![]() ![]() Man, let’s get outta here,” says Earl, and back they go to the first ex-girlfriend’s house. (Like cabbies the world over, no doubt, Lou is acutely aware of both time and gas consumption.) Yet she’s with “some guy with the largest bald head I’ve ever seen,” his meaty arm covered in Japanese gangster tattoos. He swings his twenty-year-old Town Car around, and they catch her, in Lou’s estimation, after ten minutes and five gallons. ![]() She’s not there, either, but as they’re heading to a third girl’s house, they’re passed by a robin’s-egg blue ‘57 convertible. When Earl, the guy who breaks into his ex’s house, can’t find her, he gets Lou to take him to, that’s right, the house of another ex. The book actually has as its epigraph a half-page speech that Wizard, the Peter Boyle character in Scorsese’s movie, makes when Travis confesses he’s been having “some bad ideas in my head,” telling him that a better plan would be to get laid, get drunk, have fun. Lou, the cabbie in this novel, is a lot more easy-going than Travis is. Rodger is the Jesus of the incel movement, but Travis Bickle was his John the Baptist. Today incels worship Elliot Rodger, who in 2014 posted a hate-filled manifesto about his sexual frustration and then killed six people and injured fourteen others in Isla Vista, CA by stabbing, shooting, and ramming them with his car. Scorsese’s movie not only changed filmmaking but also opened a window on the era of the mass killer. In the midst of Manhattan’s bustle, Travis is epically lonely and shockingly unprepared to negotiate the most ordinary transactions, illustrated best when he takes Cybill Shepherd’s character to a porn movie because he didn’t know there was any other kind. Then came Martin Scorsese’s ground-breaking film starring Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle, a big-city hack driver who works the night shift and sees everything, maybe too much. Before Taxi Driver, your average cab driver was a lovable knucklehead with a worldly philosophy that barely masked a heart of gold. The world’s cabbies and their chroniclers know but two time periods, BTD and ATD. I didn’t see that coming, thinks Lou, and then “I find myself wondering what makes an accomplice an accomplice,” which is the first of probably a hundred what’s-life-really-like thoughts he has in the course of this balky, meandering, engaging book. She’s probably married-divorced twice.” When they get to her house, guy gets out, knocks, waits, breaks in. Guy wants to go to his old girlfriend’s house in one of the housing projects in this little college town, but when Lou suggests he call first, his fare says, “Man, I don’t even know her number been so long. (At one point, he addresses a hypothetical fare: “Buddy, can you spare one of those second-novel pills? Just drop it on the floorboard and I’ll find it.”) As the novel begins, he picks up somebody who just got out of Parchman, Mississippi’s hell-on-earth prison. He has published one novel and is thinking about writing another in a way that suggests he never will. Let’s hop on our skateboard and trail after Lou as he begins his first day. It’s more like the center has been run over so many times that it’s just a stain on the county road that nobody uses any more ever since they built that highway. Decentralized, atomized, and alternately tranquilized and jacked up on cheap beer and meth, this is the world of Beckett, Godard, Robbe-Grillet. Whereas Chaucer’s pilgrims mounted up and rode as a group from London to Canterbury, telling tales as they go, Lou the cabbie’s fares are loners who bounce from trailer to hospital to dead-end job, and it is Lou who tells their tales. The Last Taxi Driver is a Canterbury Tales for our time, meaning that the people in it move the way we do.
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