The Best Day Of Your Life

I wrote something in my book that already needs to be revised. 

It's what I consider to be my favorite type of ride. 

Favorite Type of Ride Number Two, I wrote, is the one with the "elderly active" passenger.  That's when you get someone in the cab who's way up there in years - like over eighty - but who's still enjoying living.  I find myself exhilarated, with hope renewed that I still have many more years to go with vitality and good health. 

And Favorite Type of Ride Number One was said to be the fare with someone who's coming in from the airport who, with great anticipation, is seeing Manhattan for the very first time.  Wide-eyed and agog, this person is like a pilgrim finally setting foot in the holy land.  His excitement is contagious - I assume the role of the embedded tour guide, but with the secret agenda of absorbing his thrill vicariously.

I had a passenger a few weeks ago, however, who brought me to the realization that there is another type of ride that trumps these other two.  It's a very specific kind of ride.  It has to have a hospital as its starting point.  It has to be a man.  And it has to be the first time this man has left the hospital after having been there for many hours.  You've probably guessed what it is - it's the father of a newborn infant returning home after the birth of his first-born son or daughter.

He hailed me at the entrance of Mt. Sinai at 5th Avenue and 101st Street a little before midnight, a thirtyish fellow en route to the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn.  Although I'm always curious, I'm usually hesitant about asking anyone about why they've been at the hospital.  After all, it could be something terrible and they may not want to discuss it with their cab driver.  So I just say hello, perhaps offer some small talk, and try to give them enough space so they know if they want to talk about it, I'm approachable.  But this guy looked happy, so I jumped in.

"Visiting hours over?" I asked.

That was all it took. 

Slowly at first, suppressing emotion, and then with an open faucet of joy, he told me the story of the birth of his daughter.  Surely there can be nothing in the realm of communication between humans that is more certain to create an instant, Krazy Glue kind of bonding than this. Here was a young man who had just been through what for many will be the most dramatic episode of their lives.  Would the baby be healthy?  Will the mother be okay?  So much of everyone's future depends on the outcome - and it had all turned out fine.  A newly minted father, if he's to be any kind of father at all, is a fountain of exuberance at a time like this. 

And my passenger was.

But it had not been easy.  In labor, the obstetrician observed that the baby's heartbeat was fluctuating between too fast and too slow, a danger sign.  He therefore bypassed the natural birth process and, with his team, performed an emergency C-section.  It worked.  And a brand new, eight pound member of the human race reported in for muster.

"What's her name?"

"Harper."

He went on to explain that all the names he and his wife liked were already the names of people they knew and they didn't want anyone to think they'd named the baby after them when in fact they hadn't.  But they liked the name "Harper" because it's the name of one of their favorite authors, Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, and no one they knew had that name.  Also because it has a nice sound - "Harper".  I agreed.

"And her middle name is Francesca," he added.  "After Dr. Francesco - the obstetrician.  Who saved her life."

Somebody tells you something like that, the beauty and the correctness of the acknowledgement is so profound - you may never forget having been told such a thing.  I guess it was that which made me realize that this was my very favorite kind of ride.

Along with one other thing.  It gives me the opportunity to spring on the new parent one of my favorite, albeit corny, jokes.

First I tell him that I'm the father of a grown-up daughter myself.  Then:

"I hope you don't make the same mistake we made."

"What?"

"Don't teach her how to talk.  Go with the deaf sign language.  It will save you a fortune in telephone bills."

Always gets a laugh.

It was a half-hour ride to his place in Brooklyn.  Along the way I was able to indoctrinate the Parent Club initiate with a few gems of observation and insight that I've gathered in my tenure as a father.  I told him there are few, if any, lines of demarcation that are as distinct in your life as the line that divides Before and After the time you became a parent. 

"In looking back, you will always see it that way."

Then I told him something about his daughter.  "That tiny little baby back there that you could pick up with one hand?  In about two years, three at the most, she's going to see you doing something.  Then she's going to tell you that you're doing it wrong.  And she will be right." 

He liked that, so felt I'd been given a green light to expound on something else. 

"You know, there's only one kind of love that can really be called unconditional," I offered, "and that's the love from parent to child.  That's the strongest love that there is. It's very powerful.  It will change you.  No matter how good a person you already are, it will  make you a better one."

I believe that to be true.

He paid with a credit card and the meter spit out a receipt.  I held it out to him through the partition.

"Oh, no, that's okay," he said.

"Take it," I insisted, "it's got the date that your daughter was born on it."

Big smile. 

He took the receipt.

And we shook hands.

Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver

Well, off she goes on her own into the big old world.  Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver was officially published in the U.K., with distribution to the Commonwealth countries, on Jan. 17th.

I received a couple of advance copies on the 16th and placed one conspicuously on the dashboard of my taxi on the 17th, Publication Day, which was also a driving day for me.  It was a cheap ploy to attract attention from alert passengers onto the freak occurrence that their taxi driver had written a book about taxi driving in the same city in which they happened to be riding in a taxi.  This desperate plea for attention resulted in two sworn intentions to buy the book, several lively conversations, and in each case above-average tips.

So now I know that even if the book is a complete flop commercially, I have found yet another way to increase my tips.  Brilliant!  Or "brill", as my U.K. friends would say.

I am enthusiastic about how the book looks and feels.  The spacing of the paragraphs between the stories in each chapter is easy on the eye.  Its size and weight make it consumer-friendly, I think, and its length of 391 pages seems to me to be not too small to feel that there's not enough and not too big to confront the idea of reading it.   

And I think you'll find that the book "moves", meaning it takes you from one place to another rather effortlessly, like a ride in a taxi with a good suspension.

Now all you've got to do is get it.  And since you're a reader of this blog you are morally obligated to do so, or my agents at HarperCollins will track you down.  They know where you live!

If you're in the U.K. or in a Commonwealth country, you should be able to find it in your local bookstore.  Or if not, you can order it from Amazon.co.uk, of course.

If you're in the U.S. it can be ordered from Amazon.com. But you could also order it here for no shipping charges.

I hope you'll get it, read it, love it, and want to marry it.

And your comments would be most welcome, as always.

Be Lovely Day

My dear friend from Liverpool, Jodie Schofield, for whom I would swim the River Mersey if she asked, has requested that I lend my voice to "Be Lovely Day".

The idea is to be, well... lovely... on this coming Saturday, January 12.

Read all about it here.

And at Jodie's own blog, here: http://jodesters.blogspot.com/2013/01/be-lovely-day.html.

Brill, Jodester!

 

In Case You Missed the Radio Interview...

...and you'd like to hear it, here's a link that will bring you to the station's website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01phn2f

When you've got the website up, first click on "See all previous episodes from Up All Night" which is on the right-hand side of the page.  Then, when the next page comes up, scroll down to the episode of 02/01/2013.  Start the video and go to two hours, thirty-four minutes into the show.  That's where my interview begins, and it goes for about twenty minutes.

It says there are only five days left to hear it, and that was two days ago, so better make it quick!

The interview went quite well, I thought.  The presenter, Andy Crane, had already read the book (given to him in advance by the PR company organizing the promotions) and I think this was why the conversation moved along rather fluidly.

On The Radio Tonight

A quick announcement for anyone who may be interested... I will be doing an interview tonight on a late-night radio show in the U.K., BBC Radio 5 Live Up All Night which is scheduled to be aired at 10.30 p.m. Eastern Time in the U.S.  That would be 3.30 a.m. in the U.K.  Not exactly prime time, but, hey, one takes what one can gets.

The show is accessible on the internet, so you can hear it from anywhere in the world.

I hope you will read this in time to be able to tune in.  Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Me Bewk

Oh my God, how I have been longing to write this post.  Here's a story about something that's been in the making for a very long time.

As you may know, I started driving a taxi in New York City in 1977.  Already a writer at heart, I recognized from the start that this profession of taxi driving automatically provides a continuous source of what writers refer to as "material", and I started compiling notebooks of my more interesting fares. 

In the mid-nineties I decided it was time to take a crack at writing a book of my favorite taxi stories and I produced a relatively thin volume.  I shopped it around a bit, received some encouragement, but no bites.  I put it aside and placed my attention on other projects, mostly stage plays.

In 2006, having by then a better idea of how my taxi book should be structured, I decided to rewrite it.  I started working on the project, but, wait, we were now in the cyber-age and it hit me like a feather that a better idea would be to start a blog (this blog) first, then rewrite the taxi book.

