Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (9 page)

One night there were no quarters left
between the couch cushions or in the kitchen drawer. And Donna had
already taken the last few quarters her parents had lying around
upstairs a few days earlier. So we literally had no money. Zero.
But we were starving. This situation would be unthinkable in
Germany, because they have a much better social safety net over
there. Nobody ever goes hungry.

I looked through the kitchen cabinets to
find anything edible. I didn't care if it was stale Doritos, or
dried up old bread. I just needed something to eat. Anything. There
was nothing. And then I found a few cans of dog food in the bottom
cabinet. I grabbed one of the cans and stared at the picture on the
label. I was so hungry, the picture of dog slop started to look a
lot like beef stew. And the dog in the picture looked pretty happy
with it. I figured, hey, meat is meat, so how much worse than Dinty
Moore beef stew could this can of dog food possibly be? Turns out
it can be a lot worse. A lot.

When I told Donna I was going to eat the can
of dog food, she started to laugh, because she thought I was
kidding. Then, when I pulled a can opener out of the drawer, she
laughed even harder because she knew I was serious. She just kept
staring at me, from across the kitchen, hysterically laughing,
while I opened the can and let the gooey slop slowly slide out of
the can onto a plate. The chunks of meat really did look like stew.
Kind of.

I held each chunk under the faucet to wash
off the gelatinous goo. Then I put a bunch of those chunks onto a
cookie tray and put them in the oven, as if they were chicken
nuggets. After I heated them up, I pulled out the tray and looked
at my meal. It really didn't look all that bad. I put one of them
my mouth. The first thought that went through my head was: I made a
terrible mistake.

Apparently dog food meat is really just some
ground up dead animal, bones and intestines and all. When you chew
one of those chunks of pressed, processed meat, the ground up bones
in it feel like sand between your teeth. It's disgusting. I
couldn't even swallow that one chunk in my mouth and spit it out.
We went to bed hungry that night. The next day, Donna went upstairs
into her parents' apartment and ate a can of Ravioli while they
weren't home. I was too proud to go upstairs and beg for food or
steal cans out of their cabinets. She brought down a can of Ravioli
for me. I was so hungry at that point, I didn't care about my pride
or my principles anymore and ate the Ravioli.

Anyway, let's get back to the bag of drugs I
found on my backseat. I was thinking about selling it, because we
could have really really used that money. But I was too scared, and
I just ended up flushing it down the toilet. The thought of
returning it to the guy who pissed all over my car never even
occurred to me.

One of the regular customers who called the
taxi service I worked for had Tourette syndrome. I picked him up a
few times. He was a nice, quiet guy. He was into martial arts and
said he wanted to move to Hollywood and become a martial arts
trainer for actors or a fight scene choreographer for action
movies. I honestly didn't see that happening, because of his
condition. He would quietly talk about something and suddenly FUCK!
SHIT! FUCK! FUUUCK! he would blurt out all kinds of obscenities out
of nowhere. And his arm would begin to twitch FUCK! COCKSUCKING
FAGGOT! FUCK! and he'd hit the inside of the car door as hard as he
could while shouting things that would even make a hooker
blush.

And then there was this guy who lived right
around the corner from the base. I don't remember his name, but
let's call him Tony. Tony suspected that his wife (or girlfriend?)
was cheating on him. He stormed into the base and demanded to get a
ride so he could look for her. It was a slow night, and Jim the
dispatcher wanted to help me out, so he gave me the call even
though it wasn't my turn.

Tony told me to slowly drive up this block
and down that block. We must have been driving around for about an
hour. He didn't see his girl anywhere. So finally he told me to
take him back home. When we got there, he was just going to get out
of the car, without paying me or even tipping me. Yes, he was
black.

"Hey, wait a minute," I said. "You have to
at least pay me the $7 for a round-trip."

"For what? I didn't go anywhere. You dropped
me off right where you picked me up. I never even got out of the
car."

"Are you kidding me? I just drove you around
for like an hour, dude!"

He didn't give a shit. He was just gonna get
out of the car without paying and go inside his house. I was sooo
pissed. How could this asshole do this to me?

I grabbed a crowbar and got out of the car,
too. I shouted: "Look, you gotta pay me $7. And really you owe me a
lot more for all that driving around, because that wasn't just a
regular short round-trip. But at least pay me the $7."

He wouldn't. I walked up to him, and got in
his face, until the tip of my nose was only about 2 or 3 inches
away from the tip of his nose. We screamed at each other. Neither
one of us was willing to back down or give in. I was about to bash
this guy's head in with a crowbar for lousy $7. Crazy!

One of the reasons I usually don't get into
these kinds of situations is because I always anticipate what is
going to happen next. And what will happen after that and then
after that, like a chess player plotting his next five moves.

When people get into a fight, whatever the
reason is, it may seem important at that moment, but in the grand
scheme of things, it is utterly meaningless. Nobody will remember
or care about the reason for the fight in a week or a month or a
year from now, because it's really not that important at all.
Usually fights happen because two chest-thumping, knuckle-dragging
idiots can't agree on who has the bigger dick. But if you go to
jail for battery with a deadly weapon, or you suffer a permanent
injury during that fight, those consequences will be with you for
the rest of your life.

Was I really ready to go to jail for bashing
this guy's head in over stupid $7? No, of course not. I'm smarter
than that. But here I was, nose tip to nose tip with this guy, with
no way out, without looking like a total pussy. Luckily that guy
wasn't a complete retard either, and the same thoughts were going
through his head, and we were both looking for a way to end the
stand off without looking like wimps.

He screamed at me: "Look, I'm gonna go in
the house now. I'll call you back later, for a round-trip to
McDonald's. And then I'm gonna pay you for that round trip, and for
this one. Deal?"

