Streetcar Ride

     In less than ten minutes, the streetcar driver knows my city of birth, my destination and my future.

     He has thick dreadlocks, many and dramatic like Medusa. I recognize him from rides before, memorable because he is the most swift driver. His driving is not lethargic and historical like those of his coworkers, but monster-truck like in how he asserts his vehicle between the cars, foolish enough to jet across the Carrollton or St. Charles medians. I wish I could sit closer to him, maybe stand at his right hand and comment on the night.
Before he started the route where it begins and where I got on, Carrollton and Claiborne, he sat across from me on the first row of wooden benches. He blabbed in his phone to a friend about something I could not follow. He had a few minutes to spare before he spoiled the timetable, the integrity of which no one in New Orleans expects of these huffing relics who chug and lug down the city's main avenues. Other passengers get on, pay because they know how and sit and are not impatient.
"So where you from," he asks while still on the phone, and his tone is as natural as the August humidity. Hurt that he cannot read what I hope my blood can tell, I don't blame his question because I had tried to pay at the wrong side of the streetcar, which was the front but is now the back given the streetcar changes tracks at the end of Carrollton and Claiborne. I had also asked how often the streetcar stops here, not because of ignorance, but perhaps I could gain the code to understand the whimsy and the rhythm that is this public transportation. "Every eight minutes, till evening." I tell him my convoluted path to finally landing in New Orleans in brief. "How much longer at Loyola?"
"Graduating this year."
'Think you're graduating or you just hope to?"
I wonder if he has been to college or had once thought he would graduate. He seems to be a peer, but maybe later in his twenties.
Then he gets up and readies the streetcar. He tells to a guy sitting on the banquette bench before the first row about the fight between his cat and chiwawa. They seem to know each other, but not beyond passenger and driver. "She is fat. I gotta put that cat on a diet." The guy asks how many animals the driver has. "Oh lord, my house is zoo!" I imagine his house or apartment. He probably left the TV on.
The streetcar picks up speed, and I can only hear phrases of their conversation as the wind billows through the front windowless windshield. "My aunt is a bus driver, took off the whole month of July. If I did that I ain't coming back."
The guy to whom he is talking, whom I am now envious of for his intimate proximity, says "She cut my hours in half." He looks dejected, and an hourly wage job surely can't help that. A chubby man boards at the riverbend in tight gym clothes. Motivation? A dog barks at the streetcar, and we are a rival dog, more imposing and louder than the mutt whose owner eggs on his protest. The driver laughs.
Just before Napoleon I pull the buzzing cord. I walk the few steps to the front, feel like I’m gliding as the streetcar swings on. I stand next to him, ready to exit, and bask in the wind with him as he slows at my stop. I make a comment about my hair and the wind as a fan as for a model in a studio. He laughs again, and we wish each other goodnight. He slams the door on me, and grinds away, leaving me in the night under a streetlamp with only the flickering light of the streetcar as a guide for its movement.