My Life on the Road (11 page)

·
I’m glad to get a lifetime taxi driver in Manhattan. This one tells me he’s been at it so long that he’s writing a book called
Behind My Back.
I tell him it’s an inspired title. His book has already made him the rare American who feels equal to the rich and famous, and he spends the ride telling me about his subjects. “Robert Redford is much shorter than you think….Cher is down-to-earth and a big tipper, but she’s had too much plastic surgery….Donald Trump has such an ego, he even tried to impress me….Toni Morrison is more queenly than Queen Elizabeth….I told Caroline Kennedy she should run for office….Just from listening to bankers, I knew the subprime mortgage market would crash….”

I can’t decide whether I like this guy or not. He’s so celebrity-obsessed that I wonder about his attitude toward ordinary passengers. Just then a homeless woman wheeling a shopping cart—probably holding all her life’s possessions—darts out in front of us, and the driver almost sideswipes a bus while trying not to hit her. I’m expecting a string of expletives, but instead, he just calls out to her, “Be careful, sweetheart!”

After a quiet moment, he says, as if to excuse himself for being a softie, “Well, she’s somebody’s sweetheart.”

·
Another lifetime driver offers to photograph my hands, make a drawing of them, and deliver it to my door—all for thirty dollars. There are samples of his artwork plastered around his dashboard and on the passenger door, like ghostly hands applauding. He used to set up his easel in Central Park with other street artists, he explains, but here, he has air-conditioning in summer and heat in winter. I tell him I don’t want a drawing but would like to contribute thirty dollars to his mobile art studio. First he declines, then says he’ll take twenty-five because that’s the entrance fee at the Metropolitan Museum—he goes there to look at paintings and copy just the hands. I tell him he’s one of the happiest people I’ve ever met.

·
I’m not surprised to get a taxi driver who is moonlighting as a film extra. Manhattan is one big movie set, and cops, firefighters, and homeless people sometimes try to make a little money as extras. But this guy is also an expert on taxi stories as a genre. He repeats, as if from something he read, “The combination of intimacy and anonymity make a great dramatic device.” He also gives me a filmography that starts with Martin Scorsese’s
Taxi Driver
and ends with
Taxicab Confessions,
a cheap-to-produce reality show in which drivers elicit voyeuristic sexual stories from passengers who are caught on a hidden camera. I can’t believe people let their private lives go public, but when I say this, he tells me I’m a sucker if I think
any
reality show is real. “Hollywood people, a bunch of phonies in ripped jeans and thirty-thousand-dollar Rolexes…not one of them could survive in Bed-Stuy or Harlem….They just pay people to tell phony sex stories….They don’t give a damn about drivers getting robbed or shot, that’s reality….They should all go home to L.A.”

Chastened, I pay my fare. On the front seat is a pile of eight-by-ten glossies of the driver, bare-chested and as sexy as an athlete, with a little Bob Marley thrown in. “Do you know anybody at
Law and Order
?” he asks me anxiously. “My kid is sick—I need the gig.”

Suddenly I guess why he’s so angry. All those shows tell the stories of passengers, not drivers. When I ask him, he says, “Exactly! This country thinks people with money are interesting, not people who need money like me.”

I think he’s right. I’d rather watch a show called
Taxi Drivers’ Confessions.

·
I’m being driven by a woman with bottle-red hair who could be anywhere between thirty-five and sixty. When I say I’m glad to have a woman driver, she tells me that an Orthodox rabbi refused to get into her taxi at all, and her garage has so many male drivers that it’s like a locker room. Then she lists her previous jobs—house painter, school bus driver, and welder of decorative iron—as if to prove that she doesn’t need my help. She also yells expletives at drivers who try to cut her off, knits a row on an afghan square while we’re waiting at a tollbooth, and, altogether, is as in command of her small ship as a pirate on the high seas.

To make up for underestimating her independence, I ask about the five male photo booth images on her dashboard, below a statue of the Virgin Mary and a blue Krishna. “Those are my old lovers—anyway, the ones I remember,” she says. “I find the path to spirituality lies through ecstatic sex—and the path to ecstatic sex lies through spirituality—don’t you?”

