I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK? Read online

  He said, “Second class would be more interesting.”

  I said, “That’s an interesting I can live without. It’s a twenty-hour train ride, for God’s sake. You want to be second class for twenty hours? Be my guest. Those days are behind me. I rode in the back of a truck with you and some cows on our honeymoon in Peru. Forget it. First class is like what, only a few rupees more? That’s nothing! Are you nuts? In second class you sit upright on hard benches pressed together. In first class you might have a horrible little bunk, but at least there aren’t a hundred other people in your compartment.”

  He kept staring at me silently over our pitiful chipped cups of tea. I could have continued yammering till the year changed, so finally he said, “Okay, we’ll both take first class.” He didn’t look like he liked me very much.

  The next day, unbelievably, the same fussy rickshaw driver was parked at the curb outside our humble hotel. He began jingling the bells the minute we stepped outside. “You going train station now, I take you.”

  My love said to me, “Did you ask him to come?”

  “Of course not,” I snapped.

  First class on the train was dusty and disgusting. What a letdown.

  It was also freezing cold, so we wrapped ourselves in layers of clothes. My love would hardly speak to me. I kept saying things like, “Maybe it would be warmer down in second class, all pressed together, why don’t you go see?” The train conductor narrowed his eyes and said he would loan me a blanket if I gave him my pen. But it was my only pen. I talked him into taking a little money for a blanket instead. Then he asked me for candy. I didn’t have any candy.

  The rickshaw taxi of Agra looked better once we had seen the train.

  In Paris we had a great time one Valentine’s week—hiked by the Seine, ate croissants and crispy fish—but my pardner left his favorite hat in the taxi that took us to the airport. Miraculously, the taxi driver, with a Parisian care for detail, drove it back to the hotel. Weeks later the grimy brown hat arrived by post.

  I now think of it as the hat that stayed in France longer than we did.

  Taxi riding in Mexico became a scary enterprise. If you went to Mexico, everyone said, “Don’t take a Volkswagen Bug. No bugs. Sorry, sorry! Scary bugs. Abduction taxis. Ring of thieves. Steer clear.”

  Many people were being kidnapped by VW bug taxis. I have no idea where they were taken or if they ever came back. One Mexican friend told me every family she knew in Mexico City included at least one person who had been robbed by a taxi driver.

  What about all the honest taxi drivers of Mexico?

  I felt sorry for them. Walking around the city, a traveler was forced to repeat over and over again, “No, I don’t need a ride! I’ll walk! I love to walk!”

  Teenagers hopped through the plaza on pogo sticks. They rolled down boulevards on kick scooters and mini-motorbikes.

  One day you realize you’re someone else’s driver and you’d better get used to it—for months, years, whatever. Our son was two when we came over the ridge of the highway from which you can see the downtown buildings, the neighborhood in which we live, and he pointed and said, “Home!”

  Happiness rippled through me. He was strapped into his blue car seat, wearing his little red shoes with buckles.

  For some reason I started singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” very loudly. He did not know this song yet, but he listened. I felt the power of the driver surging within me—you pick the speed, you turn the air conditioner or radio on or off, you sing as loudly as you want, to your captive audience.

  The Same Bed

  A DRIVER PICKED ME UP AT A HISTORIC BED and breakfast inn in South Bend to take me to the airport in Chicago.

  He said, “Let me guess—you were visiting Notre Dame.”

  “Wrong.”

  “You are thinking of moving here and came for an interview.”

  “Nope.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Well, uh, last night I was really tired, but I just couldn’t sleep. I lay awake all night. Does that ever happen to you?”

  “Never. Did you take a sleeping pill?”

  “No. I read the entire guest book in my room.”

  “And what did it say?”

  “Well, one father had just married off his precious daughter Camille and had deeply mixed feelings about it. One couple was celebrating their fifth anniversary, but suffering serious problems in their marriage. One couple had just left their son at college and felt proud but very sad. And another couple on their wedding night reported they got spider bites in the bed where I was trying to sleep.”

