Driverless Taxis? My Op-Ed in The Guardian

There was an announcement in the worldwide media several days ago that Uber and Volvo have been working together to develop the technology for a driverless taxi and that the first of these cars are already being tested on the streets of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (USA).

Is this the beginning of the end of the profession of Taxi Driver?

I was asked by The Guardian, one of the UK's top newspapers (with an online edition for the US), to write an Op-Ed on this disturbing news...

Click here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/22/driverless-cars-taxis-cabs-uber

The One Good Thing That Happened To Taxi Drivers After Uber Invaded New York City

Passengers in my cab are always surprised when I tell them there is no taxi drivers’ union in New York City. It is assumed that with all these cabs everywhere you look there must certainly be a union, but there is not. There is a taxi drivers’ advocacy group, the Taxi Workers Alliance, whose leader, Bhairavi Desai, often appears in the media and at meetings of the Taxi and Limousine Commission to try to present the viewpoint of the drivers, but the Taxi Workers Alliance has no clout. This was painfully evident in September of 2007 when Ms. Desai called for a two-day work stoppage to protest the imposition of the high-tech “system” (GPS monitoring, credit card readers, and back seat television screens) upon the taxi industry in New York City. Her call was widely ignored by the drivers who instead opted to avail themselves of the inducement of Mayor Michael Bloomberg to pay her no mind and instead make a bundle on those days because he was allowing drivers to accept multiple passengers and charge by zones.

Although I did observe the work stoppage myself, I was not at all surprised that it fell on its face. The template upon which the taxi industry in New York operates was conceived in 1937, a time of enormous labor unrest in the United States. Intentionally or not, it has turned out to be union-proof. The number of yellow cab medallions was fixed at 11,787; about half of them were owned by numerous taxi fleets scattered around the city and the other half by independent owner-drivers, one taxi for each owner-driver. So with dozens of taxi garages and thousands of independent drivers scattered all over the city, there was no central location where drivers would ever congregate and no place to put a picket line. Attempts to unionize failed and, boy, the weakness that was the result of that failure has been evident ever since.

Just compare the difference in the way taxi drivers and members of the Transit Workers Union (subways and buses) are dealt with by the city when a strike, or even a temporary work stoppage, is threatened. Mayor Bloomberg, as mentioned, simply bribed the taxi drivers to continue working on those two days. In May of 1998 there actually was a one-day work stoppage by taxi drivers, a labor miracle engineered by Ms. Desai, in response to Mayor Guiliani’s sudden imposition of unpopular new rules upon the industry. For that one remarkable day there were virtually no yellow cabs on the streets of the city. The mayor went on television that evening and with a smile on his face said, “The streets were nice and empty today. They should do it more often.” He refused to negotiate and then for the next two years taxi drivers were continuously being pulled over by the police and ticketed for such offenses as wearing sandals or having an entry missing from their trip sheets. Some felt this was not a coincidence.

But should the president of the Transit Workers Union even be overheard at the gym using the word “deadline” in regard to the expiration of contracts with the city, the attitude from the mayor’s office is along the lines of, “Come on over, we can work it out, let’s do lunch.” Negotiations are conducted and deals are made. Why? Because the TWU is a very strong union - it can call a strike for real and cause great trouble not only for the citizens of the city but for the mayor, who will be blamed for letting it happen. That is clout. That is leverage. That is what taxi drivers have never had.

As a result they have been taken utterly for granted by owners of taxi fleets and city officials alike. Due to a steady influx of immigrant labor, garage owners have never had to particularly worry about not having enough cabbies to drive their vehicles, regardless of the working conditions these drivers were required to tolerate. And any newly-elected mayor or recently-appointed Taxi and Limousine Commission chairman soon learned that they can impose any rules they want on taxi drivers and there will be no meaningful opposition to their decrees.

The examples of this could fill a book (hey, there’s an idea!) but I’m going to give you just three, to illustrate the point.

1) After the recession hit in 2008, taxi garages were overflowing with drivers looking for work. Since it’s more convenient and more profitable for fleet owners to lease their cabs out on a weekly, rather than a daily basis, drivers were told they had no choice but to take the weekly deal. This meant a six-day work week for either a day shift (5 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or a night shift (5 p.m. to 5 a.m.). Should a personal situation or an illness or a Hurricane Sandy come along and you needed a few days off, tough, you still had to pay the full weekly lease if you wanted to continue to drive one of that fleet’s cabs.

