Driving Cab:Chapter Twenty-Four

Driving Cab: Chapter Twenty-Four

The first out cab gets off, and I pull into his position. I scan the parking lot shoppers as I finish off my ice cream cone. The memory of the Greek girl from Grand Avenue flashes through my mind. She asked me to wait a minute or two while she finished getting ready. I sat down on the couch and looked around her warm well-lit apartment. It was nicely furnished with just the right touch of books, plants, and prints. She was wearing a long dark skirt with slits that showed off her lightly tanned thighs, and a low cut white cotton blouse. I watched her flow to the other side of the room. She brushed her long black hair and asked me what I did. “You’re not a regular cab driver,” she told me. I explained that I was looking for a teaching job. She asked me if I had ever been to Zorba’s.

“Yea, I heard about the place. I been gonna stop in,” I told her as I watched her up turned breasts and stroking brush.

“I’m a dancer there. It’s the hottest place in town. They almost closed us down the other night,” she told me.

I pictured her belly exposed and writhing in sensuous rhythm as she came over and sat next to me on the couch. Her hands searched in a big brown bag as I inhaled the smell of her body. She told me that the best time to come is after twelve. “That’s when everybody starts to loosen up. The customers get really involved after they’ve had a few drinks.” As she went back to the mirror to put on her eye make up, I felt my heart beat pick up a couple paces. I thought how I’ve always loved everything Greek, Greek poetry, Greek philosophy, Greek history. I thought about Miller’s description of the islands, the water, the bigger than life people, the Gods that still linger there. I thought about my dreams of one day visiting there, the application I put in for a teaching job in Thermopile.

“Are you Greek? Are you from Greece?” I asked the girl.

She told me that she was from Athens. She said that she went back to visit last year.” It’s not the same. Everything has changed. Everything is so American. The old and the new don’t blend. The new looks sleek and plastic. It’s not made to last. But, the sky is still there, the sunlight, the white washed buildings. Everything is blue and white,” she said as she finished her eye make up.

“How do I look?” she asked as she whirled around in front of me.

“Beautiful,” I told her as my heartbeat picked up another notch. We smiled at each other and headed for the stairs.

On the way to Alameda, we talked about her homeland, its natural setting on the Aegean Sea, the Minoan Civilization on Crete, Cnossos, Homer, Athens, Sparta, Socrates… I asked her if she had read Miller’s book on Greece. She told me that she had heard of Miller, but that she had never read him. I explained his description of what Greece was like in 1939, how the old and the new were interwoven, how the peasants and shepherds live in the same world that their ancestors lived in, how time has not separated them from the Gods of nature, how from peasant to king they are still bigger than life, still growing and pushing back new frontiers.

The girl told me that she would have to get Miller’s book. “We’ll have to get together to talk about it. I’m off on Monday and Tuesday,” she told me as we stopped at a small house on Santa Clara. “Be sure to come and see me at Zorba’s” she said as she got out of the cab. “Come after midnight.”

I nodded goodbye, and told her I would stop by. Her middle-aged friend walked out in his stocking feet to pay the five-dollar fare.

The girl’s big brown eyes and long dark hair fades from sight as a small black hand taps on my window. I jump from my cab seat and open the trunk for a mother and her two kids. “One Five-Eight out,” I tell my radio. I help unload the groceries and decide to dead head downtown.

The double pull. The double pull, duty and self-development, excitement and fear, play and work. It’s always there. I tell myself as I pass the State Building on Twelfth. It hasn’t been all that bad has it? Maybe that’s why I stay. Where else can I find so much adventure and excitement? Material for my novel? What better place for a writer to be?

For a writer to be? I ask myself and laugh. Dat’s right, I’m a writer. I’m not just an unemployed schoolteacher, a cab driver anymore. I look at the hurrying traffic, late commuters wending their way home, and laugh. I’m no longer a part of the nine to five crowd. I’m out on the streets seeing it happen, I tell myself

I slow for the cross traffic at Jackson and spot a really sharp looking black girl waving from the curb. I pull over and she hops in the back. She gives me an address in Middle East Oakland. “Oh, I’m so lucky. I jus’ got outside,” she tells me and flashes a big smile. I turn from the rear view mirror and smile back at her.

“Jus’ getting off work?” I ask as I pull from the curb and make my way to the left hand lane.

“Over time again tonight,” she says and gives another big smile. She’s wearing a light tan pants suit and matching blouse. I breathe in a light perfume and figure that she can’t be more than twenty or so. There’s a glow from her light brown skin and a sparkle from her eyes. Her radiance fills up the back seat and flows into the front. She tells me she feels really good vibes in our cab and asks if I believe that people send off body vibrations.

“Sure,” I say turning to look across at her. “I’m picking up good vibes too. I think it’s the inner self we all carry. When you’re in touch with your own inner spirit, you can pick it up in others. I think that’s what sets off the electricity that you feel.” I turn back to watch the lake traffic and listen to the girl’s reply.

“In myself it’s Jesus that I carry. I guess it doesn’t have to be Jesus for everyone. There’s a friend of mine at work. He tells me he’s an atheist. Yet, there’s certainly something inside him. He gives off good vibes that you can feel a block away. I can walk into the lounge and tell that he’s just left. I can tell what chair he was sitting in. Not just me, other people too. He changed offices about a month ago. You can walk into his old office and still feel his vibes. You believe that can happen? That body electricity can be stored in inanimate objects?”

“I don’t see why not,” I answer. “I never really thought about it, but I’m sure it could. When you’re in tune with the universal flow you do give off an energy surge. Scientists can even measure it. If you’re really sensitive you can feel the flow when you wave your hand in front of another person’s body.”

When we stop in front of her mother’s house off Fruitvale, I flick off the meter and cut the engine. I turn to the back seat and catch her eye. We hold each other’s gaze for a minute. She leans forward and smiles. She tells me about the change in her life since she found Jesus a coupe months ago. She tells me her life is more spiritual now. “But, it’s more than that. I have a whole new feeling of confidence, a whole new flow of energy, a new way of seeing the world.” I can feel what she’s talking about. I know that she is in to something more than the Jesus bag though I wince at the simplicity of some of the things that she’s saying. “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the light…. Anyone can open his or her heart to Jesus…. Unless you are born again….”

I tell her that I’m not into Jesus in the same way she is. I explain that I had thrown out all of my religious beliefs when I began to read, that I had rejected the real Jesus with the false teachings. But, that now, I look at Jesus as one of the highest aspects of human evolution. “I feel that he shares a cosmic consciousness with men like Buddha, Socrates, and Walt Whitman. I know his words are true. It is just the structuring of them by the Church that has turned them into lies….”

We agree that there are many different paths to the truths that Jesus spoke, that the actions of a man count more than the words. I tell her that she should read Krishnamurti, him and Henry Miller too. She has me repeat the names and tells me she’ll look them up. We sit in silence a minute or so before I get out to open her door,

“Maybe we’ll see each other again,” she says as we smile our good-byes.