Yellow Throne

A cab driver is never an occupation someone aspires to be; when children have career day they never get to the cab driver (as if there’d be one there in the first place) and begin giggling in anticipation over the countless thrilling stories of life in the yellow prison.

When I was growing up I always wanted to be a writer; the idea of creating stories that captivated people was always impressive to me. I always listened to music for the lyrics. I loved people like Bob Dylan, who could turn their songs into captivating story lines.

The only problem was, I just didn’t care. I never did anything. I just sat back and listened, to everything and everyone. Every fluttering whisper in class, passed from ear-to-ear like a bee ready to extract nectar. Every conversation in the hallway, I’d hear and store it away.

I suppose those are my two best traits: listening and remembering.

Though the things I can remember best are sounds, words; anything my ears heard, I remembered. The inflection of someones voice; the way my ex-girlfriends voice would raise when she was lying; the way my best friends voice would too.

I certainly never intended to go into a career that would put both of those to good use; but hey, that’s what life is: one big story that never ends up the way you plan it out.

Towards the end of my senior year of high school I realized all that sitting around and listening, it didn’t raise my GPA at all. It didn’t get me a scholarship. It didn’t even get me accepted…though that could have been because I never bothered to fill out any applications. Luckily for me, I did just enough to graduate. Then somehow it all just sort of happened at once: I was looking for a job, ended up at one of the large taxi companies and before I knew it, I had a position. I thought it was a pretty sweet deal…I could do what I always had done, but get paid for it. I guess I always thought I’d be listening to the radio.

I guess the first time I really noticed it was my sixth passenger on the first day; right out of the gates. He was talking on and on about how he had thought he was going to be fired and what he was going to do when he got to work the next day. The classic “How far would you go to get fired” situation. I was sitting at a red light at 5^th Avenue and it occurred to me that right then, in that moment, that story was the only thing in the world that mattered. It was in its purest form, pure creation (regardless of the fact that it was not unique, it was still the essence of pure creation). Like the birth of the universe. His words, a choatic swirling mess of meaning all colliding to make this story. That was when I realized what I had unwittingly stumbled onto.

There is one thing people don’t often consider when thinking about this job. It’s one of those occupations, like a janitor, where the best perks aren’t in a contract, you don’t have to search the fine print for them. Yeah, I ferry people around; yeah, a lot of them are annoying, egotistical pricks or selfish, stuck-up princesses. But the stories I hear, that’s why I’ve kept this job. The things I hear them talk about to the friends they have with them or whomever they’re on the phone with; hell, sometimes they tell these things directly to me.

I guess in their eyes I’m a pay-by-the-minute-confidante.

These stories, they hold so much power in the duration of their time with me. Even after they’ve gone, after these people have paid their fare and have trotted off to wherever it is they’re going; these stories remain, locked away inside my yellow box.

If I may use another cosmic simile: it’s like the death of a star in some far off galaxy. Though the star has withered and its light is gone, our eyes still see it because its absence has not yet reached us. It is existing when what created it has already died.

They sit upon my yellow throne and these people, these nobodies are kings and queens for forty blocks as they take the spotlight in the back seat of my cab. Their faces I will forget, but their words, those linger in my memory. They go from peasants, to kings, to peasants again without even so much as a hint of irony or awareness. I am the only one who sees this transformation. It’s the sort of thing psychologists would do studies on if it were ever noticed.

Little Johnny Four-Eyes would sit at his desk for 14 hours a day writing a dissertation on The Four-Eyes Effect

And once he was done, as always, the world would finally see what I’ve been seeing for ten years now, though I would get no recognition.

They would never name the behavior after me. No flowers would come to my doorstep, no fruit-baskets would be delivered by a short stalky man with his name stitched on his chest. No books or movies would be written about my life. There would be no parades in my honor. No memorials dedicated to me. My face would never be immortalized in stone or granite.

You know how some people say something’s a gift and a curse, well…there’s some truth to that.

It’s as if once they leave my doors they leave all memory of this interaction behind; as soon as they exit they are just the same as everyone else; their very existence holds no meaning to what they’ve spontaneously created in the back of my cab, it is free for anyone who’s willing to listen.

The second edge to this sword is that they forget (or more likely never notice in the first place) my role in the interaction. I’ve always been forgettable…hell, they don’t even realize their own significance in this act.

They are Alfred Nobel or J. Robert Oppenheimer before witnessing their actual creations. Completely ignorant to the magnitude of what is occurring, of what they’ve created. Bathed, consumed in bliss.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this though is that you would think, with all of these different, unique minds and all of these different lives, their stories would vary.

People also used to think dinosaur fossils were proof of dragons and manatees were mermaids.

If you boil it down to strictly what is being said, hardly any of their stories are original. There’s always a similar basis: why it isn’t cheating, why they’re having this problem, how they’re fixing that problem. These people, who think that what they are telling me is strictly theirs, are morons. They think that they’re the first person in history to relay this to me, or to anyone for that matter. They think they’ve created something original, but they haven’t. I can only imagine the looks on their faces if I could replay all of the conversations and stories I’ve heard.

Yes, these people do offer a menial amount of creativity and flare, but in their entirety, these stories do not belong to them alone. They are recycled from the same heap, over and over again.

The thing that really gets me is that I’ve had the same people more than once; now being a cab driver, I don’t get to have much fun on the job…but sometimes I get the chance. Now several times I’ve retold a story to the same person who told it to me months, weeks, sometimes even days earlier, and they’ll ignore it because they’ve “heard it before”. They think it’s too predictable for even a moment of their precious time. They never realize that what I’ve just told them is a regurgitation of the same words they spat out at me. When this happens I smile, hold my laughter on the inside and politely let them drone on about their meaningless lives.

This is the sort of thing people don’t know. We are never taught these things, we never read them in a contract or on a resume under what experience we’ve had. These are the things only perceptible to people like me, the people who listen. We are interpreters of the most powerful thing in the world, the thing you take most for granted. You pass by us everyday, going on about your business, paying no mind to us. You consider yourself so important but overlook the thing that makes you meaningful in the first place. This all happens while you are talking, blabbering about nothing, but creating something beautiful. You should be cautious of what you say, you never know who’s listening.

From pick-up to destination, we share these moments; it’s an intimate relationship that’s utterly underestimated.

True love. People are always trying to define it, put it into words. Well you can’t. It can only be understood by the people it is affecting. If it is really love then the people experiencing it don’t need to describe it because the other feels the same way…it is mutually understood. My point is…what I felt for each and every one of my passengers during their stories, it can’t be described and if they could only understand the significance and beauty of what they were creating, then it would have been mutually understood.

I loved them in that time, For their blissful ignorance, their spirit tapping into the flow of the universe and extracting something pure and beautiful that would never again be possessed by another. I enjoyed every second with them inside our womb. Subtley going through a transformation that could never be understood or desbribed by any wordly definition. Something divine. No, not something divine. Something more powerful than the God we’ve created. Something that has no limits, infinite power, as a God does. Something that holds every ounce of power but can never be hated, or used for destruction, or greed, or death. No physical outlet of human corruption, ignorance and fright will ever claim it, will ever soil it. It is unreachable, even by God. For even when his words were translated they could still not aptly describe even his message. And even if they had, they would no longer belong to him. The moment they transcended the barriers of his lips, he could no longer claim them. They existed somewhere beyond him, beyond omniscience. No one can contain it, no one can reign it in. It is…perfection. And I am the only one who hears it.