2) The high-tech “system” was mandated by the Bloomberg administration to be in use in all taxis in January of 2008. It consists of three components: credit card readers, GPS tracking, and a television monitor in the back seat. I will leave the pros and cons of the credit card readers and the GPS tracking for another day - let’s just talk about the television monitor. Here is a glittering example, the gold standard, if you will, of just how taken for granted the taxi drivers have been. When you sit down in the back seat of a New York taxicab, a TV monitor is staring you in the face. When the driver turns on the meter it activates the TV and the canned entertainment begins. Of late this consists of clips taken from talk shows, interspersed with commercials and public-service announcements. What this means to the taxi driver is that for approximately sixty-five percent of his twelve-hour shift (the average percentage of time the meter is on) he will be forced to endure listening to the same jokes and babble over and over and over and over again. Was any kind of survey ever done of how the drivers felt about this? Of course not. Are the drivers even given a piece of the advertising revenue the Taxi TV generates? Uh, why even ask?

Aside from all this, there is a safety issue, as well. The monitor is about twenty-four inches from the driver’s head, so the noise it emits is inescapable. And to make it worse, the volume can be turned up to make it suddenly BLASTING with a quick tap-tap-tap of the passenger’s finger. Now, quite aside from the obvious annoyance this would be to the person who has to put up with it for two-thirds of his or her work day, has it occurred to no one that it is also a distraction to the driver and it therefore makes a ride in a taxi less safe than it would be if the thing simply wasn’t there at all? If anyone would dispute that point, I would invite them to answer this question: how would you like it if that monitor was twenty-four inches behind the head of your airline pilot as he’s bringing your plane in for a landing? Do you think that would be approved by the FAA? Of course not! But in a taxi, it’s okay?

3) And then there is the Nissan NV200 minivan, the so-called “Taxi of Tomorrow”. Forget about the fact that the car is not a hybrid. Forget about the peculiar and troubling deal that Mayor Bloomberg entered the city into which squelches competition in the marketplace by awarding Nissan an exclusive ten-year contract to be the sole manufacturer of all taxicabs in New York City. Let’s just talk about the feature of this vehicle which makes it so horrible that I told the manager of my garage, after driving it for only two shifts, that if he had no other types of cabs to offer me, I will quit: it comes from the manufacturer with a solid Plexiglas partition which cannot be opened. Why is this so bad? Because, although there is an intercom which permits a sentence or two to come through, it nevertheless reduces the chance of an actual conversation between the passenger and the driver to nearly zero. Like hair salons and bars, the taxicab is a business setting in which there is a potential for real human contact. For a driver like myself, this is the essence of the job, and for many New Yorkers - and for nearly all tourists - contact with taxi drivers is an important part of the “New York experience”. The partition which cannot be opened kills that, and it kills tips, too, as a consequence of the enforced disconnection from the driver.

So into this environment enters Uber, the new kid in town. After some initial wrangling the dust settles down and Uber creates a foothold in the taxi community. Its popularity with customers grows. The owners of car services are very worried because the Uber business model of getting a taxi via an app is superior to having to call for one on the phone and wait for it to show up, if it shows up at all. But the fleet owners of the yellow cabs are not worried because the business model of going out on the street and waving your hand is still superior, or at least as good as, ordering a cab via an app. So even with Uber in town, business was going along as usual… until last summer.

That’s when things began to change. And this was the huge, unforeseen consequence which is turning the New York taxi industry upside down: the drivers of the yellow cabs began to defect to Uber. Like weary soldiers who disappear from their units in the middle of the night, the drivers are deserting the fleets, and there is no sign at this point that they will be coming back. At my own garage at least twenty-five percent of the fleet’s two hundred taxis have been standing empty on most days since July.

This is a disaster scenario for the garage owners. It is quite an expensive operation to keep a fleet of taxis on the streets of New York. The owners' only source of revenue is what they receive from the leasing fees of drivers, so if too many cabs stand empty for too long, the fleet owners will be facing bankruptcy. And to make matters worse, the medallion, which had been trading in the vicinity of a million dollars, is in free-fall. It has lost over twenty percent of its value since the drivers began to shift to Uber, and right now it would be difficult, if not impossible, to sell one because potential buyers as well as lenders are shying away. There is no longer confidence in what the future may hold for the value of the medallion nor does anyone know what the bottom will be. This means that even if a fleet owner wanted to liquidate some of his medallions to help cover expenses while he rides the crisis out, he cannot. And the city, too, has suffered. The sale of 2,000 new medallions, which was included in Mayor Bloomberg’s final budget and was expected to bring in a billion dollars, has been suspended indefinitely.

What does this all mean for the drivers of the yellow cabs? It means hallelujah, leverage has arrived at last. It has arrived not through feeble threats of strikes or work stoppages, but through competition for the services of drivers. Now, for the first time ever, fleet owners and city officials will have no choice but to give serious consideration to how their actions affect the lives of the drivers. If they are wise, they will realize it’s not only a matter of whether or not a cabbie can make more money driving for Uber, although that is, of course, an important issue. It’s also about the working conditions of the drivers - the twelve-hour shifts, the six-day work week, the Taxi TV, the removal of choice in the vehicles they can drive, and so on.

Hey, Taxi and Limousine Commission - do you want the drivers to return?

How about doing some surveys?

