Goddamn cab drivers: Part III

(Goddamn cab drivers in their natural habitat)


You're in the cab, surrounded by the yearning stink. You still convince yourself it's something else--the leaky exhaust, the absence of hygiene outside the boundaries of your person. You sit calmly inside the cab, staring out the window.

It has been 20 minutes. You ask yourself, "How is this possible? The sumnabitch with death on his mind lives only five minutes from me!" So you ask the driver if he knows where he's going, and his only answer is a "Yes" in a suspicious Spanish. You look out the window again, and you realize that you're surrounded by a quaint, yet ominous, nothingness. Dirt clouds up the windshield, as your blind rage had done so to your proper judgment.

You're lost.

But this isn't a TV show; you can't just perform an impromptu lobotomy on the cab driver, because he is the one in control of the vehicle--and, in turn, your life. The irony is not lost on you, so you wait.

Then the air reaches out to you once more, "Get out while you can!" says the putrid, tortured air of a thousand mistreated fares, "He's a fucking imbecile! You'll only end up worse than you are now!"

"But what am I to do, putrid, tortured air of a thousand mistreated fares? I don't know where I am! If I were to get out now, I'd surely be lost for there are no other cabs in sight. We left civilization and sanity miles ago!"

As if he heard your delusional conversation, the cab driver stops the car on the side of the road. He asks you in Spanish, "Do you know where to go from here?"

Rage. Pure, unadulterated rage. It builds inside you. You forget about the insolence of your friend. Only images of violence run through your mind like ants to a picnic--like the autistics at the Special Olympics--like fire through the river Styx.

The putrid, tortured air of a thousand mistreated fares beckons: "Avenge us! Avenge us!"

You wonder, should you sate its thirst for vengence? Then, the little man inside your head, oppressed, depressed, and repressed through dozens of other ill encounters with incompetent cab drivers, says only one word, and one word only (And that one word reverberates inside your mind, because one word can carry much more emphasis than a succession of words): "Goforittiger!"


To be continued...