Why The Medallion Tanked

For several years now the most talked-about topics of conversation with passengers have been Uber and the fate of the once coveted taxi medallion.  How an established commodity selling for as much as 1.3 million dollars in 2013 could drop in value to virtually nothing in the span of a year is quite a story and I find that not only New Yorkers but people from all over the world are often quite interested in it and many are surprisingly knowledgeable about it as well.

And yet I have not encountered a single person who actually understood the true reason for the medallion's decline.  Nor have I read an article that pinpointed exactly what happened.  The assumption is always that Uber showed up and took the passengers away or, according to a recent series of articles in the NY Times, that predatory loans agreed to by unsuspecting drivers were the cause.  (To read these articles click here.  This is outstanding investigative reporting by Times reporter Brian Rosenthal.)

It is true that these are both parts of the story, but they do not identify the primary cause of the medallion's collapse.  What I'm doing in this post is setting the record straight.  

Some History

You may already know about taxi medallions.  If not, here is some information about them:

A medallion is a license -- symbolized by a piece of metal (called the "tin" in the industry) -- attached to the hood of a cab.  It's a license not to drive, but to own one taxicab.

The owner of a medallion may or may not be the driver of the cab.  Most often the driver of a yellow cab in NYC is not the owner.  The owner is more likely to be an investor who either leases the medallion to a middleman (known as a "taxi broker", who in turn sets up a driver with the medallion, a taxicab, and insurance) or the owner of the medallion leases it to the operator of a taxi garage. Taxi garages, also known as "fleets", vary in size.  Some may have only ten or twenty cabs.  Others have hundreds.  There are many taxi garages scattered around New York City, mostly in the boroughs outside of Manhattan.

The medallion system was set up in 1937, during the Great Depression.  In those days all you had to do to get a permit to be in the taxi business in New York was to have a car and pay a $10 annual fee to the city.  The industry was so easy to enter that there were eventually way too many cabs for the amount of business on the streets.  No one could make a living with that much competition.  So the city decided to stop issuing new annual permits (medallions) altogether.  If you didn't renew it you lost it and as a result the only way to become the owner of a taxi medallion was to purchase one from someone who already owned it.  Thus a market was created for the medallion.  Business remained poor for several more years and the number of taxis dwindled from over 30,000 to exactly 11,787, where it stayed until 1996 when the city auctioned off 133 new ones.  After World War II ended in 1945, however, business picked up considerably and the demand for ownership of a medallion steadily increased along with its value, which rose to its peak in 2013 at 1.3 million dollars. 

It should be noted, however, that many thousands of car service vehicles -- far more than the number of medallion cabs -- were added to the streets of the city as time went on.  But only the medallion cabs could legally pick you up by means of the street hail.  All other for-hire vehicles had to be summoned by telephone.

2013

Okay, that should be sufficient history.  Now here's the story.  Why did the medallion drop from $1.3 million to virtually nothing in less than a year?

Let's go back to the year 2013.  Conditions in the NYC taxi industry are pretty much the same as they've been for decades.  There are approximately 13,000 yellow cabs (one cab for each medallion) on the streets, a number that is set by law and does not increase, as noted, except on the rare occasion when new medallions are auctioned off by the city.

The majority of taxi drivers are working out of taxi garages.  Working conditions, as always, are far below the labor standards of most American workplaces.

Drivers must pay leasing fees for twelve-hour shifts -- either a day shift (5 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or a night shift (5 p.m. to 5 a.m.)   They also pay for filling the tank up with gas at the end of the shift.

It takes about five hours of driving time to break even, so you don't start making money for yourself until that point is reached.   You don't have to work the full twelve hours of a shift -- that's okay -- but you still have to pay the full price of the shift.  It's not charged by the hour, or by a percentage of the money from passengers.   It's charged by the shift.

There is no union looking out for the drivers, only a taxi advocacy group called the Taxi Workers Alliance.  They try their best but they are not a real union because they have no clout -- that is, they have no ability to call for and enforce a strike. No one who has any real power to improve your working conditions -- like the mayor, the Taxi and Limousine Commissioners, or the owner of your garage -- is looking out for you.  There is nothing resembling a human resources department in the taxi industry that you'd find in any big business in the United States.

There is no overtime.

There is no health insurance.

There are no sick days.

No paid vacations.

No pension.

No profit sharing (of course).

No bonuses.

Although they pretty much fit the description of "employees", drivers have been deemed "independent contractors" by city law since the early 1980s.  (And there went the concept of "benefits".)

Once you're out on the road you are driving in a kind of perpetual horse race with other taxi drivers to be the first to arrive at people waving their arms in the air.  It's very competitive.  Some cabbies prefer to work the airports and spend a lot of time waiting in lots at LaGuardia or JFK.  Others choose to wait in lines in front of hotels, museums, or clubs.  Most, though, are battling traffic and other taxis on the streets of Manhattan in search of their next customer.

After you have won your prize -- a passenger -- you must provide service to a person sitting a few feet behind your head.  It's not like you're moving cargo.  You've got people -- virtually every type of person imaginable -- to contend with.

You're carrying cash.  Even though about 70% of the payments are made with credit cards, the fact that you are known to have cash could make you the target of a criminal.  You cannot legally refuse service to anyone unless they are "disorderly" or intoxicated and you can be fined heavily or even have your license revoked if you're found guilty of doing these and other offenses by one of the TLC's kangaroo courts.

So it's a dangerous and usually a thankless job.

And yet, even with all these liabilities, there are always plenty of drivers.  The great majority of them are immigrants from third world countries.  Why?  Because as substandard as these working conditions are, they're still a lot better than whatever they had in Bangladesh.  Or Nigeria.  Or Haiti.

