I ask the two guys if there's going to be a problem with the payment...

If I'd have known that you fuckers were going to use obscene language I would have found a different fucking article. What do you motherfuckers think your doing???? Besides it doesn't make any fucking sense, so fuck off.

Way to make your point, Jack Ass

For better or worse (for worse), my working world (and thus working mentatlity) is one of casual vulgarity.

Hell, yeah, keep this going, I'm hooked on this sketchy tale. cool car to lock like that. wish i had one of those.

i hope you have a good partition though

That's the scary part...no partition. See, Portland wants to pretend that it will remain a small town with no violent criminals forever and ever. There is a camera, so the police can get an image long after the fact of, oh, the scumbag that held a knife to another driver's neck last week.

The vulgarity IS offensive. Turns out that's why people use it.

Tell it like it is, NC3.

Tedious.

Hardly, Freshmaker. This was a good payoff, preceded by a first part that promised a good, gritty short-short-short story of Portland, and a lot more real than the fakeass memoirs that make millions. Cabdrivers work in a combat zone and a bubbling social laboratory, yet they receive neither hazard pay nor funding for their amateur sociology work with the public: calming the insane, balming the devastated and suicidal, playing angel, and ferrying countless hopeless drunks and the occasional psycho scumbag with a knife. If you promised me the darned Pulitzer, I wouldn't drive a cab in Portland. Maybe for all the hash in Afghanistan, I'd do it for a week; no, a month. Tops.

Naw, this wasn't tedious, NC3. Good enough so far, but your readers and riders are still hungry. Now you have to top it, next week. (Life's fucked, right? And the writing life is aye right fucked. Thanks, Jeff Magic, for the all-purpose-word inspiration.)

Look, a little experiment here, just for S&G: I'm going to ask, to veritably beg and plead and make a sacrifice, for one of the gods or demigods of the Hindu pantheon to ride in your cab, sometime in the month of April. You get to decide if they're ordinary fares, should they appear in your rearview mirror. If nothing happens before May Day, I'll have wasted a lot of incense. You can then (or now) say I'm bullshit, and I will drop my head in shame. (Then.)

Just to keep it interesting, I have three particular gods in mind, and will put this information in a sealed envelope with an impartial friend who lives in remote Oregon. He does not read WW. His honesty is beyond reproach or question.

Thanks for keeping this column alive and well, NC3. NC2 is still my favorite NC of all time, but your columns show the soft underbelly and the big heart of Portland.

Ah jeez, here we go with the soft underbelly again. jt, you're almost as tedious as this column.

Wow....big fucking deal, "tough guy." Would have been a better story if you got your ass kicked.

Thanks, Skipper. What a fucked-up cliche, my bad; I meant the rippling six-pack abs of a city that has no lurid side, almost Nebraskan in its purity. You think this column is tedious? Why? Defend your statement. Elucidate and expound. Sway me with your argument.

So, NC3, tell us about the time you got your ass kicked. Your public wants to see your humble side. Vicious mofos, some of them.

Well, Jeff...I'm not sure I can go along with "6-pak abs" either, but there is definitely a lurid side. It's just that "soft underbelly" suggests some "hidden awfulness" and I don't think it's hidden any more. I definitely don't see Portland as "Nebraskan" and having grown up in the Mid-West, I feel entitled to that opinion.

Regarding the tedious nature of this column, I was about to describe it as:

"this guy goes to his job and some weird shit might happen to him and then it does...or sometimes it doesn't."

However, I think Freshmaker (in his second post) does a better job of conveying the same criticism. I guess after all is said and done, I just don't like this NC's style. After reading a number of his entries, I still don't have a feeling of what sort of person he is and I never get a sense of any insight into his passengers. It's mostly just complaining about his job and the people it exposes him to and I can do that for myself with my own job.

Thanks for asking me to define my complaints. It's difficult to pin down, but I think it's tedious because I keep waiting to get drawn in to this person's life--at least his worklife--and that never happens for me, no matter how much "detail" he gives us.

I'll get in on this - this column is tedious because it comes off as written by somebody who needs some serious editing and guidance. This particular entry in the NC library can be summed up roughly as "Drunk guys considered not paying, then I locked the doors. Then they paid. The End." Luckily we have the growling driver getting the riders squealing in the end, so it's all very dramatic. There’s even the looming specter of violence.

It's not gritty, it's poorly written navel-gazing on the part of a mediocre writer. The dialog is unrealistic, the story contrived and the fact it’s published on a weekly basis is ridiculous.

Tedious.

Good answers, Skipper and Freshmaker. I believe I understand what you're saying. My hope is that NC3 will continue to evolve as a writer of short essays, but as a writer myself, I know how easy it is to go with a formula, especially with limited words. And yes, there's some truth to your comments about being held at arm's length by the writer; about needing to read something clear and truthful and good when you pick up WW and turn to Night Cabbie.

