I was a guest on Tony DuShane’s eponymous podcast/radio show, Drinks with Tony. We discuss the craft writing, how I ended up driving a taxi, my experiences with Lyft and Uber, how I landed a gig writing a column for the S.F. Examiner, the pandemic and how a little bit of success can lead to a whole lot of despair.
I think. We talked for a while, and I kinda hoping he edited a bunch of stuff out…
Anyway. Not sure what Tony was drinking, but I had a seltzer on ice.
Check out the podcast here.
Ah, the memories… Even if I try to forget, Facebook always reminds me of the stupid shit I did in the past… And wrote columns about…
published on Nov 6, 2015
I was a Lyft driver for Halloween.
The idea came to me at last week’s barbeque. For some reason, driving around San Francisco, picking up fares with Lyft’s iconic trade dress on my cab, seemed like an absolutely hilarious prank. Even if I just caused confusion, at the very least it would be a noteworthy social experiment.
So that Saturday, once it got dark, I fastened the fluffy pink Carstache Lyft sent me when I first signed up to the grill of National 182 and attached the Glowstache I’d received as a top-rated driver to the dash.
I created a Pandora station around The Cramps, Misfits and Ramones.
To augment my trickery, I planned to tell my passengers I didn’t know where I was going and that it was 200 percent Prime Time all night.
I figured everyone would laugh and throw piles of money at me for having such a clever costume.
On 16th Street, a girl dressed as a spider flagged me down.
“Can you take me to Geary and Fillmore, please?”
“Sorry, I’m a Lyft driver,” I said merrily. “I don’t know where that is.”
“It’s easy,” she responded in all seriousness. “I’ll direct you.”
“…”
From Japantown, I crawled down Polk Street behind a beat-up white limo. A few cab drivers looked at me like I was committing the greatest sin by “rocking the ’stache,” as they say in Lyft parlance.
Trevor, the Street Ninja, impersonating Travis Bickle, cruised past me at one point cracking up.
“I’m a Lyft driver!” I yelled out the window. “Where am I? What street is this? Are we in SoMa?”
I stuck to the more congested parts of The City, where I knew my caricature would get the most exposure. Some Lyft drivers scowled at me. Others blew their horns or flashed their high beams.
The majority of my passengers, though, didn’t seem to notice or care. They just told me where they were going, and off I drove with my mouth shut.
So much for being a friend with a cab.
After dropping off a group of revelers at Bar None, I was heading deeper into the congestion of Union Street with The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” at full blast when a guy darted out of the crowd.
“You!” He pointed at my cab, laughed and jumped in the backseat.
Barreling down Gough, we talked about irony and thrash metal. When I dropped him off on Valencia, he almost took off without paying.
“Hey, I’m only pretending to be a Lyft,” I reminded him.
On my way to the Haight from the Mission with a fare, Other Larry pulled up next to me on Guerrero in Veterans 233.
“Nice fucking mustache!” he shouted.
“Look at me!” I jeered. “I’m a Lyft driver and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing!”
“Does it ever get old?” the guy in the backseat asked.
“What?”
“Making fun of Lyft.”
“No.”
On a ride through the back roads of the Western Addition, I tried to explain to another guy the tension between the Smartphone Hailed Internet Transportation Services and cab drivers and why the Lyft mustaches on my taxi were so hilarious.
“You mean you can’t do Lyft in a cab?” he asked. “I always assumed you guys were all the same.”
The same?
Sure, the lines are blurry these days: Flywheel is an app and a taxi company; most Uber drivers are Lyft drivers and vice versa; decommissioned Yellow cabs are used as Uber-Lyft cars; Towncar drivers slap fake TCP numbers on their bumpers to access commercial lanes; out-of-town cabs come into The City all the time and pick up street hails; and now Uber-Lyft drivers are putting toplights on their Priuses.
According to a recent study from Northeastern University, the streets of San Francisco are congested with more than 10,000 vehicles for hire on average. During a holiday like Halloween, that number is considerably higher. But only taxicabs are required to follow rules and regulations. Everyone else is free to play make-believe all they want.
It doesn’t even matter if the portrayal is convincing. The general population just wants the cheapest and most convenient ride available. Who provides the actual service, whether they’re knockoffs or the real McCoy, is completely irrelevant.
Especially on Halloween.
____________________
Originally appeared in the S.F. Examiner.
Interesting article from 2015 about a Black-owned cab company in 1940’s Pittsburgh that rose up from the jitneys that served the African-American population and neighborhood. [Includes more great photos from the era.]
“Owl Cab Company was started by former jitney driver Silas Knox because Yellow Cab refused to come to the Hill,” says Kenneth Hawthorne, guest curator of the exhibition Teenie Harris Photographs: Cars.
The history of Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District and its ever-changing social climate are issues with which Hawthorne is intimately familiar. After all, he started his career by working as a mechanic at Hawthorne’s Esso, his father’s service station on Wylie Avenue in the Hill, before eventually going on to become a vice president at Gulf Oil. Owl Cab Company, as well as their competitors and local jitney drivers, all had their cars serviced at Hawthorne’s.