Indeed, one problem owners of taxi garages never had was a shortage of drivers. Drivers would tend to come and go, but new ones showing up and old ones returning were always in sufficient supply.  Quite often there were more drivers than there were cabs, which gave the owners of taxi fleets a great advantage.  If they didn't like a driver for whatever reason, they could simply refuse to lease him a cab.  This put drivers in a position of needing to put up with varying degrees of unfairness if they hoped to continue working there.

Dispatchers demanding "tips".

No compensation for lost time if their cab breaks down.

Payment to the garage for accidents which is not returned after insurance compensates the owner.

And so on.

Perhaps the greatest unfairness of all was forcing drivers to accept a "weekly deal". It's better for the owner of a garage to assign one driver to one car and be assured of payment for an entire week than to let drivers work whichever days they preferred.   This meant that even if they took a day off to be with their families they were still paying for the shift for that day.

The point I'm making here is that drivers for decades have been utterly taken for granted.  I mean "utterly", as in completely, totally, absolutely, entirely, thoroughly, in all respects, and to the hilt.

Look at this:

I took this picture in 2009 at my taxi garage.  It pretty much tells the story.  Labor Day is the one day of the year in the USA that is set aside as a national holiday to honor working people.  One driver took it upon himself to write "WE ARE NOT SLAVES" on this insulting notice.

2014 - Uber Arrives

Although according to Wikipedia Uber "went live" in NYC in 2011, it didn't have any impact on the taxi business here until early in 2014.  Then, quite suddenly, everywhere you looked -- on billboards, on TV, on the internet, and especially on the backs of buses -- there were ads from Uber directed not at customers, but at drivers.  Some of these ads were actually offering guarantees of monthly income, something completely unheard of in the history of the taxi industry.

In 2014 Uber pulled off what I would call a military-precision invasion of New York City.  You've got to have several things in place simultaneously for this to be successful.

1. You've got to have a public that has heard of you and has access to you.  There was considerable word of mouth about Uber in the United States from people who traveled to places where Uber had already set up shop.  And by 2014 everyone had a smart phone, so access, of course, was automatic.

2. You've got to be able to provide your service to the public immediately.  If you promote a car service and an app to the general public and then you can't provide a car and a driver, you're finished.  That's what happened to Hailo.

3. You've got to have a business model and all sorts of administrators to put it into action.  This means people, policies, locations, and equipment.  You've got to have the app set up and ready to go without crashing, tech personnel to maintain the app, people to answer phones, people to explain the deal to drivers and get them on the road, managers, lawyers, and staff to run offices.

4. You've got to have a ton of money.  By demonstrating its success in other locations before it arrived in New York, Uber was able to obtain venture capital from major investors.  By June of 2014 they had secured over a billion dollars in funding.

5. And finally, you've got to have a green light from the city you're about to invade. City officials turned a blind eye as Uber was able to add unlimited numbers of for-hire vehicles to the already congested streets of Manhattan.  (By 2018 there were over 100,000.) I think it's safe to assume that the savvy leaders of Uber would not have attempted to enter the world's largest taxi market in the way they did (not with small steps, but with a bang) unless they felt confident that they would not be met with serious opposition from the mayor, the TLC Commissioner, or the City Council.

Meanwhile, At The Taxi Garage

Let's take a look into the world of the taxi garage.  Imagine that you operate a taxi garage and you own or lease a hundred medallions.  That's one hundred cabs, double-shifted.  Two hundred drivers.

If every shift is sold out that means you've got two hundred drivers paying you approximately $125 every day for the use of a cab for twelve hours.  That's a lot of money coming in, but you also have an enormous overhead.  Your expenses include:

--- the cabs themselves which by TLC rules must be replaced every three years.

-- the parts for the cabs which are in constant need of repair.

-- the cost of the garage.  This includes whatever you pay for renting the space if you don't own it, for property tax and insurance if you do own it, the parking lot for the cabs, the equipment you need to maintain the cabs, office machinery and office supplies.

-- insurance for the cabs, over $500 per month per cab.

-- a body shop and its equipment.

-- perhaps a tow truck.

-- personnel, including mechanics and dispatchers.

-- lawyers.

-- accountants.

-- fees paid to the city.

-- and let's not forget the cost of leasing medallions if you don't own them or paying for loans that may be outstanding on the medallions that you do own.

Clearly, it's an expensive proposition to run a taxi garage in New York City.

The Key Question

About a year after the medallion crashed it occurred to me that I didn't know the answer to a very pertinent question about the economics of the taxi business.  I keep up with these things and I was sure I'd never heard the answer to this question in conversation nor had I learned about it from trade magazines or in the media.  So I posed the question to the owner of my taxi garage, a person who has operated a fleet of as many as 240 cabs for thirty years:  

"What percentage of your cabs have to be out on the road for you to break even?"

He answered immediately without needing a moment to think about it.  

"Eighty per cent."

Eighty per cent to break even.  That, ladies and germs, is a great piece of data.

Here's another one: the customers of the owner of a taxi garage are not the passengers who get into his taxis and pay for a ride.  His customers are the drivers who lease his cabs.  His income comes almost entirely from his drivers.  It is of little concern to the garage owner if passengers are happy with their rides or even if his drivers are out on the streets for the full shift and racking up lots of money on the meter.  In fact, it would be fine with him if the drivers don't work the full shift.  It would mean less wear and tear on his cabs.  

The customers of the owner of a taxi garage are his own drivers.  That's where his money comes from.

Why The Medallion Tanked

The medallion did not tank because Uber took the passengers.  Uber certainly took many passengers but not enough so that you couldn't still make a living driving a yellow cab.  I can say this for a fact because I've been driving a yellow cab since 1977 until the present.   It's true that I'm making less than what I was before Uber showed up in 2014, but it's not that much less.  There's still plenty of business for yellow cabs.

