Authors: Jack Clark
"It's all fucked up, man. You know that?"
"Sure," I said. If you listened to some drivers everything was fucked up. They never made any money. If it was sunny they complained that people walked. If it rained they bitched that everybody stayed home.
"I just can't do these nights anymore," the guy said.
"I can't do the days." I knew how to bitch too. "I've tried but I can't deal with the traffic."
"You'd rather get shot in the fucking head?"
"I'm not sure," I joked.
"I got kids, man," the guy said. "Ain't nothin' funny 'bout this shit. You got kids?"
"Yeah."
"Then you know what I'm talking about."
"Sure," I lied. The truth was I didn't have a clue. I hadn't seen the afternoon edition of the morning paper yet.
The meter was pushing five dollars when I pulled into the parking lot of the Three-Six and found an empty space between two Yellows. "Just give me a couple," I said.
"Thanks, man," the guy said. He handed me three.
Inside, I nodded my head at a few familiar faces then slid into a vacant booth. The waitress brought coffee. I ordered bacon and eggs.
"It's all about body language," a loud voice behind me said. "The assholes always give themselves away."
"But how?" a familiar voice asked. It was the rookie. He'd been on the streets for months but he was still a rookie.
"Usually it's something about the way they wave," the loudmouth said. "Or the minute they open their mouth."
"But they're already in the cab," the rook whined.
"Don't pick up kids. That's the biggest thing. You see ghetto kids trying to flag a cab, you know something's wrong. You know they can't afford no ride. Let 'em take the CTA."
"I hope you didn't order the special," a new voice said. I looked up as Ken Willis slipped into my booth.
"Bacon and eggs," I said.
"Keep your fingers crossed, boy. Keep your fingers crossed."
Willis was a big, barrel-chested guy who still spoke with a West Virginia drawl after thirty years in Chicago. He'd driven a cab for several years back in the sixties, then switched to trucks. When the truck line had gone bankrupt during deregulation, Willis had come back to cabs while waiting for another decent trucking job to open up. Years had gone by and he was still waiting.
His hair was nearly gone and what was left was as grey as his face. A half smoked cigar sat unlit in a corner of his mouth. It might take him all night to finish it, and until he did he would keep it dangling there, spitting out flecks of tobacco now and then.
The waitress came by and filled Willis's coffee cup, then topped mine.
"Unbelievable, huh?" Willis said.
"What?"
"Polack Lenny," he said, as if that might mean something.
"What about him?"
"Oh, Jesus," he said, but then he didn't say anything. He looked off to the side, then towards the ceiling.
"What happened?" I asked.
"They found him by Cabrini," Willis said.
"Huh?" I still didn't understand.
"Shot in the head," he explained.
"Dead?" I whispered.
"What the hell you think we've been talking about?" the loudmouth wanted to know, and somebody passed a newspaper over.
"CABDRIVER SLAIN," the headline shouted. And there was a picture of Lenny's brand new cab, all the doors open so you couldn't read his name, and a bunch of cops standing around, probably laughing and telling stories.
"GOOD LUCK TURNS BAD," a smaller headline read. "The second cabdriver slain in Chicago this week was found shot to death early this morning on a dead-end street in the shadow of the Cabrini-Green housing project.
"Leonard Smigelkowski, who was recently awarded a taxi medallion in a lottery of fellow drivers, was found slumped over the wheel of his new cab by a security guard patrolling a nearby Commonwealth Edison substation.
"Smigelkowski, 56, is the fifth cabdriver slain in Chicago this year. Abdul Patel, 41, a driver for North Suburban Taxi in Skokie, was found stabbed to death early Tuesday morning in Garfield Park. His abandoned taxi was found several hours later in an alley a few blocks west of the park."
I remembered Lenny smiling and signing. Look ma, no hands.
"I just saw him," I said.
"When?"
"Last night."
"What time?" Willis asked.
"Midnight," I decided, "somewhere around there."
"They found him about two."
"He was deadheading up the Drive," I said. "He got on at Belmont and gave me the thumbs down. Said he was going home."
"You talked to him?"
I shook my head. "Hand signals," I explained.
"I wonder what happened?" Willis asked.
"Shit, he was going home."
"Yeah, but you know how it goes," Willis said. "Somebody flags you and you decide what the hell, one more load. You drop them off and somebody's waiting. Next thing you know you're back to work."
"Lenny was pretty careful," I said. "Christ, it doesn't make any sense. He never went into Cabrini." Lenny was one of those drivers who almost never picked up black passengers. He'd been fined and suspended several times.
"That's the scary part," Willis agreed.
The waitress dropped a plate in front of me. Two eggs stared back with sad, grease-covered eyes.
