Although he professes to be a rule breaker at heart, Brock can veer into being a stickler. When a Virginia cab -- which is not allowed to pick up fares in the District -- stopped for two men with suitcases on K Street, Brocks went into citizen-arrest mode, following the car and gesturing for the driver to roll down the window. All the while, he yelled to the passengers: "You're participating in an illegal act."
"They're taking money out of my pocket," he said after writing down the offender's license plate and vowing to file a report.
Adrian Brocks grimaces about traffic while talking to passenger Stacy Lloyd.
(Jahi Chikwendiu -- The Washington Post)
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Brocks said he accepts that many passengers are "oblivious to cabdrivers," but he does his best to find out what makes people tick. Some riders talk on cell phones or bury their heads in newspapers, showing him no interest.
He pounces on those who do show interest, though, such as the man from Norway and the woman from Canada on their way to the Ronald Reagan Building.
"You should have been here a couple of weeks ago when they anointed Little Caesar again," he told the riders, who seemed a little confused. "I mean President Bush."
After a lengthy discussion with the three in agreement that the world generally has a negative view of the Bush administration, the man said: "It's a good thing we weren't Republicans." Brocks's response: "I was hoping that you were."
He isn't always so forthcoming. He spotted two men near Foggy Bottom hailing a cab and recognized one as former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara. McNamara didn't hop in, but his lunch companion -- a man who said he was 91 -- did and soon he and Brocks were discussing how to fix Social Security. As soon as the man got out and shut the door to the cab, Brocks said disparagingly that he would recognize McNamara anywhere.
Brocks tells passengers he has been through bankruptcy, divorce, problems with the Internal Revenue Service and drug use that he says kept him from spending as much time as he should have with his three children, one of whom was gunned down two years ago in the streets.
And he readily confides, although he's not proud of it, that after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he was among the masses who took to the streets. "I was out there stealing suits," he said.
What he seldom discusses is hometown politics because, Brocks said, it "totally disgusts" him. He leaves those matters to one of his brothers who is intimately involved with labor issues and elections for council and mayor.
Otherwise, he said, his life is an open book. When he's not watching sports and news on television, he's spending time with his family.
He's particularly proud that he has a son named Adrian D. Brocks Jr. and a grandson named Adrian III. He often boasts to passengers that the kings of Prussia were a line of Adrians. He'd read that somewhere.
On a recent day, a rider who said he had majored in history in college chimed in. "Actually, they were dukes," the man said, before launching into a lesson about why Prussia, a former German state, didn't call its leaders kings.
Sufficiently convinced, Brocks said: "I guess I'll have to start pushing dukes then. They were still the leaders."
Both were wrong. The Adrians were popes.
Brocks has no illusions that the job -- despite the freedom it allows him -- will make him rich. So he spends $7 a day on lottery tickets. "We who dwell in the house of fool's gold cannot be denied," he explained with a smile.
