No Band Played, Memorial Day, 1968

The morning rush was over and I had already had my morning shot and had been to the diner for my hard buttered roll and coffee. I was taking my place on line with the other cabbies ready for the day. Cabs were parked end-to-end, down Baychester Avenue. I was third on line and I inched my cab a little closer every time someone went out on a call. My cab was running, my radio was tuned to a new FM station, the nine volt was playing “Under My Thumb,” by the Rolling Stones, and I loved it when the dispatcher’s call came over the radio.  It was Bobby.

  “7-5-9 Saigon, where are you?”

 “7-5-9 Saigon. I’m right outside the office on Baychester Avenue.”

  “7-5-9, pick up the lady at 929 Hill, going to Fordham and the Grand Concourse. Five Dollars and fifty cents. You got that Saigon?”

 “7-5-9, I read you loud and clear oh mighty one. 7-5-9 Saigon over and out.”

  It was Memorial Day but I didn’t realize it yet. I was home just about a year from my all expense paid trip to the tropical Southeast Asian jungles of Vietnam. I wasn’t the new man anymore, learning the ropes as I went along. I learned fast. In the spring cabbies had their minds on other things besides sitting in a cab waiting out the day, especially when the Trotters raced at Yonkers Raceway. The Raceway was a short trip from the cabstand and Harpo, the Iron Horse, Willie and some of the other cabbies spent all of their money betting and losing on the ponies at the track, all of them smoking cigars and drinking coffee. Except for Willie, who liked Scotch and didn’t smoke. How he could drink all afternoon and make it back for the evening rush to make his money I don’t know, but I could shoot dope and work, why not Willie? Drink? Drive?   What the fuck. Don’t mean nothing.

On race days I’d get to drive a newer cab and most of the time, it was Willie’s. The newer cabs had air conditioning and brakes that worked on command, not on wishes. I’d drive the boys up to Yonkers Raceway and drop them off at the front gate. I wouldn’t have to be back until right before the rush and that gave me three, four hours to make some cool money. The trip to Fordham Road would take me an hour back and forth. I had hoped for a fare out to Orchard Beach. It was always nice going to the beach in the summer. People were always happy on the way, but coming in the other direction, was a different story. I could catch some sights and besides, there’s always a chance of picking up another fare on the way back, since Gypsies weren’t licensed to pick up fares off the street unless it was an emergency. I figured every fare was an emergency or they’d have taken the bus. Springtime in the Bronx, warm days cool nights, pizza and egg creams. Not for me. It was work, cop my dope, get off, stay alive, and here I go again. A trip to the old neighborhood might be nice. I’d pass familiar places on my way up Fordham Road before hitting the Concourse, the Bronx Zoo, the Botanical Gardens, Fordham Hospital, Paul Hoffman Junior High, where I went to school, White Castle hamburgers, Arthur Avenue and the Half Moon Pizza, my old hangouts.

The Bronx River Parkway was my back yard and my old neighborhood, my playground. The streets were always full of boys playing stickball, Johnny on the Pony, ring-a-livio and marbles. Girls jumping rope to double Dutch while singing rhymes. Old Converse sneakers hung from telephone lines and there was a Sabrette hot dog vendor who’d been on the corner of Park Avenue outside the Sears store who served that special Italian onion sauce for as long as I could remember, with the ivy covered towers of Fordham University as the backdrop. The German deli on the corner of Webster Avenue and Fordham Road boasted the best potato knishes, dill pickles and potato salad in the Bronx. They always had tender, juicy, slow-roasted chickens and for about a dollar one of those tasty little birds could be mine. I felt the juices forming in the corners of my mouth just thinking about it. From my cab window I’d see the trays of potato knishes, made fresh every day from boiled potatoes, smashed together with sea salt and fresh ground peppercorns, then deep fried. Sitting there fully loaded side-by-side with the beef tongue, pastrami and corned beef, the grill hot and steaming, the aroma lingering in the fine haze. At lunchtime the lines would form on the sidewalk right to the entranceway.

I finished the joint in stars and stripes rolling papers that I bought in a head shop in Saugerties, as I headed down Baychester Avenue. By the time I got to Hill Avenue the lady was waiting outside. The houses on Hill Avenue in the Bronx were mostly one family houses. I pulled up to the curb and my passenger who was about forty-five, nice looking and well dressed hopped in. I couldn’t help but take a good look at her shapely legs as she slid into the back seat. She checked her French twist out in the rear view mirror and asked, “Do you know where I’m going driver?”