  “And you wonder why you couldn’t?”

  Monsters

  IN GLASGOW, SCOTLAND, LATE AT NIGHT, A taxi picked me up at a poet’s house next to a park.

  “Come along and sit inna front,” the driver said. “If ye don’t mind. Feels friendlier that way.”

  So I sat beside him, up on the left, which had started feeling normal after three weeks. He turned down the radio so we could talk.

  “How ya doin?” he asked. “Where ya from?”

  “Texas,” I said. “And I’m sad. I’m sad to leave your country. I love your country and I’m leaving tomorrow. I don’t want to leave, ever.”

  “Aye, but if ya love it, ye’ll be back soon, no worries,” said he. “It’s a wee place, but some people like it. Glad ya do. I never saw Texas no way, never went ta the United States, but maybe someday. So who you visitin’ in that neighborhood?”

  “Poets,” I said.

  He seemed startled. “Aye, poets? I didn’t know there were poets where I picked ye up.”

  “There are poets everywhere.”

  “Nah! Nah! Can’t be true!”

  We talked about the Open at Saint Andrew’s and the Highlands and the Isle of Mull and Durness in the far northwest corner of the country where John Lennon the Beatle spent his summers as a little boy and those tasty pies called pasties and bridies and all sorts of Scottish wonders. I like Scottish highway signs: PLEASE ALLOW OVERTAKING—FRUSTRATION CAUSES ACCIDENTS and QUEUES LIKELY AHEAD and TIREDNESS CAN KILL.

  I told him the poets said something very interesting about politics. They said, “In Scotland, we never take ourselves too seriously, we’re just a satellite of a monarchy, you know, so how could we? And we think that anyone who runs for a political office can’t really have good intentions up his sleeve. Surely he or she is doing it for some ulterior motive. So we’re pretty cynical in general about politics and if someone turns out to be good and honorable, we’re pleasantly surprised. But you, in the United States, you want to believe in your politicians and that’s why you’re always so depressed and disappointed.”

  I thought that was great. I liked it even better, telling him.

  “Aye,” he said, eyeing me. “So are ye now? Depressed and disappointed?”

  “About politics—totally.”

  “But you can vote fer somebody better next time, yes?”

  “Yes, but see, we don’t believe the votes are always fair. And think of all the rotten things happening in the meantime. These things will take years to get over. I’m truly worried about the environment, aren’t you? Yours here in Scotland looks better than most anywhere else. Say, do you believe in the Loch Ness monster?”

  “Sure I do! Lotta other monsters, too. Highland monsters, deep cave monsters, sewer monsters, all kinda monsters.”

  I mentioned the nature god Pan who was supposed to prance around the gardens of giant cabbages up at Findhorn, near Inverness—half human, half goat. With little hooves and a small flute. I’d read about him a long time ago and wondered if he were still prancing. He wasn’t a monster, though. He was more like a little fairy.

  The taxi driver, who smelled like cabbages himself, and cigarettes, looked interested. “Might be!” he said. “I never hearda that wee one.”

  When I hopped out, he handed me his card for next time and said, “Okay then, be safe to the other side of the sea.”

&
nbsp; I pressed the card up to my chest, and when he drove off I kissed it.

  The person you have known a long time is embedded in you like a jewel.

  The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams and you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there?

  With someone you’ve barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.

  Brown

  HOW MANY THINGS HAVE WE NEVER EVEN thought about?

  In a small Michigan village the young taxi driver who picked me up before dawn to drive me eighty miles to a town with an airport was driving a car that didn’t look like a taxi at all. It looked like an old beat-up car a kid would drive. There was no meter or sign.

  I said, “Are you really the taxi?”

  He said, “No, I’m really a guy trying to make enough money to go to college and stay tanned, but they call me a taxi.”

  I threw my bags into the backseat with a bit of suspicion and climbed in, closing the dented door gingerly behind me. There were empty Gatorade bottles on the floor.

