Insurance, by Tom Dinard

I’m not in the mood to talk.

That’s my only thought at six in the morning as my butt sinks into the vinyl seat in the back of the cab and the pure city stench of a thousand passengers past mixed with the coffee and cigarettes and Burger King and whatever else on the driver’s breath hits me.

Perfect. Just what I need today.

It takes me a few seconds to remember what city I’m in. I look out the window at the bleak concrete of Interstate 71. OK, it’s Cleveland. That’s right. I’m heading to Detroit today. Just make sure to get three or four receipts when this guy gets me to the airport and add them to the collection. Then the flight fiasco starts all over again.

I’m in the middle of a three-city, thirteen-day trip, covering a baseball team that’s lost six in a row. They’re already out of the race before the All-Star break, all banged up with injuries and wondering who’s going to get hurt next. A locker room full of glorified Triple-A scrubs awaits me tonight as the manager gets increasingly bitter, the GM answers my phone calls less frequently by the day, and the frantic mail from pissed-off readers continues to flood my inbox.

And then there was last night. The getaway game was just cruising along, about two hours and 10 minutes into the ninth, when some dipshit relief pitcher hit a batter and gave up a double. Next thing you know we’re in the thirteenth and I didn’t get out of the press box until 1 a.m. I finally got to the hotel and got sucked in by a brainless HBO weeper called “Life as a House.” I was so fried from my daily cocktail of fatigue and adrenaline that I just had to watch the whole thing. And weep.

So no, I’m not in the mood to talk.

And, of course, the cab driver is.

“How’s it going?” he asks.

Through the plexiglass separator, I see that he’s wearing one of those tropical Tommy Bahama shirts I hate so much, although I’m sure his is a knockoff because it’s definitely not silk. He’s drinking a strawberry Yoo-hoo. What grown human being drinks strawberry Yoo-hoo? I look over at the photo ID stuck to the glove compartment: Vasily Chedenko.

Ah, OK. I get it. Apparently a Russian with limited education fighting the good fight in this country and trying to make a buck for a family of seven or eight or twelve stuck in a non-air-conditioned, moldy one-bedroom apartment in some shitbag suburb like Elyria that smells like this cab drinks strawberry Yoo-hoo. So who the fuck am I to judge?

Courtesy is his only crime (that I’ve noticed), and no matter how chafed I am at the world right now, how tired and stressed out and sure that I’m going to be facing another shit storm at the ballpark in about six hours, he’s just some innocent immigrant hack looking for a fare and some cheap talk. No sense in not going high road here. Why not be the better guy?

“Good,” I answer. “How about you?”

The “Good” part was fine, I suppose, but I’ve stumbled on Mistake Number One. Simply put, If you don’t feel like talking, don’t ask any questions. I could have just said, “Good,” and then looked at my BlackBerry for the rest of the eighteen or nineteen minutes that it’ll take to get to the curb. Or looked out the window. Or pulled out a book. Or turned on my laptop. Anything, really. But now I know what’s coming and I just can’t stop it.

“Oh, fine,” he says. “Just another day.”

And then the inevitable pause as he inches ever closer to my personal doom …

“What about you? Where are you headed today?”

No sense in lying about this.

“Detroit.”

“Oh yeah? What’s going on there? Work or pleasure?”

Again, no lying here. Yet.

“Work.”

And here it comes …

“Cool. What do you do for living?”

Sometimes I have fun answering this question. Sometimes. If I’m in a good mood, maybe having a few drinks at a party with my wife, meeting whom I assume to be interesting people for the first time, then I’m willing to entertain what usually amounts to a procession of the same inquiries from the typical awestruck fan: “Do you go to all the games?” “Do you get to talk to the players?” “Do you travel on the airplanes with the players?” It continues in a similarly saccharine vein, and I assure them that it’s not really as glamorous as it seems.

Yes, “I do what I love,” I tell them, “but it’s a grind. Six weeks away from home in spring training, one hundred and sixty two games in the regular season, half of them on the road, plus the playoffs, it all adds up. It strains relationships. And yes, I get paid to go to baseball games, but it’s not like I’m actually watching them while eating peanuts and sipping beer in the stands like you. I’m working.”

They laugh at how humble I seem and often shake their heads and say, “What a great job!” I smile back, hopefully showing them that I do believe I’m fortunate to be hobnobbing with big-leaguers while they’re grading term papers or fixing toilets or selling high-end tools to mechanics. But right now I’m not in the mood to talk. At this particular moment of my life, Mr. Russian Taxi Driver does not qualify as lucky enough to get much of a response from me. Instead, he’s getting my time-tested blowoff, the immediate conversation shutdown answer that never fails:

“I sell insurance.”

