Nobody's Angel (7 page)

A group of guys were hanging out alongside the building. They were all black, of course. Most of them wore hooded sports jackets, the gang fashion of the day. The hoods were up although it wasn't very cold. It was just part of the look, the fashion of intimidation.

They knew I was watching and soon they were all facing my way. The smallest of the bunch started to run towards me. He probably wasn't twelve. I took my foot off the brake and the cab started to roll. The kid stopped and strutted back to the group and there were high-fives and jive handshakes all around.

I turned right. Two blocks later I was surrounded by the world headquarters of Montgomery Ward. That was how quick the city could change. Two blocks and there was a white guy in a suit and tie looking for a cab.

I made a left and popped the door locks, and he slipped into the back seat. "LaSalle Street and take a left," he said pointing the way.

"You mind telling me where you're going?"

He gave me an address on LaSalle and I started that way. "Did you hear about that cabdriver?" he asked.

"Heard all about it," I said, and put an end to that conversation.

I made a left on LaSalle, dropped my passenger, and continued on as the street curved through Lincoln Park and out to northbound Lake Shore Drive.

I drifted into the left lane and pushed it up to about 70, thirty over the limit, passing everything in sight.

I took the Drive until it ended and then followed what should have been Lenny's route home, Hollywood into Ridge.

I'd taken this same route last night, a few minutes ahead of Lenny. But something or someone had turned him around.

I went under a railroad viaduct. The local 24-Hour Pantry franchise was in a strip mall on the left.

There were a couple of taxis parked on Ridge, but around the corner on Devon just about every car at the curb was a cab. Some belonged to private owners like Lenny. Others, to single-shift drivers who kept their leased cabs around the clock and worked whichever hours they preferred. Later, when the night drivers called it quits, there would be even more cabs.

This was a neighborhood full of taxi drivers, mostly Indian and Pakistani. But there were still some Jewish drivers, left over from the days when both the industry and the neighborhood had been predominately Jewish. There were a few blacks too, mostly Africans. And the occasional oddball like Polack Lenny.

There were three cabs parked at the curb on Lenny's street. I recognized two of them. One belonged to Ace, another to Tony Golden. Both were regulars at the roundtable.

I slowed in front of Lenny's two-flat. I'd dropped him off here a few times but I'd never been inside. The second floor was all lit up. There were people moving around beyond parted curtains. Somebody turned and looked out to the street. I continued past

and retraced my steps to the 24-Hour Pantry. A sign over the door proclaimed: We Doze But Never Close.

I filled a go-cup with coffee, carried it up to the counter, and slid a dollar towards a muscular black kid sporting a razor haircut and a plastic name-tag which read Rollie. A skinny Indian or Pakistani stood a few feet behind him, arms folded, with a serious "I'm-the-supervisor," look planted on his face. His brass name-tag read Mohammed.

"Hey, man." Rollie smiled and a gold tooth gleamed as he rang up the sale. "I know you. You a taxi driver. You picked me up one time."

"Really?" I said. He didn't look familiar but that didn't mean anything. The passengers usually got a much better look at me than I got at them.

"You was cool, man." He handed me my change. "See, my uncle was sick and I couldn't get no cab to take me south. But then you came by. Yeah." Rollie smiled some more. "I tell you what. Next time you in, I buy the coffee."

"Anytime," I said, and I held up the cup. "Best coffee in town."

"See, wasn't for you, I might not of got to see my uncle that last time."

"You get a lot of cabdrivers in here?" I asked.

"Some nights."

"There was a guy might have been in last night," I said. "Older white guy, skinny, kind of reddish hair. You see anybody like that?"

He shook his head, "Most of our regulars be related to Mohammed here, you catch my drift." He smiled, and cocked his head towards the supervisor, who seemed not to hear.

I picked a newspaper off a stack, and opened it to the page with Lenny's picture. "How about this guy?" I asked.

"Oh, man, that the dude got killed?"

I nodded.

"Nah, man," he shook his head. "We was talking about that when I come on. See, everybody knew that guy they got a couple of months back. Used to be in every night. Little skinny, bitty foreign guy. Man, why would anybody kill a little man like that? You know he wouldn't put up no fight. You just blow him over."

I pointed to the picture again. "He would have been by just after midnight."

He shook his head again. "That's when I get off. Hey, Mohammed," he said, taking the paper from me and holding it up. "You see this dude in here last night?"

Mohammed barely looked then shook his head.

"You want I should ask the overnight crew?"

I shrugged, and dropped the paper back on the pile.

"He was your friend, huh?"

"Yeah." I picked up the coffee.

"Too many people out there got no heart, man," Rollie said. "No heart at all."

"You got that right."

"I thought about driving a cab one time," Rollie said. "But I got an uncle, different uncle, he used to drive a taxi and when I talked to him, he told me forget it."

