|
back to: words
|
TAXICAB DRIVERS Are married to their cellphones. You know the phones I'm talking about. It's those wireless Bluetooth headsets that clip around your ear. You know. The kind of phones that mid-level, white-collar workers brimming with self-importance use. The kind of phones that you laugh at people for wearing in public. You know the ones. Metallic blue, or grey in color. Matte finish. Blockish, geometrically unimaginative design. Resembling something hip. Having, uh, that chic assembly line look to it. Small in size. Real small. Like to the casual observer, invisible. Trendy. Mostly plastic. Ugly as hell. So you hail a cab. Doesn't matter what time of day it is. You get inside the cab and tell the driver where you're going. The cabbie nods, pulls away from the curb. Immediately he's in conversation with that potato chip in his ear. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Get ready—this conversation will last the full duration of your cab ride. You arrive at your destination. The cabbie's still on the phone. Blah blah blah blah blah. Cabbie pulls over. Eventually he closes his mouth. You pay the man. You leave. Ok ok, I know. Why even tell this story? It's not exactly news. The story repeats itself, over and over again, daily. With every cab driver, every hour, the same conversation, the same bloody cellphone. Yes, I realize this. Like I said, a cab driver talking on the phone is about as notable as, say, the sun setting in the West tonight. Except that—be honest—sunsets really are notable, and for the following important reason: they happen all the fucking time. I have two questions. The second question is more interesting than the first. The first is, don't those cab drivers' phones have batteries? I mean, they're not perpetually self-charging, right? Have we even invented that technology yet? Like most other electronic devices, cellphones contain batteries that die over time. Last I checked. They're subject to the same Second Law of Thermodynamics that we are. So why do cabbie Bluetooth headsets seem to last forever? There is magic and mischief afoot! The second question is this. Please don't think me rude if I say that cab drivers are boring people. Because they totally are. Boring. Granted it's the profession, partly. You spend all day driving your car around for strangers. How fascinating a person could you be? I'll tell you something else. If cab drivers are boring people—and yes, they are—then the blame for this falls squarely on their Arabic shoulders. Because ladies and gentlemen, America is a free country. You can have any job you want here: lawyer, accountant, CEO, musician, nuclear weapon designer, Academy Award winner, Chinese food restaurateur, Governor of California, abstract expressionist painter, basketball star. Foreigners have held all of these jobs. I currently hold one of them. So what does it say about your personality that you devote your life to the tedium of driving cars for ten thousand people you've never met and will never meet again? You're boring, cabbie! I haven't even asked my second question yet. Here it is. As we've established, cab drivers are boring people. Like let's say I'm riding in a cab. The cab driver asks me where I'm going, which takes him three seconds to ask, tops. Already I've heard enough from him. Ok, here's my question. Given that cab drivers are boring people, which they definitely are, boring, what could they possibly have to say that's so interesting that people are willing to listen to them talk on their cellphones 24 hours a day? What type of person listens to a cab driver talk for hours on end, anyway? Honestly! Honestly. It makes you wonder. They're moonlighting, yes? Maybe all cab drivers are secretly bookies. Or stock traders. Or prophets of some start-up religion that has yet to develop its tithing system, so that the faith is almost entirely dependent on revenue from its prophet qua cab driver. Or maybe they're playing chess with the dispatcher, except without a board, so that they're actually playing mind chess, which is pretty fucking cool, come to think of it. Or maybe they're part of some sprawling viral advertising campaign, and all the major service providers and cellphone manufacturers are in on it, and as a part of that campaign every cab driver on the planet is required to wear that ugly fucking headset in his ear and talk through it constantly, until eventually you go out and buy one, out of equal parts diffusion and futility. Or maybe all cab drivers are recovering from drug addiction—but from real, ratchet-up-the-fucking-horsepower-115%-demolish-your-ass drugs, like benzoylmethylecgonine or phencyclidine or crystal meth—and under different professional circumstances they'd have the nervous twitches