I can remember that when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California the seriousness of his campaign came into question because of his profession. The “Who’d vote for a Hollywood actor?” complaint resurfaced when he ran for President.
Any of us who refused to take seriously an actor running for President was mistaken. He’s generally considered now to be one of the most consequential American leaders of my lifetime.
A lot can change in 30 or 40 or 50 years, often in ways we don’t expect. Do you remember driving down the street on the edge of campus between the stadium and the ACC? Juniper, wasn’t it? The low-rent neighborhood bars at Five Points? Bridgett McGuires, Corby’s. Has an economist ever studied a connection between supply-side Reaganomics and how much the area in and around Notre Dame has changed since I watched his commencement address there in 1981?
A few years after that I was driving a cab in South Bend, a job that gave me my clearest insight into the lives of its citizens. The Five Points area opened for me not long after it had closed for the people who didn’t live there. I was out early in the Yellow Cab I’d picked up at the garage on Niles Avenue, driving by the beer cans and food wrappers the students had left behind. People romanticize about college, past the point of believability, while the people who live next to it get up and get to work every day, always have and always will. I took neighborhood-friendly three dollar fares to get financially strapped folks to work and to the doctor and to the grocery store and to the laundromat. Sometimes students got into my cab, bragging to one another about how drunk they were the night before, but they had nothing to say to me. Forty years later, I suppose they still regale one another with stories about the old Corby Tavern while I remember Corby Cleaners.
On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, I had picked up three guys at Corby Cleaners and then helped them unload their army surplus bag from the back of my cab before I hurried to the next fare that took me to Logan Street on the Mishawaka side, where, when I reached for my margarine tub for change, I noticed it was gone. My margarine tub with the slit in the lid that held my loose change and the vouchers that some of my my riders used instead of cash was gone and I knew, I just knew as I searched for the missing tub, that the Corby Cleaners to North Hill Street guys had it. So without thinking about the possible ramifications I let my dispatcher know and I headed back over there to get it. We need to have a conversation, is all. I’ll explain the situation.
Have you ever been windows down enjoying a warm weather drive, stopped for traffic, when the noise blaring from the vehicle that pulls up beside you forces you to roll up your windows? It’s a fierce Hoosier values competition out there, motorcycles, pick-ups, and stereos. What is it that makes someone want to share the pulsating annoyance of vibrating aluminum?
That’s the noise I felt when I returned to the house on Hill Street in a grouchy mood already because I’d been driving down South Bend city streets since 5:00 A.M. and I felt entirely entitled to get my money back which wasn’t actually very much, some change and three or four vouchers from the day that would be of no use to anyone but me, because it was my money dammit. And that tub was mine, too.
As I remember it, the walls of the one-story bungalow were bending to the beat, like some sort of Looney Tunes production as I parked my orange Yellow Cab next to the sidewalk in front of the laundromat crew abode and then trudged purposely up the sidewalk. While I helped the young fellows get the laundry into and out of the trunk as a friendly courtesy for a three dollar fare with no tip, one of them decided that my tub was as much his as mine. I could see the story as plain as day.
I knocked on the door and I knocked again, harder, because how could anyone hear me above the vibrating racket, but it wasn’t until the music suddenly stopped, as I stood alone in silence for a minute or two, on their concrete slab step in front of their door that my decision to return to the scene of the crime for a few quarters and dimes and ten dollars worth of vouchers might have been rash. The silence was louder than the beats. I’m a sitting duck, I thought.
As I pondered my options, the door suddenly opened a crack, through which a voice said, “Yeah?” through which I said, “I need to talk to the guys I just brought back here with the laundry in my cab.”
The door closed. As another silent minute passed, I wondered some more about my wisdom. “I should just tell them to keep it,” I thought. I could get killed.
A minute later, as another cab driver pulled up to check on me, the door cracked again and a hand attached to an arm reached out with the tub and said, “Here.” The tub.
And then hand said, “Could you give me a ride downtown?”
Music: "Angela" (Theme From Taxi) by Bob James
