The Caveman Lullaby

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

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

"Momma!" they groan in utmost pain.

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

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

I had just such a ride recently.

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

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

"Hey, baby," he brayed.

She looked over at him.

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

"Hey, baby," the guy regurgitated.

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

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

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

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

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

"Whoa, when ja do her, dude?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Motherfuckers," I agreed.

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

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

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

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

"Yeah?"

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

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

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

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

"Well, those guys were those guys."

"They were? How do you know?"

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

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

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

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

"Never works!" she echoed, laughing.

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

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

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

And then it hit me.

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

"Oh my God!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm gonna roll my window down right now.

Here goes.

Hey, baby...

********

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

One Thug Too Many

One way of looking at New York City is to see it as an endless battle for turf. Everyone has, or wants, their own little piece of the island. And once that is won, it must be defended.

 

When this comes down to the level of a taxi driver it means his turf is either the area of the street that he has control over as he cruises down the avenue in search of his next passenger, or it is the place he holds in a line of cabs in front of a club. And it is from this position in space that he may have to deal with the doorman of that club who has also staked out his own little plot of real estate - the area in front of his club - as his castle.

The doormen who work at hotels and luxury high-rise apartment buildings have never been trouble for me, but I have had many squabbles with the doormen at clubs. For one thing, they are not full-time employees and don't look at their job as being their careers. Usually they're big, menacing-looking muscles who operate on the thug wave-length.

Now, I don't care if they want to be thugs with people on the sidewalk who may want to enter their sacred temple. It's when they assume that they have some kind of authority over my space - the street itself - that we have a problem. I mean, if anyone owns the street, it's me.

So this is what happened a couple of weeks ago...

It was a particularly dead night which drove me to the desperate measure of waiting in front of this Manhattan strip club in the first place. If there'd been any business on the streets, I'd have been out there racing with my fellow cabbies. But when one goes half an hour, then forty-five minutes, and then a full hour without a fare, one begins to question the wisdom of spinning one's wheels and emptying one's gas tank.

So I pulled up in front of this place at 3 a.m. Even so, I wouldn't have decided to wait there had there been any other cabs in front of me on a line. But there weren't any cabs already there, so I just pulled up and double-parked outside the entrance.

Immediately the doorman caught my eye. This guy:

I kind of liked the way he was dressed for the part and I also thought he had the demeanor of the quintessential thuggy doorman, so I decided to take his picture for my photography blog (http://picturesfromataxi.blogspot.com/). But I instinctively knew he wouldn't like it if he saw me pointing my camera toward him, so I decided to be sneaky about it. I aimed the camera at him through the opened driver's-side window and took the shot while I faced forward.

This turned out to be a mistake. He noticed what I was doing.

Now, I take pictures of lots of people. They usually don't know that their picture is being taken but even when they do I normally get a slightly confused or surprised look in response, not hostility. But this guy took it as an invasion of his territorial rights. He immediately gave me his most intimidating death-gaze and snarled at me.

"Get out of here!" he yelled out at me from his command post.

I could understand his resentment of my sneaky method of stealing his image. I suppose I could have asked him if he would mind if I took a shot of him, but I'd thought what I did was the more expedient way of going about it. I just didn't think I'd get caught. Nevertheless, I didn't see this as being any big deal. He could have taken it as a compliment that I'd want to take his picture in the first place. And now he was telling me to move off of my turf.

Like hell.

I didn't move.

"Beat it!" he repeated.

I looked right at him. "What, do you own the street?" I shot back.

In a situation like this, the doorman actually does have the upper hand because he can convince the people coming out of his club that I am some kind of pariah taxi driver and that they'd better not get in my cab. And the people coming out his club will usually do as he says. That may not be fair, but that's what I would expect to happen. Still, there's a principle involved here. And that is that a doorman has no authority over where a taxi driver decides to plant his cab. He works for a private company that is situated on a public commodity known as a street. If a doorman wants a taxi driver to move, he can make it a polite request which the taxi driver may or may not grant him. It's the street!

