Through the Open Shield

Originally posted on Common Ties a wonderful website which I am very happy to write for.

By Tom D’Antoni

It was 1992 and I had it going. I was living in Baltimore. I had a writer/producer staff job at an advertising agency, I had a show on a national talk radio network, I had begun publishing an alternative newspaper and I was producing a TV show for the Mayor of Baltimore. Around that time King World hired me to produce segments for a new TV show they were introducing starring comedian Tim Reid. And I was living with my poet girlfriend and helping her raise a 10-year-old son.

I had a great life.

Within six months it was all gone. Everything, including the girlfriend. Some of it was my fault and some of it was bad fortune. Doesn’t matter though, does it?

I had nowhere to turn. I got a job driving a cab and spent the next two-plus years working at America’s single most dangerous occupation.

Driving a cab in a city like Baltimore is not like driving a cab in New York or L.A. where, although it sucks, it is perceived as a way-station, an in-between job for creative types. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a godsend for immigrants, and in towns like Portland, Oregon, drivers actually enjoy their work and make a profession out of it. But see, I had already had my work before millions of people and I was over 40. It felt like a dead end. How could I ever recover? I didn’t see any way possible.

I played the kill-me game. I would pick up anyone. I picked up every criminal I could find. Maybe one of them would kill me. Baltimore was a racist town, probably still is, and the hatred went both ways. I was the fish and the cab was the barrel.

It felt good having sunk so low. It confirmed all the bad things I believed about myself. If I had been smart enough, I thought, I would have been a real criminal. They weren’t going to have their phone cut off. They didn’t have a heart to break. I was stuck. I could see no way out.

I was in shock. I felt the pain, but I was too numb, hurt too badly to feel all of it. I drove cabs so beat up they shouldn’t have been on the street. I wasn’t able to drive every day. I didn’t want to die that much. I was passive aggressive about my suicide. Three, maybe four nights a week, and no weekends, too much competition. I could make as much on a Monday as those poor bastards did fighting each other for fares on the weekends.

It was too crazy on the weekends, anyway. I couldn’t even commit to my own suicide enough to risk being out there at 1:30 a.m. when the night was at its peak, when the bars were almost closed, and the frenzy of drunken, vicious men scavenged the streets, out to use the night and everybody in it for their own purposes, no matter what the cost.

Fridays were the worst. People got paid on Fridays. You never had the back of the cab empty then. You were never out of danger. I wanted to choose my poison. I didn’t leave the house thinking, “Tonight I’m gonna do something to cause them to kill me.” Maybe it would just happen that way.

Odd, in light of this, that I wouldn’t drive without a shield between the front and back seats. Some drivers wouldn’t drive WITH one. They didn’t pick up criminals.

Cab drivers were getting shot all the time, blown away usually from the back seat, sometimes from the driver’s side window. It didn’t make me feel anything. I figured one of these days my number would come up. There would be a lot of pain for a brief moment, and then all the pain would stop.

I felt time running out. I had spent so much time working at what I did best, the writing, TV and radio … this should have been the time I put it all together and really did something. Instead, I was in this cab. I could feel the time slipping by like I was bleeding to death.

I thought about those self-righteous self-help bastards on TV, always talking about having a choice … nice theories … bullshit in reality. Ask a junkie. Ask a drunk. Ask the cab driver.

In the depths of it all, I picked up a black woman and her little daughter who was maybe 5 years old. I left the shield open. We didn’t talk after she told me where she was going. I was so buried under the weight of my failure I could barely talk to anyone.

What prompted her, I’ll never know. We drove in silence for 10 minutes. I stopped at a red light. Without warning, the little girl grasped the base of the open shield with both of hands. She stuck her head through the opening in the shield and said, “I love you.”

I busted out crying.

It was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.

Through my tears, I said, “I love you, too.” I don’t know if her mother heard me or what she thought, but she must have been as surprised as I was.

My misery continued for another couple of years, but that one moment of pure angelic bliss has never left my mind.