This American Life - 161: Million Bubbles

Broadcast on: 02 Jun 2000

Well back I was in a taxi. The driver was a man named Ali Yusuf. He had this pretty music playing on the tape deck, though the tape was a little on the warbly side. So at some point I asked him what is the music? What is that? And he said well that's the music from his country, which if I remember right was Somalia. We talked for a while, and then he says to me that's my wife. I said really? And he says yeah she's still back in Africa. She was a singer at weddings and like that. And he was here, and she was there, and he would drive around all day in his taxi, listening to her sing, hour after hour on the road, thinking about her. Missing her. I picture him out there on the road right now. His tape playing. Just one of the many people on the road right now. So much of the life of this country happens in car. So much of it. Imagine for a moment that you could look down at all the streets and avenues and windy country roads and highways from above somehow. Highway cover leaves and a vast meadow spread before you. Each little car below. Its own little self-contained world, you know. Each one like its own little world when you go inside. In one high school sophomore tries to convince her boyfriend Tony and his friend Milo to buy tickets to the prom. Tony pay for prom. Tony says he's broke though he's about to spend over $100 on a paint job for the car. I want to go to prom. I get a dress too. I get three. You do. Tony turns to his friend. I'd like to take her out, you know. Tony you're gonna regret this for the rest of his life. Yeah because I'm regretting the date I'm taking. Meanwhile, in a four-door white 1991 Honda Accord, Lauren Byrne is speeding through San Francisco. It's part of her job. Her trunk's all smashed, tied down with rope. She's been re-rendered twice. The car floor is cluttered with empty-mountain-do bottles. It discarded packs of cigarettes. On the door of the car, a sign's attached. Look at these split messengers. Well, red light. Other cars relationship to me is definitely they don't like me. They hate me because I think they're really scared and paranoid about like driving with no hands, talking on my radio, and next stop at the same time, trying to write something down, trying to look for an address, and like, you know, I look at it as a big video game, you know. You have so much time to pick something up and drop something off in this time and then you have all these obstacles in between. Kind of like Paper Boy, like the old video game, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I've hit a few fire hydrants and a few people and a few different cars, and you get points taken off for that. I must say, dude, I totally am going the wrong way. In a year-old Chrysler 300M, Doris Kelly, drives him a long day at work downtown, toy church, playing the CD that she plays every night after work, on the way home, when her pastor recommended, when they play it in church, called Spirit Songs. People don't have peace. People don't have a joint in need there, and you see that driving on the expressways and driving on the streets, and people, you know, they're cutting in and out in front of you all the time, and, you know, honking horns and yelling at you, cursing and stuff, and if you're listening this kind of tape, you come, you're relaxed. You stop, you let people in, you, it just, to me, it's equal to a martini that someone would go home and have a martini relaxed. You look like you need a drink, she said. He sat with his head in his hands, in a pale bleached oak armchair beneath a pastel seascaped frame in a hash. In a navy blue Toyota Celica, Marlene Harris listens to one of the books on tape that she's in the middle of a science fiction novel called Darwin's Radio. She loves books on tape. The secondary mucus plug seems to be in position. There was no trauma, no bleeding. The separation was textbook, if anybody has bothered to write a textbook about this sort of thing. The hospital did a quick biopsy. It's

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