm is blowing in and i'm skipping work today to get up to South Lake for some powwow and cardiovascular wowwop. so next week i'm back and i'll tell all the juicy details of the stinky, dirty cab.

1/26/06

As soon as someone gets in the cab, they want to know if its busy or if i'm having a good night. Every Friday night is busy and every Friday night after this one will be busy. Last night i felt like i was going through the motions, punching the time card. The Warriors lost to the lakers. I picked up a Marine whose wife and baby girl left him two weeks after he finished a 16 month tour of duty in Iraq. I moved around some French people and some British people. I saw a wicked accident at Hayes and Gough where a crappy car crashed into a nice restaurant. I transported some cute girls and some ugly ones. I had a donut and coffee at the beginning of my shift and a slice of pizza at the end of my shift. I never went to the airport. Not much happened, i didn't talk to half my fares and a quarter of those were couples getting heavy before i could get them home.
At the end of my shift, i fell asleep waiting in the gas line.

Sunday night puke job

Driving a spare is not fun, they don’t drive well, they smell, and the stereos never seem to work right. It’s my own fault for driving by a drunk who throws bottles at cars. It’s Sunday and a holiday eve, as its Martin Luther King Day the next day. People are out on the town and it should stay busy into the late night hours. I pick up people in Union square, at the movies, from restaurants and plays. I get this older couple from the Sonoma who enjoyed Mozart at the Symphony. I’m listening to jazz on the radio and they tell me they saw Charles Mingus at the Jazz Collective in North Beach many years ago. A woman named Ursula gives up on the bus in the Castro and on the way over the hill to Noe Valley she tells me about her medical problems and her need to be proactive about what she puts in her body. I tell her about Café Gratitude and she thanks me by doubling the fare. I pick up two cocktail waitresses from Bimbo’s where James Brown had just performed. He was awesome and danced amazingly for his age. I drop them off in the TL and pick up a bartender with bulging discs. Its turning into a busy night and in my greed to reach my quota for a Saturday night on a Sunday night I try to get one more last fare by queuing up at the Endup. I’m first up when the exit doors flies open with a bouncer escorting a stumbling Latino tranny. A Joe jock white guy is helping her. My first instinct was to lock the doors and flee the scene, but I waited in this line and who knows. They get in and she can’t communicate where her residence is, so the guy instructs me to take them to his car parked in the alley behind 850 Bryant. It’s approximately 200 feet from the cab queue. Two minutes have passed and she/he is already passed out. He tries to extricate her from the back seat, to no avail. I get out and try to help. He pulls and I push. I exude patience when he realizes he doesn’t have his keys as they are in coat check inside the Endup. She/he slumps back into the seat and he runs away. Two cops pass me and look at me quizzically as I stand outside my taxi with a look of utter frustration on my face. He finally returns and she/he has her shirt off revealing too perfect tits. This is getting bad as I never even turned the meter on and I can see the cab queue moving fast without me. Again we try to remove her/him from the back seat but her shoes have fallen off and she’s still naked from the waist up and he’s trying to put her jacket on when she starts puking. It sounds like a faucet open wide and wide stream of vomit cascades down the road. “Please, not in my cab”, I implore. Unfortunately it has gotten on the cab and on the door and I am pissed. I tell him he has to give me money because now I can’t pick anyone up because I have to clean it up myself. All he has is $13 and that doesn’t even cover my time spent with these fools. I tell him I need more money and he says he has no more and they drive off in his new Audi and I throw the money at his car and yell “ASSHOLE”. Then I pick up the money and put it in my pocket and go back to the garage to clean out my spare cab

Too much Broadway

Its Saturday night and I’m driving a spare. I come and go, to and fro, up and down, wrong way, now turn around. Not much is happening and it’s turning out to be a fairly quiet night until I pick up my last fare. Its 2:30 in the morning and I take a radio call for a bar at Stockton and Green. Two white guys come out and one is holding a bag of ice to his nose. They get in and tell me they need to go to Pleasant Hill. Ok I say and lets go because it’s getting late and my cabs due in soon. Turns out they are brothers and the one with the ice might have a broken nose. Their story is that they were part of a bachelor party of 13 guys. Their cousin is getting married and his hillbilly friends came in for the wedding. They had two limousines and were hitting up all the strip clubs when all hell broke loss over the purchase of a certain round of drinks. Too many drinks, too much testosterone, and too few real female companions were the perfect recipe for violent mayhem. The unhurt brother started it all and threw the first punch into the face of their cousin’s friend. They fell onto the ground in a jumble of headlocks and knee shots. The broken nosed brother got his ailment by jumping in to defend his kin. They said it was 11 against 2 and they got a few good shots in themselves. The whole cab ride they told the same story over and over and the joint they smoked didn’t help them much in their reiteration of said events. On the way over the bridge they decided not to go home but to pick up their car at their cousins house in Moraga. Through the dark roads behind St. Mary’s college we creep. They tell me to stop at the corner as they are expecting an ambush from the rest of the party. The brother with the broken nose pays me and the other brother get out and puts a rock from the roadside into his pocket. I drive out of there and before I reach Highway #24, two stretch hummers pass me in the opposite direction.

