ghost cab

The first time I drove cabs, back in the 1980s, there was a live radio network, since replaced by computers. Some nights, a chilling voice would come onto this live network. It was low, male, guttural, almost unintelligible and its discourse consisted entirely of threats and obscenities. Perhaps some of these vocal qualities arose out of a desire to alter or disguise the voice - I don't know. There was a sinister chuckle in it that always raised the hackles on my neck. This guy, whoever he was, could not have been an on-the-job cabbie, because the network operators would have found him and thrown him off. He must either have been a disgruntled former driver or a working cabbie on downtime with grievances who, using some kind of CB set-up, had found a way to access the network. His intention was to drive the operators crazy and in this he was entirely successful. They used to become apoplectic when he showed up on the airwaves. I remembered about this guy the other night because of the legend of the ghost cab. The ghost cab is a rogue cab, out there somewhere in the darkness, picking up people who never arrive at their destination. Who is the driver? He's a man without a face and a voice borrowed from hell. There's a black hole in his back seat. He charges everything and gives no change. The number of his cab is 666. And so on ... well, there I was on the Bondi Junction rank, vaguely entertaining these gothic notions, when I looked up and saw a cab hurry past the line of us waiting. Number T666. It was an ordinary white Falcon with the yellow and black livery of Combined Services, which is the company I drive for. High-tailing up the hill with that peculiar kick-up-the-heels look of a taxi in a hurry. All I could see of the guy behind the wheel was a shadow hunched under a cap. He was Vacant. I nearly pulled out of the line and followed him ... & then decided, no. Some things are better left alone.

bracket creep

The other night after finishing work I called into the bottleshop of the Summer Hill Hotel to buy a bottle of red. The woman who serves there noticed my new cap and spoke to me in Greek. I laughed and shook my head. I just like these Greek fisherman's hats, I said. I paid for the wine with some of the massive amount of silver I'd gathered during the shift - one guy made up most of an eleven dollar fare with 50c pieces - and as I piled the coins onto the counter she smiled and said: Getting rid of the bracket creep, eh? Isn't that brilliant? I'll never be able to think of it simply as change again.

Moon/Dome

I was at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Crows Nest, waiting for a guy to collect his X Rays before taking him on to Royal North Shore Hospital in St. Leonards, when a radio job came through at the adjoining Royal North Shore Private Hospital. A Greek couple, going to Killara. By the time I got there, they'd gone. A woman eating an enormous sandwich came over. Was I her cab? She was going to Narrabeen. I said no, then, not very long after, yes. She apologised for eating in the car, saying it was two days since she had. Fasting all the previous day, in hospital all today, giving blood tests, waiting for her Op, which was cancelled at the last minute ... just ten minutes after her husband, who'd waited with her all day, had gone home. The surgeon had rung from the operating theatre where he was cutting out someone's cancer to say his present job was going to take another couple of hours and it would be better if she just went home. She was quite upset, she said, then apologised. It was to be her fourth Op in two years, she'd really had to psych herself up for it, now it was cancelled, she didn't know when it would be re-scehduled for, she'd used up all her sick pay ... I'm sorry, she said. I shouldn't be telling you all this. I'm sorry. She never said what was wrong with her, only that it meant she and her husband would never be able to have children. She was fearful of just about everything, yet oddly resigned as well. Those parts of Mona Vale Road where it narrows to two lanes and passes through dark eucalypt forest on either side made her particularly afraid. Well, she explained, I'm not really worried, it's just that these days I expect anything can happen. Anything bad, she meant. I took extra care on those bits. We were coming round a bend in the dark carriage way when I saw a sandstone dome floating against the night sky. As if disembodied there. A blue light shone from the apex of the cupola. Then it was gone again. We came round another corner and there, shining straight down along the road, was a huge yellow moon, slightly gibbous, a day or maybe two after full. You could see all its craters and seas. Oh, the moon! I said. She did not reply. She was holding herself against the dark places on the road. The dome reappeared on the left, much larger, enormous, as if a piece of London had come down here. It was the Bahai Temple I have seen many times from the train on the Central Coast line, from where it always looks white like a mosque. I wanted to pull in and stop the car, get out, with my fare, and ... I don't know, not pray, just seek a little calm I guess. Some grace. We hurried on, down the hill to Narrabeen and through a maze of brand new streets, brand new identical brick houses, until we got to where she lived. The house was dark. Her husband was out. She had no key. She had no money or cards either - you can't take anything to hospital, she apologised. I saw her bent over the flower pot by the front door, a grotesque shadow. She was only stroking her cat. She crossed the road to a neighbour's house, the neighbour came out with a credit card and paid for her. The cat almost got under the wheels of the car as I pulled away, driving on into the yellow of the moon that was smaller already, whiter, casting a bony light down over the black glinting sea.

slow night

First night back at work last night after my two weeks off. Well, actually, it was more like three. I knew it would be hard ... such a slow night. No cigarettes to mark the breaks between fares. A different cab, which had something wrong with its electrics, meaning I couldn't risk turning the motor off after the first time, when I only got it started again with the help of a guy on the Park Street rank, rocking the car up and down as I worked the ignition. A succession of blank fares, first time I think I've ever had a night without at least one person wanting to engage in conversation. And bugger all money ... if it wasn't for a guy I took out to Pennant Hills, and another, a sweet young American/Polynesian who was farewelled by her boyfriend at the Opera House and wanted to go to Regents Park, I would have come home out of pocket. As it was, I was passing my base about 10.30, on my way back to the City from Regents Park, when I decided to call in, fill up with gas and see what was the story with the electrics. Couldn't get the car to start again. I called my boss, Bob, who came straight down to check it out. And, since he didn't seem to be getting anywhere, bailed and came home. He called me later to say the cab was fine, no problem, just don't use air conditioning, too much for battery ... we'll see. I have to drive the same car tonight.

