by H. M. Naqvi
“I know, yaar,” I replied, “I know.”
We walked up Woodland in silence, smelling of fried onions and tired cigarillos.
5.
I drove my first car at age five. It was a sky-blue convertible rounded in the front like a Corvette. It had a stick-on fuel gauge and speedometer and a yellow biscuit-box-sized dashboard that opened out. The steering wheel was also functional, but the car wasn’t equipped with a chassis, pedals, or any sort of bottom. It moved by way of ambulation—environmentally friendly but not particularly energy efficient. Not that it mattered: I was all vim then. I zipped around in it, navigating the byways of our living room, kitchen, and backyard, blowing raspberries. Apparently, I was attached to the car for “six long months.” Ma said she even remembered me having dinner in it while watching TV, drive-in-style.
I didn’t drive again till my teenage years, when suddenly my legs stretched disproportionately faster than my arms and torso. When Ma determined that my feet could touch the clutch, accelerator, and brake, she said, “We’re going for a ride, Daddy Long Legs.” So one afternoon in the summer of ’94 we drove to the deserted road past Clifton Beach in our secondhand purple Daihatsu Charade, impelled by the doctrine of necessity: Ma needed me to do groceries, collect my father’s pension checks, and deposit the electric and phone bills. “You’re the man of the house,” she said, and this role required me to operate the levers of manhood.
After a few false starts, several skid marks, and a break during which I was treated to a pep talk and a newspaper cone of spiced peanuts, I got the hang of it. The trick, I learned, was lifting your foot off the clutch while pressing the gas and vice versa. “And,” Ma instructed, “keep your eyes open. Always check your mirrors. You have to keep track of what is going on around you.” As per the directions, I kept my eyes on the road, avoiding potholes, dodging the errant cyclist, and slowing down before speed bumps, but later, feeling confident, I did manage to wave to a family of lost picnickers and glimpse the sunset over the frothy gray sea.
Ma was a patient teacher because she was taught in the same way by another, her late husband, “Inna lillaihay wa inna illahay rajayune.” She was also a hard taskmaster. Announcing, “Now, for your test,” she directed me home to Saddar via Gizri, one of the busiest intersections this side of the megalopolis. Karachi traffic, I was to learn, requires skill and testosterone. I had neither. Consequently, the drive back was harrowing. The nightly caravan of trucks traveling from the port to the interior swept me through Gizri, and at Submarine Chowk, it happened: in an attempt to brake in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I accelerated, hitting the Honda in front of me.
I remember it being very hot. We had the windows down because the air conditioner had malfunctioned years ago—which worked fine with the sea breeze blowing in at the beach, but not in city traffic, and certainly not during the accident. Ma’s beige chiffon sari clung to her body, and my shirt was dark with sweat. My right leg shook uncontrollably. I didn’t know what to do: I was underage, in the wrong, and without a license. Ma, putting her hand on my knee, said, “Sit here,” and with that she opened the car door and slammed it behind her.
The driver of the Honda Civic, a stout man with a magician’s beard, was already outside, gesticulating wildly. Other people, mostly men, had gotten out of their cars, forming a raucous circle around the two. It was a real scene, and in the headlights Ma cut a pose like a fifties film actress with her long black hair tied up in a bun, her sari wrapped tightly around her hips, and her kohl-lined eyes flashing, but she was no damsel in distress: with one fist on her waist, she wagged a finger at the man, who, not knowing what hit him, didn’t get a word in edgewise. “And one more thing,” I heard Ma say. “Your beard needs cutting!” The magician waddled back away.
When Ma got back in, I leaned over and planted a kiss on her sweaty cheek. She was my hero. Looking at me squarely in the eye, she said, “This is your first and last accident.” Then slapping her thigh, she announced, “Let’s go, beta,” as if her work here were done.
