Riding in Style

Whether you do it often, or only on your wedding day, playwright Eugene Stickland considers how the world looks from both sides of the (Limousine) looking glass.

Conjure the image of a shadowy rider in a limousine, profiled in silhouette against a tinted back window. It is late at night on the streets of the big city. It's raining and the pavement is slick, everything shiny like it's just been painted. We hear the hiss of the tires on the pavement as the long sleek black vehicle snakes down a narrow street.

We are on foot. We pull our jacket closer around our neck and watch the red tail lights disappear into the drizzle and the night. And we walk on in the rain. Is it possible, at such a moment, to feel a faint twinge of envy for that nameless faceless rider in the big black car? Maybe even anger as you step into a pool of water in the gutter as you start to wend your weary way home after a long hard day?

After all, you're a bright person. You work hard. You have big ideas. Why should that schmuck be riding in a limo while you have to hoof it back to your cheap little apartment, wet and cold and chilled to the bone?

What gives him the right, other than some dumb luck and a lucky roll of the dice. Why lie about it? Why pretend? You hate him, don't you? Some where deep down inside, envy isn't enough. It doesn't begin to cut it. Spite? Now we're talking. Couldn't you see yourself changing places with him, just out of spite and nothing else?

Oh, I think so. To change places with the shadowy man in the limo - that's the goal, that's the dream, that's the ticket.

I became that man in the limo one night. This is what I learned: you quickly assume the role. It doesn't take a lot of skill to sit in the back of a limo. If you can sit anywhere, you can sit there. In the limo, you have very little affinity or sympathy for pedestrians, even though you yourself have spent a lot more time being a pedestrian than being a rider in a limousine. Suddenly you think your name is Rockefeller or something. Trump. You find yourself cursing under your breath at slow moving pedestrians who are impeding your progress to the very important place you need to get to.

"What's wrong with these people," you say, seething, under your breath. "Can't they see I'm in a hurry? Don't they know who I am?" Why, when you're in the back of a limo, you almost don't know yourself.

I'm not talking about some drunken high school kids on prom night. Pulling over and puking out some cheap gin, then driving home green. Or driving from the funeral home to the cemetery for grandma's funeral. Playing with all the power features, trying not to be secretly pleased you're in a limo, what with grandma being dead and all. I'm talking about really inhabiting the thing with a sense of entitlement that says to the world: I belong here. This is who I am. My life is going pretty damned well so far. How's yours going?

To ride in it like you would slip into a new housecoat. And yet to ride in it with a sense of humility, so that people catching a glimpse of you getting in or out will be overwhelmed by your grace and humility. Rather like peasants in the middle ages catching a distant glimpse of a beloved king. Or, just ride in the bloody thing, to get to where you're going.

It happened to me in rather amazing circumstances one night in New York. If ever there was a city designed for limo travel, it's New York. It's designed for a lot of things, most of them costing far too much money for the average Canadian tourist. Or struggling young artist, as I was at the time of my story.

A limo in New York! It's the only way to go. Uptown, downtown, crosstown - what better way to get around, surrounded in a luxurious cocoon, safe and sound while the best and worst of humanity passes through your line of vision?

One evening, several years ago, I was in New York working on a play of mine. The theatre company had housed me in a very questionable apartment in the Lower East Side. Someone had a grandmother (Bella) who had passed away, and as the apartment was under rent control, they were keeping her death as a secret from the powers that be. I was told that if anyone called or came to the door, I was to say I was her grandson visiting from Canada.

So I was staying in a tenement slum apartment that hadn't changed much since the 1930's. I was assured that it was a "very cool area" that everyone in the city was clamoring to get into. As I was hanging my clothes in the closet beside Bella's sweaters and dresses, and putting my socks and underwear into a drawer that held her underwear and orthopedic support hose, the apartment didn't seem like that hot a property to me, no matter what anyone said.

Not only had they put me up in this dive, but they kept forgetting to pay me, so I spent most of my non-rehearsal time wandering around the streets of Manhattan, looking for free events, wary of going back home to that apartment. Walking, endlessly walking, through a rainy season. Looking for a nourishing meal and cheap beer. (It's all there - you just have to know where to look.)

Life in the big apple. It's not for the faint of heart.

One night, I had a welcomed reprieve. I was invited out for supper. I walked the fifty or so blocks uptown to the Upper East Side, to a restaurant where I would meet my friends, who were with an oil company headquartered in Calgary. They'd heard I was in New York and invited me out for dinner and to a Broadway show afterwards.

What a transformative experience that is - to pass in half an hour or so from one of the poorest neighbourhoods in town to one of the richest neighborhoods in the world. The restaurant where I found my friends had, according to the Wine Spectator citations on the wall, one of the best wine cellars in the world. We took a few bottles from it, and had a good time emptying them along with enjoying an excellent meal. The bill for the meal was more than I had to survive on for the entire month I was there. But no matter. It's good to have rich friends - if they're generous, like mine are, it's the next best thing to being rich yourself.

After supper, I stepped outside for a smoke and there, idling at the curb, was the biggest, blackest limousine I had ever seen in my life. You see a lot of them in that neighbourhood but this one was a monster. Being up close to it like that, I could really appreciate its elegance, and even dream a little that someday there would be such an amazing car waiting to take me from point A to point B.

After a few minutes, my friends came out from the restaurant and I jokingly said, "Hey. Our limo's here!" The next thing you know, we were actually in the thing, inching our way through the crowded streets towards Broadway. No joke. This is how my Calgary friends were getting around town.

It was then and there I learned just how easy the transformation from pedestrian to person-in-a-limo can be. It took me about thirty seconds.

We were in danger of missing our 8 o'clock curtain. It was slow going along those cross town streets that were teaming with gawking tourists. I knew my metamorphosis was complete when I heard myself say, "What's wrong with those people?! Can't they tell we're in a hurry?"

After the play - which was good, although I would have been happy to drive around the streets of New York all evening - the limo was waiting for us. One of my friends and I jumped in and he took me for a tumbler of Scotch at Harry's bar on Central Park South.

He was staying at the hotel, and as I was leaving he said, "Sorry, but the limo's gone for the night. You OK getting home?"

Gone? How could it be gone? I was just getting used to the idea. Life can be cruel sometimes, no doubt about it. I pulled my coat close to my throat and stepped out into a drizzly night. Of course, there were a lot of limos waiting out on the street, but none of them had my name.

I had a long time to think about that magical evening as I trudged back the fifty blocks or so to my tenement. All I could keep thinking, over and over in my mind, with each step I took was "Someday, step, someday, step, I'll ride again in style."

 

Written by Eugene Stickland
Photography by Liz Field