Today, dispatch got a call for sixteen sorority girls going out to the IHOP.  That's the International House of Pancakes for those of you who are foreigners or live under rocks.

The conversations I heard, OMG.  It seemed like knowing things was some sort of weird social stigma or a faux pas.  If one of the girls pointed out a fact, even something as small as knowing where a particular restaurant was, the rest of them giggled about it and said, "OMG How do you know that?!" in a tone of voice that said they were scandalized.  It was the oddest thing, as if they groomed ignorance.  The biggest laughs were right after someone would say, "OMG I didn't know that."

And they really said OMG all the time.  Sometimes it was OH. MY. GOD. and sometimes it was OMIGOD really fast.

They also got ridiculously excited whenever they saw a national chain store. "OMG Applebees! OMG They have a Wendy's!  We HAVE to go!"  Perhaps they were coasties and were surprised that podunk Madison actually has national stores? 

I got maybe five blocks from their sorority house before one of them said "I have *never* seen this part of Madison before!"

The other odd thing was that they discussed what they were going to eat when they got to IHOP, as if they all needed to get group approval before ordering.  The majority of the time discussing this issue was devoted to one girl who wasn't sure if it would be okay to order a cheeseburger.  There was an awkward silence before another one finally said, "Well, it is a diner and it's the afternoon."

"Yeah, but you don't think it would be too weird if I ordered chocolate milk too?"

"Oh, that's okay - it's like the classic thing, right, the cheeseburger and milkshake and that's like the same thing."

The nice girl who looked like a young, pre-surgery, pre-drugged out LIndsay Lohan, who organized the sixteen-person outing. She seemed to be the hive queen.  When she spoke the others listened and her opinion seemed to be the most deferred-to.  "OMG, you are the best planner!" was said several times by various members of the hive.

We had a nice chat about whether or not there was a bridge to the west side Denny's and when asked for the tenth time how she knew where something was she told the hive that she and I share a wavelength and she was borrowing my taxi driver knowledge.  "And he's laughing because he knows it's true!"

They tipped me $2 and disappeared inside the IHOP.  Each one said thank you as they exited the cab.  I sort of felt like a bus driver on a field trip.

Today, my taxi directed me to a clinic on the far south side.  There, I picked up a girl in her late teens and a young boy in his upper threes, maybe as old as four.  I couldn't tell if she was just a young mother or maybe the boy's sister.  They never said anything to give away their familial status.

As soon as the boy got in the taxi, he grabbed my bike helmet and said, "What's this?"

"That's my bike helmet," I replied as I started to drive.

"For your bike?"

"Yup."

"I thought it was for your driving," the boy said.

"No, my driving isn't that bad."

We talked about our bikes.  I explained why bike helmets are important, so you don't break your head.  We exchanged stories about times we got hurt on our bikes.  This boy had fallen over once.  I hit a tree on a ramp.  We both had our bikes broken at one point.  After the tree, I had to get a new bike, it was broken so bad.  The boy said his mom was fixing his.  He didn't know what was wrong with it.

We arrived at their apartment building and I said good-bye to my fellow bicycle enthusiast; I told him it was very nice to talk to him.  His mom/sister/guardian didn't say a word the whole time, but I said good bye to her as well. 

I watched them walk across the parking lot toward their front door.  I turned, checked my mirrors and started to back up.  Just as I started to move, I glanced back toward their apartment and the boy had run all the way back to the taxi and was saying something I couldn't hear through the glass.  I rolled down my window.  "What was that you said?"

"You forgot to high-five."

"Oh," I said as I reached my arm out the window toward him, palm out.  He ran forward and gave me a high-five, a hard and solid smack.  He said bye as he turned and ran back toward his apartment door, smiling.  We waved good bye one last time as  I drove away.   It was nice to have a friend for a few minutes.

Two days in a row I drove a blind man to the doctor.  The first was on Sunday.  He got in the taxi and asked for a cigarette.  I don't smoke so I didn't have one and told him so.  He was quiet as we drove to the urgent care.  "I think I have to get my tonsils out," he said.  We arrived at the office.  The sign in the window said they opened in a half hour.  "I'll wait," he said.

