Signage in Trafalgar Street

297

Romantic Furniture/Lounge Manufacturing

301-303

Mekarnavale: a Masquerade ball in Three Acts

German Shepherd Dog League

305-309

McCallum & Co Pty Ltd/Sintered Alloys Pty Ltd

FOZZARD LNE

311

Annandale Saw Works

313

Greer & Greer/Estate Agents/560 5000

Petersham Assembly of God/Your Local Australian Christian Church

AUDLEY ST

finish first with Du Pont Du Pont Car Paints/le Mans Car Bay Body Repairs finish first with Du Pont

City Tiling Creations/Bathroom Renovation/We Create Your Dream Bathroom/Fully Insured

This Wall Is Dedicated To Legend - Werd - Unique - Outlaw - & Spence ... Music Boy 2003

ABEL LNE

319

327

Fine Quality Master Print

Enjoy Coca Cola

Colonial Castings/Casti Wrought Iron ... Spearheads Letter Boxes Security Door Panels Rating Panels Furniture Outdoor Lighting Columns Corners Frieze Gates

Glass Reflections/Glass Cut To Size ... Glass Replacement Custom Made Mirrors Car Mirrors Sash Cords Fishtanks

No. 1 Nelson Place/Beware of the Dog

Black-Eyed Peas/Special Guests John Legend/Ru C L/Katalyst

347

Lanatex Pty Ltd Weaving Mills

Smile Embroidery/Reception Please Enter

351

& O

Breakthrough Lose Up To 5 Kilos in 30 Days

T
H
U
M
P

END 50 AREA

dilemma

The day after Bob rang to try to persuade me to work in lieu of the mourning Indians, he rang again ... three times. I didn't answer the first two calls, because I suspected I knew why he was calling (he only has my mobile number). And I was right. One night about a month ago I copped a fare on Parramatta Road, going to Narrabeen. It was late, about 11.30. A young woman going home, probably from work. I don't know - she sat in the back, which usually means Not Inclined To Talk. I went the back way through Mosman, quicker at rush hour but not much odds at that time of night. I didn't know there was a speed camera on that stretch until the double tungsten flash - pow-pow! - caught me. Shit. Ever since then I've been waiting for the blow to fall. Bob said it was $75.00 plus (or rather minus) 3 points. They recently reduced the fine and upped the points lost, which I guess is better for cash-poor but points-rich me - I've never lost points before, have had the full 12 forever. Until now. Part of me wants exculpation, to find a way of getting off. I'll tell any lie I have to. The fare was ill, in a hurry, going home to a sick baby, about to give birth ... I thought I was in a 60 k zone (I was in fact doing 61 kph in a 50 k zone) ... there was no-one else around ... anything. I once did elect court for going through a red light camera, pleading poor brakes. And did get off. But another part of me says, ah, fuck it, cop it sweet, pay up, forget. I'm not sure. It isn't the points, it's the fine sticks in my throat. The fare to Narrabeen was a big one, about sixty bucks as I recall; and the miser in me simply does not want to surrender that money to the government. There's time: Bob will call it a 309 and return the ticket to the authorities, who will then write it out in my name. Meanwhile, I have to make up my mind. What should I do?

A phone call this morning from Bob, sounding sombre. How's it going? I asked. Not good, he said. One of his drivers fell off a balcony yesterday and died. An Indian. All his other Indians have gone out in sympathy, as it were. He wanted to know if I could drive today and tomorrow. I said no, I couldn't. And I can't. Bob often says his group of drivers is 'like a family'; now there is a family funeral. I'm trying to think who it could be. The only Indian I recall is the dignified Sikh who drives one of the Legion cabs. Surely not him? Falling drunk off a balcony? Maybe one of the guys out of Ashfield? I may never know.

