#01 Luke – since Jeannetta quit working the airport nearly a year ago, I don’t think we can refer to her as the Lizard Queen any more. If we were to have airport royalty these days, it’d have to be Luke. All he does is his minimal Woodford Taxi biz and work the ‘port. Usually a day shifter, I see him on both ends of my night watch. All Hail the new Lizard King!

#06 Pops – still in Florida recovering from surgery as far as I know. Of course, at his age he may be dead. I need to check on this.

#06 Charles – The new Driver #06, Charles is a rookie that won’t make it through the summer. Wrap your mind around this: Charles is dyslexic. He can’t read road signs or maps. I don’t know what else to say: I feel sorry for the guy but he just isn’t cut out for this line of work.

#07 Rico – Rico no longer works for White Cab… yet again. They come, they go: hip-hip-hiyo!

#07 Chris – the new Driver #07, Chris is #77 Adel’s sneaky little shadow. He is Shitbird Lite, to Adel’s Shitbird Genuine Draft.

#007 Giles – A jovial but none too bright fellow from Gambia, Giles is known as Chicken Man to most of the cab-driving community. (I have no idea why and I’m not really certain I want to know anyway.) I remember Giles from my short stint at Jihad Taxi. In order to pry Giles away from the Jihad, Wale made Giles a driver-manager to get him to come over. Like Dallas and Truitt before him he is completely fucking useless in this capacity… but, hey, how much can you really expect from a guy whose driver number is 007? Double-Oh Seven, Giles Bond, License to Drive!

#08 Radio – his real name is Dave. His nickname comes from his radio presence. He tells the dispatcher every little thing he does. He announces where he is, when he stops for gas, if he’s inbound or outbound, when he takes a Signal-10, if there is a ballgame, if it snows, if he’s going to take a shit. His routine got so tiresome that after each of his public service announcements on the radio I have started responding with my own inane announcements (in my best Radio Dave voice, naturally.) My best follow-up announcement so far was: “Driver 31 to all drivers. Be advised that it’s raining. Please use windshield wipers.”

#10 Sharon – Granny Ten has defected to Jihad Taxi. Her daughter was fired as dispatcher soon thereafter. I heard it was about some credit-card fraud thing but then again one hears all sorts of things.

#11 Willie – after Dallas departed the company, Willie switched from being Driver #38 to Driver #11 so that his driver number matched his cab number. You see… Jeannetta owns her own cab and its number matches her driver number: 36. Rick, too, is an owner-operator is and his cab number matches his number: 20.

#12 Kevin – One slow Sunday night a couple weeks ago, Kevin and I stood out in front of the base smoking when we saw a fire truck sirens ablaze turn onto our little forgotten street. Kevin looked at me and said in mock relief, “Well, thank God, they finally got here!”

I chuckled and we watched the truck drive up to and park in front of the base. When it was followed by an ambulance, two police cruisers, and a Channel 18 Action News truck, I looked at Kevin and asked, “You were kidding right?”

He was just as confused as me and said so as two firemen bounded from the truck and wanted to know who had been assaulted. “This is 221 Lee St., right?” We assured them that this was that address but we didn’t know anything about any assault.

One of the cops corrected the fireman’s mistake: the address was 231, not 221 Lee. As it turned out, a woman had been beaten almost to death at the other end of the block. They didn’t even know if she was going to make it to the hospital. Apparently it all went down while Kevin and I stood there, without us even hearing a thing.

#13 Wale – Wale is as Wale does. It’s a Wale World.

#17 Rebekah – A low-rent stripper-turned-dispatcher, Rebekah is one of several dozen that have blown through in the past year. (Rick likes to joke that Wale ought to just install a pole in the dispatch office to make the poor girls feel more at home.) As far as I know though, she is the first they put in a cab.

#18 Kristin – a college girl, it seems she blows in with the on-set of winter. Last year it was Junior, this year she is hooking up with Big Daddy. Does this mean if Big Daddy continues on as general manager (as he has been for about six months now) he gets to keep her?

#20 Rick – Rick is going to be a grandfather for the very first time (by his son Nick.)

