I seem to suffer from a selective Tourrette's Syndrome, which causes me to say some of the most wretched things at the most inappropriate times. This is an example of one such instance. These are written in no discernable chronological order and just surface to the fore of my memory totally unbidden.

Late one night, when I was driving a cab, I picked up a fare going to Cincinnati from the Dayton International Airport. One of the skycaps had brought out the man's luggage and the voucher and the man arrived shortly thereafter while I was loading the luggage. I only caught a glimpse of him as he got in. He was a slender man, in his mid to late forties or so with a balding pate and Lennon specs. I finished loading the luggage and we started on our merry way.
After about fifteen to twenty minutes, I decided to strike up a conversation. I had been listening to a radio program touting the twenty-fifth anniversary of Frampton Comes Alive! so I decided to share some of the wealth of knowledge I had most recently been subjected to with my passenger. I mentioned some little trivial bit about who had played on the album and how the whole event came about. I waited for my passenger to give some indication that he was impressed with this conversational salvo, but was instead met with a soft, "No." in s light British accent.
"What?" I said, perplexed that this man did not agree with my trivial pursuits.
"No, I called Billy Preston's agent and talked to him first. Billy and I had played some session work together. I always kept a book listing the musicians I had played with."
I can't win the lottery. I usually don't even get one of the five numbers correct, which I think is a far more impressive mathematical anomaly then getting all the numbers right. Yet, out of hundreds of flights with hundreds of thousands of passengers on board, I try to impress Peter Frampton with incorrect trivia about himself.

I seem to suffer from a selective Tourrette's Syndrome, which causes me to say some of the most wretched things at the most inappropriate times. This is an example of one such instance. These are written in no discernable chronological order and just surface to the fore of my memory totally unbidden.

I was called to the school to see the principal in a matter of the utmost importance. I was not told what it pertained to, only that an incident had occurred at school with my youngest son, who was a kindergartner at the time. I drove quickly to the school, after being reassured that my son was fine and no harm had come to him. It should be noted that at this time that both of my sons attended a Catholic school.
I arrived to a roomful of people. There was the principal, my son's teacher, one of the nuns and a counselor for the school system. I was told that there was an incident with another student and that the other student had tried to coax my son into a bathroom stall for reasons of a sexual nature. They all waited for my reaction and, after I was told that my son didn't follow the boy into the stall but instead went directly to the teacher, I felt relief for my son but concern for the other boy. Concern because I wondered where he had learned this behavior. We are, after all, talking about kindergartners. I opined that someone may want to see if there are any signs of abuse in the other child's life and stay focused on that.
The counselor was aghast that I wasn't concerned about my own son's frail psyche being damaged by such a horrific incident. I assured him that my boy was a little tougher than that. Then, unbidden, a truly unformed thought popped out of my mouth. Laughing, I said, "And here I thought I would only have to worry about the priests!"
Ironically, only the nun laughed while the others looked appalled.

