Tag Archives: taxi regulars

Remembrance of Things Taxi

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My column for the SF Examiner published on March 27, 2019 is about regulars from the past.

Regulars come and regulars go. Sometimes the memories of them linger on, long after the final whiff of their stinky feet in the back of your taxi is gone.

The reality is, you can only tolerate so much of anyone’s presence for any considerable amount of time. Not just the guy whose MO was to impersonate a petri dish of party favors doing acid while stoned on another daylong Mission bar crawl.

Although the body odors of long-gone passengers may not inspire much nostalgia, flashbacks of the sweaty-palmed $20 bills I’d shove in my pockets at the ends of his rides can definitely lead to a prolonged search of lost time.

Good-paying customers always have peculiar demands, idiosyncrasies or preferred routes. Besides Mr. Stinky Feet, there was Sir Shop A-Lot and Miss “I’ll gladly PayPal you next Friday for a ride to Oakland today.”

That was my problem, actually, for being too accommodating. And not just with regulars. I’ve been kidnapped by random passengers several times.

Once, forced into giving this visiting artist a tour of The City at 1 a.m. Literally compelled by her local host, under threat of not leaving the cab without one. Since they were so nice about it and told me to keep the meter running, the only charges I pressed were in my Square app.

Sadly, the problem with good-paying customers is they usually make bad-paying friends.

Read the rest here.

The End of Mr. Judy

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When it comes to certain passengers, no matter how much they pay you, it’s never enough …

This week’s column for the S.F. Examiner is about an unfortunate aspect of driving a taxi: the unwanted regular.

It’s all fun and games until you realize you’ve been listening to the same passenger moan and complain in the backseat of your taxi for the last… uhhh… two years.

At $2.75 a mile and 55 cents a minute, that may seem like a pretty good load, but what’s the going rate for being a pain sponge?

“It’s never enough,” Late Night Larry tells me. “When it comes to certain passengers, no matter how much they pay you, it’s never enough.”

Outside the Orpheum on Hyde Street, waiting for Miss Saigon to break, I’m leaning against Larry’s cab, complaining about my predicament with a deep-pocketed regular who has become more trouble than he’s worth.

“Did I ever tell you about the Cash Cow?” Larry asks.

The Cash Cow used to call him three to five times a night. The rides were usually long and profitable. But they could also be problematic.

“One night, I’m driving the Cash Cow and his girlfriend up Van Ness. At a red light, they see somebody on the sidewalk and the woman screams, ‘There he is!’ She jumps out of the cab, walks up to the guy and starts pummeling him. Soon, people are gathering around. Somebody calls the cops. Meanwhile, I’m thinking to myself… This just isn’t worth it.”

Later that night, I’m griping to Colin. He mentions the Little Shit, one of his old regulars. This guy just wanted to hang out in the backseat of his cab doing whippets while Colin drove around.

“The Little Shit always called when it was busy, which made it difficult to deal with my other regulars. Even though he paid me whatever I asked for, he wasn’t worth the hassle.”

While it’s comforting to know I’m not the only cab driver to end up with an unwanted regular, I still have to figure out how to get rid of mine: Mr. Judy.

Read the rest here.

The Regulars

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Not all rides are created equal. Some involve a series of obstacles, with one hassle after another and the expectation of a discount at the end. Others are just a pick-up and a drop-off for twice the meter.

Same with regulars. There are familiar cross streets you hear over the radio and flat out ignore. You could be a bingo, but not in the mood to deal with a hell ride, and no amount of cajoling from Artur, not even the promise of a bonus load, will persuade you to take the order.

Then, there are cross streets you know are pay dirt. Like this lady in Nob Hill who used to call every Thursday for a ride to Daly City. She paid $10 on top of the meter, which ended up being a $40 ride.

Drivers would fight over that fare. I was once three blocks away when the call came in and had the order on my tablet, but another driver beat me to the location by racing up Sacramento from the Financial in the taxi lane.

