"That's quite a lotta bags," he'll ask after the first few blocks of you staring out the window as if your decision were standing on every street corner making rasberries at you. "You look like you packed 'em in a hurry."
It's already over. If you were pressed for time at all, you would just stop the cab and run back to your apartment so you can crumple up the note before he or she gets home. But you wouldn't have put your life in two suitcases in the trunk of a cab if you weren't stubborn. So you're just going to sit there and grimace while your resolve weakens with every click of the meter.
"I been done wrong," the cabbie starts in. Blah blah blah, but he'd give everything to have said the one thing he was too proud to say...why don't you just go back there already? Your twenty-seven year old ass is no match for the worldly wisdom of the American Cab Driver. He's been more emotionally invested in a knife fight than you are in your live-in fling with Mr. or Mrs. Graduate Student In Semiotics. Yeah, you have a lot of years ahead of you, he can tell. But he can also tell that you are far too dull to do anything with them.
"My forty-first birthday...the loneliest day of my life..." he says. But what he meant to say was, "You still here?" Jesus, exactly what in this world has given you the illusion that things could ever be better for you than they already are? Look at your driver. He expects nothing more than for you to pay your fare and to once a day feel the cold steel of a revolver against his temple. Your generation, you got joy marketed to you so you think it's yours for the buying at half off on your charge card so you can get frequent flyer miles. The American Cab Driver knows two things: the clap won't kill ya' and if you get your hands on joy for half a minute of your life you can consider yourself one of the lucky ones.
Now go home and settle.
Happy Let A Taxi Driver Convince You To Stay With Your Lover, With Whom You've Been Disenchanted Of Late Day!
