Inside "Taxicab Confessions"

As I walked out of my taxi garage one evening last June to start my shift, a smiling young lady approached me and handed me this flier:

I immediately called and was given an appointment for an interview.

Thus I was able to get my foot in the door of the famous American television program, "Taxicab Confessions". I've long been a fan of this show and I'll admit it's been a dream of mine to be one of their drivers. If you're not familiar with it, click here. What they do is equip a real taxicab with several hidden cameras and microphones and record conversations between passengers and drivers. Passengers are unaware that what's been going on in the cab - often things that reveal their innermost thoughts, problems, and realities - has been recorded and are asked at the end of the ride to sign a release form, allowing HBO (Home Box Office, an American cable tv station) to use the material for broadcasting. If they sign, it may get on the air. If they don't, it won't.

This show started in 1995, and due to its popularity it has actually become a little part of the experience of driving a cab in New York City. A passenger will sometimes be having an in-depth conversation with me and then suddenly pause and say, "Hey, this isn't Taxicab Confessions, is it?" Of course, it isn't. But sometimes it is. One night a passenger told me he'd once actually been in the Taxicab Confessions taxi and had spilled his guts out about his sexual proclivities to his driver. But he wouldn't sign the release. "I don't want the world to know about that shit," he said to me... "especially my wife!"

I will occasionally refer to the show when the moment presents itself. For instance, a young man once told me that when he'd been an undergrad at Columbia University he not only was a student, but he also had a little business of manufacturing fake New Jersey driver's licenses and selling them to underage students so they could get into bars, a felony for which, if he'd been caught, could have sent him to jail and ruined whatever he was planning to do when he graduated from the prestigious and ultra-expensive university.

"Wow," I said, "now that's a 'taxicab confession'!"

Another time I had a group of four half-drunk, twenty-something man-boys on board en route to the next whiskey bar. The guy sitting up front with me was explaining his modus operandi for picking up girls for all to hear. What he does, he bragged, is simply to approach girls in the bar one by one and ask them point blank if they'd like to come to his place with him to have sex. No chit-chat, no lines, and especially no buying them drinks. "Twenty-nine will tell me to go fuck myself," he said, "but the thirtieth one will say 'yes'." A lively discussion ensued concerning the pros and cons of such an approach and what the odds actually were. At the end of the ride, as I was being paid, I asked these guys if they'd ever heard of a show called "Taxicab Confessions"? Their jaws dropped and they started rollicking around like the alcohol-soaked glee club that they were. "Are you shitting us, man? Are we on that show?" they howled, obviously hoping it was so. "No, sorry, you're not," I replied, "but you could have been!"

Now, I am the kind of person who likes to categorize data. I enjoy it when someone asks me to name my top ten movies of all time, or to list my favorite pizzerias, or whatever. I suppose that theoretically, at least, there could be a list of the "best taxicab confessions" I have ever had in my cab. And if there was such a list, I know immediately what confession would be at the top. Not because the confession itself was so outrageous, but because it was uniquely in a sub-category of its own. It was a gourmet item, a connoisseur's treasure.

It was a taxicab confession about a Taxicab Confession. And to put the cherry on it, it came from a celebrity. For fear of being sued, I'm not going to name this celebrity, but here's the story, anyway, the short version.

Quite a few years ago there was an episode of Taxicab Confessions, taped in Las Vegas, in which a young man and a young woman were in the back seat making out while the driver tried to find out who they were and what they were up to. It was obvious that they were really into each other - in fact you might say that she was ga-ga about this dude and that he was goo-goo about this doll. As the driver kept prying, we learned that the young man was a member of a certain rock band and that the girl, who had just been in attendance at one of their concerts, had more or less been plucked from the audience by this guy. So they really had known each other for only about an hour and yet they were on their way to a hotel, presumably to consummate their acquaintanceship. When the driver revealed to them at the end of the ride that they were being videotaped by Taxicab Confessions, the young man eagerly signed the release form, exclaiming that it was his favorite show.

Fast forward a couple of years to the year 2002, as I recall. Quite late one night I picked up two thirty-something guys in Hell's Kitchen and started driving them to their destination, the Soho Grand Hotel, about a 15 minute ride. One of them was quite friendly and conversational, which opened the door for me to begin a Taxicab Confessions-type interrogation. Knowing that they were en route to a hotel told me that they were not New Yorkers, so I asked why they were in town. The talkative one said he was doing some recording. In fact, they were just coming from the recording studio. That made it easy for me to ask him who he was, and he told me his name and the name of his band.

Bingo! It was the same band as the guy who had been in that episode of Taxicab Confessions a couple of years earlier. "Oh," I said with considerable interest, "you're in that band?" He replied, correcting me, that he wasn't just in that band, he was the main man of that band, the lead singer and the songwriter.

Years of experience have given me a good sense of what I can get away with with certain types of passengers, and I knew I could have some fun with this guy. I immediately went into my imitation of a John Belushi sketch character from the early days of Saturday Night Live.

"Well, EXCUUUUUUUSE MEEEEEEEEEE!!!!" I squealed, mocking him. "Excuuuuse me! I did not know! You're not just in the band, you're the main man in the band! Excuuuuuse meeeee!"

He took it well. Both he and the fellow sitting next to him (who turned out to be his bodyguard and never said a word through the whole ride), laughed at the well-deserved ribbing which, in its own way, created some rapport between us. The conversation continued. I told him that, probably because I haven't been keeping up with rock bands since the Beatles broke up, I wasn't familiar with his music or with his group except for one thing: that time a member of his band was on Taxicab Confessions.

"Oh, yeah, that," he said disdainfully.

"What do you mean?"

"That guy got himself fired because of that," he said. "I hope he enjoyed his five hundred dollars."

This was shocking to me. Why would this guy have been fired because of that? Was it because plucking pretty girls out of the audience was considered to be bad public relations? Hell, that was the kind of behavior we expect from rock bands. That would be good public relations. But his answer was something I never would have thought of.

It was because, he said, the guy wasn't really in the band. He was a hired back-up musician who was touring with the band but, by his statements and by signing the release form, he represented himself on national television as being "in" the band, something he actually was not. The five hundred dollars is what Taxicab Confessions pays people whose material is actually used by the show.

I continued to give my rock star more good-natured ribbing about what a mean guy he must be to have fired the poor fellow just because of this. I reminded him that I never would have recognized the name of his band if it hadn't been for that episode.

"Oh, he's all right," he replied. "He wound up with Fiona Apple."

So there it was. A taxicab confession about a Taxicab Confession. Gourmet, indeed!

With all my years of experience and with my knowledge of and affinity for the show, I felt I had a decent shot at being chosen to be a Taxicab Confessions driver. So a few days later, at the appointed time, I showed up at an office in Chelsea with my friend Annie at my side for support. I was greeted by a staffer who provided me with a bottle of water to offset the effects of the hot afternoon, and explained what would be happening. First, there was a questionnaire to be filled out about my experiences as a taxi driver. And then I would be miked up and interviewed on camera by Harry Gantz, who along with his brother Joe is one of the co-creators of the show.

Harry Gantz

The whole thing took about half an hour and was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Here, finally, was a place where I had a resume. Harry Gantz, as you might expect from someone who does Taxicab Confessions for a living, is friendly, inquisitive, and easy to talk to. Plus he looks a little like Fred Astaire, don't you think?

Being inquisitive myself, I found out quite a bit about how they do the show. Since here you are reading a taxi driver's blog, I thought you might find this of interest:

1) First of all, the show is for real. The passengers you see in the back seat are not set up in any way. They are indeed picked up off the street, always very late at night, with no knowledge that they're about to participate in a television documentary.

2) The taxi drivers are not actors, they're licensed cabbies. We had to bring our hack licenses with us to the interview to prove that we were the real thing.

3) In order to get material that would be useful for the show, the drivers tend to be unabashedly prying. They are helped in this endeavor by a director who is in a van that follows the Taxicab Confessions taxi wherever it goes. The driver is connected to the director via an earpiece through which he receives suggestions as to how to steer the conversation (steering the taxi he does on his own). If you ever watch an episode in which the driver has short hair, look carefully at his left ear. You will see the earpiece. The director has a tv monitor in the van and can see and hear everything that is going on.

4) Although the show is for real, there are two things about the way it's done that could give passengers an idea that something is going on. First, there is a large interior light inside the taxi that is always on. This isn't the normal dome light that all cabs are equipped with. It's a narrow, custom-made lamp that extends halfway across the interior of the cab, just above the windshield on the passenger's side. It's there to provide sufficient illumination for the hidden cameras. Second, the taxi moves at an extraordinarily slow pace. I've seen it several times on the street and I could always spot it because it goes at about half the speed of all the other vehicles on the road. The reasons for this are that if the taxi gets too far away from the van, they lose contact with each other and, probably more importantly, one of the problems they have is that sometimes a "good ride" (one that is providing potentially usable material) ends too soon. So they drive slowly in an attempt to get more stuff that might make it onto the air.

5) They go through an enormous amount of footage that they don't use. Either the material isn't good enough or the passenger won't sign.

6) The drivers who are initially chosen go through a filtering process in which they drive around in the cabs they normally use (not the Taxicab Confessions cab) with hidden microphones in place and suggestions being given by the director in the van, but without any television cameras set up. If they make it past this stage, these drivers are then used for real.

Now, I wish I could end this post by telling you that I was chosen and can be seen in an upcoming Taxicab Confessions show, but unfortunately I never got the call. I wasn't given a reason for this, but I can't help but wonder if my problem wasn't my gender. The flier I was initially given actually encourages female drivers to apply, and, if you've watched the show, you will have noticed that a disproportionate number of the drivers are women. I say "disproportionate" because the rarest kind of taxi driver in New York is a female taxi driver. You could watch cabs go by on the street all day and never see one. Yet, on Taxicab Confessions, at least half of the episodes have female cabbies behind the wheel.

So, Harry, listen up. You were probably too embarrassed to ask me to do this, but you shouldn't have been. Of course I'd be willing to cross-dress to do the show.

You've got my card. Give me a call!

********

But before you do, click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

How I Ended The War

I am a great believer in the ripple effect of communication. That a word whispered into an ear can cause a castle to crumble or another to appear.

I have often wondered, after having had a conversation with a passenger, what effect may eventually be created by that exchange. The taxicab is a unique human situation in that it's a business relationship, but its closeness in a shared space, its anonymity, and its protection from external interruptions can create conditions in which real contact can occur. The only trouble, from the driver's perspective, is that you almost never find out what the far-reaching effect of that amazing conversation may have been (although it does happen every once in a while - click here for a story about that).

So, even though it's quite unlikely I'll ever know if I've specifically changed somebody's life for the better, I like to think that I improve the world by showing respect to passengers, being a good listener, and occasionally offering what seems to me to be a sage comment or two. And that gives me a needed feeling of having "done something about it".

Now, as you know, in New York City every type of human being is wandering around and eventually gets into a taxicab. People get in and people get out in an endless and grand or not-so-grand procession of the human race. One passenger is going home to Queens after staying too late in a bar, the next one tells you he was once declared legally dead, the next one is a professional call girl who has an attentive audience as she discloses inside information about her trade, and the next one says he'd just spent the day chaperoning the President of the United States around in the U.N. (For the story about that, click here.)

With this great variety of humanity coming and going through his doors, a taxi driver every once in a while finds himself in the sudden company of a certain person who is either known by reputation or is discovered through conversation to be a "key player" in some particular sector of the world stage.

The thoughtful driver might see this as an opportunity. "What could I say to this Very Important Person," he might think, "that could create an effect on him and thus on the entire sector of the world in which he is so influential?" Such opportunities are fleeting, indeed. There are only a relatively few moments in which to establish a rapport and make your strike. More often than not, the brilliant things to say are thought of only after the person has left the taxi forever.

But not always.

Many years ago I had such a fare. Its exact location in time is a bit vague to me, but I think it happened in the mid-nineties. I had been cruising down West 43rd Street, approaching 11th Avenue, when I was hailed by two men coming out of the Market Diner. They were Irish - they'd been drinking - (no, I did not say that if they were Irish it goes without saying that they'd been drinking. I would never say such a thing!) - and their destination was 6th Avenue and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village.

These guys were around 40 years old and eager for conversation. Rather than just giving me their destination and talking to each other, they engaged me right from the start of the ride, as if for some reason I needed to be convinced of something. It turned out that what I needed to be convinced of was why it was okay for the I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) to set off bombs and use other violent tactics against the British.

Now, I knew very little about the struggle in Northern Ireland other than what I'd read in the headlines. It wasn't my fight and I never considered it my responsibility to learn the history of the conflict or to form an opinion about who was right and who was wrong. The only real contact I'd had with it, in fact, had been from another passenger who'd been in my cab several years prior to these fellows. She was a middle-aged Irish woman who expressed herself about the situation in Northern Ireland with such passion and outright hatred that I'd always remembered her. I didn't remember which side she was on, but I recognized in her emotion that she'd been personally affected by the conflict, quite possibly by the loss of someone who'd been dear to her. I believed that her passion was fueled by a gut-level, perhaps insatiable hunger for vengenance against whichever side had caused her loss and I had gleaned from her an insight into why the conflict never seemed to end. It was an "I hit you, you hit me, I hit you, you hit me" endless cycle of retaliation. From this insight I formed my only opinion about the whole mess and that opinion was that somehow the individuals involved in it had to overcome their desire for retribution and resolve to learn to live together in peace, for the sake of the future.

I listened carefully to what my two passengers had to say without challenging them. An angry comment one of them made particularly struck me as being a flimsy justification for violence - "the British cannot be reasoned with!" he exclaimed, perhaps trying to convince not only me but himself that this was so - but I didn't attempt to contradict him or even play devil's advocate. These were serious people who were speaking emotionally and, although I didn't know or want to know specifically who they were, I did know with certainty that they were in the I.R.A. and that they were in agreement with and participating in the activity of killing people who were their political enemies. Some would call them terrorists, others might call them freedom fighters, but whatever you call them, they were scary and perhaps drunk and for my own safety's sake I just wanted to be rid of them.

