You pull up to the red light at Larkin and stop, the car pointed east towards the Broadway tunnel. Maybe you’re bored. Maybe you have a passenger, the kind that you can tell likes it when a cabbie hits the gas and drives like he’s being chased by the cops with no intention of pulling over. Maybe you’re driving one of the Crown Vics that used to be a CHP patrol car – the kind with the ballast at the corners for better handling in the turns at high speeds, the turbo, the extra horsepower, and no limiter chip on the engine. Maybe some twenty-two year old kid in a lowered Honda pulls up in the left lane and starts revving his engine because he doesn’t know any better. Maybe the radio station you’ve been listening to starts playing something aggressive while you’re waiting for the green and the unexplainable desire for speed begins to overtake the better angels of your judgment. Maybe you’re just craving a little flood of adrenaline.

Tonight it’s all of the above.

I start watching the traffic lights going the other way, waiting for the green to change. When the yellow comes the other way I look over at the kid in the Honda and smile, sit up in the blast off position, grip the wheel at twelve o’clock with one hand and tell the girl in the back to hang on. Then the cross traffic light turns red and I can feel my foot sliding off the brake and drifting towards the gas as I wait for the green that’s coming in less than a second.

And it comes. I punch it as hard as I can and in a roaring instant the cab flies through first gear, shifts into second and that’s when I push the pedal to the floor and don’t let up. The engine opens up and we’re accelerating so fast my body feels plastered to the drivers seat from the velocity, the girl in the back pounding on the seats and squealing faster faster. The kid is two lengths back as we hit the first tiny curve to the right as we enter the tunnel so I throw the blinker on to be nice and drift in front of him so that I’m blocking his lane.

50, 60, then 70 in a matter of seconds and I haven’t taken my foot up off the gas yet and I see the Honda change lanes and gradually come up on my right. We’re halfway through the tunnel at this point and I know from the time and distance that have passed since the light turned green that I’m doing at least 90 but I don’t have the time or the attention to look down and take my eyes off the road. The next slight curve is approaching and I want to get in front of the kid but he’s right next to me and coming up too fast and it doesn’t matter because I can finally see the traffic lights ahead at Powell gleaming red. I take my foot off the gas as he roars ahead, extending his middle finger out the driver’s window and as I begin to hit the brakes for the red it turns green and the kid takes off, swerving into my lane as he crosses Powell.

Lights from a cop car flash to life a half block ahead of me as the kid screams down Broadway and right past a sitting patrol car. The cops hit the siren and I see the brakes from the Honda light up as both cars pull over just past Columbus. As I’m passing the kid I slow down just enough so we make eye contact and he can see me waving him goodnight.

I am no longer bored.