You Can Bring a Horse to Water, But You Can’t Force Him to Drink
One morning in the near past, I was picked up in the very early morning by a driver outside of my apartment in Brooklyn. He was assigned to take me to a studio in Manhattan, where I was to make an appearance. Let’s call him, for purposes of anonymity, Dan The Limousine Driver.
Now, Dan the Limousine Driver had picked me up once before, a few months back. Normally, when I have the rare pleasure of being driven somewhere in the city, I like to enjoy it like a dog—I put in my headphones, look at the scenery, and take lots of pictures. Dogs don’t really do that, the only similarity is that we both like to stick our heads out the window. To be polite, I usually say something like, “I’m going to listen to my music, if you don’t mind.” The driver never minds. He can turn up whatever he’d like to listen to—techno music, a sports show, NPR—and we can exist symbiotically in the car.
But Dan the Limousine Driver got to gabbing, that first time, before I even closed the door. He started out with formalities. “How’s it going,” he asked first. Then, “what are you doing on the show?” When I told him, he then launched into a condescending diatribe about how blogging is only one step above texting, and that facts no longer matter to my generation.
As he spoke, I found myself getting angry. Usually, I love a good debate. But I hate it when people talk to me like their opinion is obvious, and I’m the idiot who needs to be informed of the truth.
Before long, I found myself in a vicious shouting match with Dan about politics. Dan is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Instead, he is a disgruntled conspiracy theorist. We didn’t make it to the Holocaust in our discussion—which I’m pretty sure he doesn’t believe happened—but he definitely thinks that 9/11 was planned by the government of the United States.
It was right before the election, and Dan was hating on Obama, who he claimed was a socialist taking away all of his money. “How much money could you possibly have?” I wanted to scream at Dan. Because what Dan didn’t realize is that Obama didn’t want to raise his taxes — he wanted to raise the taxes of the people that Dan ordinarily drives around. I of course am not one of those people.
To make matters worse, Dan took the longest route possible to the studio. Rather than lasting for 20 minutes, our car ride lasted a full hour and a half. By the time I climbed out of the car, I was shaking with anger. On multiple occasions I had tried to halt the conversation by falling silent, only to be drawn back in my some inflammatory statement.
Most limousine companies don’t send the same driver every time they pick you up. Usually, it’s a new one every time.
But the other morning in the near past, when I picked up the call confirming that my driver was waiting outside, I thought I recognized Dan the Limousine Driver’s voice. “Oh fucking great,” I said to myself. Sure enough, there he was, sitting outside.
I started out by immediately telling him the fastest way to go. “You’re wrong,” he told me. “But you’re the boss.” We arrived in record time, fifteen minutes later.
On the way, he again asked me what I was doing, and again I told him live blogging. He started his spiel about blogging being non-writing, but I quickly cut him off. “I actually write for a lot of other things,” I told him. “Mostly magazines about art.”
Dan the Limousine Driver, it goes without saying, knew everything there is to know about art. As he spoke, I realized that he was one of those people who occasionally, in the stream of lunacy, says something kind of brilliant.
“An artwork is like a rough diamond,” he told me. “As you begin to chip away at it, you begin to understand yourself.”
Quickly, the conversation digressed.
“Point on matter,” he told me. “Even the tone deaf have the ability for communicative skills.”
Just as we got to the studio, he turned around. “I’m assigned to drive you home,” he told me. “So see you in a bit!”
For all of our arguing, Dan the Limousine Driver and I always end our conversations on a positive note.
As much as I dreaded getting back into the car after the taping was over, I was also kind of looking forward to it. I had grown to appreciate Dan, and knew that as the show I appeared on is getting cancelled, it was probably the last time we’d be together.
We started out talking about what I had learned on the show—for instance, a segment about mice getting stoned off marijuana. “I think I read that in the New York Post,” he told me.
Then he handed me back the paper, so I could find the story. “Reading in the car makes me nauseous,” I told him. “Why don’t you give me the sound bytes.”
“Well, Jennifer Lopez broke up with her hubby,” he said.
“Do you mean her boyfriend Casper Smart?”
“No, the singer,” he told me.
“Marc Anthony?”
“Yeah, they had kids and the whole nine yards,” he said.
I wondered then if he was reading a paper from 2009.
One of my favorite things about Dan the Limousine Driver is that he peppers every sentence with either an aphorism or an idiom. When talking about his nineteen year old son, for instance, who lives at home but has neither a job nor a college degree, he said, “You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t force him to drink.”
When talking about why people in the South don’t believe in evolution, he said, “You get the most bang for your buck down there,” he said.
When asked to explain, he told me that people living there don’t have to buy winter clothing.
Don’t even ask me how we arrived at this particular subject, because even I can’t figure it out from the emails I sent myself with quotes of what he was saying.
At this point, we were near to my apartment. “IQs are lower down there in the South,” he said authoritatively. “Because the quality of education is 10% lower.”
“Ok, Dan,” I said before I started defending the honor of Caleb and his ancestors, who are all from Georgia, and are very intelligent people. “You can drop me off here.”
“Bye now,” he said. Then, he headed home to take a nap before picking up a young man whom he was bringing to a Russian banquet hall later in the evening.
