From Iceland — Tales from the Cab Side

Tales from the Cab Side

Published July 13, 2009

Tales from the Cab Side

A full moon, star speckled Friday night throbbing with weekend Dionysian vice whilst spiked with lunatic animosity and irate inebriation. Sirens rend the air asunder: sporadically at first and then continuously as the wee hours see aggression increasingly erupt in assault and battery.
On Klapparstígur, outside the now defunct 7-9-13 bar (AKA“The Empty Bar”), bitches are brawling as blackamores spectate. A cruiser – or perhaps middleweight – eyesore of a wench swings intently away at a delectable choice cut featherweight to the merriment of the assembled masses.
In the Grafarvogur suburbs I fetch a trio of inconsiderate, unruly youngn´s who throw jabs each other’s way and unleash upper cuts at the ceiling while wailing like rabid banshees. Rid of their presence a bum fight explodes in the war zone that is the triangle of Kaffi Amsterdam, Dubliners and…, meanwhile up at Prikið, their wall to Laugavegur is being scaled by a festive gentleman with a contempt for queuing.
Back at Klapparstígur, the fisticuffs have progressed up the Laugavegur corner and the ogre is hefting a different slim opponent like a bag of waste and physically flinging her against the Kaffi Hljómalind wall. And still the pigs fail to materialise for an arrest.
I turn the corner and witness an eastern block threesome yanking a drunkenly staggering dude into an open hallway and kicking his floored body until my horn honking hastens them to retreat. Farther down across the street from the inexplicably popular B5 a guy – assumedly a perpetrator of assault – is pinned down to the street and sat on by an over weight middle aged man whilst two bouncers hover and the blinking blue lights ascend from up the street.
In Eskihlíð, a spousal altercation escalates to the point of forced ejection from the vehicle and my last nerve is strained minutes later as wasted pedestrians inattentive to the purpose of traffic lights start kicking the doors of my cab. The night then culminates in my hunting down a fare-bouncing customer and at daybreak delivering a non-responsive blacked out Lithuanian to the police station.
Unwinding with a beer and a hand-rolled seems entirely justified and Fight Club takes another spin on my home entertainment system.

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