But there was this other thing.

It was the knowledge that words can change minds and changed minds can change conditions.

So I decided to take my shot. And my shot consisted of a single word.

As they were exiting the taxi at their destination in the Village, I said this:

"I have just one word for you guys."

There was a pause. They had just spent the last ten minutes using me as their sounding board and were at least for the moment all talked out. So the moment was right. Their facial expressions seemed to say that they wanted to know what this one word could be and, whatever it was, that they would give it their full consideration. So I told them the word.

"Gandhi," I said.

The one who had just given me a ten-dollar bill for the ride seemed a little stunned by the comment. He thought of saying something in response, but he didn't. Then he closed the door and they were gone.

After that, time went by. I continued to not give any special attention to the conflict in Northern Ireland but eventually I did notice something. I noticed that things were getting better. And then the conflict was resolved and today no more bombs are being set off. The war is over.

Did the comment of a taxi driver in New York City end the war in Northern Ireland?

Of course not.

Or did it?

I write this story not only to overstate my worth to the world and to boost up my always fragile self-esteem, but because it is my New Year's message to you, a much-appreciated reader of this blog. I suggest that we resolve to never forget that thought precedes, and is senior to, action and to further resolve to never underestimate the power of communication. Let us resolve to continue to make our voices heard and to always remember that the easiest way to recognize a tyranny is by its attempts to stifle the free flow of communication.

Best wishes to you for a great New Year and a great New Decade from a taxi driver...

May your best days be yet unseen,

And may all your lights be green.

********

And one other resolution, while we're at it: let us all resolve to click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Sunday On A Roll

There's a certain phenomenon that exists in sports, gambling, and taxi driving called being "on a roll". If you're "on a roll" it means that you just can't miss. Things are going your way without effort, without even trying. If you were throwing dice at a craps game, you would just win, win, win. If you'd bought a ticket at a raffle, the name that would be picked out of the hat would be yours. It's as if you're on a psychic toboggan ride. Nobody seems to know how it happens, but, if we could bottle it, surely our troubles would be over.

I had a day like that last Sunday. I found myself on a roll. Didn't know how it happened, but it was great while it lasted.

5:25 p.m. - My first ride of the night. A nice little old lady was assisted into the cab at 46th Street and 10th Avenue by someone on the street and then rode with me uptown to the corner of 62nd and Broadway. After she paid me I saw that she might need some help getting out so I came around and literally give her my hand in order to provide that extra little pull she needed to enable her leg to come up high enough to get over the raised area where the back door meets the floorboard. It's something you have to watch out for with the elderly if you're a cab driver. Many older people will refuse an offer for assistance, so I've found it's wise to just come around without asking and open the door for them if it's not already opened or, if it is, just stand there and be ready to lend a hand. Perhaps it was this little good deed that led to the roll. For standing there before I could close the door was my next fare, a blonde.

5:34 p.m. - She was off to LaGuardia with no luggage. This in itself is enough to start a conversation - "no luggage?" - and that simple question led to a discussion about her life and aspirations and a bit of my own story, too. Why no luggage? Because she was a day tripper who'd just come in from Boston to audition for admission to Julliard's graduate school for opera singers. She'd already graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music and New York is the next very logical place to continue to pursue such a career. I asked her if she was able to read music as a singer - that is, to be able to sing by looking at the notes on the page and she replied that she could. This ability impresses me even more than being able to play an instrument from the written page since it seems to me to be more difficult to do, and I told her so. I was then able to impress her a little by telling her that I once had the opera star Beverly Sills in my cab. It pleased me to see her reaction to this revelation - "Wow! You did?!!" - because, really, how many people out there are going to be interested in knowing that? Opera is kind of a cult. It has a strong following, but not in great numbers. It shows me, though, that I must have some kind of a celebrity story for all tastes. (The latest count I did of the number of celebrities who've been in my cab came to 124. They add up over the years.) I went on to tell my aspiring diva that we had something in common in that I, too, once studied music in Boston. I'd spent one misbegotten semester at the Berklee School of Music in 1969 when the school was so new that they'd let anyone (me) in. By the time we got to LaGuardia we were in a pretty good affinity due to the abundance of communication, so I asked her name in case she should someday be famous herself and I could say, "Yeah, I had her in my cab when she was still an unknown", and she said it was Charley something. It occurred to me that there's never been an opera singer who went by one name, so I suggested she might want to just go with "Charley". She could be the Madonna of the opera world. Or the Cher, at least. If that happens, remember you heard it here first.

Now, getting a fare to LaGuardia in the early evening on a Sunday is in itself a sign that things are going your way. It's the time of the week when you are most likely to get an immediate ride back to the city, and that's fast money. I did a quick check of the taxi waiting areas (there are five of them at LaGuardia) and decided that the American Airlines lot was the best bet. In ten minutes I was on my way to Greenwich Village with a cheerful couple who appreciated my traffic-avoiding navigation and tipped generously. Back in Manhattan by 7:04. On a roll!

7:10 p.m. - I drove up 6th Avenue looking for my next fare and pulled up in front of the Bed, Bath and Beyond at 18th Street. No passengers, but the doorman of the place came up to me and handed me a little yellow card with little pictures of 30 shopping bags on it. He explained that if I either pick up or deliver customers to the store 30 times on Saturdays or Sundays between 3 and 7 p.m., I will receive a $20 gift certificate from the store. And then he punched the first bag with his hole puncher. I thought it was a creative way for the store to attract taxis when they apparently need them the most. It's not a lot of money, but in the world of taxi driving any reward from an establishment for servicing their public is a rarity, indeed. In fact, the only other place I know of in all of New York that gives a cabbie a prize for delivering a customer is a certain strip joint in Midtown. Just after the newly-arrived patron enters the place, the doorman will come over and adroitly hand the taxi driver an envelope with a $5 bill inside.

After just a minute of hanging around, a couple of guys jumped in and we drove up to 92nd and Central Park West. I showed them the yellow card I'd just been given and this somehow began a convoluted conversation about animals, politicians, and celebrities. When we arrived at their destination the more talkative of the two gave me a $5 tip on a $15 fare and told me it was the most interesting taxi ride he'd ever taken. Which gets me thinking it's not me, it's the roll, and I start feeling a bit in awe regarding the roll, wondering how long it could continue.

9:00 p.m. My next six fares were unremarkable, just so-so rides with nothing special going on, and I'm thinking my lucky streak is over. Nine o'clock is break time and since I found myself on the Upper East Side I decided to flick on my "off-duty" light and head over to the Starbuck's on 87th and Lex, one of my favorites (easy parking and two clean bathrooms). As is my custom, once I park the cab and step outside, I first open a back door and check for garbage before locking up. Something immediately caught my eye on the floor. It's something that, to a cab driver, is like a row of five cherries popping up on a slot machine to a gambler.

It was a wallet.

Ding-ding-ding!

Now, there are two kinds of wallets you can find on the floor of a taxicab. One is a wallet that has been emptied by a previous passenger. And the other is one that has not. This wallet was of the latter variety.

Ding-ding-ding!

I don't want you to think that I'm the kind of person who would find something of value and not try to return it. To the contrary, I have a very solid policy in this regard. I will make every effort to return the item unless the person who lost it was, in my opinion, outrightly evil. And that has happened only once in 32 years. My success rate is quite high, probably around 90 per cent, not counting things like umbrellas, gloves, and hats whose value isn't worth the trouble it would take to hunt the person down. I'm talking about items such as cell phones, wallets, and bicycles (yes, someone once left a bicycle in the trunk of my cab). The reason the bells of the jackpot go off when you find something like this is that invariably the person who gets it back is going to give you a significant reward.

I snatched the wallet from the floor and returned to the front seat of the cab. Examining its contents, I found about $60 in cash, a single credit card, a Medicare identification card, some phone numbers of doctors, and, fortunately, the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the person who owned the wallet and her children. This meant that returning the wallet was going to be easy to do.

I did a little detective work to try to figure out which passenger it could be. The clues I had were that it was a female who was old enough to be eligible for Medicare and had at least two grown children. I looked over my trip sheet and reviewed who'd been in my cab that night, and I realized it could only belong to one person: it was the little old lady who had been my first passenger. She must have dropped it when I was assisting her out of the taxi. The amazing thing is that I had taken nine fares since then and, counting the numbers in the column of the trip sheet that tells you how many passengers had been in each ride, these nine fares consisted of 17 people. In other words, 17 people had come in and out of my cab and no one had noticed the wallet on the floor! And that is quite remarkable.

I got out my cell phone and dialed her number. The call was answered by the desk clerk in what turned out to be an assisted living facility on the West Side. I asked if this certain person lived there, he said she did, and I told him I was a taxi driver who had her wallet. He told me she was out of the building and suggested that I just drop it off with him, but of course that was not going to happen. Trying not to insult the guy, I told him that I'd be working all night and that this was something I could give only to the lady herself. I gave him my number and asked him to give it to her when she came in. If I give the wallet to him, there goes the reward, there goes the satisfaction I get from seeing someone's faith in humanity rehabilitated, and how would I know if he would actually give it to her, anyway? I don't know this guy from Adam. Or Eve, for that matter.

I went into my Starbuck's, used the restroom, got my tall black, returned to the cab, opened up my bran muffin from Trader Joe's, and went back to work, cruising down Lex without a fare (but with caffeine) until I got to Midtown.

9:33 p.m. - My phone rings. I immediately flicked on my "off-duty" light once again and pulled over to the curb, knowing the call would be for the wallet. It was the daughter of the little old lady, overjoyed. She told me the address of her mother's facility and I told her I would be there in about ten minutes.

Just as I was about to drive off, three exuberant women came rushing up to the side of the cab seeking my services. I told them I was off-duty but if they were going my way I could take them. Not forgetting that I was on a roll, it didn't really surprise me that where they wanted to go was only two blocks away from where I was heading. They jumped in the cab. We rolled on.

Well, it turned out they were from Virginia and were having themselves a great time in the big city. They told me they come to New York every year during "this week" and, from what I could gather, it was an annual, get down and boogie, what-happens-in-New-York-stays-in-New-York weekend. They were so bubbly that I felt comfortable telling them, in order to show that New Yorkers in general are wonderful people and that I in particular am a wonderful person, that, hey, look at this, I am on my way to return a passenger's wallet. And I held it up for all to see. I might as well have told them that I'd discovered that the cure for arthritis was drinking martinis. I was an instant hero. They gave me twenty dollars for a $6.30 fare and, in the immortal words of Harry Chapin, I stuffed the bill in my shirt. It occurred to me about ten seconds later that maybe I should always have a wallet handy to show passengers that "I'm on my way to returning it". I could make a fortune.

9:46 p.m. - I arrive at the assisted living facility and the daughter of the little old lady was right there, waiting for me just outside the entrance to the place. She was about my own age, filled with gratitude, and I could see from the way she spoke that she cared deeply about her mother who, she said, was sure that "that nice cab driver" would return her wallet to her. She handed me a couple of bills, thanked me again, and we went our ways. Stopping at the red light at the next intersection, I looked at what she'd given me and saw it was two twenty dollar bills. A bit exorbitant, I thought, but much appreciated.

9:53 p.m. - At this point, I'm beginning to feel impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and, as if to test me, two passengers get in at 47th and 8th who, under normal circumstances, would have been able to get under my skin. They were two middle-aged, obese females, one of whom not only had great difficulty simply getting into the cab, but also was attempting to gain sympathy from the other by whining and moaning on about her range of motion difficulties. They were coming from a play and I overheard the whiner say, "if it wasn't Mamet, it never would have made it to Broadway". In other words, it was a new David Mamet drama and they didn't care for it. Now, I am a David Mamet fan so that comment, along with their upper crust, academic-condescension way of speaking, would normally have been enough to bring me down a notch. But not tonight. Even their ten per cent tip when I dropped them off at 89th and Riverside didn't put a dent in my elan vital. I was on a roll, after all.

But then things seemed to even out. I took several unspectacular rides. I thought it was over. But, no!

11:35 p.m. - I pick up a couple near Washington Square in the Village who are en route to the posh Regency Hotel in the Upper East Side. They were from another country - I'm not sure which - in great spirits, and enjoying each other's company. We didn't have much conversation during the ride other than my pointing out that the Park Avenue Tunnel, through which we passed, was originally built for trains. Then when we got to the Regency, the gentleman told me that he "likes the way I drive" and gave me $25 for an $11.90 fare. And asked for my card. As I drove off, I'm thinking I'm so hot I may have to be declared a fire hazard. The roll!

But I hit another lull. It had to be over. Then, this...

2:55 a.m. - I pick up a middle-aged man in Midtown who wants to go to a section in Brooklyn right under the Manhattan Bridge that's known as "Dumbo". It's pretty much a non-conversational ride, but about halfway there, just to break a bit of monotony setting in, I asked the fellow if he knew what "Dumbo" stood for. He didn't, so I told him - it's an acronym for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass". He seemed to appreciate this, so I went on to ask if he knew what Tribeca meant. He didn't know that either, so I told him it was for "Triangle Below Canal". Another five minutes or so went by without much conversation, and then as we were getting close to his destination he suddenly asks me if I know what the numbers in Union Square mean! Now, this is not a question that is normally asked of a cab driver - in fact I don't think anyone has ever asked me that, ever - which wouldn't be any big deal in itself, but when you consider that the last post in this blog was on this very subject, then his asking me this question at this particular time is something that might be considered beyond coincidence. So I told him what the numbers mean and also told him that of all the people in the world of whom he could have theoretically asked that question, I am undoubtedly the only person in the world who could hand him a card containing the web address of his own blog and direct him to the most recently written entry which would explain and demonstrate, via video, the answer to his question. And I gave him my card.

