The Last Taxi Driver

The Last Taxi Driver by Lee Durkee

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Last Taxi Driver takes us through the days of cab Driver Lou, driving in a town called Gentry, Mississippi, taking us through a cross section of the crazed and the desperate. All are trying to eke out an existence in a world that has largely forgotten them. And for Lou’s part, he is working 70-hour weeks for a sometimes-psychotic dispatcher and a woman named Stella who runs the cab company. He earns just enough to keep working, all the while threatened by the impending appearance of Uber ride sharing service.

The Last Taxi Driver is mostly set up to cover different subjects in every chapter, making it seem random, a randomness that would probably resemble that of a night driving a taxi. And a picture begins to form of a Waiting for Godot existence that we are all just going along with. There are drug addicts, old flames, old enemies, people coming out of prison, people going to the hospital, people going to work who have no other way to get there than through him…old people who cannot climb into anything higher than his low-to-the-ground Town Car. There are stories in every encounter.

Lou’s life story is scattered throughout his taxi runs, where we learn that he has a son who once suffered a near fatal brain injury; where we learn of his prolonged dead-end relationship with a live-in girlfriend that is slowly eating away at his soul. We also learn of his past as a novelist and his foray into Ufology. Knowing what a cursory examination of the author’s bio taught me, I can assume that a lot of this is autobiographical. There is an embrace of the absurd in all things: the complicated explanation for his feelings toward Bigfoot and aliens seem less strange the more time you spend with Lou.

This novel is apparently Lee Durkee’s long overdue 2nd book, and it hits on almost all cylinders. Oddly, the UFO bits didn’t hit for me as well as some of the other observations of life at the lowest rungs did. It’s a little bit like reading Bukowski, with a much less harsh tone to it.
I enjoyed it; I recommend it. It’s a pretty quick read that can pass the time while you sit somewhere in your car.








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