STREET SAINTS™ #2: THE UNKNOWN CAB DRIVER
Street Saints™. Remembering the almost forgotten. Or the misremembered.
This post marks the sophomore edition of Street Saints™, an ongoing series in which the Serious Journalists™️ here at Better Days Are A Toenail Away celebrate the small people of this world who commit heroic acts that would have otherwise gone unacknowledged.
(We say this with tongue firmly in cheek. Being acknowledged by a blog nobody reads is pretty much the same thing as being unacknowledged. An old David Letterman barb comes to mind, that time he made fun of Carson Daly: “Having a show on at 1:30 in the morning is the exact same as not having a show.”)
The last edition of Street Saints™ featured an unknown paramedic. Today’s features an unknown taxi driver. But first please allow us set the mood.
The first Street Saints featured an image, The front cover of Nirvana’s Incesticide.
In an interview with Michael Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life), Dylan Carlson, perhaps best known as the leader of noise rock veterans Earth, summed up his pal Kurt Cobain’s thematic concerns as a painter thusly: “innocence and authentic vision beset upon by a cruel and uncaring universe.”
That’s a much better way of putting it than I did. Like…take a look at that cover. If that’s not “innocence…beset upon by a cruel and uncaring universe,” I don’t know what is.
Carlson’s analysis also fits the tales told by that stately and venerable periodical known as Better Days Are A Toenail Away. Most of our stories also involve the poppy, because we were heroin addicts, duh. But so was Cobain. And Carlson. So there.
ANYWAY today’s leading loner is a man we’ll call Trevor. Trevor and I struck up a friendship while waiting on a street corner for our heroin dealer John. John had been up for three days smoking crack and shooting heroin and kept falling asleep instead of leaving his motel room to sell us drugs and we ended up waiting for forty-five minutes. I was dopesick and covered in cold sweat but I’m actually glad John took so long because I got to hear the story I’m about to relate.
Trevor was the same age as me and we’ve followed similar trajectories. Like me, Trevor was drunk for most of his twenties before switching to opiates in his thirties. Unlike me, Trevor very nearly didn’t make it to his thirties because of his drunken twenties.
One night more than a decade ago he was walking home northbound on Barrington Avenue when a gaggle of drunken frat boys hurled some insults at him from a front porch. Drunk and indignant, Trevor shouted a few choice words back. Seconds later, without warning, one of the porch boys snuck up behind Trevor and stabbed him in the neck. The blade entered a few inches below his left ear but, unfortunately, Trevor spun away from his assailant, causing the knife to rip across the front of his neck, all the way over to his Adam’s apple. He immediately crumpled to the sidewalk, the knife handle protruding ghoulishly from his neck like a shiny, synthetic goiter. Not knowing it was better to leave it in, Trevor yanked the knife out of his neck. The worst part wasn’t the pain, he told me, it was the awful sound the knife made as it relinquished its grip on his flesh.
He almost certainly would have died in the next few minutes if not for two extremely surreptitious events. One, an acquaintance of Trevor’s we’ll call Barry, who’d been walking southbound on the opposite side of Barrington, witnessed the attack and came running over, which caused Trevor’s attacker to flee. Two, a taxi cab was approaching southbound on Barrington. Barry frantically hailed the driver and informed him of the situation. The cab driver immediately kicked out his fare, a young couple who obediently exited the back seat as Barry tossed Trevor in and screamed “step on it!”
Somehow Trevor was still conscious. Barry pinched the wound shut as hard as he could, but even with the pressure Trevor was literally emptying in front of him. Blood was gushing all over the back seat of the cab.
The driver floored the accelerator and ran red lights en route to East General Hospital. He drove on sidewalks and shot down the wrong side of the road in his haste to get there faster. Halfway to the hospital a cop car pulled alongside the cab, but somehow the driver was able to communicate the emergency, after which the cop turned his cherry lights on, blared his siren, and pulled in front of the speeding cab to provide an escort. Without this escort Trevor probably would have been dead on arrival.
