Mystic Gypsy Mavericks: Dharmic Visions of a Vegas Cabbie

It's a real trip inside this magic swirling ship, when you've got the real inside skinny on the sin city lowdown...so sit back, and buckle up. You're takin' a ride with Rocketman.

 

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  Mystic Gypsy Mavericks

     I'm near the end of the line at the Luxor. Other drivers are reading newspapers or yakking outside the cabs. A plush pile carpet of cigarette butts wends its way down the drivers' side of the queue. Up on the nut a Frank Buck look-alike doorman is straightening out a thick money roll and chatting with a valet. In a few minutes the dinner hour begins and it'll be popping.
     I brought a book entitled Japanese Death Poems. These are the sagely haiku of dying Buddhist monks. They are mistily and economically rendered, as is most Japanese art, with references to blossoms, fallen petals and animals signifying the mood as well as season occasioning their impending demise. My favorite so far reads 'Oh, I don't care where these autumn clouds are drifting to'. A tap of the horn behind me and I close a half dozen car lengths to the stand. 'Frank' is amiably determining the destination of a party of three and leans into the passenger side window to ask "Is it okay if some gentlemen smoke cigars in your cab? "They can smoke anything they like in my cab." "He says you can smoke anything you like in his cab." The crowd loves it.
     I pick up a lot of Brits at the Luxor, one reason to favor the place. We meander through the construction and wait at the light, where everyone has a good laugh over a nearby billboard hawking vasectomy reversals that are guarantied, or your money back.
     The strip is clear so we go the front way into Harrah's, which is detoured into the back way over a shamefully pocked surface. I always put people at ease here, swearing they're in no danger. A left, another left, a right and we're there. All the back ways in are surrounded by barricades and bizarrely-lit rubble. I've learned the shortcuts and back ways in first hand from working girls playing cats and mice with doormen, hotel dicks, undercover johns, Metro, gaming authority spooks and ephemeral arms of Homeland Security. We have a working and social relationship. We're in cahoots. We're out all night. We dodge 'The Man'.
     Slide into The Turtle Stop, a cabbie hangout across from the Rio; combination convenience store, taco joint and The Don's Pizza, 'the pizza you can't refuse'. You can get a perspective from here on the personality of the night. Some nights it seems amazingly organized and courteous. Others are like a time-compressed crash course in the nuances of human pathology. High-heeled groups of girls stream in and out. Cabbies joke and complain. The guy behind the counter so personifies a seasoned nonchalance it's as if Duane Hanson gods have installed him in a perfectly fitting milieu. 
            I get my weekly call from Lulu's boyfriend and it's a jump west on Flamingo, then a twelve-eighty fare far to the north where she works as a nanny. Lulu is from Mexico and helps me expand on a smattering of Spanish. A ride away from the lights with her is a yank back to near sanity. We swing into the entrance and the usual "I've got Lulu" to the female guard and the usual few upscale turns to her destination. On the way back to sensory overload I drift away to her homeland, the early eighties, delirious heat and laid back people. All the while the cabbie self, picture of competent efficiency, tools the big-block Crown Vic along, a shining maniacal moth, toward the dreadful garish glimmer. 
 
        I don't know what this stuff called time is made out of. Don't even know where it boils up and steams up from, don't even know where time rolls back to. I don't know what I, my own self, am made out of, because just about every day I find out that I'm made out of something new, like time it's own self is.

 

       You could just take a handful of these things you call days and weeks, and things you say are months, and hold them in your hand like this, and blow them up into the air like a feather out of old Aunt Rhody's Pillow, and you'd find me out there back in Oklahoma, out on my Grandma's farm paying a visit.
                                                                                          Woody Guthrie

 

