"The fly in the ointment"

meaning "a small but irritating flaw that spoils the whole". I'm overall really happy in my new place of work, it is just that some aspects of its antiquated, rinky-dink manner of functioning irk me no end, but I should look at the bottom line: I make more money here. I am somewhat antiquated myself, but CorCab should really get with the technology of digital dispatch, because putting calls out over the radio creates a lot of friction, especially because their radio traffic is more anarchic than at any of the previous cab companies I have worked for. Radio should be controlled by the dispatcher and the drivers should stick to accepting calls, or asking relevant questions about their calls. There's this particular dispatcher, an elderly lady who has a very short fuse, and who has the busiest shift because she's pals with the owner; she gets stressed out when it's very busy, and there are continuous yelling matches between her and some of the more argumentative drivers, those who are easily outraged by her faults and shortcomings. Also some drivers are in love with the sound of their own voice and are forever expounding their opinions over the radio, regardless of how germane they might be. Everybody knows everybody else's business, because we have to announce that we have picked up the passenger that was given us by dispatch, and to say where we are taking them. It sours your mood if you have been getting a string of short fares and another driver seems to be getting all the long trips. So drivers are envious of each other, and we don't take into account the times when our own fool selves have had a run of good luck. Like desperate Las Vegas gamblers we want to get lucky ALL the time. Yet at the end of the week, we all have generally done pretty well, so all the bickering and aggravation on the c.b. radio has been for naught.

The owner of CorCab has a very civilized, polite manner about her, in a Lutheran sort of way, but she surely must be aware that she has two Cerberuses working in the office; the accountant and the head dispatcher.  The former ( I forget her name... Doris? Doreena? ) hounds you to hell if you are but a minute late in paying your lease. The latter, a certain Ronnie, is a pathological accuser. Blame, blame, blame. Blame you for this, blame you for that, blame you for something you never even heard about. Because he is in charge of the maintenance of the vehicles, and the company does not have their own mechanic, his job is to relegate on the poor driver the responsibility of the vehicle's upkeep... thirty-three years driving a cab this month, and I have never had to deal with the yearly taxicab inspections conducted by the municipal taxicab authority. This has always been the responsibility of the taxicab company. The ten-year old jalopies with a quarter million miles on the clock that we drive are bound to be breaking down often. Now, I am mechanically challenged. Checking the tires and the fluids is the limit of my ability. I cannot be blamed for a malfunctioning heater core. But he blamed me for the very thing the other day. Drivers I have spoken with share the same complaint, This Ronnie guy is insidiously relentless with his blaming, like a sword hanging over your head. Alternator conks out, and why did YOU let it happen? This qualifies as downright psychological abuse, Qué no?

I've met some of the drivers. We congregate at the taxi stand across the street from Hotel del Colorado. This is a smoke-free town but some of us surreptitiously indulge. I roll my own tobacco, so if cops should stop by I can easily dispose of the evidence. The drivers I best get along with are Danny, a 30-something year old Puerto Rican ( he looks like some cheeky monkey always bouncing around ) who is married to a girl from Tijuana. They have two daughters. The other is a Polish guy about my age or a little older ( looks like some skinny bird, a stork maybe )  called Alexy, who is not very forthcoming with his biography, but who I gather is retired from a previous job and is augmenting his income and keeping busy driving a taxicab. Then there is Biff.

Biff used to be a tuna-boat captain until the fishing company went bust. He's been driving a cab for five years. A tireless worker, he must be one of the top earners. His wife, who waits tables at Jerry's Café, kicked him out of the house so she can conduct love affairs with the cooks and the bus boys from the restaurant. She kept their teenage sons. Biff is a houseguest at his brother's, but his brother's wife doesn't like him and he has long since worn out his welcome, but can't afford his own place because he's still making payments on the house he used to share with his wife. Or because of bad money management, debts, I don't know.

Biff is big and burly, dresses always in black shorts and black t-shirt and sports an impressive biblical beard of prophet proportions. A Captain Ahab type who probably hums sea shanties in his dreamtime. He drinks a lot, for somebody with diabetes. He told me he drank seventeen Stella Artois the other Sunday. Biff cut his foot on a sharp stone and it's been weeks and the wound has not healed yet. He was very helpful to me when I first started, offering advice and directions. Biff is fun to talk to, but all the same he's a competitive and somewhat dishonest fellow driver, always taking any slight edge, any slight advantage that he can, sometimes stepping on the toes of other drivers. In fact most of the drivers are greedy, selfish little pigs. The only gentlemen that I can see in the bunch are Danny from Puerto Rico, and Alexy from Poland. They'll say, "after you, sir". Well, they'll say that to ME, because they can sense that I'm somehow disconnected from the prevalent dog-eat-dog competition.