And that's because the business model of the medallion cab -- people who live and work in an extremely condensed piece of real estate (Manhattan) step out onto the street, wave a hand in the air, and a yellow car suddenly appears and whisks them away -- is actually competitive with and often better than the app.  I see people all the time standing there waiting for their Uber to show up while available yellow cabs are driving right by them.  The app may have replaced the telephone but it has not replaced the street hail.   

The medallion also didn't tank because several hundred drivers were swindled by predatory lenders.  There are over 40,000 people in New York City who have valid hack licenses.  There were thousands of people who never drove a cab but purchased medallions strictly as investments.  The misfortunes of a relative few could, and should, lead to reforms in the way loans are made and even to compensations to these drivers, but it would not by itself destroy the confidence that so many others still had in the commodity.

The medallion tanked because the drivers defected to Uber.  

They suddenly left the garages, in big numbers, and did not come back.  New drivers considering entering the industry chose Uber instead of yellow.  Old drivers considering returning to the profession decided to give Uber a try instead of taking the old twelve-hour shift deal.  

Drivers, who for so many years were taken for granted, whose working conditions were deplorable, saw the possibility of a better life if they left the garages and went with Uber.  

No more twelve-hour shifts.

No more working for five hours before you break even. 

No more waking at 3 a.m. to get to the taxi garage by 5:00 to start your twelve-hour work day.

No more working all night and not getting to sleep until 7 a.m.

No more dispatchers shaking you down.

No more being turned away because all the cabs are already leased out.

Now you can own and drive your own vehicle.

You can make money even if you drive for just a few hours.

You can arrange your schedule to give you time with your family.

Work when it's busy.

Work whenever you feel like it.

Surge pricing!

Unfortunately, and predictably, this didn't last.  As time went forward Uber (and Lyft), like the owners of taxi garages, showed themselves to be not particularly concerned with the welfares of their drivers. In fact Travis Kalanick, Uber's founder, shamelessly announced that the long-term goal of Uber was to completely do away with their drivers and replace them with self-driving cars!  These companies allowed their market to become saturated with unlimited numbers of drivers and the good times were over.  It was, and still is, actually very similar to the situation which led to the creation of the medallion in 1937.

But in 2014 Uber sure looked great if you were working out of a taxi garage.

At first the drivers began to drop away like weary soldiers disappearing from their ranks on the long march home.  You might wonder whatever happened to so and so who you used to see at the garage every day.  Someone would say out of earshot of the dispatcher that so and so went to Uber.  The word started to get around from these early defectors that they were doing so much better now, making as much money in two or three busy hours as they were making in twelve at the garage.  

I will never forget what I started seeing in September of 2014.  Traditionally summer was always the slowest season for yellow cabs due to so many New Yorkers being out of town on vacation.  Many cabbies took time off in the summer, too -- the only time of the year when they may not have had to worry about losing their weekly deal.  I might see a dozen empty cabs parked on the street in front of my garage in the summer months, whereas at other times of the year there would be perhaps just two or three out there, waiting for repairs.   

But every year right after Labor Day, it would be as if a switch had been turned on. Immediately the business was back, the traffic was worse, the shifts at the garage were selling out, and things were back to normal.  This did not happen in 2014. Instead there were dozens of empty cabs sitting on the street because they did not have drivers.  In fact, the owner of my garage had a new problem -- he had no place to put his cabs.  He had to start paying to keep them in commercial parking lots. 

Driving around the city I saw the same thing.  Every taxi garage with dozens of empty cabs on the streets.  As months went by, nothing changed.  Rows and rows of empty cabs at every taxi garage.  

The days of endless supplies of drivers were over.

This meant that the garages were below their 80% threshold.  They were losing money.

Worse than that, the confidence in the medallion evaporated.  There was no reason to believe that things were ever going to get better.  

This carried over into the taxi broker segment of the industry as well.  As mentioned above, some drivers preferred to lease medallions rather than continue working out of garages.  They'd go to a middleman (the broker) who'd set them up with a medallion (owned by an investor), a taxicab, and insurance.  He'd then guide them through the red tape of the Taxi and Limousine Commission and they'd be in business for themselves.  Part of this arrangement would be for the driver to sign a contract agreeing to continue to lease the medallion for an agreed upon period of time.   

Let's say the driver signed a two-year contract to lease the medallion in November of 2012.  The two years go by; it's now November of 2014.  He sees that all the drivers he knows who went to Uber are doing great, much better than he is.  Is he going to renew his contract to lease that medallion?

No.  He's going to return it to the broker.  See ya later.

Also, getting back to the owners of taxi garages -- they usually own some medallions themselves but they, too, were leasing medallions from investors.  Seeing that they no longer had enough drivers and were losing money, did they renew their leases with the medallion owners?

No.  In order to cut their expenses they reduced the number of cabs in their fleets by returning the medallions they did not own.  My garage shrunk from 240 cabs to 144.

What if you were the person who bought a medallion (or ten) strictly as an investment?  That commodity which had been giving you a great return in the form of a monthly check from a broker or a fleet owner has now been returned to you. There are no drivers to be found and you are getting nothing.  If you owned only one medallion (and one cab) at least you could still make money by driving the thing yourself.  But you can only drive one cab at a time.  And you own ten medallions.

You are screwed.

Supposing you owned a bank or ran a credit union.  Would you still accept the medallion as collateral for a loan?

No.  So the existing medallion owners could not borrow on their own medallions in the hope of riding out the crisis.

Supposing you were someone who had been considering buying a medallion and you understood what was happening. Would you buy a medallion for a million dollars? Would you buy one at any price at all?  No, you would not.  Nor would anyone else.

