Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

“TWO MONTHS!!! SIX FEET UNDER!!! YOU HEAR ME, I'M DEAD IN TWO MONTHS, DEAD!!!”

As I bolted from the taxi, I thought to myself, “Who the hell is this guy and why did he lob this stink bomb of ‘too much information’ in my lap?”

Taxi drivers in Israel have a monopoly on honesty. Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze, it doesn’t matter—they all seem to adhere to a code of ethics that would make Gandhi blush. More often than not, they are brutally honest about their lives, their spouses, and how they really feel about the situation in Israel.

On one ride, my cab driver asked me about the proper way to use a condom and if it’s safe to have anal sex with a Filipino woman. On another, a man told me about his wife who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia due to intermittent episodes of regression to the age of five, during which sat on her windowsill and explained to her terrified family that she was actually a bird and could fly.  

But when it comes to honesty and downright bizarreness, my most recent ride takes the cake. I had hailed a private taxi to bring me to a small neighborhood in Haifa to attend a martial arts class. Before I left for Israel, my mother requested that I refrain from using public transit as long as I lived there, out of the all-too-legitimate fear that it might blow up during my ride. So out of respect for my mother’s wishes, I have been paying 10 times the standard bus fare for a little more personal safety.  

As the taxi approached, I saw a mother and child sitting in the back seat and assumed that the driver had picked them up and was going to negotiate a “joint fare” for all three of us to get where we were going. As it turned out, he was about to go off duty when I hailed him, and the passengers were his wife and young son. Rather than bargain over a fare, my driver, Eliyahu, an obese man in his 40s, pushed the meter and began blasting ’50s American rock-and-roll.

I tried to speak with him in Hebrew and he helped me when I misused grammar or if I didn’t know how to say a word. Making conversation, he asked me what I was doing in Haifa, and I told him I was a medical student doing a rotation at the Rambam Hospital. Suddenly, it seemed, something in him snapped. “You know that a doctor there, a cardiac specialist, said that I'm going to die in two months,” he said. “Yeah, he said my heart is only working at 20 percent and all my blood vessels are clogged. Six feet under! Yeah, two months.”  

At this point, I was a little weirded out—maybe he was joking? But he sounded angry: angry with the doctor and angry with me as the doctor’s proxy for giving him that prognosis. His wife piped up from the backseat and, as is the international norm, solicited medical advice from me in a sweet and sincere way—something that worried me. I responded by saying that there is always hope and that her husband could help his situation by eating right and exercising.

Turning to me, Eliyahu did a seated dance move that rocked the cab and said, “I like exercise! I just never do it.” Then he continued, “My wife is excited, you know. We have pretty good life insurance and she’s going to collect big. When I die, she’s going to marry a thinner, better-looking man. You know I’m impotent and can’t please my wife anymore.”  

Acutely aware of the fact that his six-year-old son was listening attentively, poking his head between the two front seats, I couldn’t help but interject, “Please, your son is listening—don’t you think this is inappropriate?!”

“He should know,” Eliyahu replied. “Yeah six feet under, dead, two months, TWO MONTHS, DEAD, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME, DEAD! MY HEART IS GONE! TWO MONTHS TO LIVE. FINITO. BOOM. THE END!”

Thankfully, we were approaching my destination. Shaking, I handed him his fare and bolted from the car. As I turned to shut the door, he continued to yell about the imminent end of his life.

Though I can’t say I want to get in a taxi with Eliyahu again, I do hope he makes it. It’s hard living here. Death always seems to be closer than you think, and maybe honesty is the only coping mechanism that residents have to make the fear less stifling.