#23 Big Daddy – A couple weekends ago while cruising downtown Big Daddy picked up a married couple who argued viciously all the way home. By the time he got them to their Andover home, the wife had taken off the kid gloves and was going for his juggler. She emasculated him in every way she could think of: you get too drunk to fuck… you are too small even when you can get it up…  I should have listened to my mom and married [some other guy.] He made more money than you and I know he had a bigger dick… you can’t satisfy me. I bet the cabbie can fuck me better than you... She ended the tirade by asking Big Daddy if he wanted to fuck. Amused, Big Daddy responded that he didn’t get involved in domestic disputes, all he wanted was to get paid for the ride. She stormed out of the cab. The husband gave him a twenty for the fare and tipped him another twenty, thanking him for not taking her up on her offer. Big Daddy pocketed the $40 and gave him a business card. “Give me a call. If you want, I can not fuck her tomorrow night too.”

#24 Dennis – I love Dennis to death, but I can’t understand a goddamn thing he says. Of course, that’s pretty understandable: he is a perpetually sleep-deprived Nigerian boxer.

#25 Phil – Phil no longer works for White Cab… yet again. He began flaking out a few months ago: falling asleep on dispatch, missing work entirely, not paying lease, sleeping in his car.

#26 Ja-Li – He’s gone. gone. gone! Thank God Almighty, he’s gone at last! Roger!

#27 Manna – The gift from heaven no longer works for us. When Wale fired him he sold his cab to one of those sneaky underhanded Sheloshes (see #28 Abdul below)

#28 Abdul – Abdul’s last name is Shelosh, which if you are a Lexingtonian tells you everything you need to know about Abdul. The Sheloshes run all the Marathon gas stations and most of the check cashing outlets in town; they are as close as Lexington comes to organized crime. Abdul billed himself as the black sheep of the Shelosh family when he came to work for us, which I took to mean that he was the lone honest one in the bunch. That turned out not to be the case, though. The reason he’s the black sheep is that instead of being criminally insane, he is just plain old regular insane. Wale let him go after he showed up at the base late one night and dropped his trousers in front of Big Beth, the dispatcher. Waving his goodies at her, he promised to “take her to heaven.” When she declined, he got angry and busted up the joint with a gigantic wrench.  

#31 Jay – busily working on my Cabbie Manifesto… it’s gonna be like Chicken Soup for the Frickin’ Cabdriver. (For sample lessons, see Drivers #69, #75, and #77 below. Throw in Truitt’s tendency to run out of gas and that’s about the meat of it.)

#36 Jeannetta – I don’t see Jeannetta a lot these days, as we work diametrically opposing schedules. We text a bit, share some fares, stop and chat when we can if cruise is slow. Once in a blue moon, we will have a quick Signal-36 at her apartment or the base.

#44 Speedy Dave – Speedy came back to the company for almost a week before we had to repo his car again for non-payment of lease. I haven’t seen him on the road since then and the rumor is that he has stopped driving a cab all together. I blame it all on his succubus.

#51 James – a surly middle-aged black man who came over from Yellow, James is an anti-social dick. He spends most of his time at the airport so our paths thankfully don’t cross that often.

#53 Kofi – another reject from Yellow who can’t find his own ass.

#59 Lee – Back in the middle of September, Lexington experienced some pretty heavy flash flooding. Two college girls drowned on Alumni Blvd. after being swept into storm sewers. They decided to get out of the taxi they were riding in when it was turned around by the police and attempt to wade home. They didn’t make it. One actually did make it but went back when she heard her friend scream. They were each found over a mile away from where they first went under: one by St. Joe’s, the other by Lafayette High.

Lee was driving their taxi. He left the company the next week and I haven’t seen him driving a cab since.

#66 Neon Leon – The city actually took Leon’s hack permit away for about a week… before giving it right back to him. How does the joke go: only cockroaches, Dick Clark, and Cher will survive the a-bomb? Let’s add Leon to that list.

