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By Root 1317 0

maintained cabs, which he had to rent from the taxi company, Mitchell trolled deserted streets for fares or, to save gas, parked down by the river, waiting for a call to come over the radio. Detroit wasn’t a taxi town. There was almost no foot traffic. No one hailed him from the curb, especially at three or four in the morning. The other cabdrivers were a meager bunch. Instead of the plucky immigrants or wise-talking locals he’d expected to find, the crew was made up of serious losers. These were guys who had clearly failed at every other job they’d had. They had failed manning gas pumps, failed selling popcorn at movie concession stands, failed helping brothers-in-law install PVC piping in low-end condominiums, failed in committing petty crime, in collecting trash, in doing yard work, failed in schools and in marriages, and now they were here, failing as cabdrivers in desperate Detroit. The only other educated driver, who had a law degree, was in his sixties and had been let go from his firm for emotional instability. Late at night, when radio traffic reached a standstill, the drivers gathered in a lot by the river, near the old Medusa Cement plant. Mitchell listened to their conversations, saying nothing, remaining aloof lest they realize where he came from. He tried to seem tightly wound, doing his best Travis Bickle, to keep anyone from messing with him. It worked. The other guys left him alone. Then he drove off, parked on a dead-end street, and read The Aspern Papers with a flashlight.

He drove a single mother with four kids from one ramshackle house to another at three in the morning. He ferried a surprisingly polite drug dealer to a drop-off. He took a smooth Billy Dee Williams lookalike with crimped hair and gold chains to sweet-talk his way past the police lock of a woman who didn’t seem to want to let him in, but did.

What the cabbies talked about in the roundups was always the same thing: a report that one of them, from the thirty or so working, had actually made money. Every night at least one driver pulled in two or three hundred bucks. Most guys didn’t seem to be making anything like that much. After a week on the job, Mitchell added up his total fares against what he’d paid for the cab and gas. He divided this by the number of hours worked and came up with an hourly wage of −$0.76. Essentially, he was paying East Side Taxi to drive its cars.

Mitchell spent the rest of the summer busing tables at a brand-new taverna-style restaurant in Greektown. He was partial to the older establishments on Monroe Street, restaurants like the Grecian Gardens or the Hellas Café, where his parents had taken him and his brothers as children for big family occasions, restaurants full, in those days, not of suburbanites coming downtown to drink cheap wine and order flaming appetizers but of formally dressed immigrants with an air of dignity and displacement about them, an abiding melancholy. The men gave their hats to a girl, usually the owner’s daughter, who stacked them neatly in the coatroom. Mitchell and his brothers, in clip-on neckties, sat quietly at the table, the way kids didn’t anymore, while Mitchell’s grandparents, great-aunts, and great-uncles conversed in Greek. To pass the time he examined their humongous earlobes and tunnel-like nostrils. He was the only thing that could make the old people smile: just to pat his cheeks or run their hands through his wavy hair. Bored by the long dinners, Mitchell was allowed, while the adults were having their coffee, to go up to the display case, to spoon out a mint from the dish beside the cash register, and to press his face against the glass and stare in at the varieties of cigars for sale. In the café across the street, men were playing backgammon or reading Greek newspapers exactly as they would have done in Athens or Constantinople. Now his Greek grandparents were dead, Greektown becoming a kitsch tourist destination, and Mitchell just another suburbanite, no more Greek than the artificial grapes hanging from the ceiling.

His busboy uniform consisted of brown polyester