Fantasy Fare, or How I Made a Thousand Dollars in One Night Without Having To Sleep With Anybody

The night of Monday, June 18, was the steamy cap to the sizzler the day had been. In an effort to avoid the heat, I had decided in the morning to avoid the middle of the day and work overnight instead. My efforts at sleep proved futile, and the three-hour afternoon nap I had looked forward to had resulted in maybe twenty minutes, if I count the several times my snoring woke me up from the blissful drift.

So, I sat in the parking lot of the Wellington Restaurant on the south end of Arlington Heights, staring at the dispatch computer, which had, after two hours, extended my fare toll to four for the entire day. I was not looking forward to struggling through the night to find comfort enough to sleep, or to stay awake while chauffeuring any passengers I would be lucky enough to get. I was tired. I was ready to just call the day a wash and go home.

Off to my left I noticed an older white guy, at the edge of elderly, scruffy face, thick, dirty glasses, salt-and-pepper hair wildly asserting its independence from the edges of his tweedy, long-billed cap which he wore backwards – I presumed he was of Scandinavian heritage – lugging an oversized gym bag and a briefcase across the six lanes of the desolate Arlington Heights Road. He looked right at me as he walked, so I thought, "Headed to the local commuter train station. Eight dollars. More if he tips."

He approached, asked if I was available, and then asked if I could take him to the Super 8 motel in Elk Grove Village. "That's a little better," I thought to myself, figuring it to be around 12 dollars.

He got in the car and immediately began ragging on Chicago. "I can't believe how difficult it is to get a taxi here! I thought Chicago was a big city!"

"You're not IN Chicago," I chuckled, amused by his statement and apparent lack of regard that he had walked across the street and into a taxi."You're in the suburbs. It's a little different."

Unsatisfied, he continued to say mildly disparaging things about my city, so I was mildly irked from the start of the ten-minute ride to the Elk Grove Super 8. During the drive I got a sense that he was either trying to bait me into an argument, or that he was missing a couple of marbles from his jar. As he chatted – pretty much non-stop, as I would eventually learn – he alluded to having in the past been punished for a "serious crime" – threatening someone's life through the mail – and since then being followed constantly by some elements of "the government," who harass him wherever he goes. My irk slid toward uncomfortable creep....

As we rolled up in front of the Super 8, he said, "Yeah, I'm tired of this city. I think I'm gonna go to Indianapolis."

I nodded dumbly, looking at the meter and hoping the guy was going to actually have the $12.40 to pay his fare.

"So..." he said, "will you drive me there?"

I turned and looked at him. I wish I could have seen the expression on my face. "You want to go NOW!"

"Yeah. Is that all right?"

I silently regretted the sleep I didn't get at nap time, as well as the thousand-plus miles the taxi was overdue for an oil change.

"That's a LOONG drive..." I said. I made the decision that he was indeed a few bricks shy of a load, and there was no way I was going to take him to Indianapolis!

"I'll pay you a thousand dollars if you drive straight through. You can stop first to gas up, get whatever you want to eat or drink for the trip, and then we go. Straight through."

I had judged this book by its cover. He was scruffy, not handsomely dressed, despite that he smelled of clean clothes and recent use of soap. I didn't want to blurt right out that I didn't believe he had a grand on him, so I hesitated to say anything. Then he said, "I'll pay you six-hundred up front, then four-hundred when we get there."

He certainly seemed confident, so I figured I should be as well. "Fine, but do you have a thousand bucks on you?!"

He began to fumble through the pockets of his cargo pants. Within a few seconds he pulled a thick stack of papers – hotel pamphlets, guide books, note scraps – and from within the stack he revealed a neatly folded wad of fresh $100 bills. He peeled off ten bills, held them up for me to see, and said, "Yeah, I got a thousand." He had at least twenty more bills in the wad.

"Okay," I said. "Let's go to Indianapolis!"

While he fumbled around putting everything away, and while I was still concerned about how alert I would be in a couple hours, and if the car would make it (I'm a little neurotic about it sometimes), I said to him, "While I certainly don't want to turn down your money, are you sure you don't want me to just take you downtown to the bus station where you can get a ticket to Indy for maybe fifty bucks?"

He said, "Well, if I took a bus, I'd have to lug all my stuff through the station, and onto the bus... No, I'd rather you just drive me."

