In 1990, Will Kern's long-running Hellcab documented the work-day of a Chicago cabbie on a Christmas eve conspicuously lacking in holiday spirit—a stygian slog rife with scenes of contention, selfishness, misanthropy, exploitation, and misery beyond our humble servant's power to remedy. Ah, but just when the ugliness of the universe brings him to the brink of a cosmological crisis, his despair is alleviated by one of those tiny miracles that spring up when most needed.
Thirty years later, taxicabs have largely given way to independent ride-share service and our lone pilgrim now roams the flatland highways for Uber. The plucky little Kia that he pilots is his own car, a relic of his recent ascendence in the corporate world, before his expected promotion was suddenly transformed to a layoff, arriving on the heels of his honeymoon to blight his marriage with the shadow of drudgery and humiliation.
Kern's fable was constructed as an ensemble narrative, its enigmatic coachman's various encounters offering a mosaic of the urban squalor lurking beneath the festive cheer, but while Reginald Edmund's odyssey, Ride Share, features many of the same monsters—chiefly, passengers displaying hostile rancor, poor hygiene, or impaired impulse-control, who take advantage of the intimacy engendered by solitude in close quarters to presume a misguided familiarity with their reluctant host—we remain firmly grounded in the loneliness of the long-distance chauffeur struggling against fatigue, boredom and the nihilistic demons who cry out to him from centuries of oppression to avenge the injustice inflicted thereupon.
Does he answer their call? Is his final outburst of rage a dream, its palpable evidence a welcomed hallucination? If not, will legal authorities demand that he be punished for his deeds, and if they do, will the absence of reliable witnesses absolve him? Edmund deliberately leaves some facts blurred, forcing us to determine for ourselves the fate of our flawed hero, whose every utterance and fleeting impression is savored in exquisite detail by Kamal Angelo Bolden.
Whatever your views on precisely whose lives matter, be certain that after dwelling inside the consciousness of this Everyman for our troubled age, however briefly, there can be no arguing the conviction that THIS life does.