If you've been a reader here for a long time (and I thank you), you may have noticed that at some point - around 2009 -  my posts became less frequent.  That was because there are only so many hours in a day and I was spending more and more of them writing the book. 

I am not a particularly fast writer.  I tend to turn phrases over and over until they sound just right to my mental ear, and I am a ceaseless self-editor.  These are not necessarily virtues in a writer, but I seem to be stuck with them, so I carried on in this fashion until, finally, the book, a full-sized 250 pages, was finished - yes, finished! - in the spring of 2011.

An analogy that has often been made to artistic creation is that it's like having a baby.  So much labor and care goes into the thing, and when it's finally born your dearest hope is that it will not only exist but grow and meet its potential.  You want to see that baby acquire strength and be able to make its way in the world on its own, sort of as an independent entity.  In a way, you also come to see your creation as a gift from yourself to the world, even if "the world" never knew who you were, and even if you never made a dime from it.  To know that your gift had been delivered, that it had created some worthwhile effects on those who had been willing to receive it, that would be a great satisfaction indeed.  But as many of us know, that is where the greatest disappointment awaits you.

In 1981, after two years of disciplined toil, I completed a full-length comedic drama written for the stage, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II set in modern times.  I thought then, and still do, that it was well-written enough to warrant professional production.  I tirelessly sent letters off to all sorts of theatrical enterprises and put it into the hands of whomever I could find who had hands.  My friend Ed, who reads a lot, called it "literature".  My friend Tom, a Shakespearean actor, said it was "better than Henry IV, Part II".  Wow.  And my mother described it as "a charge card at Bloomingdale's".  How could it miss?  Well, to this day A Creator Of Superior Realities has yet to have had even a staged reading.  So I know that disappointment well.

I knew, however, that the taxi book would be different because with a book, even if everything else failed, at least you could always self-publish.  And some self-published books actually do quite well.  After you've written a play or a screenplay you still have a whole series of production hurdles to jump over.  One never likes to think about what the chances are of ever making it past all these hurdles, but the sad truth is that of the vast quantity of plays and screenplays that are written, only a very few make it onto a stage or a screen.  This can be quite a slap in the face, considering the effort that went into its creation.

But this was a book, not a play, so shortly after completing it last year I began the process I have learned to loathe of sending out communications to literary agents.  The idea is: a) get a literary agent, b) the literary agent gets a publisher, c) the publisher publishes your book.  I researched the names and email addresses of dozens of agents, wrote a query letter which in itself was so well-crafted it could have won the Nobel Prize for Query Letters, and started sending them out.  After several months of this activity, though, my results were fruitless.  A few "thanks but it's not for us" replies and the rest simply never bothered to respond at all.  But I was not terribly discouraged.  I knew self-publishing was a route I couldn't be shut off from and I was pretty sure that the readers of this blog would want to read the book once it became available.  These two things kept me in motion.

And then something happened, I guess the kind of thing every blogger dreams about.  Through what might be called karma, fate, determination, intention, or just the residue of design (luck), I was able in January of this year to get the manuscript into the hands of a major publisher in England without an agent and that publisher, HarperCollins, offered me a book deal.  My book, which is to be called Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver, will be published in the U.K. in print and as an ebook this coming January, and subsequently in Canada, Australia, and Ireland.  Publication in the U.S. is still pending at this writing.

How's that for some front-page Cabs Are For Kissing news??!!!

I'd like to tell you a couple of things about me bewk.  The stories are categorized into chapters - for example there's a chapter of celebrity stories, another of road rage stories, and so on - and are connected together by an opinionated, first person narrative, kind of like if the reader were a passenger in my cab.  In fact, these stories have a verbal tradition.  I've been testing them out on passengers for over thirty years.  Nothing like having a captive audience to practice on!

I'd also like you to know that of the 108 in the book, only nine of the stories have already been published in this blog, so the book is not a compilation of what's already been written here.  You see, I've been holding out on you.  You've never read my best stories unless you've been sneaking into my room while I was sleeping. So if you were thinking, why buy the book when it's already here, fageddabowt it.  You're gonna have to fork over some dough, yo.

The truth is, I'm pretty confident you will enjoy reading Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver.  It was a labor of love and to say I'm proud of it would be an understatement - it's my personal best, maybe even my justification for having lived.  I will be posting updates here (of course!) about exactly when it will be published in various parts of the world and how you can order a copy.  Or ten copies!  Also there will also be a future post about just how this connection to HarperCollins came to pass, quite a story in itself in my opinion.

So that's the big news.

I thank you again for being there.

:)

If you'd like to see what the cover art and book jacket will look like, click here.

The American Way

As I entered the voting booth yesterday here in the United States, I was, as happens every year, reminded of what was for me a very special Election Day experience I had in 1984.  Although it's a divergence from the taxi theme of this blog, I would like to share that story with you.

In 1984, also a presidential election year, the contest was between the Republican incumbents, President Ronald Reagan and Vice-President George Bush (the elder), and the Democrats Senator Walter Mondale for president and Representative Geraldine Ferraro for vice-president, the first female to run for the second-highest office in the land in American history.  I lived in a part of Queens called Forest Hills at that time and, as it happened, that was also the area of New York City where Geraldine Ferraro made her home.  Now, my home was a one-bedroom apartment and hers was an expensive single-family house with a front and back yard, but that didn't matter.  We were neighbors.  

My polling place was located in the gymnasium of an elementary school, P.S. (Public School) 101, several blocks from my home, and I walked there at around 1 p.m. on Election Day.  As I approached the school, I could see that the place was more or less surrounded with media and police vehicles, and I realized why they were there: this was the same polling place where Geraldine Ferraro voted.  I entered the gym and as I was busy signing in (which is how registered voters record that they have shown up and cast a vote), there was some commotion around the entrance, and in came the candidate herself.

Well, the place went abuzz.  She smiled and waved to everyone and was immediately surrounded by television reporters and the like.  Many in the room, including myself, approached her to shake hands and wish her well.  And then something happened that struck me as being unseemly.  A group of Republican supporters on one side of the gym started chanting, "Four More Years", repetitively and in unison, the message being that they wanted her opponents, and not her, to be elected.  That went on for about a minute and then kind of fizzled out on its own.

Ms. Ferraro was quite used to this sort of thing, of course, and it did nothing to alter her smile nor to abate the excitement in the room.  After a while she entered a voting booth, one of those contraptions with a lever that opens and closes a circular curtain for privacy, to cast her vote.  A few booths down, I entered one of my own.  So what we had here, only several feet apart, were the candidate for the second-highest office of the United States of America and a taxi driver both exercising their right, considered sacred by many, to vote.

I voted for Reagan and Bush.

To me, this demonstration before my eyes of how we in America choose our leaders was a truly wonderful and inspiring event.  What I realized during my walk back home was even more wonderful and inspiring, however.  It was that when the chanting of "Four More Years" suddenly interrupted the mood in the gym, nothing happened.  Not only did none of the many police or Secret Service agents in the room move forward to hush them, no one even thought of doing so.  It was a public place and they had the right to express their opinion, period.  The freedom of speech, guaranteed to all by a constitution that has stood since 1789, is so engrained in the psyches of the citizenry that it is completely unquestioned. 

And that is the American way.   

Speed Of Particle Flow

I had a little episode a few nights ago that could serve as a model for the efficiency that is possible in today's world.  The chronology went something like this...

11:41 p.m. - I pick up two ladies, one a twenty-something, the other middle-aged, coming out of the Mark Hotel on East 77th Street.  They tell me they will have two stops, the first on Central Park South.  As we head downtown on 5th Avenue, I can tell from their conversation that they are business colleagues.

11:46 p.m. - The older woman gets out across the street from her hotel on CPS.  I'm told that the next stop will be the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square.  "Do you know where that is?" the twenty-something asks, demonstrating that she is an out-of-towner.  Any cabbie would be familiar with the gigantic Marquis.  "Sure," I reply, unoffended.

11:47 p.m. - We stop at a red light at 7th Avenue.  Looking at her in the mirror, she seems friendly so I decide to liven up the ride by making an out of the blue comment to her.  "Do you see that building on the left?" I ask, indicating the stately New York Athletic Club. 

"Yes," says she. 

"You know the Christmas song 'Santa Claus Is Coming To Town'?"

"Yeah."

"Thirty years ago I brought the man who wrote that song to that building."

Her eyes widened.  "Really!  Wow!"

