Anonymous Cabbie

Cab drivers should be quiet. I have enough trouble making small talk with the people I’m forced to talk to, I don’t want to waste my energy on people I can avoid talking to. Some cab drivers keep quiet. But this morning I ran into the most annoying, chatty cab driver in human history.

But first some background. I’ve been working 50-60 hours per week for 2 months. My allergies kicked in 3 weeks ago, and I wake up every morning with my breathing passages fully blocked and my eyes raw to the point of bleeding. I’m fat, I’m tired, and I’ve been drinking way too much. Shockingly, I seem to have developed gallstones. For the uninitiated, those are little rocks in your gall bladder, which is attached to (you guessed it) your liver. Apparently they can live quite happily in the gall bladder, but occasionally one decides to take a trip down the bile duct and into your digestive tract. This feels like someone sticking piece of rough, rusty rebar into your right side, and wiggling it vigorously. For 3 to 7 days straight. This happened to me the beginning of February for the first time. It was agony like nothing I had ever experienced. It came back on Wednesday, and this time was even worse.

This morning, I had an appointment for an ultrasound. Hopefully they would diagnose gallstones, give me a shot of whiskey (for the pain, you see), and then thankfully rip the gall bladder out of my body using whatever instrument came to hand. I was willing to beg them for this. I was not in a good mood.

My appointment was for 7:30 am. Meaning I got up at 6:30 am and immediately took the magic pills that make the pain retreat to just the other side of the room. Then, because the pills take 30 minutes to work and I was running late, I showered and got dressed. In so much pain that I was sweating, dizzy, and breathing shallowly. Plus, the jeans I wanted weren’t clean, I was low on cash for the taxi, and I was ashamed to wake up Carlos and make him tie my shoes (I’m not kidding). I was not a happy camper.

I ordered a cab, and it was waiting when I got downstairs. I breathed a silent prayer of thanks for that one little blessing, and maneuvered my pain-wracked body into the backseat. I told the drive where to take me. And he started talking.

I don’t know where Anonymous Cabbie was from, but he had that annoying, affected Yale drawl used by people like Bill Buckley (William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review) use to show they went to Yale. Or in this guy’s case, to pretend that they went to Yale. If you're not familiar with Bill, he’s smart: he can use the word “hendecasyllabic” in casual conversation to describe his casual conversation. He may have a pretentious accent and an elitist vocabulary, but he’s got the intellect to back them up. Anonymous Cabbie did not. Anonymous Cabbie was Bill Buckley’s younger, 100 I.Q. brother. The two things Anonymous Cabbie had going for him were his Yalie drawl and his apparently inability to stop talking. And I didn’t find either one charming.

Anonymous Cabbie talked about the weather. The hospitals. How he’d been saying for years they should tear down these old building and put up new ones. I heard about how “Father” knew everyone, “Father” couldn’t get in or out of church or walk down the street without engaging in a couple dozen conversations. “He didn’t have a rolodex, you see,” Anonymous Cabbie said, “but Father certainly knew EVERYONE. I kid you not.”

In the meantime, his driving would have frightened Dale Earnhardt, even before he hit the wall. I sat in the back of that cab for 20 of the longest blocks of my life, listening to that idiot prattle on while I clung to whatever was handy to keep my oh-so-tender side from being slammed into the doorhandle. I wanted to suffer in silence. I didn’t want to hear him prattle. I didn't care who "Father" knew or didn't know, in fact I would have happily throttled them all. I just wanted blissful quiet so I could sit as still as possible and try not to feel the pain. Never in my adult life have I so wished I could just die.

Finally, it was over. I handed him my debit card (remember, I was low on cash) and he said “Oh, well I’ll have to get out my supplies.” And then he went on, at length, how he had to be careful to punch in the right number into the computer and how they didn’t make imprinters like they used to. And it’s a good thing, because right then I was ready for a good old fashioned murder-suicide by imprinter. If he’d had one of the old metal ones, I would have hit him upside the head and dashed all 100 of his I.Q. points right out his left ear.

After the ultrasound, the nurse asked if I’d driven. “No,” I said, “I can’t drive on my pain medication.”

“Oh, that’s good,” she said. “Can I call you a cab?”

I went pale and said, “I think I’ll take the bus.”