Do Any Boston Cab Drivers Speak English?

Every once in a while, one of mankind’s great unanswerable questions makes it way through my head. Just yesterday, I got another one:

Why the hell can’t I find an English-speaking taxi driver in Boston?

Seriously! Every time I need to hail a cab in Beantown, the dude behind the wheel is either inaudible, a foreigner or an inaudible foreigner. Bear in mind, I’m far from being a stranger to the city of Boston and trust me when I tell you that I’ve taken quite a few cab rides all over this great city of ours.

Not one time have I ever had the pleasure of stepping into a Boston cab and seeing some Irish Catholic white dude behind the wheel with an all-American (or all-Bostonian) accent, ready, willing and able to talk intelligently about the insanely expensive Big Dig, the abysmal Celtics or the Pats’ chances in the post-season.

Instead, I’m consistently “blessed” with dudes you'd only see in National Geographic publications or on CNN amidst car bombs exploding in the background. Don’t believe me? Try it and see for yourself.

Head over to the TD Banknorth Garden sometime, pick the first available cab you find and step in. Twenty bucks says he’ll be from Haiti, Africa, Russia or some lesser-known Arabic-speaking country. I’ve got nothing against these people or these countries, mind you, but just once I’d like to not have to stress my brain to the point of fracture as I try to decipher my cab driver’s thick-ass foreign accent.

Remember that show “Taxi?” Ah, the good ol' days! All of the drivers were American, right? Sure, they had Latka, but they kept his googly-eyed ass in the garage, fixing cabs - not driving them!

Just last week, I had the pleasure of spending over thirty dollars on an Arabian Death Cab special. Nice enough guy, but he may as well have been speaking with a mouthful of marbles because I couldn’t understand a f**king word he said.

I told him that I needed to get to Trapelo Road (pronounced: truh-PELL-o).

He said, “A bubble?”

I said, “No, Trapelo.”

“Flah Fubble?”

“No, Trapelo.”

“Uh blubbo.”

“TRAPELO!”

“Wait! You go Boston?”

“No, we’re IN Boston, Numbnuts! I need to get to Trapelo Road. It’s a main road that connects Cambridge to Belmont to Waltham to Weston. TRAPELO ROAD!”

Finally, he goes, “TRAH-pelo Main?”

I said, “Lose the Main and you’ll be close enough.”

Then he asks me, “What route want take?”

I said, “Just hit Storrow Drive West. It’s the quickest route.”

“Burrough West?”

“Storrow!”

He, of course, took Memorial Drive.

I could have saddled up an arthritic cow, blindfolded her, given her an address and gotten there faster than this clown, but whatever. At least the cab was in motion now. And by "motion," I mean speeding up to 80 mph, then slamming on the brakes, then hitting the accelerator, then slamming the brakes again.

Clown Boy hit the brakes so hard one time that my head nearly went through that plastic divider that separates cabbies like him from dudes like me who just want to strangle him to death. After his one final, stop-on-a-dime demo, I paid him, stumbled out of the cab and spent the next twenty minutes coughing up shards of skull and checking myself for signs of internal bleeding.

Then, just yesterday, I had to get to the Fire and Ice restaurant area in Boston, which is very close to the Arlington T stop. That particular Fire and Ice is located in the same building as the office where I had my job interview, but I didn’t know the exact address. However, figuring that Boston cab drivers know their way around, I figured I’d just ask whoever I got to take me to the Boston Fire and Ice adjacent to the Arlington T Stop.

Seems simple enough, right?

So, I get in and "Captain Haitian Mumbles” is my pilot for the day. I must have repeated myself at least fifteen times before he even bothered to start driving the vehicle. And I know that he was asking me questions, but for the life of me, I couldn’t hear the man. Instead of being my abrupt and rude self by shouting, “Speak up, Slappy!”, I decided it’d be better to just reiterate that all he had to do was get me to the Arlington T Stop on the Green Line and I’d do the rest.

To his credit, I did get there eventually, though I had to tell him to stop as he zoomed right the f**k by my destination.

I was like, “Yeah, it’s right here. See the Arlington T Stop entrance? And just beyond that, there’s the Fire and Ice sign? See that?”

You’d have thought I just got done explaining Julian Schwinger’s theory on Cold Fusion with the blank stare he was giving me. I swear some of these people have gotta be fresh off the boat, yet there they are, driving cabs all over Boston with names I couldn’t correctly pronounce if you had a loaded Uzi pointed at my head. I'm sure there's a logical reason why Boston decided to stop hiring English-speaking Americans to drive cabs, but I'm guessing my Arabic will be nearly fluent by the time I figure it all out.