My Life on the Road (10 page)

I am in a taxi on my way with a friend to JFK, an airport named after a president who was assassinated only six years before. Our older driver is like a rough trade character from a Tennessee Williams play—complete with an undershirt revealing tattoos, and an old Marine Corps photo stuck in the frame of his hack license. Clearly, this is his taxi and his world.

My friend and I are acting a lot like lovers, which we are. We are also hyperaware that the driver is looking at us in the rearview mirror. That’s because, while we waited with our luggage in a darkening street, a low-slung car full of white teenagers sped by, leaving behind in the evening air the lethal word “Nigger!” Now I can feel us struggling to forget that surreal attack and stay ourselves.

When we reach the airport, the driver slides open the divider between the front and back seat. Both my friend and I grow tense. I always think that talking into that opening makes me feel as if I’m ordering French fries, but this time, I am grateful for the barrier. We have no idea what the driver thinks of us.

The driver thrusts something through the opening. It turns out to be an old battered photo of a young man in a suit, standing with his arm around a plump and smiling young woman who is clutching her purse with both hands. “That’s me and my wife when we got married,” he says. “Except for when I was in Korea, we haven’t spent a night apart for forty years. She’s my best friend, my sweetheart—but believe me, we weren’t supposed to get married. Her family is Jewish from Poland, mine is Sicilian Catholic—they wouldn’t even speak to each other until after their first grandchild was born.

“I’m telling you this because today is our wedding anniversary—and if you don’t mind my saying so, you two kind of remind me of us. If you wouldn’t be offended, I’d like to give you a free ride—so I can go home and tell my wife I helped another young couple like us.”

Surprised and touched, we say his words are enough, but we end up accepting because it matters so much to him. At the airport, we all stand outside his taxi, shaking hands—a little awkward with emotion.

“You know,” the driver says, “me and my wife and you two, we’re what this country is all about.”

Later my friend and I will agree that the worst punishment of that racist shout in the street was making us mistrust this man when we first got into his taxi.

Years pass. My friend and I are carried into different lives. He lives on the West Coast, has children, grandchildren, and a life I cannot know. We are only sure that we wish each other well.

When I run into him again almost thirty years later, the first thing he says to me is, “Do you remember that taxi driver?”

And I do.

W
HEN
I
ENTER A TAXI,
I find myself in someone’s life. Kids’ photos on the dashboard, religious or other decorations hanging from the rearview mirror, name and perhaps ethnicity evident from the hack license on display—plus the sensory hit of the driver’s physical self in a small space—all plunge me into a mobile world. In what writer Pete Hamill calls a “common strategy against loneliness, a fleeting intimacy with their passengers,”
1
drivers tell you stories and are happy to listen to yours.

I discovered these worlds on wheels when I was first living in New York. After I began writing “The City Politic,” a weekly column for
New York
magazine, I depended on cabbies not only to get me to my destination but to give me tips on public opinion and elections. They tend to be shit-free guides to the state of social issues, and are often better political predictors than most media pundits. After all, they spend more time listening to random strangers than any public opinion poll could afford; they overhear more private conversations than a wiretapper; and they often are themselves new immigrants or work with those who are. This makes them treasure troves of information on what’s really going on, not only here but in other countries.

An example came only ten days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks felled the Twin Towers in Manhattan. I was haunted by the televised scenes of office workers diving to their deaths rather than be immolated in that inferno, images so terrible that television stations soon stopped showing them. Downtown streets were covered with surrealistic gray ash and debris, and gutters were filled with the bodies of birds that had been incinerated in flight.

My driver was a quiet young white guy with a gravity that I sensed as soon as I got into his cab. We drove past construction fences covered with photos and notices posted by people who were still searching for missing relatives or friends or coworkers. There were also anonymous graffiti that had appeared as if by contagion all over New York with the same message:
Our grief is not a cry for war.

“That’s how New Yorkers feel,” the driver said. “They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren’t here. They’ll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who
weren’t
in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.”

He was right. Even before it was clear that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11—despite false claims made by President George W. Bush, who seemed to have his eye on oil more than on facts—75 percent of New Yorkers opposed the U.S. bombing of Iraq. But a national majority supported it.

