The Low Road

By Karl J. Stenstrom

The Low Road is a memoir of the life and exploits of a twenty-something Boston City cab driver in the 70s and 80s. This gritty yet humorous story targets audiences of a wide spectrum. It is a must read for anyone who likes true crime, adventure, and a likable villain that triumphs over adversity, peppered with the seediness and debauchery of inner city life.

The book places the reader in the shoes of a young man starting out in the world, alone, nave, and troubled. Having no marketable skills but his cleverness and cunning, he carves out a living in a major city. He takes hold of what is his only opportunity in life and becomes more adept as time goes on, finally becoming a master at the game that once had him pinned.

Native Bostonians, college students, and anyone with a perverse and pessimistic sense of humor will enjoy reading The Low Road because it is a fast paced, comical, and factual story of a true underdog who finally overcame.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465374639

Karl J. Stenstrom

Karl Stenstrom has been retired from cab driving for many years. He lives a quiet life in the suburbs south of Boston. He has three children and a grandchild. He enjoys motorcycling, golf, and writing.

Book preview

Chapter One

HOW IT ALL STARTED

THERE ARE APPROXIMATELY ten thousand cabbies in the Metro Boston / Cambridge area. Every one of them has some kind of story to tell. Some are just normal family-type guys. Some are drug addicts. Some are drunks. Some of them drive for fifty or sixty years and just fade into oblivion, as they pass on; their secrets die along with them. Still others mold their personalities into the only paradigm they’ve ever known, retelling their sordid narratives to old and ever-new audiences of passengers, tourists, barflies and friends over and over forever more. They all have their tales. Here are mine.

I was starving. No I was dying. That was my problem; I never listened to anyone with any sense in his head. For twenty odd years I thought it better to march to my own offbeat drummer, rather than dance to the same one as everyone else.

Job after shitty job, I bounced from here to there without any promise, betting fate would somehow reconcile with the triumphant soul that I knew in my heart was housed within, but as my teen years ebbed in to my twenties, the sands of my hourglass seemed to run faster and faster downward.

This latest job that I was just fired from was the most vulgar indignity yet…automobile bumper delivery. Who gets fired from such a shitty vocation? When I took the position, the guy that hired me, Tim, promised me everything in the world. This was going to be a very exciting opportunity where I would be rolling in dough.

For every extra automobile bumper I scavenged up on my delivery route, over and above the original number I left with that morning, I would be paid an extra twenty five cents. (Just some quick math here so you the reader can grasp the complexity of this enterprise) If I left with ten re-chromed bumpers in the morning, and at the end of the day I returned with twelve, that’s right… I made an extra fifty cents for that day on top of the minimum hourly wage that they were ponying up out of the goodness of their heart, that they so naively believed was going to feed, clothe, and shelter me.

Needless to say, it didn’t take long before I started doing what came completely natural since I was a kid and throughout my adult life: I started scamming them. Everywhere I’d worked so far in my life, it only took me a matter of weeks before I promoted myself to the position of Senior Partner. If it was a gas station, I’d sell oil to customers, keep the money, and put the empty cans back in the boxes on the bottom of the inventory stacks to fudge the count. When I worked at a liquor store, the booze I drank and stole was only outmatched by the cash I pilfered. Wholesome Farms convenience stores- I’m personally responsible for closing three of them, before they finally figured out it was me taking all of their money and stuff. That’s really my best talent; I have an incredible knack for fooling people into trusting me. They blamed everyone else before they finally figured it out.

Anyway the Hasbro Bumper Company was one of my best con-jobs to date, and its how I got into cab driving in the first place. Like I said, they were paying me this insult for a wage every week. I would have all of my bumpers delivered about two hours after I left the shop, and I guess they expected me to ride around foraging for bumpers until it was time to come back in the afternoon. I actually tried to legitimately do it for the first couple of weeks until one day they stiffed me on an aluminum bumper that I brought back. These cheap shits tried to tell me that seeing as though it had a hole in it that it wasn’t repairable and they weren’t going to give me my twenty-five cents for it. I protested that it must be worth at least that in scrap but they were adamant.

