I am not what you would call a 'frequent flyer', but have been on my fair share of airplanes. And considering that, have taken a nearly equal amount of rides in taxi cabs. There are three of those that stand out. ('3' being my favourite number, by the way...)
ONE
It was December of 1999 and I was in Las Vegas with a group of friends, having gone there to ring in the new year. Ostensibly also to ring in the new millennium, but that wasn't technically going to happen until December 2000; which didn't prevent the rest of the world from calling 1 January 2000 the start of the new millennium. But since when has the general public been concerned with niggling little details?
We were in a random Las Vegas cab, heading to a hotel from the RV lot where we parked. (We spent 22 hours driving straight from Calgary, Alberta to Las Vegas, Nevada on the I-15.) The cabbie was somewhere in his fifties and had been in the profession for quite a while. Apparently, LV can be a more-lucrative-than-average place to be in that profession. I guess. He spent the first part of the trip advising us not to let on that this was our first trip to the city, as cab drivers were wont to 'take you for a ride' if you were a first-timer. After bequeathing this sage advice on us, he then spent the rest of the ride showing us how he tracked each fare he took on a daily basis and, more specifically, how much each client tipped, with a grave look in his eyes.
Waiting to exit in the taxi line at the hotel, he then told us how he rather enjoyed using his red laser pointer at opportune times to scare the shit out of VIP bodyguards. He'd never yet been caught. Unfortunately, I didn't tip him as much as he was used to.
TWO
Three friends and I had just returned to Calgary from spending my stag weekend in Montreal. (Handing out coats and serving in soup kitchens was never so rewarding.) I paid for very little of the trip, due to the largess of my friends, so insisted on ponying up for the minimal cab fare back to my buddy's place; he lives very close to the airport.
The cabbie seemed glad to get a fare, as he'd spent a long time in the line-up at the airport. His short-lived ebullience was quickly replaced with a look of defeat as my friend told him our destination, a mere five minutes from the airport. Our driver then spent those intervening minutes complaining about how he had just wasted the last three hours of his day waiting for the glut of taxis in line at the airport to thin out so that it came his turn.
Pulling up into the driveway, the cabbie had a look of some surprise on his face when I presented him with a twenty dollar bill for the short ride. I promptly and painfully erased this look when I asked for change. (It was all the money I had left after the weekend. I didn't let my friends pay for everything.) He drove off with a shake of his head and I pictured him flinging his hands up in the air in defeat.
THR33
My current job had me stationed in Ft. McMurray, Alberta for three of the nearly six years I've worked here. So I did a lot of traveling thither and yon around the weekends, especially considering I had a girlfriend / fiancee / wife with whom to maintain a relationship. (That particular triumvirate comprising a single individual, by the way.)
I would fly from Ft. McMurray to Edmonton on WestJet, and take a taxi from the airport to my home. Much less conveniently than the Calgary airport, the Edmonton International is about an hour's drive from my residence. On one particular wintry Thursday evening, what took me most aback when entering the taxi was that the driver was a young, white male. 'Cause, you know, that's unusual.
He spoke very little and didn't have much expression on his face at all. I noticed the ring on his finger and he mentioned that he had a young wife at home, and a baby as well. He looked like he wanted to say more. I prodded a bit and extracted the fact that he hadn't been driving cab very long; he was just trying to save up enough money to go back to school. He may have mentioned for what, but it escapes me. I didn't say much after that, thinking to myself that a young man with a wife and baby at home was going to have a hard time saving enough money to go to school and wondering if he realized that.
The truth of the matter was brought into stark detail when we pulled up to a red light on the south side of the city. He turned his face slightly to the right in order to watch for the changing of the signal, and his profile was bathed very slightly in the preternatural green glow cast by the light he was focused on. Etched into his young face were lines at the corner of his eye that shouldn't have been there, his two days or so of facial hair growth stood out, there was a certain slackness about his face and I was almost overwhelmed by the understanding that this man was tragically aware of his situation.
We spent the rest of the ride in silence, exchanging a few pleasantries after reaching my home. I ended up tipping him a little more than I did the guy in Las Vegas.
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