I repeated the address as I adjusted my mirror for a better view. She gave me a quick smile, and I picked up on her sense of urgency.

You learn fast in the cab business, you learn or you don’t make any money.  I earned a  Ph.D. in people driving a cab. I was able to read people by the things they did or didn’t do or by the way they just sat there. Judging by the two-piece herringbone suit she wore, she might be a professional. The jacket covered a black silk blouse buttoned to the chest. A gold cross on a chain hung around her neck. She sat holding black leather gloves in her left hand and under her arm she held her purse. She looked just like Kim Novak. I made my way cross-town and took the entrance ramp to the Bronx River Parkway as we made small talk. We talked about what I was going to do with the rest of my life and that’s when the small talk turned into a lecture.

            She began by telling me that the younger generation seemed determined to self-destruct and went on yakking about how Rock and Roll was being overshadowed by sex and the drugs we were injecting into our veins and inhaling into our lungs. In her opinion, our cultural revolution was a sure way to an early grave. Hell, even if you lived to the ripe old age of fifty, some kind of disease would eventually catch up to you.

             It didn’t matter to her that the Virginia Slim100 she had in her hand when she got into my cab was finished and had been thrown out the window and replaced with a fresh one. What the hell was she talking about? She inhaled the cigarette an inch at a time as if she was drawing her last breath. She looked like a character in a Sam Spade novel jerking her head from side to side as she tried to avoid the smoke streaming from her cigarette. She sucked it in with no problem, filled her lungs all right, but she sure didn’t like it in her face. What a show. “Hey, lady, why don’t you open the window and get some air?” The only time she stopped talking and fidgeting was when she sucked on her cigarette. As I watched her in my mirror I thought about how different things appear when you’re looking at life from this side, separated by a front seat. As I focused on her face I saw lines I hadn’t noticed before. She looked like she was aging at every stoplight and I wonder how many cocktails this sweetheart had downed last night. If there was ever anyone that got into my cab that needed to smoke a joint, this lady was a prime candidate. Some hemp definitely would have helped. I don’t know what made this complete stranger go off on me but it wasn’t the first time it would happen and it was definitely not going to be the last. You know what they say in the Bronx, you can’t always tell the hot dog by the bun. To her I was a long-haired hippie, freak, sex crazed drug fiend but if you didn’t know what to look for, if it wasn’t under your nose every day, you’d never have known I was a junkie. I held myself pretty well most times. There was always an exception, but this wasn’t one of them. “It won’t be long now sweetheart. You’ll be history.” She asked if I was saying something. “No lady, I’m just singing with the song.” I passed the main entrance to the Bronx Zoo, I asked, “Hey lady, you ever been to the zoo?” But she didn’t answer. “Hey lady!” Still no answer, she just stared out the window lost in her thoughts.

  I was almost to the Grand Concourse when the lady asked me to pull over to the curb. “Lady, this isn’t the Concourse, it’s another block.”

   “If it’s alright with you, I know where I’m going driver.”

 “Yeah, sure lady, whatever you say.”

  I stopped and she handed me a twenty dollar bill, and with a sorrowful smile said she’d only be awhile and asked if I could wait. Now to a cabbie, “awhile” with a twenty attached could be from ten minutes to a half hour, but a twenty was a twenty and I could score five three dollar bags up on the Avenue and still have two dollars left for a couple of packs of Luckys. I said “Why the hell not.” I told her I’d park the cab under the trees up the street and around the corner. “Hey lady, don’t take all day OK.” Without another word she walked away at a steady pace, adjusting her skirt and jacket and running her fingers nervously through her hair, never looking at the display windows she passed as she sucked on another hundred millimeter. It wasn’t too often a woman would pass a display window without even a glance.  I tried to keep her in sight to see where her quest was taking her and just like that she disappeared into a two-story building.  I shifted the cab into drive and eased my way up the street. I recognized the building. It was a state run methadone clinic. Don’t tell me she was a user giving methadone a try. Junkies come in all different shells.

