Taxi Drivers

By the time I get into his cab, I’ve already let three go by.

One full of appraising men who look more than recently acquainted. Another which cuts off the next, screeching to a stop just shy of my toes. The last the picture of road worthiness in a pile marked ‘unfit’.

As they drive by, each one sucking varying quantities of air through their teeth, they give me the look all taxi drivers give me when they know they’ve failed some kind of internal audition.

It’s a look that sees me standing on the side of the road, clearly destined for somewhere in the realm of N$20 and thus squints, arches an eyebrow and implies a minor plague upon my house.

It’s all fun and intuitive avoidance until you meet someone you’ve rejected before.

A taxi driver in a sparkling black Yaris who remembers you waving him by outside the Warehouse Theatre before catching the very next cab and proceeds to believe exactly nothing about your three-tier defence of mistaken identity, doppelgängers and witchcraft.

He doesn’t say so but I know it hurt his feelings.

Here he is just trying to make a living and for no reason that occurs to him, a potential customer simply doesn’t like the look of him and so sends him on his way. He feels bad which makes me feel bad so I try to remember why I didn’t take the ride but a quick rummage through my mind draws a spectacular blank.

The thing is, for the most part, it’s just mad science.

Someone simply looking and feeling better than they did the day before. Exuding trustworthiness, obeying the rules of the road, not looking recently returned from the Tombo Olympics.

It doesn’t lend itself to easy articulation but I trust it.

That feeling I often get about people and situations that has kept me out of trouble for the last three decades and which doesn’t quite stand up to any real scrutiny despite my not having succumbed to random, road or freak accident.

We spend the rest of the trip in silence before he drops me off near my house.

Not in front of it because who wants strangers knowing where you live? But a bit down the same road he speeds away on understanding fully that I’ve found him worthy of the precaution.

I’m up to my usual self-preservation when Floppy picks me up a few days later.

I never ask his name but I’ll call him Floppy because of his hat.

He sees me studiously ignoring solicitation from the taxi drivers at Grove Mall who won’t drive one metre down the road without four passengers offsetting the trouble and makes a U-turn up ahead before pulling up with plenty of consideration for toes.

He’s young but he looks a decent sort.

His car’s clean, his eyes look sharp and he has a Namibian newspaper in the cubby hole which I ask to buy from him for N$3.

There wasn’t a single one left in Grove.

I thought I was slick and tried to buy Friday’s paper on a late Sunday afternoon and he laughs knowingly as I tell him the very thing.

It’s a little greasy, a little manhandled and very curled at the edges but he agrees to sell it to me at cost.

“Times that tough, huh?”

It’s a stupid question.

The man is a cab driver cruising around a deserted Grove Mall for the slightest hint of ‘tot by die huis’ and I’m hassling him about three bucks when he’s doing me a favour.

Floppy grins and nods his head.

Still, he has great faith in the Angolan economic crisis.

It won’t be long until rent goes down right alongside purchase prices and then he’ll buy himself a house in the suburbs.

It’s a wonderful dream buoyed by even greater optimism for someone charging people for old papers while carting them across the city and I smile, quietly hoping and praying that he will get everything he wants. On a taxi driver’s salary in one of the most expensive property markets in the world.