Yesterday, we left as Jaws’ cab driving tale was just starting to pick up steam, with Clyde, his drunken passenger starting to make trouble. If you missed yesterday’s installment, just click here and then follow along below. Take it away, Jaws!
"That's twenty dollars, jackass, then you can get the fuck out of my cab and don't you ever call this company again."
Clyde crumpled up one twenty-dollar bill and threw it at me, bouncing it off my forehead and said he wanted exact change or he'd beat me like a fucking dog. His eyes got big and he balled his fists. He began to lean towards me. Hokay fine, asshole, here's your fucking change.
I gave him a taste of pepper, literally. Direct hit in the eyes and mouth. Was I afraid? Christ, I should have been! I really should have been. Clyde was pretty fucking big. But after you've spent ten hours plus on the road, the last two or three hours of it babysitting bar rush drunks and suffering their quaint little brain-dead goddamned drunken antics, you just get too damned tired to be afraid. So, it's twenty dollars, Clyde, and fuck you very much.
A little word about pepper spray before I tell you what happened next. The statistics on that stuff (I've read them) are fairly accurate. Nine times out of ten, Manners In a Can (that's my nickname for pepper, I also call it Cabbie's Little Helper) turns an attacker into a whimpering cur, all the snot and fight gone in a light second. One time in ten it only makes 'em meaner. Clyde, being an ex-Marine with two priors for assault, as I found out later at his trial, was "a one."
Next thing I know, Clyde has his forearm wrapped around my throat and is pounding my shoulder and the back of my head, raising a few welts to be sure, but doing no major damage. The cab was still in drive, and my foot slipped off the brake and onto the accelerator. Now the cab is tearing aimlessly around the parking lot, tires squealing, missing parked cars at times by less than a foot. Thank whatever gods there may be that there were no other souls hanging around that lot that night. The voice of Oliver Hardy spoke up inside my head: "Here's another fine mess you've gotten me into! Now, what do you have to say for yourself? Mmm...mmm...mmm..!" Stan Laurel spoke up next, blubbering and whining in that semi-apoplectic style that was his trademark.
Clyde suddenly decided it might be more fun to try to pull my face off with his free hand. He stuck his fingers into my cheek, getting his ring finger in between my incisors and molars on the right side of my deadly jaws, and a local legend was born. Oliver Hardy spoke up one more time that night, "Thank you so very much, sir!" I proceeded to chew Clyde's finger off, thus earning my street name of, "Jaws."
I have to give it to him, Clyde was pretty tough. He didn't scream, but he did say and I quote: "Errr... motherfucker..."
A word at this point concerning the consumption of living human flesh:
A. As a flavorful and nutritious taste treat, human flesh leaves a lot to be desired. It's quite bland.
B. It's a lot tougher to bite through than it looks like in a zombie movie. Very tough. Very stringy.
C. When your teeth go through a human finger bone, the noise it makes is not so much of a crunch, it's more like a bowl of Rice Krispies...snap, crackle, pop...don't you know. Stick the end of a chicken drumstick into your mouth the next time you're at KFC and bite down as hard as you can, right through the bone, the sound is almost exactly the same.
I slammed on the brakes, and this caused Clyde to loosen his grip on me a bit, and at the same time I found the door handle. I flung the door open, turned against Clyde's grip and lunged free of the car. The car, of course, was still in gear when I jumped free and it proceeded across the parking lot on its own at about three mph with Clyde still in the back seat, howling and raving and blind from the pepper and squirting blood all over the parking lot and down the side of my cab. I could give a fuck. I was busy running my ass over to the Standard station about a block and a half away.
As the car went one way and I ran the other way, I could have sworn I heard the Doppler Effect being demonstrated in Clyde's dwindling curses and observations concerning my ancestry.
I made it to the Standard station, pushed my way through the door and I said to the pimplehead behind the counter, "Sir, I don't mean to alarm you, but there's a raving maniac out there with a bloody stump of a finger who will probably kill us both if he makes it over this way. I strongly suggest you lock the door while I call the police. Thank you."
Well, the pimplehead was too chagrined by my appearance to do much of anything, so I figured fuck him if he can't take a goddamned joke and I dialed 911 anyway.
After the cops got an abbreviated but to-the-point version of the story, I called up the Blue & Orange driver line and told them what happened. I was still out of breath when I hung up the phone, and then the pimplehead wanted me to shed a little light on as to what exactly the fuck was going on.