I had tried methadone once for a year but it was like substituting one monkey for another. With heroin I got a rush every time I stuck the needle in my arm and it was better than having to piss in a bottle three times a week, as they asked “Did you use heroin this week? Do you intend to use heroin next week? Leave us a specimen.” It might work for some but it didn’t do shit for me. I liked the excitement of the copping, the hassling, the anticipation, preparing the needle, the cooker, the sulfur, the smell, the eyedropper, the blood filling the works mixing with the dope. The rush. It was a ritual. It was the life style. Fuck that methadone. As far as I was concerned I’d rather be a shooting junkie. When I wanted to stop I would. Little did I know that the monkey I had sitting on my back would turn into a fucking gorilla. I drove up Fordham Road and turned onto the Concourse and found a tree and parked the cab.

            I sat there for awhile daydreaming about the summer and Orchard Beach. It seemed like a hundred years ago that I enjoyed the chocolate ices, Italian feasts, warm breezes and appetizing scents from the Coppertone suntan lotion, baby oil and iodine on the young Italian girls. Alone in my thoughts, I heard in the distance fifes and drums. It sounded like a marching band and it was getting closer and closer. Then I remembered it was Memorial Day and the parade, as it had done every year, was coming down the Grand Concourse. I had marched in the same parade as a kid with the Bronx Chapter of the New York Nautical Sea Cadets dressed in my miniature but authentic Navy blues, white Navy cap and white leggings. My childhood was calling, “Johnnie, come see the parade, hear the echoes of your past Johnnie boy.” I loved those parades, the bands were getting louder and the young boy in me called. I decided to have myself a look.

I checked in with Bobby to tell him that the lady from Hill Avenue had asked me to wait “7-5-9 Saigon, over and out.” I replaced the hand mike on the dashboard; switched off my nine volt radio, turned off the engine, rolled up the windows, locked the cab, and started my walk up the street to the Concourse.

*********************

            The Bronx in the Spring; tree lined streets, beautiful women in summer dresses, tan lines, red lipstick, sunburned cheeks, sunglasses, and something new, mini-skirts. Oh yeah, I was away for that one, but now it was good to be home. I walked past dresses on racks hung outside stores and kids driving the old men crazy playing tag up and down the street using the racks as cover. The old men looked the same as they did when I was a kid. Children hoisting each other up for a drink surrounded the water bubbler in the little park that sat in the middle of Fordham Road. Little old Italian ladies dressed in mourning black sat on park benches wiping sweat from their brows and warning their grandchildren not to chase the pigeons. “They’re going to shit all over everything! Come away from there!”

             I passed the Army Recruiting office where I enlisted in 1964. Jesus Christ, was that only four years ago? As I took myself back to that day, my life flashed before my eyes and I realized you don’t have to be dying to see your life pass before your eyes, you just had to have lived that’s all. I noticed the Orange Julius across Fordham Road and thought I’d get one and maybe even a Nedix hot dog. How good that cool malted orange juice would feel going down preceded by a juicy hot dog with deli mustard and sauerkraut. I had at the most ten, maybe fifteen, minutes before the lady would be back but that was more than enough time to grab a look at the parade, get an Orange Julius and a hot dog and still get back to my cab in time. The cadence calls were getting closer. “Left. Left. Left, right, left.” When I turned the corner there they were. The patriots, the real Americans, the John Wayn's, Gung Ho! Red, white, and blue, America we love you. It was like walking into another dimension, a Dali, a Rockwell, stone cold chiseled faces, a pre-destined twilight zone. I had to stop and remember what I was high on. I’m okay, I’m in my neighborhood in the Bronx, Alexander’s Department Store is right across the Concourse. I’m safe. Yeah, right!

Fathers had their children hoisted on their shoulders as they waved flags and listened to the bands. The cars along the parade route honked their horns. Soldiers followed the cannons, towed by deuce and a halves, and Marines decked out in their finest dress uniforms, sabers, scabbards and bayonets, polished brass glimmering in the sunlight. Bands from DeWitt Clinton, Cardinal Hayes, Cardinal Spellman and other high schools from throughout the Bronx played marching songs, their majorettes leading the way, batons twirling so high it appeared they could reach the tops of the buildings. Next came the soldiers from the Great War, the war that would end all wars, the war that was the war before they started numbering wars. There were only a handful of old soldiers now, some so weak they rode in wheel chairs. These were the brave young men who came back heroes to a cheering and thankful country now marching to keep the memories of soldiers who march to a silent cadence alive. When I was a kid there were columns of old soldiers marching dressed in remnants of their doughboy uniforms decorated with medals and ribbons from far away battlefields, canes in hand. The crowds cheered these proud, victorious men for a job well done ‘over there,’ how wonderful it is to honor you. Soldiers followed them from the beaches and jungles of World War Two and the mountains of Korea. Hair not completely gray, they passed in review quick to the step, lines straight and true, gallantly marching to familiar cadence calls, their heads held high, eagerly accepting the gratitude of their families, the gold star mothers and fathers and the crowd.

