The Card Game

“There was something in the air that night.”

Looking back at it later, that’s the way it seemed.

Someone less familiar with the nuances of a scene - its details, the usual flow of its particles - might not have noticed that something was not right.

But I did. Something, some nebulous something, was out there.

I sensed it at the beginning. I even took action to avoid it, but it happened anyway. Later I concluded that it had all been a karmic phenomenon, like a greeting card from Fate, a scene in a movie in which you sidestep your way around the danger, you even compliment yourself on having been sharp enough to have avoided it, and then, as you open the door to your house, it’s sitting there in your kitchen eating a tangerine. “Hello.”

It happened on a midsummer night last year, July 31st to be exact - around midnight - and that’s about as midsummer as you can get. I took a twenty-something female from lower Manhattan to McDonough Street in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a so-called “inner city” part of New York. She was fine, paid with a credit card and gave me a twenty percent tip. But there was a little thing that happened a few blocks before we got to her destination that caught my eye. While we were stopped at a red light a group of about twenty kids, teenagers in that danger-zone between fifteen to twenty years old, walked by on the opposite side of the street. It was the way they were moving, along with a group attitude and a certain buzzing among them, that created the blip on my radar screen. I’ve been watching people walk across the street for thirty-five years. This was a particle that was not flowing smoothly. It was sticking.

Have you ever heard of something called a “wilding”? It’s defined as “the activity of a gang of youths going on a protracted and violent rampage in a public place, attacking or mugging people at random”. I saw one in action a couple of years ago, not far from Times Square. It’s an internet phenomenon made possible by the anti-social media, and it’s very scary. Could it have been that what had caught my attention was a prelude to a wilding? Probably not, wildings are rare, fortunately.

But then, as my passenger departed on McDonough Street, I heard sirens from a few blocks away. They have a language of their own, these sirens. Police, fire, EMS, they’re all slightly different. These were police, I knew, and in the parlance of police sirens they were in the “we mean business” band. (You can tell this by the duration of the wailing and by the speed the police car is traveling which, even if you can’t see it, can be determined by the time it takes for the siren to increase in volume if it’s moving toward you or to decrease in volume if it’s moving away from you. It also lets you know how serious they think the emergency is.) That there was more than one siren was significant, as well. There were two, about a block from each other, and moving in the same direction. Then there was a third, this one from a bit further away.

Something was going on.

Then I heard distant shouts, coming from that same vicinity. And not from one source, but from two or three.

My sacred Taxi Driver Instinct told me, quite clearly, “get the hell out of here”. I flicked on my “Off Duty” light, locked the doors, and began heading back toward Manhattan, the opposite direction from where the commotion, whatever it was, was originating.

But then, just as I was beginning to breathe easier, Temptation appeared in the form of a person approaching from the street. No, not a woman in a red dress. Temptation appeared, oddly enough, in the form of a middle-aged, thuggish-looking man who might have been the guy the song “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown” was written about. He would have been the last person you would have thought I would allow into my cab at this particular moment, but he came up to my window and said the magic words.

“Take me to Manhattan?”

It was free money. I unlocked the doors and he slid onto the back seat.

“Where in Manhattan do you want to go?”

“Chinatown.”

Perfect. Right across the Manhattan Bridge.

I turned the meter on and thought about what I had just done. It was all right. This guy, although a rough kind of character, represented no threat to me in a physical sense. Just by his age I was certain of that. Morons who think it’s worth the risk of possible consequences to pull out a gun just to get a hundred dollars from a taxi driver are either in jail or dead before they get to the age of thirty. This guy appeared to be around forty-five. Plus he was taking me away from the area where I perceived the danger to be. No need to even use my
“Three Strikes And You’re Out” system to protect myself. Just get on Atlantic Avenue and make a right.

But I hadn’t driven half a block when my passenger spoke. “Pull over, he’s getting’ in,” he said. I looked around. A guy who looked like Bad Bad’s older brother was approaching the cab. I didn’t like it but I was in a situation where I had no choice.

I stopped.

The second passenger got in.

It set off an alarm. My happiness at having an unlikely return trip to Manhattan evaporated in the night air and was replaced by an anxiety, which was only heightened by the next development in the plot.

“He’s goin’ to Buffalo Avenue,” the first guy said.

“Buffalo Avenue,” I repeated, rather robotically. This was not what I wanted to hear. Not only was Buffalo Avenue in the opposite direction from Manhattan, it meant that in order to get to it I was going to have to drive toward whatever was causing the commotion that I’d already been trying to avoid.

“Goin’ to a card game,” the second guy said.

“Then you’re going to Manhattan?” I asked the first guy.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Then, abruptly: “Make a left, make a left!”

I didn’t like the tone. It had suddenly gone from “I’m doing you a favor by picking you up when my Off-Duty light is on” to being ordered around by my passengers, who were seizing control of the ride. And to make it worse, the street they were ordering me to turn onto was Fulton, a two-way road with a single lane in each direction.

I didn’t want to take that route, I wanted to take a parallel avenue, Atlantic, which also has two directions of traffic but with two lanes in each direction. On Atlantic you could move around if something got in your way, but on Fulton you’d be stuck if there were to be an obstruction.

I momentarily considered just telling them forget it, I’m only going to Manhattan, not the other way, but then I would be in a confrontational situation with the Brown brothers which could lead to who-knows-what. Besides, I wanted that ride to Manhattan after the Buffalo Avenue drop-off.

I made the left onto Fulton.

We went two blocks and then came to a dead stop behind a line of cars that looked to be a block long. Not good. After thirty seconds of not moving at all, I realized that the cause of the delay was the thing I’d been trying to avoid. In the distance there were people running. There were people shouting. Like a tornado, it seemed to be coming toward us.

“I’m getting out of here,” I called back to my passengers, who were immersed in a quiet conversation between themselves and oblivious to the outside world. And with that I made a U-turn on Fulton and headed back in the opposite direction, away from the tornado. After a couple of zigs and zags we were on Atlantic, the avenue I’d wanted to take in the first place, heading swiftly toward Buffalo Avenue. I thought there might have been a protest from the back seat since I had countermanded their instructions and had taken them a few blocks out of their way, but there was nothing.

Good.

But better than that, I’d avoided the fracas, whatever it was. It is rare in life that we are grateful for things that didn’t happen, right? This was a case of an experienced cab driver relying on his knowingness to keep himself and his passengers out of harm’s way. There’s no virtue in becoming a victim, mate.

