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! 

So that's the big news.

I thank you again for being there.

:)

Running The Gamut, Number Two

I wrote in a previous post (Running The Gamut) that one of the spectacular things about driving a cab in New York City is that on any given night it is possible to encounter passengers from the very top of the social spectrum all the way down to the very bottom. People - who can be so different from one another that they might as well be from other planets - make their entrances and exits in what could be described as a microcosmic parade of the human condition. It's vaudeville on wheels, and it can be quite a show.

Not long ago I had one of those nights that tap danced on the treetops and then slopped around in a puddle of mud. It dined at le Cirque, only to stretch its arm into a garbage can to scoop out a half-eaten slice of Ray's pizza. It was a warm bed in the Waldorf, then a cardboard box on the steps of the 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church.

You get the idea.

Let's start at the top.

On the evening of May 4th, a Tuesday, I found out that Time Magazine puts out an issue every year in which they announce the "100 Most Influential People In The World".

They divide their 100 into four categories:

1) Leaders

2) Artists

3) Thinkers

4) Heroes.

An essay is written about each person by another prominent person to make it even more interesting. The article about Bill Clinton, for example, was written by Bono. The one about Prince was written by Usher. The one about Oprah Winfrey was written by Phil Donohue.

I'm not particularly a reader of Time Magazine, so the reason I found out about this issue at all was a unique one. It turns out they have a big event to go along with the annual publication which is held, appropriately enough, in the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle. It's a red carpet affair, of course, and guess where the red carpet ends? In a taxi stand right in the middle of the circle, that's where.

So when I was brought into the area by a passenger at 11:40 p.m., I noticed there was something going on and quickly secured a position on the taxi cue. Paparazzi were milling about, always a good sign, and a contingent of onlookers held their ground on both sides of velvet ropes that extended all the way from the curb to the entrance of the building, a distance of about thirty yards. What or whom these people were waiting to see I did not yet know, but my interest in the event itself was secondary. What interested me most was the extra business I could get at a time of the night when passengers start to become less plentiful. This was going to be money found, kind of like discovering a five-dollar bill smiling up at you from the sidewalk.

The taxi line moved quickly. Within five minutes I welcomed my next fare aboard - two gentlemen wearing tuxedos, one of whom sat up front with me, and two ladies all decked out in evening gowns. Obviously they were coming from this event, whatever it was, and, just as obviously, they were in great spirits. As we began driving toward their first destination, 40th and 9th, my curiosity kicked in and I slipped in some questions during slight pauses in their own conversations. It went something like this...

"So, what's going on at the Time Warner Building?" I asked the man sitting next to me.
He told me about Time's 100 Most Influential thing. I was impressed.

"Wow! There must have been a lot of celebrities, huh? I saw the paparazzi outside the building."

"Oh, lots of them," he replied.

"Any big names?"

"Elton John."

"Wow!"

"Sarah Palin."

"Wow!"

"Bill Clinton."

"Wow, Bill Clinton's in there? How's he looking?"

"He looks good! And he gave a great speech."

"You know, say what you will about Bill Clinton's politics or his personal life, but no one can deny he's one of the great orators of our time."

"He is, it's true."

"So what was your end of the deal?"

"Well, the gentleman in the back, and myself, were two of the people being honored."

"You mean, you are two of the most influential people in the world?"

"Well, I don't know about that, but that's what Time Magazine seems to think."

I was stunned. I would have thought that anyone who could be given such an honor would either be so famous that they'd be instantly recognizable or would be driven around in a luxurious private car with their own chauffeur. The four people in my taxi, I had assumed, were probably involved with the production of the event in some way, or perhaps had been invited guests.
My next question was the obvious one:

"So... who are you?"

The gentleman on my right introduced himself as Dr. Douglas Schwartzentruber and the gentleman in the back seat, he told me, was Chetan Bhagat. The ladies were their wives. The reason Time Magazine chose them was because Dr. Schwartzentruber is a pioneer in developing a vaccine that can treat certain types of cancers and Chetan Bhagat is India's most popular author.

As a taxi driver in New York City I'm sure I often have passengers in my cab who are truly Very Important People within their own spheres of influence, but it is rare that I actually get to know who they are. And it is never that I get them at a time when they've just been bestowed with an acknowledgment on so grand a scale. So I was aware of how special this moment was not only for them, but for me as well.