So I told him as much of the story as I could before, lo and behold, Mrs. Clyde came out of the darkness and in through the door and started screaming at me, "What did you do to my husband's eyes! What the hell did you do to my husband's eyes!"
Well, as it so happened, I just happened to have managed to hang on to the pepper spray through the whole sorry ordeal, and I was within about a second or so of showing her what I did to Clyde's eyes, so they could both sort of, you know, compare notes down at the emergency ward.
That's when the first squad rolled up and the cop inside it asked, "All right, what the hell happened here?"
Mrs. Clyde, a stocky little sow with a face like the back end of a truck and mean little eyes, decided not to escalate the situation any further with a cop present and ran off, presumably to check on the status of her idiot spouse. With Mrs. Clyde out of the way, I told the cop what happened. I then got into the squad car and the cop drove me back to the scene of the festivities.
When we got there, from the looks of things and as far as the Blaine cops were concerned, I must have made their whole fucking night. At least five squads and two rescue vehicles were there. There was a party goin' on! Clyde himself was strapped to a gurney. His bitten hand was packed into a plastic bag full of blood and ice. A cop was standing beside the ambulance that Clyde was being bundled into with his foot on the bumper and dangling a pair of handcuffs from his index finger. He was dangling them right into Clyde's face, because Clyde was still feeling all naughty and rambunctious and yelling, "Punk! Punk! Punk!" over and over again right into the cop's face and, in general, endearing himself to virtually every cop in the parking lot.
Mrs. Clyde was about twenty feet away from the ambulance talking to a cop. She had a large sheath of paperwork in her hand and was looking at me with nasty little poisonous looking invisible-except-for-me-death rays shooting out of her eyes directly at me. Not a pretty sight!
I couldn't help thinking to myself, How often does he beat you? How often does he beat your kids? How often do you let him? Asshole!
There were about ten or so people, bystanders, in the lot that night. One of them walked up to me and said that she'd heard somewhere that ol' Clyde had Hepatitis B and suggested that I get myself tested. Great! Fucking wonderful! As it turned out I did manage to swallow some of Clyde's blood. Just fucking wonderful! I had no health insurance.
The rest of the night was anticlimactic. The paramedic asked if I wanted to go to the hospital to be looked at. I said, "No." The cop asked if I wanted to sign a complaint. I said, “I do." Then I asked the cop if we were all through, cause I wanted to go home and brush the human flesh from between my fangs. The cop actually giggled, and then I said I hope I gave that son of a bitch the fucking rabies. The cop kind of hiccuped, kept a straight face and told me it was all right to go home.
I went to the cab and found that it had stopped against a high curb at the end of the parking lot, no damage except that the front license plate had been knocked off at impact. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that the whole back deck was covered with blood. It looked worse than the Manson murder car! Streams of blood on the fenders, ghastly graphic bloody handprints in several places on the trunk, blood spatters all over the trunk and fenders. Ed Gein would have been really proud let me tell you. And I don't even want to talk about the cab's interior. Y'see, after the cab hit the curb, Clyde got out of the back seat and decided to beat up the car. A regular Rhodes scholar, don't you think? A cop walked up to me and suggested that I get a car wash before I tried to go back to work. I guess!
I left and drove straight to the Blue & Orange shop.
I was photographed. My bloody car was photographed. I went home, took a shower and went to bed, but it was hard to sleep. My jaw hurt a lot...it takes a lot of PSI's to bite off a human finger y'see and I strained the muscles in my jaw. My teeth hurt.
I was subpoenaed to appear at Clyde's trial. I showed up early and with joy in my heart. I had copies of every color photograph taken by the Blue & Orange insurance liaison. Clyde swore before the judge that he didn't remember a thing about the night in question. I went before the judge and reminded Clyde as to what happened {while the judge examined those photographs of me and my bloody murder-looking car at his leisure}. Clyde was convicted of fifth-degree assault and sentenced to ninety days, but was reduced to two weeks, and the court made him pay me the twenty dollars that was lost during the scuffle.
This is a true story and this is why they call me...Jaws.
Illustration by Jaws the Cabbie.
Further Reading: Two Fisted Cab Driving Tales, Two Fisted Customer Service Tales and The New Improved Testament.
