One Block

The taxi cab jostled it’s way down 2nd Avenue under the dense over hang of sycamore branches crowned with their brittle golden brown leave. Squeaks and rattles sang softly through the plastic flooring that had replaced the standard carpet. The cab was a retired police cruiser. The plastic floor, put there to making cleaning easier as well as preventing the absorption of bodily fluids, was not the only evidence that the cab had once had a career in law enforcement. The center console had holes in it where police info terminal had been screwed in place. The a-pillars, those sections of the cars body to either side of the windshield, were cut open to allow the fitment of searchlights. I often wished the cab company had left these searchlights intact as it would make finding address numbers much easier at night.

The stop sign at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Warner Street wobbled in the afternoons chill breeze. I paused there for a moment in a daydream, watching the reflections of guttered  water move across the stop signs surface. I moved on. The passengers in the back seats of course would not have seen the simple light display or understood me if I pointed it out. They thought they had places to go and things to do.

That’s one of the first things I realized when I started this job. People are in a rush to live their lives. They are fearful that if they slow down they will miss some opportunity. I also realized that in this frenzied and self important rush that they cast off those things that hold them back, chiefly manners.

I don’t know how many times I have picked up a pair of customers to hear them verbally laying waste to a common acquaintance or friend. Then realize we are stopping to pick up the very person that, moments ago, they spoke so ill of. Then next stop one of the three disembarks leaving the remaining two, one of whom spoke ill of the other, to talk about the absent individual as if he were a sworn enemy. This sort of thing happens every day.

The cab was now glideing on the newly resurfaced Warner Street. The cab seemed to relax. The squeaks and rattles flattening out along with the road. There were several manhole covers and utility access points, their metal surfaces nearly flush with the roads, but these could be avoided with a series of gentle turns that would go unnoticed by the passengers. Certainly they wouldn’t have cared if I had simply held the wheel true and run the metal covers over, creating bumps and squeaks, but I found it satisfying to negotiate the gauntlet. I also found it satisfying to do so without the passengers noticing.

The passengers… I wondered what they were talking about. I had long ago learned to shut the conversations of passengers out of my mind to near completion, only leaving enough unoccupied attention to hear the change in tone and pitch created when some one in a back seat was addressing a person in the front seat. This skill developed as a direct result of my plummeting opinion of the general population and the topics that occupied their minds. But as I glided my way down the smooth surface of Warner Street, passing the manholes and utility access points in gentle arcs, and watched the golden brown leaves of the sycamore trees dancing through the air I found myself to be the proud owner of the magical substance known as “hope for humanity”. So I cleared my mind and directed my attention to the conversation in the back of the cab.

“I don’t even care if they turn my power off! I’m never there anyway!” The tone was flat and the words were heavy in her chest.

“Yeah! Let them worry about it. Who do they think they are anyways! Such jerks, turning peoples power off in the middle of winter! It’s not like turning your power off is going to give you the money to pay them. They gotta pay a guy to come out and turn it off too! They’re stupid. Let them worry about it.” The responding voice was nasal and with each word came the faint smell of stale cigarettes.

With my “hope for humanity” spent in an instant I shut the conversation out of my mind and returned my attention to the road, the leaves, the feel of the wind softly pressing my cab to the right. On the side of the road a pool of water had collected. Even with the breeze its surface was smooth enough to reflect the pale blue sky. In that reflected image I saw an airplane high over head. As I moved parallel to the long puddle the plane seemed to keep pace with me. This brought back childhood memories of watching the moon follow my fathers car. I remember telling my father, “Dad, I think the moon is following us.” He smiled in a way I would only understand much later and said, “Oh, yeah?! Lets see how fast he can go.” He then punched the gas just enough to make the car surge forward then maintained normal speed. But he had raised his shoulder into a tense position and glanced back and forth between the rearview mirror and the road. We were playing. “Go dad. Go!” I called out bouncing in my seat, copying my fathers glancing at the moon. Without rehearsal we both made the sound of skidding tires as we took a left hand turn at conservative speed. To me, in my state of childhood play, we were racing through the streets, skidding around corners, narrowly missing other vehicles. But to the other motorists we must have looked like a hunchbacked father with a nervous tic and a child in need of attention deficit medication. As the memory faded it left a smile on my face.

My attention returned to the plane overhead and how it appeared to follow me. The puddle had narrowed to a thin line in the gutter and I was left with poetic thoughts about how distance changes your understanding, these slowly morphed into physics equations revolving around distance and angular changes over time divided by the speed of two objects in the their directional relation to each other. Running the numbers through my head soon led me to distraction, I had to brake harder than I normally do to come to a stop at the corner of Warner and 1st. I check if the passengers have noticed.

“Yeah, he’ll come over with the booze but then he’ll want to stay! He’s such a creep.”