Hungry - in the most basic sense...(NFTD Archives)

...not for love nor lust nor instant intellectual gratification - o nay, nay knave, tis hunger far more basic and necessary to survival, namely that for a huge chocolate egg cream and a ham & swiss on rye, please - that hunger!

I can almost taste 'em, from The Hempstead Deli on Old Country Road - is that right? - where Jim made the best in New York sandwiches and I got to going in there a lot and tasting everything he made several times over over a number of years on my way to and from my job driving cab in New York...

Ahhhh...those were the days. Days of my youth when there was still hope and vigor and vitality, days when you now know you were at your best, days you can now see as the acme, but also the beginning of the decline...the higher the peaks the lower the valleys...

I've had a lot of jobs in my short sweet life but none can hold a candle to cab driving for a lasting power over me; it hovers in my memory as close as a blanket over me at night; it is comfort and it is warmth the memory of New York in a cab is...

I could faint so heavy the memory of it washing over me; if I stood surely I would fall, and then it is gone as my cab, M-42, comes ripping out of the Midtown into Manhattan and heads up on Park Avenue South to pick up a package, a package no less that I have to take to Garden City LI for IBM which is sending me and my taxi to Long Island with a box about the size of a book of matches which is intrinsic to conducting the Vietnam War and its telemetric circuitry...

At the time I was able to live with this paradox - me so free and riding in my taxi ('...takin' tips and gettin' stoned...') while delivering what might be a trigger for a bomb in Vietnam - I'd done my time in the Navy. I'd like to say I did something heroic but I'm afraid as I recall that I did the run regularly and was well-compensated for it by of all people IBM & my company, and so would have to say that I too participated in the evil and illegal war effort if only in a peripheral sense, and never mind 'if only' - there are no little murders I now realize and I'm not especially proud of that particular service.

...here I was raking in a bundle from IBM in fares and huge mandatory tips on a daily basis, and on the other hand raling balls to the wall against the war, even marching twice in the streets of Denver with 30,000 or so others...too hypocritical by half I say...not a matter of pride, but pride's a sin it is said, and so...

So I relate the experience as just another scenario and not a lesson or a confession or anything; just more to fill up my time so's not to go nuts from...well, from a number of things really but I get by. Do you? You get by right? Life's OK in the main, I can take it so far...I never thought I'd see 18 and here I am 64 so I guess I've been around a while...cab driving, truck driving, commercial salmon fishing, drinking as profession, bartending, bell-hopping/desk clerking - O those Wheelers in the Hotel Vermont in Burlington - how I loved them...but it didn't work out; they went to El Paso and me to San Diego...sailor, writer, reporter...laborer, bum...laborer...laborer...writer, student, Curator of The Dump, quarry worker, brakeman on a railroad, working on the guillotine in the marble company...bum...laborer, bum, bum, bum...window washer, furniture mover, cook, bum, laborer, laborer...working in a silver mine in Idaho...editor of several newspapers, student, laborer, bum, bum, bum...

Bum seems to win out by the numbers...it's not a bad life if you can stand the cold...and I haffta laff though it ain't truly funny. Or maybe it is all part of The Cosmic Joke? In which case it is rather funny in a wry, ironic sense and I get the message: anything goes.