At this point I had to consider the very real possibility that for reasons unknown I had been imbued with godlike powers and should seriously consider starting my own religion, but of course you know that whenever you start blowing bubbles like this someone shows up with a pin...

3:31 a.m. - I pull over on Carmine Street in the Village for a young lady who has just finished kissing some guy and wants to go to 40th between Broadway and 6th. She was kind of pretty and seemed tired and done for the night, so there was no talking, really, just a straight run up 6th Avenue. And then these horrifying words: "I don't feel good". Oh my god, that translates immediately as: "I'm going to throw up now". Without needing to ask for any further information, I knew I had to instantly bring the cab to a halt and get her out because within a few moments there would be puke all over the place. But I was in the middle of the avenue and, wouldn't you know, there was a vehicle at this hour of the night blocking me, meaning it would cost me an extra three or four seconds to get over to the curb. And that additional time could mean that God was about to spit on me for my arrogance as well as whatever the girl was about to do. It just suddenly seemed somehow ironically fitting that my perfect night would end with me cleaning up vomit.

But it didn't happen!

We made it to the curb and she puked on the street.

Still on a roll!

4:30 a.m. - I finished the night off by taking a young man who was a systems troubleshooter to Brooklyn from Midtown. He'd just spent the night repairing a company's computers on an emergency basis and I realized here was the perfect person to ask about some trouble I've been having with my own computer. One of the few perks of driving a cab is that you can always get free legal advice and free computer advice from passengers. So I told him my computer, a pc with Windows XP, has been slowing down lately. He made an analogy with a truck that is carrying a heavy load - the more weight, the slower the truck can go, and recommended that I quit some of the always-running programs whose icons appear at the bottom right-hand side of the screen. I did this and it has helped enormously, which is why I pass it along to you, a little cherry to top off my Sunday on a roll.

********

Along with Sundays on a roll, I would also recommend ham and Swiss on a roll with a dash of mustard and a click right here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Can You Solve The Mystery of the Union Square Numbers?

In the Union Square area of New York City - on 14th Street between Broadway and 4th Avenue, to be exact - there is a building with a row of fifteen huge numbers brightly illuminated and always on display. The digits on the left and right sides remain relatively constant, but as the eye moves toward the middle of the row, the digits are seen to be moving more and more rapidly from zero to nine in endless repetition.

There is no explanation given for what these numbers mean.

For many years I didn't know what they meant, if anything, and I finally decided out of frustration that it was merely "pretentious art". I thought it was just somebody's idea of a joke - how to drive everyone crazy by putting up randomly moving numbers that meant nothing.

Now it just so happens that if you're driving down Broadway you will inevitably hit red lights at both 17th Street, where Broadway and Union Square East melt into each other, and then again one block further down the road at 16th Street. From both of these vantage points you can easily see the numbers and, if you're a taxi driver, that will mean as years pass by that there will be a significant amount of time spent at both these places with nothing better to do than to look at the numbers until the light turns green.

And I guess that is why I eventually understood what the numbers meant. I wasn't trying to figure it out. It just hit me one day, as if by osmosis, after about ten years. I suddenly saw it and once I saw it there was no denying what it meant. It was indisputable, and it turns out it wasn't pretentious art after all.

Being armed with this revelation, I naturally wondered when stopped at these intersections with passengers in the cab if they knew what the numbers meant. I found that, even with passengers who lived in the general vicinity, that only about one in twenty knew it. And some of the others had completely incorrect assumptions, such as:

--the "national debt". This was a confusion with a different set of numbers that once flashed on a different sign on 6th Avenue around 44th Street. It showed the accumulating total of the national debt (and no one seemed to know exactly what that meant) and, if that didn't depress you enough, it also displayed "your family's share".

--the amount of time that has passed since the beginning of the millenium.

--the number of people in the world who have died of AIDS (not bothering to notice that the number on the building would be higher than the actual number of people in existence in the world).

--and, my favorite, the "amount of records sold in Virgin Records" (which until recently had occupied one of the stores beneath the numbers).

I noticed that passengers I enlightened were often quite grateful to learn the truth about the numbers as this turned out to be something they, too, had wondered about for years. This gratitude often translates into bigger tips, so I've probably made hundreds of dollars from this revelation.

So, you wanna try your luck?

Step right up, take a look at what we've got here. I took a two-minute video of the numbers. It's a little blurry at the beginning, but then it goes into focus and you can observe what the numbers are doing. Hopefully it won't take you ten years to figure it out!

If you give up, click on the "comments" at the bottom of this post. The answer is there.

********

And while you're wracking your brain, why not take a break to click here for Pictures From A Taxi?

A Message To Soupy

I was really saddened to learn last week of the passing of one of my all-time favorite entertainers, Soupy Sales. If you were an American growing up with a television in the '60s, Soupy Sales was a name you would know. His unique brand of comedy, with its trademark pies in the face, took the country by storm for a few years. I just loved the guy, and if you want to get a taste (pun intended) of his humor, do a video search with his name. You'll be able to see samples of the old tv shows.

Anyway, I have a Soupy Sales story. No, I didn't have him in my cab. But maybe this is the next best thing...

Back in the early '90s I was in the habit of taking a break in my shift every night at about 9 p.m. at a typical New York bagel joint called "Hot Bagels" on 2nd Avenue between 34th and 35th Streets. I liked the place because not only did they have great bagels, but it was in a convenient location and there was always a parking space across the street. Those are important factors in the choice a cabbie makes for where to take his break. I would go into Hot Bagels and get my sesame or poppy seed bagel and a cup of coffee and be back in the cab in five minutes. Time is money in my business.

It's quite common in restaurants and other shops in New York to see autographed head shots of celebrities displayed on the walls like trophies. It's as if to say, "Hey, this isn't just any coffee shop - this is the coffee shop where Liza Minelli comes in to get her rice pudding!". Usually there are many such celebrity photographs on display and I've always found it interesting to check them out.

So the very first time I went into Hot Bagels - I believe it was in 1990 - I noticed right away something quite unusual. This place didn't have numerous celebrity head shots on its walls - it had only one. Staring out at me from his place on the wall directly behind the cash register was the smiling face of Soupy Sales.

I asked the fellow behind the counter why, out of all the celebrities whose pictures might theoretically be on the wall, would Soupy Sales be the one to be so honored. He told me that Soupy lived in the neighborhood and comes in regularly to get his bagels.

Wow! I was impressed. Perhaps it was this even more than the convenient location and easy parking that kept me coming back to Hot Bagels. I started to think about what I would say to Soupy if we should ever be there at the same time. I remembered a particular song he used to sing and I decided to incorporate some of the lyrics in the song into a bagel shop context, just as a personal homage to Soupy, should we ever be there at the same time. But, unfortunately, we never were.

Still, the decision to create this effect on Soupy was active in my universe and intention is senior to the obstacles of the material world, right? So I came up with a new idea. As time went by I had gotten familiar with the fellow behind the counter, a friendly, Moroccan man named Raz. I decided to use Raz as my conduit to get to Soupy.

The song I was fond of was a ridiculous thing called "Bakalafaka" (pronounced ba-ka-LAF-a-ka) that was typical of Soupy's comedy. The lyrics that I remember went like this:

Bakalafaka, bakalafaka,
They whisper it all over Turkey.
Bakalafaka, bakalafaka,
It sounds so romantic and perky...

...and it goes on using this nonsense word, "bakalafaka" throughout the song until the end where it's revealed that no one knows what "bakalafaka" means.

So I told Raz, a cheerful guy, about Soupy and how big he had been in the USA in the '60s. Raz, having grown up in Northern Africa, had no idea that his customer was so famous and seemed quite pleased that a person of this stature would come into his shop. So I knew he would help me with my plan. After a few more bagel stops I laid it on him.

I wanted Raz to tell Soupy that he wanted him to try something that's new in his shop that's delicious and goes great with bagels. It's called "bakalafaka" and it's imported from Turkey! And then watch for Soupy's reaction.

Raz thought this was a great idea and was eager to get it right. I knew the potential stumbling block in this caper would be the word "bakalafaka" itself. For one thing it sounds like the name of a real food that might be available in a bagel shop, "baklava", the Middle Eastern pastry. And for another thing, it's got five syllables, and that's a lot of syllables to remember. Both Raz and I were concerned that he might screw it up, so what Raz did was to write "ba-ka-LAF-a-ka" on the wall. He told me he would rehearse it and when he had it down cold he would lay it on Soupy.

I couldn't wait.

However, the next three or four times I went into Hot Bagels someone else was behind the counter and I began getting worried that maybe Raz had returned to Morocco after humiliating himself in front of an angry American comedian. But finally there he was. He greeted me with a huge smile and great excitement.

"I did it!" he exclaimed.

"You did? Wow! What happened?"

"His eyes opened up, real wide! And then, BIG smile! And then he says, YOU WATCHED THE SHOW!!!"

Ah, Soupy Sales. I loved that guy.

Come back to us, Soupy.

********

And when you do, don't forget to click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Watts Street

I recently had a young Frenchman in my cab who wanted to go to a street in Tribeca that always asks a question: Watts Street. His English was okay, but not great, which allowed me to get away with a conversation that went something like this:

Me: Hello, where would you like to go?

Young Frenchman: Hello, I am going to zee Watts Street in Tribeca.

Me: What street?

YF: Yes.

Me: Yes, what?

YF: Watts Street.

Me: I don't know, you tell me.

YF: Watts eez zee name of zee street in Tribeca.

Me: There are many streets in Tribeca. They all have different names. Just tell me the one you want to go to.

YF: Watts Street!

Me: Monsieur, je ne sais pas! How should I know the name of the street? You're supposed to tell me that!

YF: (slowly, and with a hint of exasperation) Sir, there eez a street and zee name of zee street eez Watts! Double you ay tee tee ess!

Me: Ohh, do you mean "Watts Street"?

YF: Yes! Do you know eet?

Me: Sure, it intersects with Where Avenue. I believe there's a Y on that block.

YF: Please take me there.

Me: Take Where to the Y on Watts?

YF: I don't know zee Y.

Me: Ah, mon ami, neither do I, neither do I. We may know Where and we may know Watts, but we never really know Y, do we?

YF: No, I have never known zee Y.

Me: Why even think about it? Let's go.

YF: Okay.

********

I believe I was sent here to take rides like this. I believe it's my calling. Along with clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi, of course.

Man Bites Dog

Way back on June 3rd I received an email from Antoinette, a researcher at a Dutch television program called Man Bijt Hond (Man Bites Dog), asking if I might be interested in participating in some broadcasts they were planning to do in New York in early September. I was told that Man Bites Dog is a long-running show that's on the air five nights a week in the Netherlands and that they'd be coming to the city to commemorate the discovery of New York by the explorer Henry Hudson 400 years ago. Someone had the idea of including a segment about a real New York cab driver as an unusual angle for a story and they found me right here at this blog. Filming would take place during the first week of September for shows that would be on the air in Holland from Sept. 7th through the 11th.

You get five minutes of fame, right? I realized I've only used up about a minute of it when I was interviewed on BBC Breakfast back in November and so I still have about four minutes left on my account! I said "yes".

Thus began a long series of emails between myself and Antoinette that culminated in a plan: I would show up at the crew's hotel in the Flatiron District in a taxi for three consecutive nights; the cab would be outfitted with special lights, sound equipment, and cameras, and I myself would have a microphone attached under my shirt; I would meet with Cas, the interviewer and cameraman, and Pepijn, the sound man; and the three of us would cruise around Manhattan for three hours each night in search of material that could later be edited for the show.


And so I became part of a real television production.

Pictures:

Antoinette

One of the crew setting up a camera angle on the big star of the show

Cas, the cameraman and interviewer, with the hand-held

Crew member setting up the back seat camera

Passengers shared the back seat with sound man Pepijn

On the second night Cas set up this camera on the hood of the cab

Cas, "NYC Gene", and Pepijn

Video clips from the show:

http://www.manbijthond.nl/fragmenten/net-talkshow

http://www.manbijthond.nl/fragmenten/taxichauffeur-schrijver

So how did it go? Mostly it was great fun. And quite flattering that such attention was being paid to me. I will admit to feeling a bit of vindication in the sense that taxi driving is normally a relatively anonymous occupation without any group support. Many things happen that you wish could be witnessed or acknowledged by others. So it was gratifying to finally have that happen in such a big way. They told me close to a million people watch this show every night.

It was also a learning experience. We accumulated more than 7 hours of footage. From that only about 8 minutes of material were actually used. So I learned something about the power of editing. Unless the person being interviewed has some kind of agreement that he has approval rights over the final cut, how he is portrayed is very much in the hands of the editor, or the director via the editor. In this case, I didn't think the material about my personal life was relevant or particularly interesting and I thought the bits at the end of the segments were pretty lame. I wouldn't have included them.

On the other hand, I thought my comments about taxi driving and the interactions with the passengers were presented very well. We had to get the know-how down about getting people to come into the cab, by the way. We found that passengers hailing us from the street didn't want to get into a cab with two guys in the front and another guy with odd machinery in the back. So what we eventually learned was that it was best to park the taxi in a busy night-life area and then Cas would go out on the sidewalk and solicit volunteers. Plus offering a free ride didn't hurt.

My favorite sequence with the passengers was the one with the screaming actress. I should point out that the video she had been in earlier that day was a spoof of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. I think an impression may have been given that she had been in the original, which was not the case. Also the decibel level of her scream was not given justice in that shot. It was much louder! Unfortunately, my comment of "I think you broke my windshield!" was not included. She nearly did! Her name, by the way, is Mika Henderson and she can be contacted at www.myspace.com/sugarnspikes should anyone reading this be in the market for a superb screamer.