  “Stay tanned?”

  “Yeah. Tanning studio. I go three times a week. How often do you go?”

  I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it. “Uh—I live in Texas. We could just go outside if we wanted to stay tanned.”

  “Yeah, you’re lucky. But I’m sure you have tanning studios down there, too. We have Tanzamillion.”

  “Yeah, sure we do—but…why? Why do you want to be tanned? It’s not that healthy for you, is it?”

  We were driving through fields of dark snow. A brilliant pink sun was just pushing up on the eastern horizon. I admired him for being up so early, anyway.

  “It’s important,” he said. “For looks. You can’t look good pale. I mean, you look healthier tan. You can also tan”—he turned his head to look at me—“places that never get tan otherwise.”

  Hmmmm. I didn’t say, Thrilling. The butt and boob tans must be considered at all costs. It was a very odd conversation to be having before dawn.

  I thought about my friend Trinidad Sanchez, Jr., who wrote a book of poems called Why Am I So Brown? I wished I had an extra copy with me to give to this dude. Wasn’t it a little strange how racism in the world often worked against darker people, yet lighter people wanted to be darker? I knew that was not an original thought, but my driver caused it to surge back into my mind so early in the morning. He had spiky blond hair and the tattoo of a small cross on the side of his neck.

  And he’d obviously had his caffeine. He kept talking, “It’s pricey even when you buy a tan package. Like, I buy thirty tans at once, to get me through most of the winter, and that’s a reduction, but still, it takes some bucks.”

  We were passing dark barns, silos, shadowy farm equipment pressed up against the sides of outbuildings. “Would you say that’s one of your main expenditures?” (I was thinking books, food, movies, music, clothes, fuel….)

  “Yeah, pretty much so, I guess. It’s not in the luxury category for sure. I put it in the basics. I don’t know what people did before tanning studios. It is definitely a harder life for us up here in the north.”

  Rollentina

  EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS BITS AND PIECES.

  Everything is nickels and dimes and pennies and lost buttons and someone remembers the street called Durango from when he was a little boy and gets emotional just to see the sign.

  Everything belongs to the one who passes, who sees it from the window—the yard sale sign and the crab shack sign and the church turned into a house and the raspberry stand in the back of a red truck. My friend Joe, driving along the coast of Deer Isle, Maine, says, “So there’s nothing between us and Scotland but some water and a few islands,” and my whole heart shifts.

  The driver at snowy Dorval Airport in Montreal says, “Bonsoir, Madame!” and opens the back door with a flourish.

  I slide in, saying, “Bonsoir to you, too!” and feel like Archie Bunker.

  The Korean taxi driver in Los Angeles says, “I will tell you where to find the best empanada, the best kimchee, the best eggplant rollentina, the best chipotle salsa fresh, the best shrimp pancake, the best…” He mixes cultures in a broad sweep of streets and there is nothing strange about it, nothing strange at all. “How do you know all this?” you ask him, and he sings, “I like to eat!”

  Riding in a taxi, passing in a car, will always feel like the central human experience to me. Not graduating from high school or college, getting married, having a baby, no. Just passing in a car…

  Once I picked up Tennessee Williams and William Burroughs in the same car because my friend and I had offered to do some airport runs for a literary conference. The great writers said, “You’re the taxi drivers, eh?” A heavy snow had fallen and my friend and I, who had no idea if Tennessee Williams and William Burroughs even got along or anything in real life, kept looking nervously at each other, hoping we wouldn’t skid into a ditch. Neither one of us had expertise in driving in snow. The great writers were wearing heavy, dark overcoats and carrying briefcases. They chattered pleasantly in the backseat and didn’t seem to notice that we drove very very slowly. To this day each one of us thinks we were the driver.

