During the Austin years, I drove a cab a couple of times to help pay the bills. One of the times was in the summer of '74. By this time I had dropped completely out of the doctoral program and had given up on all my plans. We had moved back home and back to Austin. The 'Seventies had begun to suck.
It was August. It was hot in Austin, Summer school droned on toward its conclusion and the cab business was mediocre.
I had my cab parked in the shade not far from Waller Creek on San Jacinto Street when the dispatcher called me to make a run. It was a young guy, about twenty, well dressed and nice looking. I picked him up at one of the old mansions near Hemphill Park, north of UT.
He wanted to go to the Montana Mining Company, one of those plush new watering holes with 19th century western décor. When we got there, he asked me to wait while he went inside.
I sat sweating in the heat of the cab. The meter ticked off at a dime a minute.
When he came out he was with none other than Tank Sherman. Sherman got in the cab with the kid and gave me an address on the near West Side, but he wanted to stop downtown on the way.
"I have to pick up some papers at the Brown Building," he said. "Do you know where that is, Driver?"
I nodded. Driving cabs, you hear some bizarre conversations. The one that took place between Sherman and the young man, presumably his son, ranks among the most bizarre I ever heard. The oddest thing about it was that it was obviously for my benefit. It was like that gratuitous kind of dialogue in grade B movies, where the actors say superfluous things to each other to inform the audience: what writers call exposition?
"I wouldn't be riding cabs at all if it weren't for those trumped-up DWI's they have on me," said Sherman.
"I thought they dismissed those," the boy said.
"One they didn't. I don't mind, though; at least I know the truth; taking the rap for someone else is never easy but it was necessary."
"You know I appreciate it, Dad," the boy said.
From what I had read in the papers and heard on television he'd been arrested for driving his Cadillac while drunk. There was never any mention of anyone else being involved. Sherman got a change of venue for two of the cases and got off. But it was well known that Sherman had been drunk at the dedication of "The Pyramid," better known as the LBJ Library, and had almost fallen out of his chair on the rostrum. He was the most prominent sot at the Forty Acres Club, UT's private saloon for the high and mighty.
"Hey, Driver, you're going an extra block to get to the Brown Building;" Sherman barked, "you could have turned back there."
"So I'll knock off thirty cents," I said.
A middle-aged secretary was waiting on the sidewalk in front of the building, holding a handful of papers. He stuffed them into his briefcase and we merged back into traffic.