NeuroPlastiCity

... . A few years ago, brain scans of London cabbies showed that the detailed mental maps they had built up in the course of navigating their city's complicated streets were apparent in their brains. Not only was the posterior hippocampus - one area of the brain where spatial representations are stored - larger in the drivers; the increase in size was proportional to the number of years they had been on the job.

... there is also accumulating evidence that the brain can change autonomously, in response to its own internal signals. Last year, Tibetan Buddhist monks, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, submitted to functional magnetic resonance imaging as they practiced ''compassion meditation,'' which is aimed at achieving a mental state of pure loving kindness toward all beings. The brain scans showed only a slight effect in novice meditators. But for monks who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation, the differences in brain function were striking. Activity in the left prefrontal cortex, the locus of joy, overwhelmed activity in the right prefrontal cortex, the locus of anxiety. Activity was also heightened in the areas of the brain that direct planned motion: ''... as if the monks' brains were itching to go to the aid of those in distress ... ''

from the NY Times

Crook as Rookwood

No d(é)rives this week - I've had to take the time to try once more to whip this screenplay into shape. Given how much I complain about the job, if mostly only to myself, it's surprising to feel some regret as the phantasmagoria recedes for the nonce. How perverse ... meanwhile I console myself by drawing up a book proposal based partly around cab-driving. I've been plotting it for a while, thinking it was a film, but it crystallised the other night in conversation with an amused and amusing Englishman, from a village near Leeds, whom I took up to the Gordon railway station. I was telling him about Chinese Bob, my boss, whom I like a lot, and his mate Frank, whom I've also worked for, and a third, even more shadowy character called Tony. They're all Chinese. Tony, like Frank, runs his cabs out of the carpark of the Ashfield RSL club. He's quite stylish in his dress, apart from the Andy Capp he usually wears pulled down over his eyes; and somehow sinister. Frank has missing teeth, is handsome and plausible but untrustworthy. Bob's a straight up guy, or at least I think he is. I tried to sketch these characters to the guy from Leeds and he went off on a jag of his own, about how their operation was a front, they were money-laundering, it was really a drug business. And I thought, why not? That's great. It fits in with the plot I'm developing, about a cab driver who goes missing and another cabbie, his mate, who sets off to find out what's happened. There's other elements: a failing script consultancy business the disappeared cabbie ran; a complicated family situation; the old mental asylum at Rozelle, which has something to do with the last job (script consultancy, not cab driving) the guy had and may be the actual place he went missing; the necropolis at Rookwood, which I drove by on my last job Wednesday night. Felt the chill air rising over the old graves as we whistled by. Would be great to get the phantasmagoria, which it truly is, somehow into words ... then I could call my darg, research. And feel like I was being paid twice. But no, that'd be two jobs for the one wage, wouldn't it? Oh, well ...

mighty dread

I never go out to drive without a sense of dread, even impending catastrophe. Why is this? Nothing bad has happened to me yet and I trust will not. No, it is more psychological, some deep conflict between how I would like to imagine myself existing in the world and how, incontrovertibly, I do. And yet the feeling soon passes, I settle into the rhythm of the shift, the rhythm, let it be said, of the pursuit of money. Plus the ancillary social research I cannot help following. Every fare is a question or a conundrum. Who are they? Where are they going? Why? I am always trying to find out as much as I can about the Other(s) in these relatively brief commercial transactions. Because I work through the evening rush hour and also because I pick up most of my fares in the City, I get a lot of business people in the cab. Most of them do not interact with me in any meaningful way. Mostly they use the travelling time to catch up with calls on their mobiles. Or, if there is more than one of them and they are colleagues, they discuss work matters between themselves. The language of business is at once highly metaphorical and deadly dull. Phrases recur ... 'up to the next level' (architecture?); 'driving the process' (transport?); 'put our beefs on the table' (culinary?); and so on. What is perhaps interesting is that this language is almost entirely uninflected by whatever line of business is being pursued. In fact it is sometimes difficult to discover the line of business at all. Whether it is sports promotion, health care products, banking, travel ... does not matter much insofar as the language itself is concerned. The universal subtext, largely assumed, almost never explicitly discussed, is the acquisition of wealth by means of struggle. 'Teams' use 'strategies' to 'get a win'. The sporting metaphor, derived ultimately from the practice of war, is ubiquitous, overarching. It too is never questioned. It is also, obviously, deeply implicit in the way we conduct politics in our so-called liberal democracies. Sometimes this world of contending factions in pursuit of wealth can seem very strange, sometimes I start to see it as if from very far away, like an alien observer of an equally alien culture. Every time I drive over the Anzac Bridge, which is a magnificent structure, and see the car-choked lanes of traffic heading towards and away from the lighted towers of the City, I experience a kind of vertigo, as if I really were from some other planet than this and could see with completely different eyes. The massed, serried ranks of red tail-lights heading one way, the similarly massed yellow-white array of head-lights going the other, can look very weird. This strangeness, this stimmung, is crystalised for me in an image: away to the left if I'm going to the City, on the vast flat wharfs of the Glebe Island Container Terminal, sit hundreds, perhaps thousands of brand new vehicles, cars, utilities, vans, all painted white, all awaiting their turn to navigate the already terminally hardened arteries of this steel and concrete body, whose heart, the City, is made neither of stone, nor light, nor even language, but of some ineluctable substance, some ether or electricity, of which we humans are also a part. Then my feeling of dread returns, no longer for myself but for all of us; and, mixed in with it, a sense of wonder.

