Driving Cab: Chapter Thirty-Two

Driving Cab: Chapter Thirty-Two

I sit with my pen at the dining room table in Walnut Creek. It’s already the third week of September 1971. I sit and wonder how much longer I’ll be with the cab. Will I ever get a teaching job again? I ask myself with one voice.

The job in San Mateo is sure to come through. I’ll be driving cab another week at the most, I answer in another voice. And I think how maybe I don’t even want to stop driving cab. It’s not near as frightening now as it use to be, I’m telling myself. Again, I remember how much I dreaded driving cab that first winter. How badly I wanted to find a teaching job. Still, I stuck it out until mid July when the canneries started hiring again. When I left to go back to the cannery in Hayward, I was certain that I’d never drive cab again. I knew I would land a teaching job by fall. So, I went back to my third summer at Hunt Wesson. I got my lift truck job back after a week or two when things got rolling full time. It was this season that I met the Mexican kid who just got back from ‘Nam and seemed like a really hip dude. He had spent a couple hours with Henry Miller in a London bar and was really into Miller. We spent out breaks discussing the Rosy Crucifixion.

I must have interviewed for a dozen jobs over the summer. So, many that I got chewed out for taking time off from Hunt’s to go on interviews. I was sure that at least half of the interviews would lead to the teaching job that’s been so long coming. But, August rolled into September and the cannery began slowing down. The college kids went back to school and I worked with the old timers on finished goods. On my last day in mid October, I worked with a four man Mexican crew loading a freight car with canned fruit. They were all speaking Spanish and ignored me completely for the longest eight hours of my life.

When I was finally laid off at the cannery in late October, I didn’t go back to the cab right away. Instead, I applied for a part time job at Sears. At a tour of the store after my interview, I eyed up the young girls and the brightly lit safe building and thought this would be the perfect job to pair with subbing until the teaching job came through. But, I discovered that they don’t put on new part time help until late November.

I went back to the office at Yellow and asked to be rehired. Tex looked up my file, studied it for a minute or two, looked me in the eye, and had me sign a promise that I would adhere to company dress code. When Sears called for the Saturday paid training session a few weeks later, I didn’t even call Yellow to let them know I wasn’t coming back.

After a week or so of working nights in the boy’s department at Sears, I began to better appreciate driving cab. Even on my very first night, I felt the deadly boredom of my job as a department store salesman. After the mystery of operating a cash register was solved, the job lost all of its excitement. During the hours when nobody came to buy, I couldn’t just stand around and flirt with the sales girls. I had to fold the pants, and shirts, and underwear that parents had checked out and tossed in a pile on the folded clothes. Of all the deadly bore ass jobs I had ever worked at selling in the boy’s wear department was the very worse. Still I couldn’t bring myself to go back to driving cab. It was only after the substituting stopped for Christmas vacation, only after they didn’t give me the extra hours promised at Sears, only when the money stopped coming in that I returned to the cab.

After five weeks of no show, I was surprised to see my card still in the rack. I explained to the window man that I had been really sick. He gave me a yea, I’ll bet you were really sick look, and told me that they were going to take my card out this very night. “Lucky for you, you came in,” he told me.

As I sit and remember, as I shift through the constant flow, I wonder when it was that my attitude toward driving cab changed. It was when you began to think of yourself as a writer. When you stopped thinking of yourself as an unemployed schoolteacher, and cab driver that the change came about, myself tells me. It was after I returned to the cab during Christmas vacation that I was hit with a fantastic stroke of good luck.

I interviewed for a ninth grade social studies position at a high school in Palo Alto. The superintendent as much as told me I had the job. I was to replace a young Philippine girl who couldn’t handle the discipline and was being transferred to special Ed. The superintendent told me that my experience as a substitute would make me just the right man to walk in on a mid year class full of rowdy kids. We talked about the kind of discipline it would take to get the kids back under control. I answered every question just the way he wanted. We talked about the activities I would handle after school. By the end the interview, he’s telling me how he worked his way through school driving tractor-trailer for the canneries.

Coming back next week for an interview with the school principal is just a formality. “I hate to make you drive all that way again, but it’s district policy that we have the building principal in on the interview for his school. He would have been here today, but someone committed suicide in his bleachers at the Friday night football game…”

I agree to come in the week before the semester ends to ease the transition, and we shake hands. When I come back next week for the interview with the principal, the whole concept of the job has changed. The principal has decided that this is the time to add to their coaching staff. I had to admit that I didn’t have the experience to coach either baseball or football.

I came home that day with my head hanging down feeling really defeated. How can I be so God damned unlucky? I asked myself. With a little time left before work at the cab, I stopped at the library in Pleasant Hills. It was my first visit there. I discovered that they have a really good collection of Henry Miller. I checked out several of Miller’s books that I had been dying to read. I began to get more deeply into the Rosy Crucifixion, comparing my life as a cabbie to Miller’s life as a telegraph office personnel manager. I read more and more of Miller and begin to imitate him in my every day life reading the same books that Miller read when he began his break with the more conventional way of life. I began to treat my cab driving experience as a vehicle to writing. I begin reading my customers instead of fearing them so much. When Alex begins to read Miller also, and to imitate him in his life my interest in Miller is compounded. As I look back it seems that not getting the teaching job is Palo Alto was the best thing that ever happened to me even if someone had to commit suicide for it to happen.