Lenny's Lawyer

Looks like this will be the last post here for a while - I'm taking a month off driving to finish a writing project. But before I go ... it was interesting watching Bob change the broken wing mirror yesterday afternoon. There were about a dozen facets to the break and together they looked like one of those expanding/contracting aperture mechanisms you find in older style cameras. Each shard crescent-shaped as it fell onto the roadway and was left there to be crunching by passing traffic. I wasn't driving that car last night, and the one I was driving didn't arrive until well after the nominated three o'clock start, so I didn't get on the road until about quarter to four. A late start usually means a slow night but in fact it went like a rocket. I felt oddly nostalgic, it was like being transported back into earlier times when Sydney was a freer, more relaxed and certainly more louche city than it is now. Part of this feeling came from a fare I picked up near Circular Quay around eight o'clock. I was ducking down Albert Street towards the Quay to avoid a traffic jam in Macquarie Street when I saw a couple trying to hail the cab ahead of me. The driver was oblivious, so I sounded my horn and got the fare. A man of about seventy in a suit got in the front, a young black woman in the back. She was laughing at my stratagem, he was fairly well shickered but almost frighteningly coherent. I drove round to the bus station at the Quay, about a hundred metres, and her with the big mouth, as he described her, hopped out. We continued on towards Mosman. He said he'd had a helluva day and I replied that I hoped it was a good one. I'm being blackmailed, he said. These arseholes don't think I know, but I do. Have you ever seen a movie called The Godfather? Well, I'm the guy in the Godfather. He didn't say which guy but later did an excellent imitation of Brando's Don Corleone. It was the speech to the undertaker whose daughter's been raped. You haven't found a horse's head in your bed, have you? I asked but he didn't think that was funny. You probably don't know who Lenny McPherson was, he went on, but I acted for him for thirty years. I learned a lot off Lenny. He said to me once: If I was going to have you killed, I wouldn't tell you. Christ, I thought, I've got Lenny McPherson's lawyer in the cab. Lenny was Sydney's Mr. Big for those thirty years. An old style crim, a hard man, legendary, fearsome and, paradoxically, loved by as many as went in fear of him. According to this guy, he got his start in the illegal casinos that flourished in Surry Hills way back when. Lenny would just walk in and take the money. A guy by the name of Taylor - I missed the first name - decided that, instead of having Lenny on, he would make him part of the organisation. And so it went. There were more stories, which I won't go into here. They were delivered with a precision of speech that had only minimal difficulty overcoming his considerable intoxication. The thing about this guy was that he came from a different world and knew it. Hence his melancholy. Whatever he was being blackmailed about he didn't say, only that he was going to defeat, humiliate and destroy his enemies; but even this rhetoric, delivered with many obscenities, had a kind of weary resignation to it, as if he were making moves that he had long since lost the logic or the passion of. At one moment during the ride, he made a point of looking right at me so that I could see who he was. He had a long hooked nose like the beak of predatory bird and bright dark eyes, also bird-like, set close together, intelligent, bleak, utterly without illusion. They were eyes, I thought, perhaps melodramatically, that were looking death in the face. He was going for dinner with a woman near Spit Junction. When we stopped outside the building, he pulled from his pocket a battered wallet full of nameless bits of paper and many large banknotes. Separated out a twenty then showered a whole lot of shrapnel into my hand. Forget everything I've told you, he said. I'm just an old man reminiscing. And walked off towards the fluorescent lit, blond brick units with his suit jacket hanging down off his thin stooped shoulders the way my father's jackets always fell when he was old.

between showers

Last night as I drove a couple of hospo nimrods up Devonshire Street in Surry Hills I saw a small car, perhaps a BMW, coming very fast down the hill towards me. And too close, way too close. There was a loud bang and all three of us cried out at once. But all he'd hit was the wing mirror on the driver's side. Those mirrors are sprung, so it snapped inwards. When I wound down the window and snapped it back, I realised it was broken. The glass was still in the frame but there was a four or five facetted star in the centre of the mirror. I called my boss, who suggested I drive out to his place in Ashfield so he could replace it. Take two minutes, he said. Bob's minutes are generally quarter of an hour, plus it was another half hour to get out there. He probably would have given me fifteen dollars downtime, but I could make three times that in an hour, so I decided just to keep going. But the car ... went out in sympathy. Every time the revs dropped, it stalled. If you put it in gear, it would take an age to engage, if it engaged at all. I limped with a fare to Elizabeth Bay then called Bob again. He suggested I look at the hoses under the bonnet. One was a bit loose, so I fixed it on properly but the car still wouldn't go. Take a walk, he said. I wandered round a park down there, smoking a gadang garam. It was greeny dark, everything dripping, the white lights glimmering like in a Delvaux painting. There was a van full of sleeping hippies, the only one awake was the woman at the wheel, reading a book. A guy sitting on the backrest of a park bench talking on his mobile. An old gent in an overcoat, with umbrella, who looked like the fare the radio had just offered me. When I returned to the car it fired up normally and behaved itself until I knocked off about one thirty. A mystery. But for the rest of the night my rearview was a cubist composition of headlights in the rain, distracting both because it was difficult to judge exactly what cars were there and how close they were and also because it was visually intriguing. I kept drifting off into speculative reconstructions of exactly how the shards reflected the images ... perhaps not the best way to negotiate a rainy night in the old town. Nonetheless, the image has stayed with me, as if the composition in the rearview was somehow analogous to the way we see the past, trying to make sense of what's back there in a broken mirror.