So, even though I knew I was playing a losing game, I held my ground.

I expected the doorman to come over to me and try to be even more intimidating. But instead, it turned out he had his own, even scarier-looking, thug to do his dirty work for him. This guy, whom I hadn't noticed before:

Thug Number Two walked up to the side of the cab and made this proclamation: "Get outta here!"

Although reason might have dictated that I take his advice, I still didn't feel the inner motivation necessary for me to actually go away. I stood my ground.

"What's the problem?" I asked in a civil tone.

"No pictures!" he grunted.

"I take pictures of everybody, friend," I said, trying to get him to see that I was actually some kind of street artist and not a heavy from a rival gang who was staking out the place.

"You ain't my friend," said he, "get lost!"

"I'll leave when I feel like it," I replied.

He looked at me with I think a little surprise that his attempt at intimidation wasn't working, perhaps fearing that he was losing his touch. He walked back to the club while I damn well continued to hold my position in space, even though I knew I'd never get a passenger from this place. Thug Number Two then opened the door of the club and stuck his head inside for a moment.

Out came Thug Number Three.

He was a burly white guy dressed in a suit (sorry, no picture). And I knew instantly that this guy was trouble because I'd had a minor encounter with him about a year ago. It wasn't that he was any tougher in a physical sense than the other two. It was that I knew he was an off-duty cop who works at the club as a bouncer.

So I quickly weighed my options. I could stand my ground and hold to the principle that this land is my land and I have as much right to it as you do.

Or I could pick up the pieces of my smashed camera after it hits the pavement and realize that calling the police for assistance would not be a viable option.

I decided to heed the advice of the first two gentlemen I'd encountered and seek to earn my living in a different location.

It was just one thug too many.

How To Insult A Taxi Driver

Taxi drivers become pretty much immune to the unintended insults of passengers. Someone from out of town gives you a twenty-cent tip on a $5.80 fare and then tells you to "have a good night". Okay, he doesn't know about tipping. No big deal, it sails right over your shoulder.

Or a guy and a girl and go beyond the socially acceptable sitting close together while looking affectionately into each other's eyes and break out into a lip-locking, saliva-exchanging embrace, as if there wasn't another human being sitting right there in front of them. You chalk it up to crazy kids in love (with alcohol) and it flies out the window.

Or something as common as a person getting in the cab and barking out the destination without saying "please". Humph, well, okay, not gonna condemn a person in the imaginary Court of Intolerable Behavior just because of that. We'll give the guy another chance.

But there is one thing I find particularly difficult to endure. One thing that sets off a spark that gets an immediate reaction unless I practically gag myself to stop bullets from shooting out of my mouth. And I'll bet you wouldn't guess what it is.

Being told to drive faster? Or slower?

Being accused of going the wrong way?

Being asked why a smart person like yourself is driving a taxicab?

Being told how competent the cab drivers in London are?

No, it's none of these things, although the one about London cab drivers hints of it. Here's what it is: being given directions to a destination that anyone would know unless you were a complete moron. For example, a person gets in and says he's going to Penn Station. Then he tells you how to get there. He doesn't ask you if you know where Penn Station is, although that would be almost as bad. He just tells you how to get there, assuming you don't already know.

This drives me over the edge. And it happened a few nights ago.

A twenty-something guy and girl jumped in the cab at around midnight at 6th Avenue and 36th Street. In a heavily-accented voice, the young man told me they were going to 75th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Now, this is easy navigation. Really easy. All a cabbie would have to know in order to carry out this assignment would be a) where is Columbus Avenue and in what direction does it run, b) where is Amsterdam Avenue and in what direction does that run, c) where is Central Park West and in what direction does that run, and d) in what direction does 75th Street run?

