Dan climbed in the back of the cab, and heaved a sigh of resignation. He wasn't happy about where he was going, but, come on, he didn't have a choice.
"Forty-sixth and Cumberland please." he muttered to the driver, who sped off.
After a nice long moment of comfortable silence, Dan started to get that feeling. You know that feeling you get when you some how know the other person in the car wants to initiate conversation even though they've made no outward sign? He wasn't feeling like anything remotely resembling a social butterfly at the moment, maybe a social rhinoceros, so as a countermeasure he pretended to sleep. Even snore a bit.
"You like to read, man?" querried the cabbie, who apparently couldn't take a hint.
That's all right, Dan thought, just snore a bit louder, and-
"I said, you like to read? he asked again.
Ok, fine. Keep your responses short, and ask no open-ended questions.
"A little." Dan volunteered.
"Oh yeah? Like what?"
"You know, a little o' this, a little o' that."
" Yeah. I'm a big fan of Douglas Adams, myself. You ever read him?"
"Uh... I think so, was he the Slaughterhouse guy?"
"No, man, that was Vonnegut! I'm talking about Douglas Adams, you know the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy?" The driver took his books seriously and Dan, in fact, had no idea who Adams was, but he thought it best to play along.
"Oh yeah, yeah. The Space... hitchhiking.. thing. Yeah. Great book. I hear the movie didn't do it justice." Dan was guessing here, big time.
"Ain't no movie, man. Never got made. No, poor Doug never saw that dream. Corporate bullshit and all that, you know? No, but I bring him up 'cause I got this book they put out after he died, an' it's great!"
"Yeah?" Shit. Despite being one word, that amounts to a question. Sort of.
"Oh yeah. One part actually made me take stock of my career, you know. This detective guy gets in a cab and says to the driver... well, what do you think he says?"
"I don't know, 'follow that cab'? " Why? Why won't it stop?
" 'Follow that cab', exactly! Then the driver goes off on this whole tirade about how nobody ever said that to him, and if nobody ever said that to him, and if he is to believe that television is any indication, it is said fairly often to cabbies. So he figures that means he must be the cab everybody is following. Isn't that great? Priceless."
"Yeah, that's pretty good." It actually was pretty good. "But how did that make you look at your career any differently? Do you think you're that one cab with a train of detectives following you around?"
"What? OH! No, I was just thinking I could do that. You know, write a book. How hard could it be?"
How hard, indeed.
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