The Stranger

So it's sometime in 2008, and my best girlfriend and I get rear-ended by a cab at a subway station in a major metropolitan suburb.  It's 110% the cabbie's fault, although I suppose a little blame could be shared by the folks who determined the flow of traffic, or their parents for not making them wear helmets as children.  But the long and short of it is that my bestie and I are drawn into a shouting match with the asshat who dented her bumper.  And he calls me fat.

Mark you, this is not your typical cab driver.  He is not the shining Adonis one is accustomed to seeing behind the wheels of our golden chariots when we stumble out of bars at closing time; he clearly does not belong to that unparalleled society of handsome gentlemen who take our drunk asses home and spare all and sundry from the horror of the DUI.  No, this particular cab driver is the epitome of the Average White Guy, and he's all kinds of shouty.

Average height, average brown hair, average face that might be perfectly nice to look at if you know and love him.  Utterly forgettable, the kind of guy who would play a detective in the background on Law & Order and get pulled in as filler for a line-up when the D.A.s need a witness to identify the Soccer Dad who beat the living hell out of a bodega owner or a hooker.  Has a paunch the size of Rhode Island, and he stands in the middle of a busy road and calls me fat.

He's scared; he knows he's screwed up and that we're taking down his license plate and his cab number and everything else we can about him, he knows we'll be calling his supervisor.  He's trying to put the blame on us, and it's a whirl of angry words and supercharged air.

So he says something completely ridiculous--something about having a camera on his dashboard that recorded the whole thing and would prove his innocence and send us to jail--and I cock my head at him with a really honest look, trying to make him see how far over the edge he's going.  And it hits home; he looks at me and sees what a complete idiot he's making of himself, standing there shouting at two girls whom he just rear-ended, and he goes on the defensive.

"What's that look for?  You're fat."

Now, this man has to be at least 37 years old.  37 years old, and he's using the oldest barb in the playground arsenal, the old "You're fat."  So I look over at my bestie and laugh, give his paunch a pointed look, and say "Oh, okay" in my most withering of sarcastic tones.  What I really want to do is curl up on the pavement and cry.

I know that if I were thin, he'd have said I was ugly, or stupid, or a whore--the guy was just out to hurt my feelings, because he was feeling defensive, because he'd fucked up and his bosses were going to know about it sooner rather than later.  I know that.  But the fact remains that he was right.

If he had said I was ugly, or stupid, or a whore, I'd have been able to brush him off completely as Utterly Wrong And An Idiot Mouth-Breather To Boot, and he would never have gotten under my skin and I wouldn't be writing this.  But he was right, and so he did get under my skin, and now I have the voice of a complete stranger in my head telling me I'm fat.  It's not there all the time, but every time I hear it, I feel the hurt almost as badly as I did the first time.  I feel embarrassed for myself.

I want to stop feeling embarrassed for myself.  If I'm ever being shouted at by a paunchy red-faced cabbie again, I want him accuse me of being a whore.