Ghosts in My Back Seat: An Afternoon with Lee Durkee

By Mary Miller

Lee texts me from my driveway at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon: Outside when u ready. We’re going to meet Antonia Eliason, a Democratic Socialist running for U.S. representative in Mississippi’s first congressional district. The very first Democratic Socialist to ever run for office in the state.

He says I’ll like her, she has cool hair. He went to a brunch at her house last weekend—apparently the first brunch he’s ever been to, which is just the sort of boringly shocking detail that Lee is prone to throw at you.

“Where are we meeting her?” I ask.

“We’re going to her house.”

This seems like a lot, but I’m feeling unreasonably calm today, so I settle in and listen to the music.

“I like this Chopin,” I say. I only know it’s Chopin because I read it on the dashboard.

“Oh,” he says, as if he’s made a mistake, “I meant to play Bach.” He turns it to “Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major.”

I think of Lou, the narrator of The Last Taxi Driver, and how he begins and ends his shifts with classical music. I wonder if I’m making him nervous, and that’s why he’s resorted to this soundtrack, or if he’s just trying to create a pleasant atmosphere. The last time I was in his car, we went on a UFO expedition to Holly Springs (long story), and before that we went to a protest on campus, though we weren’t sure what we were protesting except everything. FUCK EVERYTHING, our signs might have read, though someone handed us ready-made ones upon our arrival that were more specific. There were only like twelve of us because people in Oxford don’t protest.

I’m supposed to be interviewing Lee but I don’t know what to ask. I already know everything. I tell myself I am going to put that aside and focus on Lou, our hero. Lou is not Lee and Lee is not Lou even though I can’t seem to separate them.

Lou drives people around all day long—fetching them from drug rehab centers as they launch themselves out of windows, ferrying fraternity boys to drug dens and dying folks home from the hospital before they’ve gotten that new organ—and everybody is forever trying to rip him off. I don’t know how Lou does it, how Lee did it. Lee drove a cab for years too. A Lincoln Town Car, just like Lou. I’d be walking my dog and watch him cruise past, the windows so dark it felt awkward to wave, not knowing if he saw me, if he was waving back.

“I feel like whatever I ask might get you sued.”

“Don’t get me sued,” he says.

I remind him that my husband, a man he knows well, is a lawyer, and would represent him pro bono. I am always reminding my friends of this even though Oxford is filthy with lawyers; they’re even more common than writers.

I look over the questions I’ve written in the notes app on my phone and realize they’re mostly quotes from the book that I liked:

Sunglasses look ironic on a corpse.

Buddy, can you spare one of those second novel pills? Just drop it on the floorboard and I’ll find it.

I miss lust. Lust gets you in trouble, sure, but it’s great for killing time.

If you’ve ever seen a skyscraper light up at dusk, that’s what it felt like. One floor of lights came on, then another, all the way to the top. (A description of Lou’s son becoming himself again, after emerging from a coma.)

The book is brilliant. Every word in the right place. All of the errors in the drafts I read before wiped clean. It is perfect, and if I’m to be honest, I’m jealous. I’m not jealous of Lee, though, because I like him too much. I’m envious that I don’t like writing as much as he does, don’t wake up in the morning with a desire to write. Even though he hasn’t published a book since Rides of the Midway back in 2001, he’s been working this whole time, has a hard drive full of completed manuscripts.

We pull into Antonia’s neighborhood where the streets are named Rhett’s Place, Ashley’s Place, Melanie’s Place. Tara is across the street. Lee tells me that two of the fictional characters in the novel, people who definitely do not exist, also live here. He drives me around to try and find their house. It’s not what I pictured. I imagined mansions with wide manicured lawns, imagined beauty and ruin, but this is neither beautiful nor ruinous and I’m disappointed.

“I like that you have all of these recurring characters, people you have to pick up and drop off and then pick up again, so we get to know them.”

“That’s what my days were like,” he says, “picking up and dropping off regulars, fetching them again hours later.” I wonder if he misses any of them.

There’s Anna, a petite elderly lady Lou takes to the grocery store and her “dry-needle therapy” appointments, to the liquor store for her weekly handle, which he keeps off the books so that her children who pay the bill don’t find out about it. There’s Teddy and Tiffany, a pair of alcoholics of such epic proportions that I’ll let Lou describe them for you: “When I pick them up, Teddy and Tiffany are dressed in their Stepford finest and she’s helping his drunken ass falter in the direction of the Town Car. You’d think they were crossing a raging river rock by rock.” And this is before they’ve even gone out! Teddy pisses the passenger seat and drops lit cigarettes on the floorboard while Tiffany pummels him with her little fists. The more horrible the characters are, the more I like them.

