The Chicken Man

A typical shift is 12 hours, but it's not unusual to drive 14, 16, 18 hours or more, especially if you only do it a couple times a week. This may sound pretty rough, but there's practically no limit to what you can do given enough coffee and Red Bull (a beverage I discovered out of necessity but would hardly recommend) .


Generally speaking, I have no problem driving for long periods. In fact, there's something about driving a cab--the rhythm of the city, lots of activity, people coming and going. In fact, I find it relaxing. No problem.


But once I cash in at around 3 a.m. and head home on the Southeast Expressway, that's when the hallucinations kick in. Every light pole, every shadow, every piece of wastepaper blowing across the road suddenly becomes a deer jumping in front of my car, a truck about to sideswipe me or some other obstacle that I need to swerve around. My vision gets gauzy along the along the periphery. The first few times I drove for long periods, the experiences driving home were so harrowing that by the time I arrived I was soaked in sweat and couldn't get to sleep.


Over time I've trained myself to ignore the leaping animals, the corpses and the darting sprites. I learned to drive in a gauzy violet fog. The biggest challenge was trying to determine which trucks about to sideswipe me were real, and which ones were the figment of my imagination. So far, so good.


Reality, however, has a way of messing with you in a way your imagination cannot touch. Take the other night.


It started snowing by early evening. Just a few flakes at first, drifting lazily across the windshield. The forecasts had predicted this, saying it would pick up quickly by midnight, and fall at a rate of three inches an hour. The television news had announced all this a kind of hyperventilated excitement one might expect for a nuclear holocaust or the rapture. "Buy batteries and stock up on potable water," the buxom weather girl said cheerily.


By midnight, it was coming down hard. The windshield wipers could not keep up with the pace of accumulation, and every two or three stoplights I had to get out of the cab to scrape clean the wiper blades by hand. The plows had yet to emerge in force, so the streets were a mess--slushy and rutted. The work was dwindling, so I decided to quit early.

I cashed out at 1:30 a.m., and soon after was on the Southeast Expressway, carefully making my way home. Four lanes of highway had disappeared under three inches of fresh snow. Finding a lane was pure guesswork. In addition to the clumps of frozen muck, puddles and patches of ice, were the usual assortment of morons: drivers crawling along at five miles per hour in the left lane with their emergency flashers on, buttholes in Cadillac Escalades going 80 mph, and passive-aggressive weenies lining up alongside each other to create a rolling roadblock, all moving at one-quarter speed.

By the time I caught up to a phalanx of snowplows blocking the width of the freeway, my frustration and exhaustion had built up to the point that I ceased caring for my own life. I just wanted to get home. I saw an opening, and squeezed between two of the plows. I could practically hear the plow driver cursing at me, but I was free. Ahead of me was a seemingly endless stretch of pristine highway--four lanes of snow-covered Interstate to myself. With the lane markers obliterated it looked like a giant, white runway. I could spin out and gently ricochet down the road like bumper bowling.


I was happy.


Then, far ahead, I saw trouble. Flashing lights. Police action, I thought. Heads up.


The visibility was pretty bad, so I couldn't tell exactly what was going on. The flashing lights, however, weren't cops. They were too irregular, not stroboscopic, and mixed in with different colors--yellows, whites and reds--not the standard blue and red. They were also moving, not stopped as if at an accident. As I drew closer, I realized it was an advertisement of some sort.

It was an electronic sign attached to a truck, the kind in which the message scrolls across like the old news ticker in Times Square. But there was something else about this truck. The box itself was illuminated. In fact, the walls of the box weren't solid, but clear. It was a glass cube on wheels. Inside the cube was a room. It was a reading room with a deck chair, a table and a lamp. Fluorescent lights along the edge of the ceiling illuminated the room. And there was a man. At first, the man appeared in silhouette. He was squeegeeing the windows in long, vertical sweeps. the whole thing looked like a diorama from a natural history museum, a really weird museum. What the hell was this?


It had to be an advertisement. But for what? And why? And why at night on a desolate highway in the middle of a raging snowstorm?


The flashing lights announced the time: 2:28 a.m., the ad scrolled across: REMEMBER THE CHICKEN MAN. THE CHICKEN MAN IS COMING. The man inside the box put away the squeegee. He sat in the deck chair and opened up a laptop, like he was checking his email or updating his Face Book page. He seemed oblivious to the weather and peril surrounding him. I trailed the truck for a time, staring in disbelief at the spectacle.

This was nuts, and continuing to follow this truck in the dead of night in the middle of a blizzard was equally nuts. I needed to get home, so I pulled out to pass the truck, moving carefully. The man inside, an older guy pushing 50, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, ignored me. He was just doing his thing. As I rolled past the cab, I saw stenciled on the door "The Chicken Man--Boston" and a phone number (which I subsequently forgot).