Buildings on either side of the Concourse, painted with colorful advertisements, made a tunnel for the clear blue sky. People stood on cars screaming and cheering, remembering a time not so long ago when women slept soundly feeling the warmth of their husbands and lovers next to them, not realizing how their men would be awakened by bad dreams, reliving their wars shivering and covered in sweat. Children who had not yet been born would meet for the first time fathers called to duty before their birth. It was the time of my youth, a grand time to be an American. They called them the greatest generation. The generation that saved the world for themselves and fucked it up for the rest of us.

I made my way to the barrier that held the crowd back from the parade route and squeezed my way in next to an older man who was proudly waving an American flag in each hand and had so many medals displayed on his chest that the weight of them tore at his pocket. I recognized his medals because my father had the same ones. We were surrounded by the sounds of Xylophones, cymbals, cadence calls, drum rolls, majorettes in skirts, white boots and tassels. I looked at this old man and wondered how many Memorial Day parades he must have watched from this very spot. Did you cheer for that young Sea Cadet that marched in a crooked line? It wasn’t me he was cheering for now as he looked down at me, shrugged and then mumbled something I couldn’t understand. I looked up to the gothic sentries, the stone carvings of gargoyles and the Lions of Venice that clasped to the sides of the buildings nearby and lost myself in the songs of the Republic as the drums and cadence calls bounced from one architectural wonder to another. I’d soon be reminded about what I was trying so hard to forget because the old man bumped me to get my attention. It was apparent from the look in his eye and the tone of his grunt that I was a thorn in his side. Fuck him. I closed my eyes and went back in time to my childhood and my innocent visions of glory. I could feel him staring. What could he possibly know about me? He didn’t know shit about where I was yesterday or where I’d be tomorrow. Maybe I was just being paranoid. I decided the best way to handle the situation was to smile and enjoy the time I had left before meeting the lady from Hill Avenue.

**********************

The clock on the Dollar Savings Bank read ten thirty. Only four minutes had passed since I left my cab. It seemed a lot longer. This fucking asshole hadn’t said a word I could understand yet and I was determined not to give this motherfucker the satisfaction of seeing me upset. When I didn’t pay him any attention he continued mumbling. I caught the sarcasm in his voice. His face had turned the color of a ripe apple and his eyes were ready to pop from his head. His veins were sticking out of his unshaven neck and blood was rushing through them as if his heart were a turbine. He mumbled again and I thought, okay motherfucker, what’s it going to be? The Daughters of the American Revolution, a contingency of rosy cheeked, gray-headed grandmothers wearing aprons, bonnets and pleated skirts that touched the ground, marched by carrying banners celebrating the birth of our great nation. Watching them I forget for a moment that Mr. Wonderful was standing next to me. I turned and looked him right in the eye and saw hate. It was really pissing him off to be standing next to a freak at his own parade – what was the country coming to. I wanted to ask, but quickly changed my mind, if he had someone like me at home and, if so, was that why he was such an asshole? I was dressed in typical 60’s fashion, roman sandals, bell bottoms, tank top and a bandana in my hair. I hadn’t had a hair cut since I started at the cabstand. I had my St. Christopher medal, teeth marks and all, and a string of beads around my neck, my stash bag hanging from my belt and I was smiling, but the clincher, the thing that really freaked out the old prick, was the tattoo on my arm of a bald eagle clutching an American flag in its talons with the words “U. S. Army 1964.” I had better things to do than get in an argument with this half-baked, red-nosed loser. I needed to get out of there. I remembered that I had a roach in my stash bag, and thought about firing it up and really giving the old fuck something to freak out about, but if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that when there’s a parade in New York City there are police around. I didn’t want to get into any hassles with the heat. It was as if the world was shutting itself out and only allowing his words of hate and hurt in. He looked me square in the face and even with all that was going on around me I could make out his words almost before he spoke them. He was saying that I was a disgrace to the uniform and the country it represented, his words as lethal as the war itself. He told me that I should be held down while the symbol of his great country was scraped from my arm. With saliva spewing from his mouth he told me that it would be better just to kill me. I looked at this drunken fool, this poor excuse for an ‘American’ and just stared. Then as if that weren’t enough, he pointed his stubby finger in my face and asked me if I called myself an American soldier.