and mindless habits that other junkies do; unfortunately, though, you can't very well rub your fingers together or clasp/unclasp your hands or tap your feet arhythmically while driving, plus, smoking in taxicabs is illegal, I think, and it wouldn't go over too well with passengers, especially those uppity, sanctimonious passengers, who are generally middle-aged white women, I hate to say it but it's true, like would you relax and try to enjoy yourself for once in your short, crabby life—the end is so close, now; and since cabbies can't do any of the usual things to shake that insatiable yearning for the next fix, they resort to the one thing they can do, which is talk into their goddam phones all day. Or maybe they're prolific novelists, memoirists, poets, whose hearts' passion is writing, and so they dictate into their cellphones compulsively, even at work, especially at work; and their creative energies never falter, which is how they're able to keep talking at all hours, dictating interminably, mile upon mile, stoplight upon stoplight, fare upon fare, until after a few short years of driving cab their oeuvre is staggering in size from the constant blab of their chatterbox mouths; and who could've imagined that an activity as mundane as driving in traffic would inspire such a large and impressive body of work, though good luck getting it published, I'm just saying—(Hey, let's try something together! Do you like games? 'Cause we're gonna play a free association game. Ok? Here's how it works. I'll give you a word, and you say the first thing that pops into your head. Alright? You understand the rules? Ok, good. Your word is "taxicab driver." Now think of a word. Any word. The first word that... Oh. You got it? Good. Now, the first word that came to mind. Was it "fecundity"? Didn't think so.)—gosh, it must be a bitch to transcribe all those tapes, I mean, it would take weeks of thankless bitch work to get the content from those tapes down on paper, given that cab drivers work around-the-clock, dictating into their cellphones the whole time; not to mention the herculean task of editing, of taking a lifetime's worth of cabbie babble and making it legible, and then the heftier task, that of transforming a cab driver's stream of consciousness into a document people might actually want to read, which means stringing thoughts together coherently, grouping like ideas together, and being concise, excising all that digressive material that doesn't fit the tone of the overall work (just because you think it's interesting doesn't mean anyone else will), and then breaking independent thoughts into sentences and paragraphs, you know, because if you just transcribed those tapes as is and left them that way, then you'd have like a never-ending paragraph, a chimney of rambling black text rising aimlessly up into the mesosphere, a wall of words of the sort that religious groups organize a mandatory pilgrimage so their adherents go and see it, and the cola beverage companies are scrambling for corporate sponsorship, and air traffic control is losing their shit because of all the planes to divert and reroute around that big fucking word wall; so yeah, a tremendous amount of bitch work involved in writing, scary even to think about it; though I suppose they could always hire someone to be their copy editor, although no, probably not, not on a cab driver's salary, taxicab drivers are poor, and that shit ain't cheap besides, copy editing; which means they do it solo, and you gotta hand it to those cabbies, they may be boring as people but at least they're super devoted to their craft, which I give them credit for; writing poetry is not an easy career choice, first off, it takes fucking perseverance, but they don't seem to mind, they spend their near every waking hour chasing the Poetry muse up and down these inner city streets, dictating into their phones while they drive, and—uh, wait a second, that doesn't make much sense, why would taxicab poets use cellphones for dictation, unless (of course!) the piece of electronics clipped to their ear is not a phone at all. It's an MP3 recorder! Stupid! I always miss small details like that. Or maybe they're part of some ongoing Black Ops mission, like, think the biggest splinter cell in the history of espionage, like, this mission is staggeringly, traumatizingly large in scope, and so our beloved taxicab drivers are employed by the United States government, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding; they're enlisted in some elite branch of special operations no one's heard of, not even me; and their duty is one of military reconnaissance and target acquisition, the taxicab is just a front, really, like the job and the I.D. badge, the driving, the impossible foreign