The Unusual Reasons For Taking A Taxi Hall Of Fame

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

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

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

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

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

4. The No Destination Ride. Just drive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Can you take us to a bathroom?"

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, the sunrise.

It was 4:30 in the morning.

********

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

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 Fourth Worst Thing That Can Happen To A Cab Driver

I have long held the opinion that the three worst things that could happen to a cab driver are

1) Death

2) Paralysis

3) Some subhuman pukes in your cab.

In that order.

But I never knew what the fourth worst thing might be.

Until now.

Here's what happened...

A few nights ago at around 10 p.m. I was cruising for a fare on University Place in Greenwich Village. It's a narrow, one-way street that runs for only seven blocks from Washington Square up to 14th Street. I like University Place because it has several bars and restaurants on it as well as one of the great rarities in Manhattan, a bowling alley. These are all places where a cabbie is likely to find his next passenger. It's also a late-night area due to the high population there of New York University students who may be hitting the midnight oil or, more likely, hitting the midnight gin and tonic in a bar.

As I passed 13th Street, moving slowly in order to be able to stop in case I was hailed, a figure came rushing out at me from my left (driver's) side. He was a white-skinned, wild-eyed guy in his twenties whose facial expression and frantic body motion immediately struck me as WRONG. In taxi-driving, like anything that you do repetitively over a long period of time, you develop an instinct for the particles that stand out from the usual. And I could see in an instant that this guy didn't fit. People simply don't hail you like that unless there is something wrong.

Sometimes you're stuck with a person like this. You're waiting at a red light and he gets in. You know immediately that he's trouble but there he is in your cab and you've got to deal with him.

But sometimes you're not stuck with him.

You just keep driving and pass him by.

Of course you hope that he thinks that you didn't see him and that's why you didn't stop. You never want to hurt anyone's feelings. But any veteran cabbie knows that his feelings are quite secondary to your own gut instinct. The guy is trouble, you know it, and you keep your foot on the accelerator.

But it was different in this case. He came running right up next to me on the side of the cab. We made eye contact. I slowed down momentarily and glanced forward to see if the light at the next intersection, 14th Street, was red or green. It was green. This meant if I kept driving I could make the light, turn right, and be gone from this guy and whatever storms were brewing in his universe forever.

I kept driving.

There was no "Sorry, I didn't see you" about it. It was a blatant "I see you, I don't like your face, and I reject you. Goodbye." It was ugly.

I saw him still waving frantically at me in the rear view mirror, but REJECTED had been stamped on his application form and that was that. The decision of the judges is final. I made the turn and he was gone from sight and mind.

On 14th Street the distance between University Place and the next intersection, Broadway, is quite short. Because of this and its key location at the south end of Union Square, there is normally a ton of traffic at that particular spot. And it was no different at this time. It took me close to a minute to reach Broadway and then make another right to head back downtown in search of my next fare.

It was a fare I didn't have to do much searching to find. My next passenger jumped in as I stopped at the red light at 13th and Broadway.

Unfortunately, it was the same guy.

In all my years of taxi driving, this was a first. Never before had I had to confront a rejected passenger and answer for my sin. Never before had I had to speak to such a person. But there he sat in the back seat, almost surreal, looking at me like the Ghost of Misdeeds Past.

I was in shock. I immediately wondered how he'd been able to get over to 13th and Broadway so quickly on foot, and then realized that if he'd been running he could have done it in just that amount of time. I then hoped maybe he wouldn't recognize me as the driver who had just passed him by.

No such luck.

"Why didn't you stop for me, man?"

I considered the situation. There was no way I could bullshit my way out of it. So I just told him the truth.

"I didn't stop for you because I didn't like the way you came running up to me waving your arms so frantically," I said. "When people do that it usually means there's some kind of trouble going on and I don't want to be a part of it."

Interestingly, he could accept that. Truth has a way of doing that, even if it's an unwanted truth. He just accepted my explanation without feeling a need to get into an argument about it.

"Okay," he said, "Listen, I've gotta get down to 7th Street and Avenue A fast. In a big rush here, man!"

It was as if the whole rejection incident had not taken place. I felt relieved.

But as I started to drive down Broadway, I realized this was a good thing and it was a bad thing, too. Good because what could have been a major confrontation and even disciplinary action against me by the passenger had evaporated into nothing. But bad because the truth which had caused that potential trouble to disappear nevertheless meant that this passenger was, in fact, going to be trouble himself.