"Smart man."

"Sometime," Rollie said. "But sometime he be dumb too."

"It's not much of a job," I said. "And once you get into it, it's hard to get out. Take my word."

"This here be the best job in the world." Rollie gave me a crooked grin and rolled his eyes towards Mohammed.

"I'll see you around." I started for the door.

"Hey, don't forget, man," Rollie said, "next time I buy the coffee."

"Sure," I said.

"Hey, what's you name?"

"Eddie," I said.

"I be Rollie," he pointed to his plastic tag.

DISCRIMINATION IN THE SOLICITATION, ACCEPTANCE OF, AND THE DISPATCHING OF SERVICE TO PASSENGERS ON THE BASIS OF RACE, GENDER, OR GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION OF PICK-UP OR DESTINATION WITHIN THE CITY OF CHICAGO IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

City of Chicago, Department of Consumer Services, Public Vehicle Operations Division

I headed back south, to the streets I cruised night after night after night. From Wrigley Field down to the Loop, the Gold Coast to Lincoln Park, Old Town and River North--never straying too far from the lake--following Clark Street and Halsted, Lincoln and Wells. They were all nightlife streets and on good nights, they were loaded with white kids looking for cabs.

On Halsted, in Lincoln Park, a girl in an ankle-length coat waved. She had blond hair and wore her coat open, exposing a tiny skirt and long shapely legs.

"Cafe du Midi," she said sliding in. "You know where that's at?"

"I think I can find it."

"The last guy took me for a joyride."

I headed out Webster Avenue, a tree-lined residential street with a few bars and restaurants sprinkled around. I'd grown up right around the corner in a completely different world.

It had been a regular neighborhood back then, full of working stiffs like my father, a union printer. We were a little better off than most. My parents owned the building we lived in--a modest, red-brick three flat--and we had the entire first floor. Upstairs each apartment had been divided in two.

When I was in high school, hillbillies and Puerto Ricans began moving into the neighborhood, and my father decided it was time to get out.

He sold the building and used the money to make a down payment on a vast six-flat overlooking Columbus Park on the far West Side in Austin.

My parents really loved that place, at least for a time. And my father was so proud of his business genius, replacing a dumpy, working-class three-flat with this palace where a doctor lived. "That's right," I once heard him whisper to an old friend. "A doctor!"

A few years later we could see the smoke from the riots in the black neighborhood a couple of miles east. The doctor was the first to go. In no time at all, the neighborhood was almost entirely black. My father held on, hoping to get his money out of the building, but he never did. My mother got her purse snatched one day and that was it. He sold the place for whatever he could get and they moved to the suburbs.

And my father never owned another apartment building.

And he never, ever, wanted to talk about Lincoln Park which had gone on to become one of Chicago's wealthiest neighborhoods.

The hippies had come around--about the same time the West Side was burning--with their little shops, coffee houses and clubs. Eventually they'd chased the Puerto Ricans and white trash away, and made the place safe for upper-middle class suburbanites who wanted to live near the Loop.

A few years back, somebody had gutted the dumpy old three-flat and converted it to a single-family home.

At one time more than twenty people had lived in that building. Now it was just one family. You had to be even richer than a doctor to pull off something like that.

A few blocks past the old homestead the street turned industrial. This was the one section of the neighborhood that still reminded me of the old days. On the edge of the

river there was a string of leather tanneries loaded with Mexicans breathing chemical fumes, probably glad to be getting minimum wage.

We went over the river, under a railroad viaduct, and past more factories. We were the only car around.

"Where the hell are we?" the girl said, bringing me back to the present.

"This'll bring us right into Bucktown," I said.

"I feel like I'm in a movie sometimes."

"Where're you from?" I asked.

"Kansas City," she said.

"What brings you to town?"

"I just started a new job," the girl said. "Everybody's coming to Chicago. It's so cool."

"Where do all the jobs come from?" I asked. "I don't get that."

Factories seemed to close down every other week. Big plants with good, union jobs. Oscar Mayer. Stewart-Warner. Procter & Gamble. But these kids kept coming; suburban white kids for the most part, from Michigan and Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio. And they kept finding jobs. Good jobs. White-collar jobs down in the towers of the Loop. Were they new jobs or were the natives being bounced? I hadn't been able to figure it out.

"There aren't any cabs in Kansas," the girl said as I turned left on Damen. "Here, you just raise your arm in the air and one stops. It's so cool."

Back at Clybourn Avenue, a movie was letting out and I was the only cab in sight. There were people on every corner yelling and waving their arms around. I stopped short of the intersection and watched the race.

The winner was a suburban-looking kid in a college sweatshirt. "Hold on," he said, sliding in. "I've got a friend out here somewhere." Then he shouted out the door. "Hey, come on. I got it."