By the time I got home, the episode seemed so unbelievable, so surreal that I had to find out what it was. I searched on the internet for "The Chicken Man" and Boston. All I got back were references to Frank Perdue, Bruce Springsteen's song "Atlantic City" and former Red Sox slugger Wade Boggs (whose locker room nickname was the "chicken man.") I told my wife about it the next morning. She didn't believe me. "You were hallucinating again, weren't you?" she said, advising me to quit driving such long hours.


"But I didn't imagine it!" I insisted.

"Uh huh."

Determined to get to the bottom of this, I asked the other drivers if they had seen the truck. One driver said he hadn't seen the Chicken Man, but he did see an IKEA truck with glass box containing a living room set with two people lounging around. Another driver remembered a truck advertising some travel agent hauling around a beach scene with some bikini-clad young girls inside. A subsequent web search revealed that trucks hauling constructed scenes are part of a vanguard in "mobile advertising" and named firms such as GoMobile Advertising in the Pacific Northwest and Minnesota Mobile Billboards tout such 3-D displays among those specializing in the service.


Finally, another driver told me, yes, he too had seen the Chicken Man. He remembered the room and saw the guy squeegeeing the windows. But he didn't give it much thought. After all, this was Boston, a lot of crazy things happen.

But I wasn't crazy. And I still want to know, who the hell is the Chicken Man?

A Slow Day

Every shift begins with hopes. Hopes for a few airport runs, hopes for steady work, hopes for big tips. In my case, I also hope for a good story. Sometimes the story happens to me, but sometimes the story happens to someone else. But it becomes everybody's story, nevertheless.

The fare looked ordinary enough, at least for this part of town, wearing baggy blue jeans, albeit with a big stain down the front and a beat-up old sweater with a snowflake pattern The sweater looked like something his aunt gave him for Christmas in 1979. He had a nervous, kind of crazed look in his eye. Like I said, nothing special.

It was the slowest part of what was a deadly dull day. The kind of day in which you're so desperate for work that you wouldn't care if he had a butcher knife in his hand so long as it got you off the stand and moving. So maybe the fact that this guy picked your cab out of the eight or nine piled up along the curb meant your luck was going to change.

He burst into the cab. "MOVE IT!" he shouted to the driver, slamming the door.

Where to, the driver asked?

“Uhhh. . .Arlington, and HURRY!”

Arlington Street? Or Arlington, the town?

He then noticed the guy had his hands down his pants and he smelled of alcohol. Jeezuz, it's not even noon and this guy's three sheets to the wind. Has he pissed himself?

"The town, the town... just get moving NOW!!”

Okay, okay. The driver started the car, punched the meter, put it into gear and eased into traffic. He then noticed that a middle-aged woman was running down the sidewalk. She was nicely dressed, but without a coat. She was waving and yelling, pointing at the cab. Another nut job.

Is she with you, the driver asked?

"NO! C'MON, MOVE IT!!" he shouted.

In the next breath, before the car could move half a block, the street was filled with cop cars... three, four, five cars, all lights flashing. They screeched to a stop in the middle of the street, blocking traffic, and in the next second they were are all out of their cars, swarming, guns drawn.

Holy shit... And then it became clear.

Hey, they lookin' for you?

The driver didn't even finish the question before the back door flew open and the guy was gone. The driver turned in time to see the guy's back just as he turned the corner at a full sprint. While the rest of the cops hauled off in pursuit, one cop pointed at the driver to pull over. The driver, a mild-mannered Morrocan named Harari, learned later that the lady was a teller inside the bank next to the cab stand, and that the guy handed her a note demanding money. She pulled out a neatly wrapped stack of bills and handed it over. He took the money, stuffed it down his pants, then turned and walked out the door. The dye pack slipped into the stack of bills exploded not long after he left the bank. Depending on it's placement inside his underwear and the force with which it exploded, I imagine this event may have caused the crazed look in his eye and his decision to seek refuge in a taxi cab.

After fleeing the cab, the man ran down a side street and broke into a house. He ran up the stairs, climbed out onto the roof, jumped onto the neighboring house's roof (like he saw in a James Bond movie), climbed up it and then jumped onto another roof, where he got stuck. Amid the shouts of police officers below and the clattering of television news helicopters overhead, he stood on the peak of the roof, looked out across the other rooftops and weighed his options... and sat down.

