Reflections on driving a cab. Waking up early, like 4 am, the city of Philadelphia and its surrounding environs have a quiet beauty, particularly some of the worst sections. The kind of surreal stillness that the city has between breaths, where just the bones are alive, all the human and automotive muscle stripped away, exposing just what’s left: the kind of feeling, when as a kid, I got when I was up way past my bedtime; seeing things that you aren’t privy to normally, during normal people hours; as a kid, this was usually softcore porn. These days, I’d compare it to watching a good friend sleep, though without the creepy stalker connotation: seeing someone you care about at rest after a hard day, the lines and crease of their face relaxed.

I don’t generally relate to morning people. My thought processes just tend to be different. They’re fairly often traveling somewhere work-related, pursuing whatever it is that normal people pursue: mortgage payment, car payment, credit card payment, some kind of payment. With them, I try to listen more, occasionally prodding with a mildly contrary remark; to learn why they pursue the things they pursue. I say “they” because morning people are, for the most part, largely dissimilar to me. Their basic needs of food, shelter, comfort and affection are usually similar, but guess the real difference is how they define the latter two: What is comfort? What is affection?

Is comfort sitting in an uncomfortable car seat all day, punctuated by burst of jarring motion to assist someone with their luggage or groceries, having to keep your eyes always fixated on the road, and keep your mind focused on the psychological needs of your passenger, both of which change at irregular intervals? This is what being a good cab driver is, and yes, actually, it’s quite comfortable. Constant instability, I feel, doesn’t sit well with most people. They need some sense of routine. Others thrive on a lack of routine, and I think that there are more of them at night.

One of the most untrue statements one can say is “There are two types of people.” That said, there are two types of people: day people and night people, for lack of a better defining line. I use this distinction because the latter type seems to be more prevalent during the night, though as with any generalization, there are of course plenty of exceptions.

Night people I think look for more fleeting affection, the grope at the bar, the anonymous fuck, the jacking off while watching two dogs hump. Day people have probably stopped reading after that little gem.

Day people do the husband/wife or girlfriend/boyfriend thing, the stable thing, the thing where you put up with the occasional emotional discomfort for the greater pleasantness of waking up next to someone who cares about you. Night people go for this to, of course, but I think it lasts longer during with day people.

Night people and day people might agree on politics, or religion, or abortion, or necrophilia, or any number of things, but the why is where the distinction lies: is it because of the mind or the gut that dictates your feelings on the subject? Do you like a politician because of their politics or their face and body language? Do you believe in God because it’s what makes sense to you, it’s what you were taught or because deep down in the cockles of your heart, you know that there is a fundamental plan to the universe, directed but an unseen hand? Do you thing that having sex with a corpse is gross, fucked up and weird because it’s gross, fucked up and weird, or are you gross, fucked up and weird? Because really, dude, if having sex with dead people is your idea of a good time, I don’t know, use protection or something. And shower. Ug. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Anyway, there’s this guy in my cab who I figured for the boring accountant, the nine to fiver, the grunt in the constant battle against insurmountable mounds of paperwork. Well, he’s an accountant. The guy has ridden with me several times, and has given me fleeting feelings that he carrying some heavy weight. Not so much a guilty weight, more of an empty weight. Empty weights, while sounding like a self contradicting phrase, are often the heaviest. It’s the weight of having an unfulfilled need in your life; an itch that you can’t bring yourself to scratch, or would feel guilty about scratching.

So, when I drove by a drove of cross-country running girls in shorts, and remarked on the beauty of birds flying in formation, I received a taste of what this dude’s weight/itch was: lack of sexual fulfillment. As soon as I pointed out the group of cuties, I got a tirade about all the little pieces of ass trotting around center city, and how he loved spring for the return, after a winter slumber, of skirts and how he had an asian girlfriend in college who gave him a blumpkin once (blumpkin: noun, the act of performing fellatio on one whilst they defecate in a toilet) and how his wife is so boring in bed. Ah, there’s the weight. My response was along the lines of “Oh?”

People will tell cab drivers things that they would never normally tell their co-worker, or spouse, or therapist. It’s the anonymity. And, in my case, the seeming utter lack of judgment. If the guy, while he’s “making love” to his wife, might perhaps be thinking about dropping a deuce on her chest, or maybe dressing in her clothes and having her beat him with an eggplant, who am I to say that that’s wrong? I’m just a cab driver. So he proceeds to tell me that when he’s with his wife, and his son is in bed, he’s had a harder and harder time getting hard. He’s considering looking into Viagra or Cialis or some weird hormone treatment (I counseled against this last; he could end up bald with bitch-tits). I got the strong feeling by his lackluster talk about drug or hormone therapy that he didn’t think that his problem was physical (he’s in his late thirties and seems in decent health). I considered the wisdom of this for a moment, but then, banking on the anonymity factor, I inquired as to what he thought about when he was plowing the field. He told me usually other women. Ok, who doesn’t do that every so often? He said that he likes them a little older. Oh shit, here we go. I inquired as to what older was. He blushed and grew visibly uncomfortable. No prodding here, I thought, he’ll talk or he won’t, and it really doesn’t matter to me if he does. Though I am sort of car-wreck curious. And he begins talking about his mother and how she’s in a nursing home (wow, this is going downhill in a hurry) and her roommate is in her seventies (I’ve seen some not unattractive seventy year olds. I guess.) and how the roommate has to have her bedpan changed like three times a day (oops, right back on the downhill). It was right about then that we pulled up to his house, and embarrassed but relieved, he got out. He rode with me again a couple of weeks later. He completed his thought.

The woman, his mother’s roommate, had gotten his attention while his mother was riding the morphine train, and informed in that, since she had taken a fall and broken her wrist, she had been unable to masturbate, which had, until then, been the only thing she looked forward to.

I’m sure you see where this leads.

So, with his mother unconscious next to him, he proceeds to finger this bedridden elderly woman to an intense, squirting orgasm. He told me (his face turning a shade of red that a beet would envy) that he had an intense erection the entire time. I, actually taken aback for the first time in several years, could only think to laud him for helping out someone who was disabled. As I said, I’m really not judgmental. He did this a couple more times, though, he said that he and the roommate never got close on any emotional level, that it was purely physical. But he began to look forward to going to the nursing home, and his mother, whose health was in steady decline, was not the source of his eagerness, needless to say. So he and the roommate continued like this for the better part of a year, until she died of pneumonia. This had apparently been roughly three years prior, and, right around then, his libido took a nose dive. Correction, not his libido; he was as horny as ever. His ability to fulfill himself took the dive. I asked him if he saw any correlation. He said of course he did, he was just unsure how to act on it. I took a mental deep breath, rolled the dice and asked him if he felt like he satisfied his wife in bed.

He actually managed to turn more red, drifting towards purple.

Ah. The meat of the matter, as it were.

He replied that no, he didn’t. I inquired as to whether or not he had had other extramarital trysts. He said that while he hadn’t, he would be open to the idea. And then the bomb.

He asked me for my number. I asked him to what end. He said that he was wondering if I would perhaps come over and fuck his wife while he watched.

I guess the point of that whole anecdote is to say that, occasionally, for whatever reason, night people walk around during the day. People with those more… complicated…. Tastes, needs, wants and desires sometimes manage to look a surprising amount like you. Or me.

I asked him what his wife looked like, and I might just give them a call.