The Season of Springer
The Dark Underpinnings of Family Dinners

When I read the simple word "family" as the guiding light of November's writing assignment, I became suddenly aware that the directions were anything but simple. I immediately started trying to think of heart-warming stories that would make the reader feel as if they were snuggled down in an old, patchwork quilt with a glass of eggnog. Perhaps an O'Henry-esque story that would take them on a journey with a surprise ending that would illuminate the true meaning of the holidays and the importance of family.
Sadly, however, the imagery that came instantaneously to mind were pictures of such dreadful dysfunction as to make the visions of Marquis de Sade seem quaint. My own memories of childhood were not perpetually wracked with holiday horrors as such. I grew up quite an upper middle class existence and always enjoyed the comfort of turkey at Thanksgiving and a well-trimmed tree during Christmas. My only perpetual fear was receiving some gift that was so awful that I would be unable to disguise my disappointment, thus hurting the gift giver's heart. I would agonize about this over a period of time before and, if I succumbed to my inability to act the part of receptive recipient, for years afterwards.
To this day, I feel absolutely horrible over a pair of ghastly red suede gym shoes my mother had purchased, quite apparently under the influence of psychotropic drugs or perhaps in the grips of demonic possession. I wasn't sure if she truly wanted me beaten senseless every day that I went to school with these absolutely unholy shoes strapped to my feet, so I hid them. She finally found them crammed into the small access to the tub's plumbing works. The pang's of guilt were just as fresh ten years after being blinded by the opening of this unnatural gift.
All these trivial traumas pale to sheer non-existence when viewed from the time I prematurely left home at seventeen to be with my girlfriend over a thousand miles away in South Dakota. The back-story of how that came about is a long, arduous tale and one that may possibly be told at a later time. Suffice to say that I did not possess nearly as much control over certain situations as my penis did, hence my girlfriend's untimely pregnancy and subsequent life altering trip to South Dakota, where the illegitimacy of the birth would not embarrass her parents.
My first Thanksgiving on my own in the wilds of Rapid City were spent in a seedy apartment with an alcoholic couple and their to spawns of Satan. To celebrate the holiday, I drew a large picture of Bill the Cat and Opus for the little monsters. I had hoped that some adult kindness may persuade them from their favorite pastime of beating the snot out of each other while their parents lay comatose on the plain, stained mattress on the floor. Their amusement lasted mere moments before they tore the pictures to shreds and commenced to chase each other with kitchen implements.
My Christmas fared no better. My daughter was born on December twenty-first (which was the happiest day of my life) and then I found out she had been placed for adoption the very next day (the saddest day of my life). I was stunned, angry, confused, hurt…the whole spectrum of emotions rushed through me in no particular order. I had just moved out of the alcoholic's apartment into my own across town, but my state of mind was such that I hadn't completed the moving process. On Christmas Eve Day, I went over and retrieved the rest of my belongings, which did not amount to much. There was a variety of mismatched cookware and cutlery as well as clothes, a crappy stereo and a small collection of albums. The female portion of the drunken duo was the only one home at the time and made pleasantries as I loaded my meager possessions into a friend's car. Approximately eight hours later, I was arrested for breaking and entering and spent Christmas day and the next day in jail.
Apparently, the male half of the drunken duo arrived home…drunk. He was incensed that I would have the gall to come under the cover of darkness and take my own property. His gray matter swam back and forth in his whiskey soaked cranium, trying to conjure up a method to get my stuff back to them, where it rightly belonged. Genius must have struck slowly and with a lot of clatter. After conferring with his other half, they concluded that if they called the police and said the stuff was stolen, the police would have to believe such upstanding citizens such as themselves and return the plundered possessions posthaste. Brilliance! It goes without saying that their story did not even make a modicum of sense and they had so many holes in their story that no one can believe that the cops actually gave it any credence, let alone actually arrest me for it. As a side note, I actually was convicted on the charges and spent a year on probation and had to pay a lawyer to get it expunged from my record…three times! The (hopefully) last time was twenty-six years after the incident.
Fast forward through the years to the time when I meant my significant other's mother for the first time. It was a few days before Christmas and Denise and I were at the apartment cooking dinner together. A call interrupted our Epicurean evening. Denise answered and all I could here was a woman's voice screaming obscenities, cutting off anything Denise was attempting to say. She hung up the phone and said that her mom and her live in boyfriend were in a huge fight. Her mom's house was about two blocks up from our apartment, so we walked over in the frigid air. The sounds on the ongoing bout reached us at about half a block away. When we reached the sidewalk in front of her mom's house, a cascade of glass that seemingly exploded out of the front window greeted us. This was followed quickly by a barrage of hastily wrapped presents that streamed at high velocity through the broken panes. A fully decorated Christmas tree logically followed and became wedged in the frame, plugging up the jagged, gaping maw.
The following years have not gotten any better and I have become convinced that Denise's family members draw numbers out of a hat to see which one is scheduled to ruin each holiday. Even with Denise, one is never really sure what word or phrase might be the magic muttering that causes her Bi-Polar Express to come careening off the tracks. Sometimes, I just sit at the table, surrounded by the turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce and watch, as if from a comfortable theater seat, as the expletive laden cage matches take place. Sometimes, prior to a gathering, my boys and I set up a pool to try and guess which family member will be the first to surrender to a violent, mental meltdown.
As I reflect on the past debacles, I wonder if this is how it has always been, just under the surface. People seem to relish the movie made mayhem of holiday dysfunction which makes me believe that, while a majority of families don't throw themselves so eagerly into the abyss, most people feel that there is a electrical undercurrent of insanity held just at arm's length at most family gatherings. The funniest stories of reunions and dinners seem to swirl around the time went grandma went into a graphic dissertation on how grandpa likes to "mount her in the living room during football games" or when cousin Gary comes out of the closet during his turn at saying grace. Perhaps the landscape of television and the "tell all" nature of our media has made it acceptable for families to wallow in the densely populated waters of Lake Springer. Perhaps the Cleaver's of yesterday's standards are actually the circus freaks of today, with their "please pass the peas" poise and grace. Yet, I have to admit, it does send a slight chill down my spine that I may be right.

