TxM6 -- Taxi Murders
The Death of Eddie Meyers
Memories of Vietnam 1968
January 31, 1989, 07:01:23

In 1609, Heinrich Hutson (who knew the Thames),
and his mate John Colman, set sail on goodly ship
far away the pristine cataract where blind sand and
simple Ocean parted as one age passed by its
nature to another.

Imagine passing time on the taxi stand in Fort Lee,
New Jersey. 1989. Another Chinese New Year: Is it
the Year of the Snake again?

One blessed night I wait for the black clock to
automatically change my daily year closer to
millennium. I one step past twelve and thy will be
done I imagine the incoming as a great roar of the
flood, which tides pulls down into the bottom well.

Herein, the instant opened, then closed and pitched
beyond equator and that partial eclipse of the sun, Or
sleep without life, although I am not dying. Can I
live and not live, be and not be aware of the dreams I
conjured in Nam? Forget physics. Forget the grunts.
Forget the nasty delusion of life as great sailing ships
caressed North River right before my eyes as I passed
before the bridge. Enough of this crap.

Driving the cab too slow, too fast, as I picked up some
fellow travelers moving their words back into the city,
almost slow motion, now and then, the breeze cold as
I wish I could open the window and flitter out over the
George Washington Memorial Bridge. I want to fly. I know
the divided traffic lane spoke when my taxis forced the
ancient truck through unopened doors. What a crash! No
place to go and no sanctuary until my yellow cabs exits
off through the tunnels into the gray lane of New York
and London, suddenly merged in a Technicolor dream, lost
in mornings after midnight when the taxis rolled out
fiery as material sun ray clouds.

Does this dream of death reflect into my ass, or am I too
high in the cab, stoned as a great sun wheel and broken
down in Apache Sand paintings drunken sot.

Dear Jackson Pollack killed many a girl with his dear
automobile. He was a great painter no doubt, and a
greater man, if you believe the mysterious books where he
wrote it down: that recipe for fame where being part of
the process of that spray of color that mimics the whole
body as a brush. He was so intensely a part of the
color when he was not painting he had to be insane
and drunk.

That Ancient Game of Chance or the Sailing ship at flood --
Here the ancient wooden ships. Dip yellow main sail
and easily cover steel frames and glass with a bare
thin canvas haze. Can we reverse time, or did we? Easy
does it.

No fucking in the Garden of Eden. Stand by Jerusalem.
We carry the lights to instant photograph of all the
dear names etched in Black Marble at DC Vietnam
Memorial.

Can I dream again and live, or is death too soft when
I hide in some dead women's skin, covering in the
dream, as if necrophilia were a status symbol for old
dead grunts carrying home ten years after dying
humping the last hill before their tour was up.

Smoking and laughing jabbing the air, ten thousand
violent taxi drivers lean against cab fender and gaze
beyond the arch of aluminum bridges, and take in their
mouth the great neon spirit's tit and expire.


2.

Eddie Meyers Buys the Perfect Blowjob! 31 January 1989

It was thundering cold, blustery, raining snow and ice
the day former lifeguard and US Marine Staff Sgt. Eddie
Meyer's walked his last taxi driving tour.

Sgt. Eddie courted death, snorted coke, fucked dime
whores, and did anything in his power to die early. He
insisted on risk multiplied by risk. And that frozen
day, getting, what he called the perfect blowjob
Eddie's heart quit as he shot into the child's mouth.

Henry heard the story of the "blow by blow" directly
from the girl. A week after Eddie died he picked Judy
up on a whim as she hitched across the GW Bridge.

All of us knew about Judy. On the street runaway at
14, shooting coke at 15. She had a kid last year at
16; her parents' back in Ohio raised little girl. Judy
couldn't take it so she returned to the streets two
months later.

She told the driver Fat Frank that she loved Eddie and
only went back on the game, using her favorite British
slang, when she lost her fast food job. "I would fuck
Eddie just because," she said. I am sad he died. He
always made me laugh. Others said that Judy was full
of shit and that her pimp fucked with Eddie's drugs
when Eddie got too close to Judy. Others, and there
are always fifty stories for one truth saying Judy Fucked?
Eddie up when he refused to take her in his cab to
cop blow. Truth is always fragile.


3.

Laurie seemed sad, as Henry told the story to Aaron
and Angela later that night. Sure, Judy could be
lying. Then again, all I gave her was a free ride to
the city. I didn't even wait, he said.

She got out, and looking almost dead herself, pushed
her head back into the cab, through my open window,
and asked me if I would wait while she copped.
She continued smiling and kissing me on the cheek;
that "if I waited she would give me what she had given
Eddie." I laughed at her, and sped off, and I could see she
was laughing as well. I wondered why I let her kiss me on
the cheek.

