Amid the sparkling glass, a turd. A male one or a female one? Is there any way to tell? Is there any expert capable of distinguishing? A tenured professor of Biologics of Gender Excretions? This notion, which you never would have thought of before tonight, makes you laugh as you rush along the filthy sidewalk. You laugh in your mind while with your lips you mutter, “Where’s a fuck-ing cab?”
You lean up against a streetlight pole with your cheek pressed against the dusty steel. It’s weird that you still feel drunk after all these hours. And you’ve walked for ten minutes without seeing a single car. You've seen sleeping bodies, garbage bins with padlocks, cigarette butts and bottle caps, trash imprinted with the same logos you proof daily at the boffice, but not a single taxicab. There’s nothing, no traffic. No vehicle of any kind.
And you really need to get home….
But wait. That’s a cab coming towards you! You can see its glowing toplight three blocks off and you charge into the middle of the street to make yourself more visible. You’re swinging your arms, coaxing it nearer. And now this orange cab with its young black driver is pulling up beside you.
“Sharkboy!” you hear as you slide in. His tufted hair juts out like a sea anemone and his earring glints in the darkness.
It’s Myrna’s guy, Sam.
And, at the moment of this realization, your eyes register a dully-glowing four-inch figure in a rumpled suit slouched beneath his nappy locks. And this, the latest of tonight’s incongruities, makes you fall back against the seat and laugh out loud.
“Last time I saw you, you were a mess,” Sam says, in his down-tone Jamaican accent.
“I know,” you say, wondering why you hadn’t noticed it before.
“But you seem fine.”
“I’m very fine!”
It feels surprisingly natural to make this proclamation but you’re practically yelling because there’s a CD playing, a chorus made up of a hundred gorgeous voices, solemn and sober voices, in total contrast to the filth and disorder of the streets.
“Your taxi’s like a cathedral,” you say, and when he doesn’t respond you say it louder. You really want to talk to him. You want to tell Sam—or anyone—about what happened to you tonight. And as the ever-ascending song of celebration surrounding you bursts forth, you think how well this music corresponds with the way you feel right now—this feeling that you’re on the verge of an ecstatic vision.
“It’s Haydn,” Sam says while his little influencer nods emphatically. “My end-of-shift music.”
The ropey glowy little man, who’s dressed like he stepped out of an old photo by Brassai, keeps slapping at Sam’s ear with his fedora. He wants Sam to do something, or say something it seems, and when Sam reaches over to turn down the music, you take it to be your chance.
“I’m feeling sort of wow—” you begin all wrongly.
“I know,” says Sam. “It’s weird seeing you too. Your name is Neville, I believe?”
“Neville, exactly.” Why do you insist on sounding so idiotic?
“I remember because Myrna talks about you a lot.”
“She does?”
“Neville this and Neville that. But you were saying, Neville?”
Sam looks like a kid. Too young to be your confidante, but somehow you get the sense it’s really the little blue man who you’re talking to anyway.
“I had some weird sex tonight,” you announce—a complete non sequitur—but just as the words leave your mouth you think, wait, no, this is Myrna’s boyfriend.
“Weird is a subjective thing.”
But you’re incapable of stopping yourself. “Okay, but on the scale of weirdness—I think it was at the upper end.”
“I see,” Sam says, and tugs at the tuft of hair beneath his lip.
“It was unusual… plus I was drunk—”
“But it was good,” he announces. “And it made you happy!” He glances back at you to underscore his diagnosis as he grabs his clipboard off the seat. The cab drifts into the opposing lane as he jots down a few words with his pen. “You feel transformed,” he says.
Is it so obvious?
“And it wasn’t just a normal fuck,” he adds.
“What do you mean?”
“It was different. It was an unorthodox fuck as some would say.
“I’m not sure—”
“But I can tell. Even when you were out there flagging me I could see it in your aura. It looked like a perfect orb!”
“The sex was a little weird though.”
“But you liked the way things went with that, and you found that your mind was simplified. You forgot yourself for the first time in ages. You embraced life and life embraced you back.”
“There was a lot of embracing,” you say, trying to suppress a laugh that comes partly through your nose. “But it was so—I’m not sure,” you say, wiping your face with your palm. “I’m not embarrassed or anything, but—”
“No worries. It’s the same with me and Myrna. I met Myrna the same day I met you, so I see you as a talisman.”
