me on the minutia of each procedure. I got to hear endless details about sedation and the three doctors in white coats staring at her coochie and her being treated like a lab animal. And on and on about other stuff. Her victory over her eating disorder and then jogging and her bad back and the right running shoes and how she’d once played the cello as a girl in some symphony in Glasgow. And her ex-husband’s propensity for Times Square hookers. Tiresome, endlessly, vapid crap.
Every once in a while I’d try to interject stuff about work but the topics always seemed to come back to her and her physical ailments and how many times she used to puke per day or some male gynecologist pig or other.
After many nights of this I eventually found an opening. It turned out that Portia was an avid reader and a mystery novel buff and had consumed all the works of Agatha Christie and Lynda La Plante and Stephen King. Of course she’d known about my computer crash and the loss of my months of work and writing, so books and literature gratefully entered our topics of conversations.
I had mixed feelings about discussing my writing but sometimes in the late afternoon, after I’d had a few drinks following my shift, I didn’t mind. Sometimes I even liked it. Talking about Kafka and Dostoyevsky and Henry Miller and Selby and Edward Lewis Wallant was a welcome relief.
One night when the dispatch desk was quiet, after half a bottle of Chianti and after her asking again and again, I did something I had never done before with anyone I had worked with: I showed Portia some of my work—a few poems and a short story I had just finished. The piece I gave her was about my working as an L.A. taxi driver. Over the last few days I had completed two stories on the idea and was deciding if I had enough to write a series. Maybe even a book.
Portia took my poems and one of the stories into the chauffeur’s room to read. The yarn I gave her was called “Happy Birthday Tuesday.” A true story. It happened on my first night as a cabbie in L.A. I had taken a radio call to go to Venice after a drop at LAX. My passengers turned out to be a pair of drunk and stoned out Latino drug dealers on their way to a section of Venice that is known to the locals as Ghost Town. Five square blocks of crack houses.
One of the guys was on his cell phone threatening his girlfriend in Spanish. Somehow after the call, after he had hung up, the two jerks began to fight, punching and ripping at each other. I had to pull the cab over on Rose Avenue and get out, to make them stop. Their whiskey bottle had spilled on the rear floor and a brown bag that contained a couple of dozen gram bottles of white powder got strewn across the backseat.
After they left my cab, after paying me, the two assholes continued up the street shoving each other and yelling curses in Spanish.
At a gas station nearby I got some paper towels from the men’s room and began cleaning up the mess. That’s when I found the ring in the corner of the back seat. A two-karat diamond pinkie. With the money I received from hocking it I paid my rent for the month in advance and took my girlfriend Stinky to Lake Tahoe for a weekend.
Portia came back to the dispatch room and flopped my pages down on the desk. She stuck a fresh piece of Nicorette gum into her mouth and began swooning over my poem, telling me how much she admired my directness and brevity and passion.
But when we got around to my short story her face changed. “This,” she said, holding it up, “I truthfully found implausible and artificial. Unbelievable, actually.”
The words stung and I was instantly sober. It felt like a kick in the balls. “In what way?” I said.
“Wellllllll,” she whispered in her most melodious snooty drawl, “candidly, I found it’s preposterous. Sort of a cab driver’s old wives’ tale. More of a fantasy, actually.”
“The story’s true,” I said. “I found a two-karat diamond. It might not have belonged to one of the guys—it might have been stuck there in the crack of the backseat for days or months—but the story is true.”
“Perhaps. But it didn’t have