accent, it's all smoke and mirrors to distract from the super important top secret shit they do, which is acquiring targets roadside and relaying information about those targets into their cellphones, which is, uhm, less of a cellphone than it is a tactical earpiece, military issue; and thru the earpiece they call out coordinates to the snipers on the rooftops; the snipers are up there, in position, ready to go, semi-prostrate, with the barrels of their Polish bolt-action sniper rifles poking out of the balustrade; but although the snipers look all serious-fucking-commando style, they're actually terrible shots, the snipers are, bad, like beyond bad, abysmal, they're so bad at making their shots that it's just embarrassing, if you love freedom; they're terrible shots, which is why no one gets shot and killed, the targets, I mean, and so the mission keeps going and going, and going and going, and going, and just when you think the mission is about to end it keeps going, and going—it goes forever, like this paragraph here; which explains why cab drivers are still on the road after all these years, and we will not terminate this mission, soldier, negative, the mission must continue until a sniper makes his target, like, you have a job to do, soldier, complete the mission, soldier; but after years of this, after years of shots not being made, after years of incompetent snipers doing an unrelentingly bad job, consistently; after years of this, all the recon men (the taxicab drivers) have begun to lose hope, like at first they thought the snipers were just getting the hang of things, or that they were nervous or something, and so the cabbies were patient with the snipers, but the taxicab drivers stopped holding their breath years ago, like, how many coordinates do we have to call up to you before you make the fucking shot, I mean it's not that hard (to make a shot), you were trained by professionals to do this, it's not like you learned to shoot on TV, you have a military education good Republicans would kill for, you went to fucking sniper school for godsakes; and one would think that sooner or later a sniper would have to make the shot, that it's unavoidable, inevitable, like fate or serendipity or statistics or calculus, you know, because the thinking goes like this, that as more and more time passes without a shot being made, it becomes more and more likely that a sniper will make the shot eventually, that he just has to, he has to, it's like probability or theology or getting a foot massage or backpacking through the wilderness; like for instance if you flip a coin eight times, and let's say it lands heads every time, then by the ninth flip you're expecting tails for sure, this motherfucker will definitely be tails, you say, because the other eight flips all landed heads, so now you're really really ready for tails, you're super expecting it, because after eight flips, all heads, the ninth one will be tails, it just has to be, unless the coin is rigged; but it turns out that thinking this way is bullshit, it's something called the Monte Carlo fallacy (you can look it up) that says that prediction based on previous outcomes of an event is fallacious where the process is random, since two statistically independent events can have no negative correlation—or in layman's terms, that fucking up once doesn't increase the probability of you not fucking up twice, the point in this case being that you can flip a coin eight times and the ninth flip could very well turn up heads, and the tenth flip also heads, and the eleventh flip heads, and the twelfth, because the odds are always 1 in 2, they never change; and man, what a great mindfuck that is, you know, because it's not as if we're human calculators, computing our way through life, starting each new day with numbers and syllogism, but we're human beings, we reason by induction, we're conditioned by experience and shit; I hope I'm explaining this right, look I'm not a fucking math guy, don't pin me down; so to recap, taxicab drivers are Black Ops, running a top secret reconnaissance mission for the United States government, a mission where they drive cab and call out coordinates to snipers on the rooftops using that military hardware we mistake for a cheap Bluetooth headset, but yeah, it's a tactical earpiece, military issue; and the snipers have been up there for years without once making a shot, those stupid motherfucking snipers, what the fuck are they doing up there, not one shot in this many years, those lazy, cross-eyed, halfway fucking farm boy retarded, dirty cod shit, jerkoff, dumbshit syphilitic sniper motherfuckers, those assholes; and the taxicab drivers are sick and motherfucking tired of waiting for them to get their candy asses in gear and fucking