Today, I picked him up again.  This time he was smoking as he walked toward the taxi.  He bumped into the car as he fumbled for the door handle.  "Sorry, I'm blind," he said.  That's okay, I told him.  As we drove, this time to the emergency room, he said, "I have to have my tonsils out." 

I didn't like him.  I didn't want to breathe his sick air.  I didn't talk much.  He seemed to know the city well enough.  As I made turns, he would guess what street we were on and he was usually right.  He asked me what the weather was like, how bright the sun was.  He told me his name.  I told him mine.  At the emergency room, I walked him inside.  He held my arm, shuffling beside me.


On Sunday, I also picked up a drunk man at a hotel.  I know he was drunk because he had the been-up-all-night-drinking stink.  Maybe he wasn't still drunk, but he had been, and it showed in his face.  He coughed continuously.  It wasn't a cigarette cough, a scratchy Winston cough, and it wasn't the phlegm-lined cough of the sick.  I couldn't place it.

I was driving him to his new apartment.  His brother knocked over a candle "fucking around" and burned down his house.  This is all of the story I got before our stop along the way - the liquor store.  He returned with several bottles in brown paper bags.  I noticed cuts and scars up and down his forearms, a cutter.  He told me he was sleeping and heard yelling.  He woke up, thinking his brother and girlfriend were arguing.  He opened his door and heard a woosh as a wall of flame, a backdraft, came hurling toward him.  He quickly slammed the door closed but not before he caught deep lung-fulls of hot air, smoke, and soot.  He jumped out of his second-floor window to safety.

He lamented having to get an apartment on the south side.  His whole family, he said, on his dad's side, lived on the south side and he thought he'd finally escaped it.  His mom's family lived on the east side.  I reminded him he didn't have to stay, he could move away again.  He was quiet for a moment then told me about how the Red Cross helped him out a little after his house burned down.  We arrived at his new apartment.  I wished him luck and he left me a sizable tip .

Last week: I had a lot of drunks for a Wednesday. One was a regular who can barely walk who told me he graduated from East High in 1967. He made a joke about how our company's radio jingle should include the phrase "takes you from one bar to another." He said he turns 60 in January and he's gonna smoke 60 bowls of weed and drink 60 shots of Jack. "Mmm-hmmm, yeah, mmm-hmmm," he said.

The other I picked up from the hospital because she was riding two scooters at the same time, towed by a car and fell. She'd been drinking all night and was still drunk in the morning when she decided to try her little stunt. As we drove past East High she told me she graduated from there in 1980. Oooh, synchronous. I don't know why, the drunks love me. I think it's because I give them shit. The woman told me she liked the way I talked. Said I sounded smart and funny. That's good, right?

It's been raining a lot here. We're victims of that Midwest flooding you may be hearing so much about on the news. Madison has escaped relatively unscathed. A few road-closures and electrical issues, but nothing too bad. On Sunday, as I drove around town, I had to maneuver through some flooded intersections, praying my taxi would pull a Moses and part the waters until I cleared the two-foot-deep ponds where the road once was.

Today, I had a deaf customer with some sort of physical impairment that forced him to move in large, exaggerated articulations.  He communicated with me through grand gestures.  Telling me to turn left, he held his hands like a wheel and made the motion of turning left.  Here's where I don't know if it's irony or not: his name was Marcel and he looked like the spitting image of Marcel Marceau.  A weird, weird ride.

I know I have referred to it as "Bartender Syndrome" - the uncanny habit of my passengers to spill their beans (or whatever else they have to spill) while in my presence. However, I have no idea what spurs this reaction, and yet it is common, expected, and weird as all get-out. Perhaps the act of confession is some innate aspect of our psyche. Who can say?

Yesterday, I picked up a guy for a return trip - to the gas station and back. The ride there is uneventful and relatively quiet. I wait patiently, reading the second volume of Hunter S. Thompson's letters, Fear & Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist. When said guy comes back with a case of beer and a bag of chips, he starts in on his story.

"Man, I've been up to my eyeballs in pussy all morning. My friend wanted me to come back to the hotel for more. He's got three nekkid-ass bitches up in there." I said that must have been a tough choice. "No," he said, "I been fuckin' 'em for two days. I had to give my peter a rest. We spent like $1700 in two days. Man, I'm going home."

