Kudocities Meets a Road Rat

Posted 11 months ago 1 response

When the chuggers go home, another breed of slightly annoying people come out to pray on us poor drunks – the rickshaw riders. Blocking our paths with their three wheeled sofas, ringing their bells like madmen in a campanology class, they will take sweaty tourists or overly rich drunks 500 metres for 20 quid. But we are sure some of them are nice.

John, for instance. We first met John looking disheveled, asking us for money, and recovering from a hideous hangover and a night in a Russian prison, so he can’t be that bad. Since then, things must have got worse, as he’s resorted to a nocturnal career cycling lazy bastards around Soho.

We asked John a little more about the life of these road rats…

You pedal a rickshaw around London for money. What hideous tragedy drove you to this?

A tragedy that can best be described by three negative bank accounts, an indefinite period of time when ‘lunch’ for me meant bread in the park, and ‘dinner’ dry lentil curry. I couldn’t afford the books I needed for university and I couldn’t afford the bus fare to get me in: I was cycling in from Acton every day to the centre. But, this was the result of a very wonderful summer.

Do you actually enjoy it, then?

I get a masochistic kind of joy from these kinds of public service jobs, the sort where you would normally have ‘man’ in the title like it was all your life’s meaning, and you’re no longer a member of the ‘general public’ but someone everyone else expects to have a certain level of knowledge, and a certain demeanour. You’re public property. Last year I was a postman. This one’s more physical. And more liable to physical forms of abuse/punishment (spanking, etc…)

Free spanking aside, do you earn lots? How does it work?

It’s entirely based on chance. That includes what kind of mood I’m in, what night it is, who’s about, the weather, and precisely where I find myself at every moment of the night. It’s the sort of non-system of things that convinces a man dependent on it for his living that the system’s very finely tuned, and you must do what you can to get it right. Even then it seems more like spiritually aligning yourself with the forces of the night. Smiling. Patience is important above all. Some people will leave exactly on the hour, or wait until the next hour, and by general consent, closing time at the theatres is a good time to start (I’ll normally begin with Grease, personally, and if nothing happens, head down to The Phantom of The Opera, which ends about a half an hour later). Perhaps it has something to do with karma. Of course, you earn more the more people you take and the further the distance, but when it comes down to it, the money depends on the people themselves, and me. If it’s been a bad night I’ll head to the Ritz and take £30 from a wealthy Russian couple for a lift to their hotel on Knightsbridge. If it’s going well, £10 lifts from Soho as far as Marylebone are standard fare and earn me a decent wage by the end of the night.

But taxi drivers hate you. Does that make you cry? Ever had a fight with a cabbie?

They do. I haven’t ever cried. I put out my tongue. I once went slowly into the back of a cab down Haymarket after a disappointing sojourn outside Her Majesty’s Theatre. No bites. A short driver stepped out and gave me a nasty look, and I said, “Look, it’s only a rubber tyre’ (because of course the front most part of a rickshaw is its front bicycle wheel). He said: “Watch where you’re going, you little prick”. I didn’t say anything else but he kept looking and said, “Don’t you smile at me, boy”. I suddenly realised here was a man who’d been in the game fifty years and taken that long to become what he was today, a man with The Knowledge, and with it The Stare, a sage, or a high priest of the profession. While here was me, wheeling around irreverently on my four-person bicycle, giving drunks lifts ‘for fun,’ which is more a perverse kind of tourism than a real vocation – “Am I smiling?” I asked, a tactic designed partly to confuse the gentleman, and partly designed not at all, but a nervous trigger-response to what might be the early stages of something ugly.. “You’ve got a funny face,” he said, glowering, and I knew we were in the clear.

Do you have friends among the rickshaw fraternity, or do you work against each other ?Do you share those little caps and lycra maintenance tips?

It’s definitely a fraternity. They’re all either friends or just people I don’t know. It’s also much more fun taking big groups of people around with other people. There’s a kind of moral support, especially when you’re heading out to the dark and shadowy places. Racing’s fun too. You get groups of people who don’t know each other wrangling in the back of two or more rickshaws at traffic lights like they’re riding Roman chariots. You find your fingers are twitching on the handle bars ready to accelerate. Which of course doesn’t happen. We slowly gain pace, riding onward. But I normally win, if winning’s possible.