"Alright then!" I screamed back at him, like
I got my way. But really I was just glad that this gave me an
excuse to stand down and walk away without getting hurt or going to
jail. I walked back in the base and figured I was never going to
hear from that guy again.

But a few hours later Tony really did come
back into the base and specifically asked for me to give him a ride
to McDonald's on the other side of the neighborhood. I was pretty
tense in the car on the way there, because I felt really stupid
driving this guy around again, when he was probably just going to
try to stiff me again.

We didn't talk at all at first, until he
said in a conciliatory tone: "You remind me of me when I was
younger."

"Uhh, thanks," I said. I didn't really know
how to respond to that.

When we got to McDonald's, he got out of the
car and went inside. I waited for him while clutching my crowbar.
If that motherfucker was going to play games again, I was gonna
bash his damn head in! No, I wasn't. Deep down I knew I would just
leave and chalk it up as a learning experience.

But Tony did come back out after a few
minutes. I drove him back to his house, and he really did pay me
for both round-trips. Still no tip though. But I was glad I got
paid and left it at that.

A few hours later it was the middle of the
night and it was slow again. I was sitting in the room in the back
of the base. Suddenly Tony came in and asked to speak to me. Since
Tony was a regular customer and Jim had known him for a long time,
Jim opened the door and let Tony into the back. Tony sat down on a
chair next to me, and pulled out a piece of paper. It was a love
poem he had written for me! WTF?! Seriously. What. The. Fuck?!?

A few hours earlier I was ready to bash this
guy's head in. And now I had this 40-year-old black man reading me
a love poem about how he was like me when he was younger and we met
for a reason and so on and so forth. Bizarre. He was gonna hang out
at the base with me, but I told him it was time for me to go home.
After that I told Jim never to give me a call with that guy
again.

Another weird guy I still remember was this
huge white guy with a big booming voice and a thick Brooklyn
accent, who never went anywhere without his large German shepherd.
This guy was pretty intimidating. He was the size of a
refrigerator. I had to pick him and his dog up from bars a few
times. He was always drunk or high when he got in my car, and he
was very talkative.

I hate being around drunk people, because of
what happened with my dad, so I was really uncomfortable with this
guy in my car, even though he was always very nice. But I always
felt that drunk people are totally unpredictable, and at any moment
this guy could turn on me and try to pick a fight with me for no
reason. And considering his size and the size of his dog, that
fight would not have ended well for me.

He loved talking about drugs. He told me
that LSD is a miracle drug and that I have not lived until I have
had a vision on LSD. He said it enlightens the mind and broadens
your horizon. I just nodded politely and agreed with whatever he
was saying.

He always joked about my shitty old red car
and the intense smell of exhaust fumes in it. He knew that even
during the winter, I had to drive around with the windows rolled
down, if I didn't want to end up with carbon monoxide poisoning.
And he was ok with it, even though he was freezing in my car. He
was just happy that I didn't mind having his dog in my car.

One night, when he got out of the car, the
leg of his pants got caught on the jagged edge of some rusted metal
right by the door frame. It ripped his pants from his ankle all the
way to above his knee. Luckily he wasn't bleeding. I thought he was
definitely going to lose his temper about it and fight me. But he
just laughed and said: "Buddy, you need a new car."

There was this famous actress in the 60s or
70s. Her name was Karen Black. She was in a bunch of horror and
disaster movies. When I was a kid, I watched some of those old
movies with her, and for some reason I couldn't stand her from the
first time I saw her. I'm sure she was a lovely lady, but there was
just something about her face that I couldn't stand.

And she looked annoying enough even when she
wasn't doing anything. But when she cried in the movie (and she
always did, hysterical bitch) I just wanted to punch her in her
stupid face all day long. I couldn't even concentrate on the damn
movie, because she was that annoying to look at.

I never felt this annoyed about a complete
stranger again, until I moved to the States and started to drive a
cab. Every once in a while I had to pick up this woman who was so
unbelievably obnoxious, it made my skin crawl. Literally. She gave
me goose bumps. She was a skinny white girl, and ugly as fuck, with
warts all over her face, and a hook nose. She had these stupid
ghetto cornrows in her hair. It just looked so retarded.

And she had these 3 mixed kids. They were
from 3 different black guys. And she constantly, constantly
screamed at these kids at the top of her lungs, threatening them
with beatings and cursing them out: "What the fuck did I just tell
you, you stupid motherfucker? If you fucking piece of shit don't
shut the fuck up I WILL BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU!"

That's the kind of stuff she screamed at her
kids nonstop. And they were so used to it, they weren't intimidated
by it at all. Having her and her kids in the cab was so stressful,
it just made my skin crawl. I think if that woman had lived a few
hundred years ago, she would have been burned at the stake as a
witch, because she just had this horrible, evil, negative vibe
about her that made you want to run away from her.

This whole ghetto cab service I worked for
was totally illegal and all the drivers were unlicensed. We always
had to be careful not to get caught driving around as illegal
taxis, because the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission had cops
that were hunting people like us.

Whenever possible, we asked our passengers
to sit on the front passenger seat instead of the backseat, because
when people pick up a friend, the friend usually gets in the front.
When someone gets in the back, that's usually a sign that the
driver is a cabbie. And undercover TLC cops were staking out malls
and supermarkets and looking for people getting into the back of
cars that looked like they were illegal cabs.

One day I left the base to go pick up some
lady at a nearby supermarket. She got in the back with a bunch of
grocery bags. Suddenly an uncover cop car pulled up right in front
of me, blocking my way. They had followed me from the base, but I
didn't know that at the time.