solstice/full moon

Last night I saw a woman sitting in a gutter weeping. I saw another woman, beautiful, heartbreakingly thin, dishevelled, screaming You don't own me! to a man in an Hawaiian shirt. The doorman at the residential hotel sorted him out. In the rearview mirror she was huddled up like a child against a wall, also weeping. I drove down an immaculate nighttime street where outside every other house were placed deck chairs, easy chairs, arm chairs, sofas, as if for a colloquy of ghosts. I heard a man tell his mother she was already at home and, as it was twenty-eight years since he left, no, he would not be back tonight. Then he returned to the difficulties of selling novelty ice-creams. Another man crunched ice cubes so loudly it hurt my ears. A third carried a loaf of sliced white bread in a plastic bag all the way to Lane Cove, returning me to where that ghost furniture was. I thought she said: Take me to L.A. but she was only going to Balmain. All the loonies were out, gnashing their teeth, shouting at the sky, gesticulating ... it was very cold. The music on the radio was atrocious until they started playing the Blues. No-one was being served at the Hungry Wolf. I heard a worker tell the Boss at Teachers Hand Car Wash to slow down or he'd get a heart attack. The woman who sleeps in the bus shelter on the Hume Highway has doubled or maybe tripled her collection of stuffed rubbish bags. It was impossible to descry a human form among the massed shiny lumps piled up and over the shopping trolley. Why was she weeping? Had something happened at the Hospital? I wanted to stop the cab, get out, lift her up and help her on her way, but when the lights changed I just drove on into the other side of midnight.

strange attractors

One of the odd things about cab driving is that, on any given night, the fact that you have gone to a particular suburb, sometimes a particular street, seems to increase the probability that you will return there. This is something I've noticed often and other drivers have remarked on it too: one guy told me recently he once had three fares in a row to the same street in Paddington. It happened to me yesterday: my first fare of the shift was to Mortdale, where I have never been before; afterwards I drove up the main drag of nearby Penshurst, again a first. About four hours later, there I was again, in Penshurst, dropping off in the exact place I had paused to look around in the afternoon. Both fares I picked up in the City, within two blocks of each other. The logic, or perhaps I should say the mechanism, of this escapes me. Why? Is there some ineluctable convergence at work, some larger, inscrutable, perhaps ultimately meaningless but nevertheless operable, fate determining our movements?

Queen's Birthday

Back in the phantasmagoria ... some Irish chippie who's lost, or left, his tools in the Blue Mountains wants to find a hardware store before tomorrow. A pregnant woman in a hurry to catch her ferry at Circular Quay pours all her change into my hands, including some francs. Three French people at the Avis depot in William Street harrass me all the way into town about the fare on the meter. I pick up a chatty, somewhat troubled guy in Rose Bay and take him into the Star City casino. Turns out he's a cop taking three month's stand down. He says he once had to arrest a guy for a murder way out west somewhere. It was a mafia crime. The guy was packing the .38 he used for the killing, with three shots still in it, and had a loaded .22 automatic in the back seat of his car. Since then, this cop always goes to work with a bullet proof vest on. He says he couldn't do my job without his 9 shot Glock pistol. I say I couldn't do it with one. As I drop him off (he's meeting his 'business partner') he says he won't gamble tonight. Later, much later, on my way back to the depot, I see a Silver Service cab refuse a fare and take it instead. A wild looking Indian guy and a lumpy young woman. They want to go to the McDonalds in Stanmore, the same one where there was a shooting in the carpark not so long ago. I wait among the usual suspects while they pick up their order then take them back to Leichhardt. In Norton Street the guy wants me to stop again. He comes back from the Medical Centre with a packet of condoms. I already know it's a seduction, from the conversation. At the block of flats he wants me to drive into the narrow alley running down the side of the building. He doesn't have the money for the fare. He'll get it. I stare into the bare, blank, fluorescent stairwell while strange electronic music plays on the radio. What'll I do if he doesn't come back? The timer light in the stairwell clicks off then immediately on again. That means he's on his way. With elaborate courtesy, he counts out the fare ... I drive away with the image of his girlfriend's face in my mind: pulpy, bruised looking, as if she was taking psychiatric drugs, her look mingles apology and resignation. A bouncer outside a pub up the road hails me, a little guy in his sixties, maybe, wearing a checked jacket comes puffing down the street. I take him to Rockdale. On the way back up the Princes Highway, at a red light, two homeboys come over to the passenger side window. They're Indian too. Can I take them to Kogarah Station? I can't, it's late, I'm too tired, I'm nearly out of gas ... I abandon them to their fate, whatever it may be. At the late opener in Ashfield I allow myself an after work beer. A very drunk guy playing pool asks for a Gadang Garam then insists on paying 50c for it. He goes on and on about how sweet it tastes. The Greek bouncer and the Chinese bar girl are playing some complex game of flirtation and threat with each other while young hoods confer in the booths. When I finally get home it's after 2 am and the late night movie on ABC is Emir Kusturica's Underground. It's a wedding sequence. Everyone is drunk and abusive. The band revolves on a stand, blowing mad brass riffs. There's a military tank in the cellar. A monkey climbs into the hatch. The monkey's climbed into the tank! someone yells ... I can't handle this. Is it life or art? Or some third thing, made of both? Or of neither ... ?

