Working the Hard Side of the Street by Kirk Alex

Author:Kirk Alex [Alex, Kirk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780939122004
Publisher: Tucumcari Press
Published: 2012-06-03T04:30:00+00:00

Better Than Money

IT WAS AFTER ten p.m., and it was raining again in L.A. and the streets were slicker than a shaved beaver, and I made an extra effort to really stay alert in that noisy old cab and was feeling like shit because I hadn’t been able to make any money in over a week. I’d been breaking even, that’s it. The cab cost me thirty bucks to lease (per night), plus about $15 for gas. I’d been breaking even, putting in twelve hours a night and only breaking even.

There was justice in this world, somewhere, I was sure of it, but not in the cab business. But money was the least of my worries. It was a woman, it’s always a woman. She didn’t care anymore. I hadn’t seen her in close to two years, and I was living the life of an old man, someone who had given up, at 30, mind you. You bet it pissed me off, you bet it did. Living the life of an old fuck: I went home, I slept, I drove the hack, went home slept drove the hack. Didn’t have any friends, wasn’t looking for any either. What a way to live. Wasting it away, wasting it away. And I used to get on her for being so lifeless, without zip, gusto. Used to tell her: “You don’t know how to have a good time, you don’t know how to live.”

Hah!

What the hell would you call what I was doing? Stuck in a job I was sick and tired of, stuck in a room with a hot plate in a building full of senile old people, a building that used to be a retirement hotel. I was as close to being a Travis Bickle as you could possibly get, without actually going the full distance.

Maybe I was about to have a breakdown, I wasn’t sure. I think I wanted it to happen, hoped it would—because that limbo-in-between-existence was nowhere, no fucking where.

I had driven a couple to a restaurant in Santa Monica and was working my way back toward Westwood, when the dispatcher called my cab number.

I responded.

“I got one up on Mulholland,” she said. “Want it?”

“Why not?” I said.

She gave me the address—a good three or four mile haul from where I was. I was pissed for having taken it. All that gas I’d be wasting, all that gas—and the cab I had got about 8.5 miles to the gallon. And I cursed and bitched and hit the freeway and got off on Mulholland. I know, I know—my own bitching was getting to me too. There is only one answer to bitching, only one: action. One did something about it, period. You acted, or you shut the hell up. But at that point, I didn’t know any better, didn’t want to perhaps. I was in a rut, the bitching, complaining, moody fucking rut. I was sinking fast, going under, and maybe it was what I was ultimately after. Destination: Camarillo State Hospital.

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