Find out what's really needed and wanted from the drivers.

And then give them some good reasons to come back.

The Caveman Lullaby

Anyone who lives in a big city is familiar with the Caveman Lullaby. It's that melody that can be heard when a female, or a group of them - always unaccompanied by a male - walk by a neo-Neanderthal, or a group of them, on the street.

"Eww-eey, eww-eyy, eww-eyy!" they chime.

"Momma!" they groan in utmost pain.

"Baby, baby, baby!" they squeal, with visions of ecstatic copulation reeling them back to the glory days of Homo erectus.

Painting with the broadest of strokes, let me say, there are only two kinds of men in this world: a) those who would engage in this kind of behavior, even once, and b) those who would never so much as consider doing such a thing. I, of course, belong to the latter category and hold in justifiable disdain all the cavemen with whom I have the misfortune of sharing my gender. Unfortunately, as a taxi driver, I am occasionally forced to render my services to these morons and, worse, to overhear their pathetic conversations.

I had just such a ride recently.

Four of them piled into my cab on a Friday night around 10:30 - three in the back and one up front with me - and told me to drive them to a certain club on East 21st Street. This turned out to be one of those four-passenger rides in which you wind up feeling like you're the Invisible Man. They just carry on with whatever they were talking about exactly as if you weren't there. It's one thing if they're all in the back and there's at least a semblance of you're-over-there-and-I'm-over-here. But with one of them up front, you feel like you've been hijacked and forced to join the gang, even if they see you as nothing more than a temporary robot-guy. The best thing to do is to just grit your teeth and bear it. I pulled out from the curb and the endurance began.

The topic of conversation had moved from which parties they'd been to lately, to how fucked-up some guy named Schmizel was, to who supposedly got laid last week, when we pulled up next to another taxi at a red light. Sitting in the back seat of the cab was a blond, a party girl type, who was busy texting. The guy in the back on the left was directly across from her and rolled down his window.

"Hey, baby," he brayed.

She looked over at him.

There was a brief pause of anticipation on her part, as if to say, "Yeah?"

"Hey, baby," the guy regurgitated.

She immediately turned back to her smartphone as if the annoyance had never taken place.

I thought this rejection would be pounced upon by his buddies, but there was nothing. It was as if this was just part of the expected flow of the evening: you stop at red lights and grunt at whichever female happens to be beside you in the next car, your advance is denied, and you move on. Nothing personal, just business.

The topic of conversation then turned to a girl named Lorraine, who apparently was well known to all of them.

"You did Lorraine?" a voice in the back asked.

"Fuckin' uh-huh!" the guy sitting next to me said enthusiastically.

"Whoa, when ja do her, dude?"

"At Lenny's party, like, what, three weeks ago?"

"Oh, Lenny's party, shit, yeah, there was some crazy shit at that party! I remember that!"

There was some talk about how crazy the shit had actually been at Lenny's party, but the subject soon turned back to Lorraine. The information shared included:

a) what a super hot fuckin' slut she was;

b) how her left tit was bigger than her right tit, or maybe it was the other way around;

c) the vast extent of her bush and how the guy sitting up front with me needed a weed whacker to get through it;

d) the surprising discovery of some dried-up little pieces of fecal matter when he finally was able to make his way down there.

As the three guys in the back roared in laughter at this foray into the realm of gross-you-out-with-something-you-never-thought-of-before-dude, we arrived at our destination on East 21st. Keeping in harmony with the tone of the evening, they each cried out, "You pay!" at the guy sitting next to me, sticking him with the fare, as they hurriedly filed out onto the street.

"Motherfuckers!" the guy in the front yelled back, realizing too late that the last person leaving the taxi is the one who has to pay. It's an urban form of musical chairs.

"Motherfuckers," he then said in my direction, the first communication that was even slightly meant to be received by me. I felt honored.

"Motherfuckers," I agreed.

He paid me the fare, promising some sort of vengeance to be wreaked upon his buddies in the near future, and exited the premises. Noting the details of the ride on my trip sheet, I turned off the meter, looked up, and noticed an elderly gentleman hailing me a short distance down the street. I started to move in his direction, but before I could go ten feet I was surprised to see the four guys who'd just been my passengers coming back toward me with an attractive brunette in tow. They barreled right past the elderly gentleman, opened the door of the cab, and with some exaggerated and uncalled-for chivalry presented her with this handsome prize, my taxicab. As it was tough to find an available cab at this particular time, she showed her gratitude by giving them a smile and a thank you in return.

My first instinct was to tell the brunette sorry, but the elderly gentleman had already hailed me, but then I thought better of it. The four merry cavemen had just paid me and given me a decent tip, so it would have been perceived as a dis on my part to do so, even though their "chivalry" was nothing more than Neanderthal dressed in lambswool. And besides, it wasn't the brunette's fault. She probably hadn't even noticed the elderly gentleman. I shrugged my shoulders and pulled out from the curb. Horatio and Washington was her destination, in the West Village.