     The drive down Main between the Plaza and the Strat is an excursion through a littered crimescape, blighted hotels, schizophrenic theater and what's left of the famously dilapidated hacks at Western Cab strewn along the curb. Where do they all come from? Nearing the intersection of Main and the Strip there's a guy in the median with a mangled cardboard sign advertising pot for seventy-five cents. He flips it up for some cars behind me and does a mugged come-on with his big bloodshot eyes.
     The line at the Strat looks long and idle so I opt for Circus Circus behind two Hendersons and a Yellow. Going in to use the bathroom, Hear the sledges with the bells-Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight. When I get back there's a sizable looking mug in a Lexus at the turnaround who spends about three minutes burning a hole through me before gliding away. I'm wondering what gives, if he's incensed at someone who looks like me or if he's a company supervisor, T A (Nevada Taxi Authority) or a somewhat more sinister variant of twisted prick sizing me up for the kill. Gives a guy the cabbie paranoids. Soon I'm loaded for    Mandalay Bay and a ride south on Industrial with a bright and amiable kid from Scituate, Massachusetts. Industrial Boulevard; home to an ever growing plethora of gentlemen's clubs, adult arcades and escort services. You get a hundred bucks for 'stripper' referrals and most of the clubs pay twenty a scalp most of the time.
     While training for this gig doesn't include ride-along stuff as one might logically expect, it does place an emphasis on safety procedures. We got to see some dead drivers in a slide show, which should be enough to give one pause to reassess. We were advised to not pick up 'flags', there being no camera surveillance away from the stands. We're not supposed to drop behind apartment complexes, even with female passengers, as it could be a setup. One example got strangled with his radio cable behind Smith and Wollensky's, listed as a personal beef, which may have exempted him from the odds but didn't make him any less dead. We have codes to alert the dispatchers to a bad ride and also a tiny green emergency light on top which is there, in theory, to attract help from other drivers or the cops.
     Rookies are sent out on a Saturday night and left to fend for themselves. I was so nervous the first night I didn't dare to pick anyone up. I tooled aimlessly around for a few hours and then dragged myself back to the barn. Luckily, a supervisor bucked me up and advised me to follow the cheater lights (amber rear window passenger lights that are on when unloaded) in order to grok how to get in and load without offending protocol. For weeks I didn't know where anything was and would either bug the doorman for directions or stop just off the stand to wade through several maps and a phone book. I thought JetBlue was a nightclub.
     For the first few months drivers are on the extra board, which allows them to sample from a wide array of beleaguered vehicles, each one outfitted with its own unique and disturbing characteristics. Each shift is twelve hours long, two or three hours past the point where visual distortion becomes a factor. It's a good idea to get out of the car and stretch once in a while.
     Most of the drivers are okay people. The ones to take issue with are the long haulers and the bigots. Long haulers spirit people through the tunnel out of the 'port for a lengthy detour along the freeway, thereby tacking immense amounts of money onto the book. Every other time I take a load to McCarren they ask why my fare is half what they paid to get to their hotel. 'Haulers give the rest of the drivers an undeserved rep. Also, their 'scores' bump up the averages (posted daily in the drivers' room) to where honest people can't compete. If you don't hover closely around the daily averages you don't stay. T A claims to crack down on these guys during their token sting operations, but they don't. 'Thing is, they don't have to nab them in the act. It's all there on the trip sheets. As for the bigots, they can usually be ignored or avoided. Most of the drivers are fellow mystic gypsy mavericks, living out a mutually imposed exile from the sanctioned hallucination.

In Chuang Tzu's view, the man who has freed himself from conventional standards of judgment can no longer be made to suffer, for he refuses to recognize poverty as any less desirable than affluence, to recognize death as any less desirable than life. He does not in any literal sense withdraw and hide from the world. To do so would show that he still passed judgment upon the world. He remains within society but refrains from acting out of the motives that lead ordinary men to struggle for wealth, fame, success, or safety. He maintains a state that Chuang Tzu refers to as wu-wei, or inaction, meaning by this term not a forced quietude, but a course of action that is not founded upon any purposeful motives of gain or striving. In such a state, all human actions become as spontaneous and mindless as those of the natural world. Man becomes one with Nature, or Heaven, as Chuang Tzu calls it, and merges himself with Tao, or the Way, the underlying unity that embraces man, Nature, and all that is in the universe.
                                       Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings

 

     Getting to the end of these death poems and a moderately moving kind of night, a night like no night has been. The Venetian was where I was when the slowdown hit and it's where I am right now. That early morning punch-drunken grog is settling in. 'Tell you what, the horticulture here is quite lush, as is the architecture. There's a tight left u-turn up ahead where a struggle so oft' ensues between those coming in and those dropping from the back. The Ace just ahead is catching some shuteye.

  
   In Defiance of Gravity

     The social aspect of cab driving is ultra-spontaneous and engagingly up front. Often passengers are a little bit, or even quite tipsy, usually in good spirits, curious about the job, often wondering aloud 'what's the weirdest thing that's happened in your cab?'     Tonight I'm unrestricted. Restricted, or radio cabs, are prohibited from loading on the strip, downtown or the 'port. This is in order to provide service for the locals and outlying areas. Otherwise it would be a feeding frenzy at all the majors. I don't mind getting off the strip once in a while but I still have this block about working the radio. I've been trying to get with it so I won't get called in again. Getting called in entails walking the last squalid mile down the yard past the shop and inspection station and duly reporting to Mike in the training room. Mike has a four-hundred cubic inch super computer which has acquired a precise and thoroughgoing knowledge of everything we've been up to. Our puny excuses are useless against his superior hyperlinked data banks and endless streams of incontrovertible evidence. He knows...if you've been bad or good... 

     At YCS (Yellow-Checker-Star) there are computers attached to the dashboards. You can zone in, pick up calls and also receive updates on road construction, where it's wide and waiting, alerts for missing cabs, robbery suspects, or find out if there's been a flood where your car is parked. The computer dispatcher will come increasingly unraveled as the night wears on in efforts to coax someone to pick up north of downtown or in trying to contact gamblers in special service vans. She at first nicely cajoles and then threatens. The script will read normally at the front end of the shift but then intermittent caps appear and later, full cap sentences followed by several exclamation marks. I'M GOING TO START WRITING YOU GUYS UP!!!!! It's like witnessing a HAL 9000 having a massive nervous breakdown. Sometimes it'll say its beginning to rain twenty minutes into a downpour. 