If no one will buy a medallion, what is it worth?  

Nothing.  

So that is the story.  That is why the medallion tanked.  The engine that was producing the wealth -- the drivers -- galloped out of the stable in the hope of finding a better life.   

It's a story that has a certain karmic appeal to it.

If you kick a horse long enough it will no longer be around to pull your wagon.

We Create Our Own Karma

The Mark on East 77th Street is a posh, boutique hotel which caters to the well-moneyed and well-connected American Aristocracy of the Upper East Side, and to the Flying Cosmopolitans, mostly Europeans, along with at spattering of celebrities (I’ve picked up two from there - Jane Seymour and, quite recently, Eliot Spitzer). I always have my eye on the place as I drive by as there’s a watering hole at street level from which emerge potential passengers. And of course I’m always looking for that next passenger.

It was there at the Mark that I was waved down by a doorman one night not all that long ago at around eleven o’clock and a rather stunningly beautiful, ebony woman entered my taxi. She was exquisitely well put together: tall, thin, angular features, exotic-looking jewelry, what looked like perfect hair, and an outfit that even I, a fashion moron, could tell was smart and chic, if not elegant. She just had to be a model, I thought, if not a supermodel.

She gave me her destination, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, a twenty-minute ride, and after a brief discussion about the route we would be taking, I thought our conversation was already pretty much over. I’ve found fashion models tend to be rather aloof, so used to men fawning over them that they see us as men-objects, not really people, an interesting reversal on the way we are said to think about them. And also, I must admit, a woman who is perhaps too beautiful can be intimidating to a man simply by her appearance. Those of us who suffer from a deficiency in swaggering confidence see the “ten” as a goal that is automatically out of reach, a no-game condition. We assume we would have to be on a comparable level of good looks as she, or wealthy enough to make her overlook our deficiencies. So we shy away, just on assumption. I’m no different.

After five minutes of silence, however, she surprised me by initiating a conversation. What would it cost, she wanted to know, to take a taxi to Trenton, New Jersey, at six in the morning? And would I be interested?

I told her it would be ridiculously expensive because Trenton is about sixty miles away and it would take an hour and a half to get there if the roads were clear, which might be the case at 6 a.m., but would certainly not be the case on the way back. Hell, you could sit at a bridge or tunnel for an hour in the morning rush, so that had to be taken into consideration on what the price of the ride would be. Off the top of my head I told her I would charge three hundred dollars - a stupid amount of money to spend. And besides, I couldn’t do it. My shift ends at five.

She had a problem, she said. She was a model (you see, I knew it!) and she had to be in Trenton at eight in the morning for a shoot. And here it was, 11 p.m., and she hadn’t yet figured out how to get there. She didn’t even know where Trenton was.

Well, I guess she wasn’t a supermodel after all, not that it mattered. (Assumingly supermodels have managers who handle these logistical problems and, clearly, she didn’t.) So taking on the role of transportation consultant, I told her if I were her I’d take a train, then grab a cab in Trenton.

This sounded like a good idea.

-- Which train?

-- New Jersey Transit.

-- Which train station, Grand Central or Penn?

-- Penn.

-- I’ll take a taxi from Brooklyn to Penn Station, she added.

-- You can always catch a cab on Roebling Street, I said.

Problem solved.

Her smile lit up the cab.

As often happens when people communicate with each other, the level of affinity between us rose and further communication came more easily. I found out she was from Haiti, so we discussed the situation there after the earthquake; she asked me some questions about taxi-driving in New York City; she said something about her sister; we had an amusing argument about the best pizza in the city (take your pick, I say, New York is a pizza paradise). It was nothing more than friendly chit-chat, but friendly chit-chat gives you a sense of the other person and in this case it showed me a sincere, open individual whom I liked for the way she was, quite aside from her beauty.

We arrived at her place, an apartment house on North 7th Street, and she paid the fare with a card, giving me an above-average tip. As she thanked me for the ride and began to leave, I realized something: I myself would be in Penn Station at about the same time as she. I was taking commuter trains home in those days and the earliest one, the one I always caught, left at 6:10. So I told her that she and I might see each other again in Penn Station, wouldn’t that be crazy?

Now she might have responded with a sign of suspicion at my having said that - what is this guy, a stalker? - but she didn’t. Instead she smiled pleasantly, giving me the impression that she thought that if we did happen to run into each other again in Penn Station it wouldn't be a bad thing at all. Not that I had any ideas about this woman. I would have said the same thing to anyone whom I perceived to be a good-natured human being.

She waved goodbye and disappeared into her building.

My shift proceeded as usual. A couple of rides to Brooklyn, a steady passenger from the NY Post to his home in Rego Park, a period of half an hour when I could find no one, and a sampling of tourists, drunks, and bankers working late. At 4:30 I gave up looking for a last-ride airport ride and headed to the Hess Station on West 45th to gas up. My night was over. By 5:10 I was waiting on the line at the taxi garage to turn in the rate card and keys and get paid for the credit card transactions of the night. At 5:35 I was out of there and began walking to Penn Station. At 5:55 I arrived.

I had fifteen minutes to kill before my train departed. I’d almost forgotten about the model who was going to Trenton but then it hit me and, only because she’d been nice, I started to walk over toward the waiting room near the 8th Avenue entrance, which is shared by New Jersey Transit and Amtrak, to look for her - just to say hi because I thought it would be such a unique thing to see somebody twice like that. The station starts to get busy at around 6 a.m., with lots of early trains departing to Washington, Boston, and Savannah, so I had to zig-zag my way around dozens of moving bodies until I finally made it to the waiting room. There are approximately a hundred seats in there, about half of which were occupied.

I looked around.

No, no, no… maybe she left already… maybe she found another way to get there, after all… no, not there.