anecdote

Philip Glass's accountant caught a cab one night in New York City. He was astonished to find that his driver was ... Philip Glass. Who explained he needed to get out at night and meet more new people.

An earlier experience with Mr Glass as taxi driver is here ...

Green Cape

I gotta write about this other guy I met yesterday. I was at the rank on Bondi Beach, my favourite rank, you can lean on the sea wall and look out over the ocean towards Aotearoa. There's never anybody there, any other cabs I mean. So I got out to light up a gadang garam (yeah, I cracked, stressed out, bad news ... ) and there was this big guy standing there in a T shirt, sky blue shorts, runners, a milkshake in one hand and a mobile in the other, speaking very loudly about those fuckers in the Immigration Department. Our eyes met and I wondered if he wanted to go somewhere. He was quite dark, black curly hair, maybe Arab, maybe not. His accent though had that wonderful familiar Maori cast to it. Anyway, I smoked and eavesdropped, he talked and then, eventually, having made an arrangment to go round and see who he was calling, cut the connection. Do you want a taxi? I asked. Yeah, man, but finish your smoke. There's no hurry. He was Brazilian. We talked about Césaria Évora. He remembered his grandmother listening to her just a few weeks ago. And other things. Fado. The Cape Verde Islands. Easter Island. He'd been in Australia since he was eleven. Still on a Brazilian passport, but he wanted to go back for a visit, first time since he came, seventeen years ago. Nothing violent, but I've done a few things. B & E mostly. A year inside. Now the fuckers are trying to say if I go back to Brazil, they won't let me in again. But I've sorted it out. It's sweet. He spoke like he did because he works with Maori and Islander guys, fitting steel plates for tunnels and other major constructions. When we got going he said Don't turn the meter on, man, fucking Howard can't tax what he doesn't know about. I know how much it is, it's always four bucks. This is an old Sydney custom, fast dying out ... you decide beforehand what the trip'll cost and travel without the meter ticking. It changes the whole relationship, you instantly become friends sharing a ride, not customer and service provider. The cab turns into a Gypsy Cab, there's a low grade licit thrill even in that. I took him up Bondi Road a ways, stopped outside the Royal on the corner of Denham Street. He produced five bucks from somewhere. We shook hands. Rapanui, he said. Miles from fucking anywhere. How'd those Maoris get there? They paddled, I said. We laughed and said goodbye.

rorting

I was at the Bondi Junction rank last evening when a young man in a suit rapped on the boot of the cab. I opened it. He and another guy in a white chef's jacket manhandled an oil heater into the boot. I thought I'd be taking the suit home with his purchase but it was the other guy who got in. We were replacing a defective heater bought that day by a woman in Double Bay. She needed a new one urgently because she was having a dinner party that night. Her place was full of heavy antique furniture and she herself was Austrian or German, about sixty, hair in a French roll, cheerful ... she knew the guy who was delivering the heater because she'd bought some cheese off him that day as well. He was Bulgarian and the buyer in the cheese department at David Jones. Don't ask me why it fell to him to deliver a replacement heater. We talked cheese all the way back from Double Bay to the Junction ... fetta, gorgonzola, stilton rolled off our tongues ... as well as discussing the habits of the wealthy. A nice guy. And a happy man, as happy as only twenty years buying cheese could make him. When he got out, he left me with a blank, signed cab charge docket and a dilemma. How much should I charge David Jones for this service? The $25.25 on the meter or ... something more?