All right, there might be one other thing: where is 75th Street? The answer to that is that it's the one after 74th Street. The answers to the other questions are that Columbus is the same as 9th Avenue and runs downtown, Amsterdam is the same as 10th and runs uptown, Central Park West is the same as 8th Avenue and runs both uptown and downtown, and 75th Street, like almost all odd-numbered streets in Manhattan, runs west. I grant you that if you knew absolutely nothing about Manhattan, you would not know these things. However, if you were a taxi driver, you would have mastered these basics literally on your first day or two behind the wheel. Certainly within a week.

Unless you were a complete, utter, and hopeless moron.

So I rolled uptown with the green lights all the way up 6th Avenue until we reached the point where it ends at Central Park South (another name for 59th Street) and then I turned left, heading west toward 7th Avenue. My passengers were chatting quietly to each other and had not engaged me in conversation and I had paid no special attention to them, being content to listen to the oldies station that was playing softly on the radio. But then the guy began his massive faux pas by leaning forward and starting to speak.

"Take Central Park West to 75th Street and make a left," he said.

I bristled. This is like telling a hot dog vendor how to put mustard on a frankfurter. But it got worse.

"Central Park West," he explained, "is two-ways, so you can go uptown on it. 75th Street runs west - you can make a left turn onto it."

That was the end. This was the equivalent of telling the hot dog vendor why people like to put mustard on their frankfurters. I had to retaliate.

"Where are you from?" I asked him.

"Italy," he replied.

"I drive a taxi for 30 years," I said, "and then some guy from Italy gets in my cab and tells me how to get to 75th Street! That's like me telling you where Naples is... please... I'm going to shoot myself!"

Now even though my response was gift-wrapped in sarcasm, it was intended to point out the guy's insensitivity with some humor and get a laugh. I said the same thing once to a fellow from Sweden and he took it well. But the giovanotto (that's "young man" in Italian) did not. He sat there as cold as spumoni and didn't say a word. Clearly, I had offended him.

So what we suddenly had here was a) he unintentionally insulted me, b) I tried to retain my professional pride and unintentionally insulted him, and c) I realized the vibe in the cab was now uncomfortably hostile so, always assuming that more communication is better than less, I tried to lighten things up by making small talk.

"By the way, what's the name of the body of water that adjoins Naples?" I asked. It was just something to say.

I was ignored.

Now I was offended again. I was damned if I was going to sit there and be insulted and then be insulted again by being ignored. I raised my voice slightly and put an edge on it. "Excuse me," I repeated, "what's the name of the body of water that adjoins Naples?"

"The Tyrrhenian Sea," the girl replied in her own pleasantly accented voice.

"Thank you."

And that was it on the peace-making. The remaining 60 seconds of the ride were spent in a silent chilliness that could be likened to the Arctic Ocean at midnight, with a supercheap tip at the end and a brief, two-way staring fight between myself in the cab and the guy as he ascended the steps to his brownstone.

I felt bad that what should have been a pleasant ride home for these people had instead wound up in a whirlpool of hostility.

But not as bad as I would have felt if I'd let the insult go by unchallenged.

***********

And also not as bad as a I would have felt if I'd neglected to mention that you can click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

5A48 And The Manslaughter Moment

There was a taxi driver killed in a road rage incident last week here in New York City. His name was Mohammed Elwaleed. I didn't know him personally, but the story was in the news for a couple of days. Apparently Mr. Elwaleed got into an argument with another driver at around midnight at the intersection of 65th Street and Madison Avenue. In the course of whatever the argument was about, he got out of his taxi (a no-no in any road rage incident) and was then literally run over by the other driver, who was later apprehended and now faces manslaughter charges.

Mohammed Elwaleed was a 44 year-old immigrant from Sudan who leaves behind a wife and two small children.

It was yet another one of those stories that sobers one up to a disturbing aspect of living your life in a big city - or, really, just living amongst other human beings in this civilization. It's that invisible volcano beside which we are all building our huts. It's needing the ability to know when the stranger who's just appeared in front of you, Special Delivery from Fate, is about to explode.

I had such an incident myself a few weeks ago. I seem to get one or two of these a year on the average.

