the unofficial mayor of san luis obispo
An excerpt from the memoir "The Cabby's Life"
By Dell Franklin
Late morning and I’m out at the airport with Harley Hunter awaiting three flights in the next half hour—from LA, San Francisco and Sacramento, a repository of trench-coated, chain-smoking lobbyists wishing to turn San Luis Obispo into a high-tech industrial hub that Harley claims will raise housing prices so high nobody but the rich will live here. Harley is first in line on a dead morning in town and we’re both desperate for a fare, having already read two newspapers and worked a crossword, wishing we were anywhere but here, and especially a bar.
We lean against Harley’s cab, which he keeps meticulously clean, as he does his person. Harley hands out business cards announcing himself as a “Cab Pilot.” Harley is the only cabbie on our staff who personally tailors his uniforms. Harley wears a little blue Irish cap of the likes John Wayne wore in “The Quiet Man” to keep the sun off his bald head, and his too-close-together eyes are set in a perpetual squint/frown. Harley runs his cab through the car wash at his own expense and claims it is as clean as his own personal vehicle, a Honda Civic on whose engine “one could eat.”
My cab is never washed and I drive a dusty, cluttered, duck-taped jalopy. I usually need a haircut and present a threadbare uniform. And though Harley is rendered almost physically ill at the sight of slovenliness and clutter, we get along famously. Before becoming a San Luis Obispo cab pilot, Harley, a bachelor, taught high school government in the ghetto in Oakland, where he tried to inspire the poor and downtrodden, and was beaten up badly, and taught government in his hometown of Bakersfield, where he quarreled with officialdom on a nonstop basis until they “squeezed him out on the claim he was burnt out.” Harley quibbles with our cab company management over matters large, small, and minute.
On days like this, the longer he goes without a ride, the more riled he becomes about his teaching days.
“I’ve got a college degree and what good does it do me?” he asks, looking distressed. “I’m driving a damn cab in Podunk for chump change.” He sips his nutrition drink from a cooler he keeps in his trunk while I sip my third coffee and munch on an apple fritter. “You can’t just teach anymore. Bureaucrats run the show. The worst, most incompetent teachers become principals, and superintendents, and they hook up with the most despicable swine anywhere, the goddam school board, a haven for corrupt, self-important, craven, power-hungry bullies…the sons of bitches won’t let you stand up at their trumped up so-called meetings, no, they over-rule you, they tell you about fucking time-limits, and here’s what they do—they supply the kids from the richest districts computers, when they already got their own computers, while the ghetto kids don’t even have decent fucking books…so help me God, I actually supplied them notebooks and pencils from my own salary…and I ended up getting beat up for it!”
Even though I’ve heard it for months, because I think it’s good for Harley to vent, I like it that Harley regards me as the only person he can talk to on the cab staff. In Bakersfield, according to Harley, it’s about teachers being the biggest ass-kissers and hypocrites of all. A teacher gets chummy with you at their little gossipy social gatherings and, like spies, like double-agents, stab you in the back so that you have to face a mealy-mouthed principal playing both ends against each other, a climber beholden to the politicians and school board tyrants above him and catering to the parents of students who are chronic whiners and need to be in the army!
I watch my pal sip his drink. “Well,” I tell him, finishing off my fritter and belching. “You should at least be thankful you’re out of Bakersfield, Harley.”
‘Yeh, sure, right…” He tugs at his neatly clipped salt-and-pepper mustache. “I was raised in a shit-hole, I come from a shit-hole, I come here to so-called gaga land to take care of my mother, who owns the house my dead father bought to retire in, and I’m stuck with this prick she remarried, I’m supposed to call him a step-father, he’s a goddam living breathing parasite!” He fires his empty bottle into the nearby trash can as a plane roars off. “The fat bastard won’t lift a finger to do a thing, won’t walk the dog or water the plants or mow the lawn, he sits on his ass all morning listening to Rush Limbaugh while my mother waits on him, and he watches Fox News all afternoon and reality television all night, and harasses me about being a liberal.” He shakes his head. “The sonofabitch wants everybody off welfare and social security, he wants ‘em on the streets, broke, homeless, and he wants to bomb the Arabs into smithereens. He worked at Boeing and got a disability pension for a bad back I could live like a king on…”
Harley’s been pacing, and stops, scowls at me. “Every Tuesday, when I go down to City Hall and get my three minutes on radio at the public forum at the board of supervisors, who are really a board of stooges and pawns of the Chamber of Commerce and the good old boys with money bags, the prick turns off Rush and listens to me, and when I get home he’s critiquing my performance. I go after the politicians and bureaucrats and the corporate whores cocking up our small town paradise, and he tells my mother I’m a nut case because I’m thinking of running for mayor.”