We drove down 9th Avenue in a taxi full of happy chatter. The afterglow of their evening was filling the cab with an energy that was rubbing off on me. It was that floating feeling you get sometimes during a perfect ride.

The organizers of the event had given the attendees souvenirs of several copies each of that issue of Time Magazine. Dr. Schwartzentruber gave me one to keep. After thanking him for this gift, I asked him and Mr. Bhagat to sign it for me. In all my 32 years of taxi-driving, and after having had well over a hundred celebrities in my cab, it was only the second time I had ever requested an autograph. The other time had been back in the '90s when I had Tori Spelling, then starring in the hit TV show Beverly Hills 90210, in the back seat, and the only reason I'd asked her was to impress Suzy, my teen aged daughter (who failed to be impressed - of course).




What's funny here is that Dr. Schwartzentruber, in order to help me find him in the magazine, wrote "heroes" after his name, but after looking him up I discovered that they had actually put him in the category of "thinkers". Not that it matters, of course - no doubt he's a hero as well. Chetan Bhagat's signature came out kind of illegibly (maybe he should be a doctor!), so he kindly printed his name under it, again so I'd be able to find him in the magazine.

As we arrived at 40th and 9th, the location of the Bhagats' hotel, it was interesting to overhear their conversation as they parted ways. Mr. Bhagat handed his card to the Schwartzentrubers and invited them to stay at his home in Mumbai if they were ever in that part of the world. And then he said this:

"I don't belong on the same stage with you."

I repeat this not in any way to diminish the work of Mr. Bhagat. In fact, as a writer myself, I find having someone of his stature in my cab to be a bit intimidating. I repeat this because I think he was correctly sizing up the magnitudes of importance here. Writers - whether they be writers of novels, screenplays, stage plays, or songs - are very important, indeed. We all know this. But the man sitting on my right - well, let's put it this way...

What if you, or someone you care for very much, had been diagnosed with a cancer and you were confronting the prospect of undergoing chemo and radiation therapies? But now, because of this man, that cancer could be treated, and very possibly defeated, with a vaccine. How would you regard the man who had spared you from this ordeal and perhaps had saved your life? It would be how the human race regarded the man who defeated polio in the '50s, Dr. Jonas Salk.

Kind of like God.

So as we proceeded toward the Schwartzentruber's hotel on 6th and 39th, a three-minute ride, I would have to admit to feeling honored and even humbled just to be in his presence. They say we are all born equal, and that is true in a legal sense, but we surely don't wind up being equal in terms of our worth to other people. Some of us are giants. This man had a value to the world that was beyond measurement. The thought occurred to me, as mundane as it was, that I should drive extra carefully with this precious cargo in my taxi. What if a mistake on my part caused him to be injured or killed? There could be no amount of taxi insurance that could ever cover the loss.

So we drove across 38th Street at about half my normal speed. I crossed the intersections of 8th and 7th Avenues only after being absolutely certain that no vehicle was about to run a red light and crash into us. And when we arrived at their hotel I scrutinized the oncoming traffic in my rear view mirror to make sure Dr. Schwartzentruber was not struck by an approaching car as he opened his door. He was damn well not going to die on my watch!

Along the way I tried to ask him some semi-intelligent questions about his work and he answered in layman's terms. I noted that he had no condescension in his manner and gave me no feeling of being "lesser than". And that's the way it always is with the great ones, isn't it?

After dropping off the Schwartzentrubers, my night went on. I went back to the Time Warner Building and picked up another fare. This time my passengers, a young man and a young woman, indeed were a part of the team that produced the event. After some pleasant chit-chat and a drop-off in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan, business slowed down considerably, as it normally does on a Tuesday night after the witching hour. I took my post-midnight, fifteen-minute break and resumed cruising the streets of the city in search of business.

One of the great misconceptions about taxi-driving in New York is that many people assume we are always busy. Nothing could be further from the truth. After midnight on a weekday it is brutally competitive amongst cabbies trying to gain better position on the avenues so they will be the first to get to any passenger who may be somewhere down the road looking for a taxi. It's like a horse race, really.