Now, I am supremely confident about my own instincts as a taxi driver. I had rejected this guy on a gut level that is never wrong, from my point of view. I knew that anyone who comes running up to a cab like that and who looks the way he looked was just surely going to mean some kind of trouble for me. And now I was waiting to see what the trouble would be.

It didn't take long. The ride we were taking was a short one. So short, in fact, that he could have walked it in five minutes, which was an outpoint in itself. This was not the kind of person who spends money on a taxi like that. Although he didn't tell me why he was in such a rush, his demeanor and his hurried speech told me it was drugs. My evaluation of the guy was that he was a junkie and this was a drug "emergency" of one kind or another.

We got to Avenue A and 7th Street in about a minute and a half. I pulled over to the curb so as to not block the traffic. And then he hit me with it.

"I've gotta meet someone in that building across the street. She's got the money for the ride. I'll be right back, man."

It was literally the oldest trick in the Book of Passengers' Sneaky Tricks.

Normally what I would do in this situation would be to try to stop the passenger from exiting the cab without leaving something of value behind. Or I'd just take off with him still in the taxi and look for a cop. You don't take a ride in a cab and then announce at the end of the trip that you have to disappear into a building to get money. That's a taxi no-no and it takes just one rip-off at the beginning of a cabbie's career to learn that lesson.

But this case was different. For one thing, it was a really short ride with little time lost and only a few dollars on the meter. But, more than that, in the wider karmic view of things I kind of felt I owed it to him.

So I let him go without a dispute. I waited there for a couple of minutes if only to validate what I already knew - that there was no way this guy was coming back - and then I drove off.

But I did go away with two things of value. One was that it showed me once again that my instincts are rock solid. I knew instantly when seeing this guy first coming toward me that he was bad news and that I was right to have not stopped for him.

And the other was discovering what the fourth worst thing is.

It's the dead returning to life and coming to get you.

The horror of it.

The horror!

********

Of course there's no horror in clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi. It's like strumming a banjo in a meadow on a summer day.

Characters

Some recent ones...

Sunday night, 3:48 am, 49th and Broadway. A twenty-something, good-looking female comes out of the Playwrights Tavern, gets in the cab, and we are headed for 79th between West End and Riverside. She has a nice, friendly space about her and it would be easy to have a conversation with her, but, as is the case so often these days, she is preoccupied with a cell phone conversation that was already in progress before she got in the taxi. Some kind of a late-night emergency is underway and she asks me in a polite way to get her there as quickly as possible.

There is virtually no traffic at this time of the night and I know where the green lights are, so within four minutes we have shot up the Henry Hudson Parkway to the 79th Street exit and have arrived at her desintation. But she directs me not to turn off the meter - another passenger is going to join us and then we will be proceeding to 88th Street between Columbus and Central Park West. Within a minute her friend, another twenty-something female, comes running out of an apartment building, crosses 79th Street, and jumps in the taxi.

Of course my curiosity has been aroused and I am wondering what the emergency is all about. I'm thinking it's most likely a romantic problem. The second girl is probably having boyfriend troubles and needs a shoulder to cry on. Or maybe it's a family crisis. Maybe she just got a phone call from her mother in San Diego and learned that her brother was in a car accident. Or maybe her dog is sick and she needs to get him to a vet. No, that couldn't be it - she doesn't have a dog with her. Maybe she realized she doesn't have any decent clothes to wear to work the next day and she wants to borrow something from her friend. No, who the hell would do that at 3:48 in the morning?

I find myself in full fly-on-the-wall mode with the radio off and my ears straining to hear what they're talking about (also known as "eavesdropping"). I have a feeling this is going to be a good one. And it is. The second girl, it turns out, was awakened from a deep sleep by something moving under her pillow and now is afraid to stay in her own apartment. So she's going over to her friend's place to spend the rest of the night. What was under her pillow?

A mouse!

She goes on to say that she's not sure if there's one mouse or more than one mouse but her attempts to kill it, or them, with mouse traps coated with peanut butter and chocolate syrup have failed. And now she's too freaked out to stay there.

