Book Review: The Last Taxi Driver

 The Last Taxi Driver, by Lee Durkee

    I picked up this book because of the cover and the title: I saw it in the bookstore. I liked the cover -- it was bright yellow. I smiled at the title. I read the synopsis. I laughed. I bought it.

      It's one of the many reasons I browse in real bookstores as opposed to buying online. I never know what I'm looking for until I find it.

    Anyway. I was right about the book. It's enticing. It's funny. It's worth a read.

    Lou works as a cabbie in a small town in northern Mississippi filled with obnoxious frat boys, drug dealers, and desperately poor people. His employer is one of the last legitimate taxi companies around -- although its owner is a conniving fool who seems to dedicate her life to making her drivers miserable. But Uber is coming -- which will make the drivers even more miserable and anxious, with even less control over their down-and-out lives.

    So Lou muddles through his 12-hour shifts, shuffling drunks and meth-heads and old people on their last legs to low-paying jobs, hospital visits, and liquor runs in a city without public transportation. And Lou has his own problems: He's a failed college teacher (one semester) and novelist (one book, rarely to be found). He's looking for an excuse to get his no-longer girlfriend to move out, while narrating his lonely, melancholy life.

    He's really good at the narrating. And the loneliness. And the melancholy. And his undisguised despair at the town he lives in and how it forces people to live lives of -- as the philosopher once said -- quiet desperation.

    Consider this passage about the only Black Republican man in town -- who spends his days guarding the Confederate statute in the town square, while getting routinely beat up for his troubles.

Clem ended up meeting a Black woman at some Tea Party gathering who was also into the rebel flag -- there's somebody for everyone -- and they became a couple until one night, driving home from a rally, the two of them became convinced somebody was following their truck. Clem called the police -- 911 recorded the whole incident -- then he sped up, lost control of his pickup, ran off a bridge into the Tallahatchie River, and the two of them drowned together in that river without anybody ever writing them a song.

    Gems like that make one keep reading. So does his chapter of tips for the budding cab driver: Don't project your prejudices on the people you encounter while driving. Having a penis doesn't make one an awesome driver. Never fuck with anybody driving a Dodge Charger, Don't take selfies at red lights.

    There's more, but you'll have to buy the book to read them. Get thee immediately to your local bookstore and do so.