The Last Taxi Driver

Have you ever, from desperation or inertia, had a job so terrible that, perhaps most terribly, caught you in a trap of service and subsistence that left you no choice but to wake up and do it again? Lou drives a cab in northern Mississippi, shuttling the poor and rich and sick and drunk between bars and lousy motels and detox facilities and emergency rooms and fast-food jobs for a charismatically vindictive and chiseling boss, tempering his road rage with doses of Bill Hicks and Buddhism and pining over the one time he got to teach Shakespeare to frat boys before getting fired. Full of incidents so grimly bizarre they must have come from Durkee's own time behind the wheel, The Last Taxi Driver is a bitterly funny tour of the American underbelly, led by a guide as beset by demons as any of his passengers.