The night before I'd picked up a young fellow at The Object House in Surry Hills, going to Homebush Bay, where he lived in one of the units built to house the contestants at the 2000 Olympics. In his case the Nigerian athletes. He too was travelling on a cab charge docket, as he divulged almost as soon as he got in the cab, which is of course a mistake. This gradually became clear to him while, driving west, we chatted. He realised that the $80.00 fare for the same journey another cab driver had charged him was at least double what the trip was worth. That cabbie had detoured through the North Shore. He was a sweet young guy, just twenty, with a soft, furry attempt at a beard on his chin. He worked for Alpine Offset, who print many of the glossy mags from Kerry Packer's empire. Alpine Offset are notorious in Australia because of a fire at their Homebush plant in 1993. It turned out the facility had just been insured for a sum vastly in excess of its actual value; the owners, a 'prominent' Labor Senator, a 'colourful' stockbroker and one of Packer's executives, banked their shares of the insurance money in numbered Swiss accounts ... millions and millions of dollars.

Anyway. The young guy filled out the cab charge docket for an amount about ten dollars in excess of the metered fare, but still only just over half of the eighty bucks he'd been charged last time. And the David Jones one? I wrote in the sum I needed to make up my pay-in for last night without contributing any actual cash to the envelope ... in other words, I gave myself a tip of about $15.00. Do I feel guilty? No. Am I worried about being caught? Yes. But after all rorting ... is the great Australian sport.

ghost cab

The first time I drove cabs, back in the 1980s, there was a live radio network, since replaced by computers. Some nights, a chilling voice would come onto this live network. It was low, male, guttural, almost unintelligible and its discourse consisted entirely of threats and obscenities. Perhaps some of these vocal qualities arose out of a desire to alter or disguise the voice - I don't know. There was a sinister chuckle in it that always raised the hackles on my neck. This guy, whoever he was, could not have been an on-the-job cabbie, because the network operators would have found him and thrown him off. He must either have been a disgruntled former driver or a working cabbie on downtime with grievances who, using some kind of CB set-up, had found a way to access the network. His intention was to drive the operators crazy and in this he was entirely successful. They used to become apoplectic when he showed up on the airwaves. I remembered about this guy the other night because of the legend of the ghost cab. The ghost cab is a rogue cab, out there somewhere in the darkness, picking up people who never arrive at their destination. Who is the driver? He's a man without a face and a voice borrowed from hell. There's a black hole in his back seat. He charges everything and gives no change. The number of his cab is 666. And so on ... well, there I was on the Bondi Junction rank, vaguely entertaining these gothic notions, when I looked up and saw a cab hurry past the line of us waiting. Number T666. It was an ordinary white Falcon with the yellow and black livery of Combined Services, which is the company I drive for. High-tailing up the hill with that peculiar kick-up-the-heels look of a taxi in a hurry. All I could see of the guy behind the wheel was a shadow hunched under a cap. He was Vacant. I nearly pulled out of the line and followed him ... & then decided, no. Some things are better left alone.

bracket creep

The other night after finishing work I called into the bottleshop of the Summer Hill Hotel to buy a bottle of red. The woman who serves there noticed my new cap and spoke to me in Greek. I laughed and shook my head. I just like these Greek fisherman's hats, I said. I paid for the wine with some of the massive amount of silver I'd gathered during the shift - one guy made up most of an eleven dollar fare with 50c pieces - and as I piled the coins onto the counter she smiled and said: Getting rid of the bracket creep, eh? Isn't that brilliant? I'll never be able to think of it simply as change again.