It started at the beginning of a Saturday night shift when I was assigned the cab 5A48 for the evening. The taxi garage was "sold out" that night. That meant that every cab was out and should you be unfortunate enough to have a breakdown, you were stuck with that car. You couldn't bring it in and exchange it for another one.

As I headed out of the garage with the meter and rate card for 5A48 in hand, another driver noticed the identifying paperwork I was carrying.

"You've got 5A48?" he asked with a disapproving look on his face.

"Yeah... why, it's no good?"

"I had that cab last night," he said quite seriously. "Whenever it hits a bump, it stalls out. Twice it stalled out on me on the highway. I could have been killed."

This comment led to a discussion about how to start a stalled car that was already in motion. The driver who was giving me such a grim warning turned out to not know that in these situations you are supposed to put the car in neutral and start it up while it is still moving. Instead, he had brought the cab to a full stop on the highway, put it in park, and then turned the ignition key.

"No wonder this guy almost got killed," I thought, "he doesn't know how to drive!"

Nevertheless I returned to the dispatcher's window and asked the weekend guy, Wilfredo, about the condition of the taxi. He assured me it had been fixed.

I then returned to the driver and told him what Wilfredo had said.

"If God loves you," he replied, "you will not be harmed."

And on that bright note I made my way to where 5A48 was parked. I did my usual prep on the cab and after about 15 minutes I pulled out onto 10th Avenue to start my shift.

I drove six or seven blocks.

I hit a bump.

5A48 stalled out.

As I put the cab into neutral and started it up without stopping, I assessed the situation. If I brought the thing back to the garage and had the mechanics try to fix it, it could take hours. This was not a common mechanical problem. In fact, in my thirty years of taxi driving, I had never had a cab that stalled out whenever it hit a bump. (It still amazes me that after having driven literally hundreds of different taxis, I can still discover some new mechanical malfunction that I have never experienced before.)

On the other hand I could just continue with 5A48 and hope that I could make it through the shift without any mishaps. After all, the problem was really in the category of a major annoyance rather than a real danger. And since money was at stake (I would not be compensated for time lost in the garage), the choice was obvious.

I stayed with 5A48.

As the night wore on, it was clear to me that I had made the right decision. Although the frequent stalling out was a very major annoyance - the damned cab was stalling out about once every 3 minutes, thus adding up to over 200 stalls before the night was over - I had not lost any business because of it. However, it was contributing to the stress level of the Saturday night shift, which is normally crazier than any other night of the week, anyway. Saturday night is always filled with loud, stupid, and drunk party people and, even without a particularly outrageous incident getting under your skin, it has a way of wearing you down.

All of this set me up for that fare I get once or twice a year.

At 4:53 I was hailed by two guys, one white and one black, at 35th Street and 6th Avenue. They wanted to go up to 125th and Amsterdam in Harlem. Although I was tired and my shift ends at 5:00, it was a good last-fare-of-the-night ride. It would bring me about $15 extra income and I would be able to make it back to the garage by around 5:30, within the acceptable return time.

I headed west to 10th Avenue and figured I'd just ride up 10th, which becomes Amsterdam at 59th Street, all the way to 125th. The lights are synchronized in "the wave" on that avenue, so I would be able to make the entire trip with no red lights. Plus the pavement of Amsterdam is nice and smooth so I didn't expect 5A48 to be stalling out much.

We were on our way.

Within a minute into the ride I could see by the way these two guys were sitting closely together that they were gay and by the way they were talking softly to each other that they were not conversational as far as the driver was concerned. This was fine with me as I was rather exhausted and not in the mood to be chatty anyway. So I turned the radio to the smooth jazz station and headed for 10th, where I turned right and headed uptown.

All was well on 10th Avenue until we got to 51st Street. At that point we hit a delay because there had been a serious accident, with an overturned car, and the police had closed the avenue and were diverting traffic onto 51st toward 11th Avenue. I explained what was happening to the passengers, who didn't acknowledge what I'd said. What it meant was that we were going to have to circle the block and wind up back at 10th Avenue on 52nd Street. The delay took about five minutes.