hit the fucking target; like why in all hell is this taking so goddamn long, fuck, just what the fuck is your problem, anyway, make the goddamn shot, just fucking make it, make the shot, God damn you, asshole, damn it all, damn everything, damn it all to fucking hell, God damn it; and then—suddenly and without warning—a terrible thought comes over them, the taxicab drivers, a terrible, terrifying thought that they'd never thought to think about comes over them, and the taxi drivers pull over and stop their cabs and say hold on, wait, no, hold on, God no, my God, maybe it's me, maybe I'm not calling out the coordinates correctly, maybe I'm fucking up here, I'm the one, this is all my fault, maybe I'm fucking this up on my end, on calling out the coordinates, I'm the problem, I'm not calling out the coordinates correctly, and this anger and impatience of mine is misplaced, I keep fucking up these coordinates, I'm fucking up, God, it's my fault, I'm fucking up the coordinates, I'm fucked up; and if this is true then it's me, not the sniper, who's a fucking failure, who's a worthless dumbshit syphilitic motherfucker, who calls out the wrong coordinates and who's fucked this mission up into a bloody stillborn waste of government resources, God, I did this, me, me, I fucked up the coordinates; and you know what, you know, everything I've worked my whole life toward is a lie, a goddamned lie, fuck it all, it's all a waste, fuck it, just fuck it, fuck it all, I've been in this cab so fucking long, so long, so goddamned fucking long, and this is my life, people, ladies and gentlemen, of the jury, fucking welcome to my bullshit life, because at birth in the hospital nursery I was mauled by a rabid joke that never let go, and is still holding on for dear life, I have fucking life fucking rabies; oh man, is this all there is, is this it, and who appreciates the work I do, in this cab, none of this matters, nothing matters, and this planet has tricked me, the planet has vandalized me, and scandalized me, sodomized me, I have fucking life rabies and I've been sodomized by this ugly motherfucker planet, and it would be so easy, instead of calling out these bullshit coordinates, to call out my last will and testament instead, for all those motherfucking snipers to hear, to call out shit like, "And I give my pine cone air freshener to my doorman, Jacob, who was always nice to me," and then to say something like, "Goodbye cruel world!" and take my hands off the steering wheel, and gun it, and crash into a retaining wall at 85 miles an hour, and fucking kill myself and be done with it, because I've had it up to fucking here people, fucking life rabies, and I don't see the point in any of this, it's pointless and shitty; but then of course I'd talk myself down, you know, don't be stupid, that's dumb, just calm your shit, that's stupid, calm down, man, take a deep breath, you're not going to kill yourself, don't be a fucking moron, get a hold of yourself, put yourself together, man, listen: if I kill myself, then who will drive this cab, first off, I mean the cab doesn't drive itself, and I have fares and bills to pay and shit; and then more importantly, who will call out coordinates to the snipers on the rooftops, those snipers need us, because since they're clearly unable to make their targets even with our help, imagine how worthless they'd be without us; besides, if I kill myself and there's a God, well then there's that, too; and aren't I letting my fellow cabbies down, who like me are stuck in taxicabs day in and day out, waiting for those pesky snipers, oh you silly snipers, darn you; and probably even the snipers are tired at this point, it's safe to say, I mean, they've been up on the rooftops this whole time, so they must be tired, they're up on those rooftops all day and all night, with no friends except us cabbies, and no reprieve in sight; it's as they say: before you judge another man, you should walk a mile in his shoes—the Golden Rule and all that—but still, you know, you see what I'm saying here, which is like, come on sniper, yes, you can do it, I believe in you, come on buddy, it's point, aim, and shoot, it's not a frontal lobotomy, make the motherfucking shot. Or maybe, maybe taxicab drivers just have unbelievably patient wives, who don't watch soaps and have nothing better to do than listen to their husbands talk all day. I mean, these are Muslims and Sikhs we're discussing, here. Who has the foggiest clue what their marriage is like? But I exhaust myself. This speculation is going nowhere. After all is said and done, at the end of the day, I don't speak Farsi or Punjabi or whatever devil tongue it is they're rambling in. And neither do you. So I guess we'll never know. |
| top of page | back | home |
