Cab Story

Cabdrivers are a blase lot. When you are, effectively, another urban background element, the riffraff tend to 'act out'; unconscious of your existence as a human. With the same concern for the opinion of you as a witness as the very trees and sidewalks merit, these miscreants rob, shoot, slap, slug, and otherwise manhandle their hapless victims.

The title of this, my first Cab Story, is a phrase that has two distinct and relatively opposite meanings to Taxiphilologists. Actually the 'greenpea' , our word for a beginner cab driver, would come into the drivers' room all enthused about witnessing some wondrous denial of our status as thinking entities, being so mild on the scale as to not interest old time cabbies who would chuckle knowingly, or scream at the demons that chewed on his neurons, and ignore the teller. Then, seven hellish years of driving later, the now apparently ripe pea would arrive at the lot and confront the old-timer's card game with " Have I got a Cab Story for you". This latter would of course be so outrageous as to bestir the 350 pound lout who had bitchslapped Sean Penn for his third gay tantrum or rolled Mary Tyler Moore when she was loaded on 'Ludes and Dago Red.

Well have I got a got a CAB STORY for you: Short and quick version

I got a call at an apartment on the second floor balcony level. The party inside quieted after I knocked. The footsteps of the respondent thumped toward me and the light faded in the peephole. I assumed he would tell the others and some end would occur. After some moments the party resumed and I waited a decent period and re-knocked. The answer this time involved a head peeking around the door and asking "Cabdriver?"

I answered him and he and two other headbangers filed out and we quietly rode off. The heavy metal tee-shirts and half grown bangs and slack jaws just screamed "Beavis" squared.

I asked the ringleader what the problem was about coming out the first time. He looked right and left at his peeps And said haltingly " Well...uh...well... we are high on acid and when I looked out and saw John Candy I thought I was hallucinating".

I have millions of stories like that and will milk them when the well runs dry. I wrote the first 80% of this while laughing hysterically. I hope I have as much fun writing these columns as I haven't had elsewise in life. Spread the word. I have had seven 4 minute appearances at open-mike-comedy at The Comedy Underground in Pioneer Square, in old time Seattle. I had only two jokes fall flat and they were mildly non-PC. I still think they were funny and nontroubling-I am an Objectivist and this philosophy denies any validity to collectivism. Have a Happy Thanksgiving and Spread the Word. and remember folks-Acme Humor is the Acme of Humor!