high on the hog

Aaaaaahhhh ... the weekend. Is blessed relief. However. I seem to have arrived at a way of working that works. Three nights, about nine hours a night (3 pm - midnight) during which I don't stop for anything except the odd cigarette, usually on a rank so that I'm still in contention. This because I found that every time I made a pitstop it took up to an hour to rediscover the serendipidities - or stochastics - or whatever. Every night is the same, only different; or different, but the same. The thing I'm most pleased about is that I'm managing to keep my resolve to be pleasant to my fares no matter what the provocations may be ... though I nearly lost it the other night. I picked up three people on Macquarie Street. Two men and a woman. They'd been to a restaurant, were fairly well liquored but clearly used to it. A big, bluff, red-faced man got into the front seat, the other two in the back. That took a while. They were old and unsteady. Once in they began to discuss who would be dropped off first. That took even longer. I didn't mind - the meter was running. He in the front was going to Darling Point. He in the back, a little old guy clutching a biography of newspaper magnate Conrad Black, lived in Elizabeth Bay. She, tiny and elegant, with an accent that might have been Viennese, was from Bellevue Hill. The obvious way to do it would have been Elizabeth Bay, Darling Point, Bellevue Hill. But he in the back was having none of it. He wanted to escort her home. So that's what we did, dropping first in Darling Point. The two men were well-heeled, complacent, with the braying Brit accents of the born to rule. Doctors or lawyers, or at least those they talked about were. London, Morocco, the south of France ... flitted by. Darling Point, Woollahra, Bondi Junction, too. The old couple canoodled in the back seat for a while outside the mansion in Benelong Crescent. They were sweet and tender, like young lovers of another era, with a curious formality to their endearments. But as soon as she had gone, he changed. He became querulous and demanding. He was too hot. 'Turn on the air conditioning, driver,' he ordered. I did. But still he wasn't comfortable. Not surprising - he was wearing a three piece suit on a sultry Sydney night and the air-con still isn't working properly. 'The air-con's not working properly,' I said. 'Why not?' he said. 'Probably the fluid needs replacing,' I said. 'You could try opening the window.' He grumbled as he did. Next: 'Are we going to Elizabeth Bay?' I didn't answer that one. As we entered Oxford Street, Paddington, he began muttering. 'Oh I see. We are.' Then: 'This is a very long way.' He had a point - I was using the old route, as I often do, not the new, slightly quicker one. On the other hand, there isn't much to choose between them. Two sides of a trapezium are much the same as the other two sides. And at that time of night ... At the end of Elizabeth Bay Road he said: 'Number 93, driver. On the corner.' I couldn't see any corner - the road ends in a semi-circular turn around. '93!' he shrieked. 'On the corner!' I saw the big bright numerals on the gates to the mansion and pulled over. We did the business. 'Goodnight,' he said. 'Goodnight,' I said. But he mustn't have heard me. 'I said, Goodnight!' he repeated, in his imperious accent. It was at this point I nearly lost it. I turned round and looked him in the eye, making sure he could see me too. I'm capable of a cold imperious gaze myself. 'Goodnight,' I said. He got the look. A moment of uncertainty, perhaps? His own unpleasant behaviour reflected in the eyes of a servant? Perhaps not. He was still muttering as he trailed off into the night, Conrad Black tucked under his arm.

Ninety Years On

Because it was a Monday this year, and I do Mondays, I worked Anzac Day. A big night for cabbies. Cash flying all over the place, sometimes seemingly unconnected to human hands or pockets. Couple of things struck me: the City was full of young guys in suits wearing medals. I picked up several of them. One of them told me he was 34 but didn't say which campaign he served on. If he was born about 1970, what could it have been? The First Gulf War? East Timor? Iraq? Another one said that Anzac Day was the best day of the year, better than Christmas. He and his wife had woken at one am, too excited to go back to sleep. He said last year he was crawling on his hands and knees back to Cronulla by 6 pm but was pacing himself better this year. These young guys - in their twenties or thirties - were extremely polite no matter how drunk they were, they had a strong sense of entitlement, though friendly they all had a remote quality, as if they breathed a different air from the rest of us. They were part of a self conscious elite I guess, a military caste. Later on I took a couple of truckies far out west. They said the same thing: Anzac Day is the best day of the year, better than Christmas. They'd been to the Dawn Service at Brighton le Sands, then played two-up somewhere else, then gone to The Rocks, where I picked them up. It wasn't clear if they'd served or not. But they were part of the emotion of the day, no doubt. At one point in the evening, waiting on a rank mid-town, I watched a young Aboriginal woman in a party dress savagely kicking a full water bottle the length of Park Street. By that time the whole City looked like a vast open-air public bar, drunks everywhere, men and women in uniform clasped together staggering by, old diggers threading their fragile way through the melee to their rides: was the war over or had it not yet begun? Or is it some kind of perpetual state now? I couldn't help thinking of Our Leader, driving in his limo down to Anzac Cove on a road specially constructed for him by the Turkish Government ... over, literally, the bones of the dead.

Total Recall?