When we arrive at 88th Street I tell them I couldn't help overhearing their conversation (which was fine with them) and I make the obvious suggestion: get a cat! The second girl says that, in fact, she is planning on "borrowing" the cat of another friend of hers. Which gets me thinking this could be a brilliant business idea - "Rent-A-Cat". Hmmm....


Monday night, 11:15 pm, Empire State Building. two young guys come out of the Empire State Building on 33rd and 5th, jump in the cab, and we are off to Greenwich Village. They turn out to be from Sweden and are in search of a bar I had never heard of, The Spotted Pig, at Greenwich Avenue and 11th Street. They tell me it was recommended to them by a customs agent at the airport which sounded like a weird source of information to me so I joke that it's probably a set-up for a drug bust. They wonder if I'm familiar with a band that's supposed to be playing there but I tell them my usual answer to the subject of popular music which is that I haven't been aware of anything new since the Beatles broke up. And, in fact, I'm still waiting for the Beatles to get back together again.

Well, I said the magic words. They are Beatles fans, big time. One of them is actually wearing a Beatles t-shirt and the other has a very cool Beatles belt on. AND they are members of a rock band called Like A John Needs A Yoko! I am blown away. How refreshing it is to meet a couple of guys who are about 30 years younger than I am and who know more about Beatles music than I do!


Their names are Jon (on the left) and Andy. You can hear some of their music if you click onto their link, above. I tell them my John Lennon stories (click on the "John Lennon" label below to read it) and a May Pang story I happen to have and they are truly a receptive audience.

It's too bad these guys are over twenty-one. I want to adopt them.


Tuesday night, 9:35 pm, 52nd and Broadway. Two thirty-something fellows and a sixty-ish woman, all from the U.K., squeeze into the back seat and are en route to the Marriott hotel in Brooklyn Heights. One of the gentlemen is the stage manager of a Shakespeare company that is performing The Taming of the Shrew at B.A.M. (the Brooklyn Academy of Music). We engage in a lively conversation about the show, his job, and the Bard, but it is something that the lady says that amazes me.

She mentions that she is from Wales but has never been to London.

I have been to London. Twice. And she has been to New York. But never to London. I didn't delve into how that could be - it seems incredible to me - but I found it to be fascinating. And it reminded me of another fare I had many years ago.

In 1986 I picked up a woman who was in her thirties who was accompanied by her mother, who was probably close to seventy. The daughter lived and worked in the city and was playing tour guide hostess for her mom, who was seeing New York for the very first time. What amazed me was that Mom was from New Hampshire, only a five or six hour drive away.

How could someone live their entire life so close to the greatest American city, the center of the universe, so to speak, and never think it worthwhile enough to come see it? I asked her why she had decided to come now.

"To see Liberace!" she said.

Indeed, the great showman was playing at Radio City Music Hall at the time. And it turned out to be his last appearance in New York, as he died a year later.

Timing is everything.

Click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Cops And Casting Directors

It's often been said that New York is a city of infinite variety but, to be more accurate, I prefer to say it's a city of infinite realities - infinite realities all jammed together in such a tight space that you are in a constant state of exposure to them. It can be amazing how quickly you may find yourself in an utterly different reality than the one you were in just moments ago.

No one knows this better than a taxi driver...

Last Monday night just before midnight I sat in front of Nobu's on 57th Street waiting for a fare. Two middle-aged women came out of the trendy, expensive Japanese restaurant and climbed in. One was going to Gramercy Park and the other on to the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. In overhearing some of their ebullient chatter I ascertained that there had been a party at Nobu's to celebrate the opening of the movie MUSIC AND LYRICS, a romantic comedy which premiered at the Zeigfield Theater in midtown earlier in the evening.

"Did you see Drew?" one asked the other.

"Not at the restaurant," replied her friend, "but she was sitting right in front of me in the theater."

After the first one was dropped off at 21st Street and 3rd Avenue, I kind of continued the conversation as if I'd been involved in it all along. I learned that my passenger was the casting director of the movie - she had made the decisions as to which actors would play which roles, including Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. I asked her various questions about casting and about this film in particular, and she was quite conversational, but I saved my big question until the end of the ride.

"So," I asked, "if you were casting me in a movie, what kind of role could you see me playing?"

"I don't know," she said, "I can't see your face."

I turned around and moved a bit to my right so she could see me clearly through the opening in the partition.