Two minutes later I got them to their building, a tenement, on Buffalo Avenue with $8.70 on the meter. The first guy then surprised me by handing me a fifty and telling me to keep ten.

“You can pay the fare when we get to Manhattan,” I said, as I tried to return the bill.

“We’re both gettin’ out here,” he replied.

“You’re not going to Manhattan?”

“Nah, I’m goin’ to the card game,” he said.

Damn. There went my “free money”. It pissed me off - I immediately wondered if he’d ever intended to go to Manhattan in the first place. Maybe he’d just used that as a ploy to get me to take him deeper into Brooklyn. But what could I do? I can’t force people to stay in my cab. Especially this guy.

I handed him two twenties as his change, said “thanks”, and expected to hear the rear door open and the two of them depart. But instead the second guy handed me my twenties back and said he needed smaller bills.

“Smaller bills?” It was an odd request. I’m not a bank.

“For the card game.”

“Oh… all right.” Okay, that made sense. I counted out eight fives and handed them over.

“Thanks.”

“What do you play? Poker?” I asked as they opened both rear doors simultaneously.

“Yeah.”

“Hey, good luck!”

My blessing was either ignored or not heard as it brought no response - they walked away and disappeared. I drove off toward Atlantic Avenue, disappointed, but not overly so - after all, even though they’d delayed my return to Manhattan, I did make ten dollars for the inconvenience, and that’s not to be discounted. I kept the “Off-Duty” light on, locked my doors anew, and got back on Atlantic wondering if I should take the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge back to the city.

When I had driven about a mile past the general area where the commotion had been, and knowing I was beyond the reach of that problem, I began to feel hungry. I’m a creature of habit when it comes to meals - you could set your clock by my stomach - and midnight is feeding time in my taxi. So I found a quiet spot and pulled over. Out of my backpack came my pre-prepared chicken fingers and my whole wheat bread and I began munching away.

I was reviewing mentally what had just transpired with my last ride and suddenly I was jolted by a thought. Wait a minute… they’d paid me with a fifty… and I hadn’t bothered to check it. I pulled my wad out from my pocket and found the bill.

Cautiously, I held it up to the dome light of the cab.

And then, oh, oh no, nooooo… Shit! SHIT!

Forget about teenagers and wildings, if anyone on the sidewalk had heard my wails of anguish they would have thought that I was a source of danger and they’d have crossed the street to avoid me.

The bill was a fake.

How can you tell? There are three ways:

1) First, and easiest, you hold the bill up to a strong light and look for the “ghost” in the blank area on the right side. Pictured on a fifty is Ulysses S. Grant, the commander of the Union forces during the American Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. A ghostly image of Grant can be seen in that blank area if the bill is genuine. The high-tech copying machines that are used to produce counterfeit money are not high-tech enough to reproduce the image of that ghost. This bill had none. A fake!

2) Second, similar to the first, is to hold the bill up to a light and look for the bar. On a fifty the thin bar runs the width of the bill, just to the right of Grant’s head and reads, repetitively, in tiny print, “USA 50”. This bill did not have that, either.

3) The third, and not known to most people, are the grooves in the General’s coat. If you run the edge of your fingernail against the coat, you can feel the grooves. Although I didn’t notice it until later, this bill, amazingly, did have grooves. But they hadn’t been somehow duplicated there by a copy machine. Whoever made this bill had cut out a small piece of grooved cellophane tape and carefully adhered it to the left side of Grant’s coat. So to that degree this counterfeit bill had actually been created by hand. Amazing.

When my anger eventually subsided I realized I had an ethical dilemma on my hands. What to do with the damned thing?

Hold onto it until the next time a passenger pays the fare with a hundred dollar bill and then give it as change? No, that wouldn’t be right. It would make me no better than the lowlife who’d handed it off to me. Besides, it could be months before a passenger tried to pay with a hundred.

Try to deposit it at a bank? Forget it, they’re money professionals and I’d probably wind up on some kind of surveillance list.

Turn it in to the government? As if.

Or just the obvious choice, use it to pay for something at a retail store. Yeah, that seemed like the way to go. But where?

It was this that was on my mind as I crossed the Manhattan Bridge, touching down on Canal Street in Chinatown. Immediately, as if Manhattan itself had supernatural powers, my luck turned. My next passenger, a middle-aged fellow who’d perhaps had too much to drink and didn’t want to wait around at train stations, took me out to Jersey City, New Jersey. These OT (out-of-town) jobs are flat-rate and lucrative. We charge much more than the normal, metered fare because a) we can, and b) by law, we’re not allowed pick up passengers outside of the New York City limits - we are required to come back to the city empty.

I was paid $45 plus an $8.50 tip for the twenty minute ride. Travel time back to Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel would be only another ten minutes, and that’s good money, but even better than that, I suddenly realized I had a perfect opportunity to pass off my fake fifty. A godsend, really.

There are about a dozen gas stations lined up in a row near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Gas is always cheaper in New Jersey than in New York due to lower taxes, so it saves a few dollars to fill up before entering the tube. What better place than an oil company to pass off a counterfeit bill? After all, haven’t I been getting raped by these people my whole life?

And there was one particular joint, a Gulf station, which I decided was especially worthy of my wrath. A few months earlier I’d had a run-in with an attendant there. New Jersey is one of only two states in the U.S. where, by law, there is no self-service at gas stations - an employee always comes out to do the task. The guy who pumped my gas at the Gulf station had made a hostile comment to me because he thought my fifty-cent tip should have been more. Now, I always tip well above average in situations where tipping is appropriate. I’m in a tipping business myself, after all. But I happen to know that tipping pump boys is not customary in New Jersey. I also happen to know that they make better money than New York City taxi drivers. So the guy had been out of line, in my opinion.

And now, ha-ha, it was get-even time.

I pulled into the station. Funny, even though it was where it was supposed to be, the place looked different. I realized it had been renovated - it was bigger, shinier, and better lit. The attendant came over immediately, but he wasn’t the same guy.

“Fill it?” he asked with a smile.

“Uh, yeah, regular, cash,” I replied.

Well, what to do? I no longer had a justification for using the bad bill. Or did I? Okay, I had no gripe with this particular attendant, but wasn’t he a party to an industry which is keeping me poor? I mean, when I started driving a cab in ‘77 I was paying $10 for a shift’s gasoline. Now I’m often paying more than $50. And I’m not making five times as much as I did in 1977. So what more justification did I need? The plan remained in place.