Henry loved his stories called them shadows. He
saw the good Sgt. as the perfect ghost. He was dead
before he lived; Henry thought when he learned how
Eddie had died. And saying that, they he remembered
how they shared war stories, and how he believed
everything that Eddie said.

Eddie would slap Henry's back, after each story, and
carefully ask Henry why the fuck he drove a cab. Eddie
would add, finally, yea I know you got fired for
fucking some underage student, but what's the other
reason.

Man, you're out of place here, but Hen again, being
out of place, fits. We're all out of place, so you
might as well enjoy it, and he would offer Henry a
hit, or a line and Henry would carefully accept the
joint and refuse the coke.

The last thing Henry remembered. That New Year, just
before Midnight, on the taxi stand, three cabs behind
Eddie on the stand.

Eddie was looking at his box of photos. He kept them
with his cash in the cab. They were the usual ones.
Pictures of Eddie as a lifeguard, in Nam, in uniform.
Eddie would always say, look how handsome I was then,
as he fingered his past. Here's my son. Wasn't he
great? I miss him, he would add. Why did he die? Why
did I buy him that fast car so he could kill him self.
I told him not to race that fucking car.

Eddie rambled like this all the time. Most of the
drivers ignored him. Henry couldn't, but when Eddie,
called the taxi stand "His patient rest before that
moral hour soon to come." Henry saw Eddie the poet and
he remembered how he also called the GW Bridge, his
righteous black ocean to "Never-never land." Just like
Tinker bell, he said, and he would snap his fingers,
and laugh, letting his body shiver. If I could only
twinkle, he said, how I could get laid. And the other
drivers, Henry included, would laugh at the show,
waiting like Eddie, for their last call, caressing the
bridge, called it their righteous ocean.

So Myths are born.

Two hours after death Eddie another drunken ghost
rode the bridge? I never saw him, but some did. Sure,
I believe them.

One driver protested Eddie's claims. He said – how
can a ghost get stoned and drunk? How cans a ghost
get blown? “You know,” the man said, “if Eddie were
really a ghost he would have whores to service him.
"Would be free, the man, would protest, right?"

I remember Eddie one summer night maybe a year or two
earlier. Eddie was in back of a broken down cab with a
Spanish hooker. She was fucking him. The girl looked
about 20 but was probably 14. Eddie was banging her
not caring if I watched, and the bitch, was spread out on
the back seat, half stoned, almost asleep, oblivious to
the grunts and groans, as Eddie pushed his body into
her furiously trying to keep himself hard after he came. I
know I am a “sicko” but I watched the whole thing. Eddie
said later that she asked if I would be next. He told her
No, that I was a faggot, and she said, laughing back, that
her brother would do me for twenty. I said that she could
blow me if she paid me, and she smiled, pushed me down
and sucked me off in five minutes rubbing my balls to make
it happen quicker. She loved it, she said, and it was free,
which pissed off Eddie? She did suck well. It was quick and
I rose into her summer head. I felt it all like a bang on the
back of your life when you come you are like a delicious
machine making the cream into a luxurious float. I loved
watching her suck I remembered as Eddie floated past.
She sucked as her teeth scratched, and as quick as I came,
she sucked longer afterwards. Finally she licked up semen
that had dripped from her chin to almost invisible tits.

Eddie was never off course. He raged for the coke and
pussy. He died having his dick sucked, and Henry added,
telling Aaron the story, you know if I have to die, why
not in the saddle.

Aaron, always the comic, retorted, bet you fucked the
girl too. It wasn't just a blow job. Don't bullshit me Henry;
I know you never turn young ass down. You got the taste
for it in Nam like I did.


Reprise

Simple setting: a taxi man and a cold silver bridge.
Commentary will not mitigate delusions. I shared
Eddie's steps, if not his choices as we complete each
passage between the spans.

As we travel we examine our listening and speaking. We
notice the pauses and inflection of speech; compare it
to the pauses in the flood below where the river
changes tides. We not the distance we would fall if there
were no bridge. We watch the dark collect us, and then
as we ride, always-in fear and trembling as one philosopher
said. When we ride that bridge between tower and glory
(or failure) we find that common incidence of pleasure and
pain: we become the war that man kind hates.

We become the philosopher of death and we are frightened
of reprisals from our memories of childhood where we made
into brutal soup, or at least I was, by families, genes and
those casual sexual touches that parents impose as a sign
of secret love.

Now, I know all families are not fucked up -- but I knew only
the sick kind -- war, murder rage and revenge – we are spoiled
and murder the rivers that brought us to an ordinary
but ignoble end.


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