While Yellow Cab’s refusal to provide service to residents of the Hill was just one example of the many ways African Americans were discriminated against during an era of segregation, it also revealed a longstanding problem: the transit gap in black communities. Before Knox established Owl Cab Company in the 1950s, jitneys were a mainstay on Hill District streets. The creation of a black-owned cab company, however, was a major development—not to mention an investment risk for Knox.
Originally appeared in the S.F. Examiner on Mar. 5, 2020.
With the RSA conference in town last week, The City finally felt alive again. After weeks of struggling to survive, there were finally enough people with expense accounts willing to take taxis.
On Wednesday night, numerous RSA-related events were happening throughout Union Square and South of Market.
At 10 p.m., I’m on my way to check out a corporate sponsored concert at August Hall when I see an outstretched arm by The Donatello.
I quickly pull over. In the side mirror, I watch a man say goodbye to a woman. A few minutes later, though, she follows him to the cab.
I can tell right away things aren’t what they seem…
“Where to?” I ask.
The man is staying at the Hotel Zephyr. As I start to pull away, he asks the woman where she’s going.
“Let’s get something to eat,” she suggests.
“To be honest, I’m not hungry,” he replies.
“Well, we could go have another drink and just order appetizers.”
I drive slowly, waiting to hear her destination.
“Honestly, I just want to go to sleep,” he tells her. “Where’s your hotel?”
Clearly, he isn’t interested in prolonging things, but she doesn’t seem to be taking the hint and keeps recommending restaurants.
“I just want to go home,” he says firmly. “Please, tell the driver where you need to go.”
“If we’re not having dinner, then I’m going home!” she snaps and gives me an address in the Mission.
In a flash, her convivial tone becomes hostile. She accuses him of misleading her. “You lied to me. You said you were separated from your wife.”
“I never said that,” he tells her. “I don’t know why you think that.”
“You’re not wearing a wedding ring,” she points out. “Let’s ask the driver. Sir, what is your take on this?”
“Hey, I don’t know what’s going on. You guys just got into my cab a few minutes ago.”
“Great. That’s just perfect.”
I turn left on Jones and take Market to 11th. Along the way she berates the man relentlessly. Grateful not to be a target of her vitriol, I drive as quickly as possible.
The man reluctantly defends himself, almost humorously, while her attitude shifts from outright rage to bemused indignation to threats of legal action.
Waiting for the signal to change at South Van Ness and Mission, I curse the brutal light cycle. The woman’s anger escalates while the numbers slowly descend.
Once the signal turns green, I take off and manage to catch the light at Division and through 15th, then white-knuckle it the rest of the way to 24th Street.
In front of her building, I turn on the overhead light.
“Can you walk me to my door?” she asks me.
I open the back door and help her collect belongings. At her front gate she stumbles and grabs my arm.
“Do you have your keys?”
She reaches into her purse and then sighs hopelessly. “I must have lost them somewhere.”
“No!” I grab her purse and start feeling around inside for anything resembling keys. As I rummage through her possessions, she suggests possible hiding places while continuing to insult the man.
“Try the side pocket. Or the front. You know, he’s probably going to stiff you. I know his type.”
“Found them!”
I unlock the gate, hold it open for her and help her up the stairs to the front door. Once she’s inside, I hand her the keys and rush back to the cab.
Driving away, I ask the man, “What was that all about?”
“I don’t know!” he exclaims. “I only met her five minutes before we got in your taxi. I was leaving the restaurant and she grabbed my hand and demanded I help find her purse. She was obviously drunk and I only wanted to help. I didn’t realize I’d be taking her home.”
At this point, the meter is at $18.35 and we have a long way to go before reaching his hotel in the Wharf.
“You’re alright paying for this ride?”
“Of course.”
We agree it was imperative to make sure she got home, given her condition.
“I’ll just get my company to pay for it.”
_____________________
[Image from the San Francisco Postcard Collection – Street Scenes from Behind the Wheel.]
I Drive SF column published in the S.F. Examiner on April 25, 2019.
I never really wanted to drive a car. I was happy enough being the passenger, riding under glass, watching the stars come out of the sky and seeing the city’s ripped backsides.
Even growing up in the 80s in LA, the Mecca of car culture, I was perfectly content to stroll through my neighborhood, always mindful not to break my mother’s back. And if the destination was beyond the sneaker superhighway, there was always the RTD. If I had some pocket change.
At 15 years old, I moved to a small town in Alabama that didn’t have sidewalks. Just ditches on either side of the road. This presented a challenge, but I quickly sought out friends with automobiles.
Later, right before I started college at a university thirty miles way, my foster mother forced me to get a driver’s license and gave me her beat up Tercel.
I resisted at first, but soon realized the freedom that came with owning a car.
For the next four years, my friend Jody and I explored every inch of asphalt in Calhoun County. Most of the dirt roads too. There wasn’t much else to do in the sticks except cruise the backroads while blasting punk and thrash metal. We eventually got bored of our home turf and began branched out to Tennessee, Georgia and into the Smoky Mountains. It seemed like there was no place we couldn’t go as long as we had wheels underneath us.