I also noticed the political smarts of taxi drivers in other cities. When I was in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in the early 1990s, for instance, a driver with a Swedish name predicted that Sharon Sayles Belton would be the first African American woman to be elected mayor of Minneapolis. I had campaigned for her when she was a candidate for city council, and even that office was supposed to be a stretch. No professional politician or pollster gave Sharon a chance of winning in this overwhelmingly white city. Nonetheless, my taxi pundit, as blond and blue-eyed as the children in
Village of the Damned,
said, “If I’m voting for her, and my family is voting for her, and my passengers are voting for her, then she’s going to win.” He had his own test group. He was right.

In rural America, small-town drivers warned me about the growing power of such neofascist groups as the Posse Comitatus in the Midwest and the Aryan Nation in the Northwest. Local banks were afraid to foreclose on their farms, and police hesitated to help repossess farmhouses and barns when they knew their occupants to be well armed. When I carried this news back to New York, my friends dismissed it as an exaggeration or a few crazies.

However, driving is a loner profession that attracts rebels of many kinds, and one was an extremist himself. In Billings, Montana, a rancher moonlighting as a driver told me that the United Nations was using black helicopters to spy on Americans and was planning to establish a world government. I also dismissed him as one crazy guy—but a year later, newspapers carried reports of rural militia members in Montana who gathered on the ranch of one of them, threatened to shoot down all helicopters, and had the weapons to do it. I wondered if my driver was among them.

Still, when I came back to New York and said, “You know, there are ultra-right-wing groups out there, and they’re well armed,” urbanites would reply, “Just a few nuts, nothing to worry about.”

Only later did the media begin to take extremist groups seriously. By then they had committed racist murders in several cities—starting with the liberal Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, who was shot down in his driveway by a white nationalist group—then also bombing a government building in Oklahoma City, shooting Jewish children in a child care center in Los Angeles, and attempting to bomb a Martin Luther King parade in Spokane.

I still don’t see reports in newspapers about white supremacists who are trying to establish an armed and separatist homeland in the rural Northwest and parts of Canada, yet when I ask drivers or gas station attendants or other down-home authorities, they are quite matter-of-fact about the local Aryan Brotherhood, or methamphetamine labs operating with impunity in small towns, or certain rural areas where it’s best not to go.

Since drivers have time and a captive audience, they can also be vectors of modern myths. In Boulder, for example, I learned that Jack Kennedy was the Lindbergh baby. A Salt Lake City driver told me that “godless Communists created the women’s movement,” and a Dallas driver said feminism was “a Jewish plot to destroy the Christian family,” something I would hear a lot from right-wing Christian fundamentalists. Because it’s a long ride to the Denver airport, I got the entire story of the Trilateral Commission as part of an international Jewish conspiracy that stretched all the way from the killing of Jesus Christ to David Rockefeller, the founder of this private group of leaders who came from the United States, Europe, and Japan. I thought he had won the Conspiracy Prize—until another driver picked me up at Newark Airport and was sure that the Trilateral Commission was behind the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. No kidding.

I can also tell which new immigrant groups are going to what cities, since driving is so often a first job. In Washington, I always get a disproportionate number of drivers from African countries. They may not know the fastest route, but they instruct me on more important issues. From the late 1960s to the present, drivers from Ethiopia and Eritrea kept me up to date on the armed conflict between those two countries. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Castro’s Cuba all supported Ethiopia in a thirty-year war—assuming that this much larger country would defeat Eritrea. But according to drivers, it was always clear that Eritrea would prevail. Drivers from that country were proud of their independence fighters in the mountains, yet I never met an Ethiopian driver who wanted to fight for Emperor Haile Selassie or for the militaristic governments that followed. On the other hand, Eritrean drivers told me with pride that a third of their army was made up of women, some of them generals; that fighters had built schools and a hospital in mountain caves that were invulnerable to bombs; and that musicians in their “cultural troops,” as they called them, performed for the fighters and even toured Europe. “When an Ethiopian general is killed, the troops are in disarray,” one Eritrean driver explained to me. “When an Eritrean general is killed, every fighter becomes a general.”

Tiny Eritrea did win the war. However, its revolutionary leaders broke the hearts of taxi drivers from Eritrea by taking over all the media and otherwise betraying the revolution. When another border war broke out between those two countries, I noticed that neither side wanted to go home and fight.

Recently, an Ethiopian and several Kenyan drivers have sounded a bigger alarm. As one said, “I never thought I would see a second wave of colonialism, but there is one and it’s Chinese. Our countries are becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of China.”

Maybe U.S. policy makers should talk to taxi drivers.