Harley tends to ramble and lose his main purpose and become too angry when he’s on the air, but many people in town look forward to his little tirades. I am a fan. “Look, Harley,” I tell him, as people from the parking lot behind us head toward the cyclone fence to wave at incoming passengers deplaning. “You are allowing yourself to become discombobulated over the stooges and your stepfather, and that’s playing right into their hands. It’s not good for your health, Harley.”
He nods, glum, resigned. “I can’t help it,” he admits. “I’ve got a social conscience. I care. Why you think I got bottles of pills in my cab? I got high blood pressure, a damn ulcer, migraines, insomnia, anxiety attacks…I can’t even get drunk any more, because the doc says I’m a walking time bomb, too much booze and I might explode.”
The day bartender at the oldest bar downtown, where Harley drinks among long-time regulars and college students, always turns off the TV and jukebox to listen to Harley’s three minutes of hell. Whenever I run into him the next day, he wants my appraisal. I’m almost always complimentary, but after this last session I feel it’s time to deliver him a dose of reality.
“Look, Harley, I heard you the other day, and you can’t waste two full minutes talking about the clump of shit you stepped in at Mitchell Park. For two minutes you described the awfulness of the shit on your shoe, and the big ordeal of cleaning it off, and how it poisoned your day. I mean, how are you gonna get elected mayor when all you can talk about is the shit on your shoe?” He starts to protest, but I raise my hand like a stop sign. “People think you’re an anal-obsessed crackpot talking about a clump of shit on your shoe…it’s downright repulsive.”
A plane lands with a roar. Harley stabs a finger in the air and is about to answer me, eyes flaring, when his cab phone crackles. He reaches into his cab and picks it up and looks instantly distraught. He turns and tells me he has to go downtown and pick up Alf, a decrepit, sour, malodorous old regular and railroad retiree whose been trying to drink himself to death in Bull’s Tavern every day for years and refuses to die. Alf starts boozing at 6 in the morning and has to be helped in and out of the cab and walked to his door 3 blocks from the bar, a $2.80 ride in which he always requests the 20 cents and proudly maintains he’s never tipped a cabbie. Once, while he swayed while dipping into his shirt pocket for the 3 usual crumpled singles, a crisp twenty flew out in a brisk breeze and I put my foot on it without a hitch as I returned his dimes and stuffed the twenty into my shirt pocket before leading Alf to his door. You always have to spray your cab with Lysol after picking up Alf.
Harley, behind the wheel, looks as though he’s going to his own execution. He swigs from a bottle of Pepto Bismol. Just as he prepares to take off, a trench-coated lobbyist from Sacramento toting only a computer jumps into the back seat of my cab. I’ve had him before. He’ll lay a twenty on me for a ride to the Chamber of Commerce and have me keep the change on an $11 fare and request I pick him up an hour and a half later. I’m pretty sure he’s down here pushing a pro-growth ballot on local politicians in cahoots with the money-bags. Harley looks suicidal as he drives off and I follow him down the road leading to the main artery. The trench-coat lights up, (Harley forbids smoking in his cab) and says, “What’s the name of that cabbie who just drove off?”
“That’s Harley.”
“Right. He gave me his card. Calls himself a cab pilot. Guy’s a real piece of work, huh?”
“Oh yeah, Harley’s an entertainer, a real comedian.”
“I like him, but Jesus, the guy can overwhelm you, to say the least. He’s into his political agenda, all upset, says he wants to run for mayor. He can’t be serious. I mean, he’s telling me he hates this place and wants to move. I’ve never met anybody who doesn’t love San Luis Obispo. I just read it was voted one of the top ten most desirable cities to live in America. No smog. No crowds or traffic. No crime. Beaches next door. A beautiful little paradise.”