#68 & #86 The Dutch Boys – The Dutch Boys joined the Jihad for a few months after (yet another) falling out with Wale over non-payment of lease but have returned in the past couple weeks. Of note: when they left the company all the strays at the base disappeared, since they have come back so have the cats. (There is a joke there somewhere but I’m not going to be the one to make it.)

#69 Danny – Danny is the living incarnation of greed. It is his primary motivating factor. This is not a good quality in a cab driver. There is a reason it is one of the seven deadly sins. Let me tell you a little story about greed, about Danny:

A couple weekends ago when it was raining so hard, he was dispatched out to the Spearmint Rhino to pick up a stripper. She was ready and waiting when he got there at 3:30. As he pulled away with her in the cab he was flagged down by two guys standing outside the club. They offered him $40 if he would drive them back into town. Without asking the stripper if it was okay, Danny waved them into the cab. He did the same thing with two other fellows at the Shell station next door, again not asking permission from the stripper (whose cab it rightfully was.)

For those of you who don’t know, strippers jealously guard their privacy. They dance under assumed names, they don’t give out their home numbers, they don’t tell people where they live, and they always have someone (bouncer, boyfriend, etc.) escort them outside to their ride after work. This is just smart because they are at such a high risk for violent crimes.

As it turns out, all four guys that Danny squoze into the cab had been her customers that night. Now all four of them know exactly where she lives, and two of them even live in the same apartment complex as she does. Of course, that didn’t matter to Danny. What mattered to Danny was the quick $100 he was going to make from that one ride ($40 from each pair of guys and another $20 from the stripper.)

A couple days later, she filed a complaint with the company through Kevin (the next driver to pick her up.) To remedy the situation, Kevin told management about the complaint and then took her on as one of his regulars. Now she calls him direct and rides with no one else. Had Danny acted in a lawful (what he did is against hack regulations) and responsible manner she could have been his regular instead of Kevin’s. But Danny just couldn’t turn down that quick $100. He used those very words later on at the office, when he was scoffing to Big Beth about Kevin’s “whining little ass.” 

Kevin just shrugged when he heard this from Big Beth, and said, “I make about a hundred a week from her now. So who’s the loser?”

This is what greed gets you.

#75 Big Mike – Ironically, the stripper was originally Big Mike’s regular… but then he went on vacation. Instead of having someone he could trust take care of her in the interim (I refer my peeps to Rick, Dennis, or Kevin at night and Rick, Jeannetta, or Bobby during the day) he put her calls on the dispatch board. Lesson: always take care of your people.

#77 Adel – Originally from Pacmanistan, Adel was fired by both Yellow Cab and Jihad Taxi before coming over to us. As crooked as grinch teeth, Adel is likely the most dishonest cab driver in town. He uses every dirty trick in the book to rip people off: he'll run a hot meter, take the long way to destinations, charge by the head, over-stuff his cab with passengers, etc. Get this: he not only scans the competition's air to clip their drivers, but clips any of our own drivers he can.

But, as we all know, this type of assholery comes back to haunt you: in a 12-hour span last week, Adel had two of the tires on his cab slashed (he thinks it was Willie, but we are pretty certain it was Luke) and got punched in the face (by Farmer John, a yellow driver Adel clipped at the airport last weekend.) Now, ain’t karma a bitch?

#94 Mef – his list of demands didn’t go over well at all with Wale. When Wale told him to stick them up his ass, Mef painted his pimp sled bright yellow and went back to driving for the Empire. 

#99 Truitt – in the last couple weeks of December, Truitt was always reminding folks that he wouldn’t be working as a cabbie after New Year’s Eve. He said it was because his baby-mama insisted on him getting a job where he could actually make money. It was at this point I always pointed out that he could make money as a cab driver if he’d ever pull his head out of his ass, it being considerably easier to see the road that way.) None of us believed that he was actually going to quit. Well, it’s been over four months now and we still ain’t got no Truitt. (Personally, I won’t believe he isn’t coming back until next New Year.)

#122 Bobby – another defector from Yellow, Bobby is a veteran driver. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and is covered with tats. When he isn’t driving a taxi, he plays guitar in a local band. Bobby is good people.