The total on the pump came to $29. Giving no indication by voice or body language that I was trying to pull a fast one, I handed him the $50 bill. A moment of truth was at hand, and that’s what it was - a moment. It took the guy maybe two seconds to recognize that the bill was a phony. He abruptly handed it back to me.

“This is counterfeit,” he said. Interestingly, there was no great outrage in his voice. Perhaps he was used to this sort of thing.

“What do you mean?” I replied, showing surprise and very genuine concern at hearing this startling revelation.

“It’s a fake.”

“How do you know?”

“Hold it up to the light.”

Throwing what may have been left of my personal integrity completely out the window, I jumped headfirst into an impromptu act of being utterly shocked that I had received and was now unwittingly attempting to pass on a counterfeit note of the United States Treasury, followed by outrage at whoever had done this to me and the deepest, most sincere apology to the attendant.

“I’m really, really sorry about this, man.”

I handed him some actual money to pay for the gas.

Oh, and I tipped him a dollar.

Cruising back toward Manhattan in the Holland Tunnel, the flaw in my thinking edged its way into my consciousness. I had been assuming that if I’d been able to get the guy at the Gulf station to take the fifty that the entity which would be out the money would be Gulf Incorporated, and that would be okay. But what if they had a policy of making their attendants pay for any phony money they’d accepted out of their own pockets? Maybe they do that, for all I know. Then I’d be victimizing the attendant, wouldn’t I? And that would not be okay.

Emerging from the tunnel in deepest thought, I realized I had been given an integrity wake-up call. There was simply no way out, integrity-wise, but to swallow the loss. Right away I started feeling better about myself. Hey, it wasn’t the end of the world. All I’d actually lost was forty dollars (the change I’d given for the fifty) and the time it had taken me to drive those guys to Buffalo Avenue. Not that big a deal in the larger scheme of things.

Still, it stung.

But onward into the night. My next fare was a drunk, middle-aged man coming out of a gay bar. He seemed friendly, so I thought I’d use him as a sounding board for the woes of my evening and started telling him about the counterfeit fifty. He slammed back that, forget it, he knew all about these cab driver tricks, I was just trying to get him to feel sorry for me so I could get a bigger tip out of him. Then he accused me of being a Jew.

What was going on? I’m a karma guy. I felt like I was in a rowboat and was being tossed around in Somebody’s Ocean. Why was all this happening to me? I believe, as I wrote at the end of the “Karma Versus Coincidence” chapter of my book, that “what can be fully viewed will vanish” (if I may quote myself). What was I not fully viewing? I did not know. Shouldn’t my slate have been wiped clean, so to speak, by the realization that the ethical thing to do was to not pass along the fifty? So why was I continuing to pull this crap in?

I did not know.

I decided to finish the shift in silence. Passengers had become too dangerous to communicate with, and that was that. I spoke not a word to the next fare, a couple of tourists traveling from the Village to the Upper West Side, nor to a finance guy on a long ride from Midtown way up to Washington Heights. I felt if I could just tip-toe my way around Whatever It Was, maybe it would blow out to sea by tomorrow.

Well, the strategy seemed to work. I had no further trouble with passengers for the final three hours of my shift and had almost forgotten about my extraordinarily lousy night when I pulled into the Hess Station on 44th and 10th at 5 a.m. to fill up.

Now, in New York City you pump your own gas. You go up to the cashier who sits in a secure, box-like structure, push the money through a slot, and then go back to your vehicle and pump away. Since I’d already spent $29 on gas in New Jersey I figured I only needed another $30, at most, to fill up the cab, so I placed a twenty and a ten into the slot, turned, and walked a few steps toward my taxi.

And that’s when the screaming began.

“THIS BILL IS NO GOOD!” screeched the voice of the cashier, a female who is normally surly without any special reason to be. I turned and looked back at her, quizzically.

“THIS IS NO GOOD!” she screamed again, waving the twenty dollar bill in the air.

What??? I walked over to the booth. This information was not being processed mentally.

“What are you talking about?” I almost screamed myself. “You want to see a fake bill, look at this!” And with that I pulled out the fifty and held it up. “This is a fake bill!”

On some moronic level I must have been thinking that I’d already met my quota of counterfeit money that night so there couldn’t possibly be more. Of course this made no sense whatsoever to the enraged cashier who continued to wave the twenty in the air as if it were a flag.

“THIS BILL IS NO GOOD!” she screamed again and shoved it back at me through the slot.

I picked up the bill and looked at it. Oh my God, it was indeed a fake. Not nearly as well made as the fifty - the green ink was too bright and anyone who handles money could see at a glance that this one was suspicious. Except me, apparently.

Stunned, I apologized profusely to the cashier. Oddly, this time my apology was quite genuine as I’d really had no idea that I’d handed her a fake. But unlike the attendant at the Gulf station in New Jersey, she was not inclined to be so forgiving, screaming again that the bill was no good and giving me the evil eye of death. Talk about karma being a bitch, indeed.

I handed her another twenty dollar bill from my wad, making sure this one was not also a fake, and then, as I walked toward my cab in a daze, it hit me. Oh, God, no, could it be?

I opened up my roll of bills and looked warily at each of the twenties. There was the counterfeit she’d just returned to me. The next twenty was perfectly fine, nothing wrong with it. Then another, also fine. And then… oh, shit, there it was - another fake twenty!

Yes, I had not one, but two counterfeit twenties - both with the same serial numbers - in my roll. And now I finally understood what had happened: when the characters in Brooklyn handed me the fifty, I’d given them two twenties as change for the ten dollar fare. Then the guy going to the card game said he needed smaller bills. He handed me two twenties back and I gave him eight fives. But the twenties he’d given me weren’t the twenties I’d given him! He’d switched them for his counterfeits. It was dark in the cab and I hadn’t noticed.

So the whole thing had been a set-up, beginning with the first guy telling me he was going to Manhattan, which he’d never intended to do. There had been no “card game”. They didn’t need “change”. I’d been royally conned by a couple of very smooth operators. Damn, I’d even told them “good luck” as they left the cab.

Ouch!

It's been just over a year now and I still have attention on the events of that shift. Had there actually been “something in the air that night”?

Yes, there had been danger without, the turbulence in the vicinity of McDonough Street.

But there had been danger within as well. Something else, the nebulous something I had been vaguely aware of, had come from within, a mental phenomenon. What exactly it was I do not know - it has not been fully viewed.

