A person who follows a dead end road can give it up only if and when he sees clearly where it leads. Sometimes this means he must follow it to its very end. – A Guide To The I Ching, Carol K. Anthony

My first meeting with Gus Bango, almost two decades ago, couldn’t have been more bizarre. I had already been driving a cab for a five years, and certain metaphysical truths, profound iridescences woven into the tapestry of life were becoming clear to me. Don’t fuck with the flow of events. Let things happen. Don’t try to over-manipulate situations, or you may wangle your way right into a tight squeeze. And that’s what I realized I had done by rejecting the offer of the balding, middle-aged, dweeb trying to make time with his high-school girlfriend in the backseat of my cab. Drunk and goofy, they had just come back from some kind of class reunion. And this guy—imagine— actually wanted me to wait out front at the Parc 55 Hotel, while he ran upstairs to fetch the gift he’d forgotten to give her.

“Be down in a jiff. Keep the meter running.”

“No wait a second.” I looked into his glazed eyes and saw a guy with absolutely no understanding of what a busy Friday night means to me, a cabdriver. With the meter ticking away at a penurious thirty cents a minute, I imagined him strolling lackadaisically through the lobby, pressing twice for the elevator, and fussing over his dyed hair in a Narcissus pool of polished steel. I saw him getting out at the 16th floor and turning left when he should have gone right, walking a hundred feet in the wrong direction before realizing his mistake. I saw him shaking his head after stumbling over a room-service tray and nearly breaking his neck, retracing his steps back to his room in a long, circuitous route. I saw him standing in front of his door, squinting into his wallet to find his room key. Oh, here it is!!—sandwiched in-between an arsenal of credit cards. I saw him futzing around some more, sliding the key back and forth into the bronze lock way too many times, trying every possible permutation, before the magnetic strip took and the green light flashed, and the door handle clicked—leaving him in total darkness to search for a light switch. I saw him bumping around a little more, arms outstretched, feeling his way along the bed until at last his knee banged into the nightstand—and he reached under the lampshade for the light. I saw him perspiring and short-of-breath, snatching up the gift— and that’s when I decided to nip this detestable vision of the possible future in the bud.

“ Way too busy, right now. It’d be cheaper to catch another cab.”

They didn’t seem happy, but they went quietly without a fuss. Two young black teens—gold teeth, Adidas gear, jewelry up the ying-yang—sprinted outta BART to take their place. They went ape shit over the fact that I was listening to hip-hop. KPOO, 89.5 on your dial.

“You like this music?”

“No. I hate it.” I said slamming my fist in mock anger on the steering wheel. I paused, hoping for a glimmer of understanding. When I didn’t get it, I said, “I’m a masochist. I love to torment myself.”

As I shot through fleeting gaps in kaleidoscopic traffic, they flattered me about what a cool cabdriver I was, and how I made all the lights, and how the sound system was boomin’…”Let’s rob a bank. You be the getaway driver.” Except for the last remark, I’d heard it all before— remembering how quickly this amiable front can evaporate into a series of harsh commands as we move deeper into a ghetto situation, and the dangerous surroundings play to their advantage.

I dropped the first kid off in the bus stop at Turk & Polk, where he’d catch the 19 to the projects on Potrero Hill. On his left hand, reminiscent of brass knuckles, he wore a four-finger gold ring encrusted with phony diamonds. The other one, who was going to Turk &Laguna, flashed a fat wad of twenties in my face and boasted about how at sixteen he wuz stackin’ mad paper and had nearly ninety thousand dollars stashed away in a bank vault somewhere in Arizona. “

“That’s a nice, tidy sum.”

“It’s a gold-rush out here, mane. And I’m in it to win it…”

“Who doesn’t love an enterprising young man?”

“Fuck that…This a WAR out here, mane!!—I’m on some grown-man shit…Pockets on swole.” A ghetto kid, half my age. It was pretty obvious he was trying hard to impress me– and, in a subtler way, to show me up as a working stiff, nickel and diming my way through life driving a cab.

“You like drivin’ a cab?”

“Love it. Ever since I was a little boy, this is all I ever wanted to do. Now, I’m livin’ the dream.”

