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about something she’s not interested in she shouts, boring! and changes the subject to something more interesting, like herself for instance. Somehow she pulls it off. Partly because she’s gorgeous. Partly because at most social events she’s the one with the most blow, and she uses it like a carrot and a stick. She’ll sit there in the middle of the floor with her big white bag and she’ll let people drool while she chops really painstaking lines or just yaks on and on as if she’s oblivious to what everyone’s really concentrating on, except of course she’s not. She just likes to torture people. That’s the carrot part. If she thinks you want it she’ll keep you hanging on, like the Supremes say. But at the end of the night when your nose is bleeding and you’re dying to go home and sleep, she’ll demand that you do these huge lines that would choke an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner. And when you say, no way Didi, I gotta split, she’llget real indignant and go, after all this free blow I gave you, you’re just going to walk out on me?
    The classic story about Didi is that she makes her boyfriends change the channels when they’re having sex.
    I’ve totally forgotten about the Russian, who’s been sitting there in the cab for about fifteen minutes. I feel really bad about it, poor guy probably had his fill of waiting in Russia, standing in those incredible lines for his ration of rotten groceries and stuff, actually it sounds like New York now that I think about it, but still, I have to get cigarettes, we’re talking absolute necessities here, so I tell him two more minutes and I zip around the corner to the deli.
    Pack of Merits, I say to the old fart behind the counter.
    Hard or soft? he says, smirking.
    Hard, I tell him. You know I like it hard.
    The old guy cracks up. He never gets enough of this joke.
    Coming out of the store I get caught in this horrible preteen pedestrian traffic jam from the school down the street. Gremlins. I practically get run over by this tiny kid with a T-shirt that says REALITY IS AN ILLUSION PRODUCED BY ALCOHOL DEFICIENCY .
    Where was Planned Parenthood when we really needed them? is what I want to know.
    The cabbie is cool. He’s been grooving on some funky ethnic-type music on the radio—dueling balalaikas orsomething. You never know how many kinds of music there are in the world until you move to New York and start taking cabs. It’s like, from your apartment to Trader Vic’s you get Cuban music, and then from Trader Vic’s to Canal Bar you’ve got Zorba the Greek music and then Indian ragas from Canal Bar to Nell’s, Scandinavian heavy metal on the way from Nell’s up to Emile’s apartment. After that you start singing the Colombian national anthem.
    I ask him if I can smoke and he says, not problem. And I’m like, this cab should be a national historic landmark or something, the last taxi in New York City without a No Smoking sign.
    So we’re cruising downtown and the Russian’s telling me the story of his life, the short version. I can’t understand all of it, with the music and his accent and all, but the climax of the story is his first visit to an American supermarket after he’s finally gotten an exit visa and split the motherland. Or is it the fatherland? Anyway, whichever, according to what this guy tells me, having Russia for your parentland proves my theory that it’s better to be an orphan. So when he first gets to the old U. S. of A. he goes to this supermarket in Brooklyn and can’t believe what he sees, all the aisles of food and stuff. What really flips him out is the meat counter. He looks at all this red meat under plastic and he goes to his cousin—
Who for is all this meat?
(That’s how he says it.)
Is for high officials
? he goes and his cousin goes,
It is for anyone who wants
.
    I break into crying right there, the cabbie goes, to think how wonderful it is, all that meat in nice plastic for all the people who want.
    I don’t