The episode recurred in my mind the evening of the frenetic, fateful Shaman Run. By the time I had taken the number 7 into Jackson Heights, riding in the first carriage to watch the tracks widen ahead, acquired the keys and cab from Abdul Karim—who received me at his walk-up in a royal blue bathrobe and matching sponge slippers and delicately inquired why I was wearing sunglasses—and driven back into town with a passenger who, I correctly predicted, needed a ride downtown, though not to the Village but just outside the Nolita, it was after eight. Across town in Hell’s Kitchen, AC had been waiting for me since seven. Meanwhile, Jimbo had asked to be collected from the Ducks place in SoHo, an unanticipated detour that complicated an already complicated expedition. The smart thing to do was to take Houston to West Broadway, pick up Jimbo, then take Ninth Avenue to AC’s because, as any cabbie can tell you, the lights on Ninth open up all the way through at thirty-four miles per hour, but Houston was backed up. Consequently, I decided to cut through Alphabet City and fetch AC first because I figured Jimbo could wait and AC was already stewing like a pot of nihari. He would have to stew some more. The streets were helter-skelter, cars weaving in, swerving out, cutting each other off, caravans of buses lurching past like rampaging elephants. Drivers honked, cussed, raised fists and fingers, and there were cops everywhere: in patrol cars, on horseback, and in twos and threes on the street. It was as if everybody were escaping some epic catastrophe: tidal wave, airborne toxic event, Godzilla. I suspected it had something to do with the vaguely dire announcement on the news concerning the area bridges and tunnels, but instead of an exodus, everybody seemed to be going round and round.
When I finally reached Madison, the road cleared. Rolling down the windows, I cranked up WPLJ, Power 95, and bobbed to the rousing beat of a great old Doobies number. I flew past the carpet shops in the thirties, the hotels in the forties, in seven minutes flat, and for those seven minutes, I was fast and free like an errant atom. At such junctures—and they were not infrequent—being a cabbie was joy. It beat sitting head down in a cubicle for sixteen-hour stretches, staring at a screen. Cruising into the city on I-95 at night, for instance, or from Hoboken, across the George Washington, was thrilling each and every goddamn time. It was like discovering Manhattan anew. Each turn promised something else: you would see crazy bastard fistfights in Yonkers, crazy bastard wedding parties in Chinatown. You would meet the great celebrities of our age, raise your thumb to that naked cowboy guitarist in Times Square. There was, however, a consensus among us that one of the best parts of the job was that the most beautiful women in the world would chase after you in stilettos and states of dishabille at four, five in the morning. They would enter your place of business, leg first, handbag dangling, and make conversation. Some were known to bare flushed breasts for no reason whatsoever; others had bared their souls.
Although the job had its perks, few would agree that being a cabbie in turn-of-the-century New York City was a peachy proposition. One had to navigate drunks, druggies, axle-snapping potholes, labyrinthine detours, speed traps, ticket traps, summons abuses. The cops, for instance, did this thing on 42nd: if you tried taking a left from Third Avenue on a green light, you got a ticket for failure to yield to pedestrians, but if you allowed them to pass, you would receive a summons for running a red. And you paid for tickets, gas, and the $120-per-shift leasing fee from your own pocket; you got no Social Security, pension, paid vacation, or health insurance, even though you risked life and limb every night. Robberies were common, robbery-related fatalities not uncommon. During my brief and wondrous tenure, two livery cab drivers were knifed. In 2000 eleven died.
The night of the Shaman Run, I had my first near-death experience: in an attempt to confirm the meteorologists’ insistence on rain, I slowed to survey the low, hanging sky, when a figure scampered into the middle of the street as if chasing a line drive or death wish. Slamming the brake, I yelled something like JESUS H. CHRIST ALAIY SALAM! The cab screeched, then ski
dded, then stopped. With one hand stuck in his trouser pocket, the other hand shielding his eyes, a familiar character in a boxy suit swooned before me, tie slung over his shoulder. When I got out to curse the jackass, he strode over, opened a door, and sprawled onto the backseat. “Greenwich Street,” he commanded as if nothing had happened. “And step on it, sport.”
There was something about his extraordinary, cavalier manner, something in the pitch of his voice and Jersey brogue, that placed him. It was my VP. Although inevitable, it was the first time something like this had happened to me since my incarnation as a cabbie. There was no way I was going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I had come down in the world. In a made-up foreign accent, somewhere between Bengali and Swahili, I said, “I don go!”
“You go!” he yelled through the scratched Plexiglas partition.
“I off duty!”
“Well, you know what?” he said, crossing his legs. “So am I. And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to kick back, relax, and smoke a cigar.”
Throwing up my hands in the air, I cried, “No ciggy! No ciggy!”