   “I was a soldier you old motherfucker!” The words stuck in my throat.

 “You were in Vietnam, right?”

  Like it really mattered to him. I didn’t acknowledge him one way or the other and he went on talking, saying that Vietnam wasn’t a war. His was “The War.” He fought the Japs and the Nazis and that fucking guinea bastard El Ducie. “You a fucking guinea? You look like a fucking guinea! A lot of good Americans got killed in my war. Too many of you little hippie bastards are coming back to pollute the country. You and your kind should have been left for dead in the rice paddies.”

For a moment, I felt as if I were knee deep in some Papa-san’s rice paddy with the possibility of Charlie and the monster with me in their sights ready to end my life at any moment. “Hey, wait a minute, where am I?” He said that I was a disgrace to the American heroes who made the supreme sacrifice by giving their lives in defense of their country. I looked up and the glare from the sun reflecting across the street from the windows of the Concourse Beauty School totally eliminated his ugly face. As he spoke, he listed to one side and I thought he might fall over and crush the little kids sitting at our feet. Then he said “Your father must have missed his mark and let the best part of you run down your mother’s leg.”

            What kind of human being would say something like that to a total stranger at a parade no less? I imagined taking one of his flags, sticking it in his eye and watching him run through the crowd as blood and pain erased any thoughts of me from his mind.

  During the whole scene a huge woman eating an enormous amount of cotton candy was standing behind us and every time she moved her wrist the bell she wore rang methodically to the rhythm of her feeding frenzy. I thought about Vietnam and how, as punishment for being out after hours I’d have to burn the shit from the latrines, the smell second only to burning flesh, but I wasn’t in Vietnam and I knew nothing about fighting communism and the only thing I learned while I was there was how to look out for myself and my buddies. I didn’t think about whether fighting in Vietnam was the right thing to do. All that went out the window the first time I saw a dead body, life oozing from its chest and head.

    The man asked me if I was listening to him. I was still at the plantation in the jungles smelling napalm and seeing the horror. I brought myself back by thinking about the Orange Julius; the sounds of the parade were no longer a welcome melody. “What are you fucking deaf?” He put his hot clammy hand on my shoulder and I squirmed to release his grip. He was as big as a wrestler, his uncombed graying red greasy hair was thinning. Across his brow he had a scar, an ugly sight with sweat running through it like a stream in the middle of a desert. The little hairs on the back of his head reached to the nape of his neck and his shirt had seen better days. Sweat stains, beer stains, and it looked as if he had American chop suey for dinner last night stains. I stood and stared at him as he looked down at me. He was talking louder hoping to draw some attention from onlookers in the crowd, “Do you see what we have here?” Turning his head from side-to-side to see if he had attracted any attention, “This” he said, using an American flag as a pointer “is the reason we’re having all that trouble winning the war.” By 1968 the Vietnam war was not going as well as the government had planned.

 He started waving his flags as if they were pungi sticks and I backed away into the lady with the cotton candy to avoid being stuck. Since I was sure that he had used one of  those mutant flags to scratch the inside of his ear, or worse. Not too long ago in a place far, far away I knew people that used sticks sharpened and dipped in shit to do horrible things to the American G.I. Don’t mean nothing. He dropped one of the flags and when he bent over to pick it up I could see his yellow boxer shorts shit stained to the elastic waistband. The crack of his hairy ass showed and I wondered if there was a Mrs. Wonderful at home. The continuous smile on my face made him crazy, he grabbed my arm in a firm grip and his dirty, contaminated, nose picking, ass-wiping nails were digging into my skin. “What the fuck’s your problem, you crazy old motherfucker?”

 “No one gives a rat’s ass about you, so why don’t you shut the fuck up.”

  “This is a day to remember the dead and honor their memory.”

 “What’s the matter?”

 “Don’t I look like a conquering hero to you?

 “Or do I look like a loser from a bad war?”

   “Let go of my fucking arm!”

 No one knew how I felt. Not the motormen on the elevated trains, not Joe the Barber, or Romeo the butcher. It had all happened to me. I was alone in my country. No one ever asked me how I felt they just told me how I should feel. At least this asshole let his feelings be known. To him and my father there was no glory in my splendid little war.

