Friday, October 26, 2007

MAD UPDATE

I am sorry for not being upfront about the condition of Mad Cabbie, I was confused myself I didn't know what to tell you because his condition was seriously bad at one point and the next thing you know he is cracking up with the nurses and a few days later he got violently ill again and was back at the hospital for the second time.

But anyhow I am happy to say I picked up MC today from the hospital and brought him home and he will chill out with me for a few days and I will send him packing to his crib. It was supposed to be a simple routine surgery but MC responded with some kind of allergic reaction to some medication which almost killed him. MC survived because of his good spirit and the good physical condition that he is in, if it was me I would of been buried a few days ago.

When he was checking out of the hospital everyone on that floor were hugging him it was like a farewell tour. An old patient next to him was in tears when she saw him leaving, even during his darkest moments he made everyone smile.

MC will recover 100% and he thanks everyone who wished him well and appreciates all of you who stopped by at the hospital and visited him.

MC is resting well after a few sleeping pills and I am on the way out to get my refund for the used coffin I bought for him.

So long and MC will take over soon.

Take care,

Pastor Joe.

Friday, October 19, 2007

THE BACKSEAT SEX

For some of you folks out there fucking in a back seat of a taxicab after a night out and few drinks is a thrilling adventure that you can talk about the next morning at the office water fountain. Unless you are an exhibitionist or a freak who’s trying to torture your cab driver by making him helplessly horny, getting laid in a backseat of a car is not a comfortable mission at all, in fact it hurts all the joints unless it’s a roomy limo or van otherwise you might get almost killed like Pastor Joe.

Few years ago I used to have a regular passenger and let’s call her Julie. Julie was a thirty something cute face big blond and when I say big I am talking about 5’ 11” and 280lb or more heavyweight and I am a skinny ass 5’ 9” a buck fifty, when you see me walking next to Mad Cabbie I look like a fucken starving midget. After driving her a few weeks late at night from the law firm she worked in downtown DC to her home in east Silver Spring our conversation grew more intense and personal.. She was a married woman who’s having problems with her husband who calls her “fat” all the time. She told me she ballooned from 155 lbs to where she was after having three kids and her weight got out control and the husband didn’t want to touch her at all. She got emotionally attached because I listened and I wanted to get in to her extra large sized pants! You hate me? Fuck you! What am I supposed to do? I was a desperate horny cab driver who wasn’t getting any.

To make a long story short, one night we were parked at a parking lot of a church on Wayne avenue in Silver Spring and started to make out as usual but this time we were both in the back seat and that was the night for the Pastor to make his move and it worked. Clothing were coming off and I was on top of her struggling to…you know what right? The next thing I know I slipped and fell on the floor between the front and the backseat and she fell on top of me and got stuck, she was struggling to pull herself off me and I was fighting for my life trying to push her away from me. This went on for a good one minute and it felt like a long fucken year and I thought I was going to die of brain damage.

That was my last attempt of a backseat booty and I started to take her to some cheap ass Silver Spring Motel on Georgia avenue, I think it’s a Montgomery College building now that motel doesn’t exists anymore. Even back in the days in high school when I dated my ex-wife who was skinny we did it quite a few times in my back seat and never was good for me and didn’t like it at all.

But whenever you freaks start to do the nasty in my cab, I see dollar signs and I demand at least $40 up front and 99% of the time guys don’t care whenever pussy is on the line, they are happy to cough up that extra $40.

Take care,

Pastor Joe.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

FAREWELL TO ZONE SYSTEM

After 30 years of debates and bureaucracies the District government, thanks to mayor Fenty made the final decision to install meters in DC cabs and bring us back to civilization. The present zone system which could be very confusing to most passengers is going to be a thing from the past. In a zone fare system you could end up paying much more for short rides than those long rides which can take double amount of time. In another word people who ride those short trip are subsidizing the longer rides.

If you ask yourself the question what kind of passengers who typically ride these two types of fares, my twenty plus years of experience as a cab driver in Washington points out that it all boils down to racial and income line. Majority of the DC residents are African Americans and majority of those are low income and when you look at the white demographics it’s completely the opposite as you may know already, I am probably the only poor white person in Washington who doesn’t have a trust fund. Those expensive short rides are frequented by professional white passengers and majority of those longer relatively inexpensive trips are made by low income African Americans who can’t afford to tip their drivers.

So what’s the outcome is going to be from the mayor’s decision? People can have the feeling that they are not getting ripped off by some dishonest cab drivers even though they are going to end up more for their fares in most cases because of the combination of the time and distance meters and Washington’s hell traffic. I really don’t understand the dumb ass cab drivers who object to the idea of meters because the cab drivers are those who are going to come up as winners as the new system brings in a higher mileage rate, getting paid for sitting in traffic and more passengers who didn’t trust the zone system before. The losers? Low income African Americans who work in the city and live across the bridge in south east or deep north east who can not afford the meter which calculates distance and time like their white counterparts can. Is it fare? I don’t know! but what I know for sure is it’s not the responsibility of the private cab industry to bring affordable transportation to some city residents.

Fortunately or unfortunately we live in the capitalist mecca of the world we call the United States of America and we don’t give a shit about our poor, elderly or the sick. So people in Anacostia, I can understand that you might be pissed off at mayor Fenty but at the same time I would start flipping over those bus schedule again because there is nothing you or the cab drivers strike can do anymore, It’s pretty much a done deal.

And for you whittie transplant DC resident who were crying over the zone system all these years, I am pretty sure even with the meters installed you will find something to cry about! Like “You took me the long way!” "Is that meter working correctly?” “I don’t like the cologne you wearing!” because most of you out there are natural born cry babies! We shall see and time will tell us all.

