When Your Cab Driver Scares You
How blurry is the line between eccentric and dangerous?
I was standing alone outside Pennsylvania’s Paoli train station, entirely unfamiliar with my surroundings, when a disheveled older man stepped out of his rickety minivan and told me to get in.
“Did you call Mainline Taxi service?” he asked, pointing to a tiny little sticker on his back windshield. “What’s your name?”
My chest tightened because five minutes earlier I had seen someone get into a bright blue car that had Mainline Taxi printed in big letters all over its body, looking like an actual taxicab with the company’s phone number displayed loudly on the passenger side door — and that was when I called the number and they asked me what my name was and where I was going and told me they’d call me when my ride was close. Now it was five minutes later and this guy showed up with a tiny sticker on the window of a rickety old minivan and he didn’t know my name and I still hadn’t gotten a phone call.
“Nicolas.” I peered into the window and saw that the seats were all covered in random shit — books, towels, a guitar with no strings — and my phone still hadn’t buzzed but then I wondered if maybe “we’ll call you when your ride is close” is just a thing that cab companies in Pennsylvania say, so I adjusted my Patriots hat and shook the jumpy guy’s right hand as he used the other to slide his squeaky old backseat door open for me.
“I just got back from the thrift store,” he said. “I love finding stuff — all kinds of stuff,” he picked up some kind of old wooden puzzle game with a handwritten $2 sticker on it, “like this thing right here,” and tossed it to the side with the rest of the junk obscuring what I reluctantly accepted was meant to be my seat. “Here you go.”
I sat down and noticed a clunky old karaoke machine to my left and a water-stained roll of paper towels by my feet. He started to shut the door for me but I felt so uneasy — unable to tell if it was due to paranoia or new surroundings or being a prejudiced snob or maybe just having seen too many Lifetime movies — that I quickly got up and told him to stop.
“Oh, you know what? I’m actually going to the Sheraton Great Valley,” I improvised, “and I think — ”
“Well that’s right up,” he interrupted, “right up… right on up the road.” He repeated himself like a mad scientist but also like someone who did a lot of drugs when he was younger but also maybe like the type of serial killer who might show up at train stations carrying weapons and the assumption that someone from somewhere had probably called a cab within the past few minutes. “We’re good, we’re good. You can get back in the car.”
And so I did, unable to discern if I was stupid and he was a bad guy for maybe being a psycho killer or if he was harmless and I was a bad guy for assigning someone such a horrible identity purely on account of some offbeat quirkiness and a messy car.
“Man, what about consciousness? We’re all here on this earth,” he waxed, zooming down the road as I devised an in-case-he-pulls-out-a-shiv escape plan in my head. “We’re here, but why? And we’re just stuck, because the government doesn’t want us to transcend — man, you ever done LSD?”
“Nah,” I responded, so unsure about everything happening in this rickety old minivan. “You?”
“I haven’t tried LSD but I want to try everything. The government—they don’t want us to try it.” He was clearly pissed at whoever “the government” was, which I think is usually a sign that someone is either really crazy or really smart — but who can tell? “The truth is… man, America is fucked.”
“Yeah,” I replied, suddenly remembering that this whole exchange was not happening in 1992 and I in fact had a cell phone on me—protection! I quickly texted my boyfriend with the first thing that came to mind: My cab driver is scaring me. “I guess we are fucked,” I automated back to the driver. “But what can we really do about it?”
What’s he doing? my boyfriend replied, to which I wrote, rambling like a crazy person, to which he wrote, haha you’re engaging him, aren’t you? to which I thought, “Okay, well if my boyfriend is texting me with ‘haha’ right now then this situation must be normal and I must be safe.”
“We can’t do anything,” the driver answered, “but I love to read.” He then reached into his pile of crap in the passenger seat, causing me to tense up, thinking that my stupid cell phone would be no match for the gun or the knife or the pepper spray he was about to surprise me with. “The Economist… The Smithsonian…” He kept digging his hand around. “Here!” He threw a pile of magazines back at me. “We just need to learn stuff. We all need to learn more stuff.”
And then he dropped me off at the Sheraton Great Valley.
