Life is unfair. I don’t expect anything different.
I worked my tail off in the military, but that’s me: My work was my passion. I was good at it, I loved it. We were hardly war lovers, but we loved bringing peace and stability to a war zone. Eliminating the bad guys. Creating a breathing space for the locals. A lot of us were Type-T personalities, thrill-seekers, civvy life paled in comparison. Some of my buddies loved their careers to death!
You would think that when I retired, a grateful nation… Ha ha ha! Pul-lease! What planet are you living on?
Admiral Richard Dexter, one of my mom’s bridge partners, retired and became an executive vice president at an oil company. He made $60,000 a year, spent 10 years doing that and still complains that he felt undervalued!
No way was anyone hiring me as an executive vice president! Once out of the military, one of my early gigs was driving taxi. Listen, you got in my cab, you had a valet at your service! Obsequious to a fault, kind and humorous, I hefted your bags, carried your gear, waited on you hand and foot. I drove you wherever you needed to go. Businessmen used the back seat of my cab as a portable office, making calls and punching the keys on their electronic calculators. Guys from the C.I.A. had me pick them up at the office and deliver them to “no known address.” State Department people regaled me with tales about Israel. “Nowadays you can have dual citizenship,” one explained. “That was never U.S. policy. American citizens could not swear allegiance to a foreign power. If you did, you automatically renounced your American citizenship. You lost it. One day, everybody wakes up to discover that there are 100,000 Americans living in Israel who have become Israeli citizens. Without losing their American citizenship! So much for the rule forbidding dual citizenship.”
I was not a sullen taxi driver. I could not do that. Early on, however, I discovered why taxi drivers are sullen. Forget people throwing up in your cab, drinking and fornicating on the back seat, tearing up the interior— just for fun— or robbing you at knifepoint. Drivers hate taxi driving because you work your tail off from 4 a.m. to 12 midnight six days a week and only earn $32,000 a year! By the time you give the taxi company their share and pay gas, that is what you have left. And that includes tips!
“Just drive people from point A to point B,” said Ernie, my dispatcher.
“Anybody can do that!” I countered. “I like to provide high-end service. Give me a stack of the company business cards and I’ll double our customer base.”
“Jesus Christ!” he complained, but within a month, I had a client list as long as your arm. People constantly called in and requested “Kevin the Swede.”
A comer, Ernie took me aside and said, “My cousin has a limo. It’s a sweet ride. If I borrow it and set you up, you drive only for me!”
“Sure! I’m driving only for you now.”
“I mean you don’t drive for the company! You drive for me.”
So that’s how we did it. I got some great customers. Ernie rented a van and had me pick up a German rock band called Fasching at BWI. Your typical black leather jacket krautrock. For four days, I drove them all over D.C., schlepping their guitars and luggage, helping them rent amplifiers, speakers and a mixer board, helping them set up at clubs, sharing hotel rooms and groupies with them. “I watch you,” said Simon, their drummer, his brown hair cascading off his shoulders. His specialty was inviting lassies up to the room to help him wash his hair! “You choose very young girls,” he observed.
“With girls that young,” I explained, “you don’t have to deliver. They’re very oral. Lots of heavy petting. Period. If you touch their breasts, they’re outta here.”
“O-kay,” he said, shrugging.
“They vacate the premises. Vamoose. They leave.”
“Auch so!”
When I informed Ernie that the band was tipping me $150 a day, he said, “Cripes! I should put you on the phone here in the office and do the driving myself! I bet they get girls all the time, right???”
“They aren’t lonely,” I deadpanned.
When I was in the Army, I never knew how to tip people. Taxi drivers live for tips. Tips pay the rent. Ever since my experience driving a cab, I tip everybody. The auto mech changes the oil in my car, I tip him $5. The state inspector does my yearly car inspection, discreetly, I tip the man $5. The furnace and A/C guy does his twice-yearly checkup on my mom’s equipment, I tip him $5 each time. My philosophy has become, “Anybody provides me with a service, I tip!” Mom and I tip 20% at restaurants.
