• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1240 0

of the week except Sunday. He did not like anyone to come into contact with his beddings unless the person was unclothed—the female person, of course—because clothes carried contaminants. (He said this but his motives were clear enough.) Sex was a problem because he loved it with an ardor unmatched—he and Bob sniffed for it on the road like desperate bloodhounds—but he felt that it darkened his spirit and tainted his innocence. To combat the creeping impurity of his powerful urges, he sometimes sent Foreign Man to prostitutes in West Hollywood—there was this storefront setup on Santa Monica Boulevard near Crescent Heights that he knew well. He once even had Little Wendy drive him there and go in with him while Foreign Man negotiated—this was a very pure idea, he thought—then she waited to drive him home afterward and Wendy would remember that the prostitute was not amused in the least by Foreign Man and he emerged worried for his enlightened soul in any case—“We went back to his apartment and he lit incense and did a little TM puja ceremony to cleanse his spiritual self.” Anyway, he had scheduled to go on a long Age of Enlightenment Governor Training Course in San Jacinto, California—from April through much of June. And there he would rekindle his purity and become an actual Governor in the TM hierarchy and he would learn yogic flying, which was kind of like levitating, but more like hopping while seated in lotus position, and it created the most positive energy waves imaginable, and he needed to be positive since he was going to begin work on this television series immediately after the Fourth of July, and he was not at all thrilled about it.

From the start, he kept his distance. He showed up at Paramount on the fifth of July for the first read-through of the first script of the first episode and the actors—they were a lively collegial bunch making with the nervous well-meaning jokey backslapping camaraderie of nascent team endeavor—couldn’t get a fix on him. They pumped his fishy palm and searched in vain for connective light in his eyes and gathered the full spectrum of his social grace—um oh hi fine very good thank you—which was further strained by the fact that he wore headphones that first day and seemed to be listening to something on a portable tape machine. (Danny DeVito, who was cast in the role of the Napoleonic cab dispatcher, Louie DiPalma, was the only one who ventured to ask what he was listening to and Andy passed him the headphones and DeVito heard tribal chanting.) Foreign Man had been named Latka Gravas by the consortium of Brooks-Weinberger-Daniels-Davis because they, as producers/creators, thought it would be funny and yet not unbelievable. And so it was and he accepted this without any greater qualm than the overriding qualm of having taken this job to begin with. (George said he would get $10,000 for every episode in which he deigned to appear and the money would increase if the series continued.) Latka, meanwhile, was conceived to be something akin to the grease-monkey mascot of the Sunshine Cab Company garage, the concrete crucible of Taxi from which all witty twenty-two-minute morality plays sprung forth. His specific heritage would remain unidentified—he would refer to his country frequently without giving it name or locus. He would appear in the first episode, “Like Father, Like Daughter,” at the top of the second act, trundling down the garage staircase to ask Alex Rieger—the patriarchal career cabbie played by Judd Hirsch—for help with English lessons. And his arrival was scripted in such a way as to merely navigate him:

LATKA GRAVAS ENTERS. HE IS DRESSED IN COVERALLS WITH A MONKEY WRENCH STICKING OUT OF HIS BACK POCKET. HE IS SWEET AND INNOCENT LOOKING. HE GOES TO ALEX.

WE HEAR LOUIE’S VOICE.

LOUIE

Latka, where are you going? Don’t hang around the drivers, I need you to fix a cab on the third level.

LATKA TURNS.

LATKA

(IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE, WHICH SOUNDS LIKE A CROSS BETWEEN TURKISH, LATVIAN, AND GIBBERISH. HE SAYS SOMETHING THAT MEANS ROUGHLY: “LET A GUY HAVE A MINUTE, WILL YOU?”)