At East General Hospital, Barry and the cab driver carried an extremely pale Trevor inside where the doctors where waiting for him, because the police officer had notified the hospital beforehand. Trevor was still awake and terrified. Just before losing consciousness, he pleaded with a nurse to tell him the truth. “Be honest with me,” he pleaded, his voice sounding strange and unfamiliar because the blade had pierced his vocal cords. “How does it look?”
“Not good,” the nurse replied brusquely. And then everything went dark.
Trevor woke up thirty-six hours later, alive and thrashing against the wires and IV drip and stickers that seemed to cover his entire body.
“Like waking up with a thin slippery octopus on top of you,” he said. The pain was excruciating. The doctors had shoved a tube all the way down his throat, whether to pump blood out or to feed him I’m not sure, but his throat was as dry and cracked as baked earth. The mere act of swallowing shot lightning bolts of pain up and down his torso.
But he was alive.
The hospital sent him home a few days later with a prescription for Dilaudid that sent him on his way to heroin addiction, which is how 99% of heroin addicts start out…including myself. After a few days of opiated oblivion and late night TV, there was a knock at Trevor’s door. It was the cab driver, checking to see how Trevor was doing and to ask if maybe Trevor could cover the cleaning costs. He was sorry to ask, said the cab driver, but the back of his cab looked and smelled like an abattoir.
Trevor gave the man $500 and had no qualms about doing so. The man had saved his life. Unbelievably, the driver returned a few hours later with $300 in change and insisted Trevor take it. He wouldn’t even take compensation for the fare he’d lost when he kicked the couple out of his cab. According to Barry, they’d been totally gracious about it. I was happy to hear that.
When Trevor first told me the story I imagined them disgruntled, having once witnessed a car accident between an Uber driver and a work van at Dundas and Manning. The Uber passenger, a total douchebag with Buddy Holly glasses and a $500 haircut, instantly kicked open the back door and marched out without checking if his driver was okay. He was on the phone and as he stalked off, retreating back into his judgemental life, I could hear him saying “yeah so my idiot driver just got in an accident…I know, right?”
So at least the young kids were cool about losing their ride. That doesn’t make them heroes or saints, of course; it just makes them decent humans. Barry performed some heroics himself, actions that probably should have upgraded his status from “acquaintance” to “friend,” now that I think about it. But that’s Trevor’s business, not mine.
The real hero of this story though, is the cab driver. Like our first Street Saint™, he saved a life and eschewed financial reward. In fact, the cab driver’s actions are even more heroic than the paramedic’s, inasmuch as they were actions. Our unknown paramedic merely refrained from stealing. The unknown taxi driver saved a total stranger’s life at great personal and professional risk. He could have wrapped himself around a tree whilst speeding toward East General. His boss could have reprimanded or fired him for kicking out a fare (he had no way of knowing how the young couple would react. They easily could have been petulant, “I want to speak to the manager” types). This unknown cab driver risked almost everything to save the life of a total stranger.
Now that is saintlike behavior.
When I hear stories like this I realize that this world isn’t as cold and uncaring as it sometimes seems when I’m dopesick or sad or suicidal or all three. The human condition doesn’t have to resemble the front cover of Incesticide. Sometimes it can be mrore like the front cover of the aptly titled People Kissing:
PS: In case you’re wondering, the guy who stabbed Trevor was arrested that same night (I doubt it was hard to find him, he would have been covered in blood) but Trevor refused to testify against him. It’s the dirtbag Omerta, which I subscribe to as well…even if they can help us, we don’t talk to cops. But the dude got put away for some other crime, served three years, and left Toronto. Hopefully he hasn’t stabbed anyone in the ensuing years.
PPS: Also, in case you’re wondering if “Trevor” was exaggerating, he showed me the article from the Toronto Star corroborating the details he gave me. I won’t link to it because it gives his real name. As for the details the article didn’t corroborate, I’ll just say this: I believe Trevor. Dope addicts try to lie as little as possible, because they have to lie so much to maintain their addictions. The secret to lying is to not lie any more than you have to. Trevor had no reason to lie to me, therefore I do not believe he was lying. If the dramatic arc of his story was contingent on getting dope, I would be more skeptical. But it wasn’t. I totally believe that this cab driver refused the money. I totally believe that there are people in this world who are that selfless, that heroic, that saintly.
Keep your head up and don’t get stabbed.