Valentine's Day

with Pepper the stripper, dumbasses Bill and Rudy, and more...

In 2001, when we lived in Albuquerque, and I taught at the University of New Mexico, Annie taught computer classes in continuing education. Pregnant with our son Asa, she started fainting at work and had to quit. Long story short, I started moonlighting as a night driver for Yellow Cab to try to replace her income. It ended up being one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was introduced into a world I had never known existed, filled with many people on the “fringes” of society who aren’t so different from the rest of us. Yes, even the hookers and drug dealers. When I would come home, I would tell Annie stories of what happened overnight. She said I should write them down. I said sometimes they come to me as poems. Then write them as poems, she said. So I did.

The resulting book, Yellow Cab, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2006. A couple of years later, it was turned into a play and was performed before 12 sold-out audiences in Albuquerque. Here in Iowa, Ann Wilkinson, then a theater prof at Central College, did a version with some new material titled “Dead Man’s Curve, which played at Central College and the now defunct Des Moines Social Club in 2012.

.

The following poem titled simply “Valentine’s Day,” consists of vignettes that describe what actually happened while I was driving on Valentine’s Day over two or three holidays during the four or five years I drove the cab. Note—I tinkered with the structure of the poem to better fit this newsletter format.

For those sensitive to such things, vulgarity ensues, and I won’t apologize for it. Some of the best parts of life are vulgar.

Climb in.

---

Valentine’s Day

I

Pepper, the stripper who works at TD's Gentlemen’s Club

made breakfast for her husband on Valentine's Day, and

first learned something was wrong when he threw it back at her,

eggs, toast, potatoes, plate, and all, and called her an ugly whore.

Am I ugly? she asked from my backseat.

No, you’re lovely dear.

Am I a whore?

Hardly. 

Her makeup ran teary, ashen rivers down her cheeks and chin,

and she convulsed and moaned over lost love, knees curled to 

her chest, lying down in my back seat, rocking my cab,

like a fat man was jumping up and down on the trunk.

I took a sweaty hundred-dollar bill she stuffed in my fist 

into the Phillips 66 at Coors and Paseo Del Norte 

and bought her a pint of Crown Royal and a pack of menthol 

Kools.

A spark of light, then the smell of sulfur, then menthol 

and burning tobacco leaf and something much like 

death but not quite filled the cab.

Then sweet smelling Crown Royal, and the rushing over rocks 

sound of gurgling, then the crash of swallowing, again and again, 

waves slamming against the shore of her throat. 

Drive, please, she said, wiping her mouth with the back of

her slender wrist, back and forth, almost violently,

grinding bone against painted red lips.

Maybe I can find him, I think I know where his girlfriend lives

and if I find him there, I'll fuck him up

bad.

Not a good idea, I said, gently, with images of tortured angry

faces including hers, screaming, flesh being pounded,

blood erupting from small amateur-induced body traumas

pulsing through my mind, and me in the middle

of a domestic one more time.

But his fucking girlfriend didn't do nothing to me,

and I wouldn't want to ruin her Valentine's Day,

even if it is with him. So just drive.

Drive till the money's gone.

And so I drove. Fast, my meter eating the hundred

at two dollars a mile, the quicker the better,

so I could let her off, hopefully to make a hundred more

off someone else, or maybe a dozen someones,

but first I had to rid myself of the bag of tears now on the

floor of my back seat, then climbing back up,

hitting me on the shoulder, not gently.

You men. I hate you men. We bleed, and bleed, and fucking

bleed ourselves to death giving you babies. And you don't fucking care.

I gave him our nine-month-old daughter. Our lovely daughter,

I could have died. We both could have died, my little girl and me.

And now I am nothing, an ugly old whore. And our little girl's daddy

betrayed her. And me.

And you fucking men don't think that you're betraying the kids,

just us ugly old whores, but you are, the kids most of all, she screamed.

So fuck Valentine's Day, that little bastard Cupid, he doesn't shoot an arrow,

he tosses a hand grenade your general direction and stupid bitches like me

run as fast as we can to throw ourselves on it.

---

II

A giant khaki coat walked toward me out of the darkness, its immense padding reminding me of an over-inflated rubber life raft with a plethora of pockets, perhaps filled with gear that survivors of a shipwreck might find useful: rations, flares, knives, fish hooks, and a compass, maybe. For effect or function, I’m not sure. The coat was rigged with drawstrings strung from pockets, seams, and eyelets as if the person inside could be quickly secured to a fire hydrant or car bumper if the earth started to heave in some planet-rocking cosmic wave of energy. Then the coat’s front doors opened, and a woman disembarked from its folds like she was walking down the gangplank of a ship, not a mere life raft, and she came ashore at the door of my cab and found her way inside even without the compass.

