January 20, 1996 8:15 AM
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I've been really strung out and pissed off this whole week. United Parcel Service showed up yesterday with my new monitor, which was supposed to have been delivered by December 23rd, and I let the delivery guy in and he takes the box and charges upstairs with it and hurls it to the ground, causing a terrific thud. I'm watching in horror, for some reason thinking that this guy knows what he's doing and that everything will be fine, and he turns to leave and I say "Thanks." And he says "You're welcome." So I drag the enormous box through my narrow door and into the tiny apartment, and I open the box and the goddam monitor is shattered, simply destroyed, I'm standing here looking at what that the fuckin' UPS guy was throwin' around like a bag of laundry and I'm just too goddam mad to see straight, my eyeballs start to shake and the veins in my neck pulsate and bulge out of my skin (and I press my palm to my neck, because I think it feels kinda neat) and I get on the phone and I am fuckin' SCREAMING at somebody who says an attorney will be out on Monday or Tuesday - MONDAY OR TUESDAY!! THIS WAS FRIDAY!! -- so I'm sitting here right now with a box big enough to live in taking up most of the space in my apartment, and I just want this big piece of crap outta here, and I also want my television back, it's been in the shop for almost a month now while the repairman has cancelled appointments repeatedly (he keeps calling in sick, could Sears have one single repairman in their whole operation?), but I'll stop talking, 'cause I'm afraid to ever talk like this about handymen and repair people, I could wind up at the bottom of the East River with a Daily News vending machine strapped to my chest.
OK, it's a little later. I just drank a lot of water. I'll tell you what happened before the UPS guy stopped in just long enough to destroy my brand new monitor. God, it's been a long week, but you know I've been asleep for most of it, having dreams about Charles Manson and O.J. Simpson . . . Friday it was pouring rain and blowing like a hurricane out there, and I need a cab to get from Madison Avenue to York Avenue, so I go out there into the street and this yellow car (not, I soon discovered, a genuine "Yellow NYC Cab") stops and I open the back door, get in, and as I'm sitting down in the back seat I know something is wrong. The car just doesn't "feel" like a normal New York TLC vehicle, there's no bullet-proof divider between the driver and the back seat, there's no blaring Hispanic music, the driver's caucasian, and then I notice the car's got no green or red medallion on its hood, and after this instant of realization the whole car suddenly had this recliner feel to it, the back seat rolled me around on itself and I sank into it, like I was sitting in someone's mouth. So I'm not in a real safe-seeming vehicle, and a New York Times article from a few years ago about how to "choose cabs carefully" flashes back into my head, as does an irrelevent poem called "Choose Your Traffic Carefully," and by this point in the Times article their editors woulda said "It is recommended that you leave the cab." And I knew this, and the back door was still open, leaving me the opportunity to step back out onto Madison and wait for another cab, the desperado driver would understand but drive off in a snit, but I said No, roll me away. I don't care what happens. Butcher me, buttfuck me, throw me into an incinerator and chuck my worthless carcass onto Queens Boulevard. I'm tired and cranky from being stuck in my apartment all week with too high a fever to do a damn thing and I really don't fucking care what happens to me any more. As I shut the door and shouted "York Avenue," I spotted the "driver's certificate" by the glove compartment. It had expired in 1994, and it looked like something I could have printed out of my Okidata dot-matrix printer I have under my bed and which I found in a garbage can outside of an office building a few years ago. I looked over at the guy to compare the picture from the "certificate" with his face, and that ended up being the only legitimate-seeming element to the whole experience, because he looked just like the picture, so I felt a little bit of relief (which was immediately flushed away by the other circumstances) and muttered to myself that this couldn't be too dangerous, "we won't be going very far" - and I knew then that those sounded like an idiot's fateful last words before disappearing into the clutches of some fucked up Dahmer-wannabe. He had what I thought was a radio playing, and it was as loud as any car stereo I've ever heard, I mean it was just thunderous. But it wasn't music, it was was a British guy talking about Russian troops during the second World War and how they were assigned to the front lines for months and years, staying there and not being allowed to leave until they were killed or until they commit suicide. The somber narrative continued to talk about rumors which had circulated among Russian citizens during the war which said that the soldiers were so hungry and so isolated that they'd started eating the bodies of their dead comrades, and the word among the people was that some whole regiments had become complete cannibals. The voice delivering this strange narrative was so clear, so penetrating and elegiac that I almost started crying just at the sound of it. I asked the driver "What's the station?" He said "It's a tape," with a voice that sounded like he had a giant cigar stuck in his mouth (but there was no cigar). So I was looking over at the driver, who's name appeared to be Ned (according to the real authoritative-looking "certificate"), and he's wearing this tweed jacket so filthy and soiled you'da thought he slept naked and woke up every morning and pulled his clothes out of the East River the way most of us pull clothes out of our closets. And he's wearing a dress-shirt (not as dirty but pretty nasty looking). He sat slunched into his seat, left hand barely touching the steering wheel, his right hand resting across the top of the steering wheel and doing most of the steering, but not doing it very well. The guy, Ned, just drove all over the goddam place, hugely passing other cars by veering completely into the opposite lane. His clothes were preposterous, I thought. His hair was greasy and slicked back, and what I could see of his eyes glassy and right on the verge of some painful tears. And I'm just kinda staring at this guy and thinking that this is The Other Side of the wall, and I think we all see it but most of us ignore it. One time I saw this huge guy stomping around on 57th Street, he was wearing nothing but underwear and he was slapping his big fat paunch and bellowing for all to hear "please spare a dime, quarter, anything," and he was insane, laughing like a clown, absolutely beyond the blink, and there was nothing separating us, I could have done what he was doing as easily as I could sit here right now and do this, and I would still be The Same Person, the mind would keep going like it does now; none of us lives any longer than anyone else, and time and circumstance are all that keep us from being right where the other one is. Ned. He knew I was staring at him, and he just looked the other way. He saw me squinting to read his name off that piece of paper, which looked more and more comical to me, a flimsy prop to make him look legitimate. As the car neared 1st Avenue and close to my destination, that magnificent taped voice began its discussion of the rumored cannibalism among Russian troops, and to be perfectly honest this historical-seeming narrative sounded like a bunch of crap, but on it went as we reached York Avenue and I lept from the car, slipping Ned a $10 bill (it was a $3.25 fare, I thought I'd handed him a $5 bill) and saying "Take it easy." Shut the door behind me, feeling like I'd just reached land having traveled over something else for the last 5 minutes. That's when I saw that it was not an "NYC Cab," but instead this was a "YES Cab," the letters "NYC" smudged out and replaced with similarly lettered "YES" letters. Well, I thought, that's a positive way to look at it. One of these days I'll have to look for a job with that company. I'll even print up my own "driver's certificate" right now. So that's when I got home and waited for UPS to show up and smash my monitor to the ground. You see, I'd just had some blood taken for tests, and I get really dizzy and nauseous (but secretly thrilled) from having needles stuck into me, so between that and the witless anxiety of The Cab Ride With Ned I didn't have a lot of wherewithal and just hoped something normal would happen, and I guess that what UPS did was probably relatively normal, standard operating procedure, something for which some arrogant U.S. senator should lose office.
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