Thankful that this is a rhetorical question, I just keep quiet while she goes on. “I had kids with two of them, a rock band with one of them, and they’re all still my best friends. Why? Because I taught them about sex, that’s why. Not just sex-sex, but stay-in-bed-all-weekend sex, Tantric sex, go-to-a-place-otherwise-only-music-and-drugs-take-you sex.”

Trying to be cool, I ask why she has the Hindu god Krishna. “Because he’s the only male god who’s into Tantric sex. That’s why he’s always surrounded by women. I told my old lovers to pass that kind of sex on to their girlfriends and wives. Do you know, one guy’s wife called last year to thank me?”

She pulls in at the airport, beating a limousine to the last open space, then lifts my bag filled with books out of the trunk as if it were a feather. “You should write about take-no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules. If the nuns had told me that, I could have saved twenty years.”

As I’m walking away, she calls after me, “You pushy broads helped—even a loner like me.” From her, this is high praise.

·
I leave home for Newark Airport and end up sitting behind a heavy older driver who looks like an angry Buddha. He brakes and careens his way through midtown traffic, muttering in Russian over the sound of Howard Stern’s talk show on the car radio. Stern is surpassing even his shock jock self by making jokes about two white teenage boys who have just shot and killed their classmates and teachers in Littleton, Colorado. He is suggesting they should have had sex with their girl victims first.

I ask the driver to turn the radio off, but he’s too busy yelling expletives at people crossing the street. “Dirty, lazy peoples!” he shouts out the window, “You ruin this fucking country!” This last is aimed at three teenage Latino boys. “Dirty criminals!” This is flung at a young black couple. “I crush you!” This threat is for a bicycle messenger in a Jamaican T-shirt.

“Please stop yelling,” I say.

This only causes him to add “black” to his epithets, and make it even more clear
why
he is yelling.

I think:
Okay, I’m not going to change him between here and Newark, but if I don’t call him on this bullshit, I’m saying it’s okay. On the other hand, if I really get angry, I’ll cry, and that’s embarrassing.

“You know, some people here think bad things about immigrants from Russia, too, and they’re wrong—”

“You crazy?” he explodes. “I from Ukraine, no Russia! Ukraine good place. Everybody white! No dirty peoples!”

Clearly, calling him a Russian is almost as bad as saying he has anything in common with the people he’s yelling at.

I begin again: “Since there are no black or brown people in Ukraine, how can you know—?”

“Bitch!” he breaks in. “You know nothing! Black peoples ruin this fucking country!”

I’m a person who can admit only on Friday that I was angry on Monday, yet this time I get up the courage to tell him that he’s giving Ukraine a bad name—but then, suddenly, he’s screaming at a young black woman with a stroller, as if she were crossing the street just to get in his way, “Fucking bitch!”

Her startled face is the last straw.

I hurl at him a few words dangerously close to “Go home to Russia where you belong,” and think,
I mean Ukraine.
I get out in the middle of traffic and slam the door.

The drama of my exit is marred when he starts yelling for a cop to arrest me. I realize I haven’t paid my fare. I’m reduced to the ignominy of throwing money in his window and standing there while he counts every bill and coin. My only comfort is seeing the stroller woman give him the finger.

After throwing myself on the mercy of another taxi driver, I manage to get to Newark, run through the airport until my lungs hurt, and make my plane—barely. All the way to San Francisco, I think of devastating things I should have said.
Mots d’escalier
become
mots d’avion.

The next day, I learn that Howard Stern has blown himself out of the water—if not off the air—with his horrific comments. They were too much even for his fans and his boss is forced to apologize for him. Somehow I feel this is a defeat for the taxi driver, too. I have a happy fantasy that anger plus overweight will do him in.

I add up the score: I’ve seen the racist bullshit that still goes on in the streets. I’ve learned that Russia and Ukraine are not the same country. I’ve expressed anger at the time I was feeling it—and I didn’t cry.

Not bad for one taxi ride.

