Well Bottom Blues

The back of a Toyota Uber pales against the Rocket V-8 Cab  Rasta madman who took our drunken asses back to Carrollton when the green streetcar failed to appear on Canal. His rattletrap blue GM something rang like a Jamaican sleigh over the potholes, & when his glove box popped open, spilling fat spliffs into my lap. I said awesomeand he said light one up, mon. Mingled oil & grass smoke pillowed us home to bed.

As a child a taxi cab was a character out of the movies, a fat yellow denizen of streets in skyscraper cities. At once familiar & magical they thrilled me as much as the train ride to Lafayette that followed, or the lethally  gray aircraft carrier he delivered us to one Navy Week on the river.

In DC willy drivers tried to ride us through every zone on the fare map, & every ride was an intersectional argument between Africa &  America over who owed what to the other in the slave shadow of monuments. The beat cars rattled for the loa  who would bend us to his will, & carless in a subway city we complied after Metro closed

Once a Metairie Cab driver picked me up at Ochsner who knew exactly where the short, secret blocks of Fortin Street nestled up against the racetrack because he once  worked there. A talented navigator of the old school, he had The Knowledge of the city & deigned to rely on GPS. We spoke of family ill or gone, of where’d you go to school & parish churches which loomed dark in the memory of cemeteries.

Twenty years I lived east & north & never forgot 522-9771  by which numerology one could summon a United Cab. I rarely see them on Bienville at the cab stand in what the old taxi maps called the back of town, smoking & reading cheap paperbacks The last dispatcher who rattled off the calls & destinations has retired. The phones are outsourced to India where no one knows where the riverfront Hilton is exactly, & so we pull out our phones & in that ghostly light another bit of history is forgotten.