Friday the 13th

Friday the thirteenth and a full moon, everyone wants to know if I can sense the craziness that’s purported to be out there; naaahhhh. I take a dishwasher to work. I take a lawyer home from work. A beautiful Indian woman here for Macworld asks me where she can get a massage and not one with a happy ending. She tells me how bad her back is and how her boss made her come here and all she wants is a massage. I suggested Kabuki or Osento, but in hindsight I realized she might have wanted me to do it. She wanted to shake my hand goodbye and she gazed at me lovingly as I pulled out of the Best Western parking lot where I left her. Then the rain came and my windshield is a streaked mess, as if it was cleaned with a scouring pad. My last fare of the night was the most eventful. I pick up two white guys in North Beach and they want to go to the Western Addition. Instead of taking Broadway tunnel, I head south and the west on Pine Street. It’s almost 2 a.m. and people are everywhere trying to hail cabs. It’s raining hard and again its not that easy to drive. There are only three cars on Pine and they’re all cabs. I’m following one and ahead of one. As we are all cruising through the intersection of Mason St. a group of side burned hipsters with trucker caps are jaywalking in the middle of the street. The first cab doesn’t let up and as I pass I see one of them whirl around as if to throw something. I have had many things thrown at me because I am occupied and they are frustrated. I have had my cab punched, kicked, and spit on. I expect something and floor it accordingly. My driver’s side window explodes, glass is everywhere and by the time I stop I am 2 blocks down a one-way street. I pull over next to St. Mary hospital and try to get the attention of a cop but the car is unoccupied. Its poring rain and I have two frazzled customers in the back seat. I remove the glass on my seat and from my ear and proceed to the destination. I have no window and since I only have 30 minutes left in my shift; I call it quits. For the next 2 days I have to drive a spare.

lazy log

OK sorry but i have no time to blog my entire new years eve. much to tell but the snow calls. Epic rains in Cali so i am off to Tahoe now!! back in few days.

New Years Eve Eve

One of my passengers claimed that the eve of New Years Eve is better then New Years Eve. I don’t know but it sure was lucrative. It was very busy straight from the start. My first fare was a day driver named Mac the Hack; he picked up a check from his lawyer and gave me my first big tip of the night. Next up was a shopper from Trader Joes and she had lots of information on how to concoct the perfect new years day spritzer. Then I took a beautiful young woman to work at Ozumo and when she jumped out of cab another woman jumped in with a large bed cover that needed an equally large washing machine to get it clean. She directed me to where there was no Laundromat, so I took her to Brainwash and she had me wait for many minutes and then on to Whole Foods, where I again waited and then back to 88 Howard where I had to carry all the groceries to an elevator. It was worth twenty-seven bucks. Then the rain came and the wind and more rain and more wind. My rear window defroster was broken. My wipers went only three quarters speed. The air conditioner didn’t worth so it was stifling with the windows all rolled up. At this point it became a soggy blur of soaked pedestrians, crazy cloudbursts, lightning strikes, and fishtailing turns. Wherever I dropped off there was another desperate customer ready to jump in. It went on like this all night. My last fare was a very drunk lawyer who mumbled and stumbled into my back seat. We picked up his birthday girl wife in front of Division St. lounge and then fetched their drunk driving friend in parking lot on Main St. (she was going to drive to Pacifica with a mini spare tire on her car) and I took the whole group to Berkeley. The bridge was flooded on the upper deck and the rain was coming down so hard I was driving on instinct. I made it back to the garage and when I counted my booty I had to admit it was as good as New Years Eve.

Huge Holiday Weekend

I went home to the East Coast for week to be with the folks and endure negative 0 degree weather.
I came back in time for a busy busy weekend in SF.
Thursday was a blur of holiday parties and full moon wackiness. Passed up two airports because i can't accept credit cards. After missing the second one i picked up three young Indian guys trying to make LA flight out of Oakland and made it with few minutes to spare. An older woman complained that my driving was like being trapped in some hyper video game. Took some drunk office worker to SSF and she didn't have enough money so she gave me her Peets coffee card.
At St. Regis got another drunk party casualty going all the way to Vallejo. It ended up being a lucrative night.
Friday was fucked because i had to wait 4 hours just to get a cab and its cold as Poughkeepsie. Again, a ton of shoppers and holiday party people. A guy from London gave me a British cig that came from a pack costing him ten dollars. Another guy told me he's worked with Regis Philbin and what a bastard.
Saturday was wild. There were people dressed as Santa drinking heavily and soiling their suits all over. I saw at least 200 of them at church and market letting out a long, loud collective "hooooooooooo....." Later i had bike messenger girl who told me they would do battle with a bunch of clowns at post and market in a Fight Club themed drunken clash. It rained all night , making it hard to see with my streaked windshield. People were overtipping me left and right.
I made lots of money and my left arm was always wet.
Sunday sucked as usual. i worked it and made my quota in 6 hours and now i'm packing for Tahoe. later.