In the next two and a half hours, I got only four rides and was feeling the stress that comes from working hard and having little to show for it. As it turned out, it was time for the bottom to show up.

Bottom appeared in the form of a potential passenger, a thirty-something male, hailing me on Amsterdam Avenue between 74th and 75th. I could tell from the way he was waving that this guy was in an undefined state of inebriation and stopping for him at all was not necessarily a good idea. When I say "undefined" I mean I knew he was drunk but I wasn't sure how drunk. Most stoned people are still viable passengers. This fellow was iffy. Nevertheless, I was desperate, so...
I pulled over and stopped.

As he approached the cab, he did the semi-coherent shuffle - one foot forward, one foot to the left, one foot forward, one foot to the right - but still he was able to get into the back seat without too much trouble. It looked like he might be okay, but that turned out to be wishful thinking.

"Hi, there," said I.

"How-you," he replied after a few vacant seconds.

"So where are you heading?"

"Yeah."

"Where you wanna go?"

A long pause, and then: "No wan go dere no go wan go."

I knew it was hopeless but for two minutes I kept trying to get a destination out of him, anyway. Finally I accepted defeat and left him standing in the same place where he'd been before he hailed me. I drove up Amsterdam, made a right on 81st, another right on Columbus, and headed downtown to a part of town where I'd be more likely to find a passenger at 3 a.m.

The thought later occurred to me that within three hours I'd had two passengers in my cab whose influence spans the globe and affects millions of people and then, sitting in the same seat, I'd had someone whose sphere of influence was so microscopic that he couldn't get his own memory banks to tell him where he lived.

I'd run the gamut.

********

And you can have gamuts galore by clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi. What a deal!

"Make The Light"

Among the many annoyances in the game of taxi driving is the rare passenger who has the nerve to tell you how to drive. Not where to drive or what route to take, and not even how not to drive ("please don't drive so fast, I'm feeling nauseous"), but how to drive.

Examples:

"Change lanes."

"Get ahead of that bus."

"Go!"

And my favorite: "Make the light!"

Let us consider for a moment the implications involved in making such a statement. It is as if to say:

"Not only do I not regard you as a professional who knows how to do his job, I think I'm better at it than you are, so do what I tell you."

Or, to put it more bluntly:

"You're an idiot. I'm smart. Obey me."

A couple of years ago I was going down 11th Avenue with a passenger in that back seat when we hit a bit of heavy traffic and he abruptly commanded, "Get in the left lane!" Never letting a comment like that go by, I made eye contact with him in the mirror and said, Robert de Niro-style, "Are you talking to me?" And then, not waiting for a reply, "You must be talking to someone else, because no one talks to me like that!" He immediately changed his attitude and we had a relatively pleasant ride across 23rd Street to his destination at 6th Avenue.

It's a good feeling when little mutinies like that are squelched and you can regain the captaincy of your ship. Your dignity is restored and life seems to be worth living again. Which leads me to the latest incident on this chain...

I was cruising on West 63rd Street a little after 6 p.m. a few weeks ago when I was hailed by a doorman on the block between Central Park West and Broadway. He opened the door and in came a 60ish woman in a rush to get to 65th and Amsterdam, a short ride. About fifty yards in front of us was a green traffic light and she barked out those words:

"Make the light!"

I bristled internally and continued driving at my normal speed. Now, there seems to be a Force that decrees that whenever a passenger says, "Make the light!" the light you've been ordered to make will turn yellow just as you're approaching the intersection and you will have a moment of truth to decide whether to speed up and maybe go through a red, or to play it safe and hit the brake.

Right on cue, the Force did its thing and the light turned yellow.

I had my moment of truth, and...

I hit the brake.

My passenger was very displeased. She grunted an "ugh" and barked, "You could have made it," with a scowl on her face that was so pronounced that it was clear that from her point of view stopping for the red light wasn't merely an error, it was a crime.

So the scene was set for conflict. My professionalism had been assaulted, and there would be a response. But rather than turning around and giving her a lecture about safe driving, fines, and suspended licenses, I tried to reason with her. First, I pointed out the layout of the intersection in front of us.

