Cabs, Cabernets, Cabals and Caberets

Street Musician Daniel

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

So, fast-forward, pun  intended, and I am now zooming around at up to 40 miles per hour (✈), after a somewhat tense few moments prior to my discovering that you have to hold the start button down for like 3 seconds in order to start the electric bike..that probably has rare earth metals in its battery.

I don't want  to mention what I paid.

Kenny, who lives  here, might find this post and leverage that into the negotiations...

I had no  sooner returned to Sacred Heart, pushing the electric bike (I had a laptop, guitar, a lamp with a 5 foot stand, and now, an electric bike. It would have been a challenge to ride the thing for the first time- while trying to balance a lamp with a 5 foot long stand.

And, as soon  as I got back I ran into Kenny who lives here, and who greeted me basically with: "You want to sell that? How much you want? I want that bike, I really want it!"

Lord, I am  sorry for taking advantage of the gentleman who sold me the bike if it should perchance have been a case where he was jonesing for drugs, and at the point of doing something that he will regret later, in pursuit of immediate gratification.

The bike is  really at least a 700 dollar item -and that, coming from a boomer upon whom it really hasn't even sunken in yet that I was making 3 times my busking wages for sitting home during the pandemic, when a part of me was saying: "this is extra money you won't miss now, but will surely appreciate later; put $500 a week into any number of stocks from Apple to Phizer to Zelle!"

And, my 1999  self would have struck at that prospect. 

It was actually skepticism over the very system that was printing money to pay me to stay home that made me wary -a system that was penalizing me, by suppressing my contact with the outside world, beginning after I had told some truths about some things that were right in front of my face..

Like, after I  had walked right into an emergency room and had been seen right away, for whatever, but upon returning home, saw footage on the nightly news of the same facility with lines of "covid19 stricken people" -maybe 50 long- lined up outside, supposedly earlier that day (when I had been practically the only one there) and then I blogged about it.

The rioting in  the streets somehow did not inspire me to invest in stocks, as I had done in 1999.

I drove a  cab in Phoenix, then; lived in a cave in a foot hill of 'South Mountain.' in the Latino "side" of the city..

It was a  caveat from other drivers, to just not work the south side, especially at night.

I would see,  on my little 1999-era GPS equipped computer that someone was trying to get a cab down there at like 2 in the morning. After 30 minutes with no other drivers picking it up, I would start to feel sorry for whomever it was, and would go to the house, where a lot of times, a half dozen Latinos would thank me for having shown up, and would pay the fare up front for whomever was getting in.

In one instance,  they told me that ever since a certain drive by shooting-up of the house next door (with automatic weapons) it had become harder for them to get cabs to show up, especially at night.

I remember trying  to speak Spanish and them seeming to appreciate that. I have always found it easy to make friends with Latinos, going back to the 4th grade; what can I say?

I remember one  group, once in the back seat, telling me where we were going, then a couple of them showing me large pistols, and saying: "Ain't nothin' gonna happen to you bro; don't worry..you're gonna be fine!"

Ah, reminiscing...

They even had  passengers waiting, once we got there, to put in my back seat, going somewhere else, fares paid up front..

"Don't work the  south side at night," my ass -probably spoken by drivers who hated Latinos, who could smell that on them...

I remember sitting  there under the stars, driven outside by a baked potato the size of a Winnebago, watching jets approaching Sky Harbor Airport in single file, their lights like a string of pearls stretching all the way to the horizon, like ants following a trail of pheromones. 

That was a million dollar view. If I was getting a $3,500 dollar check every week, I might have succumbed to the temptation to ruin it all by getting an apartment and a vehicle. Where would that leave the squirrels and the snake?

It was costing  me about $23 a day, to live in the cave.

I would subtract  this amount from whatever I had made during a 12 hour shift behind the wheel, and then get a money order for the remainder then head straight to the TD Waterhouse place on Camelback Road, or Indian School Road..(I should remember, I was cab driver)..and I would deposit it with Carla, the young receptionist type lady, which would be for anywhere from $270 -I think was the highest- to as low as $27, maybe after a night when I sat outside an apartment complex chatting for 3 hours with an exotic dancer I might have just brought home from a club.

