The Best Day Of Your Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Visiting hours over?" I asked.

That was all it took. 

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

And my passenger was.

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

"What's her name?"

"Harper."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

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

Always gets a laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

I believe that to be true.

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

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

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

Big smile. 

He took the receipt.

And we shook hands.

Running The Gamut, Number Two

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

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

You get the idea.

Let's start at the top.

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

They divide their 100 into four categories:

1) Leaders

2) Artists

3) Thinkers

4) Heroes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, lots of them," he replied.

"Any big names?"

"Elton John."

"Wow!"

"Sarah Palin."

"Wow!"

"Bill Clinton."

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

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

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

"He is, it's true."

"So what was your end of the deal?"

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

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

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

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

"So... who are you?"

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

Kind of like God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hi, there," said I.

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

"So where are you heading?"

"Yeah."

"Where you wanna go?"

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

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

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

I'd run the gamut.

********

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

Mission To Haiti

One of the little side-benefits of driving a cab in New York City is that you occasionally have a window presented to you through which to gain an insight into major world events. For example, to go way, way back, I once had a military man in full uniform get in my cab who was en route to New York's Sloan-Kettering Hospital. It turned out he was a general in the army of the overthrown Iranian government who was going to visit "His Excellency" in the hospital. "His Excellency" was the Shah of Iran who had been overthrown by the Islamic revolution and was at that time receiving treatment for cancer at the hospital (from which he died shortly thereafter). I didn't have a conversation of any substance with this military man, but his seriousness, his stiffness, his continuing to wear the uniform of an army that no longer existed as a show of respect for the deposed Shah, and his use of the term "His Excellency" have remained with me all these years. An abstraction had been given some mass, a face. Whenever the Iranian situation was mentioned after that I could think back on this ride and get a feeling for the way it was, just based on the way this general in my cab carried himself.

I had a ride like that a few days ago.

I picked up a young man in Manhattan who was headed for Kennedy Airport, and from there he would be flying home to London. New York was a stopover in his journey from his original point of departure - Haiti, a place that, of course, is very much in the news these days. He told me he is a photographer and had donated his services to record some of the relief effort that is in progress on the devastated island.

Getting a report about something from someone who was actually on the scene makes a deeper impression on me than just seeing it on the television or hearing about it on the radio. And the stories he told me were inspirational:

- volunteers who in the morning would have recoiled at the sight of someone receiving an injection were taught how to do it and by night's end had administered hundreds of inoculations to Haitians at risk of disease,

- a volunteer took half a day to teach himself to identify all the instruments used in surgery so he could then serve as an assistant and thus free up a doctor to perform surgery who otherwise would have been doing the job of handing instruments to surgeons himself,

- volunteers were sleeping in tents, eating food packets provided by the military, using makeshift latrines as bathrooms, and taking showers from water coming down from elevated buckets,

-people were experiencing the exhilaration of knowing that they were actually saving other people's lives and knowing as well that their reach was expanding and that they would never be the same again.

It occurred to me later that changes for the better often go unnoticed and unacknowledged. Here is a country literally being invaded by people who have come to help. Some of them are specialists, some of them are there to just help in any way they are needed. Soldiers arrive in huge planes and are deployed to distribute food. These kinds of things have not been the normal way the history of the human race has been written.

It brings to mind the dream of a brave new world and it's enough to make an optimist out of you.

The name of my passenger was Felix Kunze.

You can see his photography at felixkunze.com.

The Case of the Twisted Testicle

Are you a people-watcher? Do you ever look at people walking by on the street and wonder what they've been doing all day? In New York, with its endless stream of humanity shuffling by, this is a popular activity. Most people appear to be pretty much the same as each other, but what do they actually DO?

One of the great things about taxi-driving is that people plop themselves in your car and you have a chance of turning this idle daydream into a tour of someone's reality. And sometimes, once you know it, you think, "Who in the world could ever have guessed THAT?"

I had one of these the other day.

