Same Old Paradise

Meet Genie Koko, the youngest female cabbie in all of New York City. She's about to land a fare from midtown Manhattan to borderland Texas. It's 1992, and twenty-six-year-old Genie, a Caribbean immigrant living with her uncle in Brooklyn, grinds out long days hacking a cab. Mess surrounds her, and she's struggling to keep herself free of it-but to what purpose, she wonders. Caught in lunch-hour traffic on West Forty-Eighth while reluctantly negotiating the rescue of her uncle's unwanted macaw, she picks up a rumpled, white-haired man smelling of booze. Dr. Phlogiston T. Hemphill is his name, and he wants to hire her for a week-long cross-country taxi ride to West Texas. Fed up with all she has, and with her passenger's big cash advance in her pocket, Genie risks the chance of a lifetime...