The next day on a lark, I brought another aluminum bumper to the scrap yard and got ten bucks for it. From thereinafter I was making about three hundred a week on the side. I gave up riding around looking for extra stuff for a quarter, because it wasn’t paying. I installed a faucet on the gas line on the underbelly of their truck so it legitimately looked like I was out riding around doing my job, when in actuality I went home and drained four or five gallons out every day right before I went back to bed and watched cartoons at my house. There was no way of them knowing this because they had disconnected the odometers to keep their trucks under warranty longer. They were even more crooked than me.

Needless to say, my scam was going along very well for a few months. I even doubled back once a week late at night and stole the aluminum bumpers from the core pile outside of the bumper company. But, like all things, everything good comes to an end. In order for me to get there though, I have to introduce you to a character that also worked at Hasbro Bumper named Nelson.

Nelson was a slime-ball, suck-ass, piece of shit that every good story truly needs. First of all, he was the epitome of a fat fucking ugly loser. He had no chance of ever getting anywhere on his own merit, so his stratagem for success in life was to figuratively, and perhaps even literally, ball-suck Tim for sustenance. Like one of those suck-fish that a tiger-shark lets clean his scales for living, Nelson’s best frigging bet in life was to latch on to Tim’s privates and rise to the top of the bumper industry. When everyone else was complaining about what a crappy job this was, Nelson… well, he ran back and told Tim. Looking back on it now in retrospect, I think Nelson had serious unhealthy and un-natural feelings for Tim, but I digress.

Anyway around Christmastime, the company ordered us to deliver monkey calendars to all of our customers. Everyday we’d load a case or two of these calendars with pictures of these animals in funny costumes doing funny monthly things on the insides and hand them out all morning and afternoon or in my case just the morning. Naturally I stole a bunch of them, not that I needed them so much as to just stay in practice stealing something. I hung them all over my house like trophies.

Well, like I said, it was Christmastime, and a few of the drivers and myself were standing around the backroom, the night before the big holiday, when one of the guys suggested that we might be getting Christmas bonuses as we were being called in to Tim’s office one by one.

Not a chance! When it was my turn to be called, I walked into Tim’s office and all I got was a Merry Christmas Handshake, and a monkey calendar handed to me. If this wasn’t the weirdest fucking thing I’d ever seen in my life it was about to get upstaged by something even more fucking bizarre. When once we were all reassembled back outside in the break-room, minus Tim, suck-ass Nelson blurts out, What are we gonna get Tim for Christmas?

Was I here all alone? I seemed to be the only one that was totally repulsed by this sick act of blatant homosexual man-lust. I immediately objected, and as I vaguely remember, everyone else slowly agreed with me. That was the beginning of the end for me at Hasbro bumper.

Luckily, I had been looking around for another job opportunity during the past couple of weeks. As I rode around the streets of Boston, bored to tears at the course my life had taken, I started to wonder about other people, and how they managed to exist. I saw taxi drivers everywhere. There were old guys and there were young guys. They all seemed to be well fed, adequately dressed, and not wanting for money. I wondered about it for a while. One day I just happened to be making a delivery to Bob Fernandes at the Blue and White taxi garage in South Boston. As I was watched him write out the check for the bumper, I asked him what it took to work there. All you gotta do is get a hack license down at Police headquarters. That turned out to be the most important conversation of my life.

A few days later, I parked the delivery truck down near Police headquarters and applied. I took a couple of days of class, on their time of course, and then passed the test. I had my hack license.

Meanwhile, I was in no rush to leave the bumper place, as pathetic as the job was, I was making a ton of money on the side stealing their gas and their bumpers. The three-hour workdays weren’t really cramping me too bad either.

Then it all came crashing down. Nelson … remember fat fucking Nelson. Nelson had colluded with Tim to take me down. Still reeling from the dressing down I gave him about his Christmas present for Tim idea, Nelson had secretly plotted my downfall. Inventory for aluminum bumpers being non-existent for the last two or three months, Tim apparently put his head together with his giant whale-fuck buddy Nelson and suggested it had something to do with me. Lucky guess. Regardless, Tim had whale-fuck follow me around and they were now on to me one hundred percent. Tim confronted me the next afternoon with a stern, Why’d you do it Karl?