Producing a fat one, which was promptly dropped below, he barked, “Go to hell!” As he grunted and fumbled and kicked the back of my seat, I wondered, What the hell am I going to do with this guy? My first impulse was to deposit him along Manhattan Alley and let him fare for himself among the Hondurans in wifebeaters huddled on stairs and stoops. “Okay,” I mumbled under my breath, slamming the accelerator, “I go to hell.”
One night not so long after I arrived in the States, I had accompanied AC to Manhattan Alley on an “errand,” only to find myself twiddling my thumbs on the sidewalk when he disappeared into a tenement for a “pit stop.” As I paced the trash-strewn sidewalks, dodging rats the size of kittens, I caught the attention of a squat gangbanger, hanging back on the stoop with his crew, picking the dirt beneath his fingernails with a butterfly knife. “Yo, homeboy” he had called out, “you wanna tattoo?” As his posse let out whoops of laughter like a pack of undernourished hyenas, I remember trembling, wondering: Am I a home boy? I began to whistle because Ma told me to whistle when I was afraid, a questionable strategy; then AC emerged like Hercules after the Twelve Labors, hollering, “¡Familias Latinas! ¡Tranquilo, tranquilo!”
When I glanced at my VP again, however, slumped against the backseat, peering outside through dark, swollen eyes, I realized I did not feel particularly vindictive toward him. The imperative did not jell with my jihad. Besides, there was no time for a tour of the Upper Upper West Side. So I swung around, lowered the windows for cross-ventilation, and turned up the evening jazz set on National Public Radio. In turn, my VP kicked back, closed his eyes, enjoying, it would seem, Dizzy Gillespie tearing shit up.
We reached AC’s close to nine. Pulling up in front of his building, I checked on my passenger—who looked up, then down, as if his head were fixed on a hinge—then made for the cluster of phone booths across the street. Getting through to AC was a production at the best of times. One needed a pocketful of quarters and heroic patience because he screened calls to avoid his landlord, creditors, and drug dealers, not to mention acolytes, ex-girlfriends, present girlfriends, and anybody else who wanted a piece of him. You would have to call him once, hang up, call him again in exactly seven seconds—counting one Mississippi, two Mississippi, and so on—hang up again, and then, if he was home, he would call back. If not, you would be left chilling in a phone booth like an idiot.
There was a period when, having borrowed fifteen hundred dollars from a loan shark in Spanish Harlem—a character suitably known as The Grasshopper—AC stopped taking calls altogether. He had his front door replaced with a solid iron fixture that he’d salvaged from a bankrupt halal butchery in Coney and equipped with several old-fashioned scroll-end slide bolts and a contraption known as a mortise lock, an invention, he breathlessly informed us, attributed to the nephew of Eli Whitney, the man behind “the renaissance in pre–Civil War Southern agriculture.” During the fraught Days of The Grasshopper, he had also carpeted the floors twice over and soundproofed the entrance walls with blankets and egg cartons so you could not hear him inside. Mail and flyers and rolled newspapers would be scattered on his doormat as if he were on permanent vacation. The only way to contact him then was to follow the elaborate instructions he had dispatched to us by post, which involved a pulley, a garden gnome, and a bowling pin tethered to a string off the fire escape in the alley out back. In the dead of night, we would climb up the ladder and enter his apartment through the window like Ali Baba’s Two Straggling Thieves.
Inside the inner sanctum, you learned that AC’s childhood mythology had been informed in part by dog-eared copies of bildungsromans such as Crusoe, Sawyer. How to Be a Detective rested prominently on his desk alongside translations of the Babur-Nama, the first modern memoir, and Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, the first treatise on anthropology, sociology, and economics. AC would tell you that he had reorganized his collection according to personal relevance: “Should Dante take precedence over Ghalib,” he had asked rhetorically, “just by virtue of his name? That would be ridiculous, chum.” The Anarchist Cookbook—a How to Be a Detective for grown-ups—was often consulted after a few drinks. As a result, we had all smoked dried banana-peel residue, an experience that left a bad taste for days. We had, however, balked at the prospect of attempting the hallucinogen that can be manufactured from boiling, drying, and crushing toad skins into powder with mortar and pestle.
Bracing for another screed on punctuality, I dialed, waited, and dialed again, but when he finally called back, AC simply told me to meet him in the “alley in five.” Then it began to drizzle, just like that, with no warning, no fanfare, heralded only by a faint breeze and a diffuse smell of urine. Crossing the street, I took cover under the awning of a nearby newsstand. A few yards away I noticed my VP plant his hand on the trunk of the cab and retch ferociously. A man in overalls, heaving a stack of newspapers, yelled, “You okay there, fella?” My VP waved, smiled, vomited again.