Leaning against a brick chimney, he took out his cellphone and called his wife. After a long talk with his wife, he asked the police, which had brought in a police negotiator to talk him down, if they could throw him a smoke. They did. And while he sucked on a couple of butts the cops brought in a tall ladder, which they used to help him down and into an awaiting police cruiser.

The next day in court, the hapless criminal watched impassively as the prosecutor ran down a litany of charges that included unarmed robbery. The man's wife slunk into one of the benches in the gallery, shielding her eyes from a TV news camera jammed in her face. Trailed outside by the news crew, she said that she didn't understand it. She insisted he was a good man. He just had a very bad day.

After patiently answering all the sergeant's questions, Harari--unfazed--got back into the cab and finished his shift. Cashing out at the end of the day, Harari was asked about all the excitement. He stuffed the small wad of cash into his pocket, held out his hand palm down shaking it as if say “So-so,” then said, overall, it was a slow day.

Show business

I was stopped at a light. It was late. The bars had all let out, and the only work left was catching the few stragglers and drunks left on the streets. I was debating with myself about whether to call it quits or cruise around for a final circuit when they stumbled in front of the cab, appearing seemingly from nowhere, a young man and woman, clinging to each other, flushed and laughing.

I waved for them to get in and the two made their way to the side of the cab. The guy flung the door open and threw the girl onto the back seat, her head hitting the opposite door with a loud thwunk! She groaned a little and giggled. He got in and gave me an address in the South End around Northeastern University. I punched the meter and pulled out.

"Can you put on some music?" the guy shouted, as if he was still in the bar he had just left.

Yeah, sure, I answered, tuning the radio to one of the city's alternative stations. The Clash's "London Calling" filled the cab.

"This song ab-so-lute-ly rocks!" slurred the girl. "Thanks mister."

I pretended not to hear. I was tired, and didn't feel like trying to socialize with a couple of stupid drunks. It didn't matter anyway. The two in the back were onto other things, and seemed to be cooing to each other.

Flock of Seagulls, a band I always hated, was about midway through their hit song "I ran," when suddenly there was stirring in the back seat.

"Hey!" the girl shouted. "That fucking hurt!"

"Ah, c'mon," the guy said.

"No," she continued. "That really hurt."

"Look, I was just trying to have a little fun," he countered.

"Get your fucking hands off me."

"Hey, what's the big deal?"

"You're a goddamned pig, you know that?" she screamed.

"What the hell do you know?," he shouted back.

"A lot more than you think, you pig. Maybe you're wife would like to know just what a sleazy fucking pig you are. Maybe I should call her up right now!"

This has now turned in a direction that I really don't like. I'm asking myself should I intervene? And if so, what can I do?

"You're nuts, you know that?" he said. He then leaned forward toward me. "Buddy, is it just me or is she completely out of her mind?"

Leave me outta this, I tell him, wishing now I had driven right past them and quit for the night.

"Yeah, pig, leave him out of it. Besides, I'm sure he knows all about being a sleazy fucking pig!"

What the...? I'm about tell her to shut up, too, but I stop myself. There's some rustling in the back.

"Hey!" he said. "Give that back!"

I could hear the tones of a cellphone being dialed.

"I'm calling her up right now," she said. "I'm gonna tell her all about her fucking pig of a husband."

"Goddammit" he said, reaching across the seat to grab the phone back.

I could feel the phone fly past my ear. It hit the front windshield with a heavy smack!

That's it. I pulled the car over. I picked up the cellphone, which landed on the seat beside me. I turned around. I held the phone in front of the guy, and was about to tell them both that they either shut up or the next stop was going to be the police station when the girl grabbed the phone, opened the door and bolted from the car.

"Crazy bitch," he said, as she crossed the street and disappears around a corner. "Look, I gotta get her. Wait here and we'll be right back, honest." Sure, I said, shaking my head. He took off, and I'm left cursing myself for not getting him to leave something behind. Sure enough, three, five, then seven minutes passes and there's no sign of them. They're gone.

I noticed then that I'm within a block of the address they gave me, and it occured to me that I've been played. This was a set-up from the beginning. All the screaming and the drama was a ploy to beat the fare, an elaborate charade to fool some dumb cabbie. And I fell for it. Probably next night they'll come up with a different routine, maybe where one of them pretends to get sick, or needs to run into a store for cigarettes. Who knows?

The $7 fare I have to eat. I should have quit when I had the chance.

Get Busy...

"Didja hear about Billy?," asked Rick.

"Billy?"

"You know... older guy, glasses, always wears a baseball cap."

Rick could be describing about half the drivers here, including myself.

"Yeah, well, last week Billy went to the doctor complaining about a back ache. Turns out he has terminal lung cancer. He has maybe two weeks to live."