This week, for the first time, I achieved my target amount within the hours I’ve allotted to cab driving … a celebration is in order perhaps? Instead, I thought I’d attempt an account of the last night, Wednesday, of my three day week. For what it’s worth …

The air-con is still not working. The day driver had an accident on Saturday and now the cab’s a mobile sauna. The internal light’s blown and there’s a headlight out as well. I’ll have to drive with the windows down which means I won’t hear the radio as well as I’d like. Oh, well.

About 3.30 pm I pick up a Pommie chippie outside Central Station and take him to Kings Cross, where he lives. He tells me that when he started working in Australia, his first pay packet came at the end of his first week, not after three weeks as it would have in England, plus one week’s Australian wages was double what three week’s English wages would have been. In ten years, he’s never been back. Why would he? ($10)

Around the corner are three Japanese tourists, young, well-dressed men. I take them to Circular Quay. ($12)

At the rank in Chifley Square, from which you can see, surrounded by palms, the giant, perforated metal cut out sculpture of Ben Chifley – as if shot full of holes by all that has happened since he proclaimed the light on the hill – I get a fare to Market and Kent. A businessman making a delivery. He speaks confidently on his mobile to an associate he’s meeting in ten minutes at the Niko (?) Hotel then confesses to me he has no idea where it is. Nor do I. And it’s not in the street directory either. ($8)

At the Park Street rank I pick up a guy going to Lindfield. Overweight, black – or rather light brown – American, he's in IT. He spends the trip making work calls on his mobile. He pays with an Amex and when I cheekily ask him for a tip (the request comes up automatically on the terminal menu) he says crisply, no. ($40)

A young couple, seeming diffident, hail me as I drive away after dropping off the IT guy. Turns out they’re hiding a trolley full of shopping, thinking no cabbie will stop if he sees it. I don’t care – a fare’s a fare. I take them to Roseville. ($10)

I’m being harassed by the computer over a couple of small jobs in Chatswood, which I don’t want because I don’t know where they are and would take ages to find. But I head for there anyway. In Archer Street I get offered a job in … Archer Street. A diminutive, roly poly country doctor, a Pacific Islander by the look of him, perhaps a descendant of someone blackbirded out of Melanesia, he’s from the Northern Rivers and has eye trouble. I take him from the surgery to a private hospital in Killara. ($20)

Another radio job … Killara to the Airport. One of those plums cabbies dream of, worth at least fifty bucks, specially welcome since I would probably otherwise have driven back to the City vacant. She’s a nice woman, a South African, who starts out asking me about the safety screen I sit within, like the Pope in his Popemobile, and ends up receiving a full confession of recent complications in my personal life. I can’t believe I’m telling her all this, some of which I’ve never articulated to anyone before. She’s a psychologist, she tells me finally, almost apologetically. As she hands over the money I think I should be paying her; I feel so much better. ($60)

On the way back up O’Riordan Street, heading to the City, I cop a hail to Alice Street in Newtown. A young guy going home from work. Nice guy. ($10)

As I’m dropping off another radio job comes through. Newtown to the City. It’s the Street of Crooked Houses a friend showed me when we were tripping one time. Unseen again from that day to this. But I don’t have time to look around, this couple booked the cab for the wrong time and they’re late for dinner. He gives me meticulous, even pedantic directions all the way and keeps changing his mind about what route he wants to take. She gives me a large tip when I let them off at Circular Quay. ($25)

Back at Chifley Square I don’t even have time to stretch my legs. A sweet young woman going home to Mosman after work climbs into the back seat. When we get close she says turn left at the next lights, by the Caltex Station, but there are no lights there and no Caltex Station, just a derelict yellow Midas sign. ($25)

I head straight back to the City and pick up a hail in Bridge Street. A businessman going to the Airport, a young guy who seems inordinately pleased with himself. But I don’t know why because he doesn’t speak to me. ($25)

I’m out of cigarettes so, back in the City, I stop off and buy a packet of Gadang Garam at the Chinese tobacconist next to the Kebab place by Scruffy Murphy’s in Goulburn Street. I go looking for a rank where I can have a smoke and still stay in contention for a job, but I’m hailed outside a pub almost as soon as I get back in the cab. Guy’s a bit drunk. He makes a call on his mobile, speaking baby talk, so I think he must be talking to his kid. When he gets off he says, in a normal voice, shit, I’m in trouble. It was his wife he was talking to. She’s Thai. He’s from Clapham, London, and works for Ernst Young. We talk about real estate values and immigration issues all the way to Bronte. (There’s been computer messages all night about a fare someone dropped off in Bronte yesterday. Sounds like a police matter. I was working in the Eastern Suburbs at that time but I didn’t pick up at the Coogee Bay Hotel. I’ll never know what this is about.) ($20)

I go to the Bondi Junction rank where I finally get a chance to smoke a cigarette. The rank is packed, and slow-moving. I watch a young couple manhandling a huge fluffy toy, a brown bear, into a Tobacco Station across the road. It’s bigger than she is. Reach the head at last and take a seemingly unhappy woman in her thirties to Vaucluse. She’s very nice to me, the way unhappy people sometimes are nice to strangers. ($15)

A radio job, Vaucluse to Rose Bay. I take it. But I misread the map and end up in Watsons Bay instead. Vaucluse is a maze and I get hopelessly lost. I’ve just about sorted it out when the walkie talkie crackles into life. A truly absurd dialogue ensues, with the despatcher trying to find out how long I’m going to be and me trying to tell her I’ll be there as soon as she stops hassling me. Turns out I’m nearly outside the house anyway. Three scantily dressed, heavily made up, violently perfumed teenage girls trip down the path from a mansion. Young as they are, they already assume the incontrovertible authority of the wealthy. The one in the front asks me to turn on the internal light so she can check her look in the mirror. They argue about the route. When we get there, one says, stop before the party; another says, no, drive past so we can get a look. There’s nothing to see – just another mansion. They dispute amongst themselves about the fare then underpay. ($8)