"I'm supposed to be in Memphis. I walked in the house yesterday and my uncle's girlfriend said, 'You supposed to be in Memphis!' 'Well, I ain't in Memphis.' I was supposed to leave the other day but my friend called me up and told me to come on down to the hotel and he's got a bunch of naked pussy in there. Pussy does something weird to your head. Fuck Memphis. We still got the plane tickets though."

Was he bragging? Was he feeling guilty? Was he merely sharing his manly bravado escapades with a fellow red-blooded American? No clue. But I appreciate the story nonetheless. I sincerely doubt if I'll ever find myself holed up in a hotel, burning through two grand on god-knows-what while "up to my eyeballs in pussy."

Every job I've ever had has given me that glimpse into a life, entire worlds that are not my own and I would most likely never come in contact with. Aside from the bonus it gives me as a writer, it also inoculates me from the disease of envy. In a way, it's a relief that I live the life I do and don't have to live these other ones. I know where the grass is greener and who makes it green.

I picked up another young girl from the detox facility. She was short, blond, and mousy with crooked teeth. She was wearing pink fleece pajamas with cute bears all over them and was carrying a couple bulging plastic bags, seemingly filled with all her worldly posessions. She couldn't have been more than twenty years old.

She complained that it wasn't really detox since they only gave her Benadryl. "What's that supposed to do?" she asked. This didn't sound like the talk of the usual drunks I pick up there, so I asked what she was there for and why she was going to the hospital. She said that several years ago she was an addict with a fairly bad heroin habit. Since then, she's gotten off heroin, but has been on a methadone program. Last week she decided that she didn't want to be on any drugs at all, so she checked herself into detox to get off the methadone.

On the ride, she told me she was from Rockford, Illinois, and of her dream to be a journalist, to work for something like National Geographic, and said she'd gotten a great internship at a magazine which was ruined by her heroin addiction. She asked me a lot of questions about being a cab driver. She was a little too happy, a little too interested. I've gotten this vibe from passengers before. It's usually from people who are going to stiff me on the tip.

When we arrived at the hospital, she gave me her credit card to pay for the $12.00 ride. With credit cards, we have to ask if they want to put a tip on the card since we have to have the grand total before we can process the card. When I asked, she said, "Yes, ten dollars." I replied with a skeptical, incredulous stare. My shady-sense was interrupting my thoughts like the Emergency Broadcast System. "Because you were so nice to me," she said sheepishly. I ran the card like she asked, with the 83% tip.

Guess what? It was her father's card, which was promptly declined. She looked panicked, the deer-in-the-headlights gaze, vacant, but with an urgency. "Do you have a phone?" she asked. I replied in the affirmative and let her use my phone, every word dripping with anger. She called her mother, who said she didn't have any money or another card to use. She then called her father who said he didn't have anything either. She handed me the phone. Her father offered to mail me a check or to let the fare slide until Friday when he could get more money on the card. I explained to him that neither was an option. If the fare was not paid right now, I would have no choice but to call the police and report her for theft. "Well then I guess you'll have to arrest her ass then," her father sighed. I didn't want to send her to jail. I didn't want to wait for the police. Authoritatively, I ordered him: "Talk to your daughter."

They talked for a few more minutes and then the girl said that she would have the money in a minute, "Just hold on. I am so sorry." Eventually she handed me the phone and said, "She wants to give you the number." I took the phone and a woman said, "Hi, this is her sister. I'm going to give you my credit card number. Don't repeat it. Don't let anyone see it, especially her." I felt so horrible for the family; the pain and lack of trust this girl had caused and somehow they were still going to help her. Even though I'd been sitting there for a half an hour, not getting paid, I took off the ten dollar tip, ran the card for the fare only and thanked the sister.

When the girl got out of the cab, she said thank you. I didn't look back. I sternly said good bye and drove away.