It wasn't until he left me to go get his stuff, and I used the opportunity to try to contact my niece who just recently moved to Indianapolis to start her nursing career. I figured if this guy didn't stick a knife in my throat when we got there, I could at least sleep off the drowse at her place. But, alas, she was already in bed and didn't hear her phone ring.
It wasn't until the guy (I never asked his name; I figure he was too paranoid to tell me) came back that I realized taking the bus would have been a daunting task, though we're it I, it would have been worth it to save nine-hundred dollars! He had one large suitcase, two smaller carry-on sized bags, a large duffel, a gym-bag type of thing, and a backpack. The trunk of my taxi was full!

All loaded up, we sat at the door of the Super 8 motel while he flipped through the pages of a La Quinta hotels guide. He was keen on being in downtown Indianapolis because he could be "more anonymous" there. He found a La Quinta in the downtown area, read off the address – which I entered into my GPS, and we were ready to go. He handed me a $100 bill and said, "We can go gas up, and you can get whatever you want to eat and drink for the ride, and then I'll give you the other five hundred. And of course the four hundred at the end." He was nothing if not methodical!

I drove to the Northwest Tollway and to the Oasis that is a quarter mile from where I entered. I topped off the tank, and then went inside to get a cup of coffee, a pint of chocolate milk (for the sugar), and a bottle of water. When I got back in the car I turned toward him and waited expectantly, at which point he said, "Oh! Of course! We made a deal, didn't we?" He dug into his pocket and produced five more $100 bills. When he gave them to me, I rather made a show of putting them into my left front pants pocket, but I actually stuck them in the map slot on the driver's door, just in case. In case of what, I wasn't sure. And we were on our way.

The ride was approximately three and a half hours, and the guy was quiet for maybe a half-hour of it. We covered a wide range of topics, from our families, to growing up, to the economy, to the civil rights movement, to the Black Panthers, but he did most of the talking. I had a lively spurt of monologue in around the civil rights/Black Panthers area, but was generally quiet the rest of the time. Interspersed throughout his blathering, the guy would mention the unnamed who followed him wherever he went, even surmising that we were being followed. Somehow.

Aside from there being what seemed an obscene amount of truck traffic for midnight, the only notable thing outside the car during the ride was that, at some point along I-65 between Chicago and Indianapolis, there lies a massive wind farm. The windmills spread for what seems like miles in all directions, and the interstate slices right through it. Atop each windmill is a red, flashing FAA warning beacon. At night, since there is no illumination other than the warning beacons, the windmills are invisible. And the warning beacons all flash in unison, about once every three or four seconds, glowing on, then off again. For miles. It gives the eerie illusion of an unseen deck hundreds of feet in the air that's there, and then gone. I wasn't even certain it was a wind farm until, on the return trip, I looked up at one of the flashing beacons and saw the spinning blades at the hub in the red glow.

The La Quinta hotel on East Washington Street is literally about two blocks from the exit off of I-65, so I was spared the ordeal of hunting for it. We pulled underneath the overhang above the lobby entrance. With my back still to him, he said, "Here you go..." I turned to face him and he held the final four $100 bills in his hand. I put those in my left front pocket. He stepped out of the car and into the lobby, but not thirty seconds later he was out again. "They're sold out." He doubted the truth of it, but I silently guessed that the desk clerk probably assumed he was a homeless loon like I had.

He pulled out the stack of guidebooks again and began to look for another hotel when a local taxi cab rolled under the canopy. He decided that the local driver would be better suited to helping him find a place, so we unloaded him from my car, and he started loading himself into the Indy cab.

Wile I waited, I met eyes with the other taxi driver. He smiled and, in his east African accent, asked, "How's the business?"

I reflected on the four crisp bills in my pocket, and the six identical bills hidden in the car, and said, "Tonight is good!"

I don't think he recognized that my cab was from a place 200 miles away. "It's GOOD?!" he marveled. "It is slow for me!"

I gestured with my eyes toward my recent fare and said, "Well, maybe things'll pick up."

I got in my car, pointed the GPS toward "home," and went immediately back to I-65. About 20 miles in I finally stopped to go to the bathroom. About a hundred miles later I stopped for gas and a Snickers bar, and when I got to the Indiana suburbs of Chicago, I stopped to get a sack of White Castles. My biggest fear throughout the whole trip was being drowsy, but I was energized all the way to the southern reaches of Chicagoland, and that magic hour before sunrise when the body suddenly tries to crash. But, thanks to a lucky string of favorites on Chicago classic rock radio, I was able to belt my way through the fog.