"A leading man!" she exclaimed.

I laughed out loud a bit past the time normally allotted for laughing out loud because this was a JOKE. I may be vain, but I'm not vain enough to imagine that with my oversized nose, bald spot, and baggy eyes I could ever be cast as a leading man in this lifetime. (Although, then again, there is Woody Allen. Hmmm....)

"No, come on, seriously," I said with a smile.

She took a better look. "I could see you as a teacher," she said. "You're an intellectual."

Well, I was happy with that! My feeling of self-esteem had been upped a notch and she left me with a big smile on my face (and a nice tip in my pocket) as she exited the cab and ascended the steps of her brownstone. I headed back to Manhattan on Atlantic Avenue and in eight or nine minutes I was gliding off the exit ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge, ready to find my next passenger, wherever that may be.

And then, in the blink of an eye, that city of infinite realities thing kicked in, big time.

It was a cop thing. As I headed west on one of my downtown routes (Worth Street), I noticed something only the experienced eye can perceive at a glance. There was police activity suddenly occurring, but it wasn't just any police activity - it was something big. Police vehicles - patrol cars, detectives' cars, even a few taxis that are actually undercover police cars - were appearing from all directions and they were moving faster and more erratically than they would under normal circumstances. There were sirens blaring north of me, south of me, east of me and west of me. Whatever was going on, it was big and I was in the middle of it.

I crossed through West Broadway on Worth Street just moments after a police car slammed to a halt on the north side of the intersection. The doors of the cruiser opened simultaneously and coming out of the vehicle was something I'd seen only three times in 29 years of taxi driving: cops with guns drawn.

You might think otherwise if you'd never been to New York City and the only thing you really knew about it were the things you'd seen in movies, but a cop with a gun drawn is an extremely rare sight here. I'm told most cops go through a twenty-year career without ever having drawn a weapon. It's not something that is done lightly.

I stopped the cab on the west side of West Broadway and tried to decide what to do. It was a safety versus curiosity dilemma. An officer holding a pistol in both hands was crossing the avenue and moving very carefully on foot toward a parking lot to my right, his body shifting from left to right as he tried to extend his range of vision. Oh, yes - I was in a dangerous place.

My digital camera, which I carry by my side at all times, has a video function which I've just lately been starting to play around with. A moment of truth was at hand: do I get the hell out of there or do I stay and take pictures? I knew it was a photo op that might never come again, but on the other hand there was the thought that I could be a paragraph in tomorrow's newspaper.

I went with some kind of journalist's instinct. I reached into my backpack on the seat next to me, pulled out my camera, and started fumbling with it.

I adjusted the control knob to "video" and tried to push the right buttons to get it going. It was one of those moments-seem-like-minutes time expansions: the cop with the gun was crouching down and pointing his gun at an SUV that was parked in the lot - I finally got my camera rolling and started pointing it at this cop and other cops with guns drawn - it occurred to me that this might not be such a great idea after all - the cop turned away from the SUV and looked at me - I put the camera down, thinking he might think I was pointing a gun at him - the cop shook his head at me (I realized a couple of minutes later that he thought I was a cop in an undercover taxi and the shake of his head meant there was nobody in the SUV) - I decided to get the hell out of there - I drove to Hudson Street and made a right.

That all took place in a span of about 20 seconds. Sorry to say, the video showed only blurred images, which is too bad because I would have loved to have been able to post it here. (I did learn one thing: you've got to be ready and you've got to be fast.)

My next passenger was waiting for me as soon as I turned onto Hudson. I drove him to Astoria in Queens and we had an interesting conversation about cops and photography.

Later in the night I looked at all this in retrospect. The shift in realities could be compared to changing channels on television. In the blink of an eye I had gone from romantic comedy (the casting director) to action flick (the cops). It was like YOU'VE GOT MAIL meets THE FRENCH CONNECTION.

New York City.



After reading all those words, what you need now is a picture. So click here!

The Wisdom of the Carrot

Every night one or two passengers, on the average, will tell me they're in a BIG rush. The implication (or direct message) being that I need to get them there FAST! Nothing wrong with that. I don't fault anyone for telling me what the situation is. 

