Taxi Driver Read Free

talking to people in the cab but I didn’t want that sort. That kind of woman can get really heavy, depressing, if you know what I mean. You find yourself being twisted. This way and that.
    I guess like most people I wanted to meet someone I liked, have some fun. Eventually maybe make her a commitment. Just to be with another person. To have a friend.
    I felt I was capable of giving and getting. Had been so ever since I came home. Well you know I really couldn’t prove it, but I felt there were these things inside me that had to come out on another person. With another person. Good things and bad.
    A man is not a fountain pen, you know. I wanted to care and be cared for. Well it was a heavy time. Bad days those. The people I saw. The things I did.
    Of course, I’d known some women back home. At least one, I think. Even had a sorta girlfriend. Before the Nam. Hedda was older. Not much for good looks but you can imagine a good egg. Good sort. Sweet. I guess she liked me a lot better than I ever liked her. She really wasn’t my type, I’m afraid. No class. Hedda Dugan worked on the line at the Ford Gear Shop. Nice woman except I always had this feeling about her when we were together she was taking me over somehow. She said she loved me but it felt like she was taking me over.
    She called me Pickle like a rhyme. Her big dill pickle. Said she needed a bite, of that pickle morning, noon, and night. Said, “You’re the nicest pickle in the whole damn barrel, Travis.”
    I was—nineteen? Maybe twenty? She was a damn sight over thirty. Would never see twenty-nine again, or thirty. Got scarey. She said she wanted to go wherever I went. Followed me around town just like a puppy. Waited on me breakfast, lunch, and supper. Big Dill Pickle.
    Sure I liked her but not that much. She wasn’t any dream to me, just another woman.
    I guess I hurt her feelings. I imagined she thought with a face like hers she would have to get her hooks in somebody or else, pretty soon. I imagined I was too young for that. That sort of thing.
    When I left her she cried. There was nobody in her life. Mine neither. Went away and that was that. Hedda never forgave me for not taking her to meet the old folks at home, but she was just a horse of a different color from the kinda person they liked to see me with, and I kinda knew that.
    More like a mother to me than a girlfriend, really.
    After that I was away for so long in Service that it was mostly just professionals I saw. Your friends for the night, if at all, and then I heard Hedda she had gone and done this awful thing to herself with a scissors, and that’s when I thought seriously of coming here to New York and the cab business.
    Or should I say coming to New York? Cabbying happened just as I said it did. Though I figured it would be hard to live Hedda down in a stockroom somewhere. Well, as I say, driving in the City those first weeks was a challenge. Night after night I saw things happening made Vietnam look a lot better in some respects. I saw people at their worst. Whatever that means. The asshole of the planet is hardly a fit place for making friends and influencing people.
    I would go back to the garage most mornings and have to clean stuff off the back seat, mostly come, sometimes blood. Those old women in shawls eating out of garbage cans at 5:00 A.M. , well, sometimes I’d think there’d never be anything but hard times like this. So many guys sleeping out in the street, at least I had this roof over my head. First thing I did when I came out of the service was put that roof over my head, just like that poor imitation of an army doctor said I should.
    Speaking of which I often wonder why it was O.K. over there but not here. Well, they covered themselves, of course. Said they were different. “A different value on human life,” was the way our CO used to put it. But some of the animals around here didn’t seem any better. Worse. Killing was maybe much too good for some people, was the