Radio Cab 18 - Taco Bell Meth Junky on the Toilet

Taco Bell Meth Junky on the Toilet

Around ten o’clock I got an order to an address that looked familiar. I soon realized it was the address for my bank on north Killingsworth and Interstate, the problem was that it was a Sunday and my bank was closed therefore the “customer” that supposedly called for a cab was really just someone standing on the corner at the bus stop, and this isn’t the best bus stop in town to be picking up at. I don’t mean that people are necessarily dangerous at this bus stop, just that your chances of getting paid might be a little lower and your chances of something weird happening might be a little higher. It was a slow night and I was hungry for cash being the end of the month and all, so I didn’t flag the order. Really you never know when something like that could take up to Seattle or out to the coast, you just never know. Anyway, these people were not going to Seattle and they were not going to the coast.

When I pulled up there were two groups of two people at the bus stop. One group consisted of two twenty-something neighborhood dudes just waiting for the bus dressed in normal clothes and looking very non-threatening. I was hoping to god that these were my people. But just as I rolled down my window they looked up, shook their heads and pointed to the other two people at the bus stop. I back up the cab about ten feet and in comes a swaggering twitching sore ridden woman. She’s got on an expensive and brand new looking maroon fedora, filthy torn shirt, meth worn pants with what look like blood stains on them, and pair of bright orange straight off the shelf Nike shoes that I believe still had the tags on them and probably were on their way to being some kids new basketball shoes before this lady got a hold of them. With her she had two plastic grocery bags, one was filled with what appeared to be trash (and I mean TRASH, like straight out of a trash can behind a sleazy motel or something), the other looked to be a bag of wet clothes, mostly socks. She also had an arm load of Taco Bell and a paper bag with a cracked 40oz.

I could barely take my eyes off this woman, kind of like staring at a car crash or a burning building, you just can’t look away. I almost didn’t notice the perfectly normal looking black man that hopped in with her. He was in a clean tan sweater, nice pants, his hair was trimmed. He didn’t look scummy at all, an average dude. Boy, were these two a couple. The lady was flying back and forth twitching and grinding her teeth, scratching herself, and making a terrible mess with her Taco Bell. I have absolutely no idea why I didn’t kick them out right then and there. It was obvious within the first two seconds of having this lady in the car that something bad would happen. This lady looked like she couldn’t walk half a block without getting into some kind of trouble. For some reason though, this particular Sunday afternoon, I decided I really wanted to see how this thing would play out. I think cab driving for me is turning into some sick perversion or something. I just had to know what would happen. I had absolutely no expectation of getting any money from this fare, even with the normal guy with her this lady with her missing teeth and grinding jaw was just too horrible to pass up.

So we get to it. I asked where they were going, turns out its two stops, him first of course, 14th and Sumner, not too far. I pull out and we’re off. We don’t get half a block and this lady starts raving about God knows what, there’s no way either myself or the guy in the back could possibly understand a word she’s saying. Aside from the slurring of her Taco Bell filled gums she’s swaying back and forth so fast and talking in so many circles that I almost didn’t notice that she was also drooling on herself. Trying to ignore her I just drive to this poor guy’s house, I’m assuming that they were just at the bus stop together and he, for some god awful reason, was splitting a cab with her. Then I looked back in the rear view. They were making out! And I don’t mean just kissing, she had a fucking mouth full of Nachos Bell Grande and they were swapping it back and forth like 6th graders and a piece of gum. There was processed cheese and stale chips flying everywhere. I almost crashed the car when I saw her tongue slide up the side of his face. This man was no longer clean and nowhere near normal anymore. He was now a super freak. He just looked normal, this guy was into some shit that I hope I never have to see or hear about again. I’ve come across some gross situations in my life. I’ve been around kids and dogs and all their grossness. I’ve seen people on nasty drugs and people doing all kinds of weird shit on the internet, but this. This topped it all; it was by far the most disgusting thing I’ve witnessed in my life. To be that close, I could smell he fast food nacho breath moving from her revolting-ass mouth to his, infecting his once clean and healthy aura. A normal cab driver would have stopped the car, gotten his $5.50 and kicked them out into five o’clock traffic on MLK, but not me, I just watched it all the way to his house. I couldn’t stop. I did throw up a little in my mouth I think, and that almost made me throw them out, but I held it together.

