Cab Talk

Thomas Friedman might have a problem finding a driver who’s willing to chat with him about world events, at the columnist/diplomat’s convenience, but before he officially buries the old saw of the Hack Who Speaks Common Sense in journalism’s nostalgia morgue, maybe he ought to hail a cabbie on a D.C. city street. It’s true that the language barrier between purveyor and customer has reduced conversation in taxis for at least two decades—although immigration restrictionists would reverse that reality of modern life in a minute if given the chance—but there are still plenty of gabby fellows weaving in and out of traffic to pick up a fare.

Last week, for example, the kids and I were held captive for 25 minutes on a ride to an independent record store in Fells Point—the once seedy waterfront neighborhood in Baltimore favored a generation ago by rummies, sailors and boho misfits that’s now a nighttime haven for suburban college kids looking for a sanitized adventure—and this character had his spiel down pat. Taking a look at the pony-tailed, self-proclaimed “white trash old hippie,” with his wheeze and mouth that was just half-filled with teeth, it was anybody’s guess as to what he’d ramble about one minute to the next, but it was highly entertaining and marginally informative.

He started out by giving my sons a quick lesson about the intricacies of Islam, all documented in his notebooks of poetry on top of the dashboard, and then unexpectedly launched into a lengthy lecture on the necessity, and his gleeful approval of, Saddam Hussein’s execution. I was confused: On his portable boombox Neil Young’s lazy Living With War was playing, yet this 1960s ghost who later gave us chapter and verse of his involvement in the Catonsville Nine trial was advocating President Bush’s call for a troop increase in Baghdad. The more the better, he said, since there’s no other way to win the war.

Nevermind that this graybeard said he’d voted for Kerry in ’04 or that Lou Dobbs, the television populist who, as Ken Auletta noted in The New Yorker a few weeks back, is fond of the $57 Dover sole at the Four Seasons restaurant, was one of his heroes. Less surprising was his ode to the Baltimore Ravens, the city’s playoff-bound football team that has given local sports fans a temporary reason to forget the plain truth that the beloved Orioles are doomed to finish, for the 10th consecutive year with less than 81 victories in the upcoming season. I also didn’t quite get his monologue on the obscure coffee houses where he reads from his journal among an audience that’s all black, claiming he always gets the most applause, “maybe because I’m white and an honorary brother.”

In a way, this voluble almost senior citizen reminded me of a less coherent version of the cabbie David Johansen played in Scrooged, although he didn’t cackle or raise his voice. My favorite part of the ride, as he dropped us off on Thames Street was a closing thought on the art of political correctness. Maybe this is old hat to you and has been mentioned on one of the late night shows that I never watch, but his admonition to my younger son Booker that it was no longer polite to refer to those who’ve passed into eternity as “dead,” but rather as people who have “a reduced level of participation,” cracked me up.

We got out of the cab, and as Nicky made a beeline for the vinyl section of the store—snaring a muted pink pressing of one his current favorite band’s releases was his highlight of the day, quickly blowing a $50 bill (or, as we used to say, “Tribeca food stamp”) his grandmother had sent as a Christmas present—Booker looked at me with an utterly lost look on his face, as if to communicate at the age of 12, that he’d seen the past, present and future of Pepsi Generation members who never said no to another tab of window pane or Mr. Natural and that this was a very weird deviation from his ordered world of little league, manga, the Disney channel and the irritation of too much Spanish homework.

This small adventure turned utterly bizarre less than two hours later when, finished with our errands and the boys’ lunch at the horrid Quiznos sub joint, we got into a cab heading home and found the same driver in the front seat. Now I understand that cabbies, on a good day, run through a lot of passengers, but given his intense and non-stop patter earlier, it was very strange that he gave no sign of recognizing us.

In fact, on this ride the pro-war, pro-Islam, pro-Kerry working man with the need of a dental appointment didn’t say a word to us, opting to take in our own, and far more prosaic, conversation. I was attempting, once again, to impress upon the boys that reading a daily newspaper, in the print version, wasn’t an uncool thing to do, and of course making no headway. Booker protested that he reads the funnies every day and glances at the stock tables in The Wall Street Journal to see how his pretend purchases for a school project were faring, and Nicky very lamely countered that anything of importance was on the web, via Wikipedia, Drudge or Pitchfork.

This reminded me of a story David Carr wrote for the Jan. 1 New York Times, “The Lonely Newspaper Reader,” an elegant lament for a lost era when homes, including his and mine, were cluttered with several dailies, both morning and evening editions. Carr remembers his family’s breakfast ritual as a tyke: “This, I thought, is what it means to be a grown-up. You eat your food standing up, and you read the newspaper. So I did the same thing [as his father and older brother] when I turned 13. I still do.” He ends by turning to the present, saying, “Then I looked at the four papers on the table and the empty [kitchen] chairs that surrounded them. Before my second cup of coffee, the rest of my household had already started the day in a way that had nothing to do with the paper artifacts in front of them.”

When I mentioned this to Nicky, he looked at me with wide eyes and said that Carr’s children probably learned about the important news of the day each morning from Matt Lauer, just as he does. There was no need to get into another futile argument with him and pointing out this foolishness, so I changed the subject. We arrived home, the now silent cabbie said thanks for the generous tip and told me that my boys were very well behaved. I wished him a healthy and prosperous new year, and then spoke with Nicky and Booker about the guy’s forgetful mind. “Maybe he has a touch of Alzheimer’s,” I suggested, trying to put a human spin on the situation. Nicky wasn’t buying: “Dad, that guy was stoned. I could smell the smoke on him.”

And just how do you know about aroma of pot, I asked, not really wanting to know the answer. Like a considerate son he defused a potentially tense moment by recalling an open-air concert we attended last fall where all sorts of illicit behavior was taking place. Crisis averted.