In the alley around back, a familiar, jaunty tune carried over the pitter-patter of rain. Cocking my head to one side, I heard, “… shows ’em pearly whites,” something, something, “out of sight.” Four floors above, I watched AC emerge from an open window, climb onto the fire escape, coattails flapping, beer in hand, and clamber down like Batman, before dropping seven, maybe eight feet, and landing on a mound of garbage bags without spilling a drop of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. It was, by any measure, an impressive performance. Standing up, he brushed rust flakes off his lapel, ran his hand through his hair, and bounded toward me like a mountain cat, clenching his big square jaw. He appeared ballistic, like he was going to kick some butt, but before he could, I briefed him on the developing VP crisis.
“So let me get this straight, chum,” AC said. “The fellow who fired you? He’s in the cab? Right now?
“Yeah.”
“And he just retched?”
“On the road. Not inside, thank God—”
“Indeed,” AC muttered. “How considerate.”
“Look, yaar, he’s totally wasted—”
“Well,” he said, “we’ll, ah, have to knock some sense into him, won’t we?”
Then AC took a step closer. I could count the brittle curled hairs in his nose. I thought he was going to knock some sense into me as well. Instead, he picked the sunglasses off my nose with the delicate precision of an ophthalmologist and placed them in his kerchief pocket. “Echymosis,” he stated.
“Sorry?”
“Discoloration of skin caused by internal bleeding, dry blood.”
“Sounds like a disease.”
Producing an unlabelled yellow vial from his secret armpit pouch—a traveling first-aid kit that included nips, poppers, “smelling salts,” chocolate-covered ants, and whatnot—he clasped my temple and dabbed a sticky, astringent balm under my eye, which he massaged gently with the flat of his thumb. It felt good. After replacing my shades, he popped th
e vial back into the pouch and marched forth. “Well, c’mon!” he called. “We’re late, chum! At this rate we won’t make it to the Shaman’s by late next week.” As we made our way out of the alley, we passed the pool of chewed bits of sausage and watery red onions that my VP had spewed out. “Charming,” AC remarked, pinching his mustache. “Mixed media on, ah, asphalt.”
In the car, AC threatened to lock my VP in the trunk until he gave me my job back. “Please don’t, yaar,” I pleaded. “At least let him come to.” In that effort, AC slapped him with the back of his hand. Mercifully, my VP did not stir, and if he had any sense of self-preservation, if he knew what was good for him, he would remain dead to the world, because AC was in a dangerous mood. “Look,” I argued, “if he isn’t conscious of making the decision, then it’s no good, right?” Agreeing in principle, AC could not quite check the imperatives of justice: blindfolding my VP with a polka-dot handkerchief, he bound his hands with his own Hermès tie, “so that, ah, his hands remain tied.”
During the ride, AC, always the sleuth, also guessed at my VP’s extracurricular activities. “You picked him up where?” he asked. “Fifty-third? The cheeky bastard’s been to Flash Dancers, getting lap dances and his face mashed by great big mammary glands and rubbery aureoles.” There was not much evidence for the hypothesis until AC pulled two wads of cash from either trouser pocket. “He makes what, three hundred grand a year gross? Well, he’s carrying, ah, point one percent of his salary on him. In singles.” Slipping the moolah into his own jacket, he declared, “Consider this a tax, dickhead.”
At precisely ten o’ clock, I found parking on Sullivan and, from my vantage, could see the lights on at the Duck’s. We hadn’t seen her much that summer but once upon a time we’d visited her weekly, bearing gifts, bouquets, bottles of Chianti and Brunello, and knickknacks for the house: Klimt-print coasters, a fancy corkscrew, a Dustbuster. Kissing her on both cheeks, AC would say, “Accept these insufficient tokens of our, ah, affection.” And maybe they were, but how else do you really reciprocate such consummate hospitality? We would also invite her over and once even threw an elaborate dinner party on a sailboat in her honor, complete with printed invitations and menus on ivory paper. The Duck, however, was not an eager guest herself. If she arrived at all, she would make quiet conversation with somebody she knew, strictly mano a mano, and after some time wink or make a secret gesture at Jimbo, because he would jump up, make up some paltry excuse, then lead her out.