Another thing that was left out was that the girl who was with the guy who was so enthusiastic about the celebrities I've had in my cab surprised us, when she learned that the show we were doing was from Holland, by speaking Dutch fluently! It turned out she is from Suriname, a former Dutch colony in South America. I thought that was pretty amazing.

So there it is. Cabs Are For Kissing takes to the airwaves. Hope it brings some smiles.

Three Nights

I've often said that in nearly any night of cab driving in New York City something memorable happens, either in the cab itself or out on the street. If you could accurately remember each night behind the wheel, you'd most likely recall that, oh, yeah, that was the night that that happened. Or that was the night I saw that on the street.

Last week was no different:

Sunday, 3:30 a.m.

The "city that never sleeps" was taking one of its catnaps. I had been cruising on my usual routes for more than half an hour without finding a fare, and it's at times like these that a cab driver can let his guard down, meaning that you may be so glad to get a passenger - any passenger - that you ignore the fact that the person who just got in your taxi looks exactly like Godzilla. Translation: it's a teenaged male who looks like a thug. He may turn out to be a nice kid, but you don't know that when you see him on the street. He just looks like a modern, urban version of the monster from the Japanese movie.

So I stopped for this kid on 6th Avenue at 56th Street, a good part of town. Even before he opened the door I felt I had made a mistake. When you've handled the same particles for many years, the oddities stand out. You may not know exactly what it is that keeps your attention on it, but you know that the particle hasn't made it through your internal filtering system. Call it instinct.

The kid was all wrong. Yes, he looked like a thug with his baseball cap pulled half-way down across his face, but many city kids look like thugs today. It's stylish. When he sat down in the back seat and told me his destination, 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, his speech seemed to be affected by drugs. He was coherent, but there was an odd slurring to his words. Nevertheless, I felt comfortable with his destination, also not a bad part of town, so I started driving.

Next, I tried to make some kind of conversation with him, but it turned out to be impossible due to his iPod earphones. The kid was in his own little world back there and could not be communicated with. But I wanted his money for the ride, so I ignored this additional danger sign and kept on driving.

Now, this is a big flunk on my part because I have a system for handling passengers like him (see The Three Strikes and You're Out System) but I failed to employ it. And it's especially a flunk because there have been a few taxi driver murders in New York City in the last couple of months and this kid could have been the one. Fortunately he didn't pull out a weapon. But what he did was this...

First, he changed his destination at the end of the ride (another danger sign) - now he wanted to go to 88th Street, which he mumbled in that slurred voice, just as we approached 86th. Then he wanted me to turn on 88th, which I did. Then, after some indecision, he told me to stop in the middle of the block. Then he opened the back door without paying me first. Then he stepped outside onto the street. And then he did what the experienced fare-beater has learned to do.

He ran at top speed in the opposite direction. Don't tell anyone, but that's the best way of getting a free ride. (Other than just asking for one.)

So his semi-stupor was an act. I felt the sting of being had, but wasn't really that upset about the $7 I'd lost on the ride with this punk. I was more upset with myself for having been so careless. Still, the game was on, so I put the cab in reverse and backed out of the block, hoping to catch him even though that was close to impossible. Then I circled the block one time thinking maybe I'd spot him and then get extraordinarily lucky and find a cop at the same time. But of course that didn't happen.

So it was money and time lost. But it was memorable. And if it was memorable, then it's a story. And a story has value, so I guess it wasn't a total loss after all.

Monday, 2 a.m.

And speaking of stories, one of the best sources for them in the world of taxi-driving is road rage. In a city of limited space but unlimited vehicles, the struggle for turf and manners never ends. Every taxi driver in New York has road rage stories. And Monday at 2 a.m. provided me with yet another one. And it was in a rather exotic category - "Road Rage Incidents With Garbage Truck Drivers".

Of all the different types of vehicles competing with each other for space in New York City, I think the struggle between taxicabs and garbage trucks is the most vicious. It's primarily a matter of size. Garbage trucks are enormous and often block the narrow, one-way streets while loading up. And there sits the taxi driver behind the garbage truck unable to go where he needs to go to find his next passenger or to bring the passenger he already has to the destination. It's an automatic turf war.

What often makes the situation worse is the fuck-you attitude of the garbage truck drivers. There is rarely an apology or a thank you from someone who has just taken several minutes of your time (and therefore money) so he could do his job. And there is no tit for tat in this relationship - the taxi driver never gets to take up any of the garbage truck driver's time, except for the occasional drop-off of a passenger in the middle of the block. And that's only for a few moments. Anyway, this endless conflict is a part of the life of a taxi driver and we learn to endure the suffering.

But there is only so much a person can take. And Monday at 2 a.m. was the last straw for me.

I had picked up a passenger on 56th Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue who was heading for Queens. This meant that we would drive straight across 56th to 3rd Avenue and then make two more turns to get onto the Queensboro Bridge. 56th Street happens to be a superb street for catching green lights and, wanting to impress my passenger (an attractive blonde) and at the same time start a conversation, I said to her that I thought we could get a green light at every intersection all the way to 3rd Avenue. She was doubtful that this was possible, but was curious to see if it could be done, which was the effect I'd hoped to create.

So off we went.

We indeed did make every light all the way across town. The blonde was impressed. And then, like in a scene from a movie, just at the moment when I was about to drive through the final green light at 3rd, a man walked out in front of the cab with his hands in the air. I stopped, thinking he was some kind of an idiot who was crossing the street against the light. But he didn't cross the street. He stood in the middle of the intersection for a moment, then turned around and made another hand signal to his buddy in a garbage truck who proceeded to back the truck onto 56th Street, completely blocking me and making it impossible to pass.

So instead of waiting two seconds to allow me to go through the green light - and it should be noted that there were no cars behind me - these guys felt the right thing to do was to stop me in my tracks and let me wait a couple of minutes so they could load a large pile of garbage from the sidewalk into their truck.

I was outraged. It was an insult, and an unprovoked insult, at that. I had done absolutely nothing to antagonize these guys. This was pure thug-ism, I'm-bigger-than-you-ism, civilization versus barbar-ism. It was so bad I felt it was worth it to do something retrospect might call stupid, something that it says in the "Road Rage Manual" that you must never do.

I got out of my car.

Never, never, never get out of your car unless there's an accident. It's an unwritten rule acquired by the wise. But I did. I walked over toward the guy who'd been driving the truck and commenced shouting at him, pointing out that he could have let me go through the green light, among other things.

His response: "Shut up and let me do my job." A bit of irony there, considering the circumstances.

Needing to get in the last word, I shouted back "HURRY UP!" at him as I returned to the cab, knowing quite well that being ordered to do something by a cabbie would drive him crazy. He replied that, okay, now he was going to go as slow as possible. I didn't really care. It was no longer so much about time lost. It was about pride.

He and his co-worker finished hauling the plastic garbage bags into the truck in about two minutes, actually faster than I'd expected. They then started to move the truck forward through the green light and went about half-way across 3rd Avenue. I steered my cab around the right of it and into the intersection, thinking that hopefully they would turn left onto the avenue and be on their way. But I had a feeling this thing wasn't over. Thugs in big trucks have a habit of using their vehicles as weapons when they have found a way to justify acting out their destructive impulses.

Seeing that I was trying to make a left turn around him, the driver kept moving forward to block me. Then he stopped the truck completely. I stopped as well, waiting for him to move. But instead of seeing the truck go back into motion, I saw the driver coming toward me on foot with a truly crazed look in his eye, shouting obscenities. It was about to become physical.

I had three seconds to make a decision. Either stay put and get into some kind of altercation with a lunatic sanitation worker or drive away.

I drove away.

It meant continuing straight on 56th Street toward 2nd Avenue and then taking a detour to 1st Avenue in order to get to the bridge to Queens. And it meant swallowing a little bit of pride in order to avoid a situation that was right on the brink of getting not only ugly but dangerous, both in a physical and legal sense. Jail sentences and funerals are often conceived in situations just like this.

My passenger, meanwhile, had sat through the ordeal somewhat in shock, I think, and it led to a friendly debate about the pros and cons of taking a stand. Her opinion was that it wasn't worth it to get so fired up, that these guys were jerks, and "that's why they're garbage men"; my opinion was that there are instances when turning the other cheek causes more stress internally than the feeling of moral superiority is worth. At the end of the ride our conversation resulted in a very above-average tip and a cheerful wave goodbye from the sidewalk after she exited the taxi.

Which made the incident all the more memorable.

Tuesday, 4:30 a.m.

I was looking for one more short ride at the end of my shift when I spotted a man and a woman emerging from the Brill Building at Broadway and 49th Street who were looking for a cab. Two things were remarkable about this sighting:

1) The man was a celebrity, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. The lady who accompanied him turned out to be his assistant.

2) I knew before stopping for them what they had been doing in that building and why they were leaving at this wee hour of the morning.

They got in my cab and told me their destination on the Upper West Side. Without even acknowledging that I knew who he was, I immediately said, "So, did you finish editing the new movie?"

They were kind of stunned.

"You know, the one about capitalism," I added.

They were doubly stunned.

Michael Moore smiled. "How did you know that?!" he asked.

It's a rare and particularly satisfying situation to drop some information on someone who could have no idea of how in the world you could possibly know something. It would be like approaching a stranger in a restaurant and leaning over and mentioning that "your sister Jenny- the one who lives in Ohio - wants you to give her a call". The stranger would think you have superhuman powers.

"I could go into my psychic routine," I replied, "but the truth is I had someone in my cab last night coming out of that building who was working on the film. He told me all about it, how you have something like forty people on the project and it's been going on for three days."

"Small world," said Michael Moore.

The ice having been effectively broken and even melted, we rolled up 8th Avenue toward their destination. Michael Moore is a man I have long admired for his courage in exposing the greed and corruption of powerful vested interests and his movie, Sicko, about the health care disaster in the United States, has been influential in shaping public opinion about the issue. With debate raging in this country at the current time, and with health care reform being debated and formulated by the federal government even as we spoke, I had one of those karma feelings I get from time to time while driving a taxi. My attention is on this health care battle. And then Michael Moore gets in my cab. Karma or coincidence? Hmmm...

I mentioned to him that I was a perfect example of the person who is being shut out from access to health care in the United States. The taxi powers-that-be, which is primarily the Taxi and Limousine Commission, deemed all taxi drivers in New York "independent contractors" many years ago even though in reality we are anything but. As such, owners of taxi garages don't have to provide benefits to the drivers. And even though I work a forty-hour work week, a full-time job, I do not make enough money to afford an individual health care policy. And I make too much to qualify for Medicaid. So I'm left in the middle.

"If you were living in any other industrialized country in the world," said Michael Moore, "you'd have access to health care."

"How do you think Obama is doing in regard to the health care issue?" I asked.

He replied that he thought the president needed to stick to his guns and not back down from political opponents.

Our conversation turned to his current project. It's a movie about what caused the financial crisis and how democracy is being stifled. He told me that he and his crew had been working around the clock for the last few days in order to get it done in time for consideration for an Academy Award. The deadline had been earlier in the evening and they did indeed finish in time. Talk about pressure!

It was nice to see for myself that someone you've admired from a distance doesn't turn out to be a prick in person. Michael Moore, I'm happy to say, was friendly, conversational, unpretentious, and even humble (calling me "sir"). He stayed in the cab for an extra minute at the end of the ride to finish up our conversation. And he shook my hand warmly as he left.

His assistant went on to a second stop and told me he'd barely had any sleep for the last four days, which made his congeniality all the more impressive. The next day, she said, they would be off to the Venice Film Festival.

An interesting peek into the lifestyle of one of the effective agents for change on this planet, I thought. And one of the really good guys in my opinion.

********

So those were three nights of memorable, and not untypical, occurrences while driving a cab in New York City. Yet as scary, enraging, exciting, and fascinating as those incidents were, they would pale in comparison to what was even more memorable for me on each of the three nights. Stay tuned...

How To Beat A Ticket

Back in December I was given four moving-violation tickets for a single incident by a particularly mean-spirited cop. (To read about it, click here.) These tickets could have meant six points on my license and $400 in fines if found guilty on all charges, so beating them was a big deal to me, especially since in New York City taxi drivers are subjected to special rules, one of them being that if you get six points on your license your hack license is automatically suspended for one month.

That rule, by the way, applies whether you get the points while driving a taxi or while driving your own car. Which means that a New York taxi driver could be driving a rented car in Wyoming, get a ticket at a speed trap or whatever, and lose his job in New York City. Seems clearly unconstitutional to me, but it's a rule that has stood since it was put in place by Mayor Crueliani, I mean Giuliani, in the late '90s.

But I digress.

I had to put my many years of experience in trying to beat tickets to work here because so much was at stake. I'm happy to say I was successful (or this post wouldn't be titled "How To Beat A Ticket"!) and, in reflection, I realized I might be able to pass a few tips on to you. So here goes.

1. The process of beating the ticket begins at the very moment the cop puts it in your hand. You have already (politely) tried to talk your way out of it, but that has failed. There is an impetus within you to say something sarcastic as the cop turns and walks away. Don't. Just shut up. The reason is that cops make notes of all pertinent data when writing tickets, and you want the cop to forget you. You don't want the cop going back to his squad car and noting, "make sure you nail this asshole". You're going to meet him again in a courtroom and you want the cop to have no special recollection of you.

2. Examine the ticket itself for errors. I have been surprised several times to find mistakes made in the transference of information from the driver's license and vehicle registration to the ticket. I once had a ticket dismissed by a judge who told me I "didn't have to say a word" - the ticket contained an error and that was all it took. Of the four tickets I had been given this time, two of them contained two mistakes and the other two contained one mistake. This doesn't guarantee a dismissal - apparently that depends on the mood of the judge - but it may be all you'll need. And it certainly helps present the argument that the cop's ability to observe what he says happened (as opposed to what you say) is questionable. This can be quite important because these cases usually really come down to your word against the cop's and the judge, if he's sympathetic to you, will be searching for any reason he can find to see it your way.