There aren’t any cars in the driveway at Antonia’s.

We walk across the lawn and Lee knocks on the door. She answers and leads us into the living room, offers us beers, which we decline. Lee is going to do whatever I do, so I should’ve let him speak first.

The living room is bright enough, though there aren’t any lights on. A child’s toys are scattered across the floor. I sit on a green couch and Lee sits on the other end. Antonia has her own couch. My living room has two couches as well: one for my husband and one for me and the dog.

There are a lot of rescue cats. I pet one and immediately start to feel itchy.

We talk about the animal cruelty laws in Mississippi, or the lack of them. We talk about fraternities and sororities, taxicabs, local politics, state politics, the flag, how her friends come to visit and she takes them to the Delta to see the crossroads and the grocery store where Emmett Till didn’t make a pass at that white woman. Antonia says the family who owns the building is letting it slowly fall apart instead of allowing it to be preserved, which I didn’t know and feel bad for not knowing, being a native Mississippian. I make a note to google it later, and it’s true: the owners—the children of the late Ray Tribble, who voted to acquit Till’s killers in the 1955 trial—are asking four million dollars for the place and have turned down free offers to stabilize it.

Even though Antonia is originally from Michigan and met her husband while living in England, she knows that Mississippi doesn’t have an exclusive claim to small-minded bigotry, and that this place, like any other, is full of love and hate, beauty and ugliness. If you’re going to live here, you might as well try to make it better, even though it often seems like the rest of the country just wants us to secede, or redraw the boundaries to cut us loose.

I’m impressed that she’s taken this upon herself. If I were braver, I would be doing it. Lee, too, is a Mississippian, though he’s proud to have been born in Hawaii. He likes to think about the person he might’ve been if his family had stayed in Hawaii. As a child, I always wondered why I lived here and not somewhere else, but then we’d drive over to Tallulah, Louisiana to visit my grandmother and I’d be reminded that there are worse places than Jackson, Mississippi.

“I read your book,” Antonia says to me. “I really liked it.” She tells us when she first got to town she went to Square Books and started reading all the Oxonians.

“There are a lot of us,” I say. Some would say too many. I have many local writer friends whose books I’ve never read and never will read and sometimes they call me out on it, which I think is pretty rude.

We leave soon after her husband and child arrive home and get back in the car. There are four deer in a nearby field and Lee slows so we can look at them.

“They’re so beautiful,” I say, and then I remember the deer sausage that my father brought me the other day, and how delicious it is.

We discuss where we should go for a drink. I don’t want to go to our regular bar, City Grocery, because we’ll have to see people and talk to people, and even if no one’s there we know the bartenders. We end up at St. Leo Lounge, where the music is awful, and too loud, like if Kroger had a bar.

Lee notes that there are women here that are his age, and maybe this is where he should be hanging out.

“You don’t like women your age.”

“It depends on the woman,” he says. And then, “I don’t know why you’re always saying that, it’s not true.”

Perhaps I’m still annoyed that he’s never hit on me, not once in all the years I’ve known him. Even when I spent the night at his house, he gave me the bed and slept on the couch like a nice young man, like a friend.

I can see that he’s irritated with me, but he’s never very irritated with me, even when he is. He lets it slide. Like Lou, he mostly suffers in silence and treats people decently whether they deserve it or not. Lou’s integrity combined with his barely suppressed rage is what makes The Last Taxi Driver so funny. He’s constantly walking the balance between trying to be a good person and finding that the well has run dry.

I think about the two meth heads who are “being stalked by the husband of one and the son of the other.” Lou is tasked with taking them on a cigarette run with an extra stop at McDonald’s while they fear a sighting of Jason:

At the Mobile station, Black Lycra, the mother-in-law, stays in the car while Tie-Dye runs inside, their theory being they will halve their odds of being murdered if one of them remains hidden behind my tinted windows. Meanwhile I am thinking: God, if you exist, please don’t let these women get me killed. I warn myself not to intervene. They are not your people. And anyway what kind of an insane knight would take a bullet for a disease-laden meth head? I sit behind the wheel practicing my apathy while imagining a murder transpiring on the hood of the Town Car.