How far could you go? How far have you been?

A man once asked me to take him and his wife to Richmond from a Soho bar, and to my surprise I said yes. In fact, it was my first night. I had started at 9pm and had these huge estimated figures in my head, which I’d been more or less promised by the people who were now renting me my rickshaw. I had a huge deposit down, plus one week’s rent in advance, too. By 3 am, I had £25 in my pocket. I said I’d take them there for £50 – which is vile nonsense. They’re not too light, rickshaws, and less so with two passengers, and despite what the man thought, it isn’t like riding a bike. I let him have a go – at which point I was confirmed in my suspicions he’d had a drink. This was in Knightsbridge, just beyond the Wellington Arch roundabout. As you’ll recall there’s a loud and violent road below, lit like a motorway tunnel, and the cars run along there as though it were one. But I decided I was in my rights to scare the shit out of this couple, who granted were only teachers and without the sort of money this sort of wonder really required, but so who all the more needed to be put in their place. We sailed along Cromwell Road after the initial struggle…the Natural History Museum, Embassy of Kazakhstan.. up the hill, beyond Earl’s Court. By this stage he knows my name and starts coaching me, (an all-too familiar trait among passengers) as well as now enthusing at the prospect we’re breaking some kind of record. By Chiswick High Road his wife has decided she’s a little cold, and while my conscious plain has reached a point somewhere around two and half foot over my head, I wheeze something about ‘just a little further..’ but definitely by the next taxi shop I’m dead. He gives me £30 and leaves. I learn a valuable lesson.

Have any passengers offered you a shag? Anyone been at it in your rickshaw?

We’re told not to as part of our initiation in to the business. I remember Juan, my mentor, jumbling together some clause about how “you mustn’t have any sexual relations of any kinds in your rickshaw when you’re working”. Two fat Welsh girls once offered me a tip for my phone number though (they gave me the tip anyway), a swarthy man with long dark hair and a phony French accent invited me in to his Sloane Square apartment for ‘something warm to drink’ and I declined (though intrigued). Apart from that there was a quite pretty girl dressed up as Snow White on Halloween who wanted to put eye make-up on me and asked for a lift to Little Venice, but I must have handled that wrong – seconds later I find myself threatened by a giant Smurf (“Did you just slap Melissa?”). Then there was a French couple who I took on a nice tour of the city, necking on Waterloo Bridge, but nothing exciting.

Smurf sex is best avoided. But people who get rickshaws are either overexcited tourists or rich, drunk twats. Discuss.

Actually, there are a lot of decidedly under excited tourists. I once picked up a grey-haired old German by the theatre showing The Thirty Nine Steps with his nubile Russian partner. She said to me, dead pan, “Just take us around here. You know, just for a joke.” I proceeded on my usual cruise along the labyrinths of Soho while the two in the back made jokes about English girls, but without laughing. Just a lot of awkward sneering noises. But I might answer that question in defense of some of my more pleasant customers. I once picked up three French guys looking for a Death Metal bar I’d never heard of. I said, “urrrrrrrrr…” in my usual way, and they didn’t dismiss me but said – “..or punk..?” I said – ‘yes!’ and was pleased suddenly someone had picked a place (which I was picking for them) I’d pick to go to myself. I took them to the 12 Bar on Denmark Street and they insisted on buying me a drink. (Actually, just as we’re officially not meant to fuck during work hours, drinking’s also prohibited) Needless to stay I accepted the offer of a nice cold pint in the 12 Bar and stayed for the rest of the band’s set.

What other transport do you use? It’s a bit like who cuts a hairdresser’s hair, isn’t it?

For a while I would cycle home. Which is I suppose like the hairdresser who cuts her own hair. Once I got the hang of the job, though, I noticed how completely tiring it was and besides didn’t want to be trailing right back through the mess I’d left behind along Oxford Street in the open air. Now I get the night bus.

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