3. Delay, delay, delay. The most successful tactic for beating a ticket in New York City is to delay the hearing date which you receive in the mail after pleading "not guilty". The reason for this is that the hearing date you are first given will be a day that has been set aside for the cop's convenience as a "court day". The second or third date may not be a time that's as convenient for the cop and he may not show up at all or, as happened in my case, he may show up in his street clothes without his notes, and thus need to ask the judge for a delay himself because he is unprepared. Fortunately for me the judge did not grant his request and dismissed the tickets on the spot.

4. Do your homework. Don't show up empty-handed. Always prepare and bring with you a diagram that shows the streets, vehicles, and any other relevant information. Take photographs, if that would help prove your case. If a video could be useful, make one, and post it on YouTube so it can be referred to with the court's computer. (Just be sure it's less than 10 minutes in length - that's the time limit on YouTube.) If you have any witnesses prepare a statement of the facts of the case and get them to not only sign it, but to notarize it. A person who stands before a judge with an organized stack of stuff in his hand adds credibility and a bit of intrigue (what's he got there?) to himself. A person who is empty-handed looks like just another liar.

5. Try to get the judge to like you. Now here is something I'll bet you never thought of: traffic court judges hear the same insipid excuses from defendants day after day, week after week, year after year. They become bored and cynical and difficult to convince. Try to give them something that's a bit original. Here's an example. Many years ago I was waiting for a fare at 3 a.m. in front of a bar that was frequented by transsexuals. The meanest cop I have ever met came along and wrote myself and the two other taxi drivers in line in front of me tickets for double-parking. It was an outrageously mean ticket and when I asked the cop why he was doing this, after first threatening to "collar" me, he snarled back that it was because "we don't like this place". When I went to court I told the judge that I had just pulled up at the bar behind two other cabs and "a person who I thought was a woman" dropped money down on the front seat and exited the cab, leaving me there counting the money when the cop came along. So I wasn't technically "double-parked", I was momentarily "standing". My story, although a complete lie, entertained the judge and he decided to give me "the benefit of the doubt" and dismissed the ticket.

6. As you're waiting in the courtroom for your case to be called, say these words to yourself: "I can do this. I'm going to win."

Hope this helps!

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And if it doesn't, maybe this will: click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Angels And Demons

It has oft been said that there's both good and evil in everyone. Another way of saying it is that things are never totally black nor totally white, but in reality are a shade of grey. So it's of great interest to me when I get a passenger in my cab who does not appear to have any shade of grey at all but seems, rather, to be either an undiluted evil or an undiluted good. Characters like this really grab your attention. They've been populating newspapers and novels since observations began appearing in print.

I've had a few lately, and here is my report.

First, the evil...

A few weeks ago I worked a Saturday night shift, something I rarely do anymore even though it's the best money night. I'm just sick of the drunks and, of course, Saturday night is "Drunk Night". I'd much prefer to take a sober business person home from work on a Monday or a Tuesday than to have to endure the party people. But I did work this one Saturday shift and it was a reminder of what a truly wild place New York City is on that night of the week. And it provided me with both of these tales from the dark side.

Marriage Without the "Love" Part

When you drive a cab, especially with passengers who are less than sober, you have an enormous fly-on-the-wall opportunity. There is a definite tendency for people to carry on with each other as if you're not there, and so you have this unique window from which to observe them in an unvarnished state. Some of these people, of course, are married couples.

Now, if you are the survivor of a bad marriage, or if you are currently married and are experiencing some turbulence in your own voyage, you may think you know something about what it's like to be in a destructive relationship. Well, let me tell you something, Charlie or Charlotte, I would bet you dimes for dollars that whatever mess you've been involved in would pale in comparison to the two maniacs I had in my cab on this particular Saturday night.

They were well-dressed forty-somethings who had emerged from a restaurant on the East Side and, from what I overheard of their conversation - which was their entire conversation - they were coming from a dinner party that had been attended by people who were business associates of the woman. So it was one of those situations where "business" is combined with "pleasure", which is often a recipe for "stress". The man abruptly barked their destination - the Upper West Side - at me as they sat down in the back seat without saying the word "please", an indication in itself that I wasn't viewed as being a person of any importance to them, if, in fact, I was viewed as being a person at all. Lack of manners is something I unfortunately am quite accustomed to, so it slid off my back and I started driving up First Avenue toward 66th Street, the road that goes straight through Central Park to the West Side.

Their conversation began with a few back-and-forths about the party in a civil tone. And then the man, who had been walking on a tightrope he wasn't unaware of, made a comment that sent him tumbling toward the pavement far below. He mentioned to his wife that he thought they should have stayed at the party a little longer so she could could chat it up with a particular business associate whom he thought could be a potential ally in some future business scenario.

This one statement was all it took to make the volcano explode. She jumped on him like a lion on an antelope. (Or a lioness in this case.) Her facade of civility disappeared completely and was replaced with a hostility that would have rippled even Jack the Ripper. Not only was he completely wrong in his opinion, she roared, it was utterly, deeply, and unforgivably insulting to her that he should imply that she didn't thoroughly know what she was doing at the party.

He tried to apologize, but his attempts to placate her only seemed to fuel the fire.

Here, she wailed, was yet another attempt to undermine her confidence by someone who was a complete failure in anything he attempted to do. What had he ever done in life? What had he ever accomplished? How dare he suggest that she wasn't adequately skillful in a social situation? Leave the party too soon? All the guests were leaving! Clearly, to try to engage the person he had mentioned in conversation at that time would have been a mistake. You idiot! You idiot! You brainless, thoughtless, trip-over-your-own-shoes idiot!

Like an insect that's caught in a spider's web, he continued to try to wiggle free. Well, he replied, he was just saying. It was just a comment. But she would have none of it. Shark-like, she moved in for more.

"That was your fatal mistake," she snarled. "I'm cutting you out! You're getting nothing!"

I came to understand, as her damnations continued, that she controlled the purse strings in their relationship - she was the one with the money. This conclusion was supported by his complete lack of retaliation to her rantings. Glancing at him in the mirror, he resembled a boxer who had fallen to one knee and was about to receive a salvo of new punches which he realized he was helpless to prevent. And on they came.

"There will be no third child!" she proclaimed.

"What do you mean?" he said in a kind of stunned apathy.

"I'm getting rid of it," she stated coolly. I noticed a particular perversity in the way she put this forward. There was no sadness or regret in her voice. Rather, there was a hint of the sublime.

He was on his back on the canvas and offered no response. The remaining five minutes of the ride took place in an atmosphere in which the tension could not have been cut with a knife. You would have needed a chainsaw to do the job.

I thought how funny it would be (to me) if I suddenly broke out into the song, I Get A Kick Out Of You. But of course I kept my mouth shut and just kept driving.

After I'd dropped them off, it took me three fares to shake off the effects of the ride. By "three fares" I mean the next three passengers in my cab served as my own personal therapists for downloading on them the emotional strain I'd just been subjected to. Fortunately, they were all good listeners and I felt much better as a result. But I came away with some thoughts.

Firstly, just the amazement at how bad it can get. How evil intentions, dishonesty, cowardice, and propitiation feed off each other until both parties are utterly entrapped by their own personality flaws.

Secondly, I haven't been able to get the thought out of my mind that someday he's going to murder her.

And thirdly, and this is a personal note if you will indulge me, I had the odd realization about a week later that many years ago I had imagined these two people. I wrote a stage play in the early '80s about a married couple who were just like these two. The funny thing is, I'd never actually met anyone like them in real life. I had based my play loosely on the characters in the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and figured there must be people like that out there. Which just goes to show that if you drive a cab in New York long enough, everybody eventually shows up - even people who had previously existed only in your mind.

Now, it often happens during the course of a shift that you find yourself pulling in the same kind of thing that you'd just gotten rid of in a kind of karmic reverberation. And it happened that night. Just as I had regained my aplomb, I encountered Mr. and Mrs. Insane Number Two in Tribeca.

Mobbed Up

I was driving up Hudson Street at around 1 a.m. looking for my next fare when I was hailed by a young guy who turned out to be a doorman for a small hotel about a block and a half away on Greenwich Street. He had been sent by patrons of the hotel to fetch a cab because Greenwich Street at that hour of the night is relatively deserted whereas Hudson Street is full of taxis en route from lower Manhattan to the passenger-rich Soho and Greenwich Village sections of the city.

It's not unusual for a doorman to provide this service. He hails the cab himself as if he were the next passenger and rides in the cab the short distance back to his hotel. Since he is seated in the taxi, the driver instinctively turns the meter on as the trip begins, which is what I did in this instance.

We pulled up in front of the hotel and waiting there were a man and a woman who I would say were in their mid-fifties. He was about five-foot-eight with about 70 pounds more than he needed and with a salt and peppered full head of hair, and she stood out in a party dress and a puffed-out top of bright red.The doorman exited the back seat as we pulled up to the place, and held the door open for his patrons. The meter had already clicked once, up to $3.40 from its initial drop of $3.00. But the couple did not enter the cab. Instead, the woman came up to me and asked, in an accent heavy with a lifetime in Brooklyn, if I knew any good diners.

I told her I did.

"Do you know one close to here?"

"Yeah, we could go to Greenwich Village. I know a couple of coffee shops there."

"Do they have fried clams?"

"They probably do. They all do."

"What about shrimps?" And then, without waiting for an answer, she turned to the man. "Honey, I can't decide if I want clams or shrimps."

He looked at her with an expression on his face that seemed to say that he was the godfather to women who can't decide between clams or shrimps and that all would be well for her if she just continued never to have an intelligent thought of her own. In short, he was the sugar daddy in this relationship, she was Daddy's little girl. This was apparent to me just from this quick exchange.

"Ewwww," she whined, little-girl-like, "what should we do?"

He murmured something to her I could not hear, and then they did a remarkable thing - they started to walk away.

The doorman and I simultaneously glanced at each other with puzzled looks on our faces. I told him there was now $3.80 on the meter, and that I was owed this, which he understood. Although he was just a kid and had been put in an awkward situation, he nevertheless summoned up his courage and approached the man, telling him the meter had been started when he'd gotten the cab.

The man just looked at him as if he was a bug, gave him a sarcastic little laugh, and continued walking away with his parasite.

And that was it.

Now, this may not seem like such a big deal. One could say it was just two rude people being rude. But let me tell you something - in thirty-one years of taxi-driving, with probably a couple of hundred doormen getting in my cab as this one had, this had never happened before.

It was a first. And firsts are rare after all these years, so it made me examine the incident carefully in my mind. Certainly no huge incident of destruction had occurred. There had been no violence nor bizarre dramatization as had happened earlier in the evening. But still this little episode really stuck in my craw.

I asked myself, who would do something like this? Have a doorman walk a block to get a cab, then not take the cab he'd gotten without a "sorry" or an offer to pay what was on the meter? And then just walk away with a sinister laugh? I couldn't imagine myself nor anyone I know ever doing such a thing under any circumstances. What sequence of events would it have taken to have acquired an attitude like that?

I concluded that it would take someone who was utterly at ease with committing harmful acts upon others. Someone who was a professional at it. Someone who, if he ever thought about it at all, would consider the idea of other people having rights as just an ememy's attempt to stop him from getting what he wants. Someone who, at his core, was evil. And when I say "evil" I mean the continuous intention to do harm to others when there is no need to do harm to others.

So it wasn't what he'd done to me and the doorman that had stopped me in my tracks. It was my perception that this was a person who was capable of an enormous quantity of evil. And the only context I have for such a person are the movies and television dramas I've seen about the Mob, particularly Goodfellas and The Sopranos. The characters in these shows are portrayed as having just these kinds of anti-social traits, and this guy, both in his actions and appearance, fit right into that odd slot.

So I said to the doorman something that I thought might add to his education, or at least make the incident permanently memorable for him. "That guy's in the Mob," I said.

And I drove off looking for my next therapist. I mean, passenger.

The Angels Among Us

I sometimes wonder if there may in fact be such a thing as Intelligent Design when I consider the amazing balancing act between good and evil that exists in the human race. How can there be a species which has among its members ones like the above and others like these...

Several months ago, in the dead of winter, I picked up a middle-aged woman at 3 a.m. in Midtown who was en route to her apartment in lower Manhattan but wanted to make a stop on 23rd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. It turned out she was a lawyer.

Now, I am as cynical as the next person about lawyers but this one was of a different mold, if in fact there is a mold at all. The first thing I noticed about her was that her manners were totally "in". I said "hello" to her as she entered my cab, as I do with everyone. She said "hello" back. She told me her destination and asked me if it would be okay with me if we made a stop. I told her that of course that would be no problem and I noted the fact that she had asked me this even though she didn't have to. So here was a person who just by her nature was considerate of the feelings and the rights of others. In short, a "social personality".

Not surprisingly, she was an easy converstionalist and I soon learned why she wanted to make a stop in the middle of the night. There was a church on that block, she said, which shelters homeless people. This particular church was not licensed by the city to be a homeless shelter, but did what it could, anyway. (She told me something I didn't know, which was that if a shelter isn't so licensed they cannot provide beds to people. So what this church did was provide chairs to people so they could attempt to sleep in a sitting position in a place where at least it was warm.) The reason she was making a stop here was to deliver paperwork she had been preparing to benefit one of the homeless people in the church, a woman from the suburbs of Connecticut who had lost her job and had subsequently lost her home. The paperwork had to do with red tape hurdles that needed to be cleared in order to situate this woman in affordable housing.

