I forgot that I even wrote this.. 10/29/05
I whistled for a cab with both hands in my pockets. Without my three-hundred page paycheck. By the feel of the wind, my career’s ashes were about 75 miles east. I exhaled a cloud of steam, like exhaust from my tired, heavy chest. A cigarette was poised behind my left ear, tied to the side of my head with locks of my curled brown hair. I was shivering cold, but I decided to save it for when I got the shakes. The yellow cab pulled up to my feet, the checkered stripe at knee level. I kicked dried soil off the bottom of my shoes so I wouldn’t dirty up the man’s cab. A wreck shouldn’t leave one in his path. Upon entering the cab, I hit my head on the roof. I felt my brain bounce around for a second, but at least I knew it was still in there. Sitting in the back of the cab, the thought of my lost work compressed my chest into the cheap leather seat behind me. “What’s your name?” I asked the cab driver. “My name is Ahmed, Sir.” “Tell me your story, Ahmed,” I said to the cab driver. He spoke broken English, but I understood it just fine. “A story, or my story, Sir?” “Your story. Any story. Gimme something to work with.” “I came here two years ago,” he began. “In Pakistan, my family was too poor to afford a plane ticket to America. My mother had to leave my father and sell my house for money. We sold everything we owned and came here with nothing. A friend of my father’s owned a car, and one day he taught me to drive it. I loved the feeling. The motor, the speed. I came to America and I wanted to drive. I only did it one time but I loved it. So I got a job here in America driving.” This story was worthless. Nothing to work with. I had to tell the truth. It would set me free, right? So that’s what I did. I got into the editor’s office. Mr. Jones. Or was it Johnson? It doesn’t matter. I sat him down and told him the truth. Or at least what he would think is the truth. I wrote it, I said. I wrote it good too. But I left it at home and I’d have it on his desk first thing in the morning. I’d love to stay and chat, I told him, but I had an old friend waiting for me at the door. I couldn’t keep Ahmed waiting. He was my one way ticket to Pakistan.