Anoush was the last of a dying breed: Pakistani American, heavy on the horn, patriotically heedless of yellow lights. Apps like Lyft and Mhustle had elbowed in on his terrain, offering plush seats and Dasani in exchange for higher fares. And though the driverless revolution hadn’t arrived like we’d been promised, yellow cabs were still few and far between. If you could afford New York, you could afford these apps. I was a holdout. Mhustle was for show-offs, and Lyft’s smooth-sailing hybrids left me anesthetized. I preferred wind through duct-taped windows, guys like Anoush.
“Asshole,” he said, passing a Tesla with California plates. I wasn’t sure if he meant the car’s driver or its creator, Mr. Musk: husband of models, saver of ozone, emissary to Mars, and an outspoken promoter of the UBI.
“Nothing against Teslas,” Anoush clarified. “It’s just a shame that the jerkoffs who buy them can’t drive. People say Jersey is the asshole of America, but I’m telling you, it’s California.”
“Armpit,” I said. “But point taken.”
I wondered if he’d ever left New York. Travel was expensive, and airports still weren’t pleasant places for men of his skin tone. Just the previous week, Twitter was abuzz with the story of two teenage boys, on a class trip to D.C, forcibly stripped of their turbans by LaGuardia security. Besides, California had lost much of its appeal in the wake of climate change. Who needed Venice when you could surf the Long Island Sound without so much as a wetsuit for warmth? Even In-N-Out was now bicoastal. All Cali had left was smog and drought. Anoush turned up the music. A rapper spit end-rhyming couplets on the subject of #Occupy, threatening to “cream on Senator Breem” and “go to war for Devor.”
“Fuuuuck,” said Anoush. “I completely forgot about the Funeral. Should have taken Eleventh instead.”
I’d forgotten as well, distracted by Penny, and news of Broder, and vape-clouded memories of simpler times. I was headed, instead, to the Gatsby party. It seemed right for my mood: stuck in the past, sulky that my wardrobe hadn’t saved me. To get there we had to pass through the Funeral for Capitalism. The event was bigger than I’d envisioned, thousands strong, inflatable caskets crowd-surfing the crowd. I rolled down the window. The amplified voice sounded like Devor’s, but it was hard to tell beneath the cheers and engine noise.
“Big crowd.”
“You’re telling me,” said Anoush. “I was down here earlier, before my shift. But I don’t know, man. I mean, what’s gonna come of all this? I don’t trust Breem. I’m telling you now, he’ll never let Basic Income pass. You know he started his career as a lawyer in Chip Van Lewig’s office?”
“I know,” I said, though in fact I did not, yet another reminder that for all my pretension I was grossly misinformed. I did know of Van Lewig, a Midwestern cosmetics scion with family ties to the Heritage Foundation and John Birch Society, whose lobbying efforts had helped reverse decades of environmental progress. The Van Lewig Building was across the street from C&S.
“Besides,” Anoush continued, “all those talks he gave at Clayton and Goldman. Those guys are his friends. They paid for his whole campaign. You think he’s gonna turn on them now?”
I’d been to one of those talks, watched my senator speak in boarding school argot, play up his free market vision for the partisan crowd. I’ll admit I was impressed. Not by Breem’s ideas, or the hammy jokes he interwove, but by the disproportionately large size of the senator’s head. The thing was massive, two feet from chin to dome, or at least it seemed from the back row, where I sat borderline tripping after splitting a weed gummy with Ricky. I knew that politicians trended big-headed, but it was something else to see it in person, like watching a living, breathing bobblehead doll.
“Look,” said Anoush. “If it were up to me, what we’d do is get all the brown people in America to go to a gun show in West Virginia, arm ourselves with assault rifles, and roll into Clayton & Sons like OG gangsters.”
“Right,” I said. “You really think that would help?”
“I mean, I’m not a violent dude,” said Anoush. “Do unto others, and all that. But these guys who work at Clayton, can we really call them human?”
“Hm,” I said, but must have hesitated.
“You with me brother?”
I mimed loading an AK, spraying bullets left and right.
“Watch where you point that thing,” he said, flipped the cab into reverse, hopped up on the sidewalk, and executed a K-turn. The traffic drones were nowhere to be seen.