Taxi Driver (6 page)

She seemed practically in tears, “No, and I don’t want to see you again. Understand? We’re just two very different kinds of people, that’s all. Goodbye, Travis.”

“But . . . Betsy . . .”

She waved her hand at the grimy air. “I’m catching a taxi.” She started toward the curb. I held out her record, “Betsy, your record . . .”

“Keep it!
Travis.”

“Please, Betsy, I bought it for
you.”

She stopped herself a second and then turned back. Her face softened again. She seemed to breathe in a lot of that air and then just let it out softly. “All right. I’ll accept the record.”

Then she turned again and hailed a taxi. “Taxi!”

She was opening the door of that cab just as I called out to her, “Betsy, I
got
a taxi. I
got
a taxi.”

Then that cab sped off, her looking straight ahead. She barely glanced at me as she drove away.

Well, everybody on the street had been watching us. Even that woman with the blond hair in the box office who always looks anyway.

Phone Calls and Flowers

After that I spent a lot more time at home writing. I was on a real slide down. I tried everything. Vitamins. Aspirins. Booze. I developed a special liking for apricot brandy because you couldn’t taste the bitterness so much. Well, you know, I spent a lot of time just sitting about and then hanging out. Watched TV. I don’t know what I ate most of the time. One day was no different from the next. I’d watch the news on TV, do some driving, drink, sleep a little, scribble in the journal, it was a long chain of blank spaces. Just notes

From what I could tell on TV Palantine was doing very well because he was being interviewed all the time and once or twice I caught glimpses of Betsy, too, at some rally, cheering up the crowds for him, just like a little girl beaming up at her father. Well, that would get me so angry. I thought I could have had that admiration, all that attention, all that love.

I tried calling her. Tried pleading with her. After my first call, she would no longer come to the phone. A woman with a voice like Bella Abzug answered and hung up.

I also sent her flowers, but they were always returned. They’d lie about my dusty room, wilting, dying, until the smell of them only made me sicker, and my headaches got worse.

I knew it was my fault, knew I should not complain so. “You’re only as healthy as you feel.” But something stuck in me, a feeling that it all might have been different. That if only she had gone along with me this once I could have done her trip with her, too.

I felt it was never too late to explain. That she saw me wrongly. I really was misunderstood, a serious person. I made one last attempt to see her at Palantine headquarters. I hadn’t slept in days when I walked in about noon time on a blinding hot day. Betsy was standing near the rear of the office, but when she saw me she ducked from sight. Then Tom stepped between us. I tried to push my way past him, but he grabbed me. I said, “Fuck off,” and then he grabbed me again and we started to fight.

He was bigger and stronger and he soon got me in a half-Nelson and pushed me out through the door, no matter how much I kicked and protested, he pushed me out through that door into the sun again, and motioned to a policeman to come and get me. Well, I quieted down I guess. I realized then how much she was like the others, so cold and distant. How many people are just like that.

The Pussy and The .44

I guess I gave up on myself then. Gave up even on driving. I just wasn’t making it at all. The week of the rank-and-file picnic, I slept all day and worked only nights, got stopped by a passenger on Park Avenue, some middle-aged professional who wanted to go to Jackson Heights and when I said I was off duty, he got very mean with me. “You mean you don’t want to go out to Jackson Heights?”

“No, I’m off duty.”

“But how come your off duty light wasn’t on?”

I switched the light on. Pointed to the roof of the taxi. “See . . . it was on . . . all the time . . .”

“Like hell it was.”

“Hell it wasn’t. It was on. Just takes a while to warm up. Like your TV.”

“Well,” the guy says, “my TV starts right off and so will I.” He cursed me out, and left through my side door. Shit. That’s the way it’s got to be.

So disagreeable. The way it was I thought, shit, seems like I don’t have a friend in the world. Everything stunk suddenly. The dinge they just seemed to know when I was down and out and the whole black world started singing the blues at me. I remember one dude saying, “I got high blood, low blood, sweet bloods, and bad bloods . . .”

Well I can also remember this young black gal a hooker she says: “I bleeds a lot from my cradle. Doctor said it was fireballs from my utricle.”