  You can’t tell me American people don’t look at the box scores, it’s all in the win lose columns. You win, that’s good, the fans are with you. You lose, and you ain’t nothing but shit. Still, we breathe, still, we feel and still, we die. What the fuck was the matter with this country? Hadn’t I suffered enough? I felt as if I were being buried alive as I checked the crowd to see if anyone had heard what he said to me. I thought of Saigon and the movie theatre and wondered who would be able to find me in the rubble of this American dream?

  I learned a long time ago that it’s impossible to rationalize with an irrational person and I needed to get out of there, so with the flags still waving in the breeze and the children with American flags painted on their faces watching, and the asshole next to me still talking, and the planes passing overhead as bands played, I turn to leave but he wasn’t finished. “You call yourself a soldier? I was a soldier.” Then he asked the question of the generation, “Why don’t you get a fucking haircut?” He reached into his pocket attempting to find the price of the haircut to throw at me, but came up empty-handed except for a subway token, pocket lint and tobacco. After making sure I had an escape route. I said, “No man, fuck you. Fuck you very much. You keep your token.”

 As I left, I looked back and noticed the asshole had turned back into a patriot. Don’t mean nothing. I knew for sure I didn’t give a fuck about him. I thought about how it was with my father and how he’d take his side because they won their war, but don’t they understand I didn’t lose mine? The encounter with the old man did mean something it would turn out years later. It was that meeting with that particular stranger that put me into survivor mode again.

    I passed the fat lady with the cotton candy, she wasn’t even half done. How much time has passed? It couldn’t be very long, she was still sucking her fingers, the tips bright red, the hair above her lip covered in colored sugar. She had braided red, white and blue flowers in her hair and the soft smile she unselfishly gave me brought some relief. She was happy to be at the parade in this land we call America. Then I heard that drunken fat fuck again. I looked into the crowd and wondered how many more just like me were watching from the sidelines.

 ****************************

 I made my way through the crowd back to the side street where I had parked my cab. I had completely forgotten about hot dogs, Orange Julius and the roach I had in my stash bag. Pot was not what I needed now, damn that old man. I unlocked the doors and got into the cab I’d parked under the shade of the maple trees and shot the rest of the junk I copped the night before into my arm. As the heroin worked its magic I disappeared into a place where words and thoughts were no longer important and there I would stay until my conscious mind allowed me to resume my life as it was. I wasn’t stoned. I had just enough to get me straight. I wasn’t nodding out. I was just there. I sat in my cab waiting for the pretty lady to come back.

 It wasn’t much longer before the lady returned. I was eager to make the trip back to Hill Avenue, me straight on heroin, and her with her bag of methadone. It turned out, she made the pick up for her junkie daughter. If you knew the right people, anything could be arranged. I could hear her saying something to me, but her words were lost, vanishing as she rolled down the window.

  “The leaves, she said.”

“There on the trees.”

 “The city’s pretty when the leaves are on the trees.”

 She stared out the window, the wind taking her tears from her eyes to her cheek, leaving a track of heartbreak. I had to keep my eyes on the road.  I still had to get us back to the neighborhood in one piece. I wasn’t in the mood to make small talk. I was lost in my own thoughts as I watched the lady’s eyes fill up with tears again, the mascara running down her cheeks, and saw how she tried to wipe whatever she could away with a little handkerchief she had tucked into the sleeve of her jacket. She turned her attention to the sack she so carefully held on her lap. A moment passed and tears appeared again. I had nothing to say to this woman. I knew what she was holding so protectively and securely in her hands.

  Heroin addiction is demonic for the user and devastating for a parent. I knew parents who, rather than see their children out on the streets, came up to the Avenue to score for them because they were too sick to make a buy themselves. But I never knew anyone who went to cop methadone for a kid. This was a first. I thought about my own family and what I was doing to them.

  When I got back to the neighborhood I radioed the stand to tell them I was about to drop off the lady from Hill Avenue and would be waiting my next fare. The pretty lady with the sad face paid the fare, and without saying a word, got out, closed the door and walked away. That’s how it is in the cab business. The door shuts and soon there will be a new fare. Some other life I happen to fall into. And the next time, who knew.

“7-5-9, Johnnie Saigon over and out.”

WRITTEN BY JOHN DI SANZA

My Terrace