But there's just one problem - it doesn't motivate me to do anything extraordinary to help them solve something that is their problem. I will just acknowledge what they said and drive them to their destination in the same way I would have driven if they hadn't said anything at all. But I won't run red lights, make illegal turns, or drive ten or fifteen or twenty miles per hour faster than I would normally drive. What they have failed to do is to tell me specifically what's in it for me. 

Now, some passengers will make the infamous statement that they will "take care of me" or will "make it worth my while". This promise is most often heard when five people are trying to squeeze into the cab (the rules say we can only take four and the driver could get a ticket if it's seen by a particularly mean-spirited cop). Experience shows conclusively that what follows this ride is an average or even a below-average tip. Thus a seasoned cabbie translates "I will take care of you" as "Hey, stupid fuck-head, I want you to go ahead and risk a fine and in exchange you will get nothing special." It's an insult. 

All of which leads me into what was last night's "fare of the night". It was the rare - and I do mean rare - person who understands that the best way for me to solve his problem is to tell me why it's in my own best interest to make it my problem. Here's what happened... 

 A twenty-something guy jumped in the cab at Grove Street and 7th Avenue South in Greenwich Village at exactly 11:51 PM. His destination was Fulton and Gold in the Financial District, a short ride that required knowledge of lower Manhattan's geography. I pulled out onto 7th Avenue South, quickly figured out the route in my mind, and told him how I intended to go. This was meant as a passing comment, not really requiring discussion, but it turned out my passenger was quite concerned about getting there as soon as possible and wondered if another route might be better. I told him the way I wanted to go was the best way (which it was), and then he said the magic words... 

 "My fiancee's birthday is at midnight and if you can get me there before then, I'll give you ten dollars over the meter." 

 Bingo! 

His problem became my problem. I immediately turned into a NASCAR racer, zig-zagging my way around the Holland Tunnel traffic, making the difficult and crucial green light at Canal Street, flying down West Broadway to Duane Street, catching the greens on Church and Broadway, circling around City Hall Park and somehow making the light at Beekman, and finally delivering my passenger to Gold and Fulton at 11:58. 

The fare was $7.80. He gave me a twenty and happily told me to keep it. But before he jumped out I acknowledged his brilliance by sharing with him this bit of information which I will share with you now...  

It took me nine years of taxi driving before I noticed how rare it was for someone to offer me a specific reward for doing something special for them. Once I became aware of this, I started to count the number of times it would happen and have kept this tally in my mind. That was twenty years ago. Counting last night, the number of times this has happened is... (drum roll, please)... EIGHT! That is correct. Eight times. Thousands and thousands of people have told me they are in a big rush and eight have had the wisdom to offer me a specific reward if I can solve their dilemma for them. 

I believe there is a huge life lesson to be learned here. 

Let's call it the wisdom of the carrot.

The Race For The Nipple

Taxicabs in New York City are allowed by law to carry a maximum of four passengers (five if there's a child). So when a group of five, six, seven, or eight people are traveling together, they will need to take two cabs. And therein lies the possibility for a race.

It happened to me last Saturday night.

Four twenty-somethings jumped in at a red light at West 4th Street and 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village at 2 AM. A guy up front with me and two girls and another guy in the back seat. Three friends of theirs got into a second cab just to my left. The destination for all of us was 36th Street and 3rd Avenue in Murray Hill.

Of course they were all somewhat plastered. And the fellow to my right, since he was the guy sitting next to the cab driver, felt an inner need to entertain his friends at my expense. A moment after telling me where we were going and pointing out that the cab next to us was filled with his friends, he had a brilliant idea.

"Hey, we've gotta beat them there!" he blurted out, loud enough for everyone to hear. I gave him a shrug of my shoulders and a look on my face that indicated I didn't have much interest in racing with another cab. He noticed.

"Come on, man, I know you're the man! I know you can beat that other cabbie! I know you can do it!" His friends in the back seat were all for it, chiming in with words of encouragement.

I sensed a business oportunity opening up. "Oh, yeah?" I asked with a smile. "So what's in it for me?"

He thought about it for a moment and then made what was kind of a grand pronouncement. "You will get kissed by those two beautiful girls back there!" he proclaimed. I looked in the mirror. The girls were smiling, but I wasn't motivated.

"How about some money? Let's name a dollar amount," I said, thinking of something that would actually make me want to race.

He was a shrewd negotiator, however, realizing that if he agreed to this it could hit him where it hurts. Instead, he made a counter-offer.