Shit, and I thought I had troubles. The people you sometimes meet driving along. You feel so helpless to do anything for anybody, and all those young couples coming out of the East Side movies really just turn you off inside out.

Well I was still all
alone again by myself, naturally,
inside that yellow sardine can on wheels. A loner. (Words to that effect.) Bored stupid most of the time. To say the least. One night late I picked up this young dude near a club . . . in front of a club near the Queensboro Bridge. He was just very spiffed out with a leather sports coat, had on all chestnut colors.

Said he wanted to go up to 417 Central Park West. Well, that’s well above the Mason-Dixon Line, you know. As we got to the 400 block I’m checking out the apartment numbers. Dude says, “Just pull over to the curb a moment driver.”

Christ
I’m thinking
faggot faggot faggot who’s got the faggot.

My first thoughts my very first are definitely faggot here

Well I tell you it meant nothing to me to turn my wheels into his curb

Because seeing is believing

“Yeah, that’s fine, just sit here that will do just fine,” dude says.

And then the dude says, “Really fine, that’ll do just fine, just sit here while I really appreciate that, driver . . .”

Well I still hadn’t pulled my flag. My meter was ticking as we waited. After a while the dude speaks again, “Cabbie, you see that light up there on the seventh floor, three windows from this side of the building?” I’m following him, tracking like a dog . . . Just following him, tracking him, by his directions, like with a gun sight, until I . . . until my eyes rest on a young woman wearing a pink slip, who crosses in front of the light and I say, “Yeah.”

“Ya see that woman there?”

“Yeah.”

The dude’s really chattering like he’s swallowing pills too big for his throat. “That’s my wife,
gulp,
but it ain’t my apartment,
gulp,
a nigger lives there,
gulp.
She left me two weeks ago,
gulp,
it took me this long to find out where she went,
gulp,
gonna kill her.”

Well you know I guess I just wanted to stay out of trouble

That woman had passed out of sight again. The dude asks, “What do you think of that, cabbie?”

I turned around to look at him. He was real sick-looking, white with big hollow eyes, crazy man

“What do you think of that, huh?” he shouted at me.

All I could do was shrug. I started to pull the flag on the meter but he said, “I’m gonna kill her with a .44 magnum pistol.”

The woman was standing in the light in the window again. From this distance she looked very sirene and pretty. The dude says, “Did you ever see what a .44 can do to a woman’s face?”

He said, “What it could do to a woman’s pussy?”

Well she was so pretty. She just stood there, so soft and pink you could almost touch it. Looked so unreal.

The dude says, “You must think I’m real sick, uh? A real pervert. Sitting here talking about a woman’s pussy and a .44, uh?”

She was so pretty, so pink and pretty in the light in the window, seven floors up . . .

You see enough of some things, things like that, hear enough and things get to you. After a while, they just get to you. Like they say, people are only human. Once.

Like that time in, what difference does it make now anyhow? You do what you have to do. To feel manly. A man needs to feel that way sometimes from a woman. Manly. He needs to feel certain things to do certain things. Like that time she said,
help me, help me,
and then I helped her and she turned away and couldn’t and then I couldn’t and we didn’t you know for a good long while, and that didn’t make me think any better of her even when she went on telling people how I tried to strangle her because I didn’t

I swear I don’t remember any of that. Well, it was the same with Betsy. After that evening (for which I don’t remember why I did what I did taking her to a porn theater), for a while I couldn’t remember much one day from the next. It was all just going nowhere on apricot brandy and reds, and I began to write down all sorts of silly things in this book.

All stuff like: “Pay to the order of Travis Bickle one Betsy Palantine,” after something I read in some stupid book somewhere. Also: “Death Be Not Proud to Turn the Other Cheek,” which was some poetry I read somewhere, I guess

I often wished I was a woman, too, so meeting people would be so much the easier. It seems like women always have a much easier time meeting people because they’re always so pretty. Always make the decisions whether they will or not, or whether they care to like the man. Or not.