My first call yesterday morning was at Memorial High School.  I picked up four black kids dressed with the hiphop/thuglife/gansta motif.  The first thing one of them said was, "I've been a bad motherfucker this year."  I imagined that as the opening sentence to his yearly letter to Santa Claus.  Then he told his friends the story about how his teacher wouldn't give him permission to go to the bathroom, so he got up and pissed in the corner of the classroom.  After he finished the story, he asked me to change the radio station to Madison's only hip-hop/r&b station.  I said no.  I was listening to my iPod and quite enjoying it.

I almost never change the station for anyone.  It's a rare request to begin with.  With the exception of a lone schizophrenic and an old woman who thought Bright Eyes was "too violent", the only people who ask me to change the music are young black kids, asking for that same hip-hop/r&b station.  I do have some hip-hop on my iPod, which was playing on shuffle.  I thought, maybe these guys will get lucky and one or more of those songs will come up.  I'll let the Universe decide.  No such luck.  It was Air, Sufjan Stevens, and Nirvana the whole way.

The kid sitting furthest back said, 'If you can get us there by 9:00, I'll give you a tip."  His friends laughed and laughed, asking him where he got money to be giving way.  As I pulled into the driveway of their destination, I heard the kid say, "Here's your tip.... Don't walk in dark alleys."  His friends really lost it there, laughing so hard.  "Hey, that's a good tip," I said as they got out and thanked me for the ride.

It has snowed almost every day that I've worked in the past two weeks.  The last decade or so has been pretty mild.  In 1998 it didn't snow until New Year's Eve.  Last year, we didn't get snow for Generic Solstice-Derivative Gift Exchange Ritual a.k.a. Christmas.  This has been a "traditional" Wisconsin winter - a lot of snow.  I don't think we got this much all of last year.  In general, I love it.  It's beautiful.

If my job wasn't driving, that would be great, but eight-plus hours of non-stop driving on icy, unplowed roads is a wee bit stressful.  I also have to drive the sedans, which are rear-wheel drive and thus fishtail all over the place.  Today, it was more like piloting a motorboat than driving.  Especially going up hills, which are a massive gamble, not knowing if you'll be going fast enough to get up the hill, or going too fast and hit someone, or slide into a car on the side of the road, or someone else doing all those things to me.  This is the easiest job in the world, but on bad-weather days, my nerves are shot by the end of the day.

On the bright side, people are usually so grateful that someone is willing to drive through this mess, that they tip me very well.  I got several compliments on my excellent driving and control during skids.  Go me.

(x-posted to jackshoegazer)

Sometimes my passengers give me larger-than-life stories and I'm never sure whether to believe them.  Perhaps they are lying, but some of them have such details and chaos to them, and such utter tragedy that I really have no choice.  In general, I give them the benefit of the doubt.

This time, the outrageousness came in the form of a leather-clad punk.  He got into the taxi and immediately complained the air-conditioning was too cold.  At first,  I thought he was young.  He was thin, with a full head of  shoulder-length hair.  His outfit, was thick, well-kept and genuine leather, head to toe.  Then, as I looked in the rear-view mirror, I saw his craggy face.  He looked like a strange breed of Iggy Pop circa 1997 crossed with Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code. 

His amazing tale starts off with skateboarding.  He was a professional skateboarder and moved to California when he got sponsored.  He knew the then 9-year-old Tony Hawk, and "all the Dogtown boys."  One of his friends from that time went on to be the editor of Thrasher magazine.  What happened, you ask?  Why isn't he in video games and skate-shoe commercials?  He says vaguely he came back to Wisconsin for his girlfriend and (again) vaguely breezed over something about she got them in trouble and they both went to prison.  "Fucking bitch," he says.

That's okay, he assures me.  He doesn't care about money or fame or anything.  He's been homeless most of his life.  "Just me and my skateboard.  I used to do motocross racing but it was too expensive to fix the bikes after I crashed and skateboards were cheaper, so I did that."  He doesn't want a big house or a family or stability or any of that shite.  "I've been sort of anti-authority my whole life.  Fuck the establishment."

After prison, he spent several years as an unofficial roadie for such seminal punk bands as Black Flag, Poison Ivy and The Cramps.  He said The Cramps are the best band ever, their live performances are celebrations of drug-fueled excess.  He said they're the only punk band to still be together since the 70's, still touring, still putting out albums.