After college, I packed all my things into the Tercel and drove to New Orleans. Slowly but surely, the car fell to pieces on the pothole-riddled streets. So I got a beach cruiser with a cup holder on the handlebars.
That summer I traveled across the country via Greyhound, Amtrak and thumb. My destination was San Francisco, with its vibrant atmosphere and expansive public transportation system. For eight months, I spent my days wandering through The City, too broke to afford the bus, unless I found a discarded transfer on the ground.
Back in LA, I was a personal assistant for eight years. My job unusually entailed driving from one side of town to the next in peak rush hour traffic. Because that’s the kind of grunt work you pay someone else to do if you can afford to pay people to do your grunt work. It was tedious and demoralizing. Especially in summer. During those incalculable hours stuck in gridlock, I would dream about returning to San Francisco and becoming a passenger again.
Ironically, when I did make it back to The City, I ended up driving for hire.
[photo by Christian Lewis]
AUDIO: Another Late Night Larry story recorded at the National barbecue … With chatter in the background from Daniel the Chef, Colin, Juneaux and myself…
So it’s Sunday night and there isn’t anybody anywhere and I pick up this couple. The guy’s in leather and the girl had a miniskirt…
“Hey, cabbie! You mind if I fuck this chick in the back of your cab?”
[photo from the National barbecue – Marty in the foreground next to the bonfire with Larry and Colin behind him]
VIDEO: So one Sunday morning I’m sitting in the National office after turning in my cab, waiting to make the long trek to the 24th Street BART station, when a call comes in. The person on the other line tells dispatcher Jesse that one of our cabs is blocking their driveway on York Street, just past Army.
“Do you know the cab number?” Jesse asks. “2977? Ok. Thanks for letting us know. We’ll take care of it.”
I laugh. “Fucking Toler…”
Jesse tries to get Toler’s attention on the radio, but it’s pointless.
“I’ll go wake him up,” I say. “It’s on the way to BART anyway.”
After making my way down Barneveld and through the Hairball, I approach Toler’s cab with my phone ready. The above video is the result.
NOW …
What can I say about these videos of Toler sleeping in his cab?
That’s right… taxi drivers sleep in their cabs. Just like Uber/Lyft drivers.
Should I point out that Toler does NOT represent the SF taxi industry, except as an example of everything that’s potentially bad about it? I mean, he’s a big and burly, bearded and beady-eyed MAGA fan. He stinks, falls asleep at the wheel constantly and he’s been known to yell at people for using Uber and Lyft outside DJ clubs.
Without a doubt, Toler has got to be the worst spokesman for taxis imaginable. Maybe even worse than the mysterious public poopers in the SFO taxi holding lots…
But you know what? Fuck all that “positive optics” bullshit. Yeah, Toler is gross. And the Trump shit is about as dumb as it gets… Still, sometimes it’s hard not to love the chaos Toler spreads across the city.
ANYWAY …
In this second clip, taken shortly after the first, I’d just walked up 24th Street, kicking myself for not getting Toler to give me a ride to BART – especially after missing my train and thinking to myself, that’s what you get for being a supercilious prick.
Since the next Pittsburgh/Bay Point train isn’t due for another 20 minutes, I wander down Mission Street to smoke a cigarette and – lo and behold – what do I see? National 2977. I get my phone ready and start banging on the window…
AUDIO: Another story from Late Night Larry, recorded late one morning at the National barbecue. With chatter in the background from Juneaux, Daniel the Chef, Old Man John and myself…
“I’m coming down O’Farrell Street and I get flagged by this couple. And from the early conversation, I realize they were husband and wife. The guy says to me, ‘You know, you just look like the kind of cab driver we’ve been looking for…'”
Back in the days of the National BBQ, I recorded Late Night Larry talking about pukers in his cab … Followed by chatter, comments and stories from Colin, Juneaux and Daniel the Chef …
[photo by Trevor Johnson]
It was one of those nights, when you’re out late, chasing ghosts all over The City, even though the streets are as empty as the backseat of your cab, and there’s nothing left to do but follow the faint glow of your headlights and hope for the best, despite knowing you should just head to the yard, pay your gate and call it a night, because at 3:30 a.m., if your luck hasn’t changed for the better, it probably never will…
After one last circle through Union Square, I take Mason down to Market. Waiting for the light at Fifth Street, two Yellow cabs blow past me, toplights blazing. I hit my turn indicator. At least Soma is one neighborhood closer to the Bayview.
Like an apparition, she appears from behind a plume of steam billowing from the grates in the middle of the street. She walks straight towards me.
“You available?” she asks through the half-cracked window.
“Yeah.” I quickly unlock the doors.
“I was going to call an Uber,” she says, once inside. “But… you probably don’t want to hear about that.”
“Where you heading?”
“Redwood City. I’ll have the address for you in a second.”
I hit the meter and head towards the freeway. Guess I was wrong about that whole luck thing.
[photo by Christian Lewis]
I Drive S.F. 