It already began to bother me that I would never know.

I looked again.

And there she was, sitting there, just a couple of rows away from where I was standing! I must have scanned right over her the first time I looked. Wow! I walked over.

-- Hey, hi, remember me?

-- Oh, yes, hello!

Big smile.

-- So I see you got here all right.

-- Yes, there were taxis on Roebling Street, just like you said. Thank you so much.

-- Oh, you’re welcome. When does your train leave?

She looked at me blankly. That was odd. I looked over at the departure board. There was the Trenton train, Track 2, 6:02, ALL ABOARD. I looked at the clock. It was 6:00! Why was she still sitting there?

-- Oh my God, your train is leaving in two minutes!

-- It is?

I thought maybe this whole train thing was new to her. She obviously didn’t understand how it worked - you look at the board, when it says to get on, you go to the track… she was from Haiti, maybe she didn’t understand the meaning of the words on the board…

-- Come on, you’re going to miss your train! Follow me!

She jumped up. Fortunately I knew exactly where Track 2 was located, not far from the waiting room. She followed me through the mishmash of travelers and in twenty seconds we were standing at the doorway leading to the stairway that takes you down to Track 2.

I opened the door for her.

-- Go on, you can still make it!

-- Oh, thank you!

-- You’re welcome! Go!

She ran down the stairs and for the second time disappeared from my sight. I looked at the clock. 6:01. She made the train.

I had to move a bit quickly now to catch my own train - wouldn’t that be ironic if I missed my own train - but I got there with five minutes to spare which for me, knowing exactly where things are and exactly how much time it takes for me to get to them, was an eternity. After my train pulled out and I did some paperwork regarding the night’s business, I had some time to reflect upon what had just happened.

I thought at first that I had done it, that I had been the watchful angel, so to speak. And to some degree, yes, I had. But really, she had done it. She didn’t have to be open and friendly to a random stranger, her taxi driver. She could have been cold and uncommunicative. But it was the way she was, her good nature, that made me feel it would not offend her if I suddenly showed up and said hello.

We create our own karma.

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.

Celebrity Look-Alikes

Has anyone ever told you that you look like a certain celebrity?

Over many years of taxi-driving, I have found this question popping up from time to time between myself and various passengers. It, like the question posed in my last post - "Have you ever met or known of anyone with the same first and last name as your own?" - is a sure-fire conversation spark plug. Really, it never fails to get a response. By actual survey, I've found that the majority of people say "yes" to that question when asked. And then they'll tell me which celebrity it is and I'll usually see a vague resemblance. ("Ah, yes, you both have two eyes and a nose!")

But sometimes the passenger really is a celebrity look-alike. Many years ago (before he died) I had a man in my cab who was a dead ringer for Henry Fonda. This fellow looked so much like Henry Fonda that I thought he was Henry Fonda.

"Uh, are you Henry Fonda?" I asked, figuring the straightforward was the best approach.

"Nope," he said with a smile, "just look like him."

I still wasn't sure. Maybe this was the real Henry Fonda's way of avoiding annoying people. Only after a few more back and forths was I able to discern that, indeed, my passenger was not Henry Fonda. Then he told me a story about a time he'd played in a charity golf tournament in which Henry Fonda himself was a participant. With great pleasure in the recollection, he remembered the reactions of all the people who saw him there and had no questions in their minds that he was the actual item. What an opportunity for the accidental wannabe.

Another time I had a young man in my cab who told me he made his living as Michael J. Fox's body double. Seeing him close-up, you would not have mistaken him for Michael J. Fox. The face was similar, but not convincingly so. However, his height, weight, bone structure, hairline, and hair color were identical. His job was to stand in for the star when only long-distance shots were on the schedule. This enabled the real Michael J. Fox to not have to show up on the set that day so he could do other things. What a gig!

It can also happen that the person you thought bore a resemblance to a certain celebrity turns out to actually be that celebrity! One night I picked up a man coming out of a bar on the Upper West Side who was wearing a skullcap that covered most of his head. He told me he wanted to go to a building on Central Park West, just a few blocks away, and asked if I could wait for him for a few minutes while he went inside, explaining that it was his daughter's birthday and he wanted to drop off a present.

Not a problem. He made his delivery and, upon returning to the back seat, took off his hat. Suddenly his appearance caught my attention.

"Say, do people ever tell you that you look like James Taylor?" I asked.

"Yeah, it happens all the time," he replied, "...I am James Taylor."

I looked at him more closely in the mirror. Goddamn, it was James Taylor!

"Oh. Hi, J.T.," I said.

And then I drove him back to the bar.

It is not always me who brings up this subject of celebrity look-alikes. I have often been told by passengers on their own origination that they think I look like such and such a famous person. Going back to the late '70s, when I started driving, and throughout the '80s, I was frequently told that I bore a resemblance to three celebrities in particular: Dick Cavett (an American talk-show host who peaked in popularity in the '70s); Chevy Chase (the comic actor); and Richard Dreyfuss (the movie star). Of the three, the only one I myself could see a resemblance to was Chevy Chase, particularly from certain angles. In fact, a couple of times people on the street approached me thinking I was Chevy Chase, which gave me a little vicarious thrill. However, as years went by and the aging process affected Chevy and me differently, the similarities kind of mutated and disappeared. Now I have to settle for the occasional half-blind passenger telling me I look like Dustin Hoffman or Woody Allen, neither of whom I look anything like, at all.

Now, to jump back to Karma Versus Coincidence again, what are the odds of this happening? Of the three celebrities I just mentioned whom I'd often been told that I resemble, two them - Dick Cavett and Richard Dreyfuss - eventually became passengers in my cab. What are the odds against that? A million to one? A hundred million zillion to one? But it did happen. And in both cases it gave me an opportunity which I think anyone who's ever been told that they look like a celebrity would love to have: the chance to ask the celebrity what he thinks.

