Author and Artist
The Taxi Ride
A fictional travelogue; two to three minutes to read.
In my classroom where I teach history, I’m the boss. With my own kids, I’m an authority figure, more or less. At mealtimes, only I decide when to overeat. Watching TV alone in my study, I control the remote.
On the streets of Palermo, Italy, my driver—tattoos up and down his arms, green cap worn backwards—hunches over the wheel of our open-sided, multicolored, three-wheeled Ape Calessino. I have the impression he is using his bare hands to hold our vehicle from rattling apart.
We careen around a corner before thrusting into an alleyway packed with shoppers, food stands, souvenir hawkers, hanging laundry. I look to tighten my seat belt, but there isn’t one.
Barreling along, we hit every pothole. The tightness in my lower back and spine keep track of every divot.
The bumping shakes loose a thought about why Italy in World War II sided with Germany. Mussolini must have calculated that the Allies would never figure out, let alone conquer, the tiny, twisted, jarring back streets of Italian cities.
In between talking on his cell phone and gesturing obscenely to pedestrians, my driver’s head half-pivots towards me as he points out historic monuments. In search of a tip, he is a man willing to invent history.
As we scoot through the Quattro Canti, he shouts, "Four Corners is famous. Everyone comes here. Tourists like Gothic buildings." To myself, I think: I know Baroque architecture when I see it.
Silently, I’m urging him to concentrate on the road, but no chance of that. This is what I imagine being kidnapped by a talkative alien will be like. A warp speed ride into the unknown with heavily accented commentary about every little thing in the galaxy.
“I here from Libya,” he tells me. “You got kids?” Before I can answer, he tells me about his three kids while arm-waving at the nude statues on the Fontana Pretoria. In the 16th century the "Fountain of Shame" shocked Palermo’s citizens. By today’s standards, plaster nakedness is hardly worth a glance, but my driver leers long enough to force our tuk-tuk to swerve around a group of cannoli-eating teenagers. Death by dirty figurines was not in my day’s plan,
Over the cab’s noisy two-stroke motor, I hear my heart thumping. It might be trying to escape my chest cavity to head for safety.
Stuck in my throat, there’s a shriek, "Enough!”
I want to jump out at the next stop sign, but when all the buildings look the same, being stranded on a strange street in a strange town seems even more dangerous. I’m trapped, imprisoned.
Strolling tourists licking gelato and taking pictures whiz by. My muscles are clenched. From hanging on to my seat or from frustrated powerlessness, I can’t tell.
To hear my driver tell it, Palermo is unsafe. At first, I think he means auto accidents, but he spits out, “The mafia dips its beak into everything. Violence against immigrants happens every day. I want to come to America.”
I don’t tell him that Palermo sounds a lot like home.
