Chattin' With Larry

We got a little extra bonus when we visited with my bestest friend and her family. We got to meet one of her interesting neighbours, Larry.

Biddie met Larry because he absolutely must stop to pet Ruby when he walks past her house. You would too, because Ruby is one of the cutest, most appealing little dogs ever. Biddie insisted that I have to meet him. You know how I believe that everybody's got a story? This guy's got hundreds!

Larry showed up wearing a bright orange T shirt that really set off his thick silver hair and grey beard. I live in a world where bearded men instill a sense of comfort so I settled in for a chat with my willing participant.

As it turns out, Larry grew up in the big city of Toronto. He moved to Kitchener after a close friend moved his family to K-town and Larry spent some time visiting. He likes it in Kitchener; it's a small city but big enough to keep him busy. His friend found him a fundraising job once he moved here. That only lasted six months. He hated office life. "I knew what everybody was gonna say at breaktime before they even said it." Soon he was back to driving a cab again, the job he was familiar with.

Larry was a cab driver for over twenty years, and in that time, saw some freaky stuff. He saw different waves of immigrants who escaped from war torn countries, driving cab because they could. He noticed that some guys were different from others and got a feel for which ones came out of more extreme circumstances. He described a heaviness there, from people who had seen some awful stuff.

When he started this career, he'd had a driver's licence for exactly one day. I kid you not.

He also drove for 8 years without a licence. In that time he never once got caught. He was soooooo careful! He did everything right! After he got his licence again, he got a little over confident and whaddaya know, turned into a terrible driver! He figured he could maybe just kinda deke through that red light at 3 am when nobody was looking. Admit it-- you've thought about it. You're in an intersection and there's nobody else on the road! You've wanted to keep going, haven't you????

On and off for a few years, Larry drove wheelchair vans as well. It was tricky. He had to load and unload the passengers and then drive well enough to not scare the poor folks half to death. Driving wheelchair cabs is a logistical pain, which is something I never really thought of before my afternoon with Larry. My Grandpa G was a double amputee, but he had hand controls installed on his car and never got a cab anywhere. Being in a small town, I don't think there even was such a service. Larry explained that he might have to do a twenty minute drive to get to the caller's house, load him up, and then drive him exactly one block away.

Larry sort of fell into acting at one point when he was rooming with some young directors. Over the years he has appeared in six movies and one infomercial. If I was any kind of sharp journalist I would have written it all down but I am really just a spaz who sat in a lawn chair and listened to this guy's answers to my dumb questions!

The informercial was for a Women's shelter. In it, he played- you guessed it!- the cab driver who takes a woman and her two crying children to the shelter in the middle of the night. He totally bonded with the kids on the set. He rescued them from the catered food. Instead of eating the weird uppity yuppy food, Larry made peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Later on when the kids had a hard time mustering up tears for their scene, he cut up an onion for them so they could wipe their eyes for a reason.

One night, when Larry was driving around looking for fares, he was flagged down by some guys on a movie set. They simply needed a cab driver for a scene where an actor came out of a building, hailed a cab, and drove away. Instead of hiring a union actor, they gave Larry some cash for his time and off he went. They didn't even know that he'd already had camera experience.

He'd also done some security work on movie sets. He had an adventurous night on a gravel pit when some buddies stopped by with a bit of weed to smoke. End result, the cube van he was driving sort of kind of sank up the rear axle in gravel. In his dopey state, he got out and looked for a shovel to dig the van out. That didn't work so well. He thought for sure he'd get fired. The next day, however, two other vehicles got stuck in the same place, trying to pull the van out. Larry slid outta that situation too.

Then Larry told us a classic tale of first impressions and reality. A woman doing production work got his number and left a message on his phone. She needed some camera talent and he'd been recommended to her. She had the best, huskiest, sexiest voice he'd ever heard. He saved her messages- he and his roommates would play them over and over and just shiver with delight at this woman's sexy voice. Finally they got each other on the phone and made the arrangements for the job. And it was over. No more enticing voice. All business. Turns out she was a bit of an actor herself...

One of the movies Larry appeared in was Mimic. I haven't seen Mimic. It's about cockroaches. That's why I haven't seen it. I'm a farm kid; I can handle flies, worms, carcasses, manure, anything like that, but cockroaches, I cannot deal with. I may have to see this one though, I try to spot Larry. He said it could have been the best movie ever, because the concept was heavy, but it was, in his opinion, marred by the Typical Hollywood Ending. Just another reason why I now must force myself to sit through it!

Under that mop of silver hair, there is a complex and imaginative brain. He told us all about the story idea that's been kicking around his head for over a decade. It involves art dealers, a drug dealer, a single mother, a cab driver, and an artist who refuses to paint, even when his kidnappers demand him to produce something. I asked him to write it down. He said he usually turns stuff over in his head, sometimes for years, then finally writes it all down in a burst of energy. I hope he does write it down. I'd like to read it. Actually I'd like to watch it.

Bridget's man Shawn came home from work right around this point and there was an explosion of information around the table! Shawn has a brain full of..everything...I swear that man has never forgotten a single thing he's ever learned. Shawn and Larry started comparing notes on Science Fiction. I started feeling like I had a LOT of reading to catch up on!

Larry went all Mentalist on us then. He did the old "Say silk fast five times now what do cows drink" trick, but I have a ten year old son, so I didn't fall for that one. Then he did a brain relaxing routine on Jethro, cuminating in a "say the first answer you think of" to the question, "What's your favourite vegetable?"

Jethro's answer? "Sex." That's his answer to everything. I wasn't surpised but I still laughed for about five minutes straight.

I'm not much better though. My answer was "fruit." Fruit is not a vegetable. Duh. Poor Larry. We just weren't very good at this.

He did another one involving numbers and letters. I went seriously off the rails on this one. He had us multiply a number between 1 and 10 with the number 9, and then add that number together, then pick its corresponding letter of the alphabet. I got the letter D. Unbeknownst to me, so did everyone else. We had to pick a country starting with that letter. I blanked out. Dalmatia? That doesn't count, since it pretty much hasn't been a country for over a century. I picked Dominican Republic. No idea why. Then pick an animal with the second letter of that country's name. Um...octopus??? What colour is it? Pink??? Apparently the punchline is that there are no grey elephants in Denmark. Biddie and Jethro both got it. Larry thought it was interesting that I chose such a different direction. Yeah. Story of my life.

The visit had to come to an end, despite the topics not yet covered. Larry could have had a very deep conversation on astrophysics with my son, except that the Boy was busy hitting Bridget's girls with water balloons. I believe Larry had a few days worth of stories and anecdotes and mental challenges. I really don't think we even got a fraction of it.

There was another thing we talked about: dogs.



Every time one of these two characters got a leash tangle around a lawn chair leg, we stopped to admire the dogginess of the dogs.



I wish I'd taken a picture of Larry. He is a self admitted fame hound! He was looking forward to being needled with questions! I really should have taken a picture and I regret that!

Our visit with Larry reinforced my fascination with other people's stories.

It just goes to show that in general, people are interesting. Sure, some are dead boring underneath it all, but there's a very high chance that the people you see every day have much more going on than you would expect. Even the mellow fellow who regularly stops to give the dog a pat may have had an illustrious past!!