Moon/Dome

I was at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Crows Nest, waiting for a guy to collect his X Rays before taking him on to Royal North Shore Hospital in St. Leonards, when a radio job came through at the adjoining Royal North Shore Private Hospital. A Greek couple, going to Killara. By the time I got there, they'd gone. A woman eating an enormous sandwich came over. Was I her cab? She was going to Narrabeen. I said no, then, not very long after, yes. She apologised for eating in the car, saying it was two days since she had. Fasting all the previous day, in hospital all today, giving blood tests, waiting for her Op, which was cancelled at the last minute ... just ten minutes after her husband, who'd waited with her all day, had gone home. The surgeon had rung from the operating theatre where he was cutting out someone's cancer to say his present job was going to take another couple of hours and it would be better if she just went home. She was quite upset, she said, then apologised. It was to be her fourth Op in two years, she'd really had to psych herself up for it, now it was cancelled, she didn't know when it would be re-scehduled for, she'd used up all her sick pay ... I'm sorry, she said. I shouldn't be telling you all this. I'm sorry. She never said what was wrong with her, only that it meant she and her husband would never be able to have children. She was fearful of just about everything, yet oddly resigned as well. Those parts of Mona Vale Road where it narrows to two lanes and passes through dark eucalypt forest on either side made her particularly afraid. Well, she explained, I'm not really worried, it's just that these days I expect anything can happen. Anything bad, she meant. I took extra care on those bits. We were coming round a bend in the dark carriage way when I saw a sandstone dome floating against the night sky. As if disembodied there. A blue light shone from the apex of the cupola. Then it was gone again. We came round another corner and there, shining straight down along the road, was a huge yellow moon, slightly gibbous, a day or maybe two after full. You could see all its craters and seas. Oh, the moon! I said. She did not reply. She was holding herself against the dark places on the road. The dome reappeared on the left, much larger, enormous, as if a piece of London had come down here. It was the Bahai Temple I have seen many times from the train on the Central Coast line, from where it always looks white like a mosque. I wanted to pull in and stop the car, get out, with my fare, and ... I don't know, not pray, just seek a little calm I guess. Some grace. We hurried on, down the hill to Narrabeen and through a maze of brand new streets, brand new identical brick houses, until we got to where she lived. The house was dark. Her husband was out. She had no key. She had no money or cards either - you can't take anything to hospital, she apologised. I saw her bent over the flower pot by the front door, a grotesque shadow. She was only stroking her cat. She crossed the road to a neighbour's house, the neighbour came out with a credit card and paid for her. The cat almost got under the wheels of the car as I pulled away, driving on into the yellow of the moon that was smaller already, whiter, casting a bony light down over the black glinting sea.

slow night

First night back at work last night after my two weeks off. Well, actually, it was more like three. I knew it would be hard ... such a slow night. No cigarettes to mark the breaks between fares. A different cab, which had something wrong with its electrics, meaning I couldn't risk turning the motor off after the first time, when I only got it started again with the help of a guy on the Park Street rank, rocking the car up and down as I worked the ignition. A succession of blank fares, first time I think I've ever had a night without at least one person wanting to engage in conversation. And bugger all money ... if it wasn't for a guy I took out to Pennant Hills, and another, a sweet young American/Polynesian who was farewelled by her boyfriend at the Opera House and wanted to go to Regents Park, I would have come home out of pocket. As it was, I was passing my base about 10.30, on my way back to the City from Regents Park, when I decided to call in, fill up with gas and see what was the story with the electrics. Couldn't get the car to start again. I called my boss, Bob, who came straight down to check it out. And, since he didn't seem to be getting anywhere, bailed and came home. He called me later to say the cab was fine, no problem, just don't use air conditioning, too much for battery ... we'll see. I have to drive the same car tonight.

NeuroPlastiCity

... . A few years ago, brain scans of London cabbies showed that the detailed mental maps they had built up in the course of navigating their city's complicated streets were apparent in their brains. Not only was the posterior hippocampus - one area of the brain where spatial representations are stored - larger in the drivers; the increase in size was proportional to the number of years they had been on the job.

... there is also accumulating evidence that the brain can change autonomously, in response to its own internal signals. Last year, Tibetan Buddhist monks, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, submitted to functional magnetic resonance imaging as they practiced ''compassion meditation,'' which is aimed at achieving a mental state of pure loving kindness toward all beings. The brain scans showed only a slight effect in novice meditators. But for monks who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation, the differences in brain function were striking. Activity in the left prefrontal cortex, the locus of joy, overwhelmed activity in the right prefrontal cortex, the locus of anxiety. Activity was also heightened in the areas of the brain that direct planned motion: ''... as if the monks' brains were itching to go to the aid of those in distress ... ''

