Ineffectual Tribute to Len
PETER ORNER
After graduate school I hung around another year and drove a cab for Iowa City Yellow Cab. The cab was a boat, a Chevrolet Caprice wagon. I could have put a mattress in the back and lived in it. I didn’t hate the job. I’d sit in the Kroger parking lot and read. If the dispatcher radioed and I liked the sound of the call, I took it. If I didn’t, I went on reading. My indifference didn’t make me popular with Ovid Demanaris. I once asked him, over the radio, whether he’d ever read Ovid, and he said he didn’t answer personal questions. “He’s got some real smutty stuff,” I said. No answer, dead air. I didn’t have to drive a cab. I was broke, and the only money I had was the play money left over from my student loans. Now, I can’t pay them off with real money. Still, I wasn’t a cabdriver. I was a grad student, pretending. I’d sit in the parking lot and read. Occasionally, I’d drive somewhere, pick somebody up, and drive them someplace else.
In front of the Deadwood one late night, 2:30 A.M., February, I earned a few chops picking up four blitzed undergrads. When one of them puked in the back of the cab, I hit the brakes and ordered them all the fuck out.
“But it’s fucking freezing, man. It’s fucking Iowa.”
“Out.”
That made me feel like a cabbie. And I used to take calls out to an encampment along the river west of town. People there didn’t live in tents or refrigerator boxes but in full-on shacks constructed of scrap wood and sometimes even a few bricks—it was a small, functioning village. Nearly impossible to find. It wasn’t on any map. You had to bumble along a series of rutty dirt roads south, then head north again, before you could go west close to the river. It may have been a derelict property, or maybe it was a kind of no-man’s-land in a flood zone. Ovid would put out a general call. “Anybody want to pick up an ancient freak out by the river?” If nobody took it, he’d cue his mic and say, “Ornery? How about getting off your pampered ass?” The freaks weren’t that ancient, maybe in their mid-fifties, but most of them had lived many years outdoors—in Iowa. Their faces were perpetually red from frostbite. In winter, the tall bare trees hid nothing and blocked no wind. I’d trek out there and stop in the center of that scattering of hunkered shelters and wait to see who jumped into the cab. More often than not it was a grocery run. Once, a woman who called herself Birdy squeezed my forearm—Birdy always sat beside me in the front—and invited me to shop with her at the Kroger. Nobody had requested my presence in a long time. I remember she bought a single loaf of bread, a tub of cottage cheese, and some chocolate. The fare must have been double the cost of the food.
One night a guy having a bad trip started bouncing on the seat so hard his head bashed the roof of the cab. His girlfriend was passed out next to him, but every time he bounced she’d wake up and shout, “What? What? What?” She had a pretty, snub nose and was wearing sweatpants. Neither of them could tell me where they wanted to go. So, for what felt like hours, I circled block after block, mooning over the girl in her sweats, until the guy came down enough for me to drop them at the bus station. Mostly though I sat in the Kroger parking lot and watched the shoppers push their carts out of the swinging doors and listened to the sound of those wobbly wheels struggling across the potholed pavement—and went back to reading.
Another night, just as I was about to leave for my shift, Len called
