One of the Nuts I Met Driving a Taxi

I owned a taxi for five years. It was the funnest job I ever had and the only reason I quit is that the influx of Third Worlders dropped it from a middle-class job to close to poverty wages.

One of the first drivers I met had started driving in the '50s. He once told me when he started driving he thought, "Where has this job been all my life?" That's how great it was. His name was Al and every year he drove 11 months, took off a month, put his wife in the sidecar of his motorcycle and toured the country for a month. That's what kind of job it used to be until it was wrecked by the immigration of lowlifes.

Nigerians, Somalis, Russians - the hell with all of them. Most are criminals and many are sexual perverts. So what's new about Third Worlders?

I'm all for Uber and I hope it puts taxi companies out of business. The laws for taxis are to protect and enrich the owners of the taxi companies, not the drivers.

I did meet a lot of nuts. That really goes without saying when you drive a taxi.

One of them - and I'm not making this up - had the last name of "Gaylord." He was a loon. He clearly had a serious, permanent case of brain-sprain.

He was either on disability or else lived on his dead parents' money. Probably both.

Every day he called a taxi to drive him across the street to go to his daily restaurant (God knows what the workers thought of this ninnie). He wouldn't walk. The other drivers had warned me about this nut.

He lived in a downtown residence for retired people - or perhaps for anyone who wanted to live there. It was a former upper-class motel.

The first time I picked him up and saw him bumbling out of the front door I thought, "Uh oh." He was fairly big, overweight, wore this weird fur hat and just as weird fur coat (even in the summer), and had a transitor radio clamped to his ear. I didn't even know transitior radios still existed.

The first time I picked him up he opened the back door and tried to spit on the street. He missed and hit my car. He apologized but still!

He never left his studio apartment except to get something to eat. One time I delivered a huge box of toilet paper to him and the clerk at the desk said, "He needs it." I just smiled.

I delivered this box to his room. His strange room. All it had was a bed and a dresser at the end of the bed. There were prescription bottles scattered on the dresser and on it was a huge oil painting of his mother.

I thought, "What is this nut doing? Jerking off to a painting of his mom?" It would not have surprised me.

I have no idea what happened to this goof. Probably still in his studio room with the oil painting of his mother.

It could have been worse. At least I didn't find a lil' pig in his room dressed in women's crotchless underwear and wearing lipstick.