whore, whores, whores and more whores... another taxi tale

Paite gets an account with a massage parlor, to run the women up from Toledo to the airport in Detroit. They are all gorgeous asian women who find me to be a cute little green card and are almost too friendly. He usually takes the fares himself. The woman who runs the massage parlor prefers that the drivers take a massage instead of money, but I turn that down, pretty much because my girlfriend is very, very, very AIDS conscious. I've been tested six times during my time with her. They are very scary things to take.
I get a call from the dispatcher to call him on the phone. He patches me over to Paite who is at the Detroit airport, with the owner of the massage parlor, and she has forgotten a bag. She is about to miss an international flight which only takes off daily and will pay any speeding tickets and a 50 dollar tip if I can make it there in a rather ridiculously short amount of time. I do so.
As I pull into the airport, there is Paite, all dramatic like, running out to get the rest of the woman's luggage (which I later found out had like 50 thousand dollars in it).
I hand him the bag through the window and he bolts into the airport.
I park, get out and walk into the terminal just and hear Paite scream, "No!" As the Asian woman accidently puts his breifcase on the belt to be checked, complete with his .38 automatic.
Bells go off and there alarms everywher, two plain clothes cops and all three of the security guards pull their guns and point at the man who seems to be running toward his gun.


Paite stops, smiles, holds up his hands and says in a confident, take charge voice, "You gentlement are going to laugh when you realize who you pulled your guns on, okay? This is all just a big misunderstanding. She threw the wrong breifcase on the belt, that's all that is happening here." He'd spent enough time in jail, getting arrested and in courtthat he knew how to get control of men who were holding guns on him.
(In court, Paite took great pleasure in practicing law with his jailhouse license and made a lot of money off insurance fraud. The only way he went to jail, as he told it, was that they framed him. He also claimed that was when he gave up his life of total crime, because the cops, to him, were breaking the rules by framing (though they knew and could not prove anything all the time along the way)

Back in the airport.... Well, Paite gives me a signal at some point to stay back, which I take to mean be ready to bail him out or something. They take him away in cuffs and he is talking away, already making them smile. He worked the carny enough years that he could almost hypnotize some people. . I wait around for about four hours, hear nothing, and finally just drive back to Toledo. The Asian woman made her flight because Paite insisted the gun was his, not hers, and that they shouldn't hold her up.

About ten that night, I cruise by the cab office and Paite tells me, "Well,I guess I could have been put away for like fifteen years." He puffs away on fat joints and Marlboro's as he talks fast; he waves his hands a lot and ashes fly tend to be flitting about in the air around him. "They took me to an FBI agent and, Man, when he pulled up my record, I was sweating, boy. He wanted to throw me in jail just for having the gun, mind you, in an airport. Well, I tell him that someone left the gun in my cab last night, and I called my brother, a cop, and I was gonna turn it in to him tonight."

"He didn't beleive a word of it, mother fucker. Goes 'Your brother is not a cop, don't lie to me.' So I give him the number of the sherriff's office, he calls my brother, found out he was a cop, and then he asked if I called about a gun. Of course, he covered my ass. Me and him, we'll say anything for each other. Blood is thicker than law. I got six people who will testify to anything I want them to. I'd do the same for them. Six witnesses is usually enough to get off for anything."

The story ended with Paite on a writing campaign which went on for years, trying to get the FBI to give him back the gun, because he had found it was intitled to have it returned to him by law. Paite was the jailhouse lawyer.

I use his real name and shit because he is dead and if his kids do ever come across my writing by some fluke, they should know I loved their dad like a brother/dad/mentor. He told me once I was his best friend. For awhile I was, in Toledo.

Oh, there is one more point to this story. (well, saying there is a point to any of this might be a stretch, but) This asian woman, she later tried to hire Paite to break another woman's legs. This woman 0wned the massage parlor and owed her money (the way it worked was, they came over here and worked for one woman, then that woman eventually set them up in business, but this woman, after getting a year of free work, was reniging on what was a tight custom in their prostitute/massage parlor culture. At the time, Paite had a lot of influence over me, and I hate to hear of people getting wronged. We talked for a day though like we might just have to do it, which probably had more, for me, to do with my having a huge fight with my girlfriend. But going in cold and breaking a woman's legs over a financial debt? That is not batman enough.

We told her that she shouldn't do that in this country. I don't know what she did. She told us we weren't men. I'm sure she probably eventually found someone to do it. This woman was not going to get screwed again, not after taking it for a year without a dime coming her way. I almost hope that woman's legs were broken, because there was no court this prostitute could go to, and it would be justice... but, when you work in a criminal world with criminals, you should expect them to be criminals, right?

I would never trust a hooker. Like I have said in here, my near death experience came at the hands of a whore with a butcher knife -- and my life was saved that night by a little old black lady who started screaming for the girl to 'Get out of my can. I got to go to work. Get out of there." And, since the yells of the women probably woke the whole project (on clybourn and damen), the whore got out. I describe this elsewhere, it went on with the whore... I am trying to stick to one story at a time here, so... another time.