So what is one to do?

Be more alert.

Be more honest.

Try to raise your level of confront.

And may the storm pass you by.

Good Morning, Have A Nice Night

A comment I often hear from passengers just after they learn how long I've been driving a cab is, "Wow, you must have seen it all!" My standard reply is, "Yeah, I have seen it all. Until I see the next thing."

As an example, let's take the crime of robbery. Many years ago two men jumped in my cab in a rush in front of the Hilton Hotel on 6th Avenue. They stayed in the taxi for only about three minutes before ordering me to pull over, then they paid the fare and disappeared into the street. A few moments later I discovered an opened briefcase and an opened piece of luggage lying on the floorboard back there with various items scattered around, which I suspected were the leftovers from a crime. I returned to the hotel, reported the incident, and had my suspicion confirmed - a guest waiting on the check-in line had placed his briefcase and luggage on the floor, had been distracted, and then discovered they were gone. My passengers had used my cab as a getaway car.

"Wow," I thought, "now I've seen it all!"

And that's what I continued to think until a few years later when I had a passenger actually mugged while sitting in the back seat by three slick thieves who approached the cab from the street while we were stopped at a red light in Chinatown.

"Wow," I thought, "now I have seen it all!"

And that's what I continued to think until a few years later when I had a passenger in my cab get robbed by the person sitting next to him in the cab! They were two men who'd emerged from a gay bar in Midtown and were en route to a residential address on the Upper West Side. Suddenly there was commotion in the back seat, the two of them wrestling around. I thought it was groping but what was actually going on was grabbing. The larger man was assaulting the other one and grabbed money from his pocket. He then opened his door, causing me to stop abruptly, and scurried off into the darkness. What had been thought by the victim to be a "pick up" had actually been a "set up".

"Wow," I thought, "now I really have seen it all!"

I'm mentioning this because now I can finally and definitively say that I have indeed seen it all. It wasn't a robbery, it was something else. But this is it, it's official, the book is closed. I have now seen it all...

It happened on the 6th of July of this year, a Tuesday, at exactly 7:55 p.m. I had just dropped off a passenger at the Marriott hotel on 92nd Street between 1st and York, a residential area on the Upper East Side, when I had a bit of good fortune in the form of a new passenger entering the cab as soon as the old one got out. Quick turnovers of passengers are the ingredients of a good money night.


My new passenger was a middle-aged woman, around fifty years old, neatly dressed, who told me she wanted to go uptown to 106th Street and 5th Avenue. I said okay, turned on the meter, and we were on our way. I made a couple of turns, waited at a couple of red lights, and was soon cruising up 1st Avenue. It was simple navigation - a left on 106th, across Spanish Harlem to 5th, and there we would be.

During the ride up to this point my passenger had been talking with someone on her cell phone, which is so common today. When that conversation ended she put aside her phone and spoke directly to me.

"Excuse me, driver," she asked, "do you know what time it is?"

I looked at the digital clock on the dashboard. It was visible from the back seat, so I wondered why she hadn't just looked at it herself. But, no matter, I was glad to accommodate.

"7:55," I said.

Instead of a "thank you", there was a silence. I looked at her in the mirror to see by her facial expression if she had heard me. She had, but she seemed confused. Then she spoke:

"A.M. or P.M.?" she asked.

"P.M., of course!" I replied, laughing.

I looked at her again in the mirror. To my surprise, she wasn't smiling. Her expression was rather grim, as if she'd just received some bad news.

"Are you sure?" she asked, almost pleading.

"Ma'am," I replied, "there are three things I'm certain of. Everything else is debatable , but these three things I am certain of - my name, my address, and whether it is night or day. Yes, I'm sure! It's P.M.!" I laughed again. Clearly, this was hysterical.

"You're really sure?" she asked again, this time with a touch of resignation and sadness in her voice, as if her fate had just been revealed to her.

"I'll tell you what," I said, "if the sun hasn't gone down by nine o'clock, I'll refund you the money for this ride. I'll give you my card, you can call me." This was funny!

"Oh, my god," she muttered, more to herself than to me.

"You thought it was 7:55 in the morning?"

"Yes," she replied, almost in a whisper, seemingly ashamed of herself and going into an introspective spin.

Interestingly, if one were to judge only by the brightness of the sky, it could have been either morning or evening. In July the sun rises at around 6 and sets at around 9. Still, since the invention of the sundial Man has had better ways of knowing what time it is than by just looking up. I realized she was in need of some taxi driver counseling, so I jumped into it.

"Why would you think it was the A.M.?" I asked, with considerable curiosity.

And she told me this story...

Her home and her company are in the midwestern state of Arkansas but she had been living and working in New York on a special project for the last six months as a "systems coordinator" at the Cardinal Spellman Hospital at 106th and 5th Avenue. The Marriott Hotel, where I picked her up, has been her home away from home all these months. At four o'clock, earlier that evening, she finished her day at the hospital, went back to her room in the Marriott, and decided to take a nap before waking at 7:00 to do a bit more on her project. She set her alarm and went to sleep.

When she awoke at 7, she had completely forgotten about the idea of doing more work in her hotel room and thought it was morning. She got out of bed, took a shower, dressed, did her face and her hair and went downstairs to get a cab. When she found one (mine) she was simply on her way to work to start a new day, having no idea it actually was not a new day.

Then her cell phone rang. It was her husband in Arkansas, calling to tell her he was sorry he hadn't called earlier, but he'd just gotten home. This confused her because she thought he should still be in bed asleep (it was 6:55 in Arkansas). He didn't usually get up until 7:30. He told her he'd had to work overtime at his job, that's why he was late getting home. She thought he meant he'd been working all night, and that never had happened before, so she asked him what in the world was so important that they expected him to stay at the job all night. He told her he hadn't been working all night, he'd only been working until 6:30.

"Then why didn't you call me last night?" she'd asked.

"I did call you last night," he'd replied.

"No, you didn't," she'd said, "I went to bed without hearing from you."

He reminded her of what they had talked about and she told him that that wasn't last night, it was two nights ago. Completely confused, it occurred to her that he might be putting her on. So she told her husband she'd call him back in a few minutes and ended the phone call. She knew of a way to find out the truth.

She would just ask her cab driver what time it was.

So there we were, on 106th and 2nd, in a reality free-fall zone.

"Should I take you back to the hotel?" I asked.

"Yes, I guess so," she replied from the haze.