“A talisman?”
“A good luck charm.”
You realize you’re passing the same place you were standing when he picked you up. You’ve been driving in circles and he hasn’t turned on the meter yet.
“I live on Taber Place.”
“Off Center?”
“Yes.”
He swerves to the right when you’re almost through the intersection. “Useful information,” he says before expounding on his theory further. “For me, you're a harbinger, an angel with a trumpet.”
You notice the little man is standing on his toes, shouting in Sam’s ear.
“You’re very… perceptive,” you say.
“I’m a writer and I observe thousands of people. I talk to them. It’s my rule never to pass anyone up. Not the sick. Not the bums. I pick up the least among us, even people in a state of rapture.” He’s grinning with his eyes as he looks back at you.
“I know. You saved me—”
“Some people collect stamps. I collect interesting people. Crazy people, desperate people, people bit by sharks. It doesn’t matter.”
“It wasn’t the shark—”
“And I read them, I absorb them. I imagine them in different ways. And because I’m a taxi driver, I have time to think about the ones who most affect me, the ones I write about, you see?”
“But you’re talking about things that happened to me when you have no way of knowing.”
“I can see the unseen sometimes. Myrna says it too. I can sense all sorts of hidden things, subconscious things, you know. It’s easy to tell when a person feels happy, or even euphoric like the way you are right now. But I can also tell when someone’s holding a bad secret, say. Or when they lie about themselves. Or when they lie out of habit without knowing it’s a lie. I can see when somebody’s acting out his life instead of living it, which is common. I can see when people are lonely and how they work to hide it. So many are lonely. You have no idea how many lonely people—
“But—”
“And I have to tell you. Just before I saw you, I was thinking about you—exactly you and no one else—and I was thinking, if I could only just see you and talk to you! So you see, there are forces we’re not aware of. The way we met, the way I met Myrna through you—I’ve thought about it so many times. If you hadn’t had your accident, Myrna and I would never have gotten together.”
“The good old talisman,” you mutter as you feel your expansive mood begin to contract a little and you wonder if Sam can sense it too.
“Skinny as a weed! was what I thought of her that day!” he says. “I was a bit surprised at the direction everything went after that.”
“I know. She’s underweight. She needs to eat some actual food—”
“No. I think she’s good with her eating. It takes time to adjust to it, but now I’m trying to be a vegan too.”
“Myrna turned you vegan?”
“I’m not there yet, but I’m ninety percent a vegetarian at this point.”
You can’t help but snicker. “I guess she can be pretty convincing.”
“I told her at first, no, I don’t want to do it. No way I’m giving up solomon gundy. It’s verboten with the vegans. Did you know that?”
“But you’re doing it?” you say, trying to remember what a solomon gundy was.
“Yeah.”
“She converted you.”
“She influenced me. She’s a very deep person.”
“I know! She’s just incredible!” you say, not exactly sure what you mean.
“I think she’s a genius really.”
“She’s smart but—”
“She’s a genius at life. She’s a genius at literature. She’s a sexual genius just as much. It’s like my life. One minute I’m driving around aimlessly. Next thing, I find myself entering a new realm. Meeting Myrna was like that. A new realm of life appears in front of me and it’s there for me to enter as long as I’m open to it.”
“That’s very true,” you say, sensing the chance to say something about your own new realm, but Sam’s on a roll.
“Skinny as a stork. But what a stork! I was avoiding her at first but she kept phoning so I finally let her come over to my place and oh, man!”
“Did she do something weird?”
“My roommate said if I ever bring Myrna again I’d have to move.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
But before she came over I warned her about Charles, the way he’s sensitive to noise, how he’s a writer too—a poet. How he’s always deep in thought, watching the flashing cursor. He sits for hours in front of his laptop and it takes him about a month to write one poem. Brilliant work. But very very slow. And then when Myrna comes in, she walks right past him, doesn’t even look at him. She grabs me, gives me a big hug, kisses me, puts her tongue in my mouth like we’d been together forever—”
“She can be pretty unrestrained,” you say.
“And all I’ve got is a closet, see? Just big enough for my mattress; but it’s fine! That's all I need! If I want space, I go outside, and I think a man should be outside. A man’s natural state is to be outdoors where he can observe things, observe the world. But Myrna takes me by my hand and pulls me into my little monk’s cell and slams the door.”
