How Did You Get This Number Read online

  Picture it in your mind’s nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener. This is a scent that does not waft in real time so much as seeps into your memory to replace every pleasant aroma you have ever smelled with its pungency. You bury your nose in your scarf, but not before last night’s Vomit throws an especially acidic right hook. Putrid as it is, you say nothing. Like a stranger on the street witnessing a lovers’ quarrel, you’re not sure you should interfere. But your annoyance bar is spiking. The backdraft from a cigar smoker is both avoidable with some fancy footwork and punishable with a judgmental glare. But there is no escaping the concoction of armpit and cheese rot currently molesting your face. Your mind does a quick calculation, multiplying the degree of stank by the distance between here and your destination, dividing the whole thing by your fear of overreacting. The idea that you might offend the driver is irrelevant. If he’s going to tool around this town in an air bubble of poop, he should know there are consequences.

  Perhaps you make a dramatic sniffing sound for effect. You think: Okay, a lover’s quarrel is one thing, but when someone busts out the olfactory equivalent of nunchucks, maybe it’s time to call in the authorities. Two blocks later, you demand that the cabdriver pull over, and you apologize but not sincerely. He comes slowly to a stop. Despite the fact that you can see the door handle at your side quite clearly, you fumble for it as if there’s been a fire and the cab is filled with smoke. Your cabdriver notices you doing this but does not care. He doesn’t know you and is thus unfamiliar with the authority of your nose or the infrequency with which you jump out of moving vehicles. It is about as likely that he will take your behavior as “constructive criticism” as it is that people working the deli will mourn the loss of your business when you storm out after waiting ten minutes to buy a six-pack of beer and a package of gummy frogs.

  You glance back, checking for the next surge of oncoming traffic. The instant you’re sure you won’t kill yourself, you spring out the door. You do this before you can enter into a screaming match over the $2.50 minimum fare. If you can still see the location from where you hailed the cab, you don’t have to pay when you get out. Everyone knows that. It’s in the fine print of the gum-speckled Taxi Rider’s Bill of Rights. But now what? You’re still late for wherever you’re going, guilty as usual of thinking the laws of time and space will bend for you because you’re paying them extra to do so.

  As you hail the next cab, you wonder: Did your new guy see you get out of the first? Does he think you’re hostile? In possession of an explosive device? You do anything remotely off-color in this city anymore and people think you’re either homeless or in possession of an explosive device. Go ahead, hover by a streetside ATM too long. Look in the window of an apartment complex that does not belong to you. Switch subway cars while the train is in motion. See what happens. There was a time when New York boasted the highest threshold for weird in the country. Between the blackout of 1977 and the closing of CBGB, you had to do a hell of a lot more than look askew at a building before someone suspected you of wanting to blow it up. Now people mourn the closing of a Starbucks on St. Marks Place and applaud the opening of an American Apparel on the Upper West Side. It’s reasonable to register a noise complaint before midnight, and there’s no shortage of dirty looks waiting for you if you fail to recycle whatever that is you’re drinking. Our laws have become hard, our hearts soft. Of course, New York has always been the one place where people are nostalgic for when it used to be worse.

  Through it all, the purpose and politics of taxis have remained constant, even if the makes and models of the vehicles have not. Even if the next car door you touch slides open like a minivan’s and you wind up sitting as far away from the driver as a coffin in a hearse, the driver/passenger dynamic remains the same. It doesn’t matter what your new driver thinks of you, just as it doesn’t matter what you think of him. You’re just a fare with hands that raise and legs that step off a curb. Taxicab drivers are like doctors. Professionals. You can’t allow yourself to think they’re passing judgment; otherwise, you might never go back. Often you find yourself thinking of them as your personal fleet of anonymity. Do a quick slideshow of every experience you’ve ever had in a cab. What if they were all the same cab? If these pleather seats could talk! The moment you shut the cab door, you can be who you want to be. If you are normally loath to make demands, you are now free to raise definitive questions: Why this route? Can you avoid Times Square? Can you please identify this sticky substance? How in the name of all that is holy can you not smell that? If you are a gregarious sort of person, you can finally have ten minutes of absolute silence in the presence of another human being without anyone asking you what’s wrong. If you spend your day making decisions, you can stop, releasing yourself with those magic words: Whichever way’s the fastest. Repeat it again when your driver attempts to brainstorm with you. He could tell you that the West Side Highway is closed and he’ll need to swing around the moon first. Really. Whichever way.