One night, in Boston, after a show, he spent the night sitting next to the keg, drinking the night away.  The next morning a friend said, "Hey, you know who you were talking to last night?"

"No, who?  I talked to a lot of people."

"The blond guy!"

"With the accent?"

"Yeah, that was Billy Idol!"

At that point the story veered off into the five years or so  he spent in northern California and Oregon, chopping down 120 foot trees.  "You have to run like a motherfucker when one of those come down.  If you don't get out of the way or out of the way of the other trees it knocks down when it falls, you're dead."  I wondered what it must be like to destroy something that old, something that had probably seen the beginnings of our country.  I didn't get a chance to ask, but I think the question was hanging in the air because he justified it, informing me that he planted twenty trees for every one he cut down.  "All up and down the coast, like Johnny Appleseed n' shit.  That must have been, God, almost thirty years ago now.  Those trees must be huge."  He said he'd like to go back there and see them.  There was a wistful edge to his voice, like someone talking of visiting a child they abandoned as an infant, of longing and embarrassment, a loneliness.

The levity of three decades, the passage of time, the size of those trees must have struck some chord, pressed some button, because he immediately launched into a rant about how life is pain and why should anyone bother to go on and "it's all bullshit."  That everyone is so blind and they're so damned happy with their big screen tv's but they're really not happy, they're all fucking miserable and they don't even know it and they just keep filling up their lives with shit to hide how much fucking pain they're in and it's such fucking bullshit because people who are in pain can't get the medication they need and people who don't need it can get it from their doctor and they just fucking sell it.  But if you're chemically dependent, then you can't and it's such bullshit just because you're chemically dependent and you can't get the painkillers because a guy has a record of selling cocaine to an undercover cop, it's such fucking bullshit.

"Hey man, I'm sorry to be all dumping my problems on you like this, but hey."

"It's no problem.  Us taxi drivers get the bartender syndrome.  Everyone tells us their stories," I say.

"Yeah, and that's why I love taxi drivers.  You guys, and I've met a lot of cabbies and you guys are fucking cool."

We turned a corner and I pulled in the driveway of his destination.

"Man, I hope this guy is home.  I keep calling him but he never fucking answers his phone.  I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do if he ain't home."

He gets out of the taxi, runs up the porch and rings the bell.  I start to pull out and leave him as he frantically pounds on the door and knocks on the big front window, desperately peering through drawn curtains.

School is back in session and 40,000 university students have flooded the downtown area, making traffic a veritable nightmare of congestion and jaywalkers.  As I drove through the mess with a sixty-something gentleman in the taxi, he got quiet and began to stare out the window.

"You know, I feel like such a pervert when i come downtown - all I want to do is look at the beautiful young college girls," he said wistfully, with a hint of embarrassment, a dash of amusement.  I smiled and laughed.  Then he said, "My wife, she says I wouldn't know what to do with one if I got one.  She's probably right but I'd die trying to figure it out!"

I picked up a man in his early thirties at the hospital a few days ago.  His skin was a shade of espresso, his hair cropped short.  One of his front teeth was missing.  He had his young son with him, maybe two years old, smiling and rambunctious, full of loquacious gibberish.  As soon as the man sat down, he told me, "Man, I am gonna sue them doctors."

I replied with a hint of mild curiosity, "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah!  I went in there for surgery for my hemorrhoids and now my booty hole's shrank up the size of a baby's.  I can't poop at all.  I ain't pooped in days!"

"Well, that's not good," I told him.  I find that a non-committal agreement is one of the best tactics for getting someone to go on and on.

The exact details of the conversation escape me, but he went on to tell me the long and sordid tale of his relationship with his "baby momma."  He'd been with her since she was sixteen, and now she's nineteen.  She's been trying to keep their son away from him, trying to get full custody.  He said she told the authorities that he's a child molester, abusing the little boy.  He said she's crazy and no one believes her.

He is on probation.  For what, he didn't say.  Though he can't leave the state, he told me he had to go to Chicago a few days earlier to pick up his son because the baby momma had been shot.  Not to death, nothing serious, but shot nonetheless.  Apparently she's been coming out of a club at 1 a.m. with the little boy, when something happened and a security guard fired at someone and the bullet ricocheted off a wall and hit her in the leg.  We both agreed - what the hell was she doing with a two-year old at a club?

