Former hack offers view of Spokane from cab window

It was pretty clear from the get-go that Rocky Wilson was never destined to make the Spokane Cab Driving Hall of Fame, if there is such a thing.

Looking back, he should have taken what happened on his first night of training as an omen.

Wilson says he was parked on Third Avenue and learning the ropes from “the boss,” who was in the back seat consuming a behemoth burger.

When all of a sudden – WHAM!!

The cab’s rear window exploded into a shower of crystalline fragments thanks to some street punks who had apparently tossed or shot something.

Who knows?

The cause was never determined. The thugs took off.

But at that moment, a little voice inside Wilson’s cranium should have murmured:

“Run, Rocky, run.”

Alas, Wilson’s entry into our nighttime cab scene was based upon dire necessity.

As he tells it, the peanut butter jar was running on empty and his options were elemental: drive or starve.

And so Wilson stayed at the job 16 months, until his need for an eye exam intervened.

Wilson hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

Fortunately, he says, the person struck didn’t suffer any serious bodily harm.

Wilson’s duties as a professional transporter, however, received a fatal blow months later due to the accident’s impact on his insurability.

“I got fired,” Wilson says bluntly. “It was my fault.”

As it turns out, however, Wilson’s cab-driving demise last March was a good thing for the reading public.

It led the 61-year-old to write and publish “Spokane: Driving in the Dark,” a book of cabbie exploits.

You can get it for $16 at Auntie’s Bookstore downtown, a couple of Hastings outlets, or by order on Amazon.com.

My copy came to the newsroom in an envelope bearing my name. Now, I’m what you’d call a tough sell regarding self-published works of local literature.

That said, I am also a sucker when it comes to tales about my hometown’s seamy underbelly.

And though Wilson’s book is at times a trifle too self-conscious and unnecessarily apologetic, there is more than enough gritty human drama in the narrative nuggets to make it a fun and compelling read.

Take the bitter lesson Wilson learned early on. His passenger, a woman in her 30s, sought a ride from Spokane’s downtown Intermodal Center to her mom’s home in Deer Park.

“I told her the fare would be high and asked if she had enough money to pay for the ride,” Wilson writes. “She pulled out about $80 cash, roughly the fare to Deer Park, and I began driving.

“What I didn’t do, what veteran drivers later told me I should have done at that point, was to take the $80 from her hand and tuck it under my visor.

“After all, when we got there, the money rightfully would have been mine.”

As you can guess, that momentary glance at the bills was as close to monetary satisfaction as Wilson ever got.

“… By the time we reached her sweet mother’s house at about 2 a.m., she not only refused to relinquish the $78 owed me according to my meter, but refused to exit the cab.”

When the cops arrived, Wilson learned the woman’s mother had a restraining order to keep daughter away.

And so an arrest was made.

Wilson wasn’t paid, but ripped off in a completely different way.

He was promised restitution via the courts.

If you take away anything from this book it’s to have some empathy for the lowly cab driver.

The job is not only dangerous – Wilson was robbed once, stuck with counterfeit $100 bills twice and threatened with bodily harm on numerous occasions – but pays crap.

According to Wilson, after paying the lease fees to the cab’s owner, drivers are often lucky to make minimum wage.

“Other than that I had a great time,” he says, laughing.

It’s good Wilson has a background in journalism. It prepared him for financial heartache.

At any rate, he says he’s much happier now doing technical writing, online editing plus writing for personal pleasure.

(This is Wilson’s third book, by the way.)

Not that cab driving doesn’t have its unexpected rewards.

Like the smoking hot young woman he took home from a popular Spokane watering hole.

The pickup had been marred by a large and belligerent drunk man that Wilson had stood up to when the fool began beating on the roof of his cab.

Wilson writes: “I seriously don’t know if this beautiful young lady was enamored by older men, was mesmerized by my total lack of fear when the larger fellow was assailing me, or wanted to share a cup of tea, but after arriving at her home, she presented a strong argument that I abandon my cab and join her in her upstairs apartment.”

Wilson, who is single, thought the offer over a moment but respectfully declined.

Though thoroughly flattered, he had to uphold the First Commandment that is common to cab drivers the world over.

“She indeed was beautiful and the offer should have been more tempting than it was,” he writes, “but shutting down my taxi for an hour or so when I needed to make money in a revenue-depleted environment was something I could not afford to do.”