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The Rich Are Different –– Maybe

Kirk Alex

(excerpted from Blood, Sweat and Chump Change –– Taxi Tales & Vignettes)

    Fashionably thin blond gets in the cab at the Century Tower. Heavy-lidded eyes as though she has done some serious crying recently. Wants me to take her to the Beverly Hills Hotel and bring her back. She mentions how wonderful the weather is. She’s from Michigan. I let her know I grew up in Chicago and am thinking about moving back, after twenty-four years of being away. She wants to know why.
    “I miss the people, the city.”
    “I can understand that. I like Chicago.”
    She had spent plenty of time in Chicago with her late husband. She had wanted to visit the Beverly Hills Hotel one last time, as she and her husband had spent their honeymoon there, and there had been other good times and memories over the years associated with the hotel. I remark that it is one of the more expensive hotels in Beverly Hills.
    “Oh yes,” she says, clearly aware of that. “We stayed in a suite that cost twenty-two hundred a night.”
    “What?”
    “I know. My husband was crazy.”
    We cross Wilshire Boulevard and make it up Whitmer. I wonder when her husband passed away. Her response is not audible and I don’t have it in me to ask her to repeat it. I do catch the rest of it.
    “He drowned in Hawaii.”
    I have to shake my head. What is there to say?
    “Life is a bitch,” I offer (to no one) under my breath.
    “I know,” she says. “It sucks.”
    “Was he a nice guy?”
    “He was awesome,” she says.
    “I thought you looked like you’d been crying.”
    “You could tell?”
    “Yeah. Your eyes.”
    A wake, with an attendance of one (because she wants it this way): the reason for her wanting to re-visit the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had once shared a few good moments with her now gone partner and best friend.
    “How long were you married?” I ask.
    “Three years,” she says. “Not long enough.”
    I cannot hold back my observation regarding men and women and how nearly impossible it is to find a true soul mate; not finding someone to fall in love with (that happens all too frequently and seldom lasts), but someone you could actually like and have for a lifetime friend and companion, a true mate.
    “We were best friends,” she says.
    She comes from money, it is easy enough to guess, not necessarily old money, but money just the same. Used to having it and spending it: on hotels/gourmet dining, travel.
    She asks what the hot restaurants are. She is aware of Drai’s on La Cienega. Does not care for Spago or Morton’s. She’s accustomed to the fancy, upscale places. She prefers Italian and French.
    I say: “New ones are always appearing, like Drago’s and Trattoria and others with European names not easy to remember.”
    I am hardly the expert on gourmet cuisine. I eat fast food/junk food. With enough greens tossed in, I suppose.

    I pull up under the world-renowned green canopy of the Beverly Hills Hotel. I explain to the young valet that she will be coming back out and am told to move the cab forty feet down the sloping driveway and park it to the right at the side entrance.
    I do that. My passenger jumps out and hurries to the lobby in back of us. A few minutes later she’s back in the cab and hops out with an apology, saying: “I’ll be right back.”
    I shut the motor off, stop the meter (not that I have to stop the meter, but do so just the same—not that money would be a concern for her—but do so as about the only act of empathy I have to offer).
    I sit and wait and contemplate the way it seldom adds up.
    My own blues were squeezing the life out of me, and yet, compared to her troubles mine do not compare, not that this observation makes it any easier to shake my unhappiness. She has lost her mate, and you could say all my life I’ve been waiting to meet mine. I understand none of it and those who claim to have the answers I say are goddamn liars.
    She’s back again.
    “I’m sorry, I truly am.”
    “It’s all right; believe me. I don’t mind.”
    Then she does it again: steps out of the cab. Asks me to forgive her.
    “I understand,” I tell her. “Take your time. Do whatever it is you need to do.” She runs back up the driveway to the lobby.

    The next time she returns she asks me to take her back to the Century Plaza Hotel.
    “ think I’ll go lie by the pool.”
    Later, I say: “Do you have family? People you can be with?”
    “I come from a big family. I’m flying to San Francisco in the morning to stay with my sister and brother.”
    “I love that city up there.”
    “Oh yeah!” she says.
    “Your sister married?”
    “Yes she is. She’s my twin.”
    I ask how her family is taking the loss.
    “They’re worried about me. I’ll be okay. It takes time. Only time moves so slow when you wish it would move a lot faster.”
    I understand, I do, but remain silent. I don’t know what to say, not that words would ease it any for her. Wish I could wrap my arms around her, or have her do likewise to me. I say nothing, drive across Wilshire, past the Beverly Hilton. I turn west on Santa Monica Boulevard to Century City.
    People who know me will tell you I have hated the jaded rich all my life, hated their guts, still do, and confess—clearly relish doing so, but the woman I’ve got in my backseat I don’t see as just another monied bimbo with fake gold hair, devoid of feeling, heart—instead, I see a fellow human doing what she has to to bear up under the burden.

    As we pull into the Century Tower driveway she asks what my name is. I tell her.
    “You’re awesome,” she says. (Her word, not mine. I’ll take it all the same.)
    I have less than $11 on the meter and can’t say I expected the $15 being given. Thanking her, I add:
    “Take good care of yourself. Hang in there, through these difficult times.”
    “Thank you,” she says, “for the kind words.”
    The doorman walks up to open her door. It dawns on me how quiet and atypically devoid of people the driveway is as she steps out and walks the distance to the entrance, this solitary figure.

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