Bingo, we were off to the races.  I tell her my J. Fred Coots story as we make the left onto 7th Avenue and proceed toward the Marquis on 45th Street.

11:50 p.m. - As we wait at the red light at the special right-turn-only lane at 45th Street, she asks me what time the stores close tomorrow, a Wednesday - she's catching a plane in the morning and wonders if there'll be enough time to do some shopping.  I tell her I think the stores open at 10, but caution that I can't be sure because I haven't seen that hour of the day for years since I drive the night shift and sleep in the morning.  In fact, I add, I'm not even sure that there actually is a ten o'clock in the morning, a little joke.  She smiles.

11:52 p.m. -  We pull up beside the Marquis on 45th.  Somehow the conversation has meandered onto the subject of what the odds would be of getting a passenger twice in a cab in New York City.  I wind up telling her a story about having had a Major League baseball player from the California Angels in my cab twice in two successive years.  This then leads into a related story about how the only way to have an advantage when betting on baseball is to have some inside information about particular circumstances that could affect the outcome of a game, and that these two rides had provided me with just that.  She appears to be fascinated.

11:54 p.m. - The conversation finally comes to an end.  She pays the $11.00 fare with a credit card, adding a $3.30 tip, then smiles, leaves the taxi, and disappears into the hotel.  I drive off down 45th Street toward 8th Avenue, looking for my next passenger.

11:56 p.m. - Not finding anyone after driving up 8th for ten blocks, I decide to take a break as it is almost midnight and that is routinely when I stop and eat.  I make a few turns and wind up on 59th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, a quiet block where I won't be disturbed. 

11:58 p.m. - Stepping out of my cab, I continue my routine by opening the back door to search for any debris left by passengers and, whoa, sitting on the seat is an iPhone.  I pick it up and bring it to the front for examination.  I find two things, one good and one bad.  The good is that it is not locked.  The bad is that it says it's down to only ten percent of its charge remaining, which means that if its owner doesn't call me soon, the phone will loose its charge and will likely never be able to be returned.  However, since it's not locked I am able to open the address book and look for the name of the person, I have learned from experience, who is the single best person to call for help.  And that person's name is "Mom". 

12:00 a.m. - I scroll and find Mom.  I call Mom.  The call is immediately answered because Mom thinks her daughter or son is calling.  "Hi, honey," says Mom.  I explain that I'm not honey, I'm a taxi driver in New York City who has just found this iPhone on the back seat.  She thanks me for calling, mentions that she is in Ohio, and tells me it belongs to her daughter.  I tell her the iPhone is nearly out of charge and that I'd like to leave my own cell phone number with her so that in case I'm not able to make contact with her daughter she will still have a way of reaching me after the next time she talks to you.  I give Mom my number, who then says that if she knew what hotel her daughter was staying at, she would call her herself to give her my number.  I tell her that it's likely her daughter was my last passenger and that she's staying at the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square.  Mom thanks me again and gets off the line.

12:03 a.m. - I am munching on my grilled chicken and whole wheat bread while adding up the money numbers thus far into the shift .  My cell phone rings.  It is my last passenger calling me from the Marquis.  I tell her I'll be there in ten minutes.

12:11 a.m. - I arrive back at the Marquis.  After a minute of waiting, my relieved former passenger approaches on the sidewalk and is reunited with her precious iPhone, which, in today's world, pretty much contains her life within it.  She thanks me profusely and offers me a twenty dollar bill as her way of showing her gratitude.  Thinking it would be noble to refuse the reward, upon seeing the bill coming toward me I accept it anyway, thinking it's important for a person's self-esteem to be able to keep their exchange in.  We chat for a minute and go our separate ways.  I stuff the bill in my shirt.          

To think that all of this - from picking up a passenger at the Mark Hotel, to having an extended and enoyable conversation with that passenger, to contacting her mother halfway across the country in the middle of the night, to reuniting the passenger with a lost possession - all of this took place within half an hour. 

Amazing.

What a world we live in today.

The Hotel Room

I have wondered from time to time if it's just because I'm getting older or if it's because the mores of our society have changed or if it's simply that I don't drive on Friday or Saturday nights anymore that have caused a particularly outrageous activity to vanish from the back seat of my taxi. No, not slopping up the upholstery with cheese nachos.

Sex.

It's been something like four or five years since it last went down. And then it annoyed me so much I threw them out of the cab in the middle of Times Square. Maybe that's what did it. But it finally happened again a couple of nights ago after such a long intermission - a throwback, it was, to the good old days.

Enter the stars of our show at exactly 1:52 a.m. at 2nd Avenue and 84th Street. She, an attractive brunette and he a not unattractive guy with a normal haircut and a bit of a beard, both twenty-somethings. There was nothing over the top about their appearance, nothing that would have made you think that defects in their character were showing up in the way they carried themselves or by the way they looked. In fact, they struck me as a couple of nice kids as they climbed in and told me their destination, 117th Street and 8th Avenue in Harlem. The girl, in particular, greeted me with a warm hello and a smile which gave me a sense of inclusion in their world, something that is appreciated by a cab driver in the middle of the night. It can be a lonely profession.

But that sense of inclusion quickly evaporated when I made a right on 83rd and headed crosstown. Their togetherness was too together for me to feel anything but excluded as she cuddled up on his chest and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. This would be another purely functional ride after all, the driver a mute extension of the taxicab itself, the passengers in their own space and bubble. So be it.

We stopped at a red light at Park Avenue. Having the chance to take my eyes off the road and glance around at the environment, I sensed that something was wrong here. Looking in the mirror, the girl had disappeared. Could she be taking a quick snooze on the guy's lap? Not unless she talks in her sleep, as her little female giggles were loud enough to carry over into the front of the cab. I feared the worst but carried on, turning right on Madison in the direction of the 97th Street transverse. Before we had progressed a block on the avenue the giggles had morphed into murmurs and there were some upper body movements of the guy which gave a further indication that what was going on in the back was an activity of the oral variety that is actually illegal in a public place.

No, not brushing your teeth.

Now, what is a cab driver supposed to do in this situation? Stick his head through the partition's window to catch the perpetrators red-handed (all right, perhaps "handed" is not the correct word here)? And if you do that, then what do you do? It's just too awkward to be confrontable. Besides, what if I poked my head through the partition and found that nothing untoward was actually going on, after all? Wouldn't that make me out to be the jackass?

So to hell with it. I would endure it all the way to Harlem if I had to. I made the left on 97th.

But then, as we began our trek across the Central Park transverse, they crossed the line. Looking in the mirror, they had assumed the "Taxicab Position" - the male sitting normally, facing forward, the female straddling him, facing the rear window. It means their activity had gone from "presumed innocent" to "you've got to be kidding" in the mind of the taxi driver. It was over the top, right in your face, and for the sake of one's dignity it begs for some kind of response.

I have two forms of retaliation to the appearance of the Taxicab Position and I immediately put the first one into motion. It is to attempt, by means of hard braking and sharp turning, to knock the female off her joystick. It's kind of like a party game like "Pin the Tail on the Donkey" - "Knock the Girl Off the Penis". So when I came to the next red light at Central Park West I slowed, then hit the brake with a noticeable thump. No good, she remained attached and continued to sway gently in place. When the light turned green I made the right on CPW as sharply as I could without putting the cab into a spin, but again it was to no avail. This girl could have a career in the rodeo.

By the time we came to the next red at 106th Street the party had ended, at least for the time being. She had dismounted somewhere around 101st and the two of them sat tight together, smiling and cooing at each other the rest of the way up to their destination at 117th. Still, it was not over as far as I was concerned. You simply cannot do this in the space of another human and not expect a settlement of accounts. This is my taxicab. This is my workplace. To fail to respond would be a humiliation in itself, an admission to myself that I was, in fact, just a mute extension of the taxicab. Something needed to be said, so the second form of retaliation was begun.

As I brought the cab to a stop at 117th and awaited payment of the $14.50 fare, I began a little end-of-ride conversation. "You know, the taxi rates just went up," I said in the general direction of the back seat. It was a true statement. There was a fare increase on September 4th.

"They did?" the girl responded.

"Yeah, there's a $10 surcharge now for the hotel room."

The guy laughed but his partner in crime did not get the joke. "I hope you're kidding," she said as she handed me a $20 bill.

I took the bill and held it in the air. "Yes... I am..." I replied, in a not unfriendly way.

"We're going to a hotel room!" she exclaimed, happy-faced, as if it were quite a coincidence that I happened to mention that.