Well, she turned out to be quite a nice person and a ready conversationalist. After a couple of minutes of benign chit-chat, I turned the subject to what was really on my mind.

"Those guys who got this cab for you..."

"Yeah?"

"...what did you think of them?"

"Seemed like nice guys. I'd been trying to get a cab for ten minutes, so they really helped me out back there."

"Have you ever walked by some guys on the street and had them start whistling and making kissing sounds at you?"

"Sure... God, I hate that. It's so degrading."

"Well, those guys were those guys."

"They were? How do you know?"

I gave her a censored version of their conversation about Lorraine and went on to tell her about the "hey, baby" guy in the back seat.

"Men are such pigs," she said, smiling.

It was turning out to be one of those great rides in which a female passenger is so free and open in talking to her driver about relationships between the sexes that you'd think the cabbie was a trusted female friend and not a guy she'd met five minutes ago who was just driving her someplace. I take it as a feather in my cap when I am accorded this honor. It's right out of Taxicab Confessions.

"What amazes me," I said, "is that guys who do this haven't noticed that it never works."

"Never works!" she echoed, laughing.

"It's true," I continued, "never once in the history of Men and Women has a guy gone into that "hey, baby" routine and gotten even a smile, much less gotten laid. It's automatic rejection."

"Automatic!" she agreed. "Why can't they ever learn this?"

When she departed the taxi at Horatio and Washington, she left me with not only an above-average tip, but an afterglow. I drove around for the next fifteen minutes with a smile I just couldn't get off my face from thinking about how funny and satisfying my last two fares had been. "Never once in the history of Men and Women" I replayed in my mind. How hysterical was that?...

And then it hit me.

"Oh my God!" I cried out loud as a certain almost-forgotten incident knocked on the door of my consciousness.

"Oh my God!"

On a Saturday night many years ago, sometime back in the '80s, a not unattractive girl, a twenty-something, got into my cab. She was particularly friendly, full of smiles and chatter, and was on her way to some disco (as clubs were still called in those days) on the West Side. After a few minutes of conversation she surprised me - no, hell, she shocked me - by suddenly asking if I wanted to be her date and come into the disco with her. This startled me because, for one thing, I have never been in the Brad Pitt category of boy-toy taxi driver. I am the Woody Allen knockoff, so this kind of proposition never happens to me. And for another thing, I was married at the time, and unless you happen to have been Nastasia Kinski, my fantasy sexpot in those days, I was not to be so easily swayed into tiptoeing around on my marriage vows.

So I was in the process of saying gee, thanks, that's so sweet of you, but I've gotta work, you know, so no thanks, when an incredible thing happened. A car with four guys in it pulled up next to us at a red light. The guy closest to my passenger rolled down his window.

"Hey, baby," he blurted out at her.

The Rules of Sexual Etiquette clearly state that she is required to ignore the barbarian, but that's not what she did. Instead, she smiled back at him.

"Hey, how ya doin'?" she replied.

That was all it took. In less than ten seconds she had shoved some money in my hand, opened her door, and gotten into the car with the four guys. Off they drove with the girl and disappeared into the kaleidoscope of traffic on the West Side, leaving me stupefied and alone in my empty cab. The incident was so contrary to anything I'd ever seen before that it became one of those mile markers on the highway of life that every once in a while jumps out at you in memory.

"How in the hell could that have ever happened?" you ask yourself, never expecting to receive an answer. Well, only now, twenty-five years later, do I finally have an explanation for the phenomenon.

It's like this. There are forces in the physical universe that we know exist, but we cannot see them. Magnetism, for example. Or microwaves. Or even the wind, for that matter. And then there are forces that we suspect must exist, but we don't really know what they are. Like bird migration. How do those birds know how to fly in formation and go to some exact location every year that's five hundred miles away? How do some animals seem to know a couple of days in advance that an earthquake is coming?

In a similar way - I'm sure of it now - there is a force at work that affects only the neo-Neanderthal, and not the rest of the men on the planet. You see, whenever a "hey, baby" is met with a "hey, how ya doin'?", even if it's once every twenty-five years, it sets off a carrier wave that only the caveman can perceive. He knows, on the deepest instinctual level, that she's out there somewhere. It's just a matter of finding her.

So what this means is that my supposition - "it never works!" - turns out to be not true. Actually, every once in a rare while it does work, as we have seen with that girl in my cab. And that's what keeps the whole damn thing going.

So there's no fighting it, the Caveman Lullaby is here to stay. In fact, I'm thinking maybe even I, the Mister Well-Mannered, Intellectual Taxi Guy, should give it a try. I mean, it's a numbers game, lots of people read this blog, and, who knows, the "hey, how ya doin'?" female could be reading this post at this very moment.

I'm gonna roll my window down right now.

