RACHEL'S COLUMNS

These articles appeared in Rachel's column every Friday in the A3 section of The Age

Frightful turns and the meter's running
12th March 2004

According to research "taxi drivers' brains enlarge with the job in order to help them store detailed maps of the city."  Taxi drivers given brain scans by scientists at the University of London had a larger hippocampus compared with other people.  This is the part of the brain associated with navigation on birds and animals and experts believe that the hippocampus grows larger to adapt to the amount of navigation they have to do.

This doesn't mean cabbies are smarter than the rest of us, although they do use less pronouns, but I reckon you can find out everything you need to know about a city; how it thinks, feels and acts-its personality, by the way the taxi drivers treat you.  They embody a city's personality disorder – which may be introverted, extroverted, hostile or schizoid.

Take Adelaide for instance, a charming city famous for its churches, festivals and bloodcurdling kooky crimes.  After booking a cab on a sultry summer afternoon, the over-enthusiastically-polite driver arrived, rang on the doorbell, escorted me to the car and held open the passenger door until I was seated comfortably in the front seat.  He then spent the next five minutes squeezing the blackheads on his nose in front of a small magnified mirror attached to the dashboard with masking tape.  When we finally drove away from the house, he leant towards me menacingly like a giant vulture and hissed, "It's an enchanting evening, isn't it?"  My life floated past me like body parts down a river as I imagined myself being garroted and flung into a bank-vault in Snowtown.  I thought I was dead for sure, but he was just being friendly in a lurking-behind-the-shadows, Adelaide, kind of way.

In Sydney, I jumped into a cab that smelt as if the driver had been wearing the same polyester trousers for a week.  He sped towards the CBD before I'd even had a chance to close the car door or tell him where I was going.

"Whereyagoinlady?"  He was breathless and spoke so quickly, I thought he'd said, "canyahelpmelady".  I unfastened my safety belt and grabbed the steering wheel convinced he was having a cardiac arrest.  He slammed on the brakes, peeled me off the wheel and threw his arm against my chest so I wouldn't go through the window.

"Whaddyathinkyadoin'?"  He screamed.
"I thought you were having a heart attack!"
“You bloody nearly give me one-where you goin' I said?"
"The W Hotel."
He squinted and saliva bubbles foamed at the corners of his mouth as he snarled, "How d'ya bloody spell that?"
"Dubbleyou – like the letter!"  I replied emphatically.
"Nobody sent me no bloody letter – just bloody tell me where it bloody is!" 

I did, he drove and I paid him.  You know that chattering sound you hear in Sydney all the time?  It's taxi passengers' teeth.

 I'd read somewhere that New York's taxi drivers are mobile philosophers, liberally dispensing wisdom and advice.  On my first day there, sitting behind bulletproof glass and lured by the romance of sharing my loneliness with a complete stranger, I put this question to a taxi driver.  "Do you believe evil exists?"  The guy babbled for ten minutes in another language before I realised that he was speaking into his mobile phone.  He hadn't heard a word I'd said other than the address.

 During my stay in that city, not once did I get into a taxi where the driver wasn't totally absorbed in another conversation on his mobile phone.  The entire transaction, travel and payment were conducted as if I was just a dip in the road, a momentary interruption to the Technicolor full-feature of his life.

 Back in Melbourne last week, prickly with heat and the scars of recent taxi rides, I slid into a cab in Collins Street, said what I needed to say and stared out the window.  A gentle tap on the shoulder made me turn around to a smile as big as Luna Park's entrance (but with fewer teeth) and a cupped hand full of lollies stretched out towards me.  "Have a Mintie love – you look like you could use a sugar hit."