When you sleep  in a cave women can smell minerals on you, or something.

This one dancer  in particular would curl up in the back seat, and want to talk with the meter still running, and then would tip me $50. She was from Flint, Michigan and looked like Madonna.

White women in  Phoenix went after white guys like heat seeking missiles, I found.

One young blond  haired girl walked up to me outside the K-Mart in the south side, where white men are warned not to go, especially at night, and said: "You're beautiful! You're white!" as a conversation starter... She was probably about 16 years old. It's still the 'wild west' out there.

I used to  joke with Carla, who was always as well dressed and well mannered as befitted the 1999 version of a stock brokerage firm, albeit one operating in an Internet Cafe kind of atmosphere.

I would drop  off my $107, or whatever, money order, almost daily.

Then, I would  ask Carla, who was pretty and pleasant enough looking and white and probably trying to maintain some semblance of professionalism, on my way out, if she would please call me on the hour and, to make it brief, just make the noise of a rising theremin: Wheeeiii!!! or a falling one: Wheeeuuuwww! and then, she could just hang up. I would know what it signified -my portfolio having gone up or down that particular hour.

She said something  about being too busy -it got pretty hectic in there mid day.

I had about  $3,700 in that portfolio, having put in only about $2,900, one money order at a time, after about 3 months.

AI is, not yet, able to imagine the beauty

The whole investing  idea came from a passenger who told me I should go to TD Waterhouse and open an account with $600, and then throw a dart at the newspaper's stock ticker page. In his case he bought stock in some company that he'd never heard about before seeing it in the "gainers" area of The Wall Street Journal's "Money" section. His $600 had become worth $1,280, after just a week, he told me as I transported him somewhere.

If some new  stocks were to appear on that "outstanding performers" roll call, he said he would throw all his money there, "cause those are the ones that can quadruple in a week!" type of thing.

I decided to  heed his advice, and became a Wall Street caveman overnight.

I could stay  in the cave as many days as I wanted; my 12 hour shift began whenever I went and took a cab out.

I could do  watercolors, move rocks around, feed the squirrels and chipmunks, and I was an avid home-improver. 

I gradually expanded my foraging area, looking for certain rocks -like a better fitting one than the one I had been rolling over the entrance..one that blended in better, and looked more like Mother Nature deposited it there. 

I had created the cave by chipping out sandstone which had blown into the crevices between boulders, over the centuries, and hardened.
I followed the contours of the hard granite -dumping buckets full of once-again-sand-no-longer-stone by the thousands over the edge of a 50 foot drop. 

I reached  milestones like the day I was able to stand upright in there, to the eventual completion of a fireplace/cooking pit that the steady wind pulled the smoke from the chimney of and drew, in a semi-circle around and under the 'cap' of a mushroom shaped boulder (mushroom shaped from the same persistent wind stream having sanded away the softer rock underneath the harder granite top). 

"...you explained it, I guess..."

This made it so whatever smoke I emitted would leave the chimney, go around a corner, hugging the stem of the mushroom shaped boulder,  before rising into the air, on the other side of the hill, about 75 feet away from where I was..

I hope I explained that adequately... 
It was a natural decoy, courtesy of the Santa Anna winds or whatever they were...

If I found  a really good looking rock, no matter how far away or how heavy, I would get it back to the cave, even if I needed to use a fence post, or something I found, as a lever. Great exercise -carrying rocks up an incline...

Still, I hit  a gym for a little more exercise, protein drinks and a hot shower. After changing into clean clothes and putting on a tie, I became a professional cab driver looking type of guy...

I might have  appeared, to the guy who gave me investment advice, like I should be doing something better than driving a cab.

There were a  couple early 20's aged Java programmers, whom I picked up and was bringing to the "Pompei" nightclub in Tempe who said they were making something like $1,800 a week, and , after talking to me during the $21 ride to there, told me I should  go to Barnes & Noble and get some kind of "Learn Java In 30 Days" type book and 'just mess around with it' -play with it like it's a new Ham Radio or a new piece of audio gear. 