  I can’t forget riding in the back of a limousine in Philadelphia with the two most famous Palestinian intellectuals in the world, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish. I think we had bodyguards and bulletproof glass. Mariam Said, Edward’s wife, was with us, and the great poet Carolyn Forché was there, too, and I knew even as this was happening that it was an incredible thing to be back there with them. Darwish had been sniffing our grand old hotel lobby as we all waited for the limo, saying, “This smells familiar! What does it smell like? It smells like—memory.”

  There was a part of my brain that could pole-vault out of that moment into a future moment and look back on it already and say, Oh my.

  I felt tongue-tied. I could do nothing but listen and watch, observing two great men adjust their suit coats and converse and sip pure water from plastic bottles and make quiet jokes.

  This is what I save—the elegant, unexpected moments that I slip into, like an envelope into a mailbox. I do not need there to be any message inside.

  Test Case

  BASICALLY CELL PHONES HAVE CHANGED everything in India. I am not sure whether this is good or bad. Probably it is a mixed curry.

  I can’t imagine that the dusty camel guides in the Thar Desert of far northwestern Rajasthan province have started using cell phones, because they didn’t even have land lines twenty years ago, but the city of Delhi/New Delhi feels indelibly altered.

  In the old days, like anywhere else, you had to guess if someone would show up where they promised, but now, you keep checking.

  “Craft Museum? Hello? Ten minutes! Right-o!” or: “How is the traffic on your side of the city?” Terrible, of course. A city this giant, it’s always terrible.

  “Well, we’re on our way! Save us a spot!”

  The crowdedness is a beautiful terrible because it means life.

  In Delhi everyone is very used to veering around strangely parked cars, broken buses, rickshaws, wandering cows, parades, flags, funeral processions, piles of junk, mounds of dirt and brick, small fires that people are heating large pots of water over, and heaps of giant pipes.

  ROAD CLOSED is never a surprise.

  A detour takes us through the heart of an impromptu shrine or under someone’s personal clothesline flapping pink and orange scarves. We get into such a desperate traffic jam that a frustrated pedestrian tries to punch our driver through the open window. The driver yells back and rolls the window up. He shakes his head and says to us, “This man has no patience. It is not my fault that we are sitting here. Where can we go?”

  We lock our doors.

  A few hours later, after we have made fourteen detours and U-turns trying to locate a mysterious handmade paper store and I have purchased five packets of lime and orange envelopes, he turns his weary head and asks: “Do you mind if I take the new fly-over? I believe it wi
ll help us.”

  “What? Take it! Take anything!”

  I picture the car spreading out wide wings and taking off. Fly-over? We would call it an overpass, looming up ahead of us, freshly white, sleek, and absolutely empty. Underneath us, on the old clogged roads, the traffic remains treacherously jammed, madly honking. We shoot up onto the smooth rise of concrete above them. Indeed, it is as if we are flying over everyone else.

  “But why is no one else taking this road?” I ask the driver as we look down on thousands of red blinking taillights.

  He laughs nervously. “Because, Madam, this road is very new; it just opened last night. The workers have been building it for years. They had bad luck, and it took a long time, much longer than they thought it would take. So no one trusts it yet. They are thinking maybe it will be falling down. So they want to watch us to see what happens. We are the test case.”

  In the great and ancient city of Delhi, we are among the first to pass over a shining pavement. It doesn’t fall. It’s as if we came a few days ago, when the cement was wet, and pressed our fingers in.

  Mouth of the Rat

  “I AM NOT REALLY YOUR DRIVER. YOUR REAL driver is another person.”

  Why are people always telling me this?

  When will we meet our real drivers?

  “Your driver stopped to get gas and his car broke down. So he called me to pick you up instead. I am the driver of two other people arriving from New York. Can you wait till their plane lands? I brought a big car, it’s parked outside, room enough for everybody. Come on, you can wait for us there.”

  We exit the baggage area together, entering the sweet warm air of Florida. I breathe deeply and stare up at the stately palm trees for signs of hurricanes, but they look dignified, as if nothing bad has happened in their lives.

  The driver-for-other-people leads me to an oversized white limousine.