His probation officer wanted to know how he got his son back from his baby momma in Chicago.  He had to lie and say some other family member brought him up.  At first, before the story emerged, the authorities thought he'd gone down to Chicago, shot his baby momma and took the kid back to Madison.  Not an entirely unbelievable scenario.  I might have thought the same thing at first glance.

I drove him to the Salvation Army and was quite content to get him out of my cab.  While I love the stories, the drama, it also leaves me melancholy, especially when there's children involved.  That two-year old boy was radiating such joy and it makes me sad to wonder how long before it's crushed out of him, growing up in that atmosphere, with those parents.  If I think of it as entertainment, as television or characters from a book, I can deal with it, but in those moments when it's too real to keep separate, the tragedy weighs on me and there's nothing I can do but feel the pressure, like Atlas or Sisyphus, heavy and unrelenting.

Today, as I drove, listening to an NPR segment on astronomy, my passenger asked, in an annoyed tone, if I would turn off the radio.

"Why?" I replied.

"Because I'm hearing voices."

"Well," I said, "it's talk radio.  You're supposed to hear voices."

"No," he said, rubbing his temples, "I'm kind of schizophrenic and it's making me hear voices."

"Oh, I see."  I turned the radio off.

Perhaps he detected my annoyance at his inability to deal with the contents of his head because he then said, "I suppose you can turn it back on."

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Well, it's making me feel sick."

"No, we can keep it off."  We finished the ride in silence.  I should have asked him what the voices were saying.

This past Saturday morning, my first call was a pick up at the hospital emergency room.  As I pulled into the drive, a man about my age, maybe a few years older, walked toward the cab.  He was shoeless and talking on his cell phone.  I heard the last snippet of conversation before he opened the door and got in.  "You are a fucking asshole, man."  Then he hung up and asked me to take him to his hotel on the capitol square.

"I woke up in the emergency room!" he bellowed.  Not in an angry voice, but one of disbelief.  It was the voice of someone walking to their surprise birthday party.  Surprise and incredulity all rolled into one.  He was loud and boisterous as he retold his ill-fated evening and surreal morning.  "You don't understand!" he laughed.  "I'm just a normal guy!"

It transpired that he was an architect from Los Angeles and he was in Madison for a friend's wedding.  The last thing he remembered was drinking at a club on State Street.  He was later informed that when they left he became unresponsive so his friend, later described as "a fucking delinquent," left him where he lay.  The police found him unconscious in a bush somewhere downtown.  One of his shoes were missing.  He threw the other one away in the morning.  "They were nice shoes," he said.

I waited in the taxi while he ran into his hotel to get his things.  It was already after 8 am and he had a 9 am flight to catch.  When he woke up in the ER, the first thing he said to the nurse int he room was "I have to catch a plane!"  She laughed at him.

I thought what a wonderful story to tell, waking up in the emergency room after a hard night of drinking, unconscious in a bush, one shoe, and a frantic high speed run to the airport.  It seemed very Hunter S. Thompson to me, but completely by accident.

After advising him to drink a lot of water on his flight, he informed me he had a four hour layover in Minneapolis and was meeting up with an ex-girlfriend so "hopefully we can make a little magic happen."  At that point my psychic iPod decided to play Frank Sinatra's The Lady is a Tramp.  He said, "Yeah, that's all the ladies to me."

As I dropped him off at the airport he thanked me for listening to his story.  I told him it was no problem, I 'm a writer, I'll get some fodder out of it.  "Hey, you should come to L.A.!  That's where all the writers go!  My friend is a writer.  And a waiter, and a... something else, I forget what."

Okay, guy.  I'll get right on that.

For the record, I'd like to state that I've never smoked crack.  If Denis Leary ever said anything true, it was that one should never do anything named after a part of one's ass.  Having established that, let me begin.

Today, I picked up this woman and she immediately started raving about her church and this big mosaic mural they're working on.  From there she launched into her whole sordid history, mostly covering the last two years.  She had three kids, was named Parent of the Year six years running, worked at the post office, was active in her church, had a $200,000 house and when she was thirty-six, she started smoking crack.