Aside from the permanent problems that electro-shock didn't seem to clear up (and you think I'm joking, that's what's so cute). I need help with a particular facet of my writing as it pertains to my journalistic endeavors. I do a lot of interviews and I run into the same problem: quotes! Damn these people talking all over my article, but I guess that's to be expected when you interview someone. Anyway, it usually isn't an issue because I developed a little method that seems to work. I write and lead in and a lead out and then stick a Q & A format smack dead in the middle. The problem arises when I have more than one article in the paper. This week I have three and all of them are interviews, so I had to change up at least one of them so it didn't appear to be the same old format.
What is my problem with quotes? When I write the words, "In a recent phone interview, Charlie Manson had this to say!" all I hear is a horrible television newscaster reading it. It sounds fake and really inorganic. How many times in an article can you say "he said" without sounding a bit redundant. I've tried picking random synonyms to change things up…he stated, he blurted, he screamed like a girl…nothing seems to make it all better. If someone is fluent in quote-ese, drop me a line, call me a moron and tell me how to get around it.

"Doing alright
Little Driving on a Saturday night
Come what may
Gonna dance the day away"
"Driver's Seat"
Sniff N' The Tears

Night's rain slicked streets shone a water-warped reflection, a neon succession of strip club seductions. The arc sodium streetlights creating pools of misty abandon surrounded by the ebony texture of the twilight's unknown. Light-shadow shapes danced and skidded across the cab's yellow hood, chasing and merging, sliding off and forgotten. The driver's eyes, lit by the rectangular reflection of the rear view mirror, took in the sights of the strip, always aware and on the hunt for a fare. A staggering drunk, the bus stop bound, a sopping wet shopper, the hazard-flashing call of a stranded motorist; all of these were his quarry.
It was a sad fact that this job preyed on the misfortune of others. The young single mother who had to work until late into the night, long after the time when public transportation ceased to run, leaving work haggard and aching. The business suit whose connecting flight was cancelled and needed to be in Cincinnati by noon to make another connection. The legion of life's losers who seem to drift on the waves of welfare, needing transportation to the nearest Cashland to get their once a month gift from their favorite uncle, then to the nearest supermarket (and usually a liquor) store before returning to their subsidized housing to celebrate the moment. The driver didn't used to be this sardonic and jaded, but seeing the seamy side of life for so long, his ears full of the never ending excuses and the tired tirades making him apathetic out of sheer survival. You have to shut a part of yourself down to do this job or you become the quarry and your family goes without. Then what else is there to do but to become what you have learned to hate?
The hum-crackle of the two-way radio preceded the imminent nasal droning of the dispatcher. The driver stiffened a little and, not for the first time, wondered why a business dependent on communication would hire so many lacking in the basest of these skills. One of the cab companies even had a dispatcher that worked the graveyard shift who wore not one, but two hearing aids that were so large, he had to pick up alien communications with them. The dispatcher apparently felt that the rest of the world went deaf in a sympathetic show of support for him. He yelled into the microphone so loudly, that the modulation was blown to shit and the driver's were constantly asking him to repeat the last transmission. To make himself clearer, he would scream even louder into the mike. Most of the drivers believed that this was actually a secret plot to make them all deaf as well.
"I have calls in 12, 14, 15, 16, 23, a two cab call in 24, three down and the airport's been callin' with trips." the dispatcher droned into the mike in such a nasal tone, it would make Fran Drescher seem like the Queen of Elocution.
The city of Dayton was broken up into different quadrants to make it easier for the dispatchers and the drivers to bid trips. The rules of bidding were as confusing as they were arbitrary. No one really ever got the hang of it and the abuse of the system by dispatchers willing to receive a little kickback and the drivers that would pay it, left mostly bare bones for those who were either too greedy, honest or stupid to engage in such chicanery. To be a taxi driver in Dayton and be somewhat successful took a vast knowledge of the local and surrounding streets, restaurants and bars as well as a chameleon-like personality. A driver had to be able to converse with the business people out of the airport, calm the combative drunks, laugh with the droll, roll with the tragically hip, endure the abuse of the terminally wretched, endure the extremely ecstatic all the while maintaining a control.
Maintaining control of the client and the car, keeping an ear open for current cab calls, competing with all the other cutthroat hacks that are rabidly jostling for position to gain a cherry trip: the long haul call that will pay for your lease and gas all in one shot. The trip from downtown to Indianapolis that will allow you to breathe easy for four hours, safe in the knowledge that your ahead of the game with money in your pocket on one trip. Everything after that is just gravy, leaving you with the leisure of picking and choosing your trips for the rest of your shift. Not the gnawing pressure of whether or not you would come out of the night ahead, break even, or even worse, owing the cab company money for the privilege of working for twelve hours.
