As the years pile up, Larry Sager can look back and laugh. He can smile about having knives thrust in his face. He can grin about the punk who put a skateboard through the window of his cab. And he can most certainly joke about the day he thought he’d be a responsible Jewish man and pick up a fare standing in the middle of the road, maniacally waving his arms and bleeding profusely from his forehead.

“This was my fault,” said Sager with a shake of his head.

“I saw this guy and I thought to myself, ‘Are we to the point in our society where we won’t stop and pick up a person who’s bleeding in the streets?’ So I asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital. But then he wanted to find the guys who hit him in the head with the bottle. And then he wanted 20 bucks,” recalled Sager, 52.

“One thing led to another, and I ended up getting out of the cab. And when the police showed up, he was chasing me around the car in circles like a Three Stooges routine.”

Sager recalls his wild and crazy years driving a San Francisco cab in the mid-1990s in a largely autobiographical novel called “No Guns, No Knives, No Personal Checks.” (He has had to deal with knives and checks, but — thankfully — no guns.)

Motoring a cab through the Tenderloin was a test of the Jewish values imparted to Sager during his youth in Detroit. At times he felt like he needed to help these people. Yet, as the story about the bleeding man proves, sometimes a person is better off not helping.

Keeping his head down was definitely a career imperative. But it didn’t take long for Sager to realize that he was picking up some good material during his shift, so he began filling out “logbooks” both on the job and at home.

A day on the clock might include ferrying around the Catwoman, a transvestite prostitute with a penchant for outfits resembling those favored by Eartha Kitt in the old “Batman” series; a garden variety drunk who befouls the cab; or, one evening, Danny Glover.

And then there was what Sager refers to as “the night.”

As he tells it, Sager picked up a drunk who had been thrown out of his girlfriend’s apartment and ferried him to his dealer’s house in the avenues. Sager kept his head down as usual, but did notice, at one point, that his fare was attempting to snort cocaine in the back seat while all four windows were rolled down — resulting in the cab’s sudden transformation into a narcotic snow-globe.

The fare then picked up a pair of hookers and, in a final twist, called their mothers on his cell phone to ensure that he was getting “clean girls.”

Sager graduated from high school

at 15, but soon dropped out of college to pursue a music career. He arrived in San Francisco at 18 and worked a number of jobs before heading back to college and driving a cab as a way to pay tuition bills.

After putting himself through his long-delayed final two years at San Francisco State University, Sager went on to law school at the University of Michigan and is now a lawyer in the downtown San Francisco office of an international firm. He lives in Oakland with his wife.

And for those who would follow his tire tracks and drive a cab to put themselves through school, Sager has a bit of advice: Wear shoes with good soles.

“People get so drunk they don’t remember they took a cab, that you’re the cab driver or which way to go home,” he said, able to laugh after many years away from the job.

Several times he chased down deadbeat fares. Once he pursued a man into his apartment and complained to the drunk man’s wife that her husband had stiffed him.

And there was also the night Sager drove around town in Taxi No. 666 — but, he says with a laugh, he’s saving that story for the sequel.




“No Guns, No Knives, No Personal Checks” by Larry Sager

(288 pages, Everett Madison Publishing, $14.95)