Another job off the radio, Bellevue Hill to Bondi Beach. An older guy, smelling of sweet port wine. ($10)

A hail on Bondi Road. Two English women, also going to party. We stop at a servo so they can buy cigarettes along the way. ($6)

I go back to Bondi Beach, intending to park on the rank, have another smoke and listen to the ocean for a while. As I pull up a young guy opens the door. Thanks for stopping, he says. I hadn’t even seen him. I take him to Redfern. ($25)

I’m very tired. You can’t really do this sort of thing on five hour’s sleep. Plus I haven’t eaten. My last job last night I nearly went through a red light in Enmore, could have killed both my fare and myself. She was talking about Rotorua and I was thinking about Tarawera. I go up to The Rocks, have a pee in the Hero of Waterloo and stop outside for a while, smoking and listening to the pianist doing Tom Waits’ "Jersey Girl" then Dylan’s "Make You Feel My Love". He’s a shit singer but plays piano nicely.

I get a hail in Bridge Street, a non-descript young guy with a packet of white sliced bread in his hand. God knows why. He’s going to the Park Hyatt in College Street. ($9).

I really should head home now but, after leaving the Hyatt, I have to turn left into Oxford Street, where I’m hailed straightaway by two young dudes. They’re drunk but not aggressive. There is a lot of clinking from their bags and I figure that they’ve probably been pinching glasses from wherever they’ve been drinking. They’re work mates, one more senior than the other, and they have a startlingly explicit conversation about the women in their office. Detailed discussion of anatomical features plus lurid scenarios of possible action … I tune out. One gets off at the tennis courts in Rose Bay, the other I take to yet another mansion in Vaucluse. ($25)

That’s it. 11.30. I’m definitely going home now. FBI are doing a Crosby, Stills and Nash special on The Bug-Eyed Highway, their late night country music show. I turn it up full blast as I roll through Double Bay. "We are stardust/Billion year old carbon/We are golden/Caught in the devil’s bargain/And we’ve got to get ourselves/Back to the garden …" I couldn’t do this job without the radio. The City’s full of cabs cruising vacant, all the ranks are jammed up. I get another hail on Parramatta Road, two young blokes who’ve been at a gig. They’re cool. And Stanmore’s on my way. ($12)

I have to fill the tank up with gas - $20 – and put aside $130 for Chinese Bob, whose cab it is I drive. I’ve travelled 230 kilometres and made $375, which means my take home is $225. Or thereabouts. The young Iraqi guy, always so immaculate at the beginning of a shift, now looks tired and rumpled. We exchange mute, weary smiles. I buy a bottle of beer from the Summer Hill Hotel and go home to make myself some salami and tomato cheese melts.

unloading

Not so much feeding my head perhaps as unloading it of random images of nights in the life. Writing as a process of forgetting, in the way that the character of the Judge in Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian", a malign immortal, records phenomena so that they can then be erased forever from the memory of time. Images without provenance, without explanation ... a curly-haired man lying face down, possibly dead, on a concrete slab in the lurid yellow neon light of the next door Church of Christ, Rockdale, with desultory police gathered and a slow ambulance on the way ... while down a nearby alley a man runs hectically toward the scene of the crime ... a Silver Service cab (they are the elite among taxis, immaculate Fairlanes with liveried drivers) stopped on Broadway with the back left hand door open as a young woman in a party dress bends over a pool of vomit glittering like jewels on the kerb and in the gutter ... a young Japanese hooker with meaty thighs striding towards an apartment building in Ward Avenue while her sixty year old John, who looks like Norman Mailer, pays off the cabbie and follows her in ... four drunk people in Kings Cross, three women and a man, throwing balled up paper bags at the cab in front ... they have been celebrating a day shooting a low budget movie, maybe a porno flick, and want to go to Paddington ... a couple having a leaden, nasty fight in the back seat after attending the World Premiere of the new Nicole Kidman film "The Interpreter" ... she fell asleep ten minutes in and snored and blames him for not waking her ... a man standing in the middle of Darlinghurst Road at the corner of Oxford Street, arms raised in praise at the way the night wind moves in the dark leaves of the trees outside the old jail ... the car-wash men, Arabs stripped to the waist with fags stuck in their mouths, manically hosing and soaping and wiping down and polishing the once grimy cabs under stark white fluorescents at the Ampol Station in Five Dock ... the guy who sleeps sitting down and bolstered in a complicated arrangement of bags while leaning forward into a shopping trolley in a bus shelter on the Hume Highway, whom I pass every night on my way home ...