I was cruising up 1st Avenue, looking for my next fare, when I saw two people, a man and a woman, hailing me in front of New York University Hospital at 32nd Street. At first I thought they were together but as I approached them I could see that they were standing a bit of a distance apart and were actually in competition with each other for possession of my taxi. In these situations I will try to position the cab so that the rear door is an equal distance between them when I stop and then let them settle it (or fight for it) between themselves. I don't know who's been standing there the longest and I don't want to appear to be favoring one over the other.

Anyway, the man, a thirty-something, got in. And right away he had something to say about the woman he'd left behind. "Man, I hate that. She thinks because she's a woman that she has some kind of a right to the cab. She knew damn well I was out there first and she walked right in front of me."

"Oh, you were out there first? I couldn't tell."

"Bitch!"

This outburst led to a conversation about the etiquette of taxi hailing, which is basically an uncodified sector of human conduct. You can often see what someone's made of when he or she is trying to catch a cab because there are no social consequences involved. The assumption is that the other person is someone you will never see again. It's a situation that can bring out the worst in people.

My passenger was a veteran taxi-hailer and understood but didn't excuse the every-man-(or woman)-for-himself attitude that some New Yorkers display in the catching a cab crunch time. "Everybody's in a rush," he said, "but after being in surgery for six hours I'm not gonna stand there a let someone shove me aside."

"Oh, you're a surgeon?"

"Yeah."

"What's your specialty?"

"Urology."

Well, that was interesting, so I delved. I asked him some questions about what kind of surgery he'd been doing for six hours, thinking he'd probably tell me he'd been removing kidney stones or something. Instead, he told me this story...

My passenger had operated on a young man who'd had a twisted testicle. I immediately thought of some joke which I won't embarrass myself by repeating here, but my passenger would have none of it. He explained what the situation had been in a straightforward, professional manner.

The testicle had become twisted around itself in the scrotum and, because its supply of blood had been cut off, was in danger of dying unless corrected within a matter of hours. So this was actually an emergency. To make matters worse, the (female) anaesthesiologist, although aware of the situation, had decided to take a meal break, thus delaying the surgery and adding considerable tension to the matter. When she finally did show up, my passenger had words with her and told me he intended to report her. (Looks like he was having a bad female-karma day.)

The surgery, which consisted of untwisting the testicle and sewing it to the inner wall of the scrotum, was performed successfully. And my concern that here was yet another thing I needed to worry about was pacified by learning that the poor guy's runaway testicle was an unusual, genetic disorder.

Now I imagine myself sitting in a sidewalk cafe with a friend, watching the people who are strolling by. We amuse ourselves by guessing what these people may have been doing all day.

A muscular, young man wearing a hard hat walks by.

"Oh, he must have been working at a construction site," we say.

A woman with two small children at her side walks by.

"Oh, she must have been caring for the children," we say.

My passenger walks by.

"Oh, he must have been untwisting someone's testicle," we say.

The things you learn driving a taxicab.

Doctor Evil

Halloween is a special time in New York City. It's one of the most celebrated holidays of the year (even though it technically isn't a holiday at all), right up there with Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July. If it falls on a weekday, as it did this year, there are actually two Halloweens. The first is the Saturday before Oct. 31st, and the second is Halloween itself. The Halloween parties occur on the Saturday. The Halloween parade in Greenwich Village (which drew nearly a million people this year) and the children trick-or-treating take place on Oct. 31st itself (a Tuesday this year).

I'm telling you, it's a big deal.

One of the things I find fascinating about that day is how quickly people can adjust themselves to a new reality. Some guy is walking around dressed up as a pack of cigarettes and some girl is crossing the street in a bumblebee outfit and nobody looks twice at them. Because it's Halloween. I think if suddenly the accepted fashion became wearing a red ball over your nose like a clown it would seem perfectly normal within just a few days.

Anyway, now that I'm blogging I thought I would take pictures of all the people in my cab who were wearing costumes

like these guys

and this guy

and maybe have a best-costume-in-my-cab contest. But an incident occurred at around 2 AM of the first Halloween night (Saturday) that took away all my enthusiasm for taking pictures of people dressed up like draculas, batmen, and wicked witches of the easts. And for a couple of days I was in a rare funk, hardly communicating with anyone at all.