Dick Cavett was first, in the autumn of 1980. He and his wife, Carrie Nye, hailed me as they emerged from a rear entrance to Lincoln Center on Amsterdam Avenue, and jumped in. I recognized him immediately and greeted him with a smile.

"Dick Cavett," I said cheerfully, "hi!"

I've had over a hundred celebrities in my cab over the years, most of them more famous than Dick Cavett, but his response to my greeting put him in a special celebrity category that is his alone: "Snob".

"79th and Park," he replied.

No return of my greeting, no show of being glad to be recognized, no smile, no "hello". Just "79th and Park". No "please", either.

Ouch.

Well, the nuance of his response was clear to even the oft-obtuse me. He was not allowing for the temporary equality of stature between taxi driver and passenger which - it may surprise you - is usually the case with very famous and influential people. (Read my Robin Williams story, for an example.) Instead, he had erected a little wall which said, "I'm on this side, you're on that side. Stay where you are."

Having been put in my place, I drove toward his destination without any attempt at conversation. I was heading for the Central Park transverse at 81st Street when a request came forth from the back seat to make a stop at a building on 83rd and Central Park West and wait there for a minute or two.

Sure.

I navigated the route and pulled up to the apartment house there in two minutes' time. Dick Cavett got out and scurried off into the building, leaving his wife behind with me. Rather than sit there in an uncomfortable silence, I attempted some small talk with her and found her to be a pleasant and conversational person. Perhaps that loosened me up a bit, as when her husband returned to the cab a couple of minutes later, I felt comfortable enough to pose the question to him that had been on my mind all the while.

"Mister Cavett," I said (he is the only celebrity I've ever felt that I needed to address as "mister"), "I have been told by people from time to time that they think I look like you. Do people ever tell you that they think you look like me?"

To his credit, Dick Cavett (who made his living as a quick-thinking wit) was right on it. He looked over at my name on my hack license and said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I was having lunch with Greta Garbo just the other day and she mentioned to me that I look like that taxi driver, Eugene Salomon."

This was very funny because, in case you didn't know about Greta Garbo, she was a big movie star in the '30s who quit the movie business, retired to New York City, and never gave an interview again in her life. So it was a talk-show host's ultimate wet dream to ever be able to have a meeting with her, as she was so completely unobtainable.

I never did get Dick Cavett's opinion as to whether or not he thought I looked like him, but by this time it didn't matter to me. I was happy enough just to get any reaction at all, so I left it at that.

Richard Dreyfuss, on the other hand, was a piece of cake. As is usually the case with big-name celebrities, he was friendly, courteous, and very easy to talk to. I picked him up in the Theater District, where he was doing a Broadway show, and drove him to the Upper West Side where, he said, he was going to go shopping for a new watch. We chatted it up all the way to his destination on Columbus Avenue and then, just as he was about to get out, I hit him with my big question.
Turning around in my seat so he could easily see my face, I said this:

"I've often been told by passengers that they think I look like you. Do you think I look like you?"
He studied me carefully for a few moments before rendering judgement. I turned a bit from side to side and changed the expression on my face to give him more to work with, the tension mounting. Finally, he spoke.

"Hmmm..." he said, "no... but you've got a Richard Dreyfuss attitude."

And I've been a fan ever since!

********

Hey, buddy, can you spare a click? Put it here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Karma Vs. Coincidence Strikes Again

Was it karma?

Or coincidence?

That is the question, and if you've been reading this blog for a while you know this is a little, pet recurring theme of mine. Something happens that would seem to utterly violate the laws of probability and you have to wonder whether it was just a wild coincidence or if there's a mysterious, natural phenomenon at work.

Karma?

Or coincidence?

Well, it happened again recently and I'm telling you now there wasn't a snowflake's chance in Hades that this could have been a coincidence! No way! But that's just my opinion. What do you think?

I was cruising on the Bowery in the Lower East Side a few weeks ago in search of the next one when I was hailed by two maybe-over-twenty young ladies - a redhead and a brunette - at about 8 p.m. They were smiling and pleasant and had what I would call very "clean spaces" around them, which made having a conversation with them not only an easy thing to do, but a natural thing to do. It was one of those rides that just had an immediate known-you-for-a-long-time feel to it, so to speak.

As our trip got going, for some reason one of them brought up my name, which she'd noticed on my hack license, as a topic for discussion.

"So, what kind of a name is Eugene Salomon?" she asked.

"That's a name with five syllables," I replied.

"You know," she continued with a laugh, "like what's the ethnic origin of that name?"

"Well, my last name, Salomon, is a biblical name that goes back to the Old Testament, as in King Solomon. Eugene appears in many languages in slightly different forms. Eugenio, for example, is the Spanish version, Eugene is the Irish. My mother's side of the family was from Ireland, so that's why I was given that name."

That seemed to satisfy her curiosity. But it reminded me of something that had happened a couple of times in my cab, so I asked them a question of my own about names. It's a great question, by the way, a real conversation starter.

"Tell me something," I inquired, "have you ever met anyone who has the same name as you? Or had someone tell you that they know someone who has the same name as you?"

They thought about it.

"First and last names?" one of them asked.

"Yeah, it's got to be both."

"No, I haven't," one of them said after some consideration, a little disappointed.

"I met someone once who had the same first name as me," the other one said, "but never both names."

"Only once? What's your name?"

"It's unusual - Corrina," she said.

Indeed it was unusual - not unheard of, but not common, either.

"It's happened to me twice," I said.

"Both names?" the redhead asked.

"Yeah."

"Wow, that's freaky," she said.

It was freaky. I told them the stories.