·
I’m headed to the airport for the third time in a week, trying to hail a taxi in the pouring rain. I’m late, I’m grouchy, and when a driver finally picks me up, I’m in no mood to talk to this scruffy white kid in his twenties. The only personal thing I see is a drawing of a gigantic eye propped up on the front seat next to him. I suppress my curiosity.

After a long time of quiet, he asks what I do. I offer just three words—
I’m a writer
—hoping brevity won’t invite conversation.

“Then I wouldn’t know you,” he says seriously, “because I don’t read.”

Assuming he’s a smart-ass, I don’t answer. “I also don’t watch television,” he goes on. “I don’t look at the Internet or read newspapers or books or play video games. I haven’t done any of those things in almost a year. I don’t want anything to interpret the world for me. I’m mainlining life.”

My resolve is slipping. He has made me think of a classics professor who told us to read Plato or Shakespeare or Dante as if we found their books in the street and had no idea who they were. I always loved his trust in the work itself—and also his trust in us.

Finally, I can no longer resist asking this guy why he is shutting out all the usual signals. He explains that his girlfriend was taking courses like women’s studies and black studies, so she put tape over the names of authors and told him to judge without knowing the identity of the author. He found this so disorienting that he started to count the filters that were telling him what to think. “Filters let in a cup of water,” he says, “but keep out the ocean.”

It turns out that driving a taxi is just part of a year he’s planned, working his way cross-country, doing odd jobs like repairing cars and picking fruit to support himself, all the while going cold turkey on media. He is seeing America without being told first what he’s seeing.

I tell him he has a lot in common with organizers. We’re trying to create spaces where people can listen and talk, without first putting each other in categories. After his year is up, I suggest he take what he’s learned and teach it to others.

“You see?” he says seriously as we pull into LaGuardia, “This is what happens with no filters.”

Instead of a tip, he asks for a bargain. “Write about my experiment,” he says. “Explain that you met this recovering media addict who used to dream about people in movies instead of real people. I never read a book unless some reviewer told me to. I was such a news junkie, I went to sleep with my headset on. I even worried about missing email while I was making love to my girlfriend. I had media-itis, but now I’m trying to see life unmediated.

“I’ve been clean for eight months,” he says seriously. “I’m just beginning to believe I exist.”

Finally, I ask about that drawing of a huge eye. “My girlfriend made that,” he says, “to remind me to see with my own eyes.”

I learned from him. I’m trying to see with my own eyes, too.

·
In Kyle, Texas, driving is a way of life. Taxis are mostly for people too drunk or too old to drive, on welfare with no car, or visitors like me going to the Austin airport. I see that my Chicana driver has turned her taxi into a world. She has a baby in a laundry basket on the seat next to her and a mobile toy secured by the glove compartment. When I remark on this inventiveness, she explains that this way, she makes a living without being separated from her baby daughter. Since it’s six a.m. on what is going to be a very hot day, I ask if this is hard. “No,” she says firmly. “What’s hard is worrying about my older daughter coming home from school by herself. Driving with each of my girls has been the happiest part of my life.”

·
I notice that a tough-looking, youngish white driver in Detroit is dressed in a shirt, bow tie, and suit jacket, like a Mormon missionary. He says it’s his wife’s birthday, and asks my advice about buying her a gift of lingerie. Gradually, his questions about panties grow ever more detailed. I begin to realize there is no wife. Even his pronouns switch from
she
to
I.
Then he’s off on the relative merits of string bikinis, and trying to get me to talk about my own underwear.

It’s like a dirty phone call on wheels. Not only that, but he seems to be enjoying my escalating discomfort. I bet I’m not the first female passenger who’s been left with the choice of getting out or letting him reach what is clearly his climactic destination.

Since we’re speeding along a highway with no place to find another taxi, I try for a third option. With all the stern authority I can muster, I tell him that if he doesn’t stop laying his fantasies on me and passengers, I’ll report his name and taxi number to his boss and to the cops.

He apologizes frantically, swears he’ll never do it again, and even promises to go into therapy. Then all is quiet. Too quiet. We’re at our destination and I’m almost out the door when he says with suspicious calm and an air of release, “I’m so glad you were severe with me. Thank you for punishing me.”

I’m on the sidewalk before I realize:
I’ve done exactly what he had in mind.