Disturbing incidents almost always breeze right over my shoulders and glide on out into the universe. After 29 years of taxi-driving I have developed an immunity to them. I even look at the occasional jerk who gets in my cab as being a part of the Parade of Humanity and try to find something about him that interests me. But this particular jerk on Saturday night... this guy... he must have slipped in through a crack in the floorboard. He really got to me.

Even so, the truth is I wouldn't choose to write about it if I didn't have a point to make. And the point is this: the thing we call "civilization" is held together with a glue called "restraint". Here's what happened...

I picked up three thirty-something people - two girls and a guy - coming out of one of the trendy clubs on 27th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues. They were all in costumes. The guy wore a red, white, and blue jumpsuit which I thought was supposed to be some kind of super-hero thing like Captain America, but it turned out to be an Evel Knievel (a famous motorcycle stuntman) outfit. In fact, the guy even looked like a young Evel Knievel. The girls - I don't know what they were supposed to be, but they were wearing fishnet stockings. Their destination was Murray Street in lower Manhattan.

I thought I would strike up a conversation with this group as I was interested in taking their picture at the end of the ride. But it was one of those fares in which the passengers were just into themselves and had set up a mental barrier to keep the cab driver out of their world. And most likely they'd been drinking or were on drugs. I asked the guy early in the ride if he was Captain America and got a reply not from him, but from one of the girls, that he was Evel Knievel.

But other than that there was no communication between us during the ride. I had already decided against asking them to pose for a picture and just drove along listening to the radio and wasn't paying much further attention to them, except to notice that the guy and one of the girls, who I assumed was his girlfriend, were bantering with each other and it was souding like an unpleasant, low-level argument.

It was when we arrived at their luxury high-rise on Murray Street that things suddenly got ugly.

The meter was $11 and the guy tells me he has to go into his building to get the money. This is bad taxi etiquette because he has waited until the end of the ride to make the announcement. If he'd been by himself the immediate suspicion would be that he's trying to beat the fare. But since he was with the two girls, it was no big deal. The girls wait in the cab with the meter running until he gets back with the money. Happens all the time. As long as he doesn't take too long, it's not an issue.

But then, without any explanation to me, he orders the girls out of the cab, telling them to wait on the sidewalk until he gets back.

What??

In all my years, no one had ever done this. It struck me immediately as being completely out of bounds and I turned around in my seat a bit to tell them that normal procedure was for the girls to remain in the cab until the money arrived. I had to raise my voice slightly to be heard as I was being ignored. Then, quite out of nowhere, Mr. Knievel went ballistic on me.

Now I am not one to repeat vile profanity, but if I was, this is what I would tell you he screamed at me:

"No, they are getting out of the cab, you fucking piece of shit. They're getting out of the cab, asshole."

Whaaat??

Needless to say, I was stunned. If anyone ever talks to me that way, which is never, I would probably know what had provoked it. But this came out of the blue. He ushered the girls out of the cab and told them to wait right there and then started walking toward his building.

"What do you think I'm going to do, drive away with them?" I said to him before he was out of earshot. Some sarcasm was the best I could come up with.

"That's exactly what I think you're going to do, you fucking piece of shit," he called back, and then walked into his building and was out of sight.

It's one thing if some moron is a semi-coherent drunk and throws an insult in your face. You know he's drunk and can be tolerated. But Evel wasn't semi-coherent. Evel was evil. The suddeness of his verbal assault and the perception that he knowingly wanted to humiliate, belittle, and degrade me restimulated an anger that was powerful enough to make my hands tremble. It's the kind of anger that can immediately escalate into violence, with the point to be made being, "You can't talk to me like that!" It's the kind of anger that brings you right to the precipice - the desire to strike back vs. the consequences of striking back suddenly becoming a monumental struggle. It's the stuff that manslaughter is made of.