pillbox

Last night, late, I took a young woman up to St. Ives on Sydney's leafy far north shore. She paid with an Amex card and a strange twist to her face, half apology, half pride. Perhaps she thought I'd rather have cash. As she was getting out, she looked back and found something sitting on the back seat. It clearly wasn't hers so she handed it to me: a small oblong wooden box with a marbled inlay top. As I drove away through the white-lit yet somehow dark, deserted streets - like a Delvaux painting perhaps - through which occasional sleek expensive cars hissed, I picked the box up and gave it a shake. It rattled thinly. I got momentarily lost; I was running out of gas; so I put it aside until I found a 24 hour servo on nearby Mona Vale Road. While the car was filling I took another look at the box and discovered the sliding mechanism that opens it. Inside were pills: one and a half of them. They are pale green, smaller than an Aspro but not quite as small as a Valium. On one side of the whole tablet are the letters APO; on the other, WAR 2.5. What are they? Who left them there? Shall I try one? Maybe the half, on the weekend? The box is nicely made, with a small heart burnt into the base; inside there is a residue of pill-dust, as if it has been used to carry supplies of whatever it is for a long time. When I was lost up the wrong end of Warrimo Avenue where it turns into deadend Timbarra Road, a rabbit skittered across in front of the cab and disappeared into the darkness of Kuringai Chase, a wilderness of bush stretching all the way north to the Hawkesbury River. Must have been the coincidence of rabbit and pillbox, plus I'm reading Alice in Wonderland to my sons, that gave me the song I can't get out of my head today:

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Call Alice
When she was just small

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the doormouse said:
"Feed your head
Feed your head ... "

dérive

In the previous post I probably should have written 'psychogeography' instead of 'social geography'. Which term comes out of Situationist practice with a provenance going back to the Surrealists, especially Breton's 'Nadja' and Aragon's 'Paris Peasant'. Current practitioners include Iain Sinclair with his exploratory journeys about London and the wild texts that document them. Probably John Birmingham's 'Leviathan,' a biography of Sydney which I still haven't read yet, is an example of the genre too. The dérive ('drift') as I understand it is a random walk in which you notice and interrogate everything you come across, consciously tracking your way through a forest of signs. Every night driving is a kind of inadvertent dérive (d'rive?) during which your unstructured bounce around the city and suburbs is at once both utterly meaningless and deeply meaningful ... trouble is, there's never enough time to reflect upon those signs you do manage to see, as opposed to merely encountering. I remember how I used to make a point of recalling in detail each night's peregrination at the end of a shift, but I'm too distracted at the moment to do that, so I just bring home those bits and pieces that stay with me, for whatever reason. So much of the city has altered in my time away from driving that I'm constantly finding myself at dead ends, in blocked off streets, taking turns I can't take or else driving along roads I don't want to be on. Other times, when I'm vacant, I'll visit parts of the city I love to see how they're getting on; it's surprising how often these random quests do result in fares. You find these dark solitary figures down dark solitary streets who want to go back to the bright lights. But it can go the other way too. I took a small risk yesterday, doing a U turn across traffic lights to pick up a couple of blokes in Bondi, one of whom said, in a thick, maybe Scottish accent, 'Pyrmont'. So off we went crawling through the atrocious after-football traffic all the way across town - third time in a row for me. I thought they seemed rather sanguine about the way the fare on the meter was climbing and I also wondered what they were muttering to each other in their unbreakable accent code which was hard even to hear with them both in the back seat and both fairly well shickered too. Anyway, Pyrmont ... I used to know it intimately and in fact in my last book, 'Chronicle of the Unsung', I practised a bit of psychogeography upon its then mostly derelict streets ... before I'd ever heard the term. It's unrecognisable now, casinos, hotels, TV studios and apartment blocks have replaced the vacant lots, crumbling industrial sites, disused churches, grimy pubs and marginal squats. Jones Road used to lead to the quarry where much of the stone for Sydney's grand Regency and Victorian buildings was cut but now, when I finally found it again, it's a street of brand new apartment buildings with a leafy park and a sandstone massif at the end. These guys didn't look like they lived in this kind of place and nor did they. As I pulled up and switched on the internal light they each popped their respective doors and took off into the greenery, skinny arms pumping. Shit! Thirty bucks just ran away, I thought. The bastards. In the instant I realised they'd not only planned it but must have tried it before. It was a perfect spot to do a runner. I didn't follow them - that'd be asking for trouble. I just turned around and drove back to the corner, where four young English women were waiting with a quite incredible amount of luggage to go to the Goldsbrough building ... which used to be the largest woolstore in the southern hemisphere, owned by the wonderfully named Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort but is now another luxe apartment building. So I didn't make the rent last night. I was thirty dollars short.

Down, down, to Summer Hill

Yesterday was Easter Monday so there was racing at Randwick. About four in the afternoon a general call went out for cabs to the Ascot Street entrance but I ignored it, figuring most drivers would go there, leaving plenty of work for those who didn’t. But I got a hail to Kingsford and ended up the general vicinity anyway. I was on my way to Ascot Street when I picked up a radio job in Darley Road, opposite the Alison Road entrance to the racecourse. There was a gaggle of people waiting for rides at the intersection, including a woman in a startling scarlet feather hat, scarlet dress, scarlet high heeled shoes. I was stopped at the lights in the far right hand lane, intending to turn up into Darley Road, when I saw her in the scarlet and her beau staggering across four lanes of traffic towards me. How did you know we were going this way? he said as he levered himself into the front seat. Hello, darling, she said, getting in the back. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Sir Les Patterson in his grey striped nylon suit, mustard shirt and heavy, gold glasses with yellow tinted lenses. He placed a natty mohair fedora on his head once he was settled. She was magnificent, her scarlet feathered hat down so low over her face all I could see was the red slash of her mouth. They were both on the far side of seventy, both cheerfully shickered. I cancelled the radio job, said I couldn’t help but pick up such remarkable people as they seemed to be, complimented her on her hat. I think I was wearing this one when I met the Queen, she said. But I might not have been. It was at Ascot. We were walking along, chatting as we are wont to, a couple of Aussie twits, when we realised something was coming up fast behind: Queen and entourage. She touched my hand, I haven’t washed it since, she hooted. I tried to curtsey but I nearly fell over. He was no Sir Les, but a gent of the old school, charming, gracious, avuncular, though a larrikin at heart. He regarded the world with a kind of scurrilous amusement. She was in party mode, rather more worse for wear than he was and inclined to trail off into conversational frolics of her own. We chatted gaily all the way to the Woollahra Hotel, exchanging fulsome, foolish praises. As they were getting out, he asked me where I lived. Summer Hill, I said. Aaaah, he replied. Then: Down, down, to Summer Hill. I had a sudden intimation of an old Sydney-sider, whose grasp of the social geography of the city is vast and intimate. I wished I could have talked more to him. As for her, she leaned over and gave me the hand the Queen had touched. She had blue eyes. You must have confidence, she said. If you have confidence, everything will go right for you. When she was out of the cab, she picked up her scarlet dress in two hands and danced a little jig on the footpath for the benefit of a couple of onlookers lounging outside the pub. Then they tottered inside.