  You get in the new cab and sniff. You’re in the clear. You say “What?” but your driver establishes that he’s not addressing you by gesturing at his ear and shouting, “I’m not talking to you.” When hands-free devices first began to infiltrate the cabs of New York, you found yourself annoyed by this frequent exchange, duped into making an ass out of yourself. I am not the asshole, you thought. If he doesn’t want the Spanish Inquisition, maybe he should keep his voice down. But these days this banter only makes you feel stupid. By now you should really know better. And of course he’s not talking to you. It must take a lot of restraint on the cabdriver’s part not to whip around and say, “Why, do you speak Punjabi?” You marvel at the round-the-clock friendships and strong familial ties cabdrivers must maintain. You can barely stand to talk on the phone with friends anymore. Mostly because you can never figure out how to end conversations without apologizing for ending them. This goes double for blood relations. To get your taxi license in New York, you must be a phone person first and a person who stops at red lights second. A very distant second.

  Your next order of business is to smack the off button on the increasingly ubiquitous taxicab TVs. You must do this before one of the female talking heads can take you to a new karaoke bar or make you wait with her for Shakespeare in the Park tickets. Or put on a sexy apron behind the scenes of a famous restaurant. Shield your eyes from this bizarre display of false modesty and kitchen knives.No, you hold the knife by the handle.

  Wait, let me get my hair out of my face. Okay, like this?

  No, that’s the blade, and now you’re bleeding everywhere.

  Darn it!

  Maybe if you hit the screen hard enough, you’ll get lucky and break it. Try not to think about how many greasy pointer fingers have touched that exact same spot. The idea of the taxicab TV turns every New Yorker into an erratically gesticulating Woody Allen.

  “What do you need TV for? You’ve got the best slideshow in the world!” says you-slash-Woody.

  “I like it,” says the tourist. “It makes the time go by faster.”

  “You couldn’t do that at home? Who goes on vacation to make it go by faster? Would it kill you to stop and smell the urine?”

  “There’s nothing to take pictures of in here.”

  “Get out,” says you-slash-Woody.

  You try to imagine exactly for whom these mini movie reviews and weather reports are meant. Often even the tourists find them repugnant. Most foreigners are already so disgusted by the garish hue of our cabs that there’s no point in speculating about their reaction to an all-you-can-eat dim sum festival streaming in their faces as they are held hostage by the vehicle of laziness that made us fat to begin with. They do not share our disgust so much as mock its insufficiency.

  Now that you’ve blackened the box, you’re free to turn your focus outward. Roll down the window for the occasional breeze that kicks up when the traffic lights go green. As you ru
sh past the sidewalks of downtown, you wonder why it is that you never see anyone you know from a cab. You rarely leave the house without bumping into someone on foot. Often you’re doing something very unappealing because you’ve become unconsciously dependent on strangers accepting and veering from your craziness. You should probably just learn to pull yourself together. Take care of that in the bathroom. Make eye contact with a mirror before you leave the house. Because how many times have you been caught in the presence of a coworker or a former lover, forced to explain away your picking and spilling and muttering? Where do these people hide when you are prepared for them? Who are these new faces waiting for the walk sign to change? Is there a formula to it? Speed + blocks covered ÷ weather = less awkward interaction. Or is it just one of the city’s little mysteries, like how no one has ever seen a baby pigeon? Maybe you just don’t have that many friends. That’s probably it.