"Geez... really?"

"For months he figured he was just stiff from driving long shifts. It got to the point he could barely stand up."

"Wow."

"All they can do is give him somethin' for the pain... He finished out the week, then went home to die."

"What? He decided to spend one of his days on earth drivin' a cab?"

"What else was he going to do? He's been driving a cab more than forty years. That's twelve hours a day, six days a week, every week of the year. I've been drivin' nearly thirty years and I don't remember him ever takin' a vacation. No hobbies. No real friends. Just drivin' a cab and his family. And them he only got to see maybe one day a week. He put his two kids through college, but that's a lot of missed recitals and Little League games. But whatcha you gonna do?"

"How old is he, Rick?"

" 'Bout 65, I guess."

"That's really depressing, Rick."

"I guess he figured his family could use the money."

Now I don't even know Billy but this shook me up. Not because of the tragedy of his death, but because of the tragedy of his life. I wonder if 40 years ago, when Billy first started driving, what dreams he had for himself. He'd be 25, strong, full of energy, with nothing but time and his imagination standing between him and the future. Perhaps he wanted to go to college, travel the world, start his own business. Perhaps he figured cab driving was a part-time gig, something to tide him over. Perhaps he looked at all the other middle-aged men driving cabs and told himself, "I'll never let myself turn into that." Who knows?

But then he met a girl, knocked her up, got married, had one kid, then another, and suddenly all those doors closed. He had responsibilities, bills to pay, obligations to keep. All of his dreams disappeared like his breath on a cold winter's morning. And maybe years later he looked in the mirror one morning. He saw the face staring back him with the graying temples and the thinning hair and the dark circles under his eyes and he asked himself, "Jesus, where did the last forty-fuckin'-years go?"

But heck, he may have told himself, he wasn't that old. He could still have dreams. Maybe once the kids are out of the house; maybe once the mortgage is paid off; maybe once the wife and I can finally save a little money and time for ourselves.

But first, he tells himself, I gotta go to the doctor and get my back checked out.

I ask Rick how he got into cab driving. He explained that he was welder, and that he worked in the boatyards in Quincy. After they shut down in the Eighties he couldn't find a welding job. There was a recession going on and a lot of welders out of work, so he started driving. Like the rest of us, he thought it would be a part-time thing. But, one thing led to another and, thirty years later, here he is.

Does he ever think about doing something else? "Nah, I don't give it much thought."

A couple of weeks later, a small note was posted on the office bulletin board announcing Billy's death with the name of the funeral home and the hours for the service. I don't know how many drivers went to the service. I don't know how many drivers who even knew Billy. A week after this, another note was posted, announcing that the city had awarded Billy the "Cab Driver of the Year" award--posthumously.

"Can you believe that?" Rick says. "Forty goddamned years and he has to die to get it. You think they could at least give to him while he was still alive."

I spend the rest of the night driving in a kind of daze. I keep thinking about the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, about a guy wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in prison who over the course of 25 years tunnels his way out. And I keep thinking about that line: "Get busy living, or get busy dying."

A Short Night

Ah Haaaaa Yeah!! It's a gusher.


The Red Line has broken down. There's been a power outage, and the fire department is helping evacuate trains. Not only that, it's rush hour. The stations are jammed with people just looking to get home, and there aren't enough cabs for them all. The cops in Cambridge don't even care. They just want to clear the stations and the sidewalks and turn a blind eye to cabs from out of town. Forget the hotels. Forget the stands. Just head to the nearest Red Line station.

From Park Street to Andrew...Andrew to Central...Central back to Park...Park to Alewife...Harvard to South Station. For three hours, the gravy train ran non-stop. I booked $150, nearly as much as I do during an entire shift.

The end result was I could knock off early, get home, get a good night sleep and manage to get up early enough to make use of the next day.

Now, if only I could find some pimply faced, teen-aged computer expert to hack into the T's system and do this on a regular basis.

Modern Romance

I was sitting on the stand, half asleep, when the rear door suddenly opened and someone threw themself onto the back seat. The noise made me nearly jump out of my skin.

"You're available, aren't you?" the woman asked. She was twenty-something.

"Yeah, yeah, sure," I answered, grumbling to myself that I should lock the doors in the future. I mean, what if she was some crazed robber or something? I could have been be whacked over the head or stuck up, who knows? I mean...

"You okay?" she asks.

"I'm fine," I answer, composing myself. "You just startled me. Where to?"

She gives me the address. I punch the meter and we're off.

"Workin' late?" I ask.

"No, I was just having a couple drinks with friends after work. It's been a loooong day."

"Really?"

"Like I've never had."

"Whadayamean?"