I pushed the food to the side and turned the newspaper to an inside page. There was a bad picture of Lenny, probably taken from his chauffeur's license, four for a buck and a half in the photo booth down at the Vehicle Commission. "Where the fuck is Hobbie Street?" I asked.
"Off of Crosby," Willis explained, "just south of that Edison substation."
"Jesus, what a place," I said. "Why the fuck would he go in there?"
"They stick a gun in your head, you'd be surprised the places you might go," Willis said.
I couldn't bring myself to eat the eggs. I made a sandwich of toast and bacon and washed it down with another cup of coffee.
We stood around in the parking lot, leaning against Willis's Flash Cab. "This fucking city," he said. "I don't know why I'm still here."
"Money," I said.
"You know when I first got up here I really loved this town. I thought I had the world by the balls. Just drivin' around all day bullshitting away with whoever happened to be in the back seat. Christ, the money was easy back then: forty-two and a half percent of the meter and all you could steal. I don't ever remember working hard."
"Those were the days," I agreed, although I'd never worked as a commission driver. Back then, cabdrivers were regular employees. They got paychecks like normal people, had health insurance and other benefits. They even belonged to a union.
The union had been busted years before my time and the commission drivers were long gone. Today, everybody leased their cabs and paid for whatever gas they used. Anything over the lease and the gas was profit. There were no benefits, of course. The cab companies now considered drivers independent contractors.
"Yoo-hoo," a woman called from out on the street. "Taxi!"
"Where're you heading?" Willis called back.
"The train station," the woman said. She was young and white, wearing a trench coat and running shoes and lugging a thin briefcase. "Please, I've only got five minutes."
"You take her," I said. "I'm gonna head north."
But at Division Street, I changed my mind and turned west instead. I flipped my NOT FOR HIRE sign down, drove a few blocks and there was the city's most infamous patch, Cabrini-Green. There was block after block of nothing but dim government-issue highrises, surrounded by hard-packed dirt, and grey, litter-strewn parking lots which were usually empty except for a few junk cars. There were few trees, little grass, and hardly any people.
That was one of the most noticeable things about Cabrini. There were thousands of residents, packed into scores of buildings; but, with occasional--sometimes terrifying--exceptions, there never seemed to be many people around.
The top floors of the tallest highrises had been emptied out years ago, supposedly in preparation for remodeling. But the remodeling never happened and at night the place had the foreboding look of a ghost town. A spooky little ghost town, where snipers set up shop in deserted apartments and took potshots at whatever caught their fancy.
The victims were usually fellow residents. People who'd made the mistake of actually going outside; women and children, as often as not.
The place was a cabdriver's nightmare. It sat in the middle of some of the city's best cruising territory. The Gold Coast was a few blocks to the east, River North just south, and Old Town and Lincoln Park north. There was no way you could avoid the place. Several major streets skirted the edge of the project and three went right through it. Inside, there were narrow side streets and dead-end driveways where, over the years, several drivers had been found murdered.
When I was a kid, there'd actually been white people living here. But that was long ago. Now almost everybody was black, poor, and on welfare. The place was a boomtown, one day a month.
I caught the light at Larrabee and sat there, a full car length behind the car in front, giving myself plenty of room to maneuver.
This was the main intersection of Cabrini. On New Year's Eve the police would close both streets for blocks in every direction. This did little to restrain the snipers on their biggest night of the year, but it did decrease the number of moving targets.
There were highrises on two corners, and a fire station on another. The most popular corner held a package liquor store. There was some local color lounging about and a few people waiting for the bus.
The light changed. I continued west and then turned south. This was Crosby Street, rutted with potholes and littered with debris. The substation was on my right behind a high cyclone fence. There were some small factories on my left, all closed for the night.
There were DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE signs sprinkled along the fence which turned in at Hobbie Street. I followed along. A large Bureau of Rodent Control sign joined the smaller signs. NO DUMPING, it warned. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Across the way somebody had dumped a truckload of wallboard fragments and splintered lumber in a patch of weeds.
There was no sign of Lenny's cab or any clue as to where it had been found. The street ran west for about half a block but it didn't dead-end, as the newspaper had said; it curved and tapered into an alley that ran under the Ogden Avenue bridge and then out to Halsted Street.
I made a U-turn and started back the way I'd come. I didn't know what I was looking for. Some trace of Lenny, I guess, a guy I'd been having coffee with for years. A guy I'd laughed and joked with, just killing time, while waiting for dawn.
"Eddie, you take too many chances," he'd told me years before, after I'd described some close call on the South Side. But somehow he'd ended up here, on a street that was little more than an alley, within spitting distance of Cabrini. There was no way he would have come in here on his own. Not a chance in hell. Not Lenny.
I stopped when I got back out to Crosby. A block ahead, a twelve-story red brick building stared back. Even with lights burning in most of the apartments, the building looked dark and menacing.