But let me tell you about this Miami-Cuban woman in my cab! she ignored both her companion, a burly white guy from Colorado; I'd say in his mid-forties, and my humble self, because she was on the phone with a friend the whole time, and usually people on the phone irritate me, but her conversation although not meant for us, was riveting: she was describing a get-together at the Hotel del Colorado, with the families of both the future  groom, and the bride-to-be, of a wedding fast approaching. This woman was to me some sort of star. Not so much what she was saying, but how she said it. She would speak fluent English interspersed with Cuban-Spanish asides which my ears found captivating and exotic, and I wanted to listen to her talk on the phone all night. But alas, we soon arrived at the U.S. Grant Hotel and I dropped them off. As her slim figure all in black scurried inside still on the phone, the guy said to me, as he paid me: " Yep. Cubans. Cubans and weddings".

The guy I share the cab with, he works the day shift, keeps putting these tin cans of cherry-scented car deodorant under the driver's seat, and their cloying perfume gets in my sinuses and makes me cough. I told him before, I said, I had to throw your cherry perfume out because it was bothering me. Well, he put in another one and hid it good but I still found it. I told the boss lady I cannot abide by this fellow any longer but she said we all have to get along as a team. I said I am more a lone wolf than a team player. Had a cab all to myself 18 years and it's impossible for me to put up with other people's idiosyncrasies. I don't want the guy to change his ways, I just want him gone. Put him in another cab where he can indulge his cherry scent fixation to his heart's content.

Steely Dan II

I dropped some kid off at The Belgian Lion, 30th and El Cajon. It has been a very poor week and finally we get some business. Driving down 30th Street listening to Steely Dan looking to get back on the freeway, North Park seems inviting.Young people crowding the sidewalks and bursting out the bars and restaurants and coffee places and old-style barbershops. I spy a row of arts and crafts stalls and decide to park and walk around a little. It's a beautiful Saturday evening not even seven o'clock and dark already. Warmer than it's been. The neon lights, the commercial buildings from mid-twentieth century, a quarter moon peeking from behind a cloud and everything else like that. Them girls all look pretty, not an ugly one in the bunch. What used to be a Salvation Army thrift store, one where I used to shop twenty years ago, is now a carpets outlet. The old North Park Theatre is now ... what. Is that a bar? looks like it. I need to urinate, so I boldly walk into a trattoria that looks like an old converted fabrics store, still with the concrete floor and bare walls. They didn't waste any money decorating, ha ha. Maybe that's the style nowadays. Walking out of the trattoria, I turn the corner and come upon a kitschy, over-the-top taco shop called "Lucha Libre". It's got a Mexican wrestler's mask painted on the window, behind which there is a gold lamé upholstered booth that makes me laugh. Much too much. It faces the window, and the patrons sitting on it seem on display. Still the kids are everywhere, the world belongs to the young, and do they realise how lucky they are no-one's shooting at them or trying to blow them up?



They call Alabama the Crimson Tide

Call me Deacon Blues



Just what is Donald Fagen singing about? Why am I even listening to Steely Dan? I never said I liked them. Well I do like them, a little bit. I think what it is, they remind me of happy times long-ago. Because they used to be all over the radio. They used to play in Bob's Big Boy Restaurant rest-rooms. Steely Dan II is a metallic dildo in William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch, any major dude will tell you. Back in North Park, I hurry through the narrative and the crowded streets, back to my cab I left parked on North Park Way, behind the CVS, and glide down the southbound 805 to Chula Vista, some girl singers singing about fettuccini on my stereo, behind Donald Fagen.

The VFW club in National City has closed down. The nationwide directors of all the VFW's came to town and closed it the fuck down. I wasn't surprised. They shouldn't have called it the VFW, but the WTF? Normally, a VFW is members-only drinking club for retired military. Veterans of Foreign Wars. They pay their yearly fees and they go in there and drink and party and dance and drink some more and eat hot-dogs and potato salad, all at a discount. The National City VFW though, looked more like a Rosarita Beach whorehouse than anything else. They'd be blasting narco-corridos on the jukebox and nobody spoke english. Maybe there'd be ONE veteran of a foreign war in there. A transvestite from Tijuana was seen doing the Can-Can atop the bar by this reporter. A member? I don't think so. So word must've got back to VFW headquarters and like I say, the head honchos came with fixed bayonets and ándale'd everybody out the door.