“My grandfather drove a cab in New Orleans. He had hella stories.”

“I’m sure.”

I checked him out in the mirror. He sported a furry green Kango tilted to the side, and yellow-tinted shades. A Mercedes hood ornament, probably ripped off someone’s ride, hung a couple of inches below his sternum from a braided, platinum rope.

“I know you makin’ bank on Friday night. How much you gonna make, two-hundred?”

“Yeah, right. Is that what your grandfather said he made?” I smiled at him in the mirror. He didn’t smile back.

“Yo…”

“Yo…What?” I said, flooring it across six lanes of Van Ness, the neon strands of Opera Plaza a momentary blur.

“Yo…” And, as if to emphasize what was to follow, he lowered his yellow-tinted shades to half-mast on his nose, and peering over the top of the Yves St. Laurent frames, he said. “ When we get there, I want you to wait. I got some bin-niz. Some entrepreneurial-type of things.” He peeled me off a twenty, and said, “Just so you know we cool.”

The projects at Turk and Laguna, nicknamed the “O.C” or “Out-of-Control projects” were a major hub in the crack trade during this year of 1986. They were vying against rival projects around town for control over those nasty little yellow rocks that made B-boys millionaires.

About a block away from the O.C. projects —Gus Bango yelled out, “Oh shit, where my gun at? I lost my muthafuckin’ gat!” I hit the brake, killed the engine, flung open the door, and jumped out like my pants were on fire. So did he. But whereas I made ready to flee, he stood there in a fit of panic, riveted to the spot, rapidly and systematically going through each and every pocket, patting himself down with a maniacal, desperate fury. So absorbed was he in this outlandish search, I stopped being afraid and watched him do his thing with a sort of strange fascination. What was I gonna do—-run away? Find the gun first, and shoot him before he shot me? Call a cop? Yeah, right. Fat chance of finding a cruiser near the projects! They don’t show until after the dirt, when the blood is pooling around the body, and nobody saw nothin’. Anyway, what had he done, this kid? What crime had he committed? He wasn’t belligerent—-in fact, until the outburst, he’d been totally cool.

Ironically, seen through a certain jaundiced eye, the situation couldn’t be more commonplace. People lose shit in cabs all the time—brief cases, wallets , umbrellas, most of all umbrellas (Of course, this was before the Age of the ever-vanishing cellphone). One brain-farting fellow even lost his mountain bike in the back of a Desoto van. But this was different. Very different. This was a gun! True, I’d found weapons in the cab before. Finding a butterfly knife stuffed into the backseat while vacuuming at the end of the shift will certainly get your attention. But… a… GUN!!

Getting on my hands and knees to look for a lost gun was so patently absurd, the simple realization of this allowed me to do it. Still, a pearl-handled, Smith&Wesson.38 is a lot easier to find than a lost diamond-earring. When I crouched down, there it was, staring me in the face, right under the passenger’s seat. In his initial panic he probably kicked it there. Now, feeling rather stupid, I handed it over. “I don’t think you wanna make this mistake again.”

Burner in hand, Gus Bango said, “True dat,” and grinned gold—and, after a quick inspection, he tucked the gun up under his Adidas jacket. “On the real, though…I rather be caught with it, than without it”

I observed him with a sort of hallucinatory detachment. This was one crazy motherfucker— walking up into these projects like Jesse James, with eight or nine hundred dollars stuffed in his pocket. Still, he didn’t seem like the kind of scum to shoot a cabdriver in the back, especially after what I had just done for him.

It was one of those San Francisco nights when the fog rolls in, and the mist swarms like mosquitoes in the streetlights. I pulled up across the street from the O.C. projects, lit a cigarette and parked. Gus Bango said, “Yo, man, I need you to wait. Don’t take off on me. I need you to wait.”