The two girls who were now standing on the sidewalk up to this point had not said a word. I vented some of my anger by telling them their friend was the most insulting person I'd ever met and wasn't a candidate to live a long life. And then one of them shed some light on the situation. She told me that the other girl standing there had been in a taxi a couple of weeks ago and passed out in the back seat. She woke up to find her driver molesting her.

Whoa.

Okay, that was terrible and I told her I was sorry that happened. But it didn't excuse his acting like an asshole as, obviously, I wasn't that guy. And I told her that. Which maybe wasn't the right thing to say as now she felt a need to be defensive on his behalf and so she starts to critcize me for being mad at him. I was becoming numb with rage and realized I'd be better off just getting the hell out of there, so I told her to tell Evel Knievel he could keep his fucking eleven dollars and I shifted the car into "drive" with the intention of leaving.

But she wanted to keep the game going. She leaned her body against the side of my cab and latched onto my side-view mirror, making it impossible to drive away without knocking her over. And then she said something which turned out to be fascinating: "He can pay the fare and he can buy your cab, too, if he wants to, asshole. He's a plastic surgeon and makes plenty of money."

At this point Evel - "Doctor Evil", the plastic surgeon - returned with the money. He came up to me on the side of the cab, taking the space where the girl had just been. Now, in retrospect, you would have thought the guy might have cooled off and possibly might have even been apologetic for the way he'd spoken to me or would have at least offered an explanation for his incredibly bad manners. But instead he just continued where he'd left off.

"How much is the fare, you fucking piece of shit?"

A crisis point had been reached. My desire to strike back at this guy, to see him lying on his back in agony as my foot stomped down on his nose (requiring plastic surgery) had reached a crescendo. It wasn't really his words that infuriated me. It was the unmitigated evil I perceived in him. I wanted to hurt this guy very badly. But before I tell you what happened, I'm going to step out of this scene for a moment and do a bit of reflection.

Whenever I've had the misfortune to run into somebody like this, it has always amazed me how they could live past the age of, say, twenty-five. Because the odds are against it. You go around insulting total strangers - somewhere down the road you're going to meet "the wrong guy". And that guy is going to kill you, Charlie. Just like that. It's sort of a filtering process that the human race has installed upon itself.

Consider this: I am a total unknown to Dr. Evil. He has no idea what my tolerance for being insulted happens to be. He has no idea that, although it is illegal for taxi drivers in New York City to carry weapons, various objects that are associated with the operation of the vehicle, such as a tire iron, for example, can be used as weapons. And that I have just such an object at my fingertips. He has no idea that, although I am not a big guy, I have the ability to put him in either a hospital or a hole in the ground within seconds. And he is basically begging me to do it.

So... what did I do?

I drove away without saying another word and without accepting his money.

And, as I said, I was in a funk for about two days. You didn't really want to be in my cab during that time. Not that I was rude to anyone, I just wasn't my usual semi-cheerful self and certainly didn't want to have a conversation with you. I was too busy playing and re-playing every detail of the incident in my mind. But the mental mass associated with the episode finally did move away, and I was glad I had come away from it losing only some pride and not facing charges of aggravated assault or murder.

Plus I did have an insight that I'd like to share with you.

In reviewing this guy's behavior, you might think, yeah, well, he was just upset because one of the girls he was with had been assaulted by a cab driver. But it doesn't ring true. Obviously, one person in a profession is not another person in the same profession. And this guy wasn't lacking an ability to distinguish that. What he was doing was seizing an opportunity to dramatize some kind of transgression that he himself was guilty of while trying to make himself look righteous in the eyes of his friends. His behavior was a facade.

How many times have we seen it turn out that the righteous person on a crusade against evil-doers was himself guilty of the same crimes he rails against? I had inadvertently learned that this guy was a plastic surgeon. Isn't that someone who might find himself in a position to molest unconscious females?

Dr. Evil would be wise to wear a sign around his neck that says, "The reason I'm insulting you is because I have committed crimes I don't want you to know about". That way, when he meets "the wrong guy" - as he will - perhaps his life will be spared.