Here goes.

Hey, baby...

********

Why dontcha come over to my place and we could, you know, look at some Pictures From A Taxi, or somethin'? Just click here.

Good Time Charlie

What's always good in the taxi business is an immediate turnover of passengers - that is, a new one gets in as the old one gets out. That's what happened on a recent Tuesday night just before midnight on 69th between 1st and 2nd. Actually it wasn't really "immediate". There was a gap of about a minute and a half between the two fares as my passenger-to-be, a thirty-something male, stood on the sidewalk kissing a woman who was staying there on 69th. I was patient. It starts getting slow at that time of night on a Tuesday, so even with a delay it was good business for me. Finally he got in the cab, waving goodbye and blowing a final kiss or two at his beloved.

I drove west on the one-way 69th toward 2nd Avenue. "So... where are you heading?" I asked when no destination was forthcoming.

But instead of a location, I got this: "Man, that was the best make-out session I've had in, what? I don't know, man, a really long time!"

Right away I liked this guy. In his mind I wasn't being viewed as "taxi driver who's just there to take me someplace". I was being elevated into "my man". I was his buddy, his suddenly-appearing pal, his comrade-in-arms. I knew this was going to be a fun ride.

"Yeah, you two were really going at it," I said, smiling. "I was afraid you might get invited upstairs and I'd lose the fare!"

"Hah, yeah, I wish, but, you know, it was the first date."

"No sex on the first date, huh?"

"Well, it depends. Sometimes, maybe. But she wasn't a first-date-sex kind of girl."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I don't know... good, I guess. I don't know. Man, she can really kiss!"

We had hit a red light at 2nd which was now turning green. "So where are we going?" I asked.

"I don't know... go straight."

I drove to 3rd Avenue where another red light awaited us.

"So there'll be a second date?"

"Oh, yeah, she's definitely second date material. Maybe third and fourth date material."

"You think she might be 'the one', as the saying goes?"

"You know, it's not out of the realm of possibility."

The light turned green and I started driving toward Lex, still not knowing what our destination would be. "Could I ask you a personal question?" I inquired.

"Sure."

"Where the hell do you want to go?"

The guy seemed to be more interested in going anywhere than in actually going somewhere. As a general rule, I think that is fine as long as the passenger isn't semi-coherent. But we were going to run into the wall that surrounds Central Park at 5th Avenue if we couldn't decide to make a turn before we got there. So I pressed the issue a little.

"Well, there are basically two things we could do," I said. "We could go uptown or downtown. I know it's a tough call, but what do you think?"

He gave it some thought. "Where are the bars that are open?" he asked.

"They're all open. It's only midnight. The bars stay open 'til four, most of them."

"Well, let's go there."

I made a left on 5th and headed downtown, where most of the nightlife is found.

"Okay," I said, feeling like we were making progress, "so now out of the maybe two thousand bars that are open, all we've gotta do is figure out which one you want to go to."

"One where there's lots of girls," he said.

I was surprised. "You mean after your date and all that kissing you still want to go to a bar and try to pick up some girl?"

"Actually, man, you know what would be better? Just a hooker. Where can we go to find a hooker?"

"Craig's List," I replied, reminding him that since Giuliani had been mayor in the '90s there haven't been any hookers on the streets of the city.

"So should I take you there?" I asked.

"Where?"

"To Craig's List."

Well, this was just unmitigated hysteria for my passenger, who doubled over in laughter and jumped into the concept of the thing. "Yes, take me to Craig's List and make it fast!" he demanded.

"Next stop, Craig's List!" I joined in, and stepped on the gas a bit as if it was really a place we could drive to.

We continued rolling down 5th Avenue in great spirits. I asked him again which bar, or at least which part of town, he thought we ought to be heading toward, but it seemed that once he had actually let it out that he was thinking of looking for a hooker he began to think maybe it wasn't such a great idea, after all. He became reflective.

"You know, I've probably been on something like two hundred dates in the last two years," he said.

"No way," I replied, trying to do the math in my mind, "like two dates a week?"

"Oh, definitely, yeah, I've been dating like crazy."

"How do you find all these dates?"

"Match dot com."

"But no matches?"

"Well, there have been a few who looked like maybes, yeah, but they didn't pan out."

"Too bad."

"Or maybe I didn't pan out," he added, laughing.

The thought crossed my mind that a guy who could go out on what he thought was a great date and then want to go looking for hookers after that date might, in fact, be the one who didn't pan out. But of course I kept my mouth shut, only asking him again for some kind of a destination. We were still on 5th, down in the thirties now.

"You know what, tomorrow's a work day, I think I'll just call it a night."

I expected him to say that. It often happens that someone in a party mode comes down to Earth after riding aimlessly in a cab for a few minutes.

"So where's home?"

"39th between 2nd and 3rd," he said, and then made the faux pas of giving me directions to a simple destination. "Just cut across 32nd to 3rd, then go up to 40th and cut over to 2nd," he said.