As I rolled into the parking lot of my apartment complex, I thought about that Indianapolis taxi driver and wondered if he found himself in Louisville or Cincinnati that morning!

It's more than two days later as I write this, and still, whenever I think of the absurd, surreal ride, I shake my head. And I smile.

Jalopy

A thought occurred to me this week and, lo! And behold! It was a blog-worthy thought.

I harken back to the days of my adolescence when I would see an old “classic” car driving down the road, either in sad shape as it had rolled on and on with nary a thought to its upkeep, or one of the lucky ones that had been rescued from the cancer of rust and decay, and restored to or beyond its original luster. People of a certain age know to what I refer. The classics. The ’55 Chevrolet Classic or ’57 Chevy Bel Air, the Ford Fairlane...just about any car from the 1950s that teenagers and gear-heads of the post-Vietnam War era would transform in their garages from old cars to road glitz.

A restored '57 Chevy (1957 Chevrolet Bel Air).

I was 21 years old in 1985. I never drove one of those classic old cars, never got more than a gaping glimpse at the interior of one of them, feeling fortunate that I was able on a few occasions to stick my head through an open window to look at the ancient dashboard styling or the impossibly sprawling, skinny steering wheel; at the strange knobs and levers. To my eye, these cars were primitive compared to the cars belonging to family members that I was allowed to ride in or drive at the time. 


(A brief aside… when I was a small child — perhaps in the early 1970s — I would play in Uncle Frank’s big old Buick, which may have been from the 1950s, but I had no clue then of the significance of the car’s age.

Uncle Frank's Buick looked a lot like this one.)

When I looked these cars over, I was overcome with a kind of awe. What must it have been like to drive these things back in the day? They were so huge! Were they difficult to handle? Tough to steer? The sense of a bygone era, a time before my time, would fill me with the yearning to go back 30 years in time, from the 1980s to the 1950s, just to see what it was like then.

This week I was waiting to turn onto a busy highway when I saw a “boat” from the 1980s drive past me. Maybe it was from the 1970s, as it looked much like the 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass pictured here.

I’ll place the car in the 1980s, as that’s when I would have been most aware of such a car.

As it zoomed past me — in seemingly much better condition than the vehicle pictured — that blog-worthy thought occurred to me: that car is [at least] 30 years old.

It may not seem such a blog-worthy thought, but when set beside the thought of the 30-year-old cars of my youth, a disconnect occurs. As the 1980-ish Olds drove past me, I saw just an old, gas-guzzling tank, whereas 30 years ago I was filled with awe at the sight of a 30-year-old car.

The difference? Well, of course, just about every car from the 1950s is viewed as a classic, even the marketing bombs (Edsel, anyone?). I swear, if even the smallest handful of the most obscure automotive failure were manufactured, there is someone today who is an absolute fanatic about it, and owns three of them. Or thirty. Very few examples from the 1970s and ‘80s are viewed so warmly. "Planned obsolescence” — the manufactured flaws and weaknesses that were designed to kill a car by the time it reached 75,000 miles in an effort to generate repeat sales (remember 5-digit-only odometers?) — was an endearing, if unknown at the time, feature of our beloved cars of the ‘50s, but by the 1970s and ‘80s, it was killing our nation’s auto industry because the manufacturers of our imported Japanese and German cars weren’t interested in seeing their product rattle into heaps of rolling junk inside of 10 years, and neither were American auto consumers any more.

But more viscerally, I think the lack of awe at seeing a 30-year-old rolling throwback cruise by me was due, simply, to familiarity. In that Olds (or whatever it was) I saw an old beast that I had probably ridden in, either with a family member or with high school friends on a Friday night after pizza at Aurelio’s. There was nostalgia. It was “my” era. With a car of the 1950s, for me, there is no nostalgia, just a mystique, a wonder about what it was like to ride in such a car back then. With the ’77 Olds, I know what it was like. I knew what the various knobs were for. I knew how it handled. And I was never impressed.

After it passed by, though — and after I had the fleeting thought that became this post — I was rather impressed that the heap was still rolling after all these years. Like its classic predecessors, there probably aren’t too many left on the road...due not to the fact that few have survived the currents of time, but more probably due to apathy.