The first one, which happened about twenty years ago, was the time a passenger's jaw dropped when she saw my name on my hack license because, she said, it was also her own father's name. I wound up writing a note to him which said, "To Eugene Salomon, Best wishes and good luck, from Eugene Salomon." I wished I could have seen Eugene Salomon's face when he read that!

The second time, also about twenty years ago, two businessmen from Spain squealed, "Increible!" and told me their boss' name back in Madrid was also Eugene Salomon. Same name, same spelling.

Increible!

Well, our ride was soon over and the two cheerful young ladies paid the fare, gave me a generous tip, and were on their way. My evening continued with the next few fares taking me from the Lower East Side to Greenwich Village, from Midtown to somewhere else in Midtown, to the Upper East Side and from there back to Midtown again.

At around 9:30 a middle-aged man jumped in at 49th and 1st who was heading for the Upper West Side. We drove about ten blocks up 1st Avenue with a little chit-chat and then, from out of nowhere, he says:

"Hey, I know someone who has the same name as you."

"You mean the same first and last name?"

"Yeah!"

That sign post up ahead, which actually said, "No Parking, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.," suddenly appeared to me to be saying, "You are entering The Twilight Zone." Perhaps this guy was a Lizard Person from Planet Surreal and I was in the first stage of an alien abduction. This could not be happening.

He went on to tell me that he's an attorney and that the Eugene Salomon he knows is an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles who occasionally sends him referrals. He said he's spoken with him numerous times on the phone but has never met him in person. In fact, he doesn't even know what he looks like. Which led, of course, to my joking that Eugene and I are actually the same person. There's no money in entertainment law, you see, so I supplement my income by driving a cab in New York one week out of every month. Then it's back to L.A.

Well, it turned out to be another ride in good spirits and not an alien abduction after all. (Or if it was, I don't remember any of it because those sneaky aliens always erase your memory of their abductions, right?) I told him about the other two times I'd had passengers in my cab tell me they knew someone with my exact same name. He was amazed. And then I told him that less than two hours ago I had told these same-name stories to the two girls who had asked me about my name. He was amazed again.

Now I ask you, what are the odds of this happening? It had been twenty years since anyone had told me that they knew someone with the same name as me and something like ten years since I had told anyone these stories. And then, within two hours of each other, I tell the stories to the two girls and bingo!, a person appears in my cab telling me he knows someone with my name.

Is there some kind of natural phenomenon, the rules of which we know not what, that causes this kind of thing to happen? Are the dynamics of thought, intention, and attention senior to the dynamics of the physical universe?

In other words, was it karma?

Or coincidence?

What do you think?

********

Okay, if you think it was karma, click here. If you think it was coincidence, click here.

My Cab Runneth Over

Sometimes during the course of a shift a taxi driver may notice that events of the night seem to be taking on the form of a theme. Let's say, for example, that you get three drunks on three separate rides and they all have red hair. You would think of that shift as the "Night of the Red-Headed Drunks". Or you get not one, but two passengers who offer you a big tip if you'll allow them to continue smoking their cigars in the cab and then two more who just light up cigarettes without even asking if it's okay. That shift would live in your memory as "A Smokey Night in New York City".

I had a shift last Tuesday that had a theme of its own. It was all about fluidity. Not the figurative kind. The literal kind. Of the three forms of matter - solids, liquids, and gases - the one that gives taxi drivers the most trouble by far is liquids. Gases aren't too great either but they can't compare to the misery caused by liquids that are out of control. Any cab driver reading this will immediately think of some outrageous incident involving a liquid that wasn't in the place where that liquid should have been. It happens to everyone who drives a cab.

The precursor to my evening was the weather itself. It was the kind of night that writers think of when they write, "It was a dark and stormy night..." Well, it was a dark and stormy night. Actually, come to think of it, every night is a dark night or it wouldn't be a night, would it? But I digress. This one was dark and stormy. The rain was cold, just a few degrees above the freezing mark, and it was a steady, unrelenting kind of rain, the kind that, if you weren't careful, could make you start thinking about how miserable not only the weather is, but how miserable existence itself is. It was that kind of rain.

So the stage was set. The first sign of trouble was at 7:11 when a young lady got in at 64th and Park, headed for Suffolk and Rivington in the Lower East Side. "Take the FDR," she said, and then settled back in her seat with her cell phone glued to her ear. The FDR (named for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States) is the highway that runs along the east side of Manhattan and is the fastest way downtown, so I had no problem with her route. It was her next comment that gave me pause.

"I'm feeling nauseous," she suddenly announced out of nowhere. I wasn't sure if she was directing her origination to me or to the person on her cell phone, but it was said loud enough for me to hear it and when I hear the word "nauseous" it gets my FULL ATTENTION. It's like telling your dog that it's meal time. The ears go straight up.

I stopped at a red light at 64th and 2nd a moment later and turned completely around in my seat to take a good look at her. She seemed all right. "You're feeling nauseous?" I inquired. "Oh, don't worry," she replied rather pleasantly, "if I'm going to throw up I'll get out of the cab first. But I'll be okay."

That was troubling. The problem was that I would be on the FDR in about a minute and on that highway there are no shoulders, thus no place to pull over. So I had to make a quick decision. Either she was a good or a bad vomit risk. If she was bad, I'd have to insist on staying off the FDR and sticking to the streets. If good, we would proceed as planned. I put her through a mental filter. She showed no signs of being drunk - that was good. She didn't have any signs of being sick - that was good. And she was conversing cheerfully with whomever was on the phone with her. Good again. I decided to get on the highway.

Now, since this is a post about misbehaving liquids, you're probably thinking that was a big mistake and she barfed in the cab. But, no! My judgement was good and we made it down to Suffolk and Rivington without further ado. It turned out this fare was just an incident in a theme.

