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…”
]]>“Do you have air conditioning?” I asked.
“Dah,” he responded in a blunt, unfriendly East European accent.
“Would you mind turning it on, please?”
“It is expensive for me to run AC, it take more energy, you know? So I keep windows open for breeze, OK?”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m dying in this heat, and the regulations say that you have to turn it on if the customer asks for it, right?”
The driver, irritated, snorted.
“What?” I asked, also irritated.
“You are weak, little man who can’t take sunshine?”
“Yes, that’s right. I am a weak, little man who can’t take the sunshine,” I sighed.
The driver pretended to laugh, shook his head and said something in a language that I presumed to be Russian.
“Have it your way, little mister boss.”
He then powered up the windows and contemptuously snapped on the AC.
We drove in black silence for the next five minutes.
I hated his fucking guts.
I hoped his native country got obliterated at the Olympics.
Food poisoning.
Nightmares with toys.
No Internet.
Being dunked-on while playing pick-up.
All these pestilences I wished upon him.
As I sat there concentrating my hatred, I began to pick at my fingernails. This is a habit that manifests when I’m angry, and in this case I managed to peel off several crescents of nails, which I then stored in my pocket. This detritus felt disgusting so I opened the window and tried to throw them out of the car.
The driver, his furious eyes staring at me from the rear-view mirror, shouted, “You demand AC like little dictator and now you put window down! You have no manners in my home! You waste my money, it is now five dollars extra!”
“C’mon, don’t be such a prick, I was just throwing a piece of fingernail out the window. Would you rather I left if on the seat?”
“You are disgusting man.”
“Like you’ve never picked at your fingernails.”
“You know who you are? You are like Gollum from The Hobbit. That is you.”
“That tattoo of a bear you have on the back of your neck looks gay.”
The driver slammed on the brakes.
“Gollum throw body waste out of my car, I throw Gollum out of my car. Get out now or I break you into pieces.”
“Really, are you serious?”
The driver looked at me, his eyes softening.
“Maybe I am not myself. My boy is sick and the doctors say he might lose hearing. It is awful and I cannot sleep, imaging his world without music, and then people like you come in and complain about small, small thing and I blow top. You be quiet and sit still, say nothing and I will take you home, but remember, say nothing!”