As I got rolling again on 10th Avenue, the voice of the black guy piped up from the back seat. "Why didn't you take the highway?" he asked. This was not a friendly question. His voice had an edge to it.

I could have taken 11th Avenue up to 57th Street, gotten on the highway that runs along the west side of Manhattan, and exited at 125th Street. It would indeed have been faster, although it wouldn't have been any cheaper because the distance is slightly longer and we would have no waiting time on Amsterdam. So I told him the truth.

"This cab has been stalling out on me all night whenever I hit a bump," I explained. "I didn't want to take the chance of it stalling out on the highway."

My explanation was met with a distinctly stony silence - there was a lingering feeling of distrust and resentment in the air. But I was tired and chose to ignore it. We continued up Amsterdam with no further communication between us until we arrived at their 125th Street destination, about ten minutes later.

The fare was $17 even. The white guy exited first and started to walk across 125th, a wide, two-way street with four lanes. Apparently their place was on the opposite side of the street. The black guy stayed behind and handed me the fare, with no tip, through the partition window.

Not getting a tip was no big deal. Obviously the guy was not totally happy about the ride and not tipping is a customer's prerogative. I was ready to drive off, but before he closed the door, my passenger decided to have some words with me.

"The next time somebody runs off without paying," he said, "that will make it even for this ride."

It was clearly an insult. The guy was saying I had ripped him off and lied to him about the reason for not taking the highway and that, no sir, you could fool some of those suckers but you sure as hell couldn't fool him. And not only that, he had appointed himself the ombudsman for all the inner city kids who run off without paying the fare.

It was a comment that was totally mean-spirited and had a racial undertone to it. Plus, he was totally wrong. In a more perfect world, I might have calmly attempted to handle his considerations or just shrugged my shoulders and driven off. Instead, I resorted to sarcasm.

"So you feel that you paid too much," I replied, my own mocking tone implying that his comment was idiotic and that he was a moron. "And that's the justification for ripping off cab drivers. Did I get that right?"

The guy at this point was standing on the street but had not yet closed the door. His response to my sarcasm was to open the door a bit wider, lean into the compartment, and send a ball of spit straight through the partition window and into my face. He then began nonchalantly walking across 125th Street without having closed the door.

I was, of course, outraged and humiliated. This piece of dog doo had insulted me and now had assaulted me. Nevertheless, my reaction was immediate. I wiped his spit off my face with one of the napkins I always have handy behind the visor, and then did something he hadn't anticipated when he decided to launch his saliva missle at my head. I swung the taxi around in a U-turn and suddenly was in position to run him the fuck over as he crossed the street.

And that was the manslaughter moment.

It's that briefest little speck of time in which you either cross over the line or you do not. Most of us do not. And most of those who do spend the rest of their lives wishing they could take that moment back, as is likely the case with the man who ran over Mohammed Elwaleed.

As for me, I swerved close enough to the jerk to let him know I could have killed him if I wanted to, and shouted out a word at him to indicate that he bore a resemblance to the part of the digestive system that is responsible for expelling waste products from the body.

By the time I got back to the garage my anger had pretty much subsided and I felt grateful that I had been given the ability not to act on impulses.

Perhaps God does love me.

Or perhaps He can barely tolerate me and that's why he made me a taxi driver in the first place.

There is still one place where it is perfectly acceptable to act on impulse, by the way. And that is to click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

The Bad And The Beautiful

You know, you drive a cab and people get in and people get out and most people are okay or even better than okay but then one comes in who is really, I mean really, something God must have created when He was sitting on the crapper. When somebody like that enters my cab, I put up with it and within ten minutes they are gone and happily out of my universe forever. But if a short time goes by and then another one gets in, I know what's going on. I have hit an unexpected squall of bad karma and, like a fisherman in a storm, I have no choice but to ride it out and hope I can stay afloat. So to speak.