Wei Jen Chang

You get these weird glimpses into other lives. Last night I accepted a radio booking in the city. I was to pick up at a block of brand new serviced apartments in World Tower. I knew where it was because I visited an immigration lawyer in his office there a couple of weeks ago to ask him a few questions relating to the screenplay I'm working on. The site also makes a brief appearance in Luca Antara so the portents were good. I left the cab in the street and rang the apartment number on the intercom but the intercom was busy. There was a Japanese man waiting but he had luggage and needed a station wagon. I was about to give up when I saw a slender young woman looking questioningly at me. Yeah, I said, I'm available. Did you call? She didn't say. She wanted to go just down the road but would it be alright if I took her boyfriend to suburb and back? Sure. What suburb? Her English was poor but we worked out 'suburb' was Dulwich Hill. I thought she was Japanese too but I was wrong - the name on her credit card was Wei Jen Chang. She looked delicate and fragile and was conservatively dressed; her boyfriend was the complete opposite: stylishly crumpled, world-weary, with a touch of a (very young) gangster about him. And a bad cough. She was going to work. She wanted to pay for her boyfriend's fare with her card. That meant using the antiquated system of manual registration of the card details on a driver's docket. This way, there's no guarantee the fare will be paid but what the hell. I let the boyfriend do it. Then she signed it, leaving the space for the fare empty for him to fill in later. As soon as we left her in Harbour Street, his demeanour changed. He made a mobile phone call and, while talking, directed me to Darling Harbour. He was asking someone to come down and meet us in the street. His directions were crisp and accurate. He called me Boss. We found the apartment building but there was no-one waiting. He didn't miss a beat. He directed me all the way to Dulwich Hill, using a route I wouldn't have taken but which was at least as quick, if not quicker, than the one I would have. I had a twinge of fear as we drove down what looked like a dead end street with a derelict industrial site on one hand and the backs of warehouses on the other, but there was a bend at the end and on the next corner, a brand new, fairly swish apartment block. Wait here, Boss, he said and went inside. He was gone maybe two minutes. Then we drove back to World Tower. The fare was $47.65 but he wrote down a round fifty. I have no idea what he was doing. Suspicions, but no real idea.

City of Forking Cabs

Starting taxi driving on Monday. Did three days or rather nights. Today, Thursday, I'm having a break before the Easter weekend. Will drive Friday and Sunday. Then next week ... was amazed to find I can still do it. It was stranger than that. Almost as if I'd never been away, as if the fifteen years since I last did it, the nearly twenty-five since I first drove, hadn't happened. As if my cab-driving personality had been waiting all that time to be resumed, as if in some part of my mind I had actually been driving all those forgotten years. I felt like an actor re-assuming a role he played in his youth and finding he was still word and gesture perfect. Some things are different: there were no gold coins back then; cabs had no credit card facilities; mobile phones didn't exist; and radio jobs were offered and awarded personally via a despatcher. The system was bizarre: a job would be called and drivers would bid for it by hitting a button. The first three to register were then required to call in their position and the one closest to the job got it. This system was open to abuse. There was collusion between despatchers and drivers who were their mates. There were drivers who, knowing or guessing where the job was, would call in false positions. There was a built-in bias towards experienced drivers. Now, jobs are offered via a computer system and your acceptance is also automatic. Doesn't mean you can't arrive somewhere and find no-one waiting but it's definitely fairer. Plus you don't have to listen to some windbag who thinks he's a radio jock. On the other hand, it was sometimes fascinating hearing what was going on around the city on a live network and you don't get that now. In a way the isolation of the job is more extreme. Nowadays, every taxi has either a camera system that photographs each person who gets in and out of the cab, or else a hard perspex safety capsule surrounding the driver's seat. This is meant to stop someone stabbing or grabbing you from behind but it also has the effect of making communication with passengers more difficult. Even if they sit in the front seat you're still talking through perspex. Another change is that most single people now ride in the back, whereas before Sydney-siders made a point of riding in the front: it showed that they were of an egalitarian temper. No-one, or very few, bothers with that pretence now. Other things I notice: it's still true that the wrong people have the money. That the world is run for and by clerks. That fear is a constant accompaniment to material comfort. One thing I'd forgotten: what Borges wrote about in The Garden of Forking Paths is a sine qua non of the job. You go to pick someone up to take them to the airport and they're not there. So you end up taking someone else somewhere else. Had you got the fare to the airport, your whole night would have been different. This happens all the time. You are always at a nodal point where destinies fork. Most of these destinies are (probably) trivial and have no meaning in the larger scheme of things. On the other hand ... who can say? The two preoccupations of all cab drivers are money and safety, usually, in a practical sense, in that order although there isn't anyone who would say that's the right order. But when you cut across two lanes of busy flowing traffic to catch a hail from the footpath, what are you doing? Some concept of benign fate, a good angel perhaps, is essential for me to do the job at all. I have to believe the (fairly minor) risks I take are sanctioned by some beneficent power. That dropping off in Burwood and picking up on the opposite corner a fifty dollar fare to Roseville is 'meant'. I don't really believe this in any rational way; but, as a working assumption, I do. It helps to get me through the night. Umberto Eco once wrote: Superstition brings bad luck. It's the epigraph to Foucault's Penduluum. He's probably right; but I can't help transgressing against this particular piece of wisdom because on the job superstition is just what I need. I don't think I'm alone there.

