Baby, Let’s Cruise…
Anaheim, California was a great place to be a cab-driver. The area around Disneyland is full of hotels and motels, and right in the center of it all is the Convention Center, that attracts professionals from literally dozens of industries to the area each year. One of the largest conventions was the yearly NAMM extravaganza, held each year by the National Association of Music Merchants. All of the major DVD and record companies were there, and always there were quite a few celebrities who would try to sneak in under our radar.
I didn’t always get to work the conventions like I wanted. Often I would get tabbed at the start of my shift to drive some handicapped kids to their school in the morning, and pick them up at the end of the day, leaving only a few hours in the middle of the day to work the area around the convention. It wasn’t hard work driving the kids around, but it could be heart-breaking – many of the kids had Cerebral Palsy and other debilitating diseases. I know I wasn’t always up to it. They were supposed to take the buses, which were better equipped to handle them, but some of them used cabs. One little boy wore a football helmet, and the first time I picked him up at his home, I had laughed. None of the kids could talk. He sat quietly in the back most of the time, watching out the window and drooling a little like most of them did, but one day he threw a tantrum and I understood why he needed the helmet. Another young girl named Jill literally broke my heart each time I would see her. She was in her teens, and she had a cute shape, like she could have been a high school cheerleader or something. Her parents would often dress her in short little skirts, and I would have to buckle her in to the back seat, and she would sit there, oblivious to me and the world around her, her sweet young face, all twisted and distorted by her disease or defect.
One morning I got a cab with a radio in it. It was nice to be able to listen to the music, but I wasn’t sure if the passengers would like it or not, so I left it off most of the day. I hadn’t had very many fares, and it was getting close to pick-up time for my kids, when a very pretty young black woman came out of the Hilton Hotel and got in my cab. She wanted to go to the train station over at Anaheim Stadium, and when I started up the Ford LTD the radio came on. She didn’t seem at all bothered by it, nor did she seem inclined to speak much, so I left the radio on and as I drove out onto Harbor Boulevard she began to hum along with the music that was playing. It was a song by George Michael that was a couple years old at the time, but still popular called “Careless Whisper,” and before long she began to sing along with the radio.
When the next song came on, she looked at me in the mirror and said, “I like your station.” “They play the nicest music,” she added. It was “Baby, Let’s Cruise” by Smokey Robinson. She began to sing that one too, but softer and more seductively now, and it was quite clear now that she was a professional singer, and had a lovely voice. I was getting close to the stadium, but there was plenty of time before her train would be there, so I slowed down to hear the rest of her number.
I waited at the station for another fare, and she smiled over at me once from the platform while she was waiting for her train to arrive. I didn’t know if she was famous, at least I didn’t recognize her. I asked some of the other cab drivers around if they knew who she was or who was in town at the time, and one of them said that Luther Vandross was giving a concert that evening, and Oleta Adams was with him. I had heard Miss Adams before, and I didn’t think it was her. She probably had just come down for the day for the NAMM convention.
That afternoon I picked Jill up at the special school in Costa Mesa, and drove her home.
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