Sometimes, the promise of a paid ride out of an undesirable neighborhood will make a ride more appealing. Like when you hear Bryan’s cross streets in Russian Hill over the radio after dropping in the Marina. As a rep for a beer company, he’s usually heading to the Mission or another part of town with a high concentration of bars. I’ve tried on several occasions to snake that fare from other drivers.

Read the rest here.

[photo by Christian Lewis]

The Misanthropic Drug Dealer

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“There’s no hope, I’m telling ya. All that’s left is total destruction.”

Mr. Judy has been ranting since I picked him up at a dive bar in the Mission, where he peddles his wares, and tried to drop him off at another. But as I idle in front, he just sits there, eyeballing the crowd of smokers on the sidewalk.

Randomly, he singles out a girl in ballerina flats and three chuckleheads with matching spectacles and beards fawning over her. “I hate those shoes. They’re awful. Her pants are too tight. And look at that hair … Well, at least she’s the queen of the sausage party tonight.”

“Dude, I think you’re way too judge-y to go in there right now.” I offer to drive him somewhere else, but he just wants to hang out in my cab for a while. Since I’m not feeling very servile myself, I don’t mind driving around aimlessly. At least the meter’s running.

Sensing Mr. Judy’s high level of agitation, I put on some Grateful Dead. In between tirades, he sings along to Jerry, then critiques the bars we pass on our way downtown, describing the owners, the bouncers, the bartenders, the type of clientele and what kind of music they play. His knowledge of watering holes in the Mission is impressive, though it makes sense for a bar-to-bar salesman to know his territory.

One thing I’ve learned from driving Mr. Judy is that selling drugs isn’t as easy as one might think. You have fierce competition for both customers and suppliers, you have to control your personal intake while dealing with people you’d rather see skewered in a cannibalistic ritual, 12 hours a day, just to make a buck. Which is a lot like taxi driving. Except the money’s not as good.

“I don’t know how you do it,” I say during a brief moment of silence.

“It gets really fucking boring,” he admits. “But just when you’ve had enough, someone gives you money and you feel good. So you wait around, until you can’t take it anymore. Then, right before you bail, someone gives you money. And you feel good. So you keep waiting …”

Again, sounds like cab driving.

After snorting something, Mr. Judy returns to his bitter soliloquy.

“Sometimes I hate this city as much as I hate myself. I feel like Colonel Kurtz, you know? Just send in the air raid already! Exterminate the brutes! These kids today … I can’t stand them. If they’re the future, we’re fucked! Doomed! There’s no hope. I’m telling ya … None at all. Might as well give in to total destruction. It’s the only solution.”

After a while, I lose track of his jeremiad, so just drive and grunt on cue.

“Do you have a five-year plan? No? Do you even know what you’re doing next week? I don’t … Life has no meaning. None of our lives matter. Today is all we have. There is no future. We’re living our future right now … Look at all the madness. It’s everywhere … I’m losing it. It. It. I don’t even know what ‘it’ is. But I want to know, don’t you? I want to find a way to harness the madness. I need to become a cash cow … Look around you. Madness disguised as cheap consumerism. All our needs monetized. Ad machines fueled by our complacency … That’s why we need total destruction …”

As if realizing the world outside the bars might be worse, he decides to go back to the first place I picked him up.

“Orwell was wrong,” he continues. “We don’t have to fear Big Brother. Our only fear is that Big Brother isn’t watching us … We surrender our privacy for the allusion of choice. We feed the marketers until they know everything we want, how much we want and when we want it … But they won’t sell us what we really need: total destruction.”

I pull up to the bar, and Mr. Judy looks out the window for a few minutes, making up his mind.

“I’ll call you in a bit,” he says finally, hands me a wad of bills and slowly exits the cab. Before closing the door, he leans back in. “Remember, the future is now.”

I drive away, back to my own grind, waiting for someone to give me money before I embrace total destruction myself.

Originally published in the S.F. Examiner on March 17, 2017 here

[photo via]