Them's Fightin' Words

Initially I thought it would be best if I didn’t write this post because it’s a very sensitive issue and it could potentially get Excite Taxis into a lot of trouble, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to forget what happened to us on Friday night and I think my readers have a right to know that there’s an Excite Taxis driver out there who is a very sad and fucked up person.

Around 8.30pm on Friday night, J-Rab, Jennyjen and myself called Excite Taxis to be collected from our flat in Vredehoek and climbed into a taxi shortly thereafter with a guy who, right from the get go, I got a very weird feeling about.

We went through the usual routine of telling him where to take us after which Jennyjen asked the guy if we could put on the radio, to which he abruptly replied, “No.”

We’d had a few glasses of wine at the flat (hence the reason why we weren’t driving) and so, on hearing that there was no music we broke out in spontaneous song and belted out what I felt was a rousing version of “Karma Chameleon”.

The taxi driver didn’t seem to share this opinion however, and I watched out the corner of my eye as his knuckles slowly turned whiter and whiter while he gripped the steering wheel, his eyes trained like crosshairs on the street in front of him.

We were driving to Long Street, a trip that probably takes about 10 minutes with traffic so it’s hardly as if we were droning on in this poor guy’s ear for 30 minutes. In fact, all we managed were two songs really, before things turned nasty.

This guy had a pasta salad on his dashboard which started sliding all over the place as he drove faster and faster, eventually almost klapping 100km/h as he came around Buitensingel to the tuneful accompaniment of the Bowie classic “Ground Control To Major Tom”.

It was at this time that the pasta salad slid right off the dashboard and almost into the guy’s lap, but he managed to grab it at the last  minute and throw it with all the force he could muster out his driver’s side window where it hit the road in a shower of elbow macaroni and mayonnaise.

Our singing had provoked what can only be described as a murderous rage in our taxi driver and the whole scene very quickly turned nasty.

He ran straight through a red light at the Buitensingel / Long street intersection and then shortly after that, grabbed his two-way radio and shouted, “Control I can’t hear what you’re saying until these people get out the car!”

“Excuse me!” J-Rab replied, indignant, “but if you want us to stop singing you can just ask us instead of driving like a maniac!”

“You people are bloody inconsiderate!” he shouted back at us.

“We’re just enjoying ourselves, there’s no need to behave like that! You could just have asked us to please be quiet!” J-Rab said, starting to get angry.

“You are inconsiderate! You have no respect!” he repeated, before dropping the bomb that blew everything out of proportion, “We forgave you for what you did!”

“WHAT?!” Jennyjen replied, shocked, “DON’T YOU DARE BRING RACE INTO THIS! RACE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS!”

“YES IT DOES!” he shouted back at us, “WE FORGAVE YOU FOR WHAT YOU DID AND NOW YOU THINK YOU CAN CARRY ON LIKE THIS!”

“WE’RE IN OUR FUCKING 20s! WE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT HAPPENED IN THIS COUNTRY, WE WERE CHILDREN WHEN THAT WAS ALL GOING ON!” J-Rab replied.

“YOU’RE STILL CHILDREN!” he shouted, “YOU THINK YOU CAN TREAT US HOWEVER YOU WANT!”

“Oh my God, stop this taxi, I want to get out,” J-Rab replied.

“No, this isn’t where we want to be. I’m not paying for him to just drop us anywhere,” Jennyjen said.

And so we turned back up onto Loop street so we could go another lap, much to my delight.

“If we were upsetting you, you should have just asked us to please be quiet and we would have,” Jennyjen said.

“No you wouldn’t!” he replied, still fuming.

“Yes, we would have,” I said, trying to placate the situation, “and you also just threw a perfectly good pasta salad out the window man, what the hell was that all about?!”

“You all think you can just behave any way you want, but you’ll see, you’ll see,” he said, darkly.

“Why? Are you planning some kind of rebellion or riot or something?” Jennyjen asked pragmatically.

“You’ll see,” he repeated mysteriously.

A few seconds later we all piled out, the girls adamant that they weren’t going to pay him a cent. Of course I paid the man his money in full.

I felt sorry for him. I just got the idea that he’s been through and seen some horrible, horrible things in his life that have left him extremely bitter and furious at the world and from what I could gather, white South Africans in particular.

Which begs the question, why be a taxi driver in the first place? He must have picked up another 10 car loads of young white people that night 50 times more inebriated than we were, how did he handle them? By speeding around the streets maniacally, hurling pasta salad bombs out his window like Molotov Cocktails whilst making vague threats alluding to some form of catastrophic retribution he wants to inflict on taxi-singers throughout the country?

I’m not saying we weren’t to blame for what went down. We were behaving like idiots because we were happy, not because we were deliberately trying to piss the guy off, but his reaction was just so ugly and nasty and uncalled for.

Sure, tell us to shut the fuck up, not everyone’s a Bowie fan, I’m fine with that, but don’t turn the whole thing into a race issue, that’s not what it was at all.

I guess what shocked me the most is the fact that my generation (mostly) is so sheltered from racism like that, it’s actually really shocking watching it rear it’s ugly head like some fucking creature from the bottom of the black lagoon.

Despite all the awesome taxi rides I’ve taken with drivers of all races in this city who I’ve chatted to, laughed with and swapped stories with, from now on I’m riding in silence.

It’s just not worth the risk of ending up with one that jumps red lights instead of simply asking you to pipe down and treats a perfectly good pasta salad with such irrational contempt.

That just ain’t right man.

It just ain’t right.

-ST