Trump gets strapped and meets "Kid Gavilan" CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
This idiot taxi driver continues to chew my ear off.
Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades- attributed to many.
Everyone knows the scene in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickel buys a couple of guns.
What comes out of this taxi driver Trump's mouth is more than a little self-serving. But the man offers some interesting tidbits. I promised him that I wouldn't tell anybody that he has a gun. (This taxi driver
ought to write a book.) In a way, I can't blame the poor schlub. They were robbing and killing taxi drivers left and right back then. My drone recorded his whole riff:
"Taxi drivers here in New York are not allowed to have guns or any kind of weapon at all.
"They passed a law that there would be a concealed gun permit lottery for taxi drivers with at least five years clean full time driving and no felony convictions. 5,000 cabbies were chosen and I was one of them. One of the rules was not to show or talk about it to anyone. Another rule was drug screening three times a year. They put cameras in the cars pointed at the passengers and every taxi had a sign that said the passengers agree that they are being recorded and that the driver might have a legal firearm .
I had all the requirements and I won the lottery. I already had an illegal gun that I was packing at work. Now it became legalized, but not for long.
Mayor Wilhelm says it was Deputy Mayor Luchtinkupf's idea and that he only found out about it when he was watching the news on television.
It only took a few days for everyone to realize that a very big mistake had been made.
Back in those days there were not a lot of people with money living in Brooklyn. Also, the meter ran like five cents every 45 seconds if the car is moving less than twelve miles an hour. That is four dollars an hour.
Now, four dollars an hour is a pretty good deal to hire a man and a car. I mean for the passenger that is. Why hell, you can have the driver pull over at a fire hydrant and wait for you while you have the deli man make you a sandwich. You can stop off at your girlfriend's house and have a nice little argument there while your chauffeur is waiting.
Now one click every forty-five seconds is eighty clicks in an hour. So, let's say you're on the Brooklyn Bridge, and traffic isn't moving because there's construction. So then as a passenger, you are sitting in a car watching that meter click and you are not moving. Say that you took the taxi because you needed to get home very quickly and you don't have much money. You might start complaining to the taxi driver about this even though it is really only pennies because at that moment it does not look like pennies to you.
So, let's say for example a taxi driver has to bring his taxi back to his garage in the Bronx at five. He's been working since five in the morning. Now it's four in the afternoon. He's hoping that he gets a ride uptown. But Here Comes Bozo going to Brooklyn. He gets in the car and he refuses to get another taxi. Okay, that's his right under the law but the driver is screwed. He's triple screwed when this Bozo wants the driver to pull over by Junior's so he can go in and order some goddamn cheesecake. While he's in Junior's diddling around getting his cheesecake the meter is running four dollars an hour. So, it's five o'clock and the driver is in Brooklyn. He has made about seven dollars an hour on this last trip. He's going to give up more than this last fare in time lost returning, the TriCounty Bridge toll and a fine. But wait. Bozo jumps out of the cab without paying. Happens every day. Well, this taxi driver has had a terrible week. His girl has left him. His favorite team that he bet on lost and also didn't cover the spread. He's having a terrible day. He's furious. He feels like he's been screwed, no roses, no I love you, no vaseline. It had to happen sooner or later somebody would get shot in the back. And it did four times before anyone noticed a little problem.
As John Kennedy said,
"Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan."
Luchtinkupf says the intellectual father of this guns for cabbies idea was his brother Taxi Commissioner J.J. "Coney Island" Luchtinkupf's. He's the one who ended up resigning.
I decided to keep my gun anyway.
"In the old days, they let us have a tire iron or a baseball bat underneath the front seat.
"That turned out not too good once a little demographic wrinkle took place which was because as you know for a lot of people taxi driving is not a career.
"It's passing through.
"It's doing something either because you just got to this country or you're down on your luck for some reason.
"Or you might be just about unemployable otherwise.
(So this oaf Drumpf has a ninth-grade vocabulary and some recurrent self awareness.)
"As karma or fate would have it at one particular time there were a whole lot of Israelis (not Woody Allen kinds of Jews but trained paratroopers and snipers and quite a few of them being gangsters) and Arabs driving cabs here in the city. Remember we're talkin' about tire irons and baseball bats.
"Now I wasn't there at LaGuardia Airport when this all happened, and I heard different stories about it, but you see one of the reasons I hate the airports is that the different nationalities stick together and help each other out but there are not enough of us regular orange guys to do that. But I'm getting off the subject.
"So let's say you're an Indian, following your particular Guru just for argument's sake and you get into the lot. So what you do is not move up when you have one of your buddies on his way. Then you let your paisano go in front of you. The next time he'll do the same for you. There used to be two-way radios in some taxis and not in others before they had cell phones. The two way radio guys had an advantage. So anyway, picture a bunch of Israelis and a bunch of Arabs in this lot and all of them got tire irons and baseball bats, broomsticks, nunchucks and who knows what other shit. It was only a matter of time till the shit hit the fan.
