Free Taxi Driver by Richard Elman

words out straight, they just, you know, came out like a lot of words at first, all strung together without much sense to them and a lot of spaces in between like on one of those soap operas.
    “Things got you down?” Wizard asked.
    “Real down,” I said. I hung my head against my chest.
    Wizard said, “It happens.”
    I thought I could spill it all to Wizard maybe. Thought I really needed to. I really tried to let him know where I was at. Said, “Sometimes it gets so I just don’t know what I’m gonna do. I get some real crazy ideas, you know? Just to go out and do something?”
    Wizard looked very sad just then and sorta leary of me too, but he tried to be nice. “Travis, I dig it,” he said. He shook his head at the sidewalk, said, “Look, you choose a certain way of life. You live it. It becomes what you are . . .”
    Wizard said, “I’ve been a hacky twenty-seven years, last ten on the night shift. Still don’t own my own cab. I guess that’s just the way I liked it.”
    He was nodding his head and shaking it and seemed to be very much lost in his own thoughts. He seemed to know me but there was something on his own mind, too. We’d have to have an exchange.
    He said, “Look, a certain person does a certain kind of thing, that’s all there is to it. It becomes what you are. Why fight it? What do you know? How long you been a hack, a couple of months? You’re like a peg and you get dropped into a slot and you got to squirm and wiggle around awhile until you fit in.”
    Well, I guess he just wasn’t hearing me. It was too late and he was too tired. I told him so. Said, “Wizard, that’s just about the dumbest thing I ever heard . . .”
    “I got hemorrhoids,” he said, “and a polynoidal cyst, so what do you expect, Bertram Russel? With all those holes in my ass? Travis, I’ve been a cabbie all my life, what do I know?”
    Wizard’s shaking his head no like a windshield wiper. He says, “Travis, I don’t even know what you’re talking to me about.”
    “Neither do I, I guess.” Giving up on him. Well, I guess he thought he done me wrong . . . hurt my feelings somehow because he tried to reassure me. Said, “You’ll fit in. It’s lonely at first, rough. But you’ll fit in. You got no choice, Travis.”
    Well I didn’t even try to respond to that. I said I was sorry to Wizard. Said, “Sorry, Wizard.” Well, I could feel a little twinge in my heart when he told me, “Don’t worry, killer, you’ll be all right.”
    Wizard said, “I’ve seen enough to know.”
    “Thanks.” He gave me a short wave and then got inside his cab and drove off, leaving me there with the pimps and the whores.

A New Face in the Crowd
    I have no clear recollection of the days that followed this being with Wizard except that the weather was bright and clear and warm and I was all the time feeling like I had sinkers attached to my body all over. Huge metal weights.
    Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, I know I drove everywhere in those days. I had gotten into the habit of tracking down every single Palantine rally. Making an appearance there. It just was important to me to be Johnny-on-the-Spot. To see the candidate in action. If I was to go down in history I had to make an appropriate plan.
    Looking back I don’t know whether I got to certain places on my own or because I arranged to take a fare there. Can’t even recall any of the words Palantine said those days. I can remember the city, though feeling very much like in a cage. Doors everywhere. You squirm around to get what I needed, and I needed to see Betsy again. Needed to be on the scene with Palantine.
    Once, on Avenue of the Americas, in the Fifties which is all new glass buildings, a rag of a man fluttered for a moment from a high window on the facade of this all glass tower like a big butterfly and then he seemed to fall heavily downward with a kind of loose sacklike speed.
    I drove on, calmly watching him drop. There seemed no way of knowing the expression