"Do you do Face Book?"

"No," I answer. "But I've heard of it."

"Anyway, I get an e-mail from a friend telling me to check out my boyfriend's Face Book page. So I do. And he's changed his status from 'attached' to 'single'. In other words, I've been dumped."

"Wha?... You mean he didn't actually tell you this?"

"No, nothing. No discussion. No phone call. No message. Not even an e-mail. Not only that, all my friends found out before I did. I had to learn about it from them."

"Have you tried tried to call him?"

"Not yet, I've just been in shock. I don't even know what I'd say to him."

"When did you see him last?"

"Two days ago. We spent the weekend together."

"And there was no fight, no hint that anything was up?"

"No, nothing. I thought we had a wonderful weekend."

"How do you know it's not, like, a mistake?"

"Because he put up a picture of his new girlfriend! Some twit he met last week. I recognized her from a party we went to. I asked him who he was he was talking to and he said some girl from Vermont. She had tatoos, like he does, and likes motorcycles and the same kind of music he does. He thought she was cool."

"Wow."

"Yeah, he dumps me because I don't like heavy metal music and have tatoos! Well, I'm sorry, but I know I'm going to be old some day and don't want to look like some crumpled piece of newspaper with these faded, gross tatoos."

"And how long have you been going out?"

"About three months. He had just gotten out of a really bad relationship, he said, so I was trying to be extra gentle with him, give all the space he needed, not to pressure him or nag him about spending time with me... AND FOR WHAT!? Couldn't he have just called?"

"Unbelievable. I've heard of jerks breaking up with girlfriends by leaving messages on their phone machines, but this is a whole different level of contemptible. You don't cancel a magazine subscription that way. It's despicable, almost psychotic."

"He's too chicken to do it in person?"

"It's probably lucky it happened sooner than later, because just think of if you had spent some serious time with this butthole. You deserve better. Lot's better."

"You think so?"

"Definitely. And you will. In the meantime, I'd start thinking of some medieval-style revenge on him."

"You know, he's not worth the time and effort. I think I'll just hang out with my friends."

"There ya go."

"I feel better just venting about it. Thanks."

She handed me a twenty to cover the $13 fare. I started to make change.

"No, keep it. Thanks."

"Thank you."

End of an Era

The true measure of a man's importance I discovered this past week is not what he leaves in life, but the traffic snarl-ups he causes in death. Senator Ted Kennedy and mobster Gennaro "Jerry" Anguilo--two titans of Boston's power elite--were buried this past week, and I got stuck in the resulting traffic jams for both. First for Kennedy's procession, which tied up traffic for several hours downtown as it toured various sites in the city last Saturday. According to the radio, the crowds in places were eight deep to get a glimps of the flag-draped coffin and the surviving members of the ever-dwindling Kennedy clan. The second for Anguilo's wake in the North End on Wednesday, which practically shut down Commercial Street as a potpourri of old timers, thick-necked brutes in fancy Italian suits, bikers in Hell's Angels colors, and mothers with small children lined up outside Langone's Funeral Home to pay their last respects to one of the last old-school Italian mafiosa in the city.


I assume that Kennedy being Kennedy and Anguilo, having spent most of the past 20 years in jail, never personally met most of the throngs gathered in their honor. No doubt, some wanted to be there because they felt the deceased had somehow touched their lives. Others because they simply wanted be a part of the spectacle. But most, I suppose, were there to acknowledge the end of an era.


With Kennedy's and Angiulo's go the last vestiges of a time when Boston was run by powerful families and clans. Back then, who you knew and the neighborhood you lived in meant more than how much you earned or where you worked. Boston has always been a city of neighborhoods, more so then than today, but back then it meant something totally different if you said you lived in Southie or Charlestown or the South End or Brighton. It's still a city of neighborhoods, but it's much harder to tell them apart. Back then, the people you saw on TV representing Boston were guys who were part of those neighborhoods. Guys like Tip O'Neill, Mel King, Kevin White, Ray Flynn, Dap O'Neill. Mayor Menino is among them, but he is in dwindling company.

It was different, not necessarily better, but different. In a lot of ways, Boston is a better place today. It's cleaner, it's safer. There's more to do. It's easier to get around. But something's missing.

I had the same feeling when legendary rock radio station WBCN went off the air a couple months ago. The station had changed program formats so many times that I quit listening to it ages ago, but I remember when it was part of regular day: Charles Laquidara and Duane Glasscock, the Big Mattress, the Cosmic Muffin. Now it's gone, and in its place we have what? Twenty-four-hour sports talk?

What's missing I guess is character. Like every other place, Boston is becoming more like, well, every other place.