Which brings us to the sad and continuing saga of the not-quite-romance of  Elvira and Ponytail Dave. Dave lives in the house where he grew up that his parents left him in the old part of ChulaVista. He was born around the corner in the old Chula Vista Community Hospital, now a rest home for disabled / handicapped paupers. God grant me my death before I end up there. Now, Elvira is not ugly, has tits out to here and a slim waist. She is pals with the erstwhile manager of the NC VFW, an alcoholic old harridan I don't want to think about, and so Elvira used to hang there. Elvira has the reputation of befriending the richest guy in a room and making him buy her pickup trucks and other trinkets in return for I-don't-know-what. Maybe just her charming conversation and the occasional dance. Ponytail Dave is madly in love with her, bought her a second-hand Mercedes when she crashed the truck that the other guy had got her.

A few years have passed since these likely tales were put down. Ponytail Dave died  mmmm… March of '17, and at the last minute he married Elvira the Vampyre and she, by all accounts, or by the only account I got first-hand, got Dave's house and ancillary and sundry properties, some bungalows for rent out back giving to the other street. Curiously enough, Dave phoned me from the Hospice a few days before he passed, to thank me for my services throughout the years, and to say goodbye. The unexpected call stunned me to near silence and I was unable to articulate the thought that I would never forget him. Instead, inanely, I said "thanks for calling, Dave".

Incidentally, it was Ponytail Dave told me all Steely Dan fans are assholes. Toward the end of his life Dave wanted to re-live the good times he had going to concerts in his youth, and so he went to see Hall and Oats, ZZ Top, The J. Geils Band; em, fuckin Rush or somebugger of that ilk, and quite a few others, Steely Dan among them. Apparently some of the audience in the front rows started some sort of back and forth discussion with Donald Fagen. I dunno, maybe he wasn't playing the songs they wanted. Then Dave nearly came to blows in the restroom, over I forget what, with somebody. So he told me they were ALL assholes. I had occasion to concur when I tried to join a Steely Dan appreciation group, in order to do which I first had to answer some questions. I was asked to choose my favorite between two S.D. albums. I must have given the wrong answer, because I never heard from them again.

With the weed scientist

My old friend Tibbo, we go back 45 years, has been visiting Tijuana regularly because he has a contract with the local professional soccer team to oversee the maintenance of their playing fields, him being and agricultural engineer. Always very good to see him, always good for a laugh and a drink or two hundred. This time I agreed to take a Saturday off work in order to meet up with him. I am loath to take Saturdays off, because it's the one day of the week I can be sure will be profitable.

But OK, Saturday I took the bus into town and walked to the Hotel Nelson, were we have met before; at the outdoor café on the sidewalk just under the silver arch that is 50 meters high and resembles a miniature of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis Missouri. The corner where this venerable old hotel stands is always very busy at the weekend. Musicians, prostitutes, pickpockets, police, taxi drivers, shoeblacks, fake-silver jewelry vendors and assorted beggars and drug-addicts all roam and congregate, vying for a share of the gringo tourist largesse.

So we sit there like fucking tourists, being importuned every few minutes by different specimens of the types described above. At first it's just me and him, but other friends soon arrive, the first of which was Turi, who was actually my brother's friend back in the day, same age group, but now we both belong to the old farts age group and he's good company.Very simpatico.

We sit and drink and presently there arrives a friend of Tibbo's I was introduced to I forget his name, but I'll call him the weed scientist. He's an engineer of some description, somehow into forensics, who regaled us with tall tales of having stayed at the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan hired by the government to set up a forensic computer program to help identify massacre victims. Or something.

As he monopolized the conversation it transpired he makes his living curing terminal cancer patients with different varieties of cannabis extract. But as he got deeper into technical detail he lost me and I became impatient for the conversation to take a different turn. I actually wanted to talk about pop music, silly me. And both you and I know that I am a depressive. Because I used to fall on my forehead a lot when I was very small, and as the weed scientist expounded on his very dark vision of a world controlled by big pharma and big bad government, I began to get the dismal feeling I have been living my life all wrong, putting my health in the hands of quack doctors who are instruments of big pharma.

But I have faith in my doctor and I do not believe he is some kind of big pharma robot. The weed scientist could have shaken the very ground underneath me to the point I would have thrown myself at his feet begging him to take over the direction of my health if I had continued to sit there, but I said 'excuse me a moment' and took my leave. By then other friends had arrived and I would like to think my departure remained unnoticed for at least a few minutes.

I wanted to think about something else, like maybe a plate of chicken chop suey.