Why’d I do it? After I tiptoed around it for a while, and finally realized what I guess I already knew he knew, I told him the truth. For the money you asshole! He didn’t have anything on me and we both knew it. He threatened some vague shit about restitution, but after I explained how Hasbro bumper would have to make restitution for the odometer bullshit to the local Ford dealer, he called it a draw.

I was officially a Blue and White cab driver the next day.

Chapter Two

FIRST DAY ON THE JOB

FIRST THINGS FIRST though, there is after all, a hiring process. I exited the parking lot that day and drove straight to Boston. It was only 2:00 in the afternoon or so, so it took me about a half hour to get to the taxi garage.

As I nervously entered the windowless, dank, concrete structure from the outside, my youthful eyes adjusted after only a few seconds to the interior of the building. The stark contrast of the January mid-afternoon sun setting all too quickly outside would probably abandon me altogether before my exit, leaving me to now anguish this new job application process all the more. A sign on the wall, its rusty permanence, screaming volumes on the constant openness of the position for which it eternally harkened, stating obtusely: DRIVERS WANTED, NIGHT OR DAY SHIFTS, the un-verbose image of it clung to the inside of my tense psyche as I toddled apprehensively towards the shadowy, scalley-capped figure inside the shoddy, wood framed structure that seemed to house him ever so comfortably.

As this elevated king of his minions, wrote nonchalantly on the sheet of paper that lay before him, I stood nervously below, like Dorothy before the Wizard, trying to muster both my courage and my voice to ask for a job.

"Yeah, whatta ya want?" He asked without letting his eye off of the paper.

"I’d like to apply for the position of taxi driver.

"Oh, the position of taxi driver. Well now, this must be your lucky fuckin day. That ‘Position’ just happens to be open. You got a Hack license?" I pulled out my hack license and gave it to him. His hand never extending itself to politely accept it, I placed it off to the side of where he was writing. You got a regular license? I was a little ahead of him this time and placed it along side of the other. He flicked them around with his pen a little to straighten them enough to read, seemed to write my name down on the sheet, and told me to come back at four in the morning for the X90. Without ever making eye contact or even asking me any questions, I became a fully entrusted taxi employee, newly assigned to safeguard the lives of Boston’s elite, her children, and the thousands upon thousands of everyday folks that would come to depend on me in this city’s near future for ironically, an honest deal.

I drove home apprehensively, thinking all the way, how monumentally important were the turn of events of the last four hours. There are relatively few defining moments in everyone’s life. In my own, I probably had a couple under my belt, but my innocence didn’t as of yet, give me the benefit of recognizing them. Even when I enlisted in the army, I didn’t realize the possible gravity of my actions. For the first time in my life though; now I did.

I was scared. I was scared shitless. Tomorrow morning I was going to be doing the most dangerous job I could imagine. Tomorrow morning could be the last day of my life on earth and I was so aware of it my ride home was every bit as surreal as a condemned man taking his last steps to the gas chamber. I felt more solitary than I’d ever felt in my life. It was a freakish crossroad of my time on this planet when I seemed to have no friends to turn to. My family members weren’t close at the time, and my parents had retired and moved away. I was truly alone.

I lay in bed that night sleepless. The minutes matured into hours, and as the hours grew in number, their silent taunting grew deafening. When it was finally time and I could forestall my fate no more, I dragged my un-rested, weary carcass into my clothes to face my executioner, whoever he was.

I arrived back at the garage on Dorchester St. in South Boston a half an hour later at four A.M. Unceremoniously the owner handed me a set of keys, as he asked if I had ever driven a cab before. No, I responded. Whereupon his only advice as he turned his back on me in his little wooden booth was to, stay away from young blacks.

If they gave me any other instructions than that, I honestly don’t remember. I didn’t even know how to turn on the meter or operate the two-way radio.

I walked into the cold January darkness and eventually found theX90 mingled among the tens of other similar, beat-up, 76 Plymouth Fury ex Police cars strewn unmethodically up and down the avenue and the side streets.