"You've just been in one," I zapped back. Touche.

"Can I have three dollars back?" she asked, her smile still in place.

"Three dollars back," I repeated, with just the slightest hint of sarcasm. I slowly counted out the bills from my roll and offered them through the partition to whomever would take them. She moved forward to accept the money but as she did so her boyfriend interceded.

"Tell him to keep it," he told her, sotto voce style.

She paused a moment as the suggestion was processed. "Oh, you can keep the change!" she said with just the slightest hint of airhead.

"Gee, thanks," I replied in pretended surprise. I didn't need their three bucks. But this gesture in the fragile territory of Manners, Lack Of, at least did do something to compensate for their transgression.

They stepped out of the cab and closed the door. I looked over at them for a final mental snapshot and found that the girl was waving me goodbye, still smiling.

"Thanks for the hotel room!" she called back.

Means Of Exchange

Recently I had one of those iffy passengers who fell right in the middle of the Trouble/No Trouble Line of Demarcation. He might be okay, he might not be okay - I couldn't tell.

He was a twenty-something, medium height, medium weight, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, with a Detroit Tigers baseball cap topping off the package. So he looked all right as I approached him, his hand in the air, on 2nd Avenue up in the Upper East Side. But a moment after I brought the cab to a complete stop I noticed the first sign of trouble. It was a nuance thing, just a little tiny thing only a veteran cabbie would spot: it took him just slightly too long to open the rear door. Normally you stop and there is a one to two second elapse of time before you hear the click of the door handle being lifted. It took this fellow three to four seconds to accomplish that task. If he'd been with other people it wouldn't have appeared on the radar screen as he could have been saying goodnight to his friends, but this guy was alone. Figuring in the additional factors that it was two-thirty in the morning and he was in an area where there is a multitude of bars all still open even though it was a Tuesday, and it translates to the driver as only one thing:

he's drunk.

Now, some of us realize this and drive off immediately. But I'm not as quick as I used to be and, besides, it's dead slow on Tuesday at 2:30 a.m. and if I don't take this guy it could be - who knows? - half an hour before I get another passenger in my cab. And karma being what it is, that next passenger will probably be a drunk, too. So I stayed put and awaited fate. The question now became, how serious wouldwith this guy? How drunk was he?

The first thing you have to do is put him through a little coherency test. Is he capable of communication? Can he tell you where he wants to go? Obviously if he can't do this the ride never begins. So you don't start driving or turn on the meter until he clears that hurdle. This guy, although he was taking too long to respond, was not so drunk that he couldn't tell me that 7th Street between Avenues C and D was his destination. So I started moving forward.

"Do you want to take the Drive?" I asked. We would either jump on the FDR Drive, a highway, or head down to Alphabet City on 2nd Avenue. The Drive would be faster.

No answer.

"Take the Drive?" I repeated.

I looked at him in the mirror. Oh, shit, he was slumping over. Immediately the possibility of three bad things presented themselves to me mentally:

a) he may vomit;

b) he may be so out of it that he doesn't realize that he has gotten into a cab and has no way of paying for the ride;

c) he may descend into complete unconsciousness and be unable to be awakened.

And now I was stuck with him. He'd given me an address, he'd closed the door behind him, and we were moving. I could think of nothing to do but hope for the best and take him where he'd said to go.

"I'm taking the Drive," I called out, knowing I was speaking to an inanimate object. I made a left on 79th and within a minute we were on the FDR's 73rd Street entrance ramp at the edge of the East River. The tension was mounting up within me. The biggest fear of the three bad things is a) above. Puke spilling out onto the back seat of the cab is a horror of Stephen King proportions to a taxi driver. But there are ways of trying to handle the vomit candidate and the best of them is to keep him talking. Unfortunately that wasn't possible with this guy. All I could do was get him to his place as quickly as possible in order to reduce his window of opportunity. So I picked up my speed and whispered a little prayer to the Patron Saint of Please Don't Throw Up In My Cab.

I took the long way to the Houston Street exit, knowing he wouldn't object, since it was the fastest way to get him there. In less than five minutes we were off the Drive and cruising up Avenue D toward 7th Street. I made the left there and steeled myself for what was to come - how bad would it be?

"So where should I stop?" I kind of yelled toward the general vicinity of the rear compartment.

Not surprisingly, once again there was no response.

I pulled the cab over to the curb, stopped, and turned around in my seat, fearing I would see the guy covered in vomit. But, hooray, there was none - just a human body lying flat on the seat in marinated slumber. My task now was merely to wake him up, a far better situation than having to clean up the former contents of his esophagus.

"Hey, buddy, we're here, wake up!" I announced.

He stirred slightly. There was hope.

I raised the volume. "Buddy, we're here - WAKE UP!"

He opened his eyes. Good man.

"We're on 7th between C and D," I said in a normal voice. "So where is your building?"

Arousing from his dreams, he looked around at his surroundings. I could see from the expression on his face that he understood that he was in a taxicab and that I was a taxi driver. So of the three possibilities listed above, he'd made it past a) and c). All he had to do now was tell me where exactly he lived and pay me the $16.30 on the meter.

"Where's you building?" I repeated.

He looked a me a bit oddly, not as if he didn't understand the words I was saying but as if he didn't understand why I would want to know. There's a certain stage of drunkenness in which the gears are turning but they don't mesh together and result in forward motion, like a car with a transmission problem.

"Your building - where is it?" I asked again, thinking if I rephrased the question I might get an answer.

"Go downa da cawna," he said, still half-asleep. This was progress. I drove down to Avenue C, made a right at the corner, and pulled into an empty space at the curb. Okay, I'd done my job, now it was time to get paid and be on my way. Time is money in my business. Or at least hopefully it is.

"It's $16.30 on the meter," I said flatly.

Silence.

I looked at him again in the mirror and saw that his head was slumped over on his shoulder and his eyes were closed. The motion of the cab on our little half-block journey to C had rocked him back to sleep. He would have looked cute if he'd been a six-year-old boy.

"It's $16.30," I called to the back in a near yell.

He stirred.

"16.30," I repeated, calmly.

He now understood that it was his job to find either $16.30 or a credit card on his person and he began to move his hands around into various pockets in his clothing in order to accomplish this task. I sensed trouble but gave him the benefit of the doubt in my mind as I awaited payment. Like many drunks he probably had the money but didn't remember where he'd put it.

I waited.

A minute went by.

Turning again to the back seat, I saw that he'd suffered a setback in his mission - he was slumped over again with eyes closed. I would have to take control of the situation. God, how I hated this, you have no idea.

"Buddy, wake up."

He stirred.

"C'mon, it's $16.30 on the meter. You gotta pay me so I can get back to work."

"...yeah...okay..."

Once again, his hands began searching. What was good here was that at least he wasn't trying to be evasive. I had no sense that he was going to try to beat the fare. From this we could progress. I still thought it was a better than even chance that I'd be paid.

So I waited.

Thirty seconds went by, but I could here the sounds of his hands patting himself down. Still hopeful.

Sixty seconds.

Nothing. Time's up.

"What's happening?" I asked in a not-friendly way.

"All I got is two dollars."

"How about a credit card? You have a credit card?"

"Uh... no..."

Damn.

"You mean you got in my cab with two dollars in your pocket and no credit card?"

"uh... well..."

And with that he resumed his search of pockets and any other crevices he could get his hands into. I was pissed but not outraged. Again, I appreciated that he wasn't trying to bullshit me. He wasn't trying to tell me to "wait here while I go get the money" and then of course you never see him again. He wasn't trying to pay with just the two dollars. To the contrary, he was earnestly, albeit drunkenly, trying to find the money which was somehow mysteriously eluding him.

Still, I wanted to get paid. So I decided to do something that has proven to be remarkably effective in similar situations in the past. And that is, to get a cop. It is amazing how often a passenger is suddenly able to find his money when a cop shows up.

Now, New York must be the most policed city in the world. In most areas of Manhattan you can't stand in the same spot for more than two minutes before a police car drives by, even at two in the morning. This can be intimidating if you're a driver and you're worried about being pulled over for some stupid infraction. But it's great if you actually need a cop.

Sure enough, after about a minute and a half of watching in my side view mirror with one eye and and keeping my attention on my passenger in the rear view mirror with the other, I spotted a cruiser coming up slowly behind me on Avenue C. I opened my door, stepped out of the cab, and waved at the cops.