This driver's night was just starting and he was trying to work himself into the Friday night position. Having done this dance for as many years as he had, it was instinctual, the cardsharp watching the night deal itself out. Rain was always a good way to start a weekend. Many people do not like driving in the rain, especially when they figured that they would be a little more than impaired by the time last call descends at the bar. Running up the strip now, rain reflected promises of all girl revues and dollar beers glittering by, the driver signals, slows and pulls into one of the seedier go-go bars on the Dixie Strip. He slows so as not to scrape the undercarriage of the Crown Vic on the inordinately steep entrance to the parking lot, sliding the cab directly up to the front door.
Putting the hazard lights on, the driver grudgingly shuts the engine off. An idle cab is anathema to a hack operator. Every minute the cab is not loaded is a missed trip, money lost…a failure. The cab driver reluctantly abandons the vehicle to retrieve the fare from within the confines of this bass boosted edifice. The thumping of hip-hop ecstasy could be felt through one's soles in the presence of this promiscuous promissory of perverse desires. The melodrama spills out into the evening, as the door opens, coupling with the dampness, which hangs in the air and clings to the lungs, like slow suffocation.
Making his entrance, an almost nightly performance, the driver glides into the narrow passageway, slow and strident. The black leather boots, silver studded sheaths, strike the adamantine floor in measured steps. The long leather trench coat flows out and back as the stale, smoky air rushes past to escape into the night. The strobe-lit interior offers flashes of staccato statues; the leering desperation of patrons enveloped in their own fantasies, unable to pierce through the reality to see the bored contemptuous glares of the dancers. The depths of sadness and disillusionment hidden by the staged illumination and set to the rhythms of a gyrating bass line, barely masking the screams of sorrow rising from deep within nigh all present. The driver stopped and stood at the edge of the crowd, scanning their faces trying to locate his regular trip. His eyes were shrouded under a shadow cast by the leather cowboy hat he perpetually wore, pulled low onto his brow. He appeared incredibly out of place, displaying a hunger of a different variety. Hands slid around his coat and laced themselves just above his belt buckle. The driver showed no emotion of surprise on his unshaven face. He just grasped the hands, pulling them apart, maintaining a slight grip on one as he turned to acknowledge the owner of these wandering appendages.
"Hi baby!" The words swallowed up by the driving pulse of the Dance. It was the one he sought, his regular fare.
"You ready?" he said, bending down to her short stature to be heard. After nodding her assent, he asked "You the only one right now?" She shook her head and he gestured for her and the others to get ready…they had to get moving.
She disappeared into the side dressing room holding up her finger to indicate she would be right back. He sidled up to the end of the bar and the barmaid automatically brought him a Coke with no ice.
"Anything interesting?" he yelled to the barmaid, a once pretty go-go trooper who still had the personality to gain tips, just not the body. Time and gravity are ravishing beasts while the drugs and alcohol seem to be the final parasite, cleansing the carrion of whatever dignity it may still possess.
"Pick up Destiny and Babydoll and try and get them here by midnight. We barely got any girls after you take them out of here." She yelled back in the universal Marlboro whiskey voice of almost all barmaids.
"They know I'm comin' to get them?" he yelled back.
"I'll call 'em, let 'em know. You got their cell numbers?" she asked, letting the foam spill over from a pitcher of beer she was drawing.
He nodded and he went back to casing the crowd as she ran down to the end of the bar to hand off the pitcher to the lingerie-clad server. The driver had a good gig going. When he first started driving hack, it was out of desperation. Finding himself financially fucked, a friend suggested cab driving. The driver's first night was an abortion and a lesson in the cutthroat nature of the business. The driver was never that type of person and found, throughout his life, that he never would be, but he could usually laterally think his way out of any situation beneficially. In this case, he noticed that a number of trips were coming out of a particular area and going untouched by the other drivers. He printed himself up some business card with his cell phone number on it for about $30.00 and sat in this particular area, bidding and getting almost every trip that came out. He would take the trip and at the end of the fare, if the customer was decent, he would give them a card. Every one of them were so appreciative because of being stranded on more than one occasion by various cab drivers and companies. He ended up with a majority of his clientele being strippers.

"You're lost little girl
You're lost little girl
You're lost
Tell me who
Are you?
I think that you know what to do
Impossible? Yes, but it's true
I think that you know what to do, yeah
I'm sure that you know what to do
You're lost little girl"
"Your Lost Little Girl"
The Doors