There are a few things about this ritual that never change. That hour of the morning all year around in the city of Boston is always cold. In the winter it’s cold and the wind coming off the ocean is viciously cold. Walking amongst all those cabs, there is an eerie sound of a woman’s voice; the dispatcher, echoing in all directions her constant banter of addresses from the several two-ways that were neglectfully left on from the last shift. Whether the car is going to start on these types of mornings is a crapshoot. If the car starts, round two of whether or not it’s going to be a good day or not will be determined by if the following equipment works: The heater, the two-way radio, and the meter, followed by things like door handles, window cranks, and windshield wipers.

The cars, like I said before, (although things have come a long way since) are ex-police cars. They are three or four years old with a half a million hard miles on them. Many are on their third or fourth engine. When things break, the name of the game for the garage is to get it back on the street as quickly as possible. Safety is not a priority.

I hopped in and sank down into the bottomed out drivers seat. Cab drivers are generally overweight, so you learn to bring a pillow to compensate for the sinkhole. The smell of stale cigarettes, piss, beer, mechanics grease, vomit, and body odor assaults your nostrils like an unwanted roach being showered with the bug spray of a skittish housewife.

I wriggled the key in and attempted to start it. After a longer ordeal than necessary, it came to life. What’s amazing is that these things actually operate at all they are so beaten up.

This was it. I pulled out and started searching for my first fare. I drove up and down different streets and different neighborhoods, looking in every direction for someone to flag me. After a couple of unproductive hours of this I decided to get in line on a cabstand. The idea here is to wait until you are the top cab and then either take a radio call or a "walk up’. The trouble was I couldn’t understand the format of the dispatching system, and everything the woman was saying was gibberish. I waited and waited. Cabs behind me were pulling away empty, which told me they were getting radio calls, but try as I might, I still couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Finally, around 7:45 in the morning, a young girl woke me out of my stupor, wrenching open the back door and got in. Kneeland and Washington, she directed.

I was stumped. I turned and explained to her the situation. You are my first fare ever. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know where that is. I’m sorry.

She started laughing, as the stern business look she was just wearing disappeared. She told me not to worry, as she would show me how to get there herself. She told me to take it easy and relax. When we got there, (it was a fairly short ride) I realized that I had forgotten to turn on the meter. I was handed a five-dollar bill and told to keep the change. Five bucks way back then was a pretty decent job, so I guess I kind of lucked out. Anyway, I had my first fare under my belt and I was on my way.

As the rest of the day progressed, most of the other drivers took advantage of my inexperience and didn’t bother to help me. When I got to be top on a stand, they would let me sit there silent, oblivious to the fact that the dispatcher was calling me, trying to give me work. When I didn’t answer, they would receive the job, as they were next in line.

At the end of the day, my waybill which is the rental fee for the cab was something like $34.00. I had taken in after paying for my fuel, about $32.00. The owner saw this, took $15.00 out of my roll, and told me I had better get with it tomorrow. There was an old timer there who had witnessed this whole thing. He had actually seen me out there all day and had realized right away what a rube I was and decided to help me out.

He explained to me how everything really worked, especially the radio. The radio, he explained was the most important tool I had, and to make any money I had to be a good radio man. There is so much work going out from Allaway Street, (that’s where the radio room for the Blue and White is) that the dispatchers don’t have time to go slow. They abbreviate everything that they possibly can. If you can learn to hear and speak this coded, abrupt language well, you’ll flourish. He sat me down in his cab and spent about fifteen minutes teaching me how it all worked.

The next day I made about $40.00 after paying the nut (rent and fuel). The day after that I made about $60.00 and everyday after about the same thing. All things considered not bad money for the late 70s.

Chapter Three

THE TROUBLE WITH HACKNEY

ABOUT THREE WEEKS later I was an old hand. I was tooling around the city like I owned it. The name of the game was hustle. The faster I went, the more fares I got. I was very proficient with the radio, establishing a base from which to operate that I was the most comfortable working in, South Boston. It made sense to work out of the same neighborhood all day for a couple of reasons, the main one being street familiarity. The other was that I could rely on the income. I came to know the different times when things were busy and also when to avoid things because of problems such as heavy traffic.

