Misconceptions Part 3

Racing through the city, a city block a nano-second, the faces degraded from supreme Yankee nobility to pathetic immigrant beggary. That’s what goes on as you head north in Manhattan: you can literally go rag to riches in a taxi cab.

The cab came to a screeching halt at the corner of Park Ave and 110th St. Jason looked outside and felt that there really wasn’t much to do. East Harlem, the decedents of refugees from Hispaniola, Puerto Ricans and Haitians stocking the streets speaking their New Yorker Franco-Latin, were for whatever reason giving Jason the ‘eye’. He kept to himself and knocked on the plastic window that divided him and the cabbie.

“Let’s go, it’s green.”

The cab took its sweet time, crawling through neighbourhood.

Jason looked out the window, his heart racing. His face was fixated on this alien culture. He couldn’t focus. His eyes were heavy. They were struggling to stay open. He surmised that the trading day had taken more from him than he’d thought. He surmised that he would need that rye and ginger as quick as he could get his hands on it.

The cab stopped again.

Jason began thinking that there wasn’t much to do other than talk.

“It’s really all the same. We are all struggling,” Jason said to the cabbie, who seemed to not notice he was being spoken to.

“Look at that guy – the one in the puffy yellow winter coat,” Jason pointed out in drowsy tones. The cabbie looked to his right. “Yes, the crack dealer slanging cat’s pee to the lost and destroyed. I should hate him. I should think he’s destroying America. But how could he be doing that? It’s all quite a shame. If he hadn’t grown up in this neighbourhood with those parents and this preconceived attitude about him, he damn well would have been a fine trader on the stock exchange floor. But the man is a product of his environment and a product has to be moved before it can be worth anything. The longer he sits on this neighbourhood shelf, the longer he’ll keep on collecting money by spreading dust.”

The cab began rolling again and Jason was happy with this thought. That crack dealer was able to cultivate what you could whenever you could. Perhaps drug trafficking was capitalism’s dirty secret, but the drugs would be there without money. They didn’t ban vodka in Communist Russia even if it were harder to come by. But if you couldn’t eradicate the need for vice, you couldn’t eradicate the want to deal.

Jason’s eyes become even heavier. The cab was going even slower. Jason intended to insist on the cab picking up speed, but he could feel his cheeks fill up with cotton balls. He found it agreeable that he should gain some shut eye before the cab arrived at Merci Diner.

His final thought before he took his nap: upon arrival I’ll make sure this cabbie gets full value -- $60.