I gave him a painful look through the mirror and, being an astute observer of taxi driver attitudes, he realized his mistake. "I guess you knew that already," he apologized.

I searched for the proper analogy and came up with this little gem:

"It's like telling a kindergarten teacher what a crayon is."

Well, I hit another bull's eye with that one. He again doubled over in laughter and the rest of our ride was spent in Glee Land. That's a place where anything that's seen or heard is hilarious simply because it's there. I decided right then that if I ever became a stand-up comedian I would want to order a couple hundred duplicates of this guy and bring them with me to every show. He was a perfect audience.

When I got him to his building, a luxury high rise, I was given a twenty dollar bill for a $12.70 fare and was informed that I was the best cab driver who ever lived. The door of the cab was opened by Johnnie, the best doorman who ever lived, and as I drove off my final glimpse of my passenger was of him and Johnnie, his new comrade-in-arms, laughing uproariously together about something. Or anything.

It occurred to me later that if the woman I wrote about in my last post might be considered typical of what a female goes through in her search for a mate, Good Time Charlie might be nominated as a candidate for the quintessential male.

As a taxi driver, particularly as one who's been doing it for quite a while, I see them from a distance. And I find a kind of beauty in their bumbling around.

********

And if you happen to be looking for a place to bumble around, might I suggest clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi.

What She Did For Love

There are certain people who stand there on the street looking like they want a cab, yet they do not raise their hand up as you approach them. The instant dilemma for the cabbie is to stop or not to stop. If you stop and it turns out they don't want you, you feel like an idiot. But if you don't stop and then look through your rear-view mirror and see them hailing the next cab coming up the avenue, you really kick yourself for not having stopped. So what do you do?

A young lady was standing just off the curb in front of the Skyline Hotel on 10th Avenue between 49th and 50th on a recent Sunday night at around 1:30 a.m. She sure looked like she wanted a cab, but she didn't raise her hand up.

I stopped anyway.

She paused momentarily, looking around. Then she reached for the handle, opened the door, and got in. It gave me that feeling you get when your instinct in your area of expertise is validated. I knew she wanted a cab, even if she didn't say so, and now I had the reward of a passenger sitting in the back seat. I applauded myself mentally.

I pulled out onto 10th, a one-way avenue that runs uptown.

"So, where are you heading?" I asked, when her destination was not forthcoming.

There was a further pause, and then, "Just keep driving on this, please," meaning 10th Avenue.

That's the kind of thing people say when they know they're headed in the right direction but aren't sure of exactly where their point of departure will be. But then she added this: "Could you drive slowly, please?"

That's the kind of thing people say when they're a vomit candidate. But I could see that she was alert and looking out the window, and that's definitely not the way people carry themselves when they're holding back an urge to regurge. So I was relieved, but I knew something was going on.

Finally she told me she was going to the Upper East Side, but didn't say exactly where. Then - suddenly - she asked me to make a right turn just as we approached 60th Street, then another right turn onto 9th Avenue. We were now headed downtown, the opposite direction from her stated destination. We hit the automatic red at 59th and then, when it turned green, there were further instructions.

"Could you stay on the right side of the avenue, please?" she asked, kind of meekly.

"Sure."

"And could you drive slowly, please?"

"I am driving slowly."

"I know, I mean, if you could continue to drive slowly, please."

"Sure," I replied, thinking how easy it is to get me to do almost anything if the word "please" is used.

We drove down 9th for a few blocks, her eyes searching intently at people on the sidewalks.

"What street did you pick me up at?" she asked as were approaching 51st Street.

"49th."

"Could you take me back to where you picked me up, and then drive across 50th Street?"

"Sure."

In a few moments we were back where we'd started. I made the right onto 50th as she'd requested, heading east. I drove even slower than I'd been driving on 9th Avenue and, as before, she continued to look carefully at anyone who happened to be walking in the area. Whomever she was looking for was not to be found on 50th between 10th and 9th, so we continued to 8th Avenue, but she still didn't find what she was looking for. I decided to play an experienced hunch.

"This is about some guy, isn't it?" I asked.

Her smile told me I was right. "Yeah," she replied softly and with just a touch of self-deprecation.

"You had a fight with your boyfriend?" I asked. You have to be careful as a taxi driver when you decide to pry into a passenger's world. But with her I had a sense that she would welcome having someone to talk to at this particular time.

"No..." she said, "it's not that." She paused, wondering if she should tell me the whole story. I waited quietly for her reply, giving her the space she needed to make up her own mind. Then she dove right into it.

