THE COSMIC FOLLIES:

SALIM.

Driving a cab in this City. Tell me about it. Ploughing backwards and forwards in the grid of Manhattan, navigating around the potholes like a canoe dodging the undertows. Trying to figure out whether the next guy flinging his arm out at you is the psychopath who will blow you away for fifty bucks and small change.
They used to have these cabs built like a prison. You had a grille between yourself and the passenger, who put the money in a metal flap. You put the money in a sealed box which you couldn't open till you got back to the depot. But the psychos would just shoot the drivers anyway. Now they tell me these are new, more friendly times, my cab is open like any other vehicle, but the passengers don't talk much any more. A lot of cab drivers don't speak much English, so I suppose the clients are happy to just get where they're going, and not be dumped in the South Bronx.

I was only held up once. A white man with a pony tail clapped a Saturday Night Special to my head, and asked me for fifteen dollars. I had given away my last ten in change, so I said: "I can only give you twenty-five, man."
"I want fifteen," he said, "give me fifteen dollars or I'll blow your head off." I gave him a twenty, and he rapped the side of my head with his gun. "Foreign asshole," he said, "gimme another five!" I gave him what I'd already offered and he ran out of the cab, slamming the door.

This is the nature of the West as I have observed it: People talk at each other and not with each other. Nobody listens, a web of monologues. Where everybody is an individual, everybody is a closed world. Where everybody has to be a winner, the loser forfeits every right. I was grateful the mugger only took twenty five dollars and spared my life. In this City he was an angel of mercy.
The Medallion driver cruises the City like a Samurai without weapons or armour. He is like a priest who does not speak unless spoken to. He touches people briefly, at random, listening to little snatches of lives. Collapsing marriages, itching romances, twitching business deals, rising and falling friendships, overflowing resentments, confused desires, unexplained memories. I had a girl who wept her eyes out so much I thought I would drown in the flood. I didn't know what to say, how to console her. She wouldn't pause to say what was wrong, and only stopped for a moment to tell me snappily to shut up and get where I was told. Then she tipped me five dollars for an eight dollar fare and vanished, bawling, into the entrance to a ritzy building on East Seventy-seventh. "It can't be as bad as it looks," I shouted after her, but she didn't stop and the doorman waved me irritably on my way.

Another time I had a yuppie looking businessman in a good suit and a shiny black briefcase, who talked to himself loudly all the way from City Hall to West 83rd. He was accusing himself of various crimes of self- harassment, of denouncing himself to the Internal Revenue and masturbating over pictures of footballers, who were choking his dreams. The entire team of the Chicago Bears was plotting to rape him at Easter, in the Church of Saint John the Divine. "You gotta be ready," he told himself, over and over again. Then he got out at his door and paid me calmly, saying "thank you very much," and walked away.
I had a fare who told me he was the King of Cambodia, and later I saw his picture in the paper, and it was true. And I had a young man who looked completely normal but said he was Jesus Christ, and that he had an account with the company. I let him go. Life is too short for all that.

People fuck in the cab, oh yes, and jerk off. Men and women. Just like in Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver", with Robert de Niro. Only I never got hung up on prostitutes, teenage or old raddled crones. I had a wisp of a girl with a little whip who offered to pay me in trade. I told her: Some other time, honey, I get hit enough in real life. The whores are always so tired. They fall asleep in the cab, and I cruise around with them, cradling them in my big yellow crib, thinking in my mind, fantisizing. But in this day and age, there's too much contagion. You know what I'm saying. Its just too sad.

Sometimes I imagine the City is singing to me, chanting its own requiem. The tall buildings are leaning towards me, their windows winking, their fire escape ladders rusted in their wait for Jacobs to climb up and wrestle angels on the roofs. They are crying out in their loneliness, calling to the smoke that curls up from the subway vents and maintenance chutes. The houses are wrinkled old men, weighed down by their bloated appetites, the smoke is all that remains of long lost lovers, dancing to forgotten tunes. Below falls the echo of the subway, drumming signals in a dismal code. Kadum kadum, kadum kadum. The street bucks and writhes beneath me. My cab is grating on the City's skin, which is sensitive as a one thousand year old baby. In the rain, it hisses in self-pity, whispering and letting out its breath like a sighing and despairing mother. Mother and child, with me the Holy Ghost. Except I can create no Messiahs.

Kadum kadum. And in this windy autumn, the added shrieking of the storm, buffeting the vehicle, jerking the steering wheel, threatening to pick me up and dash me against the houses. Pretty soon we'll be into the winter, which is far worse - the blizzards sweeping in from the north, icy roads, frost setting in the bones. I have seen too many of those, too, by now, my fourth year in the City. A far cry from the snows of Lebanon... The white canopy, crisp and clean, blanketing the mountains above the bloated city. Beirut. The deadly labyrinth, where every street corner and alleyway was a lethal trap. Once it was a place of laughter and singing, but not the when I was there. That was another another kind of killing. They killed you there because they knew who you were. They kill you here because they don't.

One period I picked up fares from JFK. I would make a point of meeting the incoming El Al flight, the jetlagged Israelis piling into my back seat, jabbering among themselves in their own rough tongue, which sounds like a file on sandpaper. They regard New York as a suburb of Tel Aviv, as well they might, since their daily Hebrew papers are sold in all the kiosks here a few minutes after they appear over there. I used to ache to tell them: I am a Palestinian and how are you enjoying my country? But they don't care who's driving as long as he takes them where they want. They can see my name on the dashboard: SALIM HALIMI. But it just confirms them that they have not travelled far.

Benjamin keeps telling me that I am living in the past. Nobody cares now, everyone is bored with the war, if only they knew how to end it. "Its not that they don't want to give you your rights, Salim. Its that they don't care about rights, period. Its dog eat dog, nobody bothers to chase cats. Its the zeitgeist, honey."

My friend Benjamin. The Bible tells me that he was the youngest son of the Patriarch Yakub, and the only one who was born in Palestine. The thirteenth son. His patrimony stretched from Jericho to Ajlun, in a rainbow curve north of Jerusalem. What else does the Old Testament tell me? He was born on the road between Bethel and Bethlehem, and his mother Rachel died in childbirth, calling him Ben Oni - son of my sorrow. So what's in a name? Nothing much, as Shakespeare said, it has the same smell. My mother was a stickler for the Old Testament. It is our irony that Benny's mother, poor soul, remembers virtually nothing, so he tells me, in her geriatric state, whereas my mother remembers everything, from the least tenets of her religion to the tiniest tics of our national sorrow, every pinprick ripped away since by our gaping gushing wound. She remembers every moan I made in my cradle, and every whisper of my father's litany of woes.

Which are of course our speciality. We are the Moaning Minnies of civilization. I remember that phrase from Margaret Thatcher's Britain. In this, as in much else, we have replaced the Jews. The Jews still moan, but people pay less and less heed. Today, even our justified lamentations have to struggle for attention with the cries of so many other oppressed peoples: Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, Armenians, Azeris, Ossetians, Somalis, Kashmiris, Afghans, desperate for help and salvation. The magic wand of the United Nations. The U.S. Marines. The I.M.F.. Stretching out our hands to all our tormentors, asking them to change their spots. Perhaps the blows will change into caresses. You never know until you try.

 

	[previous]	[top]	[next]

:: home :: fiction :: non-fiction :: films :: news :: :: unpublished :: links :: about :: contact :: sitemap ::