     I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.
                                           Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

     I'm up on the Palms nut and just as a couple has loaded several drunken boys come stumbling by. One of them abruptly opens the left rear door. By the time I check on the lady sitting there he's up near the entrance. I'm out of the car. "Hey, you fuzznuts punk! Are you trying to get SHOT?" Laughter from some of his trailing cohorts quickly dies out. About a dozen drivers in the line straighten up into a hyper-vigilant thousand yard stare. Everything's in freeze frame. I can hear my own footsteps back to the cab.
     Later on I pick up four guys in their forties, pretty well lit, and after relating the incident they take turns in a gravelly tough talk routine. "Feel lucky today...well do you, punk?" "You wanna get shot with a thirty-eight or should I use my three-fifty-seven?" "Yeah, pick out any caliber you want, punk." We're entering the Paris and laughing like hell. "You wanna get shot in the nuts, or would you rather get it in the...face?"
     Languishing on the tarmac at the Gold Coast. Mike has told me not to stage here. It's just us regulars, reading along. I'm a good way into Evan Harris Walker's 'The Physics of Consciousness'. It's twelve-ten and just like clockwork Midnight Mary bikes through on her lumbering way to work.
     I drive Star number twenty-two twenty-four three nights a week. The day driver says she found out a cabbie got shot in here. It's not a bad car but there's this unmistakable whiff of death just as you arrive at the left front door. I had been checking the undercarriage and all around for pigeon parts, washed the whole thing off under there and still it persists. I tell her it must be some clinging bits of brain matter down in the window slot that didn't get picked out.
     A Nellis driver with a Coventry accent strolls over to cadge some receipts for her passengers, gets in close, grips my arm and says, "God bless your old cotton socks." The valets are getting silly and racing luggage dollies down a slope toward the parking garage. One of our mob just landed, a Lucky, bobbing his head back and forth to some sixties rock 'n roll. I've been perusing the tile work and wondering if this could be the default path to spiritual enlightenment.
     Here come several groups to fill up our cabs. I get two young couples to MGM and off we go for the thrilling freeway romp to Trop, like a pinball through the curve, crowding a red light, barreling across the strip and they're happy. "Right on!" "Woo hoo!" Scrape across those god-awful speed bumps going in and scratch another line across the trip sheet. Just for the hell of it and partly for the sake of my job, I zone in on the computer. I'm bird-dogging the San Remo when HAL offers up an address. I push the button to accept. After a supermarket to home, it's back the other way on Trop and another deadhead back to thirty-three (the Gold Coast). On I-ninety-five between here and Flamingo it's inviting to tromp on it and I do. By letting up off the gas at just the right moment you can coast to the crest of the ramp and (if the light's green) experience weightlessness. A tiny misstep here and you could find yourself swiftly all atwirl and triple-lutzing through a densely packed stream of fast moving traffic. Some cabs will only reach ninety-five in that distance but this one will do a hundred and ten.

I pull on the earth with exactly the force with which the earth pulls on me. The relationship is symmetrical. The force of the earth on me and my body's gravitational pull on the earth are identical. This is just Newton's third law telling us again that objects exert equal and opposite forces on each other. Newton discerned that the gravitational force falls off with the square of the distance by noting that this is how the apparent size of an object falls off with distance. He astutely observed that this may be how distance dilutes the force of gravitation of such very massive but very distant objects as the sun, the planets, and the stars.
                                 Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness

     Just now I get a cell call from the escort joint, a sweet voice purring, "You have an envelope here, honey." When you have an envelope here, honey, you have at least a hundred bucks. Cool, baby, cool, cool, cool. The stretch of carpet along the second story is endless, deep purple and emblazoned with planets foreshadowing distant star clusters, making mystic gypsy mavericks feel right at home. Blast out from the payoff and get buttonholed by some women selling purloined cologne from the trunk of a seen-better-days Trans Am. One of them passes several samplings with a grand flourish beneath my nostrils as if this were a high-toned men's boutique and not a desolate parking strip on Industrial. I select a very appealing scent; Observe L'Essence.
     Back at thirty-three and smelling fine. Three women with shopping bags are making their way to the stand. The only other cab here tears off, rocketing along to beat hell and receding into a dot as exhaust fumes and burnt rubber compounds permeate the air. I load them cheerfully, get them home and pocket the predictable tip.
     The strip is eerily empty. An ABC up ahead is furtively trolling for flags...a cruise past the Stardust and the Frontier. A couple of diehard pedi cabs squeak and lurch along after a grueling night of disrupting the flow. Mini street sweeping machines have been trotted out and are raptly describing tight patterns in a robotic ballet. In the driver's side rear view, Steve Wynn's latest monolith is spitting out sparks while stretching toward the heavens in a marvel of cellular replication. Oh, I don't care where these autumn clouds are drifting to. 

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