I felt sympathetic toward her and tried to cheer her up. It was an understandable confusion, I said, and from the light of the sky it really could have been either A.M. or P.M. She didn't seem particularly consoled, so I tried to think of something else to tell her, something that would be worse, and I came up with this...

"Listen, if you think this is so terrible, not once, not twice. but three times I've had tourists in my cab who not only did not know the location of the hotel they were staying at, they didn't know the name of the hotel, either. Each time we had to wander around the city trying to locate their hotel by descriptions of landmarks only." (Oddly enough, all three times they were Englishmen. Go figure.)

That may have helped a bit. Looking at her in the mirror, I thought I saw a slight smile back there.

Her ride into the Twilight Zone and back came to $7.90. She paid with a corporate credit card and threw in a $1.50 tip. I thought it was appropriate that her company should pay. Strange city. Too many months away. Taking your work home with you to a place that's not even your home. In the military they have an expression for it:

"Shell shock".

********

People have also been known to have been shocked by clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi. It could happen to you.

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.

Taxi Driver Cop, Part Two

If you've been reading this blog for awhile you know that I'm big on the karma vs. coincidence thing. I'm not an extremist - I do think there's such a thing as coincidence. Let's say an asteroid has been on a collision course with Earth for a billion years and it comes down on YOU. That's a coincidence. But if you've been playing a favorite song in your head for an half an hour and then the person who sings that song from out of nowhere suddenly gets in your cab, that's karma. It's a your universe being senior to the physical universe or the universes of others thing. There's an energy involved.

So what happened merely 30 minutes after my pathetic attempt to be a taxi driver cop with the fake cab (see my last post) cannot be written off as coincidence. Karma, baby!

It was a bit after 4 in the morning, the time of night when I'm looking for "one more fare" (the shift ends at 5 a.m.). I was cruising up 6th Avenue, approaching 15th Street, when something caught my eye on the right side of the avenue. There was a yellow, medallion taxi stopped in what should be a moving lane and a twenty-something guy standing there with a bicycle on the cab's right side, opposite the driver. I pulled up a bit behind them and stopped, thinking maybe the guy wanted to put his bike in the trunk and for some reason the driver didn't want to do that and maybe I would get the fare for myself. I have no problem putting bicycles in trunks.

But what was happening was actually the beginning of some kind of a confrontation. The guy with the bicycle started screaming at the driver. I couldn't hear what he was saying nor could I even see the driver of the cab. But I could see that for some reason this guy with the bicycle was extremely angry. Right away I decided that I wanted no part of him and locked my doors. I was about to pull away and continue up 6th, but before I could do that, the situation escalated. He started whacking at the taxi's windows with his arm, perhaps trying to break them.

For me - and this is one of the things I like about driving a cab - it was one of those little instantaneous moments of truth. I could drive away. Or I could stay there.

I stayed there.

I had no idea what this guy was so pissed off about, but now it didn't matter to me. He was attacking a taxi and that zone of human activity is mine, so I was on the side of the taxi and its driver. Even so, I had no intention of getting out of my cab and confronting the guy. I just thought that the presence of another yellow cab might act as a deterrent to him.

To the contrary.

He then lifted his bicycle in the air and slammed it against the side of the taxi, breaking the side view mirror off. I'm not sure what category of crime this would fit into - assault with a deadly bicycle? - but it was felony stuff, no doubt. I expected him to then take off, but instead he just stood there and removed his bicycle chain from its prior location, around his neck, and held it in his hand in anticipation of the driver coming out of his cab to attack him, which would have been the all-too-common response to the stimulus. The "thinking" here is that sufficient motivation has been given to warrant a violent reaction, so what he really wants to do, pummel the driver into a paste, could be justified as "self-defense". Psycho.

But, amazingly, the driver did not get out - he just stayed in his cab. The two-wheeled assailant stood there for a quarter of a minute or so and then, deciding that the game was over, walked his bike across 6th Avenue and turned south toward 14th Street when he set foot on the sidewalk. I backed my cab up to the intersection of 14th Street and saw him pick up his bike and begin to walk down the stairs of the subway station there.

The need for justice runs deep in the human psyche. In the relative scale of criminal activity what I had just witnessed was not that big a deal, although it wasn't nothing. Yet I felt something stir deep within that demanded the situation be rectified. Even so, in this society, one is entering a minefield when action is taken. Considerations of physical danger, retribution, lawsuits, lawyers, legal fees, and enormous stress set in the moment one decides to take it upon oneself to do something about it. But there is one thing you can always do, although in these situations it never seems to work.

You can call the cops.

That's what you're supposed to do, right?

So I got out my cell phone and called 911. Inevitably, whenever you dial 911 with a need for immediate assistance, the person on the other end seems to be in no rush at all. I believe it's a game they play. As I tried to communicate the urgency of the situation, the driver of the cab, an Indian fellow, finally emerged from his vehicle, also speaking into a cell phone, and walked toward me. As I explained to him that his assailant had gone down into the subway and that I was calling the cops, the guy suddenly reappeared on the street, bicycle in hand, and began nonchalantly walking down 14th Street toward 7th Avenue. The window of opportunity for having this guy arrested was rapidly disappearing.

What happened next could be described by some as a modern urban miracle. There is an axiom of life in the city that is as unshakable as "you can't fight city hall" and "shit happens". It is this: "you can never find a cop when you need one".

What happened was that, perhaps for the first time in recorded history, I found a cop when I needed one. A cruiser was coming along on 14th Street. I flagged it down, explained the situation to the officers, and they took the Indian driver in their back seat to go hunt for the guy with the bicycle while I kept an eye on his taxi (which he left with the engine running). Within a minute three or four more cruisers arrived on the scene and the guy and his bicycle were under arrest. An officer returned to me to take my name and a statement, thanked me, and said they had all they would need. I wished the Indian driver good luck and was on my way.

The whole incident took about 10 minutes.

And I'm thinking as I zipped up 6th Avenue, still looking for one more fare, wait a minute, this never happens. Some anger management clown with a sense of entitlement in the area of taxi drivers bashes in a cab and then gets arrested?

This never happens!

But it did.

********

It kind of makes you want to click here for Pictures From A Taxi, does it not?

Taxi Driver Cop, Part One

Somewhere along the line, many years ago, for some reason I decided that the taxi industry in New York City was "mine". There was enough about it that was a right fit for me to make me not look at its problems as being somebody else's problems. I developed a willingness to be at cause in this particular sector of human activitiy. You could call it a sense of responsibility.