We continued the ride to her apartment building in Tribeca, a nice building in a nice part of town. I learned that in these tough economic times there were more and more people who are truly "homeless" - people who have literally lost their homes and have at least temporarily no place to live, as opposed to people who are also classified as "homeless" who are actually substance abuse cases or outright hustlers. I also learned that she does this legal work pro bono (for free) as a matter of conscience.

At the end of the ride she thanked me again for making a stop in the middle of the ride, as if I had done something extraordinary. She paid me the fare and gave me a way-above-average tip, which I accepted but later felt a little guilty about for having done so.

And I realized as I drove away that this was a person who was also looking out for me. She showed kindness and concern when she didn't have to, traits that came naturally from within. I perceived no grey here. She was all good.

Then, a few weeks ago, I had a fare who was almost a duplicate of this woman in character and deed. I picked her up on the Upper West Side near Riverside Drive a bit after midnight. She needed to place several large boxes in the trunk of the taxi, which I helped her to do. Her destination was a city-run shelter on 108th Street in Harlem and, like the previous ride, she asked me if I would be willing to wait for her while she made a delivery and then bring her to her own apartment building on 97th Street.

I noticed the smell of salami as I loaded one of the boxes into the trunk, and this was a clue as to what she was doing. She told me that she regularly takes excess food from a school to this shelter. She does it out of conscience, I surmised, out of feeling a need to take some responsibility for the welfare of others less fortunate than herself. And, like her predecessor, her kind nature wasn't limited to an exclusive charity, but included me. Aside from a friendly conversation and providing me with an example I could write about, she also gave me an exorbitantly high tip. Which I also accepted but again felt a little guilty about, thinking this was a person to whom I really should be offering a free ride.

In looking back at these four fares, I believe the entire human condition on the broadest of scales could be demonstrated by them.

I believe most people are basically good, but are hindered by forces internally and externally that they have difficulty controlling. And I believe a small percentage of people are actively, continuously perpetuating harm. And thus the story line of the human race is the same one you see in movies all the time, good versus evil.

Why this is so and what should be done about it are the subjects of philosophies, psychologies, and religions. I would not attempt to try to explain it.

I would say, though, that as a member of the grey team, I am grateful for the angels among us.

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The Pass/Don't Pass Hall of Fame

You know what you never see anymore? You never see those little messages on the backs of trucks that tell you to pass them only on the left and never on the right. I don't know why they're not around anymore. They must have gone out of style.

What you often used to see as you were approaching a truck would be words to the wise like these:

Left Side - Right Side
Pass - Don't Pass
Go - Stop
Yes - No
Good - Bad

The idea that's trying to be communicated is that it's safer to pass on the left because the truck driver has better visibility on his left than he has on his right (here in America we drive on the right side of the road, don't forget) so be a good fellow and give me a break, okay?

Being a taxi driver I have found myself sitting behind many and many a truck. Years ago I started noticing that for some truckers the simple "Pass" and "Don't Pass" cautions were apparently just too mundane, so they started getting creative with their back-of-the-truck warnings. I began writing down the ones that I liked best and only recently have I dug them out of the vault.

So I present to you now the Pass/Don't Pass Hall of Fame:

Left Side - Right Side
Live - Die
Life - Death
Sweet - Sour
Cool - Fool
Wise - Dies
Fine - Swine
Pass - Ass
Zoom - Boom
Go by - Goodbye
Overtaker - Undertaker
Grateful - Dead
Passing Side - Suicide
Go Ahead - Make My Day
Hagler - Hearns [American boxers]
Happily - Never After
Whoopie Do - Whoopie Don't

And my personal favorite (drum roll please)...

Nirvana - Nerve Of Ya

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The Drunk Drop

In all team sports there are certain set plays that are used as part of a strategy in trying to win the game. In baseball, for example, there's a play called the "suicide squeeze". In American football there's the "down and out". In basketball they have one called the "pick and roll".

In taxi driving, there's the "drunk drop".

The drunk drop is when a patron of a bar or restaurant has become so drunk that he or she is semi-coherent and is bordering on becoming incoherent or even passing out completely. The patron is then escorted, hustled, or just carried from the establishment by bartenders or waiters and is deposited into a taxicab. If the taxi drives away, the strategy has been successful.

I had one a few days ago. It wasn't pretty.

I was cruising down 2nd Avenue on the Upper East Side at around 9 p.m. looking for my next fare, having just returned empty to Manhattan from the Bronx. As I crossed 89th Street someone with his hand in the air appeared from the left side of the avenue so I deftly cut over and pulled to a stop. There's great craft in being able to cut through traffic safely and swiftly, but there's also great craft in being able to instantly size a person up before you allow them access into your vehicle. And in this I was lacking.

As I stopped my cab what I saw approaching from the curb were three people - two men in waiter's attire flanking a middle-aged woman, a blonde, and kind of half-carrying her. In other words she was walking on her own volition, but just barely, and the men had their arms under her arms to catch her should she stumble or fall.

It was a drunk drop in progress.

I think it was because it had been about twenty minutes since I'd dropped off my last fare in the Bronx, plus the fact that it had been a slow night up until that point, that caused me to pause a moment longer than I normally would have in this situation. Normally if I see a drunk drop coming toward me I either just keep on driving or, if I'm already at a stop, I lock the doors. But due to these financial considerations I just froze for a moment. And in that moment one of the waiters got his hand on the door and opened it.

And in came the drunk.

The waiters turned around and walked back into their restaurant, a chic little Mediterranean joint. One of them said something to the other that made him laugh.

For the briefest of moments I let myself think that maybe she'd just turned her ankle or something and wasn't actually drunk at all. Maybe she just needed some help walking and I'd probably be driving her to the emergency room of a hospital. But one look at her as she plopped down on the seat with her head tilted to one side told me that was just wishful thinking.

I asked her where she wanted to go.

There was a long pause. I repeated the question. Finally she said, rather conclusively... "I don't know."

Yes, not only did she not know where she wanted to go, she was sure she didn't know where she wanted to go. But at least she could respond to a question, even if it took half a minute to do so. That was a plus. After another futile attempt to get a destination out of her, I realized I had to pull a play of my own...

The Reverse Drunk Drop.

It's a wise cabbie who realizes that he mustn't step on the gas pedal in a situation like this. There is potential trouble in all directions here, especially if the semi-coherent inebriate is a female. So the play is to reverse the drop that has given you the drunk. Or, to put it in postal terms, "Return To Sender".

I got out of my cab, leaving the woman in the back, and walked into the restaurant. The two waiters were nowhere in sight, but a fellow who looked like he was some kind of a maitre d' was standing there. I told him in a voice that was calm yet had an element of restrained anger in it that two waiters from his restaurant had just put a woman in my cab who was so drunk that she couldn't so much as tell me where she wanted to go. And that they'd better come back and get her out of my cab.

Or I would call the police.

And with that I turned around and walked out of the place.

I returned to my cab, opened the rear door, and confronted the unwanted cargo that was sitting there. She had opened her bag and was looking through the objects in it, apparently hoping to find a clue as to what her destination might be. I was searching for a way to tell her that she was too wasted to meet the minimum requirements for membership in my taxi club when I was confronted myself by one of the waiters who had dumped her there.

He wasn't too happy with the situation.

I was perfectly willing to handle the matter in a civil tone, but the guy, a slightly-built man in his forties who was a bit shorter than I, was in a non-negotiating attack mode. Immediately he was yelling at me, demanding to know who the hell I thought I was, walking into his restaurant like I was some kind of authority. The implication being that taxi drivers should be seen and not heard.

Well, I would say that the guy was clearly an asshole, except that I don't use language like that in this blog. Instead, I will just say that he was clearly an orifice that is found at the very end of the alimentary canal. What followed was one of those scenes that seem comical in retrospect, but in the moment are red-hot episodes of human idiocy.

The waiter got right in my face, giving me about an inch of space between us and also providing me with an opportunity to learn that he'd been sampling the garlic bread in the kitchen. With a "how dare you" this and a "the nerve of you" that, he flew into a self-righteous rage which would have given the passerby on the street the impression that I was the offending party.

Of course it was all pretense. It reminded me of an incident that happened about two and a half years ago in which a passenger in my cab had flown into a weird, out-of-context tirade that was so insulting that it brought me to the verge of a physical assault. (Go to Doctor Evil for that story.) People who have secrets that you're a bit too close to discovering have a definite tendency to become quite upset with you, and the neon sign that announces this is their self-righteous indignation.

This waiter's secret was, no doubt, that he's served the woman far too many drinks. This could be a big problem to the owner of the restaurant (and thus to the waiter) as it could lead to the revocation of their liquor license if harm should come to her as a result. And there may have been other things he didn't want revealed, as well. Perhaps he'd lifted money from her purse after she'd been reduced to a semi-conscious blob. Perhaps he'd overcharged her. Perhaps he'd decided to give himself a $50 tip when he ran her credit card through the system.

Of course I didn't know what it was, but I did know it was something. And what I also knew was that this guy's aggression toward me was about to become a shoving match. And that could lead to a punching match. And that could lead to - well, it could lead to a very bad night, indeed.

But then, as often happens in life -at least in my life - a sort of divine intervention occurred.

In a scene that seemed reminiscent of something that happens in a silent movie, the woman suddenly emerged from the back seat of the cab, took a couple of wobbly steps forward, and then fell straight down like a sack of blonde potatoes onto the pavement.

There was a sudden break in the action.

The waiter looked at the woman.

The waiter looked at me.

The waiter looked back at the woman.

It was decision time.

Fortunately, the waiter went with the woman. He dropped his "you wanna fight, taxi-schmuck?" demeanor and with a new demeanor of frustrated desperation began attending to his fallen customer, first propping her up and then guiding her into one of the outdoor seats on the sidewalk in front of his restaurant. I got back into my cab and called 911 on my cell phone, telling them there was a semi-coherent woman who needed assistance in front of this particular establishment.

They said they'd send an ambulance.

And that was good enough for me.

I took off down 2nd Avenue in search of my next fare with thoughts of drunk drops past and present racing through my mind. And wondering what in the hell my next out-of-nowhere adventure might be.

Which is the best part of being a taxi driver.

********

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One Thug Too Many

One way of looking at New York City is to see it as an endless battle for turf. Everyone has, or wants, their own little piece of the island. And once that is won, it must be defended.

When this comes down to the level of a taxi driver it means his turf is either the area of the street that he has control over as he cruises down the avenue in search of his next passenger, or it is the place he holds in a line of cabs in front of a club. And it is from this position in space that he may have to deal with the doorman of that club who has also staked out his own little plot of real estate - the area in front of his club - as his castle.

The doormen who work at hotels and luxury high-rise apartment buildings have never been trouble for me, but I have had many squabbles with the doormen at clubs. For one thing, they are not full-time employees and don't look at their job as being their careers. Usually they're big, menacing-looking muscles who operate on the thug wave-length.

Now, I don't care if they want to be thugs with people on the sidewalk who may want to enter their sacred temple. It's when they assume that they have some kind of authority over my space - the street itself - that we have a problem. I mean, if anyone owns the street, it's me.

So this is what happened a couple of weeks ago...

It was a particularly dead night which drove me to the desperate measure of waiting in front of this Manhattan strip club in the first place. If there'd been any business on the streets, I'd have been out there racing with my fellow cabbies. But when one goes half an hour, then forty-five minutes, and then a full hour without a fare, one begins to question the wisdom of spinning one's wheels and emptying one's gas tank.

So I pulled up in front of this place at 3 a.m. Even so, I wouldn't have decided to wait there had there been any other cabs in front of me on a line. But there weren't any cabs already there, so I just pulled up and double-parked outside the entrance.

Immediately the doorman caught my eye. This guy:

I kind of liked the way he was dressed for the part and I also thought he had the demeanor of the quintessential thuggy doorman, so I decided to take his picture for my photography blog (http://picturesfromataxi.blogspot.com/). But I instinctively knew he wouldn't like it if he saw me pointing my camera toward him, so I decided to be sneaky about it. I aimed the camera at him through the opened driver's-side window and took the shot while I faced forward.

This turned out to be a mistake. He noticed what I was doing.

Now, I take pictures of lots of people. They usually don't know that their picture is being taken but even when they do I normally get a slightly confused or surprised look in response, not hostility. But this guy took it as an invasion of his territorial rights. He immediately gave me his most intimidating death-gaze and snarled at me.

"Get out of here!" he yelled out at me from his command post.

I could understand his resentment of my sneaky method of stealing his image. I suppose I could have asked him if he would mind if I took a shot of him, but I'd thought what I did was the more expedient way of going about it. I just didn't think I'd get caught. Nevertheless, I didn't see this as being any big deal. He could have taken it as a compliment that I'd want to take his picture in the first place. And now he was telling me to move off of my turf. Like hell.

I didn't move.

"Beat it!" he repeated.

I looked right at him. "What, do you own the street?" I shot back.

In a situation like this, the doorman actually does have the upper hand because he can convince the people coming out of his club that I am some kind of pariah taxi driver and that they'd better not get in my cab. And the people coming out his club will usually do as he says. That may not be fair, but that's what I would expect to happen. Still, there's a principle involved here. And that is that a doorman has no authority over where a taxi driver decides to plant his cab. He works for a private company that is situated on a public commodity known as a street. If a doorman wants a taxi driver to move, he can make it a polite request which the taxi driver may or may not grant him. It's the street!

So, even though I knew I was playing a losing game, I held my ground.

I expected the doorman to come over to me and try to be even more intimidating. But instead, it turned out he had his own, even scarier-looking, thug to do his dirty work for him. This guy, whom I hadn't noticed before:

Thug Number Two walked up to the side of the cab and made this proclamation: "Get outta here!"

Although reason might have dictated that I take his advice, I still didn't feel the inner motivation necessary for me to actually go away. I stood my ground.

"What's the problem?" I asked in a civil tone.

"No pictures!" he grunted.