They stopped beside me. As always, there were two in the car. The officer sitting on the right rolled down his window. With that blank, neutral gaze that cops have when they're entering a scene, he asked me with only the expression on his face what was up. I told him the situation: passenger, probably drunk - $16.30 on the meter - two dollars - no credit card. In unison, they stepped out of the patrol car, walked slowly to the rear of the cab, and opened the passenger's door.

"Good evening, sir, the driver says you don't have enough money to pay the fare," one of them said, flatly.

My passenger, replying in a new found coherency, indicated that he was trying to find his money, it must be here somewhere. The cop said okay, find it. After another minute of futile hand motions, Mister Sobering Up Quickly admitted to the cop that all he had was two bucks. And no credit card. The officer suggested that perhaps he could call someone who could come over and pay the fare. And added that if he could not produce the required sixteen dollars and thirty cents that he would be placed under arrest for theft of services.

That will get your attention.

Like a surreal reversal of the hit TV show Cash Cab, my passenger had a shout-out with which to call a friend and beg for help. I could almost hear the sounds of quiz show music in the background as he nervously dialed a number and waited for a connection to come through. And then, good news, his friend was on the line. He told him the situation, adding that he was about to get "fucking arrested" for not being able to pay for a taxi ride. But his face turned from hope to despair as he learned that his would-be saviour was nowhere in the vicinity at the moment and could not help him out.

Perhaps he could call someone else, the cop suggested.

He could not, my passenger replied, since he didn't know anyone else who lived anywhere around here.

The jig was up. Like a condemned man about to walk the plank, he told the officer he was out of options and resigned himself to his fate. The cop who had been standing beside the first cop came over to me and started to take my information for his police report. Meanwhile the first cop was informing my passenger in a formal manner that he was about to be placed under arrest. He had him step out of the cab and place his hands behind his back as a prelude to being handcuffed.

It was an awful scene and I was not pleased with it as I did not perceive my passenger to be an evil person. In fact, I had come to kind of like the guy. I saw him as a basically well-intentioned individual who may or may not have a drinking problem. And I admired him for not trying to insult my own or the cops' intelligence.

Being hauled off in cuffs was way too much of a penalty here. But, on the other hand, I still wanted to get paid. I knew that if he was arrested I would eventually get a phone call from the precinct informing me that I could come down and pick up my $16.30. No one was going to sit in jail for very long before somehow coming up with that relatively paltry sum. I mentally searched for a solution to the problem and after a few moments I found it.

It was sitting on his head.

I turned around in my seat and called over to the about-to-be jailbird. With the first cop's permission he leaned back into the rear compartment to hear what I had to say.

"I'll make you a deal," I proposed. "In exchange for the ride, I'll take your Tiger's cap. Give me the hat and we'll call it even."

You have never seen the word "elation" better expressed than by the look that appeared on my passenger's face. He baseball cap was immediately placed into my possession and both his hands reached forward to embrace my own as he thanked me, thanked me, thanked me from the bottom of his heart.

"The offending party and myself have reached an agreement in this matter," I declared in mock seriousness to the officer standing beside me who'd been filling out his report, "and I consider the situation to be resolved." A slight smile appeared on his face, the only expression of emotion that was made by either of them. He closed his book and walked over to where the first cop was standing, who was already sending my passenger on his way.

And so, that was that. My passenger was released from custody, headed back toward Avenue D on 7th Street, and disappeared into the shadows, hatless. I thanked the cops and they, too, quickly vanished. I was left sitting there on the corner of C and 7th for another minute, filling out the details on my trip sheet and reflecting on what had just gone down. The truth is, it would have been enough of an exchange for me to just have been thanked so profusely like that. But now I had a new hat, to boot.

All I could think was one thing.

Go Tigers!

********

That, and one other thing: click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

The Unusual Reasons For Taking A Taxi Hall Of Fame

You know what we need now? Another Hall of Fame. I had a fare recently which brought me to this realization. It's only right that excellence should receive acknowledgement, after all.

Now the great majority of taxi rides are pretty mundane. A to B is what they're all about and the reasons for them are things like getting to train stations, going home from work, arriving at the theater, meeting up at a restaurant, and so on. But every once in a while one of them steps out from the crowd, turns, faces the wannabees, and pirouettes like a duck in Swan Lake. These are the Unusual Reasons For Taking A Taxi. They might include:

1. The quintessential "Follow that taxi!" seen so often in movies.

2. The reverse of that, which is "Lose that taxi!" (or another vehicle) that's following the passenger.

3. Having some kind of sex in the back seat.

4. The No Destination Ride. Just drive.

5. The Shake the Paparazzi Ride, in which the passenger, a celebrity, wants to go just far enough to be out of sight of the frenzied photographers.

6. The "I'd Rather Die in Your Taxi" Ride in which the passenger, who has just had a heart attack, chooses to go to his hotel room rather than to a hospital.

7. The Getaway Ride. Unbeknownst to the driver, the passenger, who has just committed a crime, is using the taxi as his means of escape.

8. The Commandeered Taxi Ride. A cop suddenly jumps in and orders the driver to take him to a crime scene. No, not a doughnut shop! Who said that?

9. The "I Just Want To Be Able To Say I've Seen It" Ride in which a tourist who has only a few hours before he must catch his flight, takes a cab across the Brooklyn Bridge for the sole reason of catching a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.

I've had all these rides over the years. And then a few nights ago, this happened...

Two twenty-something party girls in tight dresses kind of hailed me on 8th Avenue at 26th Street at 4:30 in the morning. I say "kind of" because it was one of those tentative arm raisings that people sometimes do when they think they want a cab but they're not quite sure. I stopped anyway. It's the time of night when I'm looking for that one last ride. The shift ends at five.

They didn't open the back door and get in. Instead they both came over to the window and one of them quite desperately asked me this question:

"Can you take us to a bathroom?"

They had been in a nearby club until closing time, 4 a.m., and then they'd found themselves out on the sidewalk in a little section of Chelsea that had nothing going on at that particular hour in the early morning. Everything was closed, not an all-night diner or even a deli anywhere in sight. And now whatever they'd been drinking was heading for the exit. It had become an emergency. If they'd been guys there would have been no problem. They could have just found a dark corner somewhere and fired away. But ladies do not squat in public places. Absolutely not! Help!

Of course the first thing I had to do was make fun of their situation in a good-natured way. After I got that out of my system, I told them not to worry, they'd come to the right place. Yessir, a veteran cabbie knows where all the bathrooms are. They jumped in and we started cruising uptown on 8th Avenue. Only seven blocks later, at 33rd Street, I pulled over at the north side of Penn Station. Pointing to the entrance, I told them to go down the escalator, walk a few steps to the left, and that's where the Ladies Room is located. I know the station well.

I might as well have told them they'd won a year's supply of Grey Goose. They were ecstatic. The $3.90 fare, which consisted only of the first drop and one click of the meter, had taken merely twenty seconds to complete. I felt a little guilty to be charging that much for such a quick ride and said, "I don't know if I'm ripping you off or rescuing you" to the damsels in distress.

"You're rescuing us!" they squealed in unison, then handed me six dollars and hurried off toward the escalator.

"Aww, shucks, m'am, I'm just doin' my job," I blurted out Jimmy Stewart style, although they were too far away to hear me. I shoved the bills in my shirt and drove off into the sunset, a hero.

Actually, the sunrise.

It was 4:30 in the morning.

********

A perfect time to click here for Pictures From A Taxi, by the way.

Mister Hess

Well, speaking of the Hess Station at 45th and 10th, here's one from the vault. I've written a couple of times about one of the unique aspects of driving a cab in New York City, the phenomenon of finding yourself suddenly mingling with various strata of the human race with whom you otherwise would probably never have had the opportunity to be in contact.
(See "Running The Gamut". And "Running The Gamut, Part 2" .)

That's what happened during the rush hour one evening in December of 1990. I picked up three men in business attire - suits and overcoats - on the west side of Midtown who wanted to go to a restaurant across town, a ten to fifteen minute haul, depending on traffic. Two of them got in the back and the other, a somewhat older gentleman, perhaps in his '70s, sat up front with me. I owned my own cab in those days and it had no partition (I hate them), so it made for a more comfortable fit for the three of them to seat themselves this way. The two in the rear could move around easily and the lack of a Plexiglas obstruction made conversation from front to back no problem for all three of them.