Broadway, as its name implies, is a wide road with an median of greenery separating two directions of traffic, so the width of the intersection has to be considered before crossing it at a yellow light. Following Broadway, a mere fifty more yards away, is the next intersection, 63rd and Columbus Avenue. Having driven through these intersections perhaps a hundred thousand times in the last 32 years, I am quite familiar with the timing of the lights there and I knew that even if we'd made the yellow light at Broadway at the last second, we certainly would not have made the next light at Columbus. However, when the light turns from red to green at Broadway and you drive straight ahead, you will always get a green at Columbus, too. So there was no reason to speed up to "make the light" at Broadway in the first place.

My passenger's response to this perfectly rational and accurate dissertation was to snap back, "We won't make the light at Columbus". It was a direct contradiction to what I'd just said.

"Yes, we will," I replied.

"No, we won't," she returned, as if we were having a verbal tennis match.

The thought occurred to me that here was a situation where I could win a bet. I could say, "Oh, really, if you're so sure of that let's make it double the meter or nothing." I could add a few extra doubloons to my coffers with this ride and, better than that, I could humble this old crab and put her in her place. But I decided not to stoop to that level. It would be like taking candy from a baby. Better than that, I thought, would be to offer her a deal in which she couldn't lose, except if losing meant that she'd have to shut up and eat crow.

I said these words:

"Tell you what, if we don't make the light on Columbus, this is a free ride."

The success of my strategy was immediate. She did shut up, her demeanor changing instantly into an interested facial expression that said, "Well... okay...". The eating crow part would come in just a bit.

In a few more moments, our light at 63rd and Broadway turned green. The light ahead of us at Columbus, the light I had to make, was already green, as I knew it would be. With just fifty yards between these two lights, it was impossible not to make that Columbus light.

My foot pressed down on the accelerator.

You know, there's a military truism that in combat operations, nothing ever goes according to plan. Apparently the same thing is true in taxi driving. For just as I drove through the Broadway intersection, not one, not two, but three cabs suddenly appeared in front of me and stopped to discharge passengers at the Empire Hotel, the only building on the tiny block. These taxis didn't pull over to the side. No, they just stopped in the middle of the street, making it impossible to get around them.

Precious seconds ticked by. A couple of beeps from my puny horn did nothing to move them. The light at Columbus turned yellow. The light at Columbus turned red. And I found myself in the midst of my latest humiliation, a knife in one hand, a fork in the other, and a crow on a platter in front of me.

I tried taking it like a good sport, laughing out loud, and not trying to wiggle out of the noose I'd created for myself by using the cabs blocking the street as an excuse. "Well," I said, "a deal's a deal. This is a free ride."

Of course, what I was hoping she would say was what any fair-minded person would say - that it was all right, that she wouldn't hold me to my offer. But instead, what she said was, "Well, I'll give you a good tip." In other words, "Thanks for the free ride, sucker."

My only solace was that my misery would be brief. 63rd Street runs into Lincoln Center at Columbus, so we had to make a left turn, go down to 62nd Street, make a right, and then drive over to the next avenue, Amsterdam, make another right, and finally go just three blocks to her destination, the Lincoln Center Library, at 65th Street. As it turned out, the reason she was in a rush was because she works in the library and was running late for the evening shift.

In the few remaining minutes of our ride, which seemed like an hour to me, she did an attitude reversal. No longer was she an ill-mannered cow in a china shop, stomping over anything in her way because she was late for work. Her getting something for free had trumped her bitch card, and she became a chatty human being sitting in the back seat. But I even found her attempt to be sociable offensive when she asked me this famous, left-handed question:

"So what else do you do besides drive a cab?"

I am asked this occasionally, and when it happens I usually look at it as a cast-not-your-pearls-before-swine situation. The person who asks it is telling you that the job you are doing is considered by him to be beneath his standard of what a respectable job should be - would he ask a teacher what else does he do besides teach? - and what I normally say is, "This is it, I drive a cab." And then give him a little speech about the good things of taxi driving - freedom, adventure, the whole human race sitting in your back seat, no boss, no four walls, no office politics, no deadlines, no bringing your work home with you. I leave out the parts about twelve hour shifts, no health care, no pension - things like that.

But to this passenger, probably because I was hoping she would realize it would be mean-spirited to hold a working man to his promise of a free ride, I tossed a pearl.

"Well," I said, "I'm a writer."