And that's how I became a taxi driver cop.

I find that if I happen to see something very wrong that involves a taxicab on the street, my impulse is to do something about it if I can, within limits. You don't want to put yourself in danger, of course. But if possible, I will act.

And that's what happened last Tuesday night at 3:30 a.m. I was taking a twenty-something female, who'd been working late, to her home in Brooklyn from Midtown. As I glided down Broadway without traffic something caught my eye a couple of blocks north of Houston Street. It was a fake taxi cruising down the avenue just in front of us.

There are a few of these guys out there. They buy themselves a Ford Crown Vic, the vehicle that is the most used as a taxicab in New York, paint it yellow, put a rooflight on top, and do their best to make it look like a legitimate cab. These vehicles may actually be a legal cabs in some other part of New York State, such as Westchester County, but it is totally illegal for them to be used to pick up passengers from the street in the city. That is strictly the province of the New York medallion taxis. (Click here to see my related post, Interview With The Vampire.)

I can tell at a glance when I see one of these guys. Some of the little things that most people wouldn't recognize as outpoints, such as the medallion number or various markings on the cab, are obvious to me.

I pointed the taxi out to my passenger. This would be a good topic of conversation.

"Do you see that cab in front of us?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Would you get into that cab if it stopped for you on the street?"

"Yeah, I guess so, why?"

"That's a fake cab!" I exclaimed with a bit of dramatic emphasis.

"It is?" How can you tell?"

"Well, for one thing, it's a '97 Crown Vic. Cars that old aren't on the streets as taxis anymore. Also, the medallion identification letter is wrong. See how he's got the letter "I" between the other three numbers? We don't use that letter in the medallion identification system."

"Oh, wow!"

She was impressed, but I thought I could do more. We had stopped for a red light and were able to pull right up next to the fake cab. I looked into the compartment and saw that the driver was a white man in his forties. I had never seen this guy before and decided to let him know that I knew what he was up to. Yeah, let him know that he might think he's clever in stealing business from legitimate taxi drivers, but we know what he's doing and he won't get away with it forever. It was Taxi Driver Cop time.

I called over to him through our opened windows.

"Hey!"

He looked over at me, a bit sheepishly I thought, probably wondering if in fact I was an undercover cop. My passenger was taking it all in with great interest and I have to admit that it did cross my mind that this little macho display might be the kind of thing that turned her on, you never know about women.

"I see what you're doing," I barked in accusation. "You'd better not pick anyone up. I'm watching you!"

I don't see the point in making an attempt to be courteous to a person like this. Here's someone who's blatantly stealing business away from cabbies who are playing by the rules. And, what, we don't have enough competition amongst ourselves wihout him? Fuck him.

He looked at me with a kind of blank expression on his face. This was odd, because I'd expect his reaction to be one of either hostility or fear, but if anything he just looked a little confused. And then he spoke.

"We're making a movie!" he said. And he pointed down Broadway to the next block.

I looked down the street. Parked along the curb were several huge movie trailers and some heavy equipment that are used in big-budget productions. This "fake taxicab" was a movie prop!

I looked back at the driver. He looked back at me with an expression on his face that I believe could be interpeted as meaning, "What are you? An idiot?"

I exhibited one of those shit-eating smiles that people are known to put on their faces when they have just made complete jackasses out of themselves.

"Oh," I said... "never mind!"

It took another fifteen minutes to get the passenger to her house in Brooklyn. But somehow it seemed like an hour to me. You know that expression about how time flies when you're having fun? Well, it turns out time crawls when you're having humiliation.

********

However, time really flies if you click here for Pictures From A Taxi. Or so I've heard.

The Three Strikes And You're Out System

Quite often, after a passenger learns that I've been driving a cab in New York City for thirty years, they will ask me if I've ever been held up.

"You mean tonight?" is my usual wiseass reply.

"Noooo... ever!"

"How many times would you guess?" I ask.

They think about it for a minute, doing some kind of math based on a thirty-year time span.

"Ten?"

"Nope."

"Twenty?"

Wrong again. Sorry to disappoint anyone who's hoping to get a juicy tale out of me, but the answer is actually ZERO. Throughout all those years in the '70s and '80s when New York had such a high crime rate, I was driving cabs that had no partitions to protect me from passengers and I was taking people to the worst neighborhoods in the city almost every night, yet I have never been the victim of a robbery. I've had people rip me off by not paying the fare, sure, and once a kid on the street tried unsuccessfully to grab the money that was in my shirt pocket, but I've never had a passenger pull out a weapon or in any way attempt to separate me from my money. Never.

When I tell people this, what I usually hear is, "Knock on wood."

Like hell I will. If I thought it was luck, then I would also think that any day now my luck is about to run out. It isn't luck.

I have a system...

Many years ago - I think it was in 1978 - I had a conversation with a passenger in my cab which may have saved my life. The passenger was a woman who was an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn. Our conversation had to do with violent crime, a subject that was on everybody's mind in the city in those days. She told me she had prosecuted hundreds of violent criminals and had come to this conclusion: the one you think it is, it is.

"The one you think it is, it is." Those words remained in my consciousness, big time, and it led to the development of my taxi driver's anti-crime system. What she meant was that people who commit stupid, violent crimes look the part. And holding up a cab at gunpoint or knife point in the hope of getting, what? - a couple of hundred dollars? - is a really stupid crime because the idiot is risking years in jail in order to get so little.

The beauty of it, if you want to call it that, is that someone who is that stupid is also not smart enough to dress up in a three-piece suit in order to fool the cab driver. Because if he was smart enough to do that, he wouldn't commit the crime in the first place. He'd commit a different kind of crime, like stealing pocketbooks in restaurants, instead.

After you drive a cab for six months or so you begin to become quite familiar with the various types of passengers you tend to get on any given day. Generally speaking, your customers are people who can afford to pay the fare and fit into certain categories, like business travelers, tourists, working New Yorkers, etc. So the odd person who does not fit into one of these categories stands out like a sore toenail and that is the person you pay careful attention to.

And that is where my system begins.

STRIKE ONE: the passenger looks like Godzilla and I would have driven right past him without stopping, but somehow this guy (it's never an unaccompanied female) made it into my cab anyway. Maybe I was stopped at a red light and he got in or maybe he got in before the previous, departing passenger could close the door, but one way or the other, there he is in my cab. I am stuck with him.

