He Carried My Poems in His Taxi
My first reader drove nights and reviewed my drafts at red lights.
My first literary critic kept my poems in his glovebox, between the insurance papers and a bag of boiled sweets.
His name was Farooq, he drove a night taxi in the city for twenty-six years, and for three of those years he was the only person on earth who read my work.
We met because of my job, not my poems. I was doing the closing shift at a hotel front desk, done at 1 a.m., and the buses by then were theoretical. The hotel had an account with a cab company, and the night rotation kept sending the same white sedan with the cracked left mirror and the small brass hook on the dashboard where Farooq hung his radio when the dispatch chatter annoyed him, which was always.
For the first month we didn't talk. I liked that about him. The city at 1 a.m. through a taxi window is a kind of poem already, shuttered shops, dogs asleep in the warm patches, one man ironing shirts in a lit doorway like a figure in a painting, and Farooq drove through it unhurried, as if the night were his and he was letting the rest of us borrow it.
Then one night I fell asleep in the back seat and my notebook slid out of my bag.
He found it while checking the seats, as he did after every fare. The next night he held it up at the window before I got in.
"Yours?"
"Yes. Thank you. Sorry."
He didn't hand it over right away. "Page nine," he said. "The one about your father's radio. Why did you stop it where you stopped it?"
I stood on the pavement at 1 a.m., mouth open. "You read it?"
"You left it in my house," he said, patting the roof of the car. "In my house, I read."
He read poems the way he drove: unhurried at exactly the moments everyone else would have rushed.
That was the beginning. It embarrasses me now... how hungry I was for it. I was twenty-four, new to the city, and profoundly alone in the specific way where your phone is full of numbers and you eat dinner standing over the sink.
I had no writing friends. I had no writers at all, just a notebook and the growing suspicion that wanting this so badly was itself embarrassing. Years later I would find whole pages of poems about that exact loneliness, but at the time I didn't have the word for it. Farooq apparently did. He said once, unprompted, at a signal near the flyover: "City is full at night. Full of people who are one each."
One each.
I have never written a better line than that and he gave it away for free at a red light.
The system we developed was simple. I'd hand him two or three new poems, typed, because he said my handwriting was "a crime scene." He kept them in the glovebox and read them during the dead hours, at signals, at the airport queue where cabs sat for forty minutes. Feedback came a ride or two later, delivered entirely at red lights, because he refused to talk about poems while the car was moving. "Moving is for driving." So my education arrived in thirty-second installments, rationed by traffic engineering.
He was not gentle. "This one is wearing a costume," he said about a poem where I'd used the word "cerulean." Red light, both hands on the wheel, eyes forward. "You don't talk like this. Why does your poem?" Green light. Silence for two kilometers... while I bled quietly in the back seat. Next red light: "The last two lines are true. Keep those. Burn the shirt."
He had no training. He had twenty-six years of listening to the backs of people's voices at night, which I have since decided is superior training. Drunk brides, weeping businessmen, boys rehearsing proposals, women leaving. He knew exactly what a false note sounded like because he heard true ones nightly, at meter rates.
What the Glovebox Was For
Here is what I didn't know, the turn I never saw coming. I found it out on a Tuesday, three years in, when a woman flagged me down outside the hotel. Fifties, hotel guest, red-eyed. She asked if I was the one who wrote the poem about the father's radio. I stared at her. Nothing of mine had ever been published.
My entire circulation was one glovebox.
"The taxi driver," she said. "Last night. I told him my husband died in March and I couldn't sleep in the room. He pulled over, took a paper from the glovebox, and read it to me. With the meter off." Her voice went somewhere... and came back. "He said, a young one wrote it, someone is going to know her name someday. I asked him for a copy. He said no, it isn't mine to give, but the writer works at this hotel."
She wanted to tell me the poem helped... that was all. She went back inside, and I stood under the porte cochere shaking slightly.
That night I confronted him at the first red light. "You read my poems to passengers?"
"Only when the passenger needs. Poem sitting in a glovebox is a battery," he said. "Somewhere it has to be put." Green light. End of hearing.
He'd been doing it for over a year. My grief poems for the grieving, the funny ones for a couple who'd had a terrible wedding day, the one about leaving home for a boy going to the airport, one way.
I had an audience the whole time.
Its members boarded one each, at night, and I never met them, and he never told me, because he knew that I was writing honestly precisely because I believed no one was listening.
It was Farooq who made me publish, in the end, if publish is the word. He gave me a deadline the way he gave feedback, flatly, at a signal: "New rule. You enter one competition or I stop reading." I entered a monthly poetry contest with the radio poem, the one he'd defended from page nine onward.
It didn't win. The second one I entered didn't win either. The fifth got a commendation, my name on an actual website, and he kept a printout of the page folded in the glovebox until the creases wore through, and later I put some of the older poems up on a community wall for poets, where strangers could take them freely. He approved of the wall in principle. "Same as glovebox," he said. "Bigger car."
He retired the year I left the city. On my last night as his passenger he drove me to the station and switched off the meter for the only time in our history, and I knew better than to mention it. At the platform he handed me the entire glovebox archive, three years of my own typed pages, soft as cloth at the folds, smelling of boiled sweets and engine.
"Full circle," he said. "Now you carry."
We still talk on the phone on the first of every month. He complains about his knees, his son-in-law, the state of radio. He asks what I'm working on and I read him one poem, exactly one, and he is silent for a long moment at the end... and I can hear him not rushing, and I know that somewhere in that pause there is a red light he's stopping me at, one last time, before he tells me the truth.
The pages he gave me live in my desk drawer now, held together with a rubber band from his dashboard.
Battery, still charged. Somewhere it has to be put.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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