“Yeah, no sweat, I’ll wait.” I marveled at how skillfully he had entangled me in his plans, uncertain if I really would wait. “ I got your back,” I said, as he cut out across the street. I drove halfway down the block, and posted up at the corner of Eddy & Laguna, next to an embattled liquor store with a sliding iron-gate, and wire-mesh peeling from the edges of its rear window. The roof had coils of barbwire, razor halos pronged with tiny little ax blades designed to rip flesh and keep intruders at bay, and along its outer edges, broken bottles embedded in cement jutted out like primitive teeth. It’s exposed brick wall topped by a Coca Cola sign, was a study in hood hieroglyphics—mocking the uninitiated with sinister swirls and all-seeing umlauts.

This was the hood, dark and dangerous. Nuanced in shadows. Alive with an edginess that picks up momentum every time you hear a car rumble past. I kept the engine running, but killed the headlights and shut off the radio. Sitting in stoic meditation, alert to the slightest ripple in the established silence, transported me back to Vietnam– the phantasmagoria of a disembodied voices yelling, mortar rounds going off with concussive force, rockets discharging in pink puffs above us. That’s where I started self-medicating, shootin’ red rock heroin. They called it red rock because it was clay red. Copped it right on the base. But if I couldn’t get H, it didn’t matter. I’d go 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Gulp a vial of this liquid crank called moon juice, shit would keep me up three days straight. The important thing was to stay high. Achieving an optimum comatose state, staying “fucked up,” that’s what mattered. So I can relate to this aspect of life in the projects, the diabolical intersection of drugs and brutal violence in the service of death. But don’t call this ghetto shit, WAR! And don’t call yourself a soldier. Young thugs armed to the teeth, breaking into mailboxes; pissing in hallways, dealing drugs in the playground. That’s fucked up. But it ain’t WAR! Not if you can still drink clean water out of a tap, and go to the mall to buy designer gear, and wolf down ninety-nine cent value meals at Mickey D?’s.

But my psychic lecture was interrupted when Gus Bango came flying out of the building, sprinting towards me like Carl Lewis, legs pumping high.

I flipped on my headlights.

The beams penetrated the latticed cinderblock of the courtyard, where a mob of drug dealers took off in all directions. It was like lifting up a huge rock, and discovering a nest of scorpions. Then a kid with braids, wearing a Cleveland Indian’s baseball jersey ran out of the building pointing in our direction. At first I thought he was just pointing, but then the Pop, Pop, Pop of shots rang out. And it was on. “They shootin’. Go!! Get the fuck outta here!” Gus Bango said, flinging open the rear door, and throwing himself headfirst into the cab. I didn’t need any coaching. I tore rubber and screeched-the-fuck-away. The door swung open on its hinges. Gus Bango lunged for it and slammed it shut.

As we sped down Golden Gate past blocks of Section 8 housing, he said, “You saved my neck, dawg. “

“They call me Tea.”

“Aight, Tea. I’m G to the U.S…B to the A to the N…G.O. Young nigga makin’ money, yo…”

I thought, gimme a fuckin’ break!

After we shot across Van Ness, and the golden arches and the Federal Building, Gus Bango enlarged upon his compliment. “You on some raw outlaw shit. Back there, what you did, Dat wuz gangsta!”

“Gangster? Don’t make me laugh. I’m a writer. And this was a mistake.” The whole thing—picking him up, finding his gun, getting shot at—was light years beyond stupid . I decided to dump him at 6th & Market. “I might wind up as an accessory to a crime, so I’d appreciate it if you told me what happened back there? “

“Hood Politics. Niggas be livin’ real sheisty. Hatin’ on another man’s game.”

“You stirred up a fuckin’ hornets nest, dude.” I gave him an opportunity to elaborate, but he didn’t take me up on it. I floored it across Market to make the green light. About ten yards into 6th Street, a zombified Latina in her late thirties— with electric eyeballs and no teeth, draped in a filthy, powder-blue blanket speckled with leaves—walked out between parked cars and threw herself directly into the path of my on-coming headlights. Amazingly, I managed to avoid flattening the dumb bitch, but she launched herself up onto my hood anyway, crying out in pain, and howling for eye-witnesses to come forward and do the right thing.