Sam’s influencer is looking very amused. He sways his hips and draws a big heart with his hands.
“No place to stand, no room for escape,” Sam goes. “And Myrna, who I don’t know from a Raggedy Ann at this point, is pulling me down on my bed. She’s undressing me! She’s tearing at my clothes, high speed, and I’m saying, wait, slow down! She’s pulling off my pants and kissing me all over. It’s like being eaten alive. Everything—armpits, earlobes, the spaces between my toes!” Sam’s cracking up as he speaks. “She’s on top of me. She wants to drive the car, this woman, which is something I’m still getting used to, because I’m the driver!”
He’s laughing loudly now, pulling this way and that on the steering wheel, weaving between the lanes of the deserted street so that you’re thrown from one side of the back seat to the other. “I’m being devoured!” he cries. “She toys with me. The clothes in the closet are falling down on top of us and she’s flinging them away, cursing them for interrupting her cannibalistic feast! She’s like a demon, but a very skinny demon. Light as a feather. I can circle her waist with my fingers and I can stop her in her tracks if I want to but I don’t want to and she slips down over me—like a glove. It’s a fantastic fit! She’s an artist you know. She knows how to put me on the edge, and then retreat a little; a true master of her art. She comes down again and again, but unpredictably, see? She really knows how to sneak up on it.”
Is this a taxicab or a theater? Sam’s telling this while Haydn’s chorus of exalted voices rises and falls in the gaps between his words. Sam looks young but he talks old. He’s got this rhythmic cadence, and you wonder if the characters in his stories speak like this.
“She’s a sorceress. With hair like tumbledown flames. I love the way she looks when we fuck. She’s so greedy. She’s completely uncivilized.”
The little influencer beats his palm against Sam’s neck in time with his soliloquy.
“And she talks dirty too. Expertly dirty. Literarily dirty if you know what I mean. She’s the Shakespere of smut, you see. The most pornographic fuck-talk anyone’s ever heard.” He roars with laughter. “The Mozart of Muff!” he cries. “The Houdini of hanky-panky!”
“And when the earthquake comes, it comes from down underground, but it rushes ever and ever closer. Chaos loosed upon the world, you know.” He pumps the brakes to make the car bounce. “It’s an eruption that goes on and on. The city’s reduced to rubble! And it’s like we roll onto the dewy grass—sapped, as it were. Enfeebled, you see? And I’m so glad I picked you up that day! Every time I drive by the pier I get hard, and I’m thinking about her all the time. It’s a sickness is what it is. I’m getting hard right now thinking about her, and I want to throw you out of this car and drive straight to her apartment. But I know she’s gotta go to work tomorrow, and she’d be unhappy if I showed up at four in the morning with my tongue hanging out.”
Sam’s speech is something you don’t really want to hear, but you’re laughing too. Everything’s part of a big mystical dream tonight, and you’re perfectly at peace. You’re glad to find out about Myrna. You’re amazed, but you’re not. It’s easy to imagine her with Sam like that. And you know it’s true. You know there’s this side to her and all those other dimensions too. You know about Myrna-ishness with its unmatched emotions that steer her to extremes even as the monk stares down the guillotine lady, and Sam’s story of their lovemaking inspires you. It makes you think about Alana and how you wish you could be back with her, though it was a different sort of thing that happened there—and everything’s different now.
“That’s funny,” you say as he turns onto your street. “All this time I thought you guys were just working on your novels.”
“Oh yeah. There’s that too. And Myrna’s been huge for me. She’s made me a better writer.”
“But she can never sell her work.”
“I know. It’s too good. It’s too deep. It’s too kooky and too feral. It’s too emo, and it’s not about anything anybody’s talking about—and that’s exactly why she’s doomed….”
Sam’s little flaneur is lying on his back. He’s covered up his face with his hat. You can see what a pauper he is in actuality. You notice the stains on his suit, his ragged socks.
“It’s the next one on the left,” you say.
“But what were you going to tell me?” Sam asks, turning around. “You were going to tell me about your night!”
“It’s okay,” you say. “It was something that just—you know. You’re reaching for your wallet.
“No. No way I’m taking your money, Neville,” he says. “You and me need to get together. With Myrna too—the three of us, okay? That way, you’ll be able to tell us all about it.”
Dear Rubin
I dreamed of you last night, I kid you not, asking myself why has he not resumed those weekly chapters?
Welcome back.