As the ride got under way, they continued a conversation which had already been in progress before entering the cab. I, a professional fly on the wall, took note that what they were talking about was how the situation in Iraq was affecting the price of oil. Clouds of war were in the air in those days. Sadaam had already invaded Kuwait, the international coalition had been formed, and a deadline for withdrawal had been sanctioned by the U.N. In retrospect I wish I'd paid more attention to exactly what they were saying, but at the moment I thought they were just three businessmen discussing what was currently in the news. I tuned them out and put my attention back on the observation of the particles in perpetual motion on the streets and sidewalks of New York City.

After a couple of minutes, however, my contemplation was interrupted by the gentleman to my right.

"Hey, driver," he said, "what kind of gasoline do you put in your cab?"

"Amoco, usually," I replied.

"Do you ever use Hess?"

"Sometimes."

"Do you know that station on 45th and 10th?"

"Sure."

"Are you happy with the service you get over there?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Tell me something - are the bathrooms clean?"

I noticed in the mirror that the two fellows in the back had big grins on their faces and were suppressing laughter. I knew something was up and needed no further prompting to turn the tables on them.

"All right," I said with a smile of my own, "that's it... which one of you guys is Leon Hess?"

The older gentleman sitting beside me reached over and shook my hand. He was, in fact, Leon Hess, the founder and owner of Hess Oil and, no less impressive, the owner of the New York Jets football team. It was understandable that I hadn't recognized him. Unlike some owners of professional sports teams, Leon Hess never gave interviews and was quite low profile when it came to the media. You never saw a picture of him in the papers.

Having had his identity revealed, which was no doubt his intention, the subject turned immediately to the Jets. I admitted to Mr. Hess right away that wasn't much of a football fan, that baseball was my sport, but that didn't deter him. I think I became for him "The Fan", at least for the moment, and he went into a digression about the current situation in Jets World. The team had been particularly horrible that year and although there were still a couple of weeks left in the regular season, they were already out of contention for making the playoffs. Mr. Hess told me with some anguish that he'd just fired the coach.

"I hated to do it," he exclaimed, "he's a good man. But it's my responsibility to do whatever I can to put a winning team on the field."

He told me he'd been at Giants Stadium the previous Sunday to watch the other New York football team, the Giants, play the Dallas Cowboys in below-freezing temperatures. Although the weather was brutal, he said the stadium had been full. He contrasted that with the fact that his own team had only been filling half the seats in the same stadium for the last few home games due to their losing ways.

"It's not the fans' fault," he said, "Jets fans are the best in the world. It's up to me not to let them down."

I wished I'd been more of a football fan so I could have held my own in conversation with him and I kind of apologized for being so much on the periphery of the sport. It was too bad my friend Harry wasn't here, I told him, because Harry was a guy who probably knows as much about the Jets as he did. Harry was a sports fanatic who could tell you the names of every position player on the team for the last ten years.

"Say hello to Harry for me," Mr. Hess said with a smile as he and his friends got out at a swanky-looking restaurant.

He paid me double the meter, something I appreciated more for its acknowledgement implication than its monetary value. And I noticed that he had not fastened his seat belt even though he was sitting up front seat with me. A sign of trust, I thought, that I also appreciated.

I've had many years to reflect on that ride. It left me with a first-hand experience with, as mentioned, a type of person with whom I might otherwise have never come into contact. Here was Leon Hess, a lion of American business, probably a billionaire, giving me fifteen minutes to form an impression of how someone in his station in life might be. And the impression was quite a favorable one.

Was he aloof?

No, to the contrary.

Was he friendly and conversational?

Quite so.

Did he show any of the social class snobbery, the "I'm over here and you're over there" attitude of people who feel cab drivers are beneath them?

Not at all.

Did he, in fact, demonstrate that most admirable of characteristics, caring?

In a big way, not only when he spoke of his football team and its fans, but when he spoke of his oil company and its customers.

You know, there's no data better than first-hand data. When you've seen something with your own eyes, it doesn't much matter what you read in the papers or hear other people say about that with which you've had personal contact. You know. I can't say that because Mr. Hess made a favorable impression on me that all people at the pinnacle of Big Business are nice guys. But because of this ride I also can't fall into the easy assumption that you've got to be a rat to rise to the top.

And that's one of those little nuggets of wisdom one picks up along the way.

********

Along with this, of course: click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Meanwhile, At The Hess Station...

You've never seen a gas station like the Hess Station at 45th Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan. With twenty-four pumps, it is the biggest in New York City. And the very fact that it even exists on the island of Manhattan gives it the distinction of being part of a vanishing breed. Like record stores and men who smoke pipes, gas stations in Manhattan are on the verge of extinction.

Well, perhaps I should qualify that by saying "south of 96th Street in Manhattan". If you're not familiar with the demographics of the city, let me explain. When you think of "New York City" - the business and cultural capital of the world (some say) and the kind of people who make it so - you're thinking of Manhattan below 96th Street. Above that you have the sections known as Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood. These are neighborhoods which could just as well be in any of the other four boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx) of New York City. They have their own characteristics, good and bad, but they don't have the same flair, energy, or pizazz as Manhattan south of 96th Street.

What's been happening over the last dozen years or so is that real estate developers have been offering the owners of gas stations so many millions of dollars for the purchase of their tiny plots of land that they'd be fools to turn them down. Up goes the thirty-five story luxury high rise with a pool and a spa on the twenty-ninth floor and into memory goes the Gaseteria. In fact, south of 96th Street - a place where 13,287 yellow cabs must fill up their tanks twice a day and hundreds of thousands of other cars and trucks clog the streets - I can count only eleven gas stations still in existence. At the same time, I can count eleven others that have disappeared in the last five years. It's quite common for a motorist to pull up next to me at a red light, roll down his window, and beg me to give him the answer to this desperate question: "Hey, buddy, can you tell me where there's a gas station around here???"

So you can imagine the kind of business those few gas stations which are still around are doing, and none are busier than the Hess Station at 45th and 10th. Five o'clock is when the shift changes for most cabs and this station is in an area where there are several taxi garages, including my own, so you've got an invasion of yellow taxis all zeroing in on the Hess Station at around this time. Picture this scene: every pump taken by a cab or an occasional private car, two or three cabs waiting in line behind the cabs that are already at a pump, more cabs waiting behind them out on the street, a few cars trying to circle the station in order to find a hoped-for empty spot, drivers waiting on line to pay for their gas or to get their change, night shift drivers walking around looking for their cabs, horns honking, people yelling, tempers flaring.

Chaos.

It's so bad that they actually have speed bumps surrounding the station - when have you ever seen a gas station with speed bumps? - and they need a couple of employees out there directing traffic to try to keep order.

"Yo, you're behind 7N86!"

"What??"

"Get behind 7N86!"

"That motherfucker cut in front of me!"

"I don't care, you're behind him now!"

"Hey, fuck you, man!"

"I don't wanna hear your shit, man, just get behind him!"

And on like that. I am quite used to it, of course, and barely pay attention to the craziness surrounding me as I walk around the place looking for the the cab I myself will be taking out on the streets for the next twelve hours. A couple of weeks ago, however, as I was performing this daily ritual, something odd suddenly caught my eye: a pair of legs sticking out from under the opened front door of an unmoving taxi.



I walked around to see what was going on and found a cab driver lying flat on the pavement, face up, eyes open, and not in any apparent pain. He was just lying there. And what was equally strange was that no one was attending to him. You'd think that when someone is lying flat on his back in the middle of a gas station with cars in motion all around him somebody would be trying to assist him. But, no.



I walked over to another cab driver who looked like he knew what was going on.

"What's with this guy?" I asked.

"He's full of shit," he replied.

"Why, what happened?"

"Trying to say the guy hit him. But he just fell down on his own. I saw it."

"Which guy?"

"Him."

I looked over to the person he was indicating, an employee of the Hess Station who was in an animated conversation with another employee who I knew from prior acquaintance to be the supervisor of the place. He seemed to be explaining to her what had happened and she seemed to be believing what he was saying as she, too, wasn't showing any signs of believing that the guy might actually be injured and in need of assistance. Looking back at the guy lying there, I noticed that he was now talking to someone on his cell phone.



The whole thing was comical. I mean, here was this super-busy gas station with cars moving all around all over the place and there's this guy lying flat on his back in the middle of the whole thing talking on his cell phone! And no one is paying any attention to him. It was like one of those What's Wrong With This Picture? things. A farce.