Take care,

Pastor Joe.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

JET

Back in the early 90’s Washington DC was labeled “The Murder Capital of the World” due to the alarming rate of murders among crack hustlers fighting over territories. Driving a cab during the night was a dangerous business especially in deep south east and north east DC but I didn’t give a shit at all, nothing scared me because I was an angry white man who was mad at the world so getting shot and killed was a blessing in disguise for me and there were times that I prayed for some kid to take me out of my misery by smoking my ass but at the same time I was making a shit load driving a cab cruising through neighborhoods where cops are scared to go to. Everyone was my friend, they were happy to see a cab in their hoods picking up people and most hustlers preferred to take a cab to move around town.

They used to call him "Jet”! he was a black kid from the projects who dropped out during the 9th grade to hustle the streets of Washington and had a dream of being a drug king-pin. In those days pagers were the high tech way to communicate and I used to get quit a few pages every night from him and drive him around where ever he wanted to go. He used to tell me that I was a “crazy white man with a nigger’s heart” for having the balls to show up in his hood, I didn’t care all I wanted was his money and he used to carry thousands and thousands of dollars in his pocket, I don’t think they had banks in his hood, all the banking transactions were made in liquor stores where you can find them at every block.

It was the September of 1992, I picked Jet up from the section 8 apartments he shares with his mother and three other siblings. It was a slow night for me and I was happy to get a page from him to pick him up, I desperately needed some cash to pay up my bookie who could be trigger happy at times. I drove him all over the place and spent a good three hours with him and some other thugs and finally I dropped him off at his girlfriends apartment in Capitol Heights but for the first time ever he didn’t had the cash to pay me and I was fucken pissed because I was expecting at least a couple of hundred dollars from that trip, he tried to calm me down by giving me the “Scarface“ VHS movie he carries with him where ever he goes, he tells me he watches that movie at least three times a day. So I didn’t have any choice but to wait for a couple of days for my cash and I moved on to my next job with a freaken Al Pacino flick as a partial payment.

A week passed without getting paid, he wasn’t responding to my pages and I was getting annoyed. So one day I dropped of some mental-case at St Elizabeth’s hospital and made a quick stop at Jet’s apartment since he lived a few block away from the hospital. When his mother opened the door the apartment was full of cigarette smoke and little kids running around and she was watching the re-run of “Miami Vice”.

Mother: “What the fuck you want? Who are you?”
Pastor: “I am Joe can I talk to Jet?”
Mother: “Are you a cop?”
Pastor: “No I am cab driver!”
Mother: “A cab driver! I didn’t call for no fucking cab!”
Pastor: “No I came her to see Jet, is he around?”
Mother: “No Jet is dead!”
Pastor: “What the fuck you mean he is dead?”
Mother: “He got killed last week OK! Now leave me alone!”

And she slammed the door on me. To be honest with you, at the time I was more pissed that I won’t be able to collect my couple of hundred dollars than him being shot and killed because I really didn’t give a shit about him. I admit that I was a complete ass-hole but what can I say? that is the nature of night driving, you have to be a ruthless motherfucker to survive, there is no room for cry babies at night shift.

Later I found out that he died the same night I dropped him off in Capitol Heights, they shot and killed both him and his girlfriend while they were walking back to her apartment from a 24 hr Chinese food carry-out joint.

To this day I still have that “Scarface” movie in my basement and “In the memory of Jet” written on the cover. There are quite a few of my passengers who had gone six feet under but Jet is the only one who comes to my thoughts from time to time! Or is it the devil side of my mind thinking about that $200 I didn’t collect?

Take care!

Pastor Joe

Friday, October 12, 2007

PASTOR CHECKING IN

When I met Mad Cabbie for the first time 16 years ago at a Seven-Eleven in Georgetown, he looked like a confused kid just out of high school wondering around a college campus not knowing where to go. We started a casual conversation walking toward our cabs and we’ve been best friends ever since. He was a rookie cab driver the very first day on the job bitching about not making any money after ten hours on the road and hungry for information on how to be a skilled cab driver.

So that evening we ended up having a dinner together and had a long conversation about the taxi business and I gave MC a few tips on how to hustle the streets of Washington DC even though deep down inside me at that time felt MC wouldn’t make it as a cab driver because he was so clean cut and straight forward good person. You have to be a fearless asshole to be a money making cab driver especially if you are an overnight driver and I didn’t see that on MC at the time not knowing that he turned out to be a good student learning it from the master asshole.

After I lost my job as an air traffic controller twenty five years ago thanks to Ronald Regan and the last I heard he is burning in hell, and my divorce that followed, I was a loner who avoided people and would be friends and be miserable on my own and loved every minute of it. But there was something about MC that I could not explain, the minute you meet him he can suck you in and the next thing you know you are his buddy and you have him on your speed dial.

Even though I am a little older than he is I can say he is the best friend I ever had period. We are a complete odd couple when you see us walking down the street, a bolding red-neck and a metro-sexual brother! But we did all kind of wild shit together and worked well as a team. I taught MC how to hustle and make money and the bean counter that he is he taught me the most important skill, which is how to keep my cash and let it multiply.

When I came to the decision to give up cab driving and move on, the most difficult part of the decision was the idea of not hanging out with MC every night during the night shift even though we remain best friends and meet quit often outside the cab world. We still exchange some crazy ass old cab stories and laugh our asses off!

I will post some of my old cab stories as much as I can while Mad Cabbie is resting at his parents house after an emergency surgery. He is a strong kid and he will be all right and we will pray for his healthy return.

Pastor Joe.