Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey Page 6

  In the meantime I had also submitted a manuscript for a comic book to a German cartoon publishing house. The editor there wrote me a personalized rejection letter and politely explained that my cartoons were amateurish crap. He told me that a pretty famous German cartoonist, who had dozens of books published, just so happened to be living in New York at the time as well. He gave me that famous cartoonist's phone number and suggested I give him a call and get some professional advice from him.

  Mr. Famous Cartoonist Guy was nice enough to meet up with me at his house. He looked at my German cartoon book manuscript and told me the same thing the editor at the publishing house had told me: "Kid, this is crap." Then he gave me a lot of good tips that really did improve my work a lot. He knew I wasn't making enough money as freelance cartoonist to survive, so he told me about a German language newspaper on 72nd Street in Manhattan, which was always looking for people in New York who could speak German.

  I met the head honcho at that newspaper and he hired me on the spot. He asked me if I knew how to use the desktop publishing software they were using at the newspaper. I lied and said that I did. I figured since I had grown up around computers, I should be able to learn the software on the fly. I was right. From one day to the next, I had a job in the graphic department of a newspaper in New York.

  The boss liked my work and made me art director after just two or three weeks. I got to put some of my cartoons in the paper each week, and my boss told me he had always dreamed of being a book publisher, not just a newspaper publisher. He was just looking for the right kind of manuscript for his first book release. I told him I had a manuscript for a cartoon book ready to go. I really didn't. The book was going to be published in America, so my crappy German cartoon manuscript was useless. But I figured if he bites, I'd wing it and quickly throw together a bunch of new cartoons for a book.

  He went for it. So now I had to come up with about 100 cartoons in a matter of a week. I drew cartoons every waking minute at home. Those hastily drawn cartoons were shit. Well, each new cartoon was a little bit better than the one before, but honestly, the book was crap. But now I had my first book published. Yayy! I felt like a real artist. I felt like I should be wearing black turtleneck sweaters and a beret.

  Working at a newspaper is very stressful, and it wasn't really what I wanted to do, so I quit and decided to live off my book earnings and my cartoon sales as freelance artist. Well, there were no book earnings. I think I sold like three copies of that book. (By the way, thank you for buying THIS book. You rock.)

  MY FRIEND THE ESCAPED MENTAL PATIENT

  "Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy."

  Nora Ephron

  After a few weeks of pretending to be a freelance artist, I had to admit to myself that I wasn't actually making any money. I really shouldn't have quit my day job as art director at that newspaper. So I needed to find a new job. Not that easy.

  Donna's brother's father-in-law Lou owned a limousine service. Well, that's what he called it, but it was really just a bunch of guys driving their own shitty cars. There were no actual limos. It was a typical New York ghetto cab service.

  There are 2 different types of taxis in New York City. The yellow cabs that everyone knows don't have radios, but the drivers are allowed to pick up people on the street. Limousines are not yellow, and the drivers have two way radios to communicate with a dispatcher, but they are not allowed to pick up people on the street.

  Lou was always looking for drivers, so if I had a car, I could start working for him right away. But I didn't have a car. Donna's uncle Rick had an old junk car rotting in his backyard. He said I could have it for free. He was probably happy to finally get rid of that wreck. The transmission was slipping, the seats were ripped, the ceiling in the car looked like it had cancer, and the body was so eaten up by rust, that there were holes in the floor in front of the backseat.

  People sitting on the backseat could look down and see the asphalt through the holes between their feet. It was an old red Dodge. Rick jokingly called it the Red Baron. I called it the Flintstone mobile, because I felt if I kick down hard enough, my feet would be on the street, and then I could use my feet to move the car, just like Fred Flintstone.

  As an added bonus, the muffler was broken. So the exhaust fumes were coming through the holes in the floor. The car was basically a rolling gas chamber. I inhaled so much carbon monoxide, I'm sure I lost quite a few brain cells, while driving around in that death trap.

  If I remember correctly, I was a New York cab driver for about 2 years. Maybe a little less. I drew cartoons during the day and drove at night, from 6 pm until 2 am. A lot of crazy stuff happened during those 2 years.

  There used to be a show on HBO, called Taxi Cab Confessions. The cab was equipped with hidden cameras, and the driver worked for the show. The people who got into the car had no idea that they were being filmed. They said and did such crazy stuff, I was sure that show was just as fake as wrestling. I figured these crazy people couldn't possibly be real. It had to be staged. Well, once I drove a cab myself, I realized that that show really had been real. You really do meet a lot of crazy people when you drive a cab.

  Some of the craziest guys I met were actually the other drivers. One of them was a homeless crack addict. He drove an old black 2-door Chevy Camaro that he had bought a long time ago, during his better days. Now he slept in that car. And he drove it as a cab. When he picked people up, they had to move the front seat back to climb into the backseat, which was covered with his dirty laundry.

