When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,66
of his stuff?”
How to explain that this wasn’t really about the homeowner. He figured, of course, but the lasting image is of the flaming mouse, this determined little torch, shooting back into the house and burning it to the ground. What happened after that is unimportant. That’s why the newspaper left it out.
I covered these points as cheerfully as possible, and the cabdriver responded with a T-shirt slogan. “Only in New York.”
“But it didn’t happen in New York,” I said. “Weren’t you listening? It happened in Vermont, out in the country, where people have houses and piles of leaves in their yards.”
The man shrugged. “Well, it could have happened here.”
“But it didn’t,” I told him.
“Well, you never know.”
That’s when I thought, OK, Lumpy, you just lost yourself a tip. The French business I was willing to overlook, but “Only in New York” and “It could have happened here” just cost you five dollars, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Of course I did give him a tip, I always do. But before handing it over, I tore the bill practically in half. Passive aggression, I guess you’d call it.
I’d come to America for a lecture tour — that’s what they’re called, but really I just read out loud. My first date was in New Jersey, and because I don’t drive the theater sent a town car, which met me in front of my hotel. Behind its wheel was a black chauffeur who wore a suit and tie and introduced himself as Mr. Davis. The man was in his early seventies, and as he lowered his visor against the setting sun, I noticed his fingernails, which were long and tapered and covered with clear polish. Above each knuckle shone a ring, and on his wrist, in addition to a watch, there hung a delicate gold chain.
I meant to plow right into my mouse story, but before I could begin, Mr. Davis started in on what he termed “the traffic situation vis-à-vis liquidity.” His tone was finicky, and rather than speaking normally he tended to intone, like God addressing Moses through the clouds, only gay. After telling me that people were fools to drive in Manhattan, he looked into the surrounding cars and slandered his competition. The woman beside us was a boob. The man in front, a chucklehead. Dimwits, dopes, dummies, and dunces: it was like he had a thesaurus on his lap and was delivering the entries in alphabetical order. He criticized a cabdriver for talking on a cell phone, and then he pulled out one of his own and left an angry message with his dispatcher, who should have known better than to send him out in this mess.
For blocks on end, Mr. Davis fumed and muttered, this until we came to Canal Street, where he pointed to a gap in the downtown skyline. “See that,” he said. “That is where the World Trade Center used to be.”
Out of politeness, I pretended that this information was new to me. “What do you know!”
Mr. Davis stared south and brushed a bit of lint off his shoulder. “Eleven September, two thousand and one. I was present on that fateful morning and will never forget it as long as I live.”
I leaned forward in my seat. “What was it like?”
“Loud,” Mr. Davis said.
One would expect a few more details, but none was offered, and so I moved on and asked what he had been doing there.
“Had myself a meeting with an import-export company,” he told me. “That was my profession back then, but 9/11 killed all that. You can’t ship anything now, leastwise you can’t make any money at it.”
I asked what he imported, and when he answered “You name it,” I looked into the window of the adjacent car.
“Umm. Little stuffed animals?”
“I moved some of those,” he said. “But the name of my game was mostly clothes, them and electronics.”
“So did you travel a lot?”
“Everywhere,” he told me. “Saw the world and then some.”
“Did you ever go to China?”
He said that he had been more times than he could count, and when I asked what he had seen, he rolled forward a few inches. “Lots of people eating rice, mainly from bowls.”
“Gosh,” I said. “So it’s true! And what about India? That’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit.”
“What do you think you’re going to see there?” Mr. Davis asked. “Poor people? Chaos? So much garbage you can’t hardly stand it?”