I didn’t intend to spend the rest of my life behind the wheel. One of my fares was a black headhunter named Jerome Whitney. “I can’t believe someone with your background is driving a cab!” he said, giving me his card. He passed me to a recruiter named Sue Morgan. She was hiring for the Drew Peterson Institute of Public Opinion. “You’ve got a great voice,” she remarked, the two of us sitting on either side of her gunmetal desk in a glass and steel office building in Bethesda.
“This isn’t your regular office,” I remarked.
“How did you know that?” she asked, laughing.
“No personal touches.”
“Well, that’s true. I’ve only been hired to recruit for the company. Once that’s done, I move on to my next assignment somewhere else.” Rosy-cheeked, a chubby, middle-aged matron, her concerns surprised me: “Can you work evenings?… Can you work weekends?… Can you work holidays?”
“Yes, yes and yes. For God’s sake, Sue, I am driving a taxicab. We work all day, every day.”
“Because with your military background, you’re a shoo-in for this job.”
There were forty desks in the Call Center. A typical morning would be spent telephoning subscribers to The National Herald and asking if they had seen the full-page ad on page A7. “It’s in orange… If you saw it, what product was displayed?” In the afternoon, we telephoned registered voters and took the pulse of the nation: “Do you think Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? How strongly do you agree or disagree with the following sentence: George W. Bush is doing a good job as president. Is Bush running the White House or Vice President Cheney? Do you favor or are you opposed to tax cuts? Do you think America faces an imminent terrorist attack?”
We also threw in control questions: “Who is your favorite movie star? Do you believe in UFO’s? When did you last visit a movie theater?”
When we got the contract for the John Kerry campaign, we went nuts trying to offset the media bias roasting our candidate. No, Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, wasn’t an insane woman! No, Senator Kerry wasn’t some lamebrain anti-war activist. “Are the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth credible? Or are they actually stalking horses, secretly representing the Republicans? Is John Kerry a hero?” At the time, V.P. candidate John Edwards was a glimmer of light on a dark and stormy sea.
After stomaching a year and a half of public opinions, I quit. “Not to worry,” Skip Evans, my boss, assured me. “The burnout rate among telemarketers is 30% a year!”
*
You can always tell when school ends, there are teenagers wandering around every store and shopping mall. Eventually, they get their routines in order and swarm less. Three hours ago, parking my car and heading for a grocery store to check out the DVD’s, I stumble upon a teenage gang— two guys and three girls— dressed in shorts, tees and sneakers, sitting on the curb in the sun, doing absolutely nothing. Which makes them twice as interesting as “Snooki & JWoww.” One of the girls is crouched against a drainpipe, trembling from head to foot.
“Is she all right?” I ask the guys.
“We puffed some stuff last night,” one of the guys tells me.
“She’s just upset because it’s Friday the 13th,” says the redheaded girl, her face a sea of freckles.
“Ah! I know the scientific name for that. Paraskevidekatriaphobia. Fear of Friday the 13th,” I tell them.
They laugh.
“Go away,” says the girl by the drainpipe.
Standing, facing the highway, I envision her making a scene. I don’t want to get arrested. I leave them, thinking, “I don’t want to get in trouble, but I also don’t want to live my life in fear.”
It’s easy to do. Paul Simon once said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”
I’m as paranoid as the next person. My fear is getting arrested for pedophilia or sheer bloody-mindedness.
My mom is afraid no one will show her any affection.
Admiral Dexter and his wife fear not keeping up with the Jones’s.
My neighbors are terrified their money will run out.
It’s Friday the 13th, but I don’t consider myself superstitious.
So what do we have?
The average American family has lost 35% of their wealth in the last five years, while a clueless president wants us to reelect him, so he can provide more of the same.
Sixty percent of the country is suffering the worst drought in 25 years, but Congress refuses to acknowledge global warming.
Massacres plague the Middle East, but the Russians enjoy playing one regional power off against another.
The more U.S. troops we bring home from Afghanistan, the stronger and more aggressive become the Taliban.
*
No wonder I horse around with young girls, adult life is an abomination!
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yustyoking 
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