  One of the other drivers was a retired cop. Later I found out he didn't really retire. He was fired for stealing cocaine from the evidence storage. He told me that one of his regular taxi customers was an old man, who paid the retired cop to have sex with the old man's hot young wife in the cab, while the old man watched.

  Another driver, Will, was mentally ill. When he took his medications, he seemed to be high functioning. Or at least functioning well enough to drive people from point A to point B. But when he didn't take his meds, you could tell that there was something seriously wrong with him. He would stand in the middle of the room at the taxi home base, and bop back and forth, shifting his weight from his toes to his heels. And he was convinced his wife and daughter were being raped by aliens, and that the aliens had implanted tracking devices in their brains through their noses.

  One of the other drivers was friends with Will and went over to his house every now and then. One time, when he got there, Will opened the door and whispered: "Shhhh, they're here!"

  "Who's here?" the other driver asked him.

  "The aliens!" Will replied with a whisper.

  The other guy followed Will into the house. He looked around, but the living room was empty.

  "I don't see anyone."

  "Shhhh! They're invisible!"

  A few weeks later Will boarded up the windows and doors on the first floor and then jumped out of a second story window. That's when his wife decided enough was enough, and she called 911 to have him committed to the mental health ward at Bellvue Hospital.

  Will jumped out of the driving ambulance and ran away to Florida.

  About a month or so later, he suddenly showed up for work again, like nothing happened. Since Lou was always short on drivers, he didn't ask any questions and just told Will to go pick up some people and drive them to wherever they had to go.

  So these people were being driven around by an escaped mental patient. Literally. Food for thought for the next time you take a cab.

  Another driver was this young latino kid who was a gang member. He had robbed a mall with a machine gun. He was arrested and went to prison, but hid the money. When he finally got out of prison, he invested the money into opening up a flower store. But business wasn't going so well for him, so he ended up driving a cab to make ends meet.

  He was playing Tomb Raider at the time. I was playing it too, and I was farther alo
ng in the game than he was. There was this one spot he couldn't get past, so one day he said: "You're coming to my house tonight and you're gonna get me past that spot."

  I really didn't want to. I figured if I don't get him past that spot, he's gonna get pissed and stab me or something. And if I don't go, that's gonna piss him off, too, and then he's gonna stab me for that. So I went home with him after work at 2 am. He turned on his Playstation. I was sweating bullets, but I got him past that difficult spot in Tomb Raider without too much trouble. Then he said, "Thanks, you can go now."

  This other driver was a member of the mob. Or maybe he just pretended he was. He was this little old Italian guy who looked and sounded a lot like Joe Pesci. He had been in prison for check fraud for a couple of years. All the other old time drivers knew him, but I was the new kid. When he got out of prison and started working at the cab service again, he kept staring at me, while we were sitting in the base, waiting for calls. I kept looking back at him, wondering why he was staring at me. It was getting uncomfortable.

  Then he said: "Why are you looking at me?"

  "Uhmm, I'm not."

  "Why not? What? I'm not good enough for you or something? You think you're better than me?" He really did sound a lot like Joe Pesci.

  "Uhmm, no. Look, I don't want any trouble. I'm just trying to make some money."

  But he didn't let it go. He just kept making these confrontational comments. He really was trying to start shit with me for no damn reason. It was getting kinda scary. He was about a foot shorter than me. I'm sure I could have taken him in a fight if I had to. But who knows if this nutjob has a gun or something?

  Finally Jim, the dispatcher, told Joe Pesci to back off: "Leave Oliver alone. He's a good kid."

  Joe Pesci backed off immediately: "Aww, come on, I was only kidding." He gave me a big grin and slapped me on the back. Fucking douchebag. We ended up getting along pretty well though.We drivers were one big crazy family of misfits.

  Jim the dispatcher liked me a lot, because he thought it was cool that I was a cartoonist, and because I ran personal errands for him inbetween my calls. Jim weighed about 350 pounds and had no teeth. Well, no, that's not true. Actually he had one front tooth left that was holding on for dear life. Most of the errands involved returning a couple of pornos each night, that he had rented from the video store the previous night. He rented a LOT of porn.

  In return, he always tried to help me out by giving me the best calls of the night, even when it was really someone else's turn to get the next call. Airport calls were usually the best kind, because people who go to the airport tend to give big tips.

  Short one-way trips within our neighborhood were only $3.50 back then. Short round-trips were $7. Sometimes people had to make short round-trips to go buy drugs. Jim knew all the local crack houses, so if someone called for a round-trip to one of the known drug hotspots, he charged them $20 instead of $7, because of the risk involved.

