Saying the Wrong Thing

When I'm heading out of town and need a ride to the airport, I have a guy I call. He works for a local shuttle company. I like to call him instead of SuperShuttle; I like to feel like I'm dealing with an individual human being instead of a massive chain of franchises.

He speaks broken English with a thick accent, and the white-bread English name on his business card is in quotation marks. No doubt his given name is difficult for Anglos to pronounce and he's tired of the hassle. When I first started using him, I tried for the longest time to figure out where he was from. Turkish, I wondered? I didn't dare ask; I surmised that wherever it was, it was someplace where a lot of the people hated a lot of their neighbors, and an incorrect guess would land me in a lot of hot water.

One day when he picked me up, I saw he had several small pennants mounted on his van, snapping jauntily in the breeze. Perhaps it's New Years or something in his country, I thought: a perfect opportunity to discover the truth. "I like your flags," I said aloud. "Is it a holiday?"

"It is to remember genocide against my country. 1915, millions of people murdered by Turks."

An awkward silence followed. I tried to say something to make him feel that I was in solidarity with him, but it's hard to speak with such a large foot in your mouth. Thank God I never said "Turkish" out loud, I thought to myself.

(I was still relatively new in town at that time; I discovered later that all shuttle drivers around here are Armenian. It's just one of those things: film directors are Jewish; cooks are Mexican; drivers are Armenian. It's like the first guy from each country came to the American continent, got a job doing whatever it was that he did, made some money, and then called all of his friends from back home -- who were also in his line of work -- and encouraged them to come over and do the same thing. Voila, a whole colony is born of people who all come from the same place, all do the same work, and all know each other. Perhaps if the first white guy to come ashore 500 years ago hadn't been a brutal genocidal conqueror by trade, things might have gone differently for the Native Americans.)

A lot of our conversations go the same way as that one. He's clearly had a tough life, and he's not a jolly guy. I know this, but its like I'm standing in front of an oncoming train, and somehow I'm too stupid to step out of the way; I just keep trying to make pleasant conversation with the train until it hits me. Every time he sees me, he asks, "How's business?" ...Which is polite banter, but which also means, "Will you be needing a lot of rides to the airport soon?" And as a fellow small-talker, I feel obliged to reply, "And how about you?" Then I cringe and wait for the inevitable reply: a sigh, then "The same."

Last fall, I was heading out on a business trip. The morning was beautiful. The air was crisp. I was in high spirits. Business was good -- "...And how about you?"

"I come back from visiting my country. It snows there," he replied.

Now we're getting somewhere, I thought to myself. I said, "How wonderful! I've always missed the snow since coming to California. It's so beautiful."

"Farmers all crying. Snow comes too soon. Crops all die."

Shit.

He continued: "But I see my family. I see my mother."

I managed weakly, "That sounds nice. It's good to see family, especially with the holidays coming up..."

"Probably last time. My mother is very old and sick."

I give up.