My Fare City and Letters to Bud

I started driving a taxi in 1996, seven years after I moved to the great city of San Francisco. Soon after, the dot com boom brought new life to the city by the bay. The internet was lacking something, something that I had. Content. Fate brought me together with someone who could bring the strange and bizzare events I had been living first hand to life, on a web zine named Captivated. I published three years of my life online, half as a night driver, the other half as a day driver. I received accolades from Netscape, Yahoo, and many others. I received email from around the globe, some complimentry, some not so. My Fare City documents my life as a taxi driver, from the guy who tried to rob me with a Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick, to the fare lady I picked up who would become my wife and mother of our child. Included in this new edition are all of the letters I received while publishing my journal, and my responses. I went out on the streets of San Francisco looking for something I had lost, and I found it. Take a ride with me, you won´t be disappointed.

I moved to San Francisco just before the 1989 earthquake. Since that time I have worked a variety of jobs, some legal and some not so legal, but never in my wildest dreams or scariest nightmares did I ever expect to find myself driving a taxicab from dusk 'til dawn. That's what makes life so grand, all of those blind corners can lead to almost anything. Most hacks move on to their other interests by the end of the first year, there are the chosen few, who the longer we keep driving, the harder it is to get out. I just was never interested in what the establishment has to offer me. Like all "underachievers," I was intelligent enough to get by with little or no effort while putting the majority of my energy in to self-medication. That's the politically correct way of saying I grew up smoking pot, eating acid, and doing whatever else whenever possible to escape the reality of a world I wanted to be as far away from as possible. I must say I did a damn good job of that, until I became a San Francisco Taxi Driver.