from the NY Times

Crook as Rookwood

No d(é)rives this week - I've had to take the time to try once more to whip this screenplay into shape. Given how much I complain about the job, if mostly only to myself, it's surprising to feel some regret as the phantasmagoria recedes for the nonce. How perverse ... meanwhile I console myself by drawing up a book proposal based partly around cab-driving. I've been plotting it for a while, thinking it was a film, but it crystallised the other night in conversation with an amused and amusing Englishman, from a village near Leeds, whom I took up to the Gordon railway station. I was telling him about Chinese Bob, my boss, whom I like a lot, and his mate Frank, whom I've also worked for, and a third, even more shadowy character called Tony. They're all Chinese. Tony, like Frank, runs his cabs out of the carpark of the Ashfield RSL club. He's quite stylish in his dress, apart from the Andy Capp he usually wears pulled down over his eyes; and somehow sinister. Frank has missing teeth, is handsome and plausible but untrustworthy. Bob's a straight up guy, or at least I think he is. I tried to sketch these characters to the guy from Leeds and he went off on a jag of his own, about how their operation was a front, they were money-laundering, it was really a drug business. And I thought, why not? That's great. It fits in with the plot I'm developing, about a cab driver who goes missing and another cabbie, his mate, who sets off to find out what's happened. There's other elements: a failing script consultancy business the disappeared cabbie ran; a complicated family situation; the old mental asylum at Rozelle, which has something to do with the last job (script consultancy, not cab driving) the guy had and may be the actual place he went missing; the necropolis at Rookwood, which I drove by on my last job Wednesday night. Felt the chill air rising over the old graves as we whistled by. Would be great to get the phantasmagoria, which it truly is, somehow into words ... then I could call my darg, research. And feel like I was being paid twice. But no, that'd be two jobs for the one wage, wouldn't it? Oh, well ...

mighty dread

I never go out to drive without a sense of dread, even impending catastrophe. Why is this? Nothing bad has happened to me yet and I trust will not. No, it is more psychological, some deep conflict between how I would like to imagine myself existing in the world and how, incontrovertibly, I do. And yet the feeling soon passes, I settle into the rhythm of the shift, the rhythm, let it be said, of the pursuit of money. Plus the ancillary social research I cannot help following. Every fare is a question or a conundrum. Who are they? Where are they going? Why? I am always trying to find out as much as I can about the Other(s) in these relatively brief commercial transactions. Because I work through the evening rush hour and also because I pick up most of my fares in the City, I get a lot of business people in the cab. Most of them do not interact with me in any meaningful way. Mostly they use the travelling time to catch up with calls on their mobiles. Or, if there is more than one of them and they are colleagues, they discuss work matters between themselves. The language of business is at once highly metaphorical and deadly dull. Phrases recur ... 'up to the next level' (architecture?); 'driving the process' (transport?); 'put our beefs on the table' (culinary?); and so on. What is perhaps interesting is that this language is almost entirely uninflected by whatever line of business is being pursued. In fact it is sometimes difficult to discover the line of business at all. Whether it is sports promotion, health care products, banking, travel ... does not matter much insofar as the language itself is concerned. The universal subtext, largely assumed, almost never explicitly discussed, is the acquisition of wealth by means of struggle. 'Teams' use 'strategies' to 'get a win'. The sporting metaphor, derived ultimately from the practice of war, is ubiquitous, overarching. It too is never questioned. It is also, obviously, deeply implicit in the way we conduct politics in our so-called liberal democracies. Sometimes this world of contending factions in pursuit of wealth can seem very strange, sometimes I start to see it as if from very far away, like an alien observer of an equally alien culture. Every time I drive over the Anzac Bridge, which is a magnificent structure, and see the car-choked lanes of traffic heading towards and away from the lighted towers of the City, I experience a kind of vertigo, as if I really were from some other planet than this and could see with completely different eyes. The massed, serried ranks of red tail-lights heading one way, the similarly massed yellow-white array of head-lights going the other, can look very weird. This strangeness, this stimmung, is crystalised for me in an image: away to the left if I'm going to the City, on the vast flat wharfs of the Glebe Island Container Terminal, sit hundreds, perhaps thousands of brand new vehicles, cars, utilities, vans, all painted white, all awaiting their turn to navigate the already terminally hardened arteries of this steel and concrete body, whose heart, the City, is made neither of stone, nor light, nor even language, but of some ineluctable substance, some ether or electricity, of which we humans are also a part. Then my feeling of dread returns, no longer for myself but for all of us; and, mixed in with it, a sense of wonder.