Poor Lou doesn’t even have a working horn and often visualizes his death occurring in silence, without a meager honk in protest.

I look at my notes again and try to move the interview in a friendlier direction. “Why do you think traffic lights are so kind to bigots?”

“It was just a joke,” he says, shaking his head.

“I thought there might be more to it than that.”

“No, just a joke.”

I kick myself for being so literal. (In an email from Lee a few days later, however, he confirms that there’s something to this traffic light/bigot thing: the red-light question was a good one, but I couldn’t answer it because it was you and I woulda sounded pretentious to myself! If anybody else had asked, I would have talked for five minutes.)

“Why does Lou refer to gasoline as ‘petrol’? Do you usually call it ‘petrol’?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever called it that.” He’s looking rather alarmed now, and I realize that my questions are, indeed, very bad, and that I am maybe pointing out things that are mistakes. I love his book. Perhaps it’s harder when you love a book. I don’t feel like I’m getting that across either, though I’ve told him dozens of times how good it is, and how proud I am of him. Being a writer is weird in that the publishing world can leave you behind for many years, seemingly forever, but if you keep writing, eventually you’ll have something that someone agrees to publish and it might just be a great success. You never know. I had a friend release a novel years ago that was universally panned—the Goodreads reviews nearly made me cry—but now he’s sold the film rights to a second novel before it’s even been published. Stars, legit Oscar winners, have signed on. The writing gods giveth and the writing gods taketh.

We leave St. Leo Lounge and go to Funky’s, a daiquiri bar/pizza joint that’s nearly empty at this hour. Today’s specials are three-dollar Skinny Bitches and two-dollar domestics. It smells like bleach, but it’s nice and quiet.

We order drinks and sit at a table by the window. I check my notes and the only thing I haven’t asked about is Lou’s bug-splattered windshield with a link to an article on the insect apocalypse. I put my phone away.

We look out the window for a while, and don’t mention writing or books or publishing. It’s nearly all we talk about, it seems, even when we don’t want to. Lee tells me about a woman who owns a successful local business that he recently picked up in Memphis (though he no longer drives a cab, he still does the occasional airport run). This woman didn’t have enough cash on her and told him to come by the next day to pick it up; she’d leave an envelope at the counter. And so he went in there the following day but there was no envelope. He doesn’t say it, but I know how humiliating it is to ask for an envelope that isn’t there. It bothers me that she’s the shitty one, the one who’s done something wrong, while he’s made to feel bad about it.

“The worst thing is they know they’ve screwed you over so they don’t ever call you again,” he says. “You lose a customer.”

We talk about how hard it is to understand people sometimes, even the people you think you know. I can only hope it catches up with her, and it always does in a small town. To quote Lou: “In a town this size you know everyone, or it feels that way, and you also know the rumors and trysts and disgraces attached to each person.”

As Lee drives me home, I turn and glance into the back seat. He doesn’t drive the Town Car anymore, doesn’t have regulars he takes to the liquor store or their shifts at Burger King, but I know he still thinks about them—Anna and Teddy and Tiffany and all the rest. There’s a repeated refrain throughout the novel about how, even when they’re gone, they’re never really gone: “They are always with me, all my meth heads, plus the guy sniffing his TV dinner, the long-faced farmer covered in grasshoppers, the hundred-year-old man in his hospital gown, the Goth girl, the howling baby, they are all crowded into the back seat of my Town Car like some demented team photo I glimpse, only for a moment, every time I check the rearview.”

Not to be overly dramatic about the whole thing, but these people are with me now too. They’re not ghosts in my back seat, thank the good Lord, but they’re with me too.

Lee Durkee is the author of the novel Rides of the Midway (W. W. Norton). His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Sun, Best of the Oxford American, Zoetrope: All Story, Tin House, New England Review, and Mississippi Noir. In 2021 Scribner will publish his memoir, Stalking Shakespeare, which chronicles his decade-long obsession with trying to find lost portraits of William Shakespeare. A former cab driver, he lives in North Mississippi. The Last Taxi Driver is his first novel in twenty years.

Mary Miller is the author of two collections of short stories, Big World and Always Happy Hour, as well as the novels Biloxi and The Last Days of California. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Oxford American, Norton’s Seagull Book of Stories (4th ed.), McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, and others. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss.

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