Apparently she thought she could help the crack addicts she knew but instead of rescuing them, they drug her down (no pun intended) and turned her into an addict.  She said to me, "You hear about that girl who was beaten and robbed for $800 last year?  That was me.   You hear about that girl who was sexually assaulted on the bike path last year?  That was me.  You remember when so-and-so killed that guy?  I walked into the aftermath of that.  He still had blood on his hands and he grabbed my wrists and made me leave.  I should have been dead three times now, but I survived."

She went on to tell me about how she's been sober for eleven months now, does a lot of work for her church and runs a program to help women who are fresh out of prison or rehab to get back into life and stay away from crime and drugs.  She said that everyone in her building is a drug dealer and she's turned them into the police but nothing really changes.   She turned in a woman who was prostituting her fifteen-year old daughter to pay for her crack habit.  Apparently this kind of thing happens all the time.

She lost everything, went from top of the world to the very ugly, scummy bottom in a year.  She said, "I don't know why I had to go through what I did, but I believe God has a reason."  I can't help but think that she survived violence, rape, and murder so she could help others find their way out.  However we both agreed that you can't help anyone unless they want to help themselves.  She told me a girl she knows told her, "I really admire what you've done, turning your life around and getting clean, but I'm going to smoke crack until my heart pops."

What can you do in the face of such disregard for life?

Another woman I drove this week told me the tale of her supremely fucked-up sister who was hiding from the police because she's back on crack again.  The sister has had six kids, all taken away because of neglect.  Apparently one of the kids was thrown against a wall as an infant when she was upset.  The told me the courts have been trying to get her sister sterilized so she can't have any more children, especially now that she's turned into a crack whore, literally, fucking people for crack.  She said she thought her sister would wake up when she hit bottom, when she'd lost everything - her family, her friends, her health, and self-respect, her integrity.  Obviously she's not there yet.

I've never really understood addiction, especially when it is something so severe, something so devastating to life and community.  Crack literally destroys neighborhoods, lives, and families.  It's like an alien parasite takes over your life and you become nothing more than a method to propagate the parasite.  You are possessed.  There is no Dana, only Zuul.  The woman who got sober after two years in hell said crack is Satan.  Who could argue that it's not?

One hears this same story over and over again and I am amazed that anyone could look at a crack head and think, "Hey! I'm going to smoke crack!"  I orbit between feeling a profound sadness and pity for these people and being furious at them for being weak clichés.  It's horrible, and it's no one's fault but their own.  But who can be so cold and cynical in the face of such widespread tragedy?  In the end, I can't help but hope that these trials are for a reason and that some of them may wake from this fevered dream and rise up, take back their lives, but mostly I'm disappointed.

They say it always happens in threes.

Certain friends of mine have mentioned their "psychic iPods" that play terribly appropriate songs while shuffling.  As a new iPod owner I'd yet to experience this and while driving ye olde taxi cab, I've started to notice these odd coincidences.

I picked up and old man and his wife and the Decemberists were playing.  He laughed at the lines "At the old town/We reigned at the pool hall/With one iron cue ball/And we never let the bastards get us down."  However, he got very quiet when the next lines played - " And we laughed off the quick tricks/And the old men with limp dicks..."  Dear me, oh my!  We quickly recovered from the uncomfortable silence when I informed him it was the Decemberists, a band known for their clever and quirky lyrics.  The old man asked if they were named for the Russian Decemberists.  I was glad to inform him that yes, indeed, they are.  His accused erectile dysfunction was never mentioned again.

Later that day my passengers were a young black man and his girlfriend, on their way to the hospital.  I cringed for a moment when "Leave the poor black child in his crumbling school..."  from Bright Eyes' song "I Must Belong Somewhere" played.  No one else noticed as he and his girlfriend were discussing liars and cheats amongst their friends and family.  Obviously I worried that out of context the line might appear racist, but I blame good ol' white guilt - I often worry that I'll appear racist for some innocuous reason.  I didn't used to think this way, but I think my crazy passenger who told me that he thinks all white people are secretly KKK members may have sparked some paranoia on my part.