high on the hog

Aaaaaahhhh ... the weekend. Is blessed relief. However. I seem to have arrived at a way of working that works. Three nights, about nine hours a night (3 pm - midnight) during which I don't stop for anything except the odd cigarette, usually on a rank so that I'm still in contention. This because I found that every time I made a pitstop it took up to an hour to rediscover the serendipidities - or stochastics - or whatever. Every night is the same, only different; or different, but the same. The thing I'm most pleased about is that I'm managing to keep my resolve to be pleasant to my fares no matter what the provocations may be ... though I nearly lost it the other night. I picked up three people on Macquarie Street. Two men and a woman. They'd been to a restaurant, were fairly well liquored but clearly used to it. A big, bluff, red-faced man got into the front seat, the other two in the back. That took a while. They were old and unsteady. Once in they began to discuss who would be dropped off first. That took even longer. I didn't mind - the meter was running. He in the front was going to Darling Point. He in the back, a little old guy clutching a biography of newspaper magnate Conrad Black, lived in Elizabeth Bay. She, tiny and elegant, with an accent that might have been Viennese, was from Bellevue Hill. The obvious way to do it would have been Elizabeth Bay, Darling Point, Bellevue Hill. But he in the back was having none of it. He wanted to escort her home. So that's what we did, dropping first in Darling Point. The two men were well-heeled, complacent, with the braying Brit accents of the born to rule. Doctors or lawyers, or at least those they talked about were. London, Morocco, the south of France ... flitted by. Darling Point, Woollahra, Bondi Junction, too. The old couple canoodled in the back seat for a while outside the mansion in Benelong Crescent. They were sweet and tender, like young lovers of another era, with a curious formality to their endearments. But as soon as she had gone, he changed. He became querulous and demanding. He was too hot. 'Turn on the air conditioning, driver,' he ordered. I did. But still he wasn't comfortable. Not surprising - he was wearing a three piece suit on a sultry Sydney night and the air-con still isn't working properly. 'The air-con's not working properly,' I said. 'Why not?' he said. 'Probably the fluid needs replacing,' I said. 'You could try opening the window.' He grumbled as he did. Next: 'Are we going to Elizabeth Bay?' I didn't answer that one. As we entered Oxford Street, Paddington, he began muttering. 'Oh I see. We are.' Then: 'This is a very long way.' He had a point - I was using the old route, as I often do, not the new, slightly quicker one. On the other hand, there isn't much to choose between them. Two sides of a trapezium are much the same as the other two sides. And at that time of night ... At the end of Elizabeth Bay Road he said: 'Number 93, driver. On the corner.' I couldn't see any corner - the road ends in a semi-circular turn around. '93!' he shrieked. 'On the corner!' I saw the big bright numerals on the gates to the mansion and pulled over. We did the business. 'Goodnight,' he said. 'Goodnight,' I said. But he mustn't have heard me. 'I said, Goodnight!' he repeated, in his imperious accent. It was at this point I nearly lost it. I turned round and looked him in the eye, making sure he could see me too. I'm capable of a cold imperious gaze myself. 'Goodnight,' I said. He got the look. A moment of uncertainty, perhaps? His own unpleasant behaviour reflected in the eyes of a servant? Perhaps not. He was still muttering as he trailed off into the night, Conrad Black tucked under his arm.

Ninety Years On

Because it was a Monday this year, and I do Mondays, I worked Anzac Day. A big night for cabbies. Cash flying all over the place, sometimes seemingly unconnected to human hands or pockets. Couple of things struck me: the City was full of young guys in suits wearing medals. I picked up several of them. One of them told me he was 34 but didn't say which campaign he served on. If he was born about 1970, what could it have been? The First Gulf War? East Timor? Iraq? Another one said that Anzac Day was the best day of the year, better than Christmas. He and his wife had woken at one am, too excited to go back to sleep. He said last year he was crawling on his hands and knees back to Cronulla by 6 pm but was pacing himself better this year. These young guys - in their twenties or thirties - were extremely polite no matter how drunk they were, they had a strong sense of entitlement, though friendly they all had a remote quality, as if they breathed a different air from the rest of us. They were part of a self conscious elite I guess, a military caste. Later on I took a couple of truckies far out west. They said the same thing: Anzac Day is the best day of the year, better than Christmas. They'd been to the Dawn Service at Brighton le Sands, then played two-up somewhere else, then gone to The Rocks, where I picked them up. It wasn't clear if they'd served or not. But they were part of the emotion of the day, no doubt. At one point in the evening, waiting on a rank mid-town, I watched a young Aboriginal woman in a party dress savagely kicking a full water bottle the length of Park Street. By that time the whole City looked like a vast open-air public bar, drunks everywhere, men and women in uniform clasped together staggering by, old diggers threading their fragile way through the melee to their rides: was the war over or had it not yet begun? Or is it some kind of perpetual state now? I couldn't help thinking of Our Leader, driving in his limo down to Anzac Cove on a road specially constructed for him by the Turkish Government ... over, literally, the bones of the dead.