You know a big Black driver named Manny? she asked from the back seat with a thick Texas drawl on our 35-dollar run to the Double R. I nodded, thinking of a big brown leather-wrapped boulder of a man called Manny.

She shook her pretty black hair, smiled, and said, Manny and I go way back; he's my driver, my very own driver, it seems at times, and I love to talk to the big man, and we talk about life, love, and how good it would be for me to get my shit together someday. And he preaches to me the word of God, Jesus Christ Our Lord, and between the two, the Lord and Manny that is, they help me find my path, and that sweet ol’ boy Manny helps me with my sons, with advice and shit, and he tries to tell me when a man is no good, just like that one who just dumped me on the street back there, and I try to listen, but it doesn't always take, but Manny forgives me when it seems no one else will, so when you see Manny next time just tell him Linda loves him, and prays for him, and between you and me honey? Just between you and me?

I nodded and she sighed.

Right now, I'm praying that someday, someday, by God, someday, that big man Manny, that big wonderful man Manny, will be my Valentine, mine and mine alone, instead of the piece of shit Valentines I always seem to have about February time.

And in the morning, when we cashed in, I said to Manny,

Manny, I met a friend of yours, a pretty girl named Linda from the Double R, who says you go way back, and that she loves you, and that she prays for you, and thanks you for your help with her sons, and you preaching her the word of God, and helping her find a better path.

And big ol’ Manny, takes off his blue baseball cap, scratches his head, and says,

Whatchoo talkin’ bout, don't know no lady from the Double R named Linda.

She says you do.

Was she nice?

Yeah.

Was she pretty?

Yeah.

I'd remember a nice girl from The Double R. I'd remember a pretty girl from the Double R. You betcha. She must have me confused with another big black man who drives a cab in this life or in another she lives.

And he rolls back his big round basketball of a head and laughs.

Ain't that the shits, pretty girl likes me, and she in another man's cab on Valentine's Day, and I don't know who the fuck she is. Story’a my life!

---

III

I had a Valentine once, a lovely man, a gracious little man with a ducktail haircut back in 1957. A man who used to roll his cigarettes into the sleeve of his short-sleeved white T-shirt like they did back then, said Myrtle the nice lady at Circle K in Midtown as she took the $26.75 gas money from my hand and gave me my receipt.

And then, when I wasn't looking, my lovely little Valentine somehow turned into a deadbeat ex-husband who wouldn't pay his child support, the goddamn lying dog. I've always been puzzled since then if men eventually turn into dogs like fruit rots with time or if they were born that way, born as dogs, and if it just takes a woman a while to figure it out.

---

IV

Bill and Rudy,

the dumbasses I pick up

at Fantasy World,

the all-nude review,

complain when I ask

for money upfront.

And I say it's nothing personal,

it's just a bias I have against everyone

who lives in their neighborhood

which they accept.

And Rudy sighs and says,

we must be the only fuckin’ guys

in the world tonight who are not getting laid

given it’s Valentine's Day and all.

How the fuck can that happen,

how can we be so fuckin’ lame?

All the free pussy in the world,

and we can't find any.

Everyone has a Valentine but us,

and I don't fuckin’ believe it.

The problem with you guys, I say,

is that you've been looking for pussy,

when you shoulda been looking for a Valentine.

---

V

In the alley behind the Pulse,

two men kiss, and

one man rubs his hand,

lightly,

over the other man's

tight belly,

as I roll by, and my lights

flash on them,

then they turn shy,

and tenderly turn away,

from me,

but not each other,

as they move deeper

into the bushes,

on Valentine's Day.

---

VI

And so about midnight,

I tell Beverly,

a ghost of an old lady

and a regular,

who retired about a lifetime

ago, when I pick her up at

the nursing home and

take her to Sandia Casino,

that broken and bleeding

hearts

line the streets

of Albuquerque

and maybe the world

on Valentine's Day,

like armadillo roadkill

on a Texas Highway

on Saturday night.

Ah, says Beverly,

‘isn't love grand?

What I wouldn't give,

to be able to

break another

heart,

or two,

before I die.

---

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Dana James: New Black Iowa, Des Moines

Pat Kinney: View from Cedar Valley, Waterloo

Fern Kupfer: Fern and Joe, Ames

Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Bussey

Tar Macias: Hola Iowa, Iowa

Kurt Meyer, Showing Up, St. Ansgar

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Macey Spensley: The Midwest Creative, Iowa

Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land, Kalona

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