by Paul Larusch

Created on: June 06, 2008

Back in the 90s I was what Archie Bunker might have called an "entramanure": I financed, started up, and ran my own business. I owned two taxi cabs in the city of Buffalo, NY. One of my drivers was a guy named Gerry Albert. He was a good man and an honest man. And by "honest" I don't mean cab-driver honest; I mean honest honest. Cab-driver honest drivers steal from you, the owner of the car, but not all that much. They steal only enough to make the day worth their while (by their definition) too. Honest-honest drivers run everything on the meter and pay you your share at the end of the day.

(Footnote: context is everything. In the taxi business a cab-driver-honest individual is a more precious commodity than you'd think, for they at least get the basics covered. They (A) show up for work; (B) take care of the vehicle, or at least don't grossly abuse it; and (C) stay on the clock. I had one driver, a native-American male, who had dual citizenship-US and Canadian-who disappeared in Canada for two weeks with one of my cars; and another, an attractive white female, who really wanted to work the bars at night. Once or twice or three times a night when she had a male passenger in the car she'd call out of service for an hour. Can you guess what she was doing off the meter?)

Anyway, as I said, Gerry Albert was a good man and a good worker who made money for all concerned-himself, me, and our dispatch service. I had no problem with him, but he did have a problem, his health. He was a young (in his mid-twenties) and tall (over six feet) but he weighed well over 400 pounds. He was, as a friend of mine said, "beyond a belt": because he could not find a belt long enough to go around his waist he had to use suspenders to hold his pants up.

One day Gerry picked me up at my home and was driving me back to the dispatch office so that I could pay him for his day's work and the dispatch-service owner what I owed him for the week. When we got close to the stand he said he wanted to stop at a Texas Hots place to get dinner to go. When he came out he was carrying a rectangular box that was about a foot long and eight inches wide and a bucket that looked like the bucket you get at a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand. I asked him what all he had.

"My dinner."

"All that? What is it?"

"A dozen hot dogs and a bucket of fries," he answered, as he set the box and the bucket on the seat between us. He peeled back a corner of the foil on the box. "Want one?"

"No, thank you. You eat all this in one

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