***

I’ve used this one on planes, in hotel concierge lounges and in cafes all over the great cities of the American League, and it’s usually foolproof. Of course, that’s not the case today.

“Really?” he says, suddenly lighting up, like he’s been handed Kate Beckinsale’s phone number, a bucket of Milk Duds, and the keys to a new Maserati.

Oh, shit. What did I do now? Just be matter-of-fact with it. It’ll work. It always works.

“Yup,” I say, rolling my eyes, playing up the mock boredom with my own pathetic condition in case he’s eyeing me in the rearview. “Really.”

“Wow. It’s really weird that you say that.”

Weird? Insurance sales is about the least weird occupation on the planet. Incredibly boring, virtually meaningless, a time-honored bane of population’s conversational existence … shit, I could name two hundred adjectives before settling on “weird.” Don’t even answer. Don’t even bother. Don’t …

“OK,” I say, throwing my hands up slightly as I begin to roll down the window.

Alright. That ought to end this once and for …

“My family and me, we have very difficult insurance problem,” he says. “Maybe you give me advice?”

Good lord. Please let this end quickly.

“Well, I guess I can try.”

No results should be expected or applied, but I can try. All I ever do is try, anyway.

“My mother, she owns restaurant in Rocky River. She used to work at group home for people with mental illness and things like this. Now she host free lunch for these people at restaurant. But my sister, she is 33 and need specialized care for kidney disorder she has since child.”

Ugh. Don’t even put the gun to my head. Just shove it right up my asshole, and you might as well poke around a little bit in my intestines before pulling the trigger.

“OK.”

“Well, my mother is having problems with state insurance program. Last Christmas, my sister had issue with bladder and needed surgery. My mother visit six hospitals, to find right specialist. She find urologist but was told no proper testing done until she switched insurance to one accepted by hospital. It took two weeks and my sister was in pain.”

“OK.”

What else can I possibly say? This is fucking horrible. I’m fucking horrible.

“She got antibiotics and CT scan and test for bladder, but again she had to wait for more tests because of insurance. Now she has swollen kidney and can’t stand up straight. What should we do?”

What should you do? How about what should I do? And why aren’t we at the airport by now?

“Look, I’m sorry about your sister.”

That buys me a second to regroup, but I don’t know anything about insurance, so I should probably just tell him I work in a different line of insurance. He’d be better off consulting an expert from the particular field of insurance he’s referring to. Or something.

“But I work in insurance claims for farmers and on environmental issues, so it’s an entirely different arena. The whole medical thing has me baffled, too. Your mother should probably look into talking to an attorney with expertise in these areas. There might be some loopholes or some government programs designed to aid people with similar problems navigating the system.”

That should take care of that, right?

Now I pick up my BlackBerry. If he’s looking at me, he’ll see I’m busy and have moved on to other, more important things. Or maybe not.

“OK. Thanks. That’s interesting to me. My father was farmer in Ukraine. What type of insurance claims do you deal with?”

Are you kidding me? Who is this guy? How the hell can he possibly care about any of this? And how did I run into the one person on the planet who gives a shit about insurance claims on Ukrainian farms? And goddamnit, where’s the friggin’ airport?

“Oh, you know, the usual stuff. Workman’s comp issues.”

We’re at the exit for the airport. Thank God. Keep going.

“Sometimes cattlemen and ranch hands get into, you know, trouble … and then we have to clean up all the dirty work.”

What? You better explain this before he laughs so hard that he spits strawberry Yoo-hoo all over the windshield and causes a fiery wreck that makes you miss this flight.

“What I mean is, there are accidents all the time down on the farm. Claims are made. Insurance claims.”

I can’t think of anything else on this topic. Could that possibly have shut this guy up for good?

“OK,” he says. “I see.”

Yes!

As I take forty bucks out of my wallet to pay the thirty-two-dollar fare, he pulls up to the curb. He gets out on his side, pops the trunk, and takes my bags out as I stand by and wait.

“It was nice talking to you,” he says.

“Yes,” I answer. “It was. Have a great day.”

He hands me the four receipts I asked for and we shake hands firmly, like comrades.

“Before you go, let me ask you one question,” he says, gently, smiling while placing his left hand on my shoulder.

“Sure.”

“You’re not really insurance salesman, are you?”

I put my hand on his shoulder.

“No, I’m not.”

He gives me one more pat, a nod and a salute before starting to walk back to the driver’s side. Before he does, he turns back to me and smiles one last time.

“That’s OK,” he says. “I’m not really taxi driver.”

He gets back in the car and pulls away.

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