A few weekends ago, I went down to visit my girlfriend at Duke for my first trip to the South. I expected a weekend of mechanical bull riding and Civil War reenactments, but I wasn’t prepared for the cab ride from hell.
I ordered a cab to take me to the train station for my departure. When it arrived, the Sudanese driver asked me in broken English to use his cell phone to take down Mapquest directions-—the first bad sign.
The trip was uneventful until we arrived in Raleigh. I began to doze off until I saw a swarm of oncoming traffic after a recent right turn. Realizing we were on a one-way street, something my driver, Isam, seemed rather blasé about, I hollered for him to stop. The directions were wrong. “Et tu, Mapquest?” I thought.
With Mapquest having failed us, it was time to stop and ask directions. The clock was ticking, and my train was leaving in eight minutes. We stopped for directions.
“Straight down and to the left, you can’t miss it.”
Before the man finished his sentence Isam had floored it. He slammed on the brakes with the train before us. I flew out of the car and started running. Alas, too late. I ran for a bit, but there was no chance.
Defeated, I returned to the cab and sat down. Suddenly I heard a howl unlike anything I have ever heard. Isam slumped forward onto the wheel and started bawling.
Watching this hulking mass heave up and down as he sobbed, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. That’s when I remembered he was from Sudan. I had yelled at a potential Darfur refugee, as if my fate in the ninth ring of hell hadn’t already been sealed. I got out of the car to escape the sounds of Isam’s sobbing and went inside the station. One of us needed to remain calm, and from what I had seen it wasn’t going to be Isam.
I headed back out and calmly asked him to take me back to Durham so I could figure out how to get home. He told me not to worry about the meter, which was at about $65. After the show he had put on, though, the ride may have been free but we both knew he was getting a hefty tip.
We started heading back when he informed me we needed gas. I glanced at the fuel gauge, which was so low it was coming back around to full. We were now driving around the suburbs of Raleigh and neither of us knew where we were.
We finally came upon a gas station, and Isam went inside to ask directions. A few minutes later he came running out to the car with a load of things I couldn’t quite make out. He opened the door and shouted, “Here, I’m so sorry!” and hurled a series of assorted beverages into my lap. I didn’t want the drinks, but I thanked him wholeheartedly and opened a Snapple.
Finally back on the highway, I thought everything was going to be okay. But periodically, Isam’s hands would slowly move from the steering wheel to his face, where he would begin sobbing again. Slowly, the car would drift off the road until my cries of desperation snapped him back to reality.
It was truly a miracle when we got back to Duke, and I leapt out of the car screaming for joy. Isam handed me a card with his personal cell-phone number explaining that if I needed to go to the airport he would take me for free. There was no way I was going to call him .
I returned to my girlfriend’s dorm room. She said her roommate would drive me to airport and I could get a cheap flight. But that would have been too easy. Her roommate never showed up. Trembling, I took Isam’s card out of my wallet. Feeling faint, I dialed the number.
“Hello?” a deep voice bellowed. A single tear rolled down my cheek., but I wiped it away. I couldn’t afford to cry at this point. In fact, I couldn’t really afford anything. At $450, the ultimate cost of the trip after the plane, train, and cab, I could have stayed in D.C. and gotten a nice hooker. My girlfriend didn’t find that funny, and neither do I, ‘cause it’s true.
