- 13 Dollar Friday
- The Keeper Of The Calendar
20 years ago today, I had just gotten a job driving a Yellow Cab in Phoenix, Arizona.
Coming down from the mountain on the first day of the year, I had gotten a room at the YMCA downtown for 85 bucks a day.
There, I had broken a two week fast with a few cups of red clover tea, and felt a bliss like few others.
On January 12th, I had finally procrastinated long enough, after having arrived with just shy of a thousand bucks on me, that I was down to 50 fifty cents in my pocket after I paid the lease on a Yellow Cab for a 12 hour shift. It was 57 dollars, but 5 of that went into a deposit every day which the driver got back whenever he quit, if he hadn't damaged any of the cabs and was at fault for doing so.
The gas tank was almost empty when I got the car, so much so, that I had to sit and wait for my first fare to pop up right around the cab station.
One popped up and I drove about 3 blocks to pick it up -it was a young Latina lady, and an opportunity for me to practice my Spanish words for "straight," "left" and "right- and then brought her to her destination about 3 miles away using some of my last few drops of gas.
After she paid me the six dollars that her fare was, I drove to the nearest gas station where the cab, as if on cue, ran out of gas so I had to push it a few feet to one of the pumps.
I put the six bucks in the tank, pouring a little in the carburetor to help start it after it had run dry, and then I never looked back.
It would make for a pretty good life, driving the cab for 12 hour shifts and living in a cave up Dobbins Peak a little ways, one that I was expanding the dimensions of with a chisel a little bit each day.
Loading my backpack with groceries, wine, tin foil, lamp oil, candles, food for the chipmunks and squirrels and other assorted things designed to make living in a cave easier, I would take the bus to the end of its line and then hike about a mile and a half to where my cave was.
The cave could only be gotten to by jumping from one particular rock over about a 3 foot gap -if you couldn't make the full 3 feet then you would plummet about 50 feet through the gap- to another one. From there you could walk around under the cap of a giant mushroom shaped rock, which had gotten that shape through erosion over the centuries.
The entrance to my cave was a tunnel under a large flat rock that sat at ground level. This could be covered by dragging another flat round rock that fit over it like a lid.
Often, I would hear the voices of people who had not jumped to the layer of rock that I was on at the one spot where I did. They would be about 40 feet below me with no way to get up to where I was, or they would be somewhere above me.
There were petroglyphs on the rocks around where I wound up making my cave.
I did this by carving out, using the chisel, as much of the sandstone that I could, which was clogging up the gaps between the hard pinkish grey granite which formed the outline of the cave.
This wound up being only a bit bigger than a two man tent, but it had a fireplace, was rain-proof and afforded me a million dollar view of the city of Phoenix.
On the morning of March 21st, I heard voices outside my cave.
Crawling out through the entrance I had made by tunneling under a rock, I encountered a couple of students from Arizona State University.
They were there to verify that upon that spring equinox day, the sun did indeed rise smack dab through the middle of a notch that had been cut out of the top of the mountain to the east, if viewed from the perspective of a spike of rock that had been erected in front of the petroglyphs.
This rifle sight arrangement of rocks was lined up so that the petroglyph representing the equinox lay directly in line with and was under the shadow of the spike of rock which jutted up from where it had been placed, perhaps a thousand years ago.
"Your cave is on holy ground," said one of the students to me.
They told me that they had no objections to seeing me living there as long as I wasn't destroying the petroglyphs, and that my cave, which I might have been reclaiming from a previous inhabitant by chiseling out the sand and dust, would have belonged to none other than "the keeper of the calendar" -only the most high and holy of all the holy men of the tribe that lived there almost a thousand years earlier.
The notches made with piles of rocks on the crest of the east horizon mountain, combined with the slab of rock that had been erected in front of the petroglyphs demarcated the equinox, as well as the solstices.
There were also animals depicted relative to those seasons, perhaps chronicling when the bison, or something, migrated each year.
At night, I could see the planes coming in, their lights forming like a string of pearls, stretching from the horizon towards Sky Harbour Airport.
The candles had to be kept burning all night to ward off rats and mice. I bought the "Jesus" ones, which had religious pictures and prayers inscribed on them. They would burn for something like 30 hours. I always got the Spanish ones.
I had kind of an unspoken arrangement with a 4 foot diamondback rattlesnake which camped under a rock not far from the entrance of my cave.
I would throw a few Doritos plain corn chips down in front of the rock right after sundown. I would almost instantly see the chips go into motion, being carried in every which direction by almost invisible mice. The snake would strike one of them, and then I wouldn't hear it rattle for a few days.
There was a gila monster that I didn't see until I had been in the cave for about a couple months.
By then it was March and was probably warming up enough for a gila monster to want to come out and sun itself. It (the monster) was probably also getting used to my presence enough by then to want to come out and sun itself.
Plus, at the time I was doing a watercolor painting of the city and sitting pretty still, and probably didn't look like a threat.
The cave and the cab driving job served to put about another $1,100 in my pocket by the time August arrived with its 118 degree temperatures, and it's slowing down of the tourist trade, and its laying off of cab drivers.
After that, it was off to Federal Way, Washington, after a stop in Las Vegas where I purchased a car for $420 off a gambler, which began to lose power as the elevation increased as I left there.
It was something to do with the air/fuel mixture, as the elevation effect might suggest, but the mechanics in Cedar City, Utah couldn't fix it after having worked on it for over a week, trying about a half dozen things, such as cutting the catalytic converter off, and sealing a slight vacuum leak.
I eventually just let them have the car in exchange for all the work they had done, and caught a ride with a guy whom I had met, who was on his way to Federal Way, Washington.
That is how I wound up there by August of 1999.
But, "it was 20 years ago, today" that I got the cab driving job in Phoenix.
I am in my studio mixing down the latest jam between Jacob and I. At least one of my original songs should be ready for release in the coming days.
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