What had happened had been that she'd been sitting at the bar in the Skyline Hotel and had struck up a conversation with a man who'd also been in there. This man had been part of a group of people who were with a well-known actor, Paul Rudd, who was also in the bar. He was professionally associated with Paul Rudd in some way, perhaps his agent or manager, she wasn't sure. They had sat at the bar talking for a little while and then his party was leaving and it was time for him to go. They said goodbye and he rejoined his group, which soon left the place. She saw them disperse and watched him walk away, perhaps heading east on 50th Street, or maybe walking uptown on 10th Avenue, she wasn't sure. She didn't know his name. He didn't know hers. They had not exchanged phone numbers.

A few moments later she also left the bar. Not being sure what to do, but thinking she should probably catch a cab and go home, she walked out onto 10th Avenue. She stood there looking like she wanted a cab, but she had this man on her mind and she wasn't sure what to do and so she didn't raise her hand to hail a taxi that was coming up the avenue. But the taxi stopped anyway. And she got in.

And so now we were searching the streets for this man.

We went up 8th Avenue until we reached Columbus Circle at 59th Street, but we both knew he couldn't have gotten that far in that amount of time. So we turned around and went back down 9th and zig-zagged several blocks in the fifties, to no avail. She was about ready to admit defeat and head home, but decided to give it one more try and go down Broadway into Times Square - maybe he'd decided to walk a few blocks and catch a subway over there. It was a long shot but worth a try, she thought, so we drove up 8th again to 57th Street and then down Broadway toward 50th.

"So what's so special about this guy?" I asked. By this time we were teammates and I felt no sense of inappropriateness in posing this kind of question to her. She confided that it was the feeling she had when she was talking with him. In her words, she just felt comfortable being with him. It felt "right". And then she made this comment:

"You have to understand," she confessed sadly, "I don't like anyone!"

But she liked him.

But by my own analysis, after over thirty years of studying Homo sapiens, what she was really saying was this: this fellow had passed through an internal, kind of genetic, filter. The qualities she was searching for in a mate, consciously and unconsciously, he possessed. His physical appearance, his smile, the way he looked at her, the way he tilted his head when he reached for his drink, her perception of his kindness, his confidence, his hands, his strength, the hair on his arms... these and other nuances had passed through the filter. He just possibly might be "the one". And she had let him slip away.

Men and women are clearly different in this regard. Due to the biological clock, females tend to be much more serious and even businesslike about locating, corralling, and branding (marrying) their potential mates than are their male counterparts. They may say it's something else, but what's really going on here is the mysterious and somewhat magnificent imperative to procreate the species. It's serious business. A few years ago I had a guy and a girl in my cab who'd just been out on their first date. The young man got out first, giving her a polite kiss and a non-specific suggestion that they should get together again soon. "The search goes on," she said to me with some resignation as we drove away. There would be no second date. He had not made it through the filter.

After scrutinizing the relatively empty streets of Times Square for a bit longer, my passenger had finally had enough and I was directed to head back uptown to the Upper East Side. I tried to cheer her up by pointing out that there was still a way she might be able to find this guy. Her window of opportunity was that she knew he was associated with Paul Rudd. What she had to do, I said, was find out where Paul Rudd was located, show up there, and find him.

"Wouldn't that be like stalking him?" she wondered.

"It would only be stalking him if he didn't want you to be there," I said. "What I'm talking about is being true to your own reality and following the dictates of your heart."

Well, those words of wisdom may or may not have made an impression on her. She did seem to be considering it, but most of the rest of our time together was spent chit-chatting about other, more mundane, things. When we finally arrived at her destination, what should have been a ten-minute cab ride had stretched out into twenty-six minutes, and what should have been a ten-dollar fare had turned into twenty-eight, including the tip.

As I watched her walk up the steps of her brownstone and look through her bag for her keys, I had one of those time-progression visions that you get sometimes. I could see her in my mind's eye as a much older woman, long since settled in with whatever her searching may have ultimately brought her, reminiscing with a perhaps wistful smile about the things she had done for love.

Her name was Gina.

She lived at 341 East 85th Street.

********

And I'd like to think that one of the things she did was to click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

How I Ended The War

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not always.

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

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

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

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

But there was this other thing.

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

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

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

"I have just one word for you guys."

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

"Gandhi," I said.

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

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

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

Of course not.

Or did it?

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

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

May your best days be yet unseen,

And may all your lights be green.

********

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

Contact

Contact - some would say it's the most basic of human needs, perhaps even more important than food. As a taxi driver I am often witness to the permutations that arise from the attempt to obtain it...

Saturday, April 14th, 4:35 am - my last fare of a long, busy night is a 40ish white male with some kind of a European accent which I could not decipher. He enters my cab at 77th Street and Columbus Avenue with a plastic bag and a newspaper in his hands and tells me to drive him to 39th and 9th. I am immediately put off by his brusque manner and decide this is not someone I want to have a conversation with and, in fact, I want to be rid of as quickly as possible.

