Chinatown

On Thursday, Chinatown was bright and dusty, like an over-exposed postcard from a previous era.

I hailed a cab and in the car the song Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd was playing. The driver, silent and seeming tense, was leaning forward and very aggressively keeping beat to the music with his fingers against the steering wheel.

“Hey teacher, leave those kids alone!” Pink Floyd sang from past.

The driver was lost to the music, and the look on his face indicated an angry agreement with it, rather than a pleasant remembrance of the time the song recalled. Thirty seconds or so likely passed, and then as if thinking out loud,  in a hard, Jamaican accent,  he said, “Some music stays with us, man.”

“Yeah, but it always brings something else with it, doesn’t it?” I responded. “I mean, it’s never alone.”

He shot me a look, an unfriendly one, that suggested I had intruded somewhere I wasn’t welcome, and I receded into the back seat– the rest of the drive was quiet, but for his small, out of key voice occasionally singing along to the radio, “All in all it was all just bricks in the wall, we wuz all just bricks in the wall…”