testing

So I passed my test for the taxi driver's licence on Monday - sweaty palms and racing heartbeat along with the knowledge that the crusty old guy with tatts who was my examiner would pass me whatever, because I spoke English as a first language and probably hardly anyone else he sees does. Afterwards I went to Parramatta Station to catch the train back to Summer Hill and there was this young man on the platform pacing back and forth, with a reflexive half smile on his face, repeating certain words over and over out loud to himself: My birth family is Vietnamese! I am Australian! City I live in, Sydney! State, New South Wales! Country, Australia! Over and over, as if learning his lines for some other kind of test. The odd thing was, considering what he was saying, is that he was almost certainly a speaker of English as a second - or third, or fourth - language. He was wearing institution black shoes, institution grey trousers, a green shirt, a back pack ... no way I could catch his eye, though I tried. Crazy, perhaps. Anyway. The MoT will post me my Authority to Drive this week sometime but my producer(s) have asked me not to go out on the streets yet. They feel it will ruin my concentration upon the screenplay I'm going to be writing over the next two months and are drip-feeding me money to avert the distraction of taxi-driving. I want some security of income, while at the same time dreading (is this too strong a word?) the consequences of doing what must be done to attain that. Cab-driving, every cent passes through your hands two times, once when you get it, twice when you spend it. There's a peculiar satisfaction in that. But it does have a levelling effect. You are down there where the cash exchanges take place. No substitutes will do. You are on the street with everybody else, dealing with the necessities of journeys which you usually do not know the reasons for. You feel a need for assertion. My family is _____! I am _____! City I live in _____! State _____! Country _____! You're lucky if someone catches your eye. You're even luckier if you can catch it back.

seven days

My other job is screenwriting. There is, I know, something indelibly cliched about a screenwriter who drives a taxi but that's not why I did ... do? ... it. It's just for money. I mean the screenwriting as well as the cab driving. It sometimes surprises me to look back and realise that over the last twenty years I've written or co-written the scripts for six films, two shorts and four talls, one of which was never released, or perhaps I should say has not yet been released. And they're just those that have been made, not the legion that never got off the page. I have a troubled relationship with the profession; I'm always leaving it. Every screenplay I write is my last. I'm not one of those super-committed people who live and breath entirely in the milieu of film. In fact I hardly ever go to the movies. I don't belong to any professional associations and I don't go to parties, conferences, retreats or anything like that ... ever. Except this is about to change, because my latest (last ...) screenplay has somehow ended up in a Project Lab which begins on Friday and runs intensively for the next seven days. This is perhaps problematic, perhaps not. I don't want my lack of commitment to the profession, or the role, to be exposed. On the other hand, I do want the screenplay to be made into a film. It's a good idea and I feel that it is starting to make that strange, indeed ineluctable transformation from words on pages to images on screens ... that metamorphosis I am committed to, that's where the thrill surely lies. It's a process not unlike what happens in reading, except in reading the screen upon which we project the matter our eyes have scanned is interior, private, unique; whereas the screen upon which a film is projected is the same for everyone who looks at it, never mind that they may each and all see something different there. So ... the weirdness of sitting in a room in Lidcombe being lectured upon how to avoid being shot or stabbed or bricked by a fare will be succeeded by the weirdness of sitting in a room in the old mental asylum in Rozelle being lectured upon how to maximise the empathetic potential of characters, how to refine narrative strategies towards a taut, powerful denouement, how to make choices under pressure ... pressure ... pressure ...

Hermes

Richard Lopez at Really Bad Movies, I think it was, a little while ago suggested that being a taxi driver was an ideal job for a poet. I noticed the comment because I've driven taxis before and am about to again. Previously when I drove I was a poet (self description) but no longer; not that it makes much difference except perhaps that next time, this time, I won't suffer from the defensive arrogance that so afflicted my previous two terms of duty: 1981; 1988. The process of getting a license has become much more complex than it was in the eighties, but there's no esssential difference: an Iraqi (or a New Zealander) could still be driving within two weeks of arriving in Sydney as was possible two and a half decades ago. May happen too. I hope so. The egalitarianism of this place is still its strongest recommendation. I used to think of Oz as some kind of Noah's Ark of humanity, with examples of all our kind aboard. The repel boarders approach of the last ten years (yes, so long) hasn't altered the essential character of here: I mean the drama of self and other keeps on playing in our souls and our streets. Winged heels and the requirement to take travellers where they are going, as if any one of us might be messengers of the gods: I will try to imagine myself bearing a caduceus as I put my foot down in what I hope is a Falcon.