Driving the Taxi of Pleasure, Part 2

Strange things happen in the small hours….

The seductive side to driving a cab is just that: knowing that something strange can happen to you at any moment. On a good night a comfortably large wad of cash will fill your pocket over the course of the evening, good-natured people will get in and out of your life quickly, leaving perhaps a good story but no mark other than that, and at all times you zip through the nighttime traffic like someone out of a Bruce Springsteen song—always knowing that something weird can happen at any time.

Early one Tuesday morning I got a call to a quiet street in South Austin. A drunk woman stumbled out and told me she wanted to go to an “orgy place.”

An orgy place, forsooth! What the hell?

I’d heard about some sex clubs that operated out in the wealthier suburbs, but as far as I knew they partied only on weekends and were by invitation only. I was pretty certain that this woman didn’t have an invitation.

“Take me to the damn orgy place,” she said.

I started driving randomly north, and she told me her sad story. Her husband was cheating on her—cheating with a stripper. So she was going to get back at him by having sex with not just one guy but a lot of guys. At an orgy place.

We were passing an all-night grocery store. I asked, “If you want to get laid why not just go in there? You can probably find you a nice stockboy or two.”

She didn’t like the suggestion and told the story of her husband again—and again. I began to see why her husband was hanging around with a stripper. She became so annoying with her drunk jabbering about her husband that I ended up taking her to a porno store just to get her out of my cab. “This is sort of like an orgy place,” I said. I hope she found what she was looking for.

Once when I was working days I picked up a skinny white woman on the East Side who announced that she was an ex-hooker who now worked as a madam. “I’m the Heidi Fleiss of Austin,” she said. Then she said she’d “do” me if I drove her to Pflugerville.

I thought about it. Pflugerville was a good forty dollar run, at least.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Forty dollars was a lot of money for me, at that time.

“I’ll wear a dress. I look real good when I’m all dressed up.”

I shook my head. “I’d rather have the cash.”

That pissed her off. She had me let her out at a McDonald’s down the street—three dollar fare, no tip.

Most people are nothing more than closet exhibitionists, I guess, content to merely ponder backseat sex unless they’re drunk and feeling exceptionally frisky. There are real exhibitionists, though. Real sex does happen in cabs. One evening I picked up three people—two men and a woman—at a beer joint in West Austin. The older of the two men got into the front seat.

“I have to sit up here,” he said. “They’re gonna screw.”

I thought, What?

“I remember you,” the guy in the back said. “You took me to the Driskill.”

“You’re gonna screw between here and the Driskill?” I asked. From the beer joint to the Driskill Hotel was maybe a five minute drive. Sex seemed like a lot of trouble—for him, for her, and for me. It kind of pissed me off.

“No—that was last time. Now I want you to take me home to Lakeway.”

Well, then, Lakeway—a thirty or forty dollar fare. I pulled onto the expressway, and before I got to the suburbs the younger man and the woman were flopping around and grunting in the back seat. The older guy was telling me that he had been in the army with Jimi Hendrix. At one point he interrupted his story to look in the back seat. “What’re you people doing back there?”

“Fucking!” the woman gasped.

“Oh.” The old guy settled back into his seat. “Yeah,” he said to me, “well, ol’ Jimi, you know, he was real serious about his guitar—he’d be practicing all the time....”

The backseaters came or whatever as I drove through the town of Bee Cave, and when I got to the house in Lakeway I got $45 for the fare, a $100 tip, and a kiss on the cheek from the woman.

The $100 tip—the kiss, too, I guess, maybe—gave me an idea. Why not look for a niche market? Why not specialize my business? Why not specialize in backseat love? Why not make a profit on the margins? I decided to turn my car into a Swingers’ Hack—a Taxi of Pleasure, a Cab of Concupiscence. I put advertisements on a few adult websites, and then placed a tidy box of lubricant and condoms in the trunk, along with some pillows and blankets and sheets, a cheap vibrator, and a four pack of wine coolers. I waited for business to roll in.

But I received only one response to my ad. It was from a man—a great huge naked fat white man, his emailed photo showed—who indeed wanted to have sex in my cab.

But with me.

Who would drive? I wondered.

Late in my cab driving career I picked up a pleasant young hooker and took her off to meet a customer. We chatted about politics and baseball, and when we got to the client’s apartment she asked me to wait.

“This won’t take long,” she said. “I specialize in old guys who prematurely ejaculate.”

When she came out a few minutes later she had a handful of cash. “Eighty dollars for me, forty dollars for you,” she said. When we got back to her place I had an idea. I was about to finally quit the cab and concentrate on getting back into school, and I didn’t need the Taxi of Pleasure accessories. I got out and opened the trunk and gave her the box of lubricants and condoms and the vibrator—and the wine coolers, too. I was leaving the margins—or, at least, heading for a different margin.

The girl was pleased. “Thank you so much!” she said, and she gave me a hug, and as I watched her walk back to her apartment I felt like I had accomplished something—I had made someone on the margins a little happy, a nice way to end my cab career.