"Now I don't know who started it and I don't know who won but what I do know is that a bunch of people got hurt and they had to bring in the cops and everything. It was a mess, so they changed around the main taxi holding lot and made the entrance narrow. They put one of those bakery ticket machines with numbers on the tickets at the entrance and one at the exit where you got to the actual line where passengers are.
"The dispatchers that work for the Port Authority that runs the airports are supposed to make sure that nobody breaks the line.
"The other thing they did was make a rule that you cannot have anything that might be a weapon except for a ballpoint pen.
"Now wouldn't you know it. The dispatchers also are mostly ethnics and so they would sell what you call shorty tickets to their paisanos so to speak. A shorty ticket lets you jump the line and they're supposed to give one to you if you got a passenger out of the airport that was not going far. Then you have 90 minutes to come back and jump the line legally.
Aha! Now you understand why when you would leave your hotel to go down to Greenwich Village, the doorman wouldn't put you in any of the taxis that were sitting in front of the hotel on the taxi stand.
"So then they run to a plush tourist hotel and hit the doorman off with five bucks to get a LaGuardia fare quick.
"So you got a passenger going back to LaGuardia, you drop him off and then you get right back in front. And even the white airport dispatchers won't take money from no white people because they figure regular white guys might be cops or people who don't understand that snitches get stitches.
"So for guys like me the airport is fucked. But I'm getting off the subject again.
"Got myself a gun. (This is top secret, pardner). A good gun for protection. I keep it in my knapsack and let me tell you. All the times I've been stopped by cops and Taxi Limousine inspectors not one ever wanted to look inside my knapsack. I just feel better when I have this thing next to me so there. I have it next to me.
"Now I'm not any Travis Bickle here. I'm not out to change the world. I don't want to rescue damsels in distress. But you never know. You know the Boy Scout motto is "be prepared" and that's what I decided I was going to be when they said no more bats or tire irons.
"I got to tell you I'm the original April Fool. One of the guys that pumps gas at the garage, everyone calls him Kid Gavilan, and me I'm always ready to fall for a gag, and I don't know nothing about boxing back in those times. I thought maybe he is Kid Gavilan.
"Anyway this Kid Gavilan who is not Kid Gavilan had come up to me a couple of times and asked me if I want to have a gun. Well, the last time he asked me, I said yes. So he took me to this apartment in the projects that are right by the garage when I told him that I was ready and that I had $700, which I saved up in about a month. Back in those days, you could still make some money doing this shit. And plus he gave me two boxes of ammo too. 'Kid Gavilan' not only was a gas pump jockey but he was also an under the table gun dealer if you want to believe that. This Kid Gavilan is not Kid Gavilan but he is a guy that almost made it in boxing. You know what they say about almost though. It works out okay with horseshoes and hand grenades."
What an idiot. No wonder Jerk is driving a taxi. (No offense meant to hardworking immigrants, people between jobs, actors, and students.)
I asked him if he had the trip record and he said yes he did. I told him it would be best if we had breakfast somewhere else a little more private and that it would be on me. So we took a stroll up to 1st Avenue and sat down at a table in the back of a quiet diner.
Not to mention his goddamn cigarette smoke I had to sit through chatter about how it was against the rules for him to get the trip card from the dispatcher, but that he knew for five dollars he could do it, and so, he did it as a favor and not to tell anybody because the garage is supposed to keep it blah blah blah, cough cough. This guy is an insufferable imbecile.
I got the exact address where he dropped the Democratic Party operative off. I had a suggestion for Trump that he should cruise the block in the mornings till he "coincidentally" happens to get this fellow to be his passenger once again.
\Trump started negotiating on this. (I see this is not going to be as easy as I thought.) The idea is to get one of our house fly info drones riding on this guy, maybe on his back, or one of his shoes, or inside one of the cuffs of his pants, but I couldn't tell this to Trump.
Trump's gambit was that he's a night driver. That he pays a certain lease fee for the night. And that he's supposed to bring the car back at five o'clock in the morning or sooner. There's a stiff fine for coming back late, and the clock starts at five-oh-one. Trump also complained that if he were to do this for me, he would be too tired to work the next day. I asked Trump if he could do me a favor and leave a small package to hang on the men's front doorknob. Trump agreed. I went into one of the housing project buildings (I should get a medal for bravery don't you think?) I took one of those supermarket discount flyers that they put in transparent plastic bags and hang on the doorknobs in these places. I brought it back to the office and I put two of my babies in there).
You see, I've been thinking about all of this. Thinking and thinking. Technicon - the big shots - are responsible for what happened to my marriage. I'm no pauper. I get the annual increases you get with a title till you hit the max. I get the New Year bonuses. But no promotions. No merit raises. My 401 K is healthy, and I'll be getting more than most people do from Social Security. Then there's my disability pension (PTSD and lower back pain) from the Chicago Police Department. So I'm not going to starve, but I want more. I feel like I was cheated out of the upper-middle-class life I deserve. I'm going to have it now. I've been cheated. Now it's my turn.
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