by Brian Kerstetter

OUR SCARY CABBIE

 

Last summer O and I were invited to brisbane, australia to show a homemade movie and then speak intelligently about it at a reception.  in new york we sat at the bar of savoy and considered the invitation.  O didn’t mind traveling around the world to show his movie but he was sure he had nothing intelligent to say about it.  I told him I couldn’t agree more, especially regarding his second point.  I asked him why he never spoke intelligently at receptions.  He thought a moment and said, “i never learned to eat appetizers and speak without food flying out of my mouth and bouncing off the other person.”

 

A month later we landed in queensland.  since we were in Australia,  we thought we’d spend a few days in sydney.  on our first day O bought a tweed train conductors cap from a brazilian girl in a boutique; she recommended we experience the panoramic view of the city from the bar atop the hotel Shangri-La.  that night we rode a glass elevator to the top of this cheesy hotel and drank three martinis, ate a bowl of edamame, and stared at the glowing city below.

 

After three martinis and a few japanese seeds, I don’t remember much, except O pointing his greasy finger against the window and saying, “I really don’t like that Opera thing down there.”

 

We went to chinatown for a platter of moo goo guy pan and, leaving the restaurant, (cars drive on the wrong side over there) O nearly walked in front of a speeding taxicab – he was momentarily distracted by his own complaining.  I remember this made my heart jump, then I thought it was funny, so I tried to push him in front of the next car.

 

The following day we flew back to Brisbane, where we met someone that would haunt my nights for weeks, someone I will probably never forget.  At the airport we hopped in a taxi to take us to our studio in the city center.

 

Like usual, O chatted with our driver.  I sat behind the driver’s seat and never actually saw the fellow’s face, but I heard him.   oh, I heard that voice, or should I say, those voices, for I will take them to my grave.  the fact that I never saw his face made my dreams all the more disturbing.  Seated behind him, I only saw his fleshy neck and his dark eyes in the rear view mirror.

 

O and he spoke about the drought in queensland, international rugby, australian automobiles, and immigration patterns of brisbane.  I could tell our chauffeur was a lumbering fellow by his puffy eyes and deep voice.  From the back he looked like Hardy from old Laurel and Hardy movies.

 

Then it happened.  O had just finished a cell phone conversation with makiko when he asked, “and you, are you from australia?”  the guy looked in the rear view mirror at me and in a perfect woman’s voice said, “who, me?  no, I’m from Serbia, you know old Yugoslavia.”

 

I froze.  I searched his eyes in the mirror for the joke but they were dark and flat.  O leaned forward to look at the man’s face.  “and how long have you been in Brisbane?”  O continued.  A hand with five little sausages slowly ran down the back of his hair, he looked in the mirror and said, in a precise feminine articulation, “let’s see, I am thirty-nine.  That makes thirty years, dear.”   Suddenly I saw him driving us back to his apartment, watching him put on a wig and a floral dress and then chopping us matter-of-factly into pieces and placing us in the freezer.

 

I grabbed O’s arm but he seemed to be enjoying this performance and, like a kid with a new toy, started asking our driver a volley of questions to discover who would answer.  Sometimes our driver would answer as a man, sometimes as a woman.  Sometimes a deep husky voice would speak about football; next a lady’s precise elocution would respond about his wife and son.  At a traffic light a driver next to us rolled down his window to ask for directions and our driver seemed to clear his voice as a woman and indicate the correct route as a man.

 

It was starting to get dark.  We were lost in a generic subdivided landscape with a bilingual monster.  my eyelids were perspiring.  I considered hopping out at the next light and leaving O with the madman but I knew he would find me and slice me into filets while speaking like Margaret Thatcher.  I closed my eyes, I breathed, I put my right hand out the window, and i listened to their three-way conversation for what seemed to be an hour.

 

Before the taxi had stopped at our studio I jumped out and ran up to our room, locked the door, turned on all the lights and locked myself in the bathroom and took a lengthy, steaming bath.  surely I’d been imagining things, I was just fatigued from our travels.

 

When i finally left the bathroom in my robe, O was banging on the front door.  I turned the handle and who was standing there but O and the taxi driver.  “mind if I use your bathroom?” the driver asked in a normal Australian man’s voice.