When I say he "looks like Godzilla" what I mean is that he looks like a thug. This is a guy who, to my eye, looks conceivably like someone who is low-life enough to think it would be worthwhile to stick up a taxi driver. It is a judgement call by me based on years of experience. I do not compromise my own reality.

However, this is only Strike One. I do not make any attempt to get him out of my cab or give him a hard time. I merely ask him where he wants to go and start driving in that direction. If the place he wants to go is a well-populated street in a decent part of town, I have no problem with it. Even a stupid criminal is smart enough not to try to stick you up in the middle of Herald Square. But if he wants to go to the South Bronx at two in the morning, then it's...

STRIKE TWO: he's taking me to a bad part of the city at a time of the night when I don't feel safe going there. If the guy is planning on holding me up, this is where he wants me to be. He could direct me to drive into a dark, deserted street in an area where he feels safe and commit the crime there.

When a passenger has two strikes, I have a distinctly uneasy feeling about him. The fare seems wrong. My instincts tell me I am heading into trouble. This is the critical time for a cab driver. The incorrect thing to do is to "hope". You don't want to find yourself in that dark, deserted street with this guy. On the other hand, it would also be wrong to refuse to drive him there. Maybe he's okay. But you don't know that yet, and what must be done at this point is to find out.

I emphasize "must be done". Finding out if this guy is intending to hold you up is the difference between being at Cause or being at Effect, possibly even between life and death. And you must remain at Cause in this situation. How can that be done?

I do it by forcing myself to have a conversation with him. I will just start talking to this guy about ANYTHING. It could be sports, politics, the weather, the economy, traffic, giraffes, people passing by on the street, the color of my true love's eyes, if Burger King's fries are really better than McDonald's... ANYTHING. As I am talking to him, I am carefully watching his reaction to my communication in the mirror. I am trying to determine, by his response or lack of response, what is going on in his mind. I am trying to get a "feel" for the guy.

Interestingly, 99 percent of the time he turns out to be okay. I can see by the way he talks that he does not have an evil intention. I continue on with the ride and he pays the fare. But what about that one percent? What if the guy speaks with some hostility, is sarcastic, or won't communicate at all? What if, after forcing myself to converse with him, I still have a bad feeling about the guy? Then it's...

STRIKE THREE: he is out. I must get this guy out of my cab and I must do it in a busy place where there are lots of people around. How to get rid of him? There are three basic ways:

A) Overtly. You pull up next to a police car and announce to the passenger that you don't like the feeling of this ride and you're not continuing on with it. You don't charge the guy for the ride but if he has a problem, there's the police officer. Or, if there's no cop around, shut the partition and lock it and order him out of the cab. Again, no charge. Make sure you stop in a place where you can pull away the moment his foot touches the pavement.

The overt method is not recommended. It could lead to a confrontation or a ticket for a refusal from the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Better than that are the other two methods, the sneaky methods, both of which require a little acting skill...

B) Covertly, Part 1. There is something wrong with the car. Years ago, when I owned my own cab, I had a cut-off switch installed in the taxi. Whenever I hit the switch, the engine would stop running and wouldn't start up again. It was (and still is) illegal, of course, as it could be easily abused to refuse fares you don't feel like taking. But that was the perfect tool. However, if you can't get a cut-off switch installed, there is another way.

Press your foot lightly on the emergency brake to the point where the red "brake" light appears on the dashboard. It will not affect the movement of the car if the pressure of your foot is very slight, but the red light will come on nevertheless. Then announce to the passenger that the brake light just came on and the brake pedal is going all the way down to the floorboard when you step on it, so you're going to have to end the ride and call a tow truck. Don't charge him for the ride as he leaves the premises. Then lock the doors, put your off-duty light on, and drive away.

C) Covertly, Part 2. There's something wrong with you. One way of doing this is the fake cell phone call. You pull out your cell phone and pretend that you're having a conversation with a family member. There has been a terrible accident and a relative has been taken to the hospital. You must get there at once. Sorry, but you're going to have to drop him off right now. No charge.

And then there is the most drastic, yet effective, way of all: "Very sorry, it's really embarrassing to say this, but I have diarrhea." No need to elaborate! Just remember to do this only in a busy place with lots of people around.

So there it is. If you are a cab driver yourself, I urge you to study and practice the Three Strikes And You're Out System even if you have a two-way radio in your cab. (In New York, we don't have radios - all our business comes right off the street.) And if you know someone who is a cab driver, please print out this post and put it in his or her hands. You never know, you might be saving a life.

The Dwindling Spiral

"The dwindling spiral" - it's a figure of speech used to describe a situation in which someone is headed on a path toward inevitable destruction. It's as if there's a force in the universe, like a whirlpool, that is attracted to someone due to a flaw in that person's character and, once it has him in its grip, the journey to extinction is unstoppable. 

What can be fascinating is that this process can be so obvious to you but remain completely unseen by the person who is actually heading down the drain. I had such a person in my cab a few days ago. He was a guy, about 35 years old, whom I picked up in the Upper East Side late last Tuesday night headed to Battery Park City, an upscale apartment complex way downtown in the Financial District. He had curly blond hair that went down almost to his shoulders, eyelids that looked like he was having difficulty keeping opened, and the glazed-over demeanor of someone who'd been doing a lot of drinking. But this is a good late-night fare, so I was glad to have the guy aboard. And what made it better was that although he was obviously a party-animal kind of dude, he was quite talkative and not arrogant or rude as many of these people tend to be. So this was going to be a fun ride. 

We whizzed down 5th Avenue without any traffic and there wasn't yet much more than aimless chit-chat between us until we were approaching 33rd Street, just past the Empire State Building. At this point he suddenly had a big idea. He asked me to slow down, make a right turn on 33rd, and stop. His object of attention was a place called "Joy" which was a short distance down the street. He told me if this joint was open he would be getting out right there (a shortened ride and a disappointment to me), but on inspection it was clear that the establishment was shut down for the night. 

So what was "Joy", I wanted to know. He told me it was a massage parlor where for a hundred bucks you could get an hour-long massage from an Asian lovely with a "happy ending" if you wanted it. Well, I knew these places were around town but what I found intriguing were two things: 1) that it was on the ground floor with a sign on the front door, and 2) that this guy was ready to go into it on a whim. I mean, a minute ago he was all set to go home to Battery Park City and then, out of the blue it's, hey, let's have some wang with Miss Wong. 