“Yeah, Harley went on vacation to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He wants to move there. Says the people are friendlier, and it’s cleaner. That’s the biggest bone of contention with Harley—cleanliness.”
“This place is clean as it gets.”
“It’s not clean enough for Harley. He says there’s too much dogshit in the parks. One of the reasons he’s running for mayor is to prosecute all those responsible for not picking up their dog’s shit in parks. In fact, if you get on your computer, you can listen to Harley address the board of supervisors on public radio. It’s worth waiting for. He’s a real card.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
After dropping the lobbyist off, I check in with the dispatcher, who says a lawyer was coming out of City Hall and to take him to the airport, where a man awaits me for a ride to the Cliffs, a resort hotel in Shell Beach, a $22 ride and probably a salesman. She tells me to hurry, because Harley would be bogged down taking little old ladies back and forth from the market, which meant more $4 fares and puny tips to fuel his rage and his sense that life hated him.
The salesman going to Shell Beach is in high spirits at attending a convention and tips me well and back at the airport a woman needs to go to Cal Poly. Another fare needs a ride from a country home to the airport. Later, after returning the lobbyist to the airport, I pull in ahead of Harley for the second arrival of afternoon planes. Harley is so morose he refuses to get out of his cab. Planes land. A handsome, perky couple in their thirties, dressed in style, with Texas accents and designer luggage, approach me. They are going to a high-end resort/winery out in Paso Robles, a $60 ride, at least. I gaze at Harley, who looks like he might cry as he sizes them up. I walk to his window. Harley is all about fair play and despises greed and will always buy you a drink in the bar.
“Those folks are going to Paso, a resort. You want ‘em?”
He busts out of his cab and opens the rear door for them and takes their luggage, and he smiles for the first time all day as he asks them where they were from. Driving off, he is talking to them, animated, no doubt filling them in on the dos and don’ts in San Luis Obispo county.
(Eventually Harley ran for mayor as a write-in candidate and got twenty something votes, mostly from the bar where he drank. I’d have voted for him, but I live in Cayucos.)
By Dell Franklin
Late morning and I’m out at the airport with Harley Hunter awaiting three flights in the next half hour—from LA, San Francisco and Sacramento, a repository of trench-coated, chain-smoking lobbyists wishing to turn San Luis Obispo into a high-tech industrial hub that Harley claims will raise housing prices so high nobody but the rich will live here. Harley is first in line on a dead morning in town and we’re both desperate for a fare, having already read two newspapers and worked a crossword, wishing we were anywhere but here, and especially a bar.
We lean against Harley’s cab, which he keeps meticulously clean, as he does his person. Harley hands out business cards announcing himself as a “Cab Pilot.” Harley is the only cabbie on our staff who personally tailors his uniforms. Harley wears a little blue Irish cap of the likes John Wayne wore in “The Quiet Man” to keep the sun off his bald head, and his too-close-together eyes are set in a perpetual squint/frown. Harley runs his cab through the car wash at his own expense and claims it is as clean as his own personal vehicle, a Honda Civic on whose engine “one could eat.”
My cab is never washed and I drive a dusty, cluttered, duck-taped jalopy. I usually need a haircut and present a threadbare uniform. And though Harley is rendered almost physically ill at the sight of slovenliness and clutter, we get along famously. Before becoming a San Luis Obispo cab pilot, Harley, a bachelor, taught high school government in the ghetto in Oakland, where he tried to inspire the poor and downtrodden, and was beaten up badly, and taught government in his hometown of Bakersfield, where he quarreled with officialdom on a nonstop basis until they “squeezed him out on the claim he was burnt out.” Harley quibbles with our cab company management over matters large, small, and minute.
On days like this, the longer he goes without a ride, the more riled he becomes about his teaching days.