The night went on. The rain continued and continued, only letting up for brief moments before resuming its assault. One passenger commented that "at least it isn't snow", but I informed him that snow was in the forecast for the next day. A gloom had set in, an ominous feeling that we were in the hands of a deity who was out to get us for something we must have done but could not remember what. It was a feeling that was exacerbated within me by the behavior of a 30-something male who got in the cab at Church and Vesey at 9:45 and wanted to go to the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

I went up Church and made a right on Canal, heading for the Manhattan Bridge. We stopped for a red at the corner of Lafayette and then, without warning, he told me to pull over.

"I have to piss," he proclaimed, as if this was something that happens all the time in the course of a taxi ride.

A sense of urgency set in. A pisser isn't as alarming as a puker, but it's alarming enough and I didn't have a read on this guy. Was he about to pee in his pants, and thus on the floorboard? That could be almost as bad as vomit. There was a garbage truck on my right that was blocking me from being able to get over to the curb and I told him to hold on until the truck moved. But he didn't hold on. He opened his door and went directly to a newsstand that was closed up for the night and took aim.

Meanwhile, the light turned green, the garbage truck moved out of the way, and I had a few moments for reflection while I waited for my passenger to finish making his contribution to the evening's rainfall. I realized this was only the fifth time in 32 years of cab driving that someone had gotten out in the middle of a ride to take a piss. (Yes, I've counted them.) So he'd entered an elite group. But beyond that, I considered the possibility that some kind of karma was at work here. All this rain, then there was the girl, and now this guy with his bladder. If I indeed was being toyed with by Fate, would Fate be kind? Or would I be washed away as if I were a metaphor in Somebody's parable?

The night went on. I brought my passenger to his building on Taaffe Place and headed back to the city. The rain just kept coming down and a wind had picked up that was really blowing things around, making garbage bags fly across the avenues like some kind of urban tumbleweed. But hours went by and the rhythmic counting of my windshield wipers finally had me forgetting about the possibility of a confrontation with a liquid destiny.

Perhaps it was this complacency that made me a target for a passenger who got in at 12:40 at 21st and 7th and was heading down to Varick and Broome. He was a middle-aged gentleman carrying a huge, flat object wrapped in a huge plastic covering, presumably to protect it from the rain. He placed the object carefully across the back seat and then slid in next to it. Of course, I was curious about what it was, so I asked him about this thing resting beside him on the seat.

He told me it was a sign. It turned out he was a sign maker by trade and the sign he was carrying was going to be displayed on the front of a store but first he needed to bring it back to his studio for some final touches. He was a friendly person and, since I was interested to learn about his craft, a lively conversation ensued. He told me he'd been doing it for ten years, that business was always good since there were only three other sign makers in that part of the city, that his business was recession-proof, and that he wished he'd started doing it long before he did, instead of wasting his time at his previous occupation, a building superintendent. Now he was his own boss and was making great money doing something he really enjoyed. And it was also in harmony with his talent as a fine artist - he was a painter.

He went on to tell me about a project he hopes to be commissioned to do by the city. Sixth Avenue, when it was renamed "Avenue of the Americas" many years ago, used to have circular renditions of the coats of arms of all the countries in North, South, and Central America displayed beneath street lamps all the way from Tribeca up to Central Park. Most of them are now gone and the few that remain are in very poor condition. He told me he wants to be the one to restore these heraldic devices. And, he confided, he has a friend who knows Mayor Bloomberg personally, so he thinks he may have an insider's shot at landing the job.

Well, the guy struck me as being a genuine craftsman, a master of his trade, and a relatively fulfilled human being. It was a pleasure to talk with him and I felt a good rapport as he paid me the fare. He opened the door, took one step out into the rain, and then he blurted out two ominous-sounding words:

"Oh, shit."

"What's the matter?"

"Uh, the paint spilled."

This didn't compute. Paint spilled? What paint? How could paint spill? I didn't know what he was he talking about.

"What do you mean?"

"I had a can of paint in the bottom of my bag. It must have fallen out of the bag while we were talking."

"What??? You mean you spilled paint in the cab?"

"Uh, yeah. Sorry."

I jumped out into the rain and looked in the rear. A puddle of white paint covered the right rear floorboard area and there were splatterings on the hump and on the left door panel as well. It was a disaster.

"Do you have any paper towels?" he asked.

"Not enough to clean up that mess!" I said. "Oh my god, is that stuff oil-based?" I cried out in desperation. If it was, I knew that no one could ever get it out and that a) my night was over, b) the entire vinyl floorboard covering would have to be replaced, and c) if this guy didn't pay for it, I would wind up with the bill from the taxi garage. It was enough to make vomit look like a good thing.

"No, it's acrylic. I can get it out with soap and water."

"Thank god!"

And with that, my passenger told me he was going to go down Broome Street to his studio and that he'd come back with soap and towels. He then took off in the rain, taking his sign in its plastic bag with him.

It was a moment of truth. I wasn't sure if he'd return at all and had to make an instant decision - should I insist on accompanying him to his place to make sure he didn't run off on me? Or should I let him go without a word of protest? I decided to trust him, based on my impression of him as being an honest person.

Well, it's nice to be right about someone's character - in two minutes he was back with a couple of towels and a bottle of Fantastic cleaner. Fifteen minutes later, the mess was pretty much gone. I complimented him for taking responsibility for what he'd done and we shook hands.

I was back in business, although the time I'd spent standing out in the rain watching him clean up left me close to soaking wet. But that was as it should have been, considering the theme of the evening:

My Cab Runneth Over.

********

Now, if you're ever feeling washed away yourself, here's a little life preserver for you: just click here for Pictures From A Taxi.