When we got to his house he pleaded with the crazy woman and tried as best he could to get her to stay with him. That poor man, he’d been infected with crazy. His mind was now filled with dreams of Taco Bell scarffing meth junkies that want to take life to the next level of weird. He would obviously never be the same again. She would have no part of it though. She explained to me on the way to her house (at least this is what I think she said, it was near impossible to understand a word, and it was too nauseating to look back and try to read her lips) that she wanted to go home and sleep, he wanted her to come in and “party” (stay up longer doing drugs) and that sometimes you just have to say that enough is enough. Somehow this woman was the voice of reason in their short lived relationship.
She lived across town on 52nd and Division. This was going to mean another fifteen minutes of waiting in traffic and her crazy talk from the back seat. Not to mention all the mess she was making that could only get bigger. For the 19 blocks up to 33rd from 14th she was talking a mile a minute and was only catching about a word or two out of every run on sentence she threw at me. When we hit 33rd she was starting to quiet down, nodding out I think. The mess in the back seat was unbelievable. This was the only woman on the planet capable of this kind of filth. When we got to 39th she was out like a light, beer in hand and a Taco Bell pillow. Her trash and wet clothes was her blanket. Then that damn stop sign on Glisan. I glanced back just I applied the brake. Her hand just let go of the open 40oz and down it when pouring out all over the floor of my cab. I yelled at her to wake up. She snapped into an upright position and immediately apologized as if she was suddenly some kind of normal person and rules of common decency that once need not apply to her were now common place. She started telling me that she would take care of it when we got to her place and how sorry she was, on and on. Then she fell asleep again, this time with the cap on her beer.

I pulled up to her house and woke her up. She did another quick snap to an upright position. I said, “Its twenty three dollars.” Hoping that she was still that nice respectable person she was for thirty seconds when she spilled 40 ounces of malt liquor in my car, but of course not. She just closed her eyes and fell asleep right there, sitting up. I woke her again and she cursed me and fell back to sleep. I really didn’t want to have to touch this woman to get her out of the cab. I woke her again and thank God she started to get out… not having paid me yet. She threw the door open and tossed remainder of her Taco Bell on the sidewalk. Then threw to the bag of trash on the sidewalk (what‘s the point of carrying trash around with you if you’re just going to skater it somewhere else). She gathered her wet clothes and empty beer and got out. Then she told me to follow her around the corner. We argued for a minute about what would happen around the corner, mostly because I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me. You try dealing with a drunk-stoned meth junky with no teeth who owes you twenty five bucks and get back to me about how it goes.

I followed her to her door as she yelled and apologized and yelled some more. The beer in the car was long forgotten. I still expected not to get paid, but she kept telling me there was money to be had, she just had to go inside to get it for me. She opened the door, inside was a dark staircase that she somehow made it to the top of without plummeting to her death. At the top of the stairs she started screaming at me to go ahead and call the cops and telling me that I could fuck off and die. Then it got abruptly silent. The door was still open down stairs and she hadn’t turned any lights on yet in the house. My guess was that she passed out and I’d never see her again unless I wanted to go into her house, which by the way, was not going to happen. Then came the familiar sound of urine in a toilet, this woman was taking a piss, and a long one, it was going on forever. Then came the plopping, she was going all out up there, but still not talking. She finally yelled down the stairs to me and told me to reach in and turn on a light. This lady was obviously pissing and shitting at the top of the stairs and there was no way I was going to turn any lights on, besides I already decided not to go in the house. All of a sudden a light came on and a large black man appeared at the top of the stairs, he yelled down, “Who the fuck are you?” I told him I was the cab driver and that the woman owed me thirty bucks for her ride home. He moved down the hall and away from the top of the stairs to revile behind him the crazy woman sitting on a toilet pants around her ankles shaking her fist yelling, “Don’t you give him a penny over twenty!” The man came down and turned out to be her 15 year old son. He handed me a twenty dollar bill and said sorry. I told him I was sorry too, and I left.

When I got back to the cab the mess in the back was completely absurd. I did a quick once over to get all the trash and Taco Bell out of the car and left most of the beer, and that lovely beer smell that came with for the rest of the night. Every other customer must have either been drunk or assumed that I was drunk because that car smelled like the inside of that woman’s mouth for the next six to ten hours that I was driving it.