God Hates Us All

Are you okay?” I ask.

He grunts. “Double shift.”

“Just get us there in one piece.”

“You don’t like, you find other cab,” he says, turning around to face me.

“Can you keep your eyes on the—” Too late. I hear a sickening screech as the cab scrapes against a parked car. The cabbie throws the wheel in the other direction, overcompensating enough to slam into a town car in the next lane. I’m thrown forward, then sideways as the cabbie pulls the wheel the other way, sending the car into a spin. We bounce off two more cars before coming to a stop, facing oncoming traffic. Several more cars collide around us.

We sit for a minute in silence. “I’m going to find that other cab now,” I tell him, hopping out of the backseat and sprinting to the safety of the sidewalk. Traffic on First Avenue has come to a complete halt.

“The fare!” he screams after me, climbing out of the cab with what looks like a police baton. I flip him the bird and scramble over the hood of the dented town car. I sprint two long blocks to the next uptown avenue and stop another cab.

“Kennedy,” repeats my new driver, a turbaned Pakistani who at least doesn’t seem dangerously fatigued. “Do you want we take the tunnel or the bridge?”

“Which is faster?”

He shrugs. “That is not for me to decide.”

“Which is usually faster?”

“Sometimes the bridge, sometimes the tunnel.”

“Okay, the tunnel.”

“I think maybe the bridge is faster.”

“Fine,” I say. “The bridge.”

The taxi pulls up to JFK’s International Terminal ten minutes past my appointed meeting time with Mr. Yi. “We should have taken the tunnel,” says the cabbie. “You never know, you know what I’m saying, man?”

“How much?”

“Forty-two dollars.” I toss three twenty-dollar bills at the cabbie. “You don’t have change?” When I shake my head no, he sighs. He makes a show of fumbling through his pockets. “I hope you’re not in a hurry!”

“Well played,” I tell him. I leap out of the cab, leaving him a nearly 50 percent tip.

“God bless you!” he yells.

As promised, the punctual Mr. Yi is nowhere to be found. “Fuuuuuck!” I scream at no one in particular.

“Watch the language,” warns a passing transit cop.

By the time I’ve paged Mr. Yi over the public-address system and called the courier agency—both misses— the flight is less than an hour away. I slump to the floor near the ticket counter. You’ll see her again in a couple of weeks, I say to myself. I rest my head in my hands.

“Are you okay?” asks a woman from behind the ticket counter. She’s Korean, approaching middle age, dressed in the uniform of the airline I’m supposed to be flying.

“My mother is dying,” I say, surprising myself.

Suddenly, we’re both crying. “And you missed your flight?” she asks, holding out a tissue box.

“I was supposed to meet the guy with my tickets here, but my cab got into an accident and I was late.” I accept a tissue and dab my eyes. My conscious brain is no longer in control of my speech. “She’s in the hospital in Seoul…,” I hear myself saying. I’ll spare you the rest of the performance; suffice to say that it’s desperate, shameless, and in the end, effective.

“There is one thing I can do for you,” she says. “The flight is not full. I could sell you a seat.”

“I don’t have much money.”

“I can charge you bereavement fare, because of your mother. Can you afford three hundred and fifty dollars?” I nod that I can—I still have nearly a thousand dollars left over from my aborted deal with Danny. After checking my passport, she scribbles a series of numbers and letters onto my ticket. “When do you want to come back?”

“Monday morning?”

“So little time!” she says, pausing to look at me. I nod gravely with puppy-dog eyes. She begins to cry again. “There’s one last thing,” she adds, tears streaking down her cheeks. “I can only get you a ticket in first class.”

A minute later I’m sprinting through the airport like O. J. Simpson in that Hertz commercial, arriving at the gate just before it closes. I show my ticket to a stewardess, who ushers me to a large leather chair that would have been too big to fit in my apartment.

“Cocktail?” she asks.

And then we’re taking off. We’re in the air for nearly an hour before an old lady sitting next to me offers me a huge smile. “Don’t you just love these international trips?” she says. “So exciting. Even the air on the plane smells different. It re-minds me of my garden.”

I take a whiff of the air. It suddenly dawns on me that what she’s smelling is the two pounds of marijuana I’m still carrying on my person. I excuse myself for the bathroom, where I flush two thousand dollars’ worth of drugs down the toilet.

15

“WHERE IS YOUR LUGGAGE?” ASKS THE Korean customs official with a cherub’s face.

“No luggage,” I reply, causing the cherub to raise an eye-brow. “I’m only here for the weekend. To see my girlfriend.”

“Ah, girlfriend,” he says, stamping my passport. “She must be good girlfriend for all this travel.”

“She’s the best.” I look up at the clock behind him, which places the local time at three P.M.

The cherub returns my passport and nods at the soldier who stands between me and the exit. “Soldier” isn’t the right word to describe a kid with greasy hair and a soft layer of stubble and who, despite the ominous-looking machine gun hanging from his neck, reminds me of a teddy bear. He smiles and gestures at me with the gun, indicating that it’s okay to pass. South Korea may be the most adorable country on Earth.

Unlike New York, Seoul’s subway runs right into the airport, making it an obvious choice for a budget traveler like yours truly—I only have a few hundred dollars left to my name, and it is going to have to last given the abrupt end to my relationship with Danny Carr. So I’m disappointed to discover, studying the map on the wall, that none of the stops are labeled “the Four Seasons,” K.’s hotel and the only point of reference I’ve bothered to bring along. One more thing to re-member the next time I make a mad dash across the world to evade the police and spend the weekend with a lady.

I exit the terminal to a sunless afternoon that feels ten degrees colder than what I’ve left behind. Rain is inevitable. Luckily, the taxi stand is where I expect it to be, just outside baggage claim, and a black-suited man escorts me into the back of a waiting car. Ahead looms a skyline, white, shiny, and clean, like a miniature Manhattan by way of The Jetsons.

About forty minutes later, we pull into a semicircular driveway in front of the Four Seasons. The driver points to the meter, which has just broken 11,000.

I rub my eyes to make sure I’m reading the meter correctly. I hold up the portrait of Andrew Jackson. “Hothyel,” says the cabbie. I’m saved when a smartly uniformed valet opens my door for me. “Welcome to the Four Seasons,” he says in perfect English. “The concierge will be happy to help you exchange your American currency for our Korean won. I will ask your driver to shut off the meter while he waits. You should know that in Korea it is not customary to tip the driver.”

The doors to the hotel part like curtains, exposing an international casting call for beauty and wealth. As I scan the lobby for the concierge, I find Ray. He’s sitting on a couch, looking completely at home, his attention focused on a dark-haired woman. He doesn’t look up as I cross the room to the front desk.

An agreeably efficient concierge magically transforms $100 American into a princely 70,000 won. I’m on my way back to pay the cabbie when Ray intercepts me by the door.

“There he is!” he yells, capturing me in a bear hug. “Man, do we have to talk!”