Impressed, yes, and hopeful that whoever was driving it was bringing it to his garage somewhere, and was that evening going to begin his labor, and soon that heap would once again be road glitz.



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Guilt Trip(s)

Friday night there was another train versus pedestrian fatality in Arlington Heights. According to the earliest reports in the suburbs' Daily Herald newspaper, the victim was male. Given very little information by the police, the article is mercifully brief and devoid of speculation and drama.

With probably more than a thousand miles of commuter railroad track spread out in a spider web from the hub of Chicago, the Metra Rail system sees a lot of incidents involving cars, trucks and pedestrians. Friday night's was at least the second pedestrian incident at the Arlington Heights station in about a year.

While I certainly feel sorrow and pity for the victims of these incidents, I feel just as strongly for those who have witnessed them. As a perhaps overly-sensitive human being, I can barely stomach the thought of seeing another human being (or just about any being) die; to see one's life snuffed out amid the carnage wrought under the wheels of a train is the stuff that nightmares and a lifetime of psychiatric therapy are made of, and I'm only imagining it.

I was having a fairly slow day. By 5:00pm I had just barely made my goal for the day, when I was dispatched to pick up a fare in Mt. Prospect, the next town along the Metra Northwest line to the southeast of Arlington Heights. When I arrived I saw literally hundreds of people standing around on the train platforms, in the parking lot, and along the street adjacent to the station, which usually means the line has been stopped, and people are free to find other means of transportation, until the problem is fixed. My fare got in, and I said, "Train problems?"

He said, "No. A pedestrian was hit in Arlington Heights." It took no more than that to turn the entire conversation to all of the past incidents of memory.

He asked me to take him to the Rosemont CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) station, about 10 miles away toward the city. I forgot to make a turn that would have brought him to his destination a bit sooner, due to traffic, and so we wound up staying on Northwest Highway, running parallel to the Metra Northwest line's tracks most of the way. When we drove through Des Plaines, there was easily double the number of stranded people than I had seen at Mt. Prospect. "I know which way I'm heading back," I said to my customer.

Rosemont is about 10 minutes — with rush hour traffic — south of Des Plaines. I dropped off my customer in Rosemont, and the fare came to $20 exactly, and he gave me a four dollar tip. I headed back to Des Plaines. A block past the Des Plaines Metra station, I picked up two men who wanted to go to Arlington Park, the station that sits across a parking lot from the Arlington Park horse racing track, and which is the next station beyond Arlington Heights, where the incident had occurred - $25.60 plus a three dollar tip.

At Arlington Park I was hailed by a gentleman who asked me to take him to the Barrington station, which is two or three stops northwest of Arlington Heights - $22.00 plus a four dollar tip. The trains had begun moving again, after nearly three hours of delay.

From Barrington, I drove empty all the way back to Arlington Heights, where I was flagged down by an attractive young Polish woman who had apparently been blown off by a cab she had called for. Arlington Heights was her stop, and she just needed a ride home to Rolling Meadows - nine dollars, plus a 4 dollar tip.

By the time I ended my Friday, I had exceeded my goal by nearly fifty percent. A man had died, but in the relative chaos his death had caused, I saw opportunity standing in rows along the street.

Something about this makes me feel dirty.

"Shrink Rap"

The first one is up and running!



Rennratt, if you could contact your viral buddies and have them work their magic, it would be awresome!

The Dawn of a Great Friendship

Back when I was a wee lad, a mere sophomore in high school, I thought I was pretty damn funny. Strange how little things change. But anyhoo, I found myself sitting in Sophomore English class, smack in the middle of the classroom. I was too shy to sit up front — especially since I had a huge crush on the teacher, Ms. Lloyd, and I was ever fearful of what might “pop up,” you know, being a teenage boy and all.

But I digress.

And I was too much a goody-two-shoes to sit in the back of the classroom with all the kids who were too cool to sit anywhere but in the back of the classroom.

Sophomore English was a school year divided by study tracks. One track was composition, another was Greek mythology, another was Speech, I think. There may have been others, but I don’t remember. I moved into Ms. Lloyd’s classroom mid-year as I started the composition track. I found this education style uncomfortable because, after a school quarter or so in one class, I had grown comfortable with a certain routine, certain friends, a certain class pecking order, as it were, and then we were all uprooted, shaken up and placed in a new situation to sort through all over again. Welcome in the part of my life that I’m in now, but as a painfully self-conscious teen it was very stressful.