"What do you write?"

Holding back a temptation to say "words", I told her I had a blog.

"You must have lots of stories."

"Yes, driving a cab and stories are a good fit," I agreed.

"So much material," she added.

"That's the thing - the material just comes right to you," said I, mentally noting the irony of someone who could be "material" herself commenting about the abundance of material.

Amazingly, against all odds it seemed that we were developing some rapport between us and, as I pulled in front of the Lincoln Center Library, it started to feel like this ride might actually have a pleasant ending. I had left the meter running and the total was $6.00, including the $1.00 evening rush hour surcharge and the 50 cent New York State tax. So here was a second moment of truth - would she redeem herself by handing me the full fare, telling me thanks, but no thanks, for the free ride offer? I had already decided I would say that I appreciated that and then, like Harry Chapin in his Taxi song, stuff the bills in my shirt and we'd both be on our way.

But instead she handed me $2.00, opened her door, said, "Have a nice night," and walked away. I watched her enter the library and shot an imaginary arrow through her head. Then, realizing I had an extra arrow in my quiver, I took it out and shot myself, too.

For having offered, and given, a free ride to someone who was not one of the nice people of this world.

********

Target practice? Don't shoot a mean person. Send an arrow over here instead for Pictures From A Taxi.

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.

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.

Just Another Saturday Night

It's hard to drive a cab in New York on a Saturday night without seeing something or hearing about something that's basically outrageous. Here are last Saturday's entrees.

11:50 pm - I was taking a fare up 1st Avenue and we hit traffic at 56th Street. This isn't unusual because there's often a back-up here for the 59th Street Bridge, so I wasn't taking much notice of what was going on. But after we moved inch-by-inch for a couple of minutes I finally noticed some flashing police lights up ahead at 58th Street. And then, as I approached the intersection, I discovered the actual cause of the jam-up.

Two police cars were parked in the right two lanes, and all the other vehicles had to merge to the left to get by them. So what was the emergency? Someone on the 3rd or 4th floor of a townhouse had rigged up the pay-per-view broadcast of the Mayweather/De La Hoya fight so it projected onto the wall of an adjoining building. It could be seen from the street and a small crowd had gathered at the corner to watch it. Were the cops monitoring the crowd? Policing the traffic flow? No, they were standing there next to their patrol cars, wide-eyed, watching the fight. All that was missing were their bags of popcorn.

Add that one to the Traffic Jam Hall of Fame.

2:14 am - In the field of humor, there's a difference between a funny thing happening to a normal person and a someone who is a "funny person". For example, if Betty wore a fruit basket hat on her head to a costume party, it would be funny. But if Betty wore it on the street because she thought it looked pretty good and at the same time would remind her to pick up some peaches at the supermarket, she would be a "funny person". She would not think of herself as being funny, but others, seeing the outpoints in her behavior of which she was not aware, would laugh.

I had a "funny person" in my cab on Saturday. He was a twenty-something guy en route from 33rd Street and 11th Avenue to 60th and Amsterdam. He was a cheerful and pleasant person, but not the brightest star in the sky. The first thing that happened was that he noticed that I was a white-skinned, American guy driving a cab.

"Oh, wow, you're white!" he said.

Observations like this from passengers are so mundane to me by this time that, to try to keep it interesting, I feel compelled to play around with it whenever someone mentions it. I looked at my arm in mock surprise.

"You're right! I am white!" I said. My sarcasm went right over his head and out the window. He continued on in the same way.

"You know how long it's been since I've had a white cab driver? Like... years!"

"Really!"

"Yeah! All these guys are from Pakistan or someplace."

"They are?" I thought for sure he would pick up on my attitude, but he absolutely didn't get it.

"Yeah! I don't know, maybe India, I don't know, but, man, you are like the first American driver I've had in a really long, long time, man!"

"Wow!"

"Yeah, serious, man."

I found myself smiling at his profound inability to understand that, of course, how could I not know this extremely well. Not to be unkind, but the guy was stupid in a charming sort of way. He was funny. I decided to change the subject as it was hopeless to keep on being sarcastic with him.

"Where are you coming from, the Copa?" I asked.

"No, I was at Stereo," he said.