And then go from being a cab driver who lives in a cave to a guy raking in $1,800 a week and; I guess, sitting outside that same cave at midnight, after the heat that sank into a rock the size of a Winnebago from the sun hitting the other side, had radiated its way through, like a thermal wave, and was then turning the heat inside the cave to the upper 80's, and had driven me out, to sip wine and stare at the city.

The cave was  chiselled deep enough into the rock so that I only recorded a high temperature of 87℉ on a day when it had hit 115℉ elsewhere. But every night around 11:30 pm., my walls would start oozing heat, and I

would wind up sitting outside, enjoying the view of Phoenix from a perch about 350 feet above it; waiting for it to cool off inside; and tossing Doritos on the ground in front of a certain rock that a 4 foot long Diamondback rattler lived under -Doritos that the naked eye could barely make out in the darkness, but which would begin to move off in every direction, immediately after landing; carried by invisible mice.

The snake had  announced its presence with a half hearted rattle, one evening in June, as I passed within 4 feet or so of it. I was coming back after a shift that I had unwittingly started late that morning, not foreseeing having to get off work equally late in the evening, and having to sidestep Gila Monsters and Diamondbacks.

A flashlight was  just not an option. It will ruin a man's night vision, and give away his position. Besides, with almost no moisture in the atmosphere, one can read a book by a Phoenix moon that's any larger than a sliver, or find one's cave.

Walking to a  secret cave that even has a rock rolled over the entrance to camouflage it, using a flashlight?! Not happening. There was a reason it was only after having lost his (map, compass, knife, rifle...flashlight(?)) that the guy in "The Bear" saw the bear.

🐿

I had fed  the squirrels so many unsalted peanuts in the shell that they had created a soft rug of shreds along the floor of the tunnel that was just big enough to admit me on hands and knees and mat protected the latter against the hard granite.

The snake would  have come out right after sundown, to set up shop. I guess I had usually been in by then. It goes from light to dark in Phoenix in a matter of minutes after sundown. There's no moisture in the atmosphere to reflect any "twi" light back to earth.

I had gotten  a pretty good bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, as was my habit, the night the snake rattled, and that had eventually warmed my heart to the thing and, already having found that a Dorito dropped on the ground in the darkness, anywhere around the cave, immediately "grew legs," and moved to underneath the nearest rock, I started to drop chips in front of the snake's rock, just after sundown.

And, sure enough,  they would start to migrate in all directions, visible only because of being bright yellow, but being toted by invisible mice.

Then out of  the darkness would soon come a surprised sounding shriek, that sounded a lot like a mouse having been stabbed by venomous fangs.

Having kept snakes  as pets, I knew that, taking only a minute or two to swallow a meal means it's not a totally satiating one, and so about 15 minutes later, I would launch another salvo of Doritos plain (corn, salt and lime juice) variety chips towards the rock. And I can say that the Diamondback never crawled into my tent in the middle of the night and struck me in the face with its fangs...so, there's that...

I do like  mice; but, so does almost every rodent or reptile, apparently...

I have an  animal feeding hierarchy. 

I'll feed mice to snakes. 

I also stood back and let a black caped night heron have at the rats that I lived with and fed, under the wharf the last time I was homeless. 

I think I might feed a snake to an owl..

But, I wouldn't  feed an owl to anything, not even humans. On Thanksgiving Day...so that's my hierarchy of animals (in a nutshell).

So, I guess  now I'm really trying to decide if I think the electric bike is an analogy of the flashlight mentioned above. Is it a lazy man's vehicle?

35 miles per  hour is fast enough to make you want to ride in the middle of a lot of roads, but, to a lot of motorists, you are just crawling along, and it was kind of unsettling, during the short ride I took earlier, to see cars behind me changing lanes to go around me -an accident waiting to happen comes to mind...

Kenny really wants  to buy the thing. Maybe if I jack the price up $100 over what I paid..

But, the time  saved in getting around eclipses even that which a good 10 speed bike would effectuate. I figure I will save about 35 hours a month, over walking everywhere, if I keep the electric bike.

And, it's harder  to mug a person who is going 30 miles per hour with money in his pocket, over someone who is ambling along at 4 miles per hour with his money in his pocket...

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