I guess I was just feeling very angry and upset about Betsy: about being rejected. You know I’ve got feelings too, and that’s just about the worst feeling in the world.

Galore.

When women came on to me most of the time now I didn’t know what I should do. So out of things.

They’d say, “Any particular topic you’d like to discuss with me, driver?”

Or they would ask, “Have you ever been a moving man?”

“Ever been in films?”

“Worked in plate glass?” I thought they were just teasing me

Tormenting me

It got so that I couldn’t . . . I would carry their bundles upstairs or help them open front doors and when I did, nothing ever happened.

Seems like I must have been living on another planet. Or on TV. I watched a lotta “Star Trek,” wished I could be Spock.

I was just very withdrawn. I begun to study the various telephone numbers in the Manhattan Directory. Tried to find some connection between the combinations of numbers given to various people and their names, occupations, addresses. I was also counting all the Joneses, Smiths, etc., the common names. Words to that effect. Yes . . . a census . . .

The Traveling Salesman

By now, I’d saved a couple thousand dollars that I wore in a money belt about my waist. I felt heavy and sluggish a lot of the time. Jowly fat. A real thug.

Well nobody expects a cabbie to be Warren Beatty, or even Troy Donohue. I can remember the day that I had to go to Brooklyn to meet Dough Boy and this friend of his Andy. I was on aspirins that day out of the giant econo-size bottle three and four at a time plopped in my mouth and chewed like chicklets. My teeth.

They came riding over in an off duty taxi, Dough Boy and this nice-looking guy about twenty-nine: a dark pin-striped suit, white shirt, floral tie, long modish hair. Dough Boy introduced us on a street corner: “This is Andy he’s a traveling salesman.”

We went in Dough Boy’s cab to this kind of hotel, a little run down but not, you know, skid row, and then this Andy says to me, “You take care of Dough Boy right here and I gave him thirty dollars out of my own pocket, and he said, “Hey, that’s sweet, thanks, Travis.”

He drove off. I followed Andy to his room.

It was just then as we’re going through all these corridors in the hotel, and I’m feeling pretty cranky from lack of sleep, or maybe reds, a little groggy, a speed hangover, you know, that I began to become aware again of this dream I was in. Call it the dream-of-almost-certain-death.

Hadn’t happened to me since that time in Hong Kong. The strange thing is it wasn’t strange. Didn’t feel
that
strange. It was something like sharing rooms with others in an apartment where you’ve placed yourself a few years. A common phone, and fridge, and people taking messages for each other on a pad supplied every year at Christmas by the local lumber mill.

The locations always changing, and I had certain notes written down on a clipboard, as if somebody were scouting them for me way in advance, a patrol of sorts. It’s this walking dream of people in corridors, accordian rolls of barbed wire, myself, for instance, leading the patrol. Almost certain set-apartness.

A strange salty taste in the mouth, like blood, or come. It begins somewhere between my shoulder blades, or the hair on the back of my neck, like after a summer nap, perhaps, or before brushing my teeth first thing in the morning back home when I’ve already brewed coffee, walked the dog.

Now in this dream-of-almost-certain-death I am a stick figure preparing to leave home again at age thirty on the shoulders of a beautiful young woman such as Betsy.

Or I am making my first million on a talent I’ve so far suppressed, such as horse shoe pitching.

A feeling like a headache. A sign like a billboard. Big block letters: “
YOU ARE A GUARANTEED POTENTIAL DREAMER OF ALMOST-CERTAIN-DEATH.
”

As if I finally understood I was going to die. All along. Perish somewhere. Maybe even in this hallway. That beauty mark of freckle on my cheek was just a spot of air . . . a spot
in
the air, gaudy and thin, like one of Mick Jagger’s costumes. My pulse fluttering was only temporary, too. I was disposable. This very little piece of film. Like living inside a dream, afraid of enjoying myself there. Or, like watching a serious movie in a deep velvet chair, with only this one half of myself.

I seemed to be going crazy for ignorance of the plot. The lucky ones walked through the open doors of the dream, they would sit down on its furniture and have a few drinks and eventually maybe meet other strangers and die there, but where was I? Who was I with?