My sense is that I'm watching the evolution of a writer, who works in an almost impossible format (500 words) and who is, I believe, trying to connect with readers. It's a process.

My best regards to both of you, and my thanks for your measured, well-reasoned, and civil posts. You have given NC a fair challenge, to write more deeply and honestly. My bet is that he'll do it. Writing's a hard dollar anyway, but driving a cab is a huge risk. Every week, when I get into his cab, I want to see what Portland is really like, especially at night. And "soft underbelly" was a really unintelligent, lazy way to talk about Portland's nightlife. (I too grew up in the Midwest, about 90 miles north of Omaha. Now there's the soft underbelly of America.)

It's a pleasure, most of the time, to read Night Cabbie. But it's always a pleasure to read the posts here.

Actually, the column is 250 words.

Holding the reader away from me, the "real" person, is a very intentional move on my part. When I thought about how I wanted to write the column, I decided that my first priority was to write something that was an honest representation of what it's like to be a cab driver. As I could theoretically be any male cab driver in the city (which is to say just about any cab driver in the city), I feel obliged to write a column that as many cab drivers as possible can look at and say "yeah, that's what it's like." And from what I can tell, I've been largely succesful at that, and that's pretty much all I care about save for my second concern, which is fairly and honestly portraying the other people that appear in the column. From the interactions I've had with the people who I see again, and recognize me, I've done a good job of that. I think that that's also evident in the way readers have sympathized with passengers when I present myself as being an asshole (the guy with no pants in the rain).

So I guess that's the thing... my target audience is incredibly small (cab drivers and the people I write about), but I feel like I've done a very good job of serving that audience. I completely agree with the criticism that I haven't created some compelling persona for the reader to root for, but that hasn't been my goal.

A good deal of that is because my predecessor did an incredibly good job of writing a column that was almost completely driven by her personality and the uniqueness of her being a woman cab driver. I wanted to write something different, and I made a conscious decision to have this column be as anonymous as possible. Not just in some "it's a mystery who's writing it," way, but in the sense that the narrator's a blank, a flaneur who's all gaze and no substance. I also, given consideration number two up above, decided that I would always put the telling of the story above myself. I tried to lay the foundation for all of this with the first two columns, the first of which was about the deflation of ego, the second of which was about alcoholism and shared experience. The times I've mentioned being a recovering alcoholic haven't been attempts to win the reader over with some personal detail, but clues that for the first year or so, I tried to make this column about the destruction (or maybe deconstruction is a better word?) of "self." Not the physical body, but the whole mess of neuroses, habits, opinions, etc. that we often call "ego."

For what it's worth, I've changed that emphasis, but the reader still shouldn't expect to be let into the wonderful world of me. I LOVE the anonymity of the column, and the fact of the matter is that I'm a very busy person with a lot of interests, and that these interests are very unique. If I were to write about them in the column space, it would make me very easily identifiable by anyone who had a cursory conversation with me in the cab. I can't write the music columns my predecessor did (which I think played a role in helping people identify her), because I listen to very weird music. Writing a column about introducing a fare to Cobra//group would be completely pointless.

So that's the other part in my keeping you at arm's length - I have to, as otherwise the anonymity that I think of as the cornerstone of the Night Cabbie concept goes out the window.

I'm not going to pretend that I don't care what people think, of course I wish that everybody loved the column. But I never expected that everybody would, and in fact expected that my approach to it would put a number of folks off. But I should also say that I've heard from people both through email and in the cab (not knowing who I am) who seem to appreciate and enjoy the approach as well.

As for the quality of my writing, etc., that's all fair. I've said many times that I'm a cab driver, not an author. If I were some literary genius, I wouldn't be driving a cab. There have been some other points made that I can't comment on for a number of reasons, but I will say that I don't disagree with everything that's been written above. I'll also admit that there have been times where I've been so busy that I've just dashed columns off hurriedly with very little thought, which is much to my discredit.

I'll close by saying what I've said several times before: when it comes down to it, this is a tiny column buried in the classifieds of a free weekly paper. If you don't like it, then it's incredibly easy to ignore.

Thanks for caring enough about the column to discuss it at length and with such thoughtfulness. I really mean that.

The line should actually read "which I think played a role in helping people identify WITH her"

Ignore it? Not a chance. 250 words is like building a ship in a bottle.

Keep entertaining me, NC3. Keep on pushing the envelope. This two-parter was good to read. Nice job. Where are we going next week?

Love the column, NC3. Even with a measured quantity of poetic license.

I don't think I've taken much poetic license at all, and what I have has been unintentional. I'm not saying that everything in quotation marks is 100% absolutely what was said, word for word, but I stick to what I remember and not what I wish had happened. This column appears in a newspaper, and I take that very seriously.

This is why gripes like Freshmaker's are silly to me - I'm just a guy in a cab, I can't have something exciting and/or profound happen to me every week, especially not something profound and exciting enough to always fit into such a small space.