“I’ve got a college degree and what good does it do me?” he asks, looking distressed. “I’m driving a damn cab in Podunk for chump change.” He sips his nutrition drink from a cooler he keeps in his trunk while I sip my third coffee and munch on an apple fritter. “You can’t just teach anymore. Bureaucrats run the show. The worst, most incompetent teachers become principals, and superintendents, and they hook up with the most despicable swine anywhere, the goddam school board, a haven for corrupt, self-important, craven, power-hungry bullies…the sons of bitches won’t let you stand up at their trumped up so-called meetings, no, they over-rule you, they tell you about fucking time-limits, and here’s what they do—they supply the kids from the richest districts computers, when they already got their own computers, while the ghetto kids don’t even have decent fucking books…so help me God, I actually supplied them notebooks and pencils from my own salary…and I ended up getting beat up for it!”
Even though I’ve heard it for months, because I think it’s good for Harley to vent, I like it that Harley regards me as the only person he can talk to on the cab staff. In Bakersfield, according to Harley, it’s about teachers being the biggest ass-kissers and hypocrites of all. A teacher gets chummy with you at their little gossipy social gatherings and, like spies, like double-agents, stab you in the back so that you have to face a mealy-mouthed principal playing both ends against each other, a climber beholden to the politicians and school board tyrants above him and catering to the parents of students who are chronic whiners and need to be in the army!
I watch my pal sip his drink. “Well,” I tell him, finishing off my fritter and belching. “You should at least be thankful you’re out of Bakersfield, Harley.”
‘Yeh, sure, right…” He tugs at his neatly clipped salt-and-pepper mustache. “I was raised in a shit-hole, I come from a shit-hole, I come here to so-called gaga land to take care of my mother, who owns the house my dead father bought to retire in, and I’m stuck with this prick she remarried, I’m supposed to call him a step-father, he’s a goddam living breathing parasite!” He fires his empty bottle into the nearby trash can as a plane roars off. “The fat bastard won’t lift a finger to do a thing, won’t walk the dog or water the plants or mow the lawn, he sits on his ass all morning listening to Rush Limbaugh while my mother waits on him, and he watches Fox News all afternoon and reality television all night, and harasses me about being a liberal.” He shakes his head. “The sonofabitch wants everybody off welfare and social security, he wants ‘em on the streets, broke, homeless, and he wants to bomb the Arabs into smithereens. He worked at Boeing and got a disability pension for a bad back I could live like a king on…”
Harley’s been pacing, and stops, scowls at me. “Every Tuesday, when I go down to City Hall and get my three minutes on radio at the public forum at the board of supervisors, who are really a board of stooges and pawns of the Chamber of Commerce and the good old boys with money bags, the prick turns off Rush and listens to me, and when I get home he’s critiquing my performance. I go after the politicians and bureaucrats and the corporate whores cocking up our small town paradise, and he tells my mother I’m a nut case because I’m thinking of running for mayor.”
Harley tends to ramble and lose his main purpose and become too angry when he’s on the air, but many people in town look forward to his little tirades. I am a fan. “Look, Harley,” I tell him, as people from the parking lot behind us head toward the cyclone fence to wave at incoming passengers deplaning. “You are allowing yourself to become discombobulated over the stooges and your stepfather, and that’s playing right into their hands. It’s not good for your health, Harley.”
He nods, glum, resigned. “I can’t help it,” he admits. “I’ve got a social conscience. I care. Why you think I got bottles of pills in my cab? I got high blood pressure, a damn ulcer, migraines, insomnia, anxiety attacks…I can’t even get drunk any more, because the doc says I’m a walking time bomb, too much booze and I might explode.”
The day bartender at the oldest bar downtown, where Harley drinks among long-time regulars and college students, always turns off the TV and jukebox to listen to Harley’s three minutes of hell. Whenever I run into him the next day, he wants my appraisal. I’m almost always complimentary, but after this last session I feel it’s time to deliver him a dose of reality.
“Look, Harley, I heard you the other day, and you can’t waste two full minutes talking about the clump of shit you stepped in at Mitchell Park. For two minutes you described the awfulness of the shit on your shoe, and the big ordeal of cleaning it off, and how it poisoned your day. I mean, how are you gonna get elected mayor when all you can talk about is the shit on your shoe?” He starts to protest, but I raise my hand like a stop sign. “People think you’re an anal-obsessed crackpot talking about a clump of shit on your shoe…it’s downright repulsive.”
