The Good Driver, The Bad Driver and The Ugly Driver

For whatever unexplained reason, I seem to have a lot of what one might be inclined to term surreal experiences. Nothing all Close Encounters or anything along those lines; just some very odd stuff.

The latest happened four weeks ago, on the Saturday night when the blizzard started. I was out with some friends at the newly-opened downtown branch of P.J. Clarke's celebrating a birthday. We all knew the snow was coming (or most of us did anyway, as the birthday boy and one other claimed it was going to be another meteorological bullshit job), but decided to go out anyway. As we sat having a nice leisurely, booze-filled dinner we watched out over the harbor outside the World Financial Center as the snow went from a light misting/dusting into big, wet, thick flakes, and we knew it had arrived. It didn't stop us though, we kept on going, and in fact adjourned to the rear bar for a few more once we settled up the dinner bill.

I'd have to put it somewhere around 1am when we all finally decided to call it a night. Not very late, but the snow was heavy, and there were already a couple of inches on the ground. Now, in case you're not aware of the geography, the WFC isn't exactly a hopping night spot. It's an office tower complex (and one that I worked in for a little while back in 1998-99), though with the recent residential boom of Battery Park City it's not quite the weekend ghost town that it once was. I figured between the neighborhood and the weather, cabs would be a bitch to come by (as did my friend Rob, who walked out the north exit of the WFC and hoofed it through the snow to City Hall), but there were a few waiting outside the south exit of the complex. Lucky me.

So I hopped in one, and the guy has his radio on. I knew that I knew the song, but I couldn't quite place it. It was an instrumental, and sounded vaguely Musak-esque, so I figured it was just another version of some song and the Guinness was blocking my brain. A few blocks go by, and the cab driver turns around (while driving through snowy streets, no less). He says:

"You know this song, my friend?"

"No, sorry, I don't." (I lied. I was drunk and tired, and it was just easier.)

"I see. You will know in a moment."

He turned back and reached for the car radio, hitting the Next Track button a few times. The next sound I heard, I knew quite well. And so would you. Even if you never knew where specifically it came from, it's one of the most recognizable movie themes of all time, and it happens to be from one of my favorite films.

So I'm enjoying it, but still a little bit on the drunk side, and my Tuco-loving cab driver turns again.

"You know it now, my friend?"

"Yes, of course."

"Is a classic, no?"

Now, as wonderful as this conversation was, I really wanted to get home, um, what's that word? Right: Alive. It's a fucking blizzard, we're speeding up the FDR, and this guy wants to chat about the Spaghetti Western genre. I'm not a big cab talker at any given point, but right about now I'm starting to fear that this dude might fancy himself a bandit, and we may go careening off into the East River, Thelma & Louise style.

This is where you might expect a climactic end, the final gun battle between Blondie and Sentenza if you will, but no such luck. He drove me home, the whole while listening to 15 seconds of a track and skipping to another, spinning around to ask what I think, his ADD in full effect.

There's all different types of crazy in this world, and we all own at least a tiny sliver of it. This guy was somewhere about halfway up the chart, I'd figure. Not crazy enough to do something drastic (at least not to me, God help the first passenger who says they hate Sergio Leone movies), but just crazy enough to want to chat about obscure movie soundtracks from 1966 while driving through a snowstorm.