  I didn't want to get arrested with drugs in my car for lousy $20, so I asked Jim to never send me on any of these drug runs. He promised he wouldn't.

  Then, during a particularly slow night, with hardly any calls at all, Jim sent me on a round-trip with this girl. She kept sniffling a lot while she was sitting in the car next to me. We drove to some really shitty part of town. She ran into some wretched house, came back out 2 minutes later, and handed me $20 when I dropped her off at her home. She was obviously a coke addict and we had just been on a drug run.

  When I got back to the base, I was mad at Jim and asked him why he sent me on that call, when I had specifically told him to never send me on a drug run. He said he felt bad that I wasn't making any money because it was such a slow night, so he figured he'd throw me a bone. He said he was just looking out for me. I told him I appreciated that he had the best intentions, but that I really really did not want to do these kinds of runs. After all, I was driving my own car, without a taxi license. So if the cops pulled me over with drugs in the car, I wouldn't be treated as a cab driver who had nothing to do with it, but as an accomplice in a crime.

  A few weeks later it was another very slow night. Jim sent me to pick up some guy who lived near the base. We drove to some shitty part of town, and he ran in, ran out, and handed me $20 when we got back. It was another drug run! Motherfucking Jim!

  When I got back to the base, I told Jim again that I didn't want these types of calls. He grinned his toothless grin and said: "Stop complaining. You just made some easy money, and nothing happened."

  I went on another call and when I was about to head back to the base, Jim called me on the radio and told me not to come back just yet. I asked him why not. He said because my previous passenger, the guy who had gone on a drug run, had lost his drugs in my car, and was freaking out.

  He was at the base, screaming that I had stolen his drugs. Jim tried to calm him down and told him that I didn't do any drugs and I didn't have his stuff, but the crazy guy kept screaming and freaking out.

  Finally he left and I went back to the base. I was sitting in the back room, where we drivers sat and waited for the next call. People who walked up to the dispatcher's booth window could not see into the back room.

  Suddenly the crazy drug guy came back into the base and started screaming at Jim through the window of his booth. He yelled that he knew I was there, because he saw my car parked out front. Jim told him that I had gone home for the night, and that I left my car parked in front of the base because I lived right around the corner. The guy wouldn't stop. He was going nuts. He was really fiending for his fix.

  After screaming at Jim for about 10 minutes, he walked outside, to my car. He unzipped his pants, pulled out his dick, and peed all over the hood of my car. What the fuck?! I guess that was his revenge for me "stealing" his drugs.

  That night I had a few more calls after that little incident. Then I went home and parked the car. The next morning I was going to go to the grocery store. I got into my car, looked in the back, and there were the drugs, lying right there on my backseat, in plain sight! I couldn't believe that the passengers I picked up after the crazy drug guy didn't say anything or take it.

  So now I had a handful of white stuff wrapped in cellophane. I tried to figure out what to do with it. It looked like a lot. He had probably spent his whole paycheck on that stuff. I was so clueless about drugs, I didn't even know if that was cocaine, crack or heroin.

  What to do, what to dooo? I was thinking about trying some of it. Just to see what it's like. But I was scared, so I didn't. Then I thought about selling it. I sure could have used the money. You don't make a lot of money driving a cab. After you pay for the gas and the base fee to rent the two-way radio, and pay the base their share of the night's earnings, you basically walk away with nothing, if it wasn't for the tips.

  I had seen a news segment about racism. The news crew wanted to show that New York cab drivers were racist, because they would rather pick up a white person than a black one. The news crew had hired a black professor, and a white convict. The black professor tried to hail a cab, but virtually all of the yellow cabs passed him to pick up the white convict a few feet up the road.

  But now that I was a cab driver myself, I knew the truth: It had nothing to do with them being black or white. They could have been yellow and purple. The simple truth was that white people usually tipped the driver, and black people usually didn't. And if you depend on tips for your survival, of course you're going to try to pick up as many tippers as possible.

  Most of the other drivers drove 12 hours shifts, from 6 at night until 6 in the morning. And then they slept all day. But since I drew cartoons in the day time, and I had to get some sleep at some point, I only worked until 2 am. Those missing 4 hours made a big difference, because I still had to pay the same expensive rental fee for the two-way radio as everyone else. Some nights I came home with $20 or less. Things were so bad that I actually had to resort to eating dog food one day. That was probably the lowest point of my life.

&
nbsp; Donna's dad owned the house we lived in, and he gave us a break on the rent, because he knew we didn't have any money. But even the little bit of rent that we did have to pay was hard to come by. And then there were the bills. After everything was paid, there usually was almost no money left for food. And when I applied for my green card, Donna and I had to waive our rights to getting any kind of public assistance for the next few years. So we couldn't even apply for food stamps.