"Okay," he said, "here's the deal: if we get to 36th Street first, my girlfriend will show you her nipple." I looked again in the mirror. Both girls were still smiling. I looked at my passenger. He looked at me.

"Deal!" I said. Here was something worth racing for. I wanted that nipple.

And we were off.

The light turned green and I headed uptown on 6th Avenue. My first order of business was to figure out my route. No problem, it was obvious - straight up 6th to 23rd Street, right turn, straight across to 3rd Avenue with the great flow of green lights that 23rd Street has, and then a left up to 36th Street. I was hoping the other driver would choose another route, but he was an experienced cabbie and went the same way I did. He knew it was the best way to go.

6th Avenue, like all the one-way avenues in Manhattan, has the lights synchronized in a "wave". If you go about 27 miles per hour with no other cars in the way, the lights will turn green as you approach them and you will never hit a red. So this other cab and myself were traveling neck and neck up to 23rd Street, not stopping for a single light. My passengers, particularly the guys, became my cheering section.

When we finally did catch a red on 23rd Street at 5th Avenue, it was break time. Unfortunately, the guy in the back seat got on his cell phone and informed his friends in the other cab that we were in a race to see who would get to 36th Street first. This notched the excitement level up to a new level. Now there was not only a nipple at stake, there was pride.

The light turned green on 5th Avenue, and the race continued. Both myself and the other cabbie knew we would get greens at Madison, Park, and Lexington Avenues and then we'd have a red at 3rd. So it was a matter of jockeying for position so that one of us would be in front of the other at that 3rd Avenue red light. I was in the lead the whole way, and then the moment of truth arrived: just as we approached 3rd Avenue, he tried to cut in front of me. I held my ground and sped up enough to close the small gap between my cab and the car in front of me, and he was forced to pull in behind me. It was the critical move of the race.

When the light turned green at 3rd Avenue, we both made left turns and went one block to a new red light on 24th Street. Other vehicles were already at the "line" except for one open spot on the left which I grabbed. This meant that when the light turned green I would have no one in front of me and could zip all the way up 3rd Avenue. My competition would be stuck behind other cars.

And that's exactly what happened. I coasted up 3rd Avenue to victory at 36th Street, bringing the cab to a halt on the far right corner of the intersection. And now it was time for my reward.

I turned to look back at the girls in the rear. Both doors had been opened and one girl and the guy were already outside and the other girl was moving toward the exit.

I looked at the guy sitting on my right. "So... where's that nipple?" I asked. A man has a right to collect what is owed to him.

With what might be called a shit-eating smile on his face, he called out to his girlfriend - "Hey, Jess..."

But Jess was already out the door.

"I'm not that drunk!" was her reply.

I looked again at the guy. He shrugged his shoulders and had an expression on his face as if to say he wished he could help but was powerless to do so under the circumstances.

"Some pimp you turned out to be!" I said in mock distress.

The fare was $8.60. He gave me $11, a bit more than the usual $10 for that ride. But I wasn't placated.

I wanted that damned nipple.




"Pictures From A Taxi" - click here

The Wrong Guy

In my last post ("Doctor Evil") I mentioned someone whom I realized I once had in my taxi back in 1999. You know this person, too, or at least you know of him. You may have never seen his face, but you have spoken of him from time to time.

Has something like this ever happened to you? You are walking on a crowded city sidewalk in a pretty good mood, just minding your own business, when someone walking in the opposite direction bumps into you and knocks you off balance for a moment. But instead of apologizing to you or asking you if you're all right, he turns back and says, "Get the fuck out of the way, asshole."

Or this? You are waiting in line at the QuickChek and someone a foot taller than you blatantly cuts right in front of you with his beer just as you were about to step up to the cashier. You think of saying something to the guy but he looks like a thug, so you just keep your mouth shut and stand there with your half-gallon of milk.

In both cases your urge to react in a forceful way is suppressed by the consideration of what the consequences might be if you did. You might be injured. Hell, you might be killed. You might be arrested and charged with assault. You might have a lawsuit on your hands.

So you stand there and take it. But you soothe your anger by thinking this thought: "Someday that guy is gonna meet the wrong guy." The wrong guy is not you, so you let it pass. But you know he's out there somewhere and it's just a matter of time before he evens the score with this sub-human who was just so incredibly rude to you.