Seeing it as a fraud-in-progress, I, too, felt no impulse to do anything to help the guy and went off looking for my own taxi d'noir, 2K53, with a smile on my face. A couple of minutes later, not finding my cab, I checked back in on the scene. By this time the cops had arrived and, being cops, were all serious and trying to understand what was going on. A female officer was trying to get the cab driver to his feet.



However, he was apparently a helpless slab of meat who couldn't move his legs and she couldn't hold up the weight of his body, so she lowered him back down to the pavement. Another cop was shouting out to no one in particular, "Did anyone see what happened?" Nobody came forward. "No one saw anything," the cop barked out, again at no one in particular, with a touch of disgust in his voice.



I came forward. "A cab driver told me he saw what happened," I offered. "He said the guy was faking it. I don't see him around, though."

"That's hearsay!" the cop growled at me. Then he turned his back and walked away.

Well, excuse me. He was right, of course, but what about that "courtesy" thing? I shrugged it off and resumed my search for 2K53 and, just as the ambulance, lights ablaze and siren blaring, was arriving, I spotted it coming down 44th Street. The day driver told me that, fortunately, he'd already filled the tank at another gas station, so all I had to do was get in and drive away, which I did. This was lucky because, with all this madness at the Hess Station, it was going to take half an hour to get in and out of the place. I drove 2K53 up to 46th and 10th, did ten minutes of clean-up, and set off for my night's adventures.



The next day I was back at the Hess Station at shift change time and was curious, of course, to know what had happened, especially if the cops had arrested the station's employee. So when I spotted him standing around I asked him exactly how the whole thing had gone down. He told me his version of the story, which I found completely believable.

He had yelled at the cab driver, he said, to move his cab behind some other vehicle in the station. The cabbie, probably tired and irritable after a long day in New York City traffic, took offense to the way he was being spoken to and stepped out of his cab to scream back at him. He then "got in the face" of the Hess Station guy and, in retaliation to the cabbie's too-closeness, the Hess Station guy lightly pushed him back. In response to his being lightly touched on the chest, the cabbie collapsed in a heap on the pavement, thus setting off the much ado.

"So were you arrested?" I asked.

He had not been. The paramedics could find nothing wrong with the driver, he said, so the cops saw no reason to make an arrest. And that was it. The driver miraculously regained his ability to walk and drive a cab and he drove away. The EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) drove away in their ambulance. And the cops drove away in their cruisers.

Someday I'm going to write a screenplay.

It will be a comedy.

It's going to be called Welcome To New York City.

And this will be the first scene in the movie.

********

Then again, maybe I'll just call it Click Here For Pictures From A Taxi.

Islands In The Stream

There are three things that can happen between drivers and passengers during the course of a ride in a taxicab:

1) Nothing. The passenger looks out the window, talks on the cell phone, or (rarely) watches the canned programming on the cab's TV monitor. The driver drives.

2) The driver becomes a fly on the wall and either voluntarily or involuntarily eavesdrops on the voices coming toward him from the back seat, whether it be from multiple passengers talking to each other or from a single passenger on the phone.

3) A conversation takes place.

In a huge metropolis like New York, where the flow of particles is so continuous, it's quite natural to think of the motion of the city as having a similarity to the current of a river. The river runs, ever onward, and the taxi driver is a ferryman of sorts, his cab a temporary haven on an endless journey to who knows where. People who may or may not ever meet again engage in conversation, as if to acknowledge that it's better to float down the river in the company of others than to brave the waters by oneself. If a taxi driver has an affinity for this unique situation he is in, it's this third possibility, the things that can happen through communication, that can make the job so interesting.

Some of these conversations, like particularly intriguing islands in the stream, may startle, disturb, reassure, delight, or educate the intrepid explorer. I had three in the course of a single shift a few weeks ago.

5:45 pm, Penn Station to North Moore in Tribeca
It was the "survival of the fittest" time of the evening when the quickest and most alert are most likely to get the next available taxi. As I was assisting an elderly gentleman out of my cab at the Long Island Railroad entrance to Penn Station, an attractive young miss appeared on the cab's opposite side and waited with her hand on the door (as if to say, "It's mine!") until the old fellow's delicate extraction was completed. Getting in with a smile, she told me her destination and we pulled into the heavy traffic on 7th Avenue.

Now, there are certain nuances that tell a driver that the newly arrived passenger is a candidate for a conversation. There's the smile, the return of the driver's "hello", along with, perhaps, an "how are you?"; there's the friendly tone of the voice; there's the position of the seating - the passenger doesn't slump out of sight behind the partition but, rather, sits right in the middle of the seat, perhaps even leans forward a bit; and often there's eye contact in the mirror. The attractive young miss had all of these, helped, I felt, by some admiration on her part at seeing a taxi driver performing an act of kindness for the fragile passenger who had preceded her.

Aware of all this, I started in with some common chit-chat - the traffic, the weather, the difficulty of getting a cab at this time of day in Midtown - and this rather magical process we humans are capable of went into gear. Back and forth, back and forth, and then - wham! - suddenly the person on the other end of the conversation is telling you something that's no longer in the realm of the chit-chat mundane - something personal, a bit surprising, perhaps. Kind of out of nowhere, she tells me she's a boxer. A boxer! This friendly, rather petite-ish, altogether feminine-looking female gets in a ring and tries to punch the beejeebabs out of other women. Not professionally, but at the next level down, in organized matches in gyms. Career-wise, she's in the related field of sports rehabilitation. One of her clients, she said, is the famous boxer Pacquiao.

It's always kind of fascinating when the way a person is does not match one's own stereotype of what a person does and I will admit that I find the sight of women going at each other quite entertaining (what the world needs is more mud wrestling). So this particular conversation was really holding my interest. And then it did something that communication can do when people listen carefully to each other, acknowledge what is said, and create a space that is comfortable and safe: it led to a further, more insightful revelation about the other person, something that opens a window into their inner world.

What was revealed was a situation that was eating away at her, something that was consuming her attention the whole day long, a problem that would not resolve. She told me what it was and, to her credit, it wasn't actually her own problem. It was a tangled mess that was endangering the future - perhaps even the life - of someone who was dear to her, her brother.

Growing up in an environment where one's fists are at least as valuable as one's social graces, he, like his sister, had also become a boxer and a couple of months earlier, at the age of twenty, had turned professional. Shortly after that he had a "bad break-up" with his girlfriend who, to get revenge, did something quite evil - she enlisted the services of some thug she knew to beat the crap out of him. How do you beat the crap out of a professional boxer? You get a dozen of your thug friends to help you. In a modern version of tracking somebody down, the jilted girlfriend gave the thug his Twitter address. He and his gang read his tweet messages to locate him when he was alone, shooting hoops in a schoolyard. Then they ambushed him and battered him so badly that he had broken teeth, broken ribs, a concussion, and needed thirty stitches to close the wounds to his face and head.

"Did he go to the police?" I asked.

"No, he's got some goddamned Sicilian code of silence," she lamented.

Now I understood why she felt a need to talk about this thing. It wasn't over and it wasn't likely to end well, either. Her brother is thick-headed and would handle it "in his own way", which would mean more violence. After that there would be further retaliation and he might be killed or spend the next twenty years of his life in jail. She had the wisdom to understand this, but she had no solution. So she was living each day with a helpless feeling of dread. It was like trying to hold onto someone who was dangling off the ledge of a mountain.

If I'd thought of it at the time, I would have advised her to find someone to intervene in the conflict, someone whom all parties involved knew and respected, if such a person exists. Or I would have advised her to bring her brother and the ex-girlfriend together in some kind of counseling session to confess what they'd done to each other and to apologize for their actions. That might have handled it. But, as is often the case when someone says something startling, you don't think of the right thing to say until later. In my business people enter and exit rather quickly and I'm often left in the middle of the story.

And that is one of the downsides of the taxicab conversation.

1:45 a.m., 47th and 6th to Astoria, Queens
He was a gaunt, middle-aged man - long, black overcoat, no hat - who hailed me with his right hand while taking one final drag on a cigarette with his left. Before even entering the taxi, he gave me the impression that he was a "serious" smoker. He was probably coming from a job where he couldn't smoke and since you're not allowed to smoke in a cab anymore in this NO SMOKING city, the time between the workplace and the taxi becomes the time to have that thing you've been craving for all night. My impression was confirmed when, just a minute into the ride, he asked me if he could light up a new one.