"I take pictures of everybody, friend," I said, trying to get him to see that I was actually some kind of street artist and not a heavy from a rival gang who was staking out the place.

"You ain't my friend," said he, "get lost!"

"I'll leave when I feel like it," I replied.

He looked at me with I think a little surprise that his attempt at intimidation wasn't working, perhaps fearing that he was losing his touch. He walked back to the club while I damn well continued to hold my position in space, even though I knew I'd never get a passenger from this place. Thug Number Two then opened the door of the club and stuck his head inside for a moment.

Out came Thug Number Three.

He was a burly white guy dressed in a suit (sorry, no picture). And I knew instantly that this guy was trouble because I'd had a minor encounter with him about a year ago. It wasn't that he was any tougher in a physical sense than the other two. It was that I knew he was an off-duty cop who works at the club as a bouncer.

So I quickly weighed my options. I could stand my ground and hold to the principle that this land is my land and I have as much right to it as you do.

Or I could pick up the pieces of my smashed camera after it hits the pavement and calling the police for assistance would not be a viable option.

I decided to heed the advice of the first two gentlemen I'd encountered and seek to earn my living in a different location.

It was just one thug too many.

The Fourth Worst Thing That Can Happen To A Cab Driver

I have long held the opinion that the three worst things that could happen to a cab driver are

1) Death

2) Paralysis

3) Some subhuman pukes in your cab.

In that order.

But I never knew what the fourth worst thing might be.

Until now.

Here's what happened...

A few nights ago at around 10 p.m. I was cruising for a fare on University Place in Greenwich Village. It's a narrow, one-way street that runs for only seven blocks from Washington Square up to 14th Street. I like University Place because it has several bars and restaurants on it as well as one of the great rarities in Manhattan, a bowling alley. These are all places where a cabbie is likely to find his next passenger. It's also a late-night area due to the high population there of New York University students who may be hitting the midnight oil or, more likely, hitting the midnight gin and tonic in a bar.

As I passed 13th Street, moving slowly in order to be able to stop in case I was hailed, a figure came rushing out at me from my left (driver's) side. He was a white-skinned, wild-eyed guy in his twenties whose facial expression and frantic body motion immediately struck me as WRONG. In taxi-driving, like anything that you do repetitively over a long period of time, you develop an instinct for the particles that stand out from the usual. And I could see in an instant that this guy didn't fit. People simply don't hail you like that unless there is something wrong.

Sometimes you're stuck with a person like this. You're waiting at a red light and he gets in. You know immediately that he's trouble but there he is in your cab and you've got to deal with him.

But sometimes you're not stuck with him.

You just keep driving and pass him by.

Of course you hope that he thinks that you didn't see him and that's why you didn't stop. You never want to hurt anyone's feelings. But any veteran cabbie knows that his feelings are quite secondary to your own gut instinct. The guy is trouble, you know it, and you keep your foot on the accelerator.

But it was different in this case. He came running right up next to me on the side of the cab. We made eye contact. I slowed down momentarily and glanced forward to see if the light at the next intersection, 14th Street, was red or green. It was green. This meant if I kept driving I could make the light, turn right, and be gone from this guy and whatever storms were brewing in his universe forever.

I kept driving.

There was no "Sorry, I didn't see you" about it. It was a blatant "I see you, I don't like your face, and I reject you. Goodbye." It was ugly.

I saw him still waving frantically at me in the rear view mirror, but REJECTED had been stamped on his application form and that was that. The decision of the judges is final. I made the turn and he was gone from sight and mind.

On 14th Street the distance between University Place and the next intersection, Broadway, is quite short. Because of this and its key location at the south end of Union Square, there is normally a ton of traffic at that particular spot. And it was no different at this time. It took me close to a minute to reach Broadway and then make another right to head back downtown in search of my next fare.

It was a fare I didn't have to do much searching to find. My next passenger jumped in as I stopped at the red light at 13th and Broadway.

Unfortunately, it was the same guy.

In all my years of taxi driving, this was a first. Never before had I had to confront a rejected passenger and answer for my sin. Never before had I had to speak to such a person. But there he sat in the back seat, almost surreal, looking at me like the Ghost of Misdeeds Past.

I was in shock. I immediately wondered how he'd been able to get over to 13th and Broadway so quickly on foot, and then realized that if he'd been running he could have done it in just that amount of time. I then hoped maybe he wouldn't recognize me as the driver who had just passed him by.

No such luck.

"Why didn't you stop for me, man?"

I considered the situation. There was no way I could bullshit my way out of it. So I just told him the truth.

"I didn't stop for you because I didn't like the way you came running up to me waving your arms so frantically," I said. "When people do that it usually means there's some kind of trouble going on and I don't want to be a part of it."

Interestingly, he could accept that. Truth has a way of doing that, even if it's an unwanted truth. He just accepted my explanation without feeling a need to get into an argument about it.

"Okay," he said, "Listen, I've gotta get down to 7th Street and Avenue A fast. In a big rush here, man!"

It was as if the whole rejection incident had not taken place. I felt relieved.

But as I started to drive down Broadway, I realized this was a good thing and it was a bad thing, too. Good because what could have been a major confrontation and even disciplinary action against me by the passenger had evaporated into nothing. But bad because the truth which had caused that potential trouble to disappear nevertheless meant that this passenger was, in fact, going to be trouble himself.

Now, I am supremely confident about my own instincts as a taxi driver. I had rejected this guy on a gut level that is never wrong, from my point of view. I knew that anyone who comes running up to a cab like that and who looks the way he looked was just surely going to mean some kind of trouble for me. And now I was waiting to see what the trouble would be.

It didn't take long. The ride we were taking was a short one. So short, in fact, that he could have walked it in five minutes, which was an outpoint in itself. This was not the kind of person who spends money on a taxi like that. Although he didn't tell me why he was in such a rush, his demeanor and his hurried speech told me it was drugs. My evaluation of the guy was that he was a junkie and this was a drug "emergency" of one kind or another.

We got to Avenue A and 7th Street in about a minute and a half. I pulled over to the curb so as to not block the traffic. And then he hit me with it.

"I've gotta meet someone in that building across the street. She's got the money for the ride. I'll be right back, man."

It was literally the oldest trick in the Book of Passengers' Sneaky Tricks.

Normally what I would do in this situation would be to try to stop the passenger from exiting the cab without leaving something of value behind. Or I'd just take off with him still in the taxi and look for a cop. You don't take a ride in a cab and then announce at the end of the trip that you have to disappear into a building to get money. That's a taxi no-no and it takes just one rip-off at the beginning of a cabbie's career to learn that lesson.

But this case was different. For one thing, it was a really short ride with little time lost and only a few dollars on the meter. But, more than that, in the wider karmic view of things I kind of felt I owed it to him.

So I let him go without a dispute. I waited there for a couple of minutes if only to validate what I already knew - that there was no way this guy was coming back - and then I drove off.

But I did go away with two things of value. One was that it showed me once again that my instincts are rock solid. I knew instantly when seeing this guy first coming toward me that he was bad news and that I was right to have not stopped for him.

And the other was discovering what the fourth worst thing is.

It's the dead returning to life and coming to get you.

The horror of it.

The horror!

********

Of course there's no horror in clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi. It's like strumming a banjo in a meadow on a summer day.

Good Cop

Well, I wrote a "bad cop" story - "Two Kinds Of Tickets". In the interest of fairness, and as required by the Taxi Driver's Code of Honor which doesn't exist, I am compelled to file the following report.

It's a "good cop" story.

It happened a few days ago and it had to do with something I knew would happen sooner or later (and turned out to be later).

Yellow cabs in New York City have been required to accept credit cards for just over a year now. Since it began I've been wondering what would happen when:

a) the only credit card the passenger has is declined. Or all the credit cards the passenger has are declined, and

b) the passenger has no cash and no apparent way of getting cash.

This situation is a bit different than what the same situation would have been in the days prior to credit cards. In those days, the passenger presumably knew that he didn't have any money in his pockets. I mean, who would get into a taxicab without knowing he had money to pay for the ride? You get the guy to his apartment building and then, after a minute of putting his hands through his pockets...

"Oh my god, I'm so sorry, I don't have any money on me!"

And then...

"I'll go upstairs and get some money. I'll be right back!"

And then...

Nothing. And you can't believe you've been suckered again. Plus you've wasted ten or fifteen minutes of money time. "He (or she) seemed so sincere..."

But this declined credit card situation is a little different. It's much easier to believe that the person genuinely didn't know his card would be declined and there's a presumption of innocence. Right?

Well, wrong. It turns out that, if you're a veteran cabbie and you've been ripped off whatever the requisite number of times is, the assumption is that this is just another, more modern, way of beating a fare. It's a presumption of guilt, actually.

Here's what happened...

A few days ago I picked up a fare at 3:45 a.m. in Midtown at 6th Avenue and 56th Street, a good part of town. It's an area where you might find office workers who've been doing an all-nighter heading wearily home or you might find someone who's been in an upscale bar all night heading wearily home. My passenger was an attractive 30-something female, professional in appearance and sophisticated in demeanor, whose destination was 84th Street in the Upper West Side. There was nothing "street" about her, nothing that would seem to be a tip-off that she would even consider the possibility of not paying a cab driver his fare.

So when, after several swipes, her credit card was declined by the taxi's satellite-connected system, I wasn't concerned. She would just use a different card, which is actually not that unusual.

But she didn't have another card.

Still, I was not concerned. She would just reach into her bag and pull out enough cash to pay the $7.80 fare, probably giving me a ten and telling me to keep the change. Or, if not a ten, then certainly nine, since eight would be a 20 cent tip (also known as an "insult") and this person would never give a 20 cent tip.

But then came an alarming confession. "I don't have enough cash," she said.

Now this was not good and quite immediately I was concerned. In prior years when the passenger had no cash but did have a credit or debit card, an option at this point would have been to go to an ATM. But since her card didn't work in the taxi's system, there didn't seem to be any point in trying the declined card in a bank. Nevertheless, there was still another way. I suggested that she go upstairs to get money from her apartment but leave something of value in the taxi as collateral.

And this is where she lost me.

She told me that there was no money in her apartment and she then handed me two dollars and offered to give me her business card so that I could call her the next day to arrange to be paid the remaining $5.80 of the fare.

Now I was offended.

Her gesture reeked to me of deceit and manipulation. I'm afraid I've been around the block too many times (literally) to see this as anything but an attempt to take me for more of an idiot than I actually am. Plus telling me there's no money in her apartment - not even ten dollars - sorry, even in the unlikely chance that this is true, couldn't you find something in your apartment to pay the fare with? How about a tea kettle? (That actually happened once.)

The funny thing in a situation like this is that getting paid is no longer the real issue. If someone gets in the cab and tells you up front that he doesn't have enough money to cover the cost of the ride, well, all right, you can decide right there to either take him or leave him. No harm done and you respect his honesty. And, most importantly, I haven't been made a fool of.

It's when someone thinks he can pull a fast one on you - make you a sucker - that the game becomes "You Can't Do That To Me!"

And that's what this game had become. What I do in a situation like this is to become a not very nice guy. If the person appears as a threat to me, I will suddenly slam the plexiglas partition window shut, lock it, and announce that we're now going to drive to a police precinct. If the person does not appear to be a threat, as in this case, the window stays open but we still take off for the police station. Sometimes the passenger will try to bolt from the cab at this point, so the trick is to drive to the cops without ever stopping, not even for a red light.

And that is what I was about to do.

Except something happened that only happens in the movies. It's like when a screenwriter is creating a scene and knows that in order to keep the audience involved in the story he has to "cut to the chase" or in some way bend the rules of reality. Because what happened next was almost unbelievable.

At the very moment I needed a cop, a police cruiser - without being signalled to in any way - suddenly pulled up next to my cab and the officer closest to me asked me if everything was okay.

My god!

Apparently the cops had been watching the block and had noticed that the time it was taking for the passenger to depart the cab had been unusually long. And that was enough to ask if I was okay. When I told them that my passenger's credit card had been declined and she had no money to pay the fare, this sequence was set into motion:

- one of the officers informed my passenger, in so many words, that she was damn well going to have to pay the fare

- she decided to give an ATM a try anyway and told me her bank was two blocks away, on 86th Street

- I told her I was turning the meter on again and did so

- we drove to her bank with the police car following right behind us

- she got out of the cab and went into the bank's lobby where the ATM machines are located (pictured below)

- one of the officers actually got out of his cruiser and followed her into the lobby! (he's standing out of sight behind the white pillar in this shot)

- with the cop standing ten feet behind her, she tried to withdraw funds

- she could not

- she returned to the cab and we drove back to her apartment building

- the cops followed us there

- she told me she was going to go upstairs to see if indeed there was any money in her apartment and that she was leaving her wallet on the back seat until she returned

- I said okay

- she left the cab and disappeared into the building

- the meter kept running

- she returned in two minutes with a twenty dollar bill, saying that luckily her boyfriend was there which she hadn't known before and that he had given her the money

- I didn't believe her but let her save face by pleasantly saying okay

- the original fare of $7.80 was added to the second fare of $4.60, bringing the total to $12.40. She took $3 back from the twenty, thus leaving me with a $4.60 tip "for your trouble".

- I said thank you and thought that was the right thing to do and a decent thing to say

- she left the cab and went back into her building

- I got out of my cab and walked back to the cops and thanked them, telling them I had been paid in full

- they said I was welcome and one of them added that "you've got a hard job, too"

As I drove off looking for one last fare for the night, the whole incident seemed to me to be what a fantasy of a cab driver might be after he'd been ripped off by a passenger and had received no justice at all. I mean, we expect no justice. So what happened here was surreal.

And it also answered the question of what to do when a passenger has neither a valid credit card nor any cash.

You just sit there for a moment and from out of nowhere a cop will come along to help you.