The last is the most mundane, me thinks, because no one else was around to witness the oddity.  I was waiting for a girl to come out to the cab so I could take her to the GRE testing facility.  I noticed that I had gotten a bit of dirt under the nail of my forefinger and I took out my nail clippers to clean it out.  Just then I was listening to Weezer's "El Scorcho" and at just that moment Rivers Cuomo sang "And you would keep my fingernails clean..."  I laughed.

In keeping with the theme of three, I have one last ditty to tell.  Early in the morning I picked up a woman from a hotel to take her to a restaurant for a business breakfast.  It was a fairly quiet, early morning ride.  She told me she was in town for her son's orientation at UW and made some business meetings while she was out here. 

Later on, I had to pick her up from said restaurant and take her to another meeting across town.  This time we had quite a bit of lively conversation, partially centered around the fact that she's from New York City and she says that you never never get the same cabbie twice.  Well maybe not never.  She said she got the same cabbie twice in a two week period and she spent the next week worrying she was being stalked.  We had a nice laugh about me being the only cabbie in Madison, or perhaps all the cabs are run by my clones. 

Thus, I couldn't help but bid on her call to return to the hotel several hours later.  It was uproariously funny, the look on her face when I pulled up.   She said she was going to tell all her friends that there is only one cab driver in all of Madison.  The only thing that could have made it better would have been if I was also the cab driver for her ride back to the airport the next morning.  However, that would have broken the rule of threes and we know you can't mess with that because it always happens in threes.

Have I mentioned I'm a millionaire now?  No?  Perhaps I should explain.

I've picked up this guy a few times.  Let's call him Red.  The first time he was in my taxi, he smelled of liquor so strongly I thought he must have spilled a bottle of brandy on himself just before.  He wore sweat pants, clunky Carhartt boots and carried a tin of rolling tobacco.  He was unshaven and filthy.  I was not terribly surprised to learn I was driving him to a detox facility.

Red seemed friendly enough, very loquacious..  As if I were a bartender, he began to tell me his life story - much of which I've forgotten.  However, I do remember that he told me that he'd been a drunk since high school, something like thirty-five years now.  He said he'd never gotten his license or a car because he knew that if he ever drove, he'd kill someone or himself.  I found this to be quite thoughtful and prescient for a drunk.

A few weeks later I picked Red up at the detox facility and drove him home.  He didn't say a word.  He had a dead look in his eyes, staring into nothing, tobacco tin dangling loosely in his fingertips.  I assumed they'd changed his medication or perhaps that's just how he was when sober.  It was a bit of a sad sight, like Jack Nicholson at the end of One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

I saw Red again last week and he seemed to be back to his old self, dirty and reeking of alcohol.  He got in the taxi and the first thing he said to me was, "I got a book on economics."

"Oh really, " I replied.  "You learning anything?"

"Yeah," he said smugly, "Everything."

"I don't know everything," I said meekly.

"Well, you wouldn't," Red replied with an second serving of smug.

"Are you planning on investing some money?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, "but I only deal in millions."

"Wow, millions, huh?" I said.  "I don't have a that much myself."

"You want a million dollars?" he asked.

"Sure."

"Okay," he said.  "You've got a million dollars."

"Thanks," I said.  I didn't want to burst the delicate bubble of this delusion, so I refrained from asking where I could pick up my million.

Red did however tell me that he was going to give up beer as of that very moment, because he'd realized it was no good for him, that it didn't do anything for him.  The line seemed rehearsed, as if he'd said it before to a hundred other people.

The rest of the drive was spent on inanities.  We'd see a photographer taking pictures of a wedding party and he'd ask, "You like photography?"

"Sure.  I take a lot of pictures.  What about you?"

"Yeah, I take a few."  A closed answer.

Then further along, he'd see a billboard for a tv show and ask if I liked it.  I'd tell him I don't know, I've never seen it, then ask if he liked it.

"Yeah, it's good."  The same answer over and over again.  He did tell me that I was "good people."

I don't know which Red I liked better, but maybe I'll get the economics-Red again and he can tell me where my million is.  Perhaps it's like The Secret, and he's just sent it toward me and if I concentrate hard enough, the Universe will pass it my way.  Money may not buy happiness, but it buys solutions for a whole damned lot of other problems.