One Thing: I'm a taxi liar
seeing the world one titty bar at a time
Don’t judge me, but I have never spoken a word of truth to a taxi driver in my life, except for the address of the place I’m going. Actually, you can judge me, I’m fine with that - I'm too old and set in my ways now to change, and external shame has long since ceased being a motivating factor to me, a lazy mosquito that I only occasionally notice and flick away with a somnolent hand.
I don’t know how it started, but I realised a long time ago that in a taxi ride, you can be anything, or more importantly, anyone. They’re a kind of liminal zone (yeah I studied creative writing), where for a brief moment the gap between your destinations you can slide between the edges of reality and become someone new. You might think this would always be aspirational - I’m an international model, I’m Booker award winning author Damon Galgut, I’m the tallest woman in the world. But I am both limited by the curse of sight (so many taxi drivers can see these days and instantly verify that I am not a very tall woman) and inclined to mild domestic tragedy, perhaps due to how depressing a taxi is. On a recent trip, the polite taxi driver asked if I was in town for work, and I answered “oh I have a couple of meetings set up (doing what???), but I’m helping my sister move house after a divorce”. OK Johnny Franzen? Please note I was in town for a joyous family birthday.
I seem to love larping as a kind of sad, mid-level businessman, alluding to boring conferences and joyless 3 star hotels. Recently when I was in Adelaide, for the genuinely interesting and exciting reason of speaking on a panel about my upcomong novel, I told the taxi driver that I “doing damage control for a colleague’s fuck up”. And you BETTER believe I laughed wryly, tapping away on my phone like I was “looping back” to colleagues. I was playing Marvel Snap.
Mostly this is just a fun little game to try and distract myself from watching the taxi money tracker device tick upward with dread, but I have discovered a delightful little perk of my commitment to deceit when I’ve gone back to Sydney over the last few years. I moved to Melbourne in 2021, just in time to suffer through the majority of Melbourne’s lockdowns (and in general), which means I regularly go back to Sydney to see my family and friends and “the sun”. Last week I went back for my friend Sammy’s wedding, which was perfect. On my way to the wedding from my hotel, I’d already established my persona (gay businessman attending the wedding of his boss), and my driver started pointing out local landmarks.
“That used to be a titty bar” he grunted, pointing at the Oxford Tavern, which I hadn’t realised had shut down. “Hipsters took it over and tried to make it into a gastropub… didn’t work… probably gonna be a titty bar again” he said. “You like titty bars?”
You have to realise I was wearing a silk neckerchief at the time, so I was personally baffled as to what vibe I was currently giving this man. “Ha ha, I wish!” I said, which seemed to confuse him enough that he then spent the rest of the trip pointing out other “titty bars”.
But the beautiful thing was that I lived around the corner from the Oxford Tavern for years, and having its shuttered doors and storied past pointed out to me like I was a tourist made me somewhat sad about the city I no longer called home, but also flooded me with the good nostalgia. As we drove through Stanmore I saw the street I’d walk up most Monday nights to go to the Salisbury to have dinner with my dear friends (I swear all my memories aren’t pub based), as we went down Marrickville road I saw the weird little theatre where one of my early plays had a run, and a sharehouse where an ex and I lived with our two insane dogs. I’m so familiar and comfortable with this city that mostly it’s invisible to me, unremarkable (except for that thing where the train pulls up at Circular Quay and you realise it’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world), so briefly becoming someone else (sad corporate guy) allowed me to see the city as a tourist and immerse myself in all my cherished memories, and actually see it with the new eyes of a liar.
“That’s a titty bar,” my taxi driver pointed out. “I didn’t know that” I responded enthusiastically. But I did.
I’ve recently been reading about the newspaper/ magazine booms of New York in the 60s and 70s, because I’m that kind of nerd, and one of the things I was feeling sad about was that I never got to write cute little “slice of life” columns. And then I remembered I have my own publication where I make all the rules and questionable decisions, so ONE THING is gonna be that.
Anyway, please subscribe:
More slices of life, please!