  Suddenly, you feel exhausted, thinking about your life. All this taking stock can take a higher toll than a trip to the airport. You look up at the lights of the hotels in Midtown and wonder if you shouldn’t just check into one of them. Tell the cab to stop right here, stop paying rent, crush your cell phone, deplete your bank account, stare at the wallpaper. Do not, by any means, check into the Pierre or one of the boutique hotels downtown. Staying in a great hotel when you’re happy is wonderful. Staying in one when you’ve worked yourself up into a taxicab depression feels fatal. The good news is, it’s started to rain. Pedestrians are putting their palms up to measure droplet frequency and reaching for the black umbrellas they just left in restaurant booths. Since you’re already cocooned in your banana chariot, you indulge in a little schadenfreude—the ultimate New York comfort food, surpassing even the cupcake.

  The bad news is, now you’re trapped in traffic. There will be no keeping the frustration at bay when you look at your watch and realize that terrible truth: the subway would have been faster. Once this occurs to you, it cannot unoccur to you. You delve deeper into the fantasy of punctuality, speculating about what stop you’d be at right now. Underground You always moves faster than Aboveground You. Underground You always arrives at the platform just as the train’s pulling in and never has to contend with crowded stairs or construction delays. Force yourself to imagine the more realistic alternative. The one that has the would-be passengers, jostling and anxious, leaning into the dark tunnel. They’re hoping for a glimpse of a moving light, triple-checking to make sure the illumination in the tunnel is attached to a wall and not a front car. They look like synchronized pink flamingos—one leg up, leaning out with their long necks.

  It’s not working. You know in your heart you’d have been there by now. Your driver starts openmouthed munching on potato chips or Cheez Doodles and you burrow a Care Bear Stare into the back of his head. You think: There are a finite number of nacho cheese Doritos in this world. He has to run out eventually. He doesn’t.

  “This is good,” you say, a full block from your destination.

  You’re no physics expert, but at the speed your driver has been going, there’s no way he can come to a full stop on command without killing you both. He taps the meter to make it stop. He faces forward, making eye contact only during the exchange of paper, the proof of your time together. You see his eyes in the rearview mirror. No matter how you pay—cash or credit, with a request for the overhead reading light or a request for a receipt—he looks vaguely disappointed in you.

  You’re out of the cab, but you’re not done yet. Chances are, much like the Vomit that stank up your first cab, you’re going to have to come back out the way you came. Hours later, you step onto the street and walk up a block to the next major avenue. You raise your hand to hail a cab. You leave it up there, regardless of spotting available cabs. It’s a strangely lazy gesture, based on muscle memory more than effort. The rain has stopped, but it’s dark outside now. If you’re not drunk, you’re tired, and if you’re not tired, you should be. It’s been a long day. But there is good news. The Fates reward you instantly. The next wave of cars includes one with a bright light on top, like a glowing fez. It veers seamlessly toward you, having mastered the art of whisking. Inside, the cab is odor-free and clean. Or at least clean enough that nothing reflects or sticks or moves in the dark. You provide your home address, turn the TV off with your knuckle, and settle in for some AM radio and irresponsible texting. But don’t get too comfortable.

  Around this time, the driver blows straight past your street. It’s after midnight on a school night. Sure, there’s a possibility this is one of those nights where you’re ready for round two, perhaps off to a secret bar or illegal gambling club or something too fantastic for words. In those cases, you might have provided an incorrect address. But tonight chances are you’re going home. This is the new, more wholesome New York, after all. Most everyone’s going home. When you point this out, your driver ardently insists that you gave him the wrong address all those many traffic lights ago. You are annoyed, bars above your head spiking. You may not know much, but, like a kindergartner, you know where you live. The seconds feel alive as you move farther away from your actual destination. Why, you wonder, is it always home they miss? In the daylight, when you’re late to some activity you’d just as soon skip, they practically memorize the floor and suite number. Practically drive you up the side of the building. But when all you want to do is curl up so that you can start afresh tomorrow, you find yourself on an unsolicited tour of your own neighborhood. So you say something nonsensical, like “Why would I have gotten my own address wrong?”

