Theft: A Love Story

39

The taxis in New York are a total nightmare. I don't know how anybody tolerates them, and I am not complaining about the eviscerated seats, the shitty shock absorbers, the suicidal lefthand turns, but rather the common faith of all those Malaysian Sikhs, Bengali Hindus, Harlem Muslims, Lebanese Christians, Coney Island Russians, Brooklyn Jews, Buddhists, Zarathustrians—who knows what?—all of them with the rocksolid conviction that if you honk your bloody horn the sea will part before you. You can say it is not my business to comment. I am a hick, born in a butcher's shop in Bacchus Marsh, but fuck them, really. Shut the fuck up.

Yes, it is insane to consider educating them one by fucking one, Miss Manners, but when I find a moron leaning on his horn outside my window...

So I had to go to the supermarket at a time of night when you would expect the trip to be a swift one, when all the nice Jewish grandmothers should be home in bed or making their special gefilte fish for Rosh Hashanah or whatever it is they do—but perhaps the crowds of grannies in Grand Union were Christians or Tartars, but by God those old women were a subcategory of their own and they would smash you with their shopping carts if you could not match their speed. I was jet-lagged, a foreigner, and I was slow. God help me.

An American supermarket is one thing, Jesus—but a New York supermarket is a complete dog's breakfast—you would have to be born in aisle five to understand its logic. As you have doubtless guessed already, I had come to buy a dozen eggs. At first I could not find them, then there they were, right next to the feta, so many bloody categories of eggs, sizes of eggs, colours of eggs, my fellow shoppers could not wait for me to make a choice. I was blocking their aisle, so they locked wheels with me, crowded in from aisles two and three, swarmed like gridlocked morons at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

I bought brown eggs because they seemed more basic—I really was a hick—but five blocks later, above Mercer Street and Broome, when I stood in the rusty shadow of the fire escape, I discovered the expensive little fucks had shells like concrete. Did I tell you I had been a fatal fast bowler at Bacchus Marsh High School? I still had a good eye and my father's arm but no matter how I swung or spun them, the eggs bounced off the windscreens of the honking cabs.

Marlene, bless her, tried neither to prevent nor encourage me and when I stepped back in through the open window she looked up from the ratty sofa where she was stretched out reading The New York Times. "Come here my genius."

She was so, so gorgeous, the reading light catching her left cheek, a wash of gold dust, rising from a slate blue field.

"You are a moron." She held her arms open and I held her, smelled her jasmine skin, her shampooed hair. Did I say I loved her? Of course I did. I slid my hand down her pole-climber's back, touching every vertebra in that nubbly line of life. She was my thief, my lover, my mystery, a lovely series of revelations which I prayed would never end. It was our third night in New York City. We had money now. The day had been a big success, and not just because of the case of Bourgueil and the bottle of Lagavulin, although that did smooth the edges, but Do2y Boylan's Signal-fly painting was now stored in an art world fortress in Long Island City. Its only entrance, Marlene told me, was through a tunnel which was flooded every night. The vaults were filled with Mondrians, de Koonings, and her precious Leibovitz which her wacko husband would come and sign off ASAP.

"Forget the taxis," she said. "It's New York. What do you expect? You'll get used to it."

She was right, of course. I was from the Marsh where Highway 31 ran right past my bedroom, trucks roaring and grinding all night as you waited for them to lose it on Stamford Hill, plough down into Main Street, sheering all the verandahs off the shops.

I would grow accustomed to the fucking taxis, but what I could not get used to was that Marlene was not screaming at me. By now the Alimony Whore would have called the cops but here I had a quick hit of Lagavulin—God bless the workingmen of Islay—and as I left to buy some better eggs, she called me an idiot and put her tongue inside my ear.

At this hour in Sydney only the bars would still be open but the entrance of Grand Union was crowded with limping black men who had come to feed empty cans and bottles to an automated machine. Also, new grandmothers had arrived—later I discovered that there was an endless supply of mafia mothers in the neighbourhood and I mention this now because John Gotti's mother was later mugged by some unlucky fuck. What did I know? It was my good fortune that I was polite to all these lethal individuals, and when I tested an egg or two inside the refrigerated cabinet, no-one had the time to see my crime.

There are 8,534 taxi medallions in New York, which must mean close to twenty thousand drivers and of course I could not give etiquette classes to them all, but you must believe me when I tell you that my eggs finally made a difference. You think this is ridiculous, but ask yourself: What are all those Sikhs saying to each other on their radios?

I was much happier with my second dozen eggs, large thin white shells which splattered beautifully. We turned off the lights and my beautiful little thief came out on the fire escape to admire my aim.

"You're being unfair," she said. "The wrong people are being punished. Forget the taxis. Go for the minivans with New Jersey plates."

I was drunk when we came back inside, a little spongy in the legs, and when the next serious eruption of horns arrived, just before midnight, I was ready to say my point was made. But I was standing at the icebox, so it was nothing to pickup an egg, turn off the lights, heave open the window, and burst my yellow bomb across the offending windscreen, a minivan as it turned out, with Jersey plates.

"Come back in. Turn on the light."

In front of the minivan, whose wipers were now smearing yolk and white across the glass, was a yellow cab from which two travellers were slowly emerging.

Pleased as I was that the minivan was now silent, I was slow to realise that the men emerging from the taxi below were both known to me.