A plane lands with a roar. Harley stabs a finger in the air and is about to answer me, eyes flaring, when his cab phone crackles. He reaches into his cab and picks it up and looks instantly distraught. He turns and tells me he has to go downtown and pick up Alf, a decrepit, sour, malodorous old regular and railroad retiree whose been trying to drink himself to death in Bull’s Tavern every day for years and refuses to die. Alf starts boozing at 6 in the morning and has to be helped in and out of the cab and walked to his door 3 blocks from the bar, a $2.80 ride in which he always requests the 20 cents and proudly maintains he’s never tipped a cabbie. Once, while he swayed while dipping into his shirt pocket for the 3 usual crumpled singles, a crisp twenty flew out in a brisk breeze and I put my foot on it without a hitch as I returned his dimes and stuffed the twenty into my shirt pocket before leading Alf to his door. You always have to spray your cab with Lysol after picking up Alf.
Harley, behind the wheel, looks as though he’s going to his own execution. He swigs from a bottle of Pepto Bismol. Just as he prepares to take off, a trench-coated lobbyist from Sacramento toting only a computer jumps into the back seat of my cab. I’ve had him before. He’ll lay a twenty on me for a ride to the Chamber of Commerce and have me keep the change on an $11 fare and request I pick him up an hour and a half later. I’m pretty sure he’s down here pushing a pro-growth ballot on local politicians in cahoots with the money-bags. Harley looks suicidal as he drives off and I follow him down the road leading to the main artery. The trench-coat lights up, (Harley forbids smoking in his cab) and says, “What’s the name of that cabbie who just drove off?”
“That’s Harley.”
“Right. He gave me his card. Calls himself a cab pilot. Guy’s a real piece of work, huh?”
“Oh yeah, Harley’s an entertainer, a real comedian.”
“I like him, but Jesus, the guy can overwhelm you, to say the least. He’s into his political agenda, all upset, says he wants to run for mayor. He can’t be serious. I mean, he’s telling me he hates this place and wants to move. I’ve never met anybody who doesn’t love San Luis Obispo. I just read it was voted one of the top ten most desirable cities to live in America. No smog. No crowds or traffic. No crime. Beaches next door. A beautiful little paradise.”
“Yeah, Harley went on vacation to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He wants to move there. Says the people are friendlier, and it’s cleaner. That’s the biggest bone of contention with Harley—cleanliness.”
“This place is clean as it gets.”
“It’s not clean enough for Harley. He says there’s too much dogshit in the parks. One of the reasons he’s running for mayor is to prosecute all those responsible for not picking up their dog’s shit in parks. In fact, if you get on your computer, you can listen to Harley address the board of supervisors on public radio. It’s worth waiting for. He’s a real card.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
After dropping the lobbyist off, I check in with the dispatcher, who says a lawyer was coming out of City Hall and to take him to the airport, where a man awaits me for a ride to the Cliffs, a resort hotel in Shell Beach, a $22 ride and probably a salesman. She tells me to hurry, because Harley would be bogged down taking little old ladies back and forth from the market, which meant more $4 fares and puny tips to fuel his rage and his sense that life hated him.
The salesman going to Shell Beach is in high spirits at attending a convention and tips me well and back at the airport a woman needs to go to Cal Poly. Another fare needs a ride from a country home to the airport. Later, after returning the lobbyist to the airport, I pull in ahead of Harley for the second arrival of afternoon planes. Harley is so morose he refuses to get out of his cab. Planes land. A handsome, perky couple in their thirties, dressed in style, with Texas accents and designer luggage, approach me. They are going to a high-end resort/winery out in Paso Robles, a $60 ride, at least. I gaze at Harley, who looks like he might cry as he sizes them up. I walk to his window. Harley is all about fair play and despises greed and will always buy you a drink in the bar.
“Those folks are going to Paso, a resort. You want ‘em?”
He busts out of his cab and opens the rear door for them and takes their luggage, and he smiles for the first time all day as he asks them where they were from. Driving off, he is talking to them, animated, no doubt filling them in on the dos and don’ts in San Luis Obispo county.
(Eventually Harley ran for mayor as a write-in candidate and got twenty something votes, mostly from the bar where he drank. I’d have voted for him, but I live in Cayucos.)
