Spitting off tall buildings - By Dan Fante Page 0,17

their guys had called up and quit over the phone.

At first, because I didn’t know the city, I made constant mistakes and had the passengers pissed off at me. But the company had a high turnover and my dispatcher didn’t care about anything other than me showing up for work. When I’d get jacked up or in trouble about a destination, I would radio in and he’d give me directions.

Mostly, I spent my shifts bopping back and forth from La Guardia and Kennedy Airport and then back to the city. Pick ‘em up here - drop ‘em there. The tips were good.

Our barn was in the South Bronx and the service was owned and run by two Puerto Rican brothers, Alesandro and Hector. We were technically a gypsy cab and illegal because what the brothers had done was to make a back-door deal with the legitimate, larger services to carry their overflow without having to pay any of the heavy New York City licensing fees.

The problem was the equipment. Our vans were shit. The brothers owned three vehicles that stayed in operation fifteen to twenty hours a day. There was no towing insurance, and no back-up or contingency in the event of a breakdown. When one of the mini-buses would give out on an airport run, Hector would come out in his Chevy station wagon with the torn seats and missing headliner and complete the drop by delivering the passengers himself. Sometimes it would take him two hours to get back, attach a thick link tow chain to the front bumper of my van, and pull me back over the Tri-Boro Bridge to Gerard Avenue in the Bronx.

The brothers were both certifiable wacks and their operation ran in continual bedlam. Yelling was the only communication method. Also, they’d jerry-rigged and substituted so many parts under the hood of each van to save money that what had been fixed only days before almost always would re-break right away.

The best mini-bus of the three ran good but had no heater. The driver and his passengers would freeze their asses off but usually always get to their destination. The second one had a secret gasoline leak that stank up the vehicle and a weird alignment problem from an accident. It crabbed down the thruway at an angle and would wear out a set of front tires every couple of weeks.

The last one was the worst. I was low man so I was stuck with it. Two of the motor’s cylinders were inoperable and a billow of thick, uncombusted oil smoke trailed me through the New York streets like relentless fucking Jobert in Les Miserables.

Passengers griped constantly and self-righteous ecological motorists would honk and gesture at the virulent gray gook as it billowed out the tail pipe. Once, at a stop light, an indignant, coughing pedestrian with a metal-hilted walker cane put a crack in the driver’s side window by tapping too hard.

In my third week on the job my van’s engine finally seized up and quit. I was in rush-hour traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway five miles from Kennedy Airport. A sudden lurching occurred, then a clanking, then a thud. Ugly, black smoke and the stench of burning rubber began filling the interior of the van.

My passengers were forced from the vehicle and had to wait by the side of the freeway in twenty-degree weather until Hector arrived in his Chevy repair station wagon. They all missed their flights.

That night, when we finally got back, Hector gave me fifty dollars, laid me off, and confessed that they could not afford to have the van’s engine rebuilt anytime soon.

Chapter Nine

THE TICKET-TAKER DOORMAN job was from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. at an after-hours club called Ponce in Times Square. Tips only. I had been misinformed about the earning potential, retaliated by reporting drunk, and was let go on the third night.

It was lunchtime. I walked cross-town to the bank to cash an old Workpower company check for $16.23 that I’d been keeping in my wallet as a back-up. Eight people were waiting for service in the customer line and there were two tellers. Only two tellers. Lunch hour. I waited. Minutes passed but none of us in the line moved.

Then one of the tellers, a Middle Eastern-looking human, having finished with the patron she’d been attending, put her ‘NEXT WINDOW PLEASE’ sign up, and walked away.

I began yelling. I yelled at the official-looking assholes sitting behind the railing at the desks. The suits.