This was an action that opened a window into character. Here was a guy who was living on the edge of something. He was not your normal working stiff having a big night out. He was different. I wanted to know more about him, so I delved. And this was his story...

He had been a Wall Street trader for a number of years and had made quite a bit of money. His business had brought him to Brazil several times and he'd even lived there for a while. During the time he was in that country he discovered something that really appealed to him - that he could live like a king there for relatively little money. So he had recently decided to move to Brazil. He bought a house on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, hired two servants, and all it costs him is a thousand dollars a month, total. But my passenger didn't make this move to set up a business or pursue some kind of inner calling. He made the move to party. He'd had enough of the Wall Street game. Now it was time to get down. He hadn't taken the trouble to learn the language (Portuguese). He had no involvement in the community of his adopted country. This was going to be an endless run of sex, drugs, and the Samba.

Now it probably wouldn't surprise you too much to learn that someone in this situation had pulled in the following: only three weeks prior to his being in my cab, he'd been driving his own car in his town in Brazil at night and was pulled over by some kind of military police outfit. They proceeded to search him and his car and, according to my passenger, he actually witnessed them dropping a packet of cocaine into the trunk. But they didn't arrest him and haul him down to the police station. They let him get on his cell phone with his lawyer and conducted a thinly-veiled extortion in which a price (several thousand dollars) was agreed upon to have the charges dropped. They then accompanied him to his house to get their money, but he only had enough cash for part of the amount they demanded. So they gave him a bank account number and directed him to deposit the rest of the money into it the next day, which he agreed to do. 

And then they left. 

However, when he tried to make the cash transfer the next day, for reasons he did not understand, the bank account number he was given was said to be invalid. Very shortly after that, he left Brazil and came back to the USA. But my passenger, who told me he thought at the time that these cops might take his money and then just kill him, knows they're still back there and are expecting to get more out of him. 

"Well," I said, "so much for the Brazil experiment," thinking there was no way in the world he would ever return there. 

"Oh, no," he said, "I'm going back next week." 

 "You mean to sell your house?" 

 "No, I'm not leavin' there." 

 "But what about these guys? They know where you live!" 

He just shrugged his shoulders and made an expression on his face as if to say, "Whatever will be, will be." 

I was amazed by his response, but before I had a chance to ask him why he would decide to return to living in such a dangerous environment when he didn't have to, we had arrived at his destination and the only other thing I had the time to say was, "Good luck." 

I thought quite a bit about what his reasons for returning to Brazil could be as I drove around Manhattan that night, but after a while I realized that whatever he would have said would certainly not have been the truth. Because he couldn't see it himself even though it was so glaringly obvious to me. This guy had a character flaw - his only purpose for living was to get laid and to get high. And the lure of that lifestyle and the grip that it had on him made his confront of his environment too low to observe that he was a sitting duck for predators who, like snakes moving in on an easy kill, could put the bite on him at any time. 

He was in a dwindling spiral.

********

Nothing dangerous about clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi, however.

Australian Bullet Story

This Karma Vs. Coincidence thing seems to have a karma of its own. What I mean is, ever since I wrote that post a few weeks ago I've had some attention on the phenomenon of unlikely things happening simply because I have my attention on them. And as a result of that it seems to keep happening. Or maybe these things happen all the time but I haven't been really noticing it as much as I have been recently.

Anyway, here's the latest installment...

Last Thursday night at 9:05 I picked up a middle-aged, Australian woman in the Meat-Packing District who was headed for the Holiday Inn Hotel in Chinatown. She was in great spirits and quite chatty and we wound up having one of those lively conversations that easily bounce around all over the place. We somehow got on the subject of internet dating and she told me that she'd tried it and had gone through a couple of dozen dates that didn't amount to anything, except for one particular man whom she'd dated for eight months. And then she told me this truly bizarre story of something that had happened to him years before she'd met him...

He was a policeman in Perth. One day he pulled a motorist over to the side of the road in a deserted area for a traffic infraction. While he was speaking to the motorist, a third man approached them on foot. For no reason whatsoever this third man suddenly pulled out a gun and fired it into the head of not the cop, but the motorist sitting in his car, killing him instantly.

Her former boyfriend (the cop) immediately did what he'd been trained to do, which was to run away in zig-zags to make himself a difficult target. Nevertheless, he was hit by a bullet in the thigh. Fortunately he was able to keep running and he did elude the maniac with the gun.

I asked her why he didn't pull out his own gun and she told me that at that time police officers in Australia did not carry weapons. But that now they do. And that the reason that law was changed was this very incident. So it was a famous case in Australia.

Anyway, later that evening the gunman, whom my passenger described as a "psychiatric case", went to the home of his boss with the intention of killing him, too. The boss, however, was somehow able to talk him out of it and his would-be killer left, only to turn his gun on himself and commit suicide a few hours later.

Ten years went by. Apparently according to Australian law, evidence must be held by the government for ten years even when the perpetrator is dead and no one had been put on trial. At the end of that time, the evidence is either given back to whomever it belonged to, or it is destroyed. In this case the policeman, who at that time was dating my passenger, was notified that if he wanted the bullets that had been recovered at the murder scene, he could have them.

He decided to accept them. But then, having accepted them, he didn't know what to do with them and this became an odd dilemma. He was considering, among other options, having them mounted in transparent plexiglass as a trophy, but, as this was at the time when they stopped dating, my passenger wasn't sure what he had finally decided to do with them.

And that was the Australian bullet story.

Two hours later I pick up another middle-aged Australian woman. Now right away the odds of picking up two middle-aged Australian women in the same shift are quite slim, probably on the order of 10,000 to 1. I can't recall that this ever happened before. This one also is quite chatty and we engage in a lively conversation. The discussion turns to the danger of crime being commited in a taxicab, and then to crime in general. And then to the police.

Without any prompting from me, she makes this statement: "The police in Australia don't carry guns. Well, they do now, but they never did until recently."

After picking up my eyes (which had popped out of my head) and my jaw (which had dropped to the floor), I informed her that the ex-girlfriend of the cop whose case caused that law to be changed was sitting in the seat she now occupies only two hours ago.

Once again, I ask you, what are the odds here? What are the odds of a second Australian woman appearing in my cab and bringing up the same subject that a previous Australian woman had been talking about only two hours earlier? Was this coincidence?

Or do things actually appear out of nowhere simply because we have our attention on them?




Come to think of it, this might be a pretty good time to put your attention on Pictures From A Taxi. Just click right here.