A good cop.

********

And while you're celebrating your good fortune, click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Suicide Watch

The night of the Oscars is always an interesting night to drive a cab in New York City. Nearly everyone is into it and so it provides a whole nightful of conversation possibilities. Also there's a big rush of business around midnight when it's finally over and people are leaving "Oscar parties" and going back to their own apartments. So that's extra money on a Sunday night which is ordinarily a slow time on the streets.

Of course not everyone sits through the whole, four-hour thing. These are the people, when they get in a cab, who can give their driver an update on what's happened on the show so far. One such person, a man whose age I would estimate to be in his late'30s, jumped in at Houston and 6th at around 9:30 en route to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. I asked him if he'd been watching the Academy Awards - he had been - and this began what I thought would be a typical back-and-forth about the show.

But you never know with whom you're chatting in a taxicab, especially in New York where there is so much variety among the taxi-riding population. How was I to know that this guy was on the brink of suicide?

But let me back up...

I don't think I've ever known a movie that had such excellent word of mouth as Slumdog Millionaire. "You've got to see this movie!" I was told from all directions: by passengers in my cab, by friends, and even in a post card from India from my brother. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I saw it myself with my pal, Annie. And, I must say, I immediately became one of the converted. Here was a movie that had it all - action, romance, humor, rags to riches, villains, children, heroes, characters you could really root for, and things to be learned about a part of the world we Americans for the most part know little of.

Being something of a writer myself, I particularly admired the originality and brilliance of the script. I know a little bit about the world of script submissions and script rejections, and I mentioned to Annie on our way out of the theater that this story was so good that it must have created quite a buzz in the Hollywood community, maybe even resulting in a frantic bidding war for its rights.

So now fast forward to this guy getting in my cab on Sunday night. I asked him if anything interesting had happened on the show so far and according to him nothing much had, other than Slumdog Millionaire already picking up a couple of Oscars. Well, this set me off jabbering away about the wonderfulness of this movie. I asked my passenger if he'd seen it himself and he said he had not.

The guy was a good conversationalist so the speedbump of his not having seen the film didn't matter as far as our chat was concerned. We entered into one of those fast-moving discussions that's kind of like a maze of back and forth pinballs, one thing leading to another until you finally arrive at something rather remarkable that stops the conversation in its tracks, but then immediately starts it going off again in a new direction.

And the thing we arrived at was that he himself worked for a movie studio. As a reader of scripts, he said, among other things.

This was of great interest to me. I was curious to know how the process of script submission was done where he worked. What it came down to, he said, was that he deals with agents and known contacts who pitch a script to him or send it to him. He reads the script and either recommends it to a decision-making executive or rejects it. He said scripts come to him in great numbers, and he reads as many as 40 per month.

I realized I had an opportunity to verify what I'd thought after seeing Slumdog Millionaire. I asked him if he knew if there had been a buzz about the script that had set off a bidding war. And he said that there hadn't been. In fact, he said, it had been shopped around to all the major studios and no one wanted it.

This surprised me and I quipped that I wouldn't want to be the person at a studio who had rejected Slumdog Millionaire.

Uhh... wrong thing to have said.

Yes, you guessed it - this guy in my cab was that guy! He'd read the script of Slumdog Millionaire two years ago and had rejected it!

Now that was a "taxicab confession" if I'd ever heard one!

"Why didn't you want it?" I asked.

His reply was that first of all it was from India and Bollywood wasn't box office in the United States. But the main reason was that it had only one known "name" on board, the director of the movie, Danny Boyle. And he felt that wasn't enough to warrant the gamble of money invested to expected return.

"What does it cost to make a movie like that?" I wanted to know.

"Ten million dollars," he said.

I asked him if I might know any movies made from scripts he's read that he had recommended.

"Juno," he replied, "but the studio executives didn't agree and it went somewhere else."

"Which studio do you work for?"

"I'd rather not say."

"Why haven't you seen Slumdog Millionaire?"

"Too painful."

I was glad as we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge that there was no traffic holding us up. If I'd had to stop the cab in the middle of the bridge - who knows? - this guy might have been inclined to do something rash... there's the rail... there's the river... and on the other side of the bridge is Brooklyn with two million people watching Slumdog Millionaire win yet another goddamned fucking Oscar.

It may have been difficult for him to choose life.

A decision that couldn't have been any easier as the night wore on.

********

Hopefully, even if he did decide to end it all, he clicked here first for Pictures From A Taxi. And you should, too. Not end it all. Just click.

Two Kinds Of Tickets

Something happened to me a few weeks ago that hardly ever happens to me:

I got a ticket.

Not a parking ticket, a moving violation ticket. The kind that adds points to your license.

And this reminded me of a truism I discovered quite a few years ago when it comes to tickets. And that is that there are two kinds of tickets:

1) the ticket where you are mad at yourself for having made such a dumb move, and

2) the ticket where you are mad at the cop for having been so mean that he would have written the ticket at all.

An example of the first kind of ticket would be, say, you make a left turn at an intersection where there is a sign that clearly says, "No Left Turns". You see the sign but you make the turn anyway. A cop sees you do this, pulls you over, and writes you a ticket.

You are mad at yourself. You knew you were doing something illegal but you did it anyway and you got caught. "Stupid dumb ass me," you say to yourself.

An example of the second kind of ticket would be this: you are approaching an intersection where there is a stop sign. When you get to the intersection you check to see that no other vehicles or pedestrians are present and bring your car almost to a stop but not completely to a full stop. As you proceed your speed is less than three miles per hour. A cop pulls you over for failing to stop at a stop sign and writes you a ticket.

You are mad at the cop. What you did might have been technically illegal but you were in good control and knew that your actions in that situation were completely safe. You don't introvert and call yourself a goddamned freaking moron for not having come to a full stop. You curse the cop instead (in your mind, of course).

Well, guess what kind of ticket I received? Here's a hint - I wasn't mad at myself.

Okay, this is what happened...

On a Monday night at 4 AM - the time of the night when the "city that never sleeps" is taking catnap - I was cruising down 2nd Avenue in Manhattan with a couple of cars in front of me but no cars behind me. I was in the middle of the avenue. Suddenly a person appeared on the sidewalk to my left waving at me in the classic "I want a taxi" fashion. As a veteran cabbie who has been in this situation once or twice during every shift for the last 31 years, I did two things:

a) I instantly checked my side view mirror to make sure no vehicles were behind me, and

b) I turned sharply, cutting across two lanes, and got to the passenger.

I knew, before I made the turn, that it was a safe move. No one had to swerve out of the way to avoid hitting me. No one had to step on their brake. In actuality, it was an expert maneuver made by a professional driver in order to do his job.

But the cop didn't see it that way.

The passenger, a twenty-something female, entered the cab and told me her destination. During the time it takes to open and close the rear door, our light turned red. Then, just after it changed to green and I began to move forward to begin the ride, a police car pulled up beside me and a not pleasant officer informed me that he wanted to see several pieces of identification. The passenger departed to seek another means of getting to point B. As I handed over my driver's license and the taxi's identification card to the officer, I knew immediately that I was in trouble. Because just as there are two kinds of tickets, there are two kinds of cops you may encounter in this situation:

1) The "let's talk about it" cop, and

2) The "there's nothing to talk about, so don't talk to me" cop.

With a "let's talk about it" cop you at least have a chance of talking your way out of it. Even by allowing conversation, the cop is saying, in effect, that he is willing to allow the possibility that he will let you off with a warning. I must say that in the past I have been quite successful in this situation.

But not this time.

This cop was a "there's nothing to talk about" cop. In fact, he might have even been a "if you dare to try to talk your way out of it I will find something else to write you a ticket for" cop. So, actually, there are 3 kinds of cops in this situation.

And apparently this cop was of that third variety because, even though I didn't say a word to him and handed him the papers he wanted to see, he thought multiple tickets for a single offense, if in fact there was an offense at all, was the way to go.

Did I say above that I got "a" ticket? Uh, correction... make that four tickets.

1) Unsafe lane change.

2) Failure to signal.

3) Not stopping within 12 inches of the curb when pulling over for a passenger. (Believe it or not, this absurd rule is actually on the books in New York City.)

4) Stopping in a crosswalk.

This was from a cop whose powers of observation were so good that he could see all of this from a full block behind me, but whose powers of observation were not so good that he couldn't avoid making several errors in trying to copy over the information from my driver's license onto the tickets he was writing.

When I got back to my garage and told the dispatchers and a couple of the drivers what had happened, I was informed (belatedly) that "the heat is on" in the city. And, in fact, I noticed in the following couple of weeks that an inordinate amount of taxis were being pulled over, and presumably ticketed, by the cops.

This situation - the possibility of being selected as fodder for ticket blitzes - is one of the crosses that New York City taxi drivers bear and I suspect is one of the main reasons that many competent people decide to get out of the taxi driving business. It's just too much to take, considering everything else we have to put up with.

And it reminds me of what I consider to be a fascinating observation about an aspect of life in New York City that I have made and I don't think anyone else has noticed. I would like to invite every New Yorker who may read this blog to consider this.

Here is the observation: we have over 13,000 yellow medallion cabs and many more thousands of car service vehicles roaming the streets of the city. Some of these drivers are amazingly competent and some of them are not. But competent or not, one thing even a casual observer would notice is that taxis are pulled over by police cars all the time. I see it every night.

However, we also have in New York, thousands of buses crowding the streets. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of garbage trucks roaming around, apparently, with impunity. And we also have quite a few newspaper delivery trucks making their rounds. During my years as a cabbie I have seen countless instances of buses gridlocking intersections, running red lights, and cutting off other vehicles (although I do think, generally speaking, that bus drivers are highly competent). I have seen garbage trucks commit every imaginable traffic offense frequently. And I see newspaper delivery trucks running red lights and speeding every night.

But here's what I have not seen. And I think this is so amazing that I will put it in boldface:

I have never seen, not even once in 31 years, a bus, a garbage truck, nor a newspaper delivery truck pulled over by a cop. Not once!

And if you're a New Yorker, I'll bet you haven't either.

Isn't that amazing? I have always assumed that the reason for this is that the fix is in with the city due to agreements made with their unions. The taxi drivers, of course, have no union.

Anyway, I pleaded "not guilty" to the tickets and now have a court appearance scheduled for April.

The story of which I will post in this blog. So stay tuned.

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And while you're staying tuned, why not click here for Pictures From A Taxi? It's free and you won't get pulled over by a cop. I mean, unless maybe if you're also driving while you're clicking. That would be bad.

The Misfits

Here's a little story I intended to write a few months ago but didn't get around to. It's on that recurring theme that has been following me around like a puppy, karma vs. coincidence.

But before I get into it, let me remind you that driving a cab in New York City is like being spun in circles on the Wheel of Fortune. We who drive the iconic yellow cabs do all our business off the street. No one calls us on a telephone to get our services. It's just a random coming together of a person on the street - one person out of millions walking around in the city - with one of the 13,187 cabs that are in their own random motion from east side to west, from west side to east, like a kaleidoscope of yellow. So to speak.

So with all this random motion, when something happens that seems to defy the randomness of it - something that would make coincidence seem like a naive explanation - one begins to get the idea that "something's happening but we don't know what it is". It's like sensing that there's a phenomenon going on and if we could just isolate exactly what that phenomenon is we would really be onto something.

In my case, I know that when I have my attention on something - especially when I have started to do something but have not completed it - I have a tendency to "pull in" whatever that thing is. It happened again recently...

My favorite television station is TCM - Turner Classic Movies. Here you can find more great, classic films than anywhere else in TV land. It's a premium channel, but to me it's worth a few bucks a month because I'm a big classic cinema fan. One day last July I was looking over the schedule and saw that a movie I'd always wanted to see but never had was slated to be on the air. So I set my video recorder to copy that movie. Its name is "The Misfits".

Some of the great names of cinema were in front and behind the camera in this film from 1961. The screenplay was written by Arthur Miller. It was directed by John Huston. And it starred Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift, who were all big names then (it was Gable's and Monroe's last movie), and co-starred an actress named Thelma Ritter and an actor named Eli Wallach.

The movie remained unwatched in my recorder for a few weeks, but it didn't matter because I could watch it whenever I felt like it. Finally, one day in August, I turned it on. I watched it for about half an hour and then, although I was enjoying it up to that point, I had to attend to other matters so I turned it off. But, again, it didn't matter because I could continue watching it whenever I felt like it.

Well, two months went by and I still hadn't gotten back to it. I record a lot of movies and sometimes I wind up with a backlog. C'est la vie. Having too many great films to watch is a problem I like having.

Then on October 13th I was driving 9J72 and stopped for three passengers at 16th and Park Avenue South. A 30-something fellow sat up front with me and an elderly man and woman were in the back seat. They were a pleasant group which created an easy air of conversation in the cab. The fellow up front with me would alternately chatter with the couple in the back and with me, talking about nothing in particular at first but eventually mentioning that they were all actors. In fact, he said, the passengers in the back seat were both renowned thespians who'd been in the theater for many, many years. Their names were Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach.

Eli Wallach!

I ask you, what are the odds of watching half an hour of a movie that was made 47 years ago and then having one of the stars of that movie walk into your cab? It was almost like having a character on the screen jump out and sit down next to you in the theater. Or reading a book about the Civil War and then there's a knock on the door and Abraham Lincoln is standing there.

Eli Wallach, now 92 years old and kicking, and his wife, Anne Jackson, were delightful passengers, happily fielding questions from me about their careers. I took great pleasure in being able to tell Mr. Wallach that I was in the middle of "The Misfits" but hadn't finished watching it yet.

"Don't tell me how it ends!" I pleaded.

So what do you think? Was this just a random coincidence? Or was it "something's happening but we don't know what it is"?

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And if you were to click here for Pictures From A Taxi, would that be karma? Or just following orders?