On the first day in Ms. Lloyd’s class, during the roll-call, among the names she called out was Sam Lapin. The kid next to me raised his hand. “Here.”

My best friend, Lu, had told me about this kid, Sam Lapin, told me how funny this kid was, how clever he was. This was my best friend, telling me — pretty damn funny me — since junior high — how funny this Sam Lapin kid was. Until that day I had never met Sam Lapin, though I had seen a kid on the playground and in the halls who I thought was Sam Lapin, and I despised the very sight of the kid, not to mention the very mention of his name. And here he was, sitting right next to me in English class. Only the kid sitting next to me answering to the name Sam Lapin wasn’t Sam Lapin, or at least the kid who I had thought was Sam Lapin up to that point!

Okay, so I had to get used to a new face to associate with the name of the kid I hated for no other reason than my best friend’s accolades.

As time went on in the class, Ms. Lloyd proved to be a very good sport — if not an easy target — for my brand of humor (hence my eventual crush...plus she was nice to look at), which is very word-nerd oriented. My brand of humor relies heavily on plays on words and taking words from someone else’s mouth in their alternate contexts.

But the thing I noticed was that, at every moment I found to blurt out some wise-crack based on Ms. Lloyd’s words, Sam Lapin from right next to me, blurted out a wise-crack, too. Not only that, but he often said the same thing I did. I mean the same thing, word for word, which caused both of us to look at each other and laugh with, I’m certain, the same look of bewildermazement on our faces! And whenever we didn’t blurt out at the same time, he proved to be as pretty damn funny as my best friend, Lu, had told me he was! In turn, Sam Lapin found my solo quips to be worthy of a good laugh.

In short time I no longer bore any animosity toward this Sam Lapin, but we shared the spotlight in cracking up each other and our fellow classmates and — yes — Ms. Lloyd! One day Sam made the first effort to forge a friendship — detailed in another blog post to come — and to this day we remain good friends, despite our infrequent correspondence and even less frequent face time, as we now live in places about 600 miles apart.

But our shining moment as the comedy duo Sam & Tony came late in the school year. I’d like to think Ms. Lloyd had something to do with Sam and me winding up in her classroom for the entire rest of the school year as the English tracks changed, but it may have just been lucky coincidence.

Sam’s trademark wise-crack move was to respond whenever a teacher — after explaining a concept or procedure — would pose the open-ended question to the class, “Are there any questions?”

Every time — and I mean every time — Sam would raise his hand. And the teacher would point to him. “Sam?”

And every time Sam would ask the question, “What’s the capital of North Dakota?” It mattered not what the topic of discussion was; that was Sam’s question.

As I said, Ms. Lloyd was a loving, trusting easy target for guys like Sam and me, and every time she asked the question and Sam raised his hand, she fell for it. Every. Time. But one.

Late in the school year she finished a discussion of a topic or a set of instructions, I remember not which, and she asked the inevitable, “Are there any questions?”

Sam raised his hand.

Ms. Lloyd got this expression on her face, a sort of bemused smile-smirk, as she looked at Sam and said, “Not you, Sam--” She was on to him and she finally hadn’t taken the bait! Instinct took over, and I raised my hand as she finished telling Sam with a chuckle in her voice, “--I’m not falling for it this time!” And then she shifted her gaze to me. “Tony?”

Fighting a laugh at my own clever self and barely managing the words, I said, “What’s the capital of North Dakota?”

The whole class erupted in laughter — or at least I like to remember that they did, but they might have been so tired of our shit by that point that they didn’t bother to hear us — and Ms. Lloyd hung her head in defeat. I’m certain Sam knew what was going to come out of my mouth the moment Ms. Lloyd called on me, and his laugh was the loudest in the class.

For many years after we graduated Sam and I maintained a friendship with — and I my crush on — Ms. Lloyd, sending or bringing her a Snickers bar every year on her birthday, an inside joke the origin of which I no longer remember.

I lost contact with Ms. Lloyd only about 10 years ago, a good 20 years after my graduation from high school. A Facebook search seems to be in order.

And to the person who was that kid I thought was Sam Lapin from 7th grade into the first semester of sophomore year, whoever you are… I’m sorry for all the dirty looks and mean thoughts I sent your way.



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