Taxi Driver

by Richard Elman

  He cleared his throat. “Well,” says I, “I’m one of your biggest supporters. I tell everybody that comes in this cab, they should vote for you.”

  I can feel his eyes moving from my shoulders to the little plastic license on the dashboard. He’s smart.

  Palantine says, “Travis, this is going to be a crucial race here in New York.”

  Me: “I’m sure you’ll win, Sir. Everyone I know is going to vote for you.”

  “In fact,” I tell him, “I was going to put one of your stickers on this particular taxi, but the company said it was against their policy.”

  “Well,” Palantine says, “I’ve always respected the opinions of taxi drivers.”

  So now he stopped relating to his other friends and seems interested in me. “Tell me, Travis, what single thing would you want the next President of the country to do most?”

  I told him just like I told Betsy: “Clean up this city.” Words to that effect.

  “It’s filled with filth and scum,” I told him. Words to that effect. “It’s like an open sewer. Sometimes I can hardly take it. Some days I go out and smell it and then I get headaches that just stay and never go away. We need a President that would clean up this whole mess. Just flush it out.”

  I figured he was not some professional bullshitter, but a real person, a real man, if Betsy liked him so much. And he looked O.K. to me, too, as I say, but I guess he couldn’t help but be a little vague. Said something like “I know just what you mean, Travis.”

  His friends were looking more upset than he.

  Palantine said, “It’s not going to be easy.”

  Said, “We’re going to have radical changes all throughout the city and municipal government.”

  Me: “Damned straight.”

  Well, I left him off at the Plaza: “Nice talking to you, Travis . . .”

  “Thank you sir. You’re a good man, Sir.”

  Afterwards, I felt lonely again.

  Felt a little let down.

  Well I mean I had this record for Betsy and all gift wrapped by my side in the cab and I was going to be with her in just a little while, and I knew I couldn’t breathe a word about that to the Senator, and there he went all slim, neat, and trim from the shoulders down, up these steps, through the glittery entrance to the Plaza, and there I was you know grinding away in my cab.

  Well, I just had to go right home and clean up, because I didn’t like Betsy to see me that way, as I was going to meet her in a little while outside Pallantine headquarters.

  Date Night

  The rest is history. My journal records: She was smartly dressed when I went to see her tonight all blue.

  I can’t describe the exact outfit, but it was neat. For sure. Betsy seemed very glad to see me too. We’re walking down Broadway toward Times Square a short while later with the warm spring grit on our faces. An orange sun blinds the black glass buildings. The moon is thin, faint, silvery.

  The big moment: I give Betsy her record and she seems very, very pleased.

  Says, “Terrific, that’s really terrific, Travis,” and, again, as if nervous, “I told you you weren’t just another pretty—”

  “Face,” I interrupt as we walk, trying to bring her body close to mine along the greatest street in the world. Side by side on the Big White Way. Unreal. We’re passing through a faint stink of pot. Betsy says, “Really, you didn’t have to spend your money.”

  “Hell, what can I do with it all.”

  Well, she saw the seal on the record hadn’t even been broken and she said, “Travis, you haven’t even played this.”

  Well I lied to her, my stereo player was broke but I assured her the record was just fine. “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Your stereo broke? God,” Betsy says, “I could hardly stand that. I live on music.”

  “Well, I don’t follow music too much, you know I’d like to though,” I told her, “but I don’t.”

  Betsy was pointing to the record. “So you haven’t even heard this song yet?”

  “No.” I took a chance on Betsy then, said, “I thought maybe you could play it for me on your player later.”

  Well it was the wrongest thing to say. I know that now. Her face just turned off on me. She looked really worried, bit at her lower lip, made a little laugh.

  Well I asked could I carry the album for her and then I turned her on the corner from Broadway to Forty-second Street. The Apollo was showing Lost Weekend, a revival, with Ray Milland. We went next door where they advertised in big letters “Swedish Marriage Manual,” because I wanted her to know that I was a serious person. Not just in this for kicks. I said, “You stay here and I’ll buy the tickets.”

  Well they cost five bucks apiece.

  Unreal again, the look on her face.

  She actually started pulling on my hand, then my elbow: “What are you doing?”

  “Buying a couple of tickets.”

  “But,” she sputtered, “these are dirty movies.”

  “No,” I tried to explain, “these are the kind that couples go to. They’re not like some others. All kinds of couples go all the time.”

  I wanted her to follow me. I wanted her inside that movie theater with me. Wanted her to see with me.

  Betsy wasn’t buying any of that. “Travis,” she said, “these aren’t the kind of movies normal people go to.”

  “I don’t follow that many movies.”

  “You mean,” she said, “these are the only kind of movies you go to?”

  “Well, mostly . . .”

  Again, that look. She slapped her brow with one hand, weakly. “My God!”

  Well it was very crowded there with the usual freaks and degenerates staring at us when she started walking away back toward the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway and I started running after her saying, “We can go to another movie if you’d like. I don’t care. There’s plenty of movies around here. I haven’t seen any of them, but I’m sure they’re all good.”

  Betsy looked so clean surrounded by so much filth. She seemed determined to remain clean, stamping her foot looking at me very grimly, her lips very tight: “No, Travis, you’re a sweet guy and all that, but I think this is it. I’m going home.”

  “You mean,” I asked, feeling embarrassed in front of all those people, “you don’t want to go to a movie?” Some asshole laughed. “There’s plenty of movies around here, Betsy.”

  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
<
br />   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.