  Don’t do that.

  You’re right, of course. But there’s no way you’re going to win this argument. All he needs is an excuse to yell at you. He doesn’t know you. He’s seen one hundred other people today just like you. What he knows is this city. He is what keeps it in motion. He is the roller ball. The way you think of taxis, he thinks of people. He hears the slamming of doors, the losing of stray things, the charming beginnings and frustrating endings of relationships, our worst selves and our best. We are a blur of sliding butts and straddling legs and leaning elbows. Of “Can I smoke in here?” and “Can I get five dollars back?” All set to the soundtrack of receipts sputtering out from the taxi hull in a million tiny waves, breaking over every borough, white curls crashing down at the edges of a concrete and canary-colored ocean. And his hearing, like your sense of smell, is impeccable.

  Light Pollution

  Why not just call it shit? ”

  I have been staring out the window at a blur of wildflowers, and this is the first sentence to leave my mouth in forty-five minutes. A high-speed conveyor belt of daisies and Arctic violets is pulled through my field of vision as we zip along a desolate Alaskan road. In the backseat of an SUV headed south on the Kenai Peninsula, I am as much out of place inside the car as outside of it. A seven-year inhabitant of Manhattan, I am woefully unfamiliar with what the rest of the country drives. It’s difficult to be in any vehicle without staring suspiciously at the dashboard, keeping an eye on a meter that’s not there. Like a limb long since blown off in some unnamed war, but which I persist in scratching. No one in Alaska notices me doing this, and they wouldn’t—inhabitants of the “Lower 48” are notoriously suspicious and amusingly paranoid, mistaking mountains for glaciers and asking dumb questions about avalanche triggers. Why should my reaction to a family-sized vehicle be any different? They’re probably amazed I didn’t try to lick the tires or get in through the windows. I’m a little amazed myself.

  The only reason I even know I’m in an SUV is because when I retell this story to friends back home in the weeks that follow, I describe the vehicle as “like a van but nice.”

  My friend April, in the passenger seat, twists around.

  “Why not just call what ‘shit’?”

  “Bear poop.” I giggle, pushing forward into the gap between the front seats.

  I am more like a child in Alaska than I have been in years. Probably more like a child than when I was a chil
d. Everything here is new and tremendous, and this feels like vacating in a way all other vacations have not. Not only am I physically dwarfed by the scenery, but going to Alaska seems like something my family would have done in the ’80s but never did. Do people fly across the country just to see it anymore? To tour the homes where presidents were born? Do they go to the zoo and buy plastic visors? Make pilgrimages to houses made entirely of corn? They should. American appreciation vacations have become the purview of the very local or the very foreign. Which is a shame. The song doesn’t go “If you can’t be with the one you love, leave the country.”

  But back to the poop. After a hike in the woods outside Anchorage, I have learned that bear feces is called “scat.” Actually, “woods” is a bit of a misnomer. The strip of trees in my parents’ backyard, that sacred burial ground for our pets, is “wooded.” The voodoo-stick-doll-sprinkled camping grounds of The Blair Witch Project are located “in the woods.” I, on the other hand, was tripping on the root structures of spruce trees taller than my apartment building back home, trying to avoid poisonous plants the size of my toilet.

  That’s where I spotted the sign that (a) taught me my new word for the day and (b) warned me against “engaging a bear,” should I cross one’s path. Since the latter bit of information was easily dismissed (I get it: the bear wins; I’m not going to ask it to play poker), I chose to focus on the scatological. At the time I did not make the connection between the adjective for “prevalence of shit” and its abbreviation in noun form. Perhaps this is because, for longer than I care to admit, I thought “scatological” was an adjective for “all over the place.” On countless occasions, I had accused other people of being “scatological,” meaning “mercurial; please try to focus.” When in fact I was accusing them of being full of shit. This explained a lot. And if you believe something for a long enough time, it’s hard to replace that belief, even if you know it’s wrong.