When I drove a cab, we were dispatched by a group of mean crusty old men who sat in a little metal shack in the corner of the taxi lot. The meanest and crustiest of them all was named Frankie Smith, the Monday-Friday overnight dispatcher. He wasn’t the sort of man you ever became familiar with,so he was never called just Frankie…it was always Frankie Smith.
I don’t really have a point with this, I was just remembering today how, when Frankie Smith was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, he decided not to get chemo. His father and brother had both died of cancer, and he’d seen how the treatment was almost as bad as the disease.
Everyone at the cab company tried to get him to change his mind, tried to stop him from committing a de facto suicide, but he stood firm. He didn’t even stop smoking, just kept on screaming across the airwaves all night with a pack of menthols in front of him.
Six months later he went back to his doctor, and the cancer was gone. A miracle had been sent to someone who truly deserved it, but it got mixed up on the way and ended up going to Frankie Smith instead. The doctors had no idea what had happened, but the cabbies at the garage had a theory: they said that the cancer didn’t stand a chance in his acid blood.
They said that Frankie Smith didn’t get cancer…cancer got Frankie Smith.