Now this was a huge surprise to me. There are two clubs right next to each other at 33rd and 11th, the Copacabana and Stereo. The Copa gets a primarily Hispanic, hetero crowd and Stereo is hardcore gay. Although this guy wasn't Hispanic, I figured he had been at the Copa as he didn't fit the gay mold at all.

"Oh... so how was Stereo? Big crowd in there?"

"I don't know, I didn't get in," he said.

"Why not?"

"I was supposed to meet a friend of mine in there, " he said. "So what they do is, first they make you wait outside. Then they finally let you come into this entranceway they have before you can actually get into the place. And then these two guys frisk you to see if you have any weapons."

This is standard operating procedure at clubs in New York. The police department is very tough on club owners if there's ever any violence inside the premises.

"So what was the problem?"

"Well, when they frisked me, they felt me up," he said flatly. "They touched me all over. They even touched my dick. And then they tell me I'm not on 'the list', so I don't get in anyway."

I was shocked. "They touched your dick!" I blurted back to him.

"Yeah."

Actually the incident struck me as being not only outrageous, but humorous, too. The idea that gay security guys get to molest the customers in a gay club as a normal function of their job seemed highly comical to me. And that they could do this and still not even let the guy into the club made it seem like their real function wasn't to find weapons, but to feel everybody up. But my passenger wasn't reacting like it was either outrageous or funny. To him it was just something that happened, like receiving change at the check-out counter of the deli.

I tried to delve a little to see if I could get more of a response to the incident from him. "Maybe you should look at this as a bonus," I said. "You got felt up for free."

"But I'm not gay," he said.

"You're not?"

"No, I'm straight. It's my friend who's gay."

"Oh... uh, okay... so... what are you going to do now?"

"Go see my girlfriend."

Just another Saturday night.




Nothing funny about clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Art Buchwald Made Good Copy

A few days ago Art Buchwald, the American polical satirist, died at the age of 81. I had him in my cab once and, in recalling that ride, I realized there are two things I have taken from him and made my own.

His gloves and his umbrella.

Just kidding. The first was something he said to me in my cab. This ride occurred in December, 1980, and the reason I can remember its exact date is Ronald Reagan had been elected but had not yet been inaugurated. The conversation went something like this...

Me: What are you doing here [in New York City]? Aren't you supposed to be in Washington?

Buchwald: Nah, Washington's dead. Nobody's around 'til the inauguration.

Me: So what do you think of Reagan? Do you think he'll be a good president?

Buchwald: He'll make good copy.

"He'll make good copy." I've been using that phrase to describe anyone or anything that seems promising ever since he said that to me. I know it's a newspaper term that didn't originate with Buchwald, but that's how it got into my mind. I think we usually don't remember how something like this enters our consiousness, but in this case I do. It came from him.

The second thing was a writing thing. After having had this honor of transporting his butt from point A to point B, I started paying more attention to his columns and, in reading them, I came to recognize the basic form that the newspaper essay takes. First, a premise is stated. ("People act strangely when the moon is full.") Second, data is supplied to back up the premise. ("I saw old Jed flying a kite in the middle of the night and he was wearing Spock ears.") And third, the premise is re-stated, perhaps with a humorous twist, to end the essay. ("Yup, people sure do act strange when the moon is full. Excuse me - I've gotta go get my Spock ears back from Jed.")

A well-written essay in a blog uses this same format. It's how a point is made as opposed to wandering off in all directions.

I don't know if he invented this form - he probably didn't - but nevertheless I did gain my understanding of it from him. So that's two things I got from this guy.

And, you know, I do have a collection of gloves and umbrellas that people have left in my cab... hmmmm... does anyone know what size glove Art Buchwald wore?

New Blog!

Ladies and Germs, may I have your attention please?
Announcing my new blog - Pictures From A Taxi.
I do a lot of "street photography" while driving my cab - most of my shots are taken while waiting at red lights. Originally I thought I would include some of these pictures in this blog (Cabs Are For Kissing), but now I think that rather than post pictures that have nothing to do with the text, it would be a better idea to start a second blog that would be just photography. It will be one picture every day from various sections of New York - a city, by the way, that is like heaven for street photography.
Your comments are welcome, of course!
Hope you will visit often for a dose of New York as seen (literally) through the eyes of a taxi driver.