The radio, like I already mentioned, is the best tool, period. When you’re sitting on a stand you are eventually assured of getting work because as long as you’re top, sooner or later, they will call you. It also serves you when you are close to an empty cabstand and there is a call that needs answering. In this case, what they do is throw it out. That’s the term where anybody close can bid his number. When the dispatcher is able to recognize one number out of all the other chatter, she awards it to the driver she heard first, this is known as getting the job on the fly.

The second most important tool is the ability to get around quickly, and unfortunately for me, I thought I was better at it than I really was. I always liked driving fast, but youth and skill sometimes clash.

I was having an ordinary day. It was a cool, overcast, spring morning in town. I was coming back into South Boston from downtown sometime around 10:00. The Broadway Bridge is one of about six entrances in to Southie and from downtown it’s the most popular. Being a radioman, I’m flying over this thing going somewhere around fifty hustling to get back on a radio stand. The speed limit is probably thirty. The bridge has two lanes inbound, and two lanes outbound. In the passing lane going in my same direction is some woman in a car going fairly slow. I come up behind her in the slow lane, and as I start to pass her on the inside, she veers into my path unmindful of anything but applying her fucking makeup, causing me to swerve into the curbstone. My tire blows out.

About fifty yards ahead, she stops at a red light, oblivious to the accident she caused, and smugly she sits, lighting a cigarette. Me, I’m pissed! I limp up beside of her, my blown out tire hobbling my car to the crippled equivalency of a one legged mailman.

I jump out of the cab, and proceed to start lecturing through her open window on what an asshole she is. Her response is to blow a puff of smoke towards me as she rolls up the window. I go ballistic. I shriek, You fuckin douchbag as I emphasize the point by pounding on her now closed window with my fist. Her response now is to simply drive off through her conveniently changed green light, leaving me standing in the intersection alone like the fucking village idiot.

I get back in my car, shamble off down the street and change the tire in a nearby parking lot. Pissed! At the end of the day, I slink back to the garage without saying a word. I really don’t need to have to say anything about the flat tire in the trunk. If enough shifts go by, no one will realize who hit something and bent the rim beyond repair. Taxis are always getting banged up without anyone reporting it.

About two weeks later, I show up for work and the owner shouts out to me. "Stenstrom, they want to see you down at Hackney". Hackney is the part of the Boston Police Department that deals specifically and only with taxi complaints. They are pains in the ass if you have anything to do with the industry, as they are civil servant bureaucrat cops, and have never had, nor ever will, work a day in their entire lives, so they cannot possibly have any empathy whatsoever for anyone else who actually does, or will.

What do they want with me? I asked innocently. "Don’t know, but I do know you’d better get the fuck down there this morning".

I showed up a few hours later at Police Headquarters, seeing as though their hours are just like that of bankers. It was housed at the time inside of a large ominous stone structure on Berkeley Street in downtown Boston, with a permanent Boston Police Headquarters chiseled into the granite. Why they put something like this, that obviously is going to require such a huge amount of parking space for its clientele in the middle of downtown Boston is only something a dopey public sector official could conjure up. The Police Hackney department was on the first floor as you walk in and around the corner on the right side near the men’s room, which always stunk like piss, all the way out to the street, thanks to some Civil Service janitor that could give two shits about anybody but himself.

After I entered, I stood in line behind some other driver that was in trouble for overcharging. The cop read part of the complaint before stopping and asked the driver, "What do you have to say for yourself?" He denied the whole thing. Every time the cop read something incriminating, he would interrupt with a doesn’t sound like me, until the cop read on and the critical letter had gotten more explicit. He read the woman’s grievance aloud as it went on to describe the offending driver as an overweight 60ish white male with a blue ‘fishing hat, a green sweater, and a fat cigar hanging out of his mouth. As the 60ish, blue hat, and green sweater wearing overweight white driver stood there chewing on his cigar he came to the realization that there might be more to this accusation than met the eye. Doesn’t sound like me. He half-heartedly repeated before finally clamming up, now figuring he’d let the cop play out his full hand. The cop finally broke the silence by suggesting that he give the woman a money order for ten bucks". He reluctantly agreed, and promised to return with the money order, grudgingly, to say the least.

Next it was my turn. After giving my name and cab number, the cop pulled out a hand written letter from a thin file folder marked STENSTROM and started reading aloud in monotone a complaint from a woman about how she was threatened by a taxi