Tuesday night was like that.

It started with my second fare. She was a particular type of character whom I have run into occasionally and whom I dub the Woe Is Me Person, sort of a professional victim. This is someone who is perpetually "suffering" from one malady or another and by cleverly making you feel guilty about it is able to manipulate you if you're not too bright. She was sixty-something, built like a boxcar, and had that "I am in such pain but don't mind me" thing going on. Sitting next to her was the cowed lackey whom I suspect has been saying "Yes, dear" for the last thirty years, her husband.

They got in on the west side of 56th and 5th and she told me their destination was a deli at 57th and Lex, a thankfully short ride. She mentioned the name of the deli. Did I know it?

"M'am, I don't know delis by their names, except the famous ones like the Carnegie Deli. But I do know 57th and Lex. I'll take you there." She spoke to her husband just loud enough for me to hear, "He doesn't know the deli." I ignored the invitation to an argument and started to drive.

It was 93 degrees Fahrenheit (that's damned hot for those of you who use centigrade) that day but fortunately the cab I had for the shift had excellent A/C and the compartment was quite comfortable. We drove less than a block, and then, her suffering voice:

"Driver, could you turn off the air conditioning, please? I have a cold and I need the windows open. Thank you."

It wasn't a request. It was an order. Turn off the A/C on a sweltering hot day.

What I should have done was to have told her that she can shut off the A/C button which controls the flow of air in the rear of the taxi herself while I close the partition to keep the cold air in the front of the cab. That would have stared the tiger in the face and probably put an end to my upcoming karma situation, but instead I complied and told her she was probably the only person in New York City who didn't want air conditioning today. My oblique comment was ignored.

I made a left on 54th Street and headed east. It was rush hour and the traffic was bumper to bumper. As I pulled up to stop at the red light at Madison Avenue, I heard this:

"Driver, please don't drive too fast. I have a bad back."

What I should have said: "Lady, do you have bad eyes, too? Look, the traffic is at a standstill. I couldn't drive too fast if I wanted to. And I do want to."

What I did say: nothing.

When you're dealing with the mechanics of karma, this is a mistake. Taking it on the chin is a way of keeping the negative energy in your own space and that makes you a magnet for the next lousy thing to happen. But I didn't realize this at the moment. I just adopted the mode of suffering saintliness myself and drove them to the damned deli on 57th Street and then shot invisible arrows through her bad back as she exited the taxi and walked into the deli by herself, leaving her husband/servant behind to pay me the fare.

Well, good riddance. But it didn't take long for her replacement to arrive.

I drove down Lex and within five minutes was hailed by a middle-aged woman at 45th Street - a woman who seemed okay at first but turned out to be another type of character I encounter from time to time: The Evil Jockey. This is a passenger who assumes you are a moron and takes control of the navigation aspect of the ride by telling you not only the route to take but which lane to be in, what speed to drive at, and where exactly to turn left or right. Sprinkled in with this will be comments such as, "Come on, you can make that light!" The passenger is the jockey. You are the horse.

She was a businesswoman going to 33rd and 6th who had not given herself enough time to get to what she said was an important meeting. When the ride began, she was conversational and pleasant. In fact, I even made the mistake of telling her I'd been driving a cab for twenty-nine years when the talk went in that direction. But when we became stuck in heavy traffic at 42nd Street (due to the explosion a couple of weeks ago that shut down Lexington Avenue between 42nd and 39th Streets), with the speed of a light switch she became the bitch from hell.

"You'd better change lanes. You're in the slow lane."

Bingo. With that single disrespectful communication she turned me into a driver who cared about getting her to that meeting on time to one who didn't particularly give a damn if she was late or not. Not that I intended to sabotage the ride. But the mental machinery was turned on that seems to control whether things go right or things go wrong. And wrong it went.

First, it took three minutes to get through the light at 42nd Street. But the tension in the cab made