It was the "wrong guy" who got into my cab that night in 1999. I had taken a fare out to Jackson Heights in Queens at midnight on a Saturday night and was heading back toward Manhattan on Northern Boulevard. Suddenly a man came running to the street waving his hand at me. I stopped the cab, he got in, and we drove off.

The first thing I noticed about him were his physical characteristics. He was short - maybe 5 feet, seven inches - thickset, muscular, probably close to fifty years old. He appeared to be Hispanic-American and spoke without an accent.

The next thing I noticed was that he was in a state of extreme agitation. Without any prior conversation these alarming words came shooting out of his mouth: "FUCKING BASTARD! DAMN FUCKING BASTARD!"

"What's the matter?" I asked.

His answer startled me again. Not only because of what he said, but the way he said it. He actually started to cry.

"Oh my god," he sobbed in a lowered voice, "I hope I didn't kill him."

"What happened?" I asked.

"THAT STUPID FUCKING BASTARD!" he screamed. "WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HE'S TALKING TO? I WAS IN NAM, I DON'T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT!"

"What happened??"

My passenger began crying again. "I think I killed him," he blurted out as he covered his face in his hands. "Oh, God, I hope I didn't kill him."

To say that this guy was "upset" would be an understatement. He was riding on a wave of emotion that went up to anger and down to grief like a yo-yo, back and forth. He was literally inconsolable. It took the full ten minutes of the ride for me to piece together what had happened.

He'd been sitting in a bar, alone, minding his own business. Just having a couple of drinks and brooding to himself about his own troubles. Three rowdy guys entered the bar and sat nearby. One of these guys decided it would be a good time to have some fun at my passenger's expense. He began making belittling comments at him while his buddies laughed. He wouldn't let up and it led to a brawl.

The fight was no shoving match. It was an outright slugfest which ended with the rude guy collapsing on the floor from a chop to his neck which may have crushed his windpipe. He gasped desperately for air before slumping over, unconscious, possibly dying. My passenger ran out of the bar to the street looking for a taxi. My cab became his getaway car.

What the sack of shit didn't know when he decided to forget his manners was that he had finally met "the wrong guy". His object of ridicule was an ex-Marine who knew martial arts and was in no mood to take crap from some punk.

When we arrived at his destination, I advised him not to talk to anyone else about this incident other than a priest. Not to let his feelings of guilt put him into a jail cell. He thanked me and disappeared into the night. I never learned any further information about what may or may not have happened that night.

I found it interesting to observe that, although he may have just killed someone, I felt no fear in being alone with him in my cab. He wasn't my wrong guy. I don't have a wrong guy because I don't go around intentionally insulting strangers.

But we've all met people who do. And it was fascinating to meet the guy they will eventually run into.

Female Trouble

When a guy with flowers in his hand jumps in a cab at four in the morning and says he's in a big rush to get to 25th Street and 1st Avenue, it can mean only one thing - female trouble.

Here's what happened: Tyrone does event planning and had organized a party for clients earlier in the evening. His fiance, Amanda, had thought she would be able to go to this party herself but it turned out she could not get in. She told Tyrone it was okay, no big deal, and went home while he stayed and worked the event. But later in the night, when the party was finished, they spoke on the phone and Tyrone detected that Amanda was in fact a bit upset about it. Result: flowers, particularly sunflowers which Amanda is fond of, and an emergency taxi ride to 25th and 1st.



Some of the best advice I ever heard about maintaining a relationship is to never go to sleep over an upset. Tyrone must have heard this advice, too, or just have great instincts, because he didn't treat this as a trivial matter. Getting Amanda un-upset was top priority. Now if she does the same for him, these two are going to have a very hamonious marriage.

An interesting thing about Tyrone, by the way, is that he speaks Italian fluently. He told me both his parents are half Italian and half black and he grew up speaking both English and Italian. He had some amusing stories about being among Italians, overhearing their Italian conversations, and then shocking them by revealing (in Italian) that this black kid understood everything they were saying! It reminded me of a fare I had a couple of years ago in which an Asian girl was speaking in Russian to her friend. It turned out she was from one of the former Soviet republics. It wasn't a language I would ever have expected to be coming out of her body.

So, Tyrone... how about a comment about how it turned out with Amanda that night? My millions of readers want to know!