So when we get to his destination and he tells me to pull over while he finishes a conversation on his cell phone, I am not pleased. Several minutes go by and, after a couple of nudges from me - "excuse me, are you getting out here?" - he tells me to drive him to an ATM on 38th and 6th. It is late, I am tired, and I have become annoyed with the guy as his behavior has crossed the line into peculiar.

We drive to the ATM. He exits the cab but brings his plastic bag with him. I keep my eye on him all the while as he has been deemed a flight risk in my mind. But he returns and, in the same abrupt manner, orders me to drive to 33rd and 2nd without any explanation of what's going on. He gets back on his cell phone and, now that I am suspicious of the guy, I try to listen to his conversation and am able to pick up only pieces of it. With great seriousness he is describing his physical characteristics to someone on the other end. "I am white, I am thin... yes... yes..."

When we arrive at 33rd and 2nd he once again does not pay me and get out, but instead continues a conversation on his phone. This time he's getting an address and an apartment number from the person on the other end. He says this aloud a few times, the sound of his voice creating a memory of it in his mind. Then, finally, he decides to end the ride. The fare is $15.40. He gives me an additional 60 cent tip. I am so happy to be rid of him and the anxiety he carried with him that I'm not even upset about the cheapskate gratuity. In fact, I expected it.

My night is over, so I drive to the gas station to fill the tank for the next driver. As I clean up the cab, I find that The Village Voice has been left on the back seat and is opened to a large section they have at the end which is a listing ("body work") for prostitutes.

Now I understand.


Tuesday, April 17th, 11:37 pm - a 30ish guy, white skin, about 6 feet tall, jumps in at the intersection of 5th Avenue and 34th Street. Our destination is DeGraw Street in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. As the ride begins I overhear him say to someone on his cell phone that he just punched someone on a subway platform. A minute later that conversation is over and, unable to resist asking him about it, I do. (Which turned out to be a good thing for him, as he needed to talk to someone.) He told me this story...

He'd been at Yankee Stadium and was on a subway filled with people coming from the game. The Yankees had just played the Indians. He grew up in Cleveland and, although he's lived in New York for ten years, he was wearing an Indians hat. A group of "white, suburban gangster wannabes", all teenagers, decided to harass him due to his hat as they exited the subway car and stepped out onto the platform. This led to an angry exchange of words and one of these kids in particular, showing off to his friends, got in his face.

And that's when my passenger slugged him.

He said they were all in shock and just stood there as he hastily went up the stairs and left the station. He then jogged a couple of blocks and jumped in my cab, thinking about stupid, teenaged punks and lawsuits. So actually it turned out I was his getaway driver.

Interestingly, as he told me about the incident, he was filled with regret and chided himself for losing his cool and hoped maybe it will have taught the kid a lesson. It reminded me of the time another person used my cab as a getaway car after being in a bar fight and thinking he may have just killed someone. (See "The Wrong Guy". )

But this one wasn't as serious. "Worst case scenario, the guy's got a broken nose."


2:42 am - two girls, both in their twenties, one a platinum blond and both of them wearing skimpy clothes, get in at 87th and York. Their appearance translates immediately to the male eye as a neon light flashing "sex" - not quite as obvious it would be if they were street hookers, but it's close. That they are standing on a street in a residential neighborhood where there are no bars around adds an element of curiosity about them to my expert eye.

Their destination is 7th Avenue around 24th Street, but they are not sure of the exact address. When they get on a cell phone and are then told the number of the building, added to the fact that they speak in strong Russian accents, I have no doubt that these are call girls en route to a client. It's something I sometimes suspect with certain female passengers, but it's not often I am so sure about it.

Well, they seem pleasant enough and the way they jabber away to each other in Russian is rather melodic to my ear, so I am thinking whoever is paying for them may be getting his money's worth. But halfway into the ride their phone rings and after a short conversation I am told to please turn around and take them back to where I picked them up. Which I do.

I am thinking about asking them why their customer cancelled out on them but decide that would be pushing it and I just keep my mouth shut. We return to 87th and York, they pay the fare, and disappear into a deli.

4:11 am - my final fare of the night is a dancer/stripper from Flashdancer's. The girls all leave the club at 4:00 and I'm told there are as many as 50 of them working each shift in the joint, so it's a good spot to get one last ride.

Since I work the place often, I've had many conversations with these girls. I find the ratio of conversational to non-conversational to be about 50 per cent. In other words, about half of them do not want to speak with their cab driver. This in itself is interesting to me because, if you think about it, here's someone who has just spent several hours dancing almost naked around a pole and then trying to lure guys into a back room so they can do twenty-dollar "lap dances" for them. It's a come-on dressed up in a heightened degree of "friendliness" (pardon my pun). But then, just minutes later, they are often quite out of communication.

This last passenger fell into that category. It was a long ride out to Queens during which she stared blankly out the window. She seemed to me to be a lonely and unhappy person. And if that's true there's some irony there considering the type of work she does.

One of the permutations of the attempt to make contact, if you will.