Now, this is a situation I actually enjoy. The taxi driver in New York City is usually taken somewhat for granted and is not accorded the kind of respect that certain professionals enjoy. I mean, you'd never say to a pilot as you entered his aircraft, "I'm late, step on it," right? But a passenger who would ask his driver to break the the rules so he can stick that little white cylinder in his mouth is on the other end of the respect spectrum. This guy is an addict, someone who is living in the moment, and to him the taxi driver is the Gatekeeper Of Bliss, The Man With The Plan. Hey, how ya doin', dude? I mean, sir.

If, after observing how the person seems to be, I think he or she has a sense of humor, I have been known to say something like this:

"Well, I'll consider it, but only under two circumstances."

"Sure, no problem."

"I haven't told you what the circumstances are yet."

"Oh, okay."

"First, you've got to keep the cigarette inside the cab. Don't hold it out the window." (This is because the danger here is that the driver can be fined if a cop happens to see the passenger smoking in the back seat. I've never heard of this ticket actually being written but, who knows, it might be "Give Tickets To Cabbies Who Allow Passengers To Smoke Week" at the Police Department.)

"Oh, yeah, man, no problem, no problem."

"Good. And the second thing is... you've got to beg me."

"Beg you?"

"Yeah. You see, this is the only time I can ever get anyone to beg me for anything. It's good for my self-esteem. So if you wanna smoke, you gotta beg."

Now, as I said, I wouldn't say this to someone if they seemed too solid mentally. You've got to size them up before saying it. But so far I haven't missed and they jump right into it with a smile.

"Oh, please, please, Mister Taxi Driver, can I smoke a cigarette? Please? Pretty please?"

"Yes, you may."

And it's off to Puffland.

Looking at my current passenger in the mirror, I decided right away, nope, no begging joke with this guy, he looks like he hasn't laughed in two years. So I just told him about the no-holding-the-cigarette-out-the-window rule and not to light up until we got onto the 59th Street Bridge, about a minute away. He thanked me.

Well, although he may or may not have appreciated my sense of humor, there was something in the way he was that made me curious about him. I wasn't sure what it was. He just seemed to be someone it might be interesting to talk to. So I decided to delve, as is my tendency.

"You must be a serious smoker," I said, as we were approaching the bridge. Being that smoking was the subject at hand, it seemed like an easy way to get a conversation going.

"Why?"

"Well, I've noticed that when people ask me if they can smoke in the cab, it's because they want a cigarette really, really badly."

"I just wanted to finish the one I started."

"Yeah, you see, that's what I mean. You're a heavy smoker?"

"Just three or four a day."

"Packs?"

"Cigarettes."

This surprised me. I would have bet he went through a pack a day, at least.

"Since I quit."

Ah, so there it was. I was right. The thing about him that I was trying to put my finger on, I realized, was that it was impinging on me subconsciously that heavy smokers have a certain kind of demeanor. Something about the way they look, their body language, their voice, that has cigarette smoking as a component part of it. That's what was making me curious about him.

"Oh, so you had been a heavy smoker?"

"Yes," he replied, rather half-vacantly. Sometimes when people say something you have the feeling they're only half-speaking to you, the other half being diverted to another, invisible, entity.

"What did you do, a pack a day?"

"Two or three."

Heavy smoker, indeed. "Wow... well, and now you're down to just a few cigarettes a day?"

"Yes," he said flatly. There was no sign of pride in his voice at making progress toward an objective. You would have expected a bit of positive emotion here, but this guy was flat as a board.

"Good for you."

"Since the cancer," he said, the focus of his eyes extending no further than the partition which separates driver from passenger.

I had stepped on a landmine and I knew it. What the hell do you say to a stranger who's just told you he has cancer? I didn't know what to do. I could say nothing, pretend that I hadn't heard it. But I thought that would be cold-hearted, even cruel. I could acknowledge it - just say, "I'm sorry" - and leave it at that. But quite possibly he'd said it because he just felt a need to talk about it with another human being, another island in the stream. God knows the despair and loneliness this man might be enduring, and although listening to him might not be able to do anything to cure his disease, it might help him change the way he dealt with it. And that could be a very good thing. I waited until we reached the Queens side of the bridge (so we might better be able to hear each other - bridges and tunnels are tough on the acoustics inside a taxicab), and then attempted to resume the conversation.

"What kind of cancer do you have?" I asked.

There was silence. Not just any silence, a dreadful silence. Had I gone too far? Had I trivialized the seriousness of his situation by reducing it to taxicab chit-chat? Or had he just blurted it out and then regretted having said it? I looked at him in the mirror. He had that same solidity, what appeared to me now as a half-dead look, and gave no sign of having heard my question.

I didn't know what to do. Should I ask him again? Probably not, I thought. I mean, what could be more of an imposition on someone than to pry into his perhaps-terminal illness? But he'd brought it up. Wasn't it possible that he simply didn't hear me? What was I going to do, ignore him? I gritted my teeth and raised the volume of my question a quarter of a notch.

"What kind of cancer do you have?" I repeated.

I watched him in the mirror, almost praying that he'd say something. But he was gone. He sat there silently, his gaze fixated on the parade of darkened buildings passing by on Northern Boulevard. Not only had my attempt at conversation been a failure, my attempt at offering him some comfort had nose-dived into an abyss. The remaining two minutes of the ride, not surprisingly, made my Top Ten List of Most Awkward Silences of All Time.

He paid with a credit card, giving me a $1.90 tip on a $13.10 fare. Other than my "thank you", no other words between us were exchanged, and he disappeared into a shadow on Steinway Street.

He never did light that cigarette.

A fare like that can haunt you, and some cabbies may conclude that it's better not to attempt to communicate with their passengers at all. I have always resisted this. That's not to say that you have to communicate with everyone. You've got to respect a person's right not to communicate, too. It's just that the interplay with passengers is the essence of this job and to let the occasional disaster shut you down is to lose a lot. So I soldiered on.

3:45 a.m., 79th and Columbus to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn
Now here was a ride that from a driver's point of view was just about perfect. For one thing, it was the final hour of the shift and what you want at this point in the night is a good, long, money ride with just enough time to make it back to the garage by 5 a.m., the shift end. And this ride was that. And for another thing, the passenger, an upbeat, intelligent, well-mannered thirty-something fellow, was as easy to talk to as you as your favorite drinking buddy, if you have such a thing.

Now, this wasn't a drama ride or a pathos ride like the ones I've been telling you about. This was simply an educational ride, quite common in a taxicab, by which you learn something about life or the world that you didn't know before. Drive a cab for a few years and these conversations accumulate into an impressive reference file, making a cabbie a walking encyclopedia with an opinion about everything.

I don't know how we got into it, but he started telling me about his wife and her job. He described her as an Armenian by birth ("How did you meet her?" "In a bar."), lovely to look at, highly organized, a go-getter, and she was now working for what he described as a "Russian oligarch".

"And what is a 'Russian oligarch'?"

He told me about what's been going on in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Industries which had been owned and controlled by the state became privatized. This opened the door for big-time entrepreneurship and the accumulation of great wealth and power by a relatively few aggressive individuals in a short period of time. It was kind of like the "robber barons" in the United States a hundred and fifty years ago. And that's what a Russian oligarch is.

My passenger's wife worked for one of these people. He'd made a fortune as an arms dealer and then legitimized his business by moving into the metal refining industry in a big way. Due to his nefarious background, he can't enter the United States because the State Department won't issue him a visa. But that doesn't stop him from doing business all over the world. His wealth is so great that he owns a private yacht, complete with a crew of five, that he has never set foot on. It's used to entertain clients.

The wife's job is to manage the finances of the yacht. She does this primarily from their apartment in Brooklyn, but she does have to travel occasionally to Europe, where the yacht is located, to personally oversee matters. And that's where she was on this particular night, somewhere in France.

As I said, there was no drama or pathos here. It was just a typical example of a taxi ride that includes a conversation between driver and passenger. As I entered the Belt Parkway and headed back to Manhattan with my off-duty light illuminated above me, I had gained not only an $11.50 tip on a $43.50 fare, but a bit more understanding of the world in which we live. Who would ever imagine that, walking down a street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, you could walk by an apartment building and behind one of the windows of that building would be a woman sitting behind a computer who was managing a yacht anchored off the coast of France which was owned by a modern-day Jay Gatsby with a Russian accent?

As is usually the case, the stopover at an island in the stream had left me better off for having been there, and happy to have made the visitation.

********

Looking for a nice little island in the stream of your own? Click here. Plenty of 'em at Pictures From A Taxi.