“Some of y’all must’a’ seen it. Desoto Cab ran me over”. Before this little drama could pick up any steam and morph into something nasty, Gus Bango leapt out the cab, and in three long strides, he was in her face. “Bitch, I ain’t fuckin’ wit you. Pick your sorry-ass up outta here, now, before I break that neck for real.” Jesus Christ himself couldn’t have performed a more convincing miracle. In a flash, the half-dead Harpy laid out across my windshield came to life, threw her head back with a tweeker’s blinking-gaze, and took off—going barefoot across a sea of grime and shattered glass—indifferent to the sputum, the feculence, the splotches of vomit and drying urine checkerboarding these brain-damaged streets.

As a tribute to his charisma, we proceeded on.

A couple of blocks south, he had me stop at a notorious crack house at 6th & Howard. The hotel was a shithole—with dirty, torn curtains and malarial light— a full step down from those seedy flophouses smelling of curry, where the old and infirm sit listlessly in front of TV, marinating like onion skins in the blue flickerings of corporate consciousness.

The kid vanished into the lobby, where a couple of dressed-down transvestites with plucked eyebrows flitted about near a soda machine. He did his business one-two-three, and when he returned to the cab, he peeled me off another twenty. “Yo, One more stop.”

“Where to?”

“3rd and Palou.”

Turning left from 6th onto Folsom, I told him a story. “ I had a contractor in my cab recently. The guy did all the plumbing in that hotel you were just in. He says a ghost with red-eyes haunts the place. I know it sounds absurd but his employees were all freaked out about it. I’m not kidding, these people were seriously freaked out. One guy actually quit his job, rather than set foot in the building again. The contractor thought it was a lot of malarkey. But then one evening when he was working late by himself on one of the upper floors, he felt someone tap his shoulder. When he looked up to see who it was, there they were, a pair of red eyes, two red-hot coals blazing at him through a window. The shit scared him so bad, he couldn’t grab his tools fast enough and get the hell outta there.” Gus Bango shook his head, “Niggas be getting’ thrown off that roof, mane. Muhfuckas get murdered up in that spot.”

At China Basin we drove on in silence, often slowing to a crawl to negotiate a road of misshapen bumps and potholes. South of the Lefty O’Doul Bridge, where an abandoned school bus with yellow curtains rusted away unnoticed, Gus Bango said, “I believe in the unseen. I believe in the esoteric world.”

“Esoteric? Whered’ya come up with that word?”

“C.Y.A. Locked up in Juvy, I be readin’ all kinda books. Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim…You a writer, ever read them cats?

“No. Can’t say that I have.”

“You should. They the shit…” On our way up 3rd Street to the Bayview-Hunter’s Point ghetto, a montage of tall cranes and inert cement mixers—silos, warehouses, and old, forgotten piers—gave way to a gloomy string of liquor stores, gas stations and fast food joints.

“One time I was on the bus reading a book about the brain. You know the different kinda waves…beta, theta, rapid-eye movement … all that shit. And yo, it’s a trip how white people be checkin’ me out. I can see the wheels turnin’. What’s this young black cat with a headwrap on, doin’ readin’ a book? A book on science, no less, hmmm…This old white lady says to me, Are you in school studying to be a doctor? I looked at her, and said, no, I’m just interested in the human brain.

Why?

I wanna know how it works.

Why? she said , Why are you interested in how it works?

Because, I have one…”You dumb bitch!

I left him in front of a dilapidated little shack on Palou. Nearby, a store window advertised in bright lettering, CHECK CASHING AND MONEY ORDERS. Gus Bango pointed to it, and said. “You see, the system got a strangle hold on us. Be stealin’ our money, legally.” We did a handclasp with three variations, and wished each other well. Then, halfway out of the cab, he stuck his head back in. “I don’t even wanna be seen on these muh-fucken streets. But what’s a young brotha to do? Nigga just got outta jail, broke as hell.” In that moment, we seemed to share a premonition. “I’ma keep doin’ what I been doin’…Finna hit these corners and get my shit right.”

MC Mars is a San Francisco-based author of a book of thirty true, truly outrageous cab stories called Don’t Take Me The Long Way. It can be purchased at many fine indie book stores in the Bay Area and is one of City Lights recommended reads.