19 March 2008, Freetown
He is my taxi driver. A friend of a friend gave me two driver’s numbers, and I called this one first, just because of the name. He wears a t-shirt, dark blue jeans with a trendy weave, a red foam visor that’s the cleanest thing I see all day. He says people love him:
- All people. I know all people—good people, bad people. I know bad people doing good things, good people doing bad things. They love me as a driver. They love me so much they give me a name. Ricky did. You know Ricky? He stayed here 3 years, worked at embassy. He called me patient driver, man. He had sympathy. Human sympathy. He sent me referrals. He called me Wildway. Now it’s my name. Even my family, some of my uncles, call me Wildway.
He doesn’t talk much, unless you open the possibility, and then he can chat up a storm. He quickly becomes an ally, a protector, even. When we sit in stand-still traffic, and a woman comes over to beg, he says to her, “She my wife. Why you hassle my wife?”
I keep him all day–we have too many places to go. He turns down other customers who call, promises to get them next time. He doesn’t now how many times a day that phone rings; too many to count. “My line is hot.”
He has a decal on the windshield that says, “I am covered with the blood of Jesus,” and a sticker above the glove compartment that’s a picture of pages from the Koran. A CD with hologram stickers of the Virgin Mary spins from his rear view mirror. His real name is Mohamed.
And he sleeps as late as I used to, and so we must part ways, because in Freetown, even I start at 7…
