The Good Old Days

For me the old days was the end of the 97 to spring '01.
In 97 I was clearing $1200 a week easy in a rented cab, by January of 99 I was running my own 8 or 9 car fleet under the umbrella of the company I ran with. Me & my guys were driving the best cars because I did research at the police auctions and avoided police cars when I could.
I rotated them more often than the company did, hell the company bought some of my cars.
The rest got cheap paint jobs in flashy colors to cover the battle scars and whatever cheap matched mag rims the used tire shop I used had laying around. Painted purple, and electric blue, and jalepeno green metallic, with custom rims and low price tags, they sold quicklybecause they were clean and cheap, to people who couldn't afford better.

I made money off these cars all the way around.
Pay $2500, run the car for 12 to 18 months, they paid for themselves in 9 weeks, you do the math.
Then $300 in paint, $300 in cheap wheels and used tires, park it on the corner with an $1800 price tag then let 'em dicker down to $1500! Everybody's happy.


But when I think about 'back in the day', what I think about is the hunt, pulling that $600 Vegas trip out of the Circle K, or the $1100 trip to Long Beach, or the couple that paid me $35 an hour to sit in an OTB bar with them and watch them bet the horses.
There's some genuinely silly mother fuckers out there, and I met A BUNCH of 'em!

More than anything I remeber taking over the Country Boys restauraunt at 2am, the joint looked like a taxi impound lot from 2 to 4 am, sometimes there were 40 cabs in the lot.

Inside it was like a party, yelling, laughing, all of us trading war stories and jokes, every english speaking company in town was represented. We were brothers and sisters, comdrades in arms, cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air (this was before the smoking ban), it was fun!

I'd walk in wearing blue jeans, a white dress shirt, my cowboy hat, & my 2" .357 Magnum clipped backwards on my left side.
People would see me, cabbies I didn't know would yell out, it didn't matter if every table was full (they often were), guy and gals, whose names I never knew, would make room for me! Flo (really her name) would bring my breakfast without asking my order because she already knew! I reckon Flo probably earned $200-250 in tips for those 2 hours!

In my entire life, to this day, I've never felt more accepted, more welcome!

It didn't end in that diner, we all watched out for each other, didn't matter whose name was on the tophat, if a cabbie got jammed up some kinda way he could make a call, in 15 minutes he'd be up to his ass in cabbie backup.
One night a driver got stiifed on a fare, 20 minutes later, there were cabs up and down this asshole's block 4 or 5 of them in his yard, 8 or 9 of us on his porch beating on his door with Maglites! MotherFucker paid his fare!!!

The dispatchers called each other too, when a cab went missing the alarm would sound, every company had all thier drivers looking.

I'll never forget the night Big Jim went down, we found his cab crashed into a lightpole, he was slumped over the wheel, shot in the head and back. They never got his killer. Likely they didn't try real hard.
You couldn't count the taxis in his funeral procession, better than a hundred I know.

We were family.


Sptember 11th changed everything, drove a lot of us into straight jobs, me included.
When I came back it was different, we didn't trust each other, didn't talk to each other.
There were more cabs than ever on the street, competition was fierce.

When I got shot up, 3 cabbies came to see me, back in the day they'd be rotating in, 5-6 at a time, all day long, until the nurses chased everyone out when visiting hours ended.



I got to reminiscing tonight after I got the word that my mentor in the cab business died Friday night. He died at the cab stand around the corner from the Hyatt, heart attack, looks like.
He was truly old school, he said he was the last cabbie in Phoenix to work a Checker Marathon.
Shit he was probably the first to.
He dove a cab in Phoenix for more than 40 years, last I heard he'd been shot 4 times, stabbed 5, fucker was tough as nails.
He trained me, taught me everythung I did right in a rented cab, in 40+ years he never owned a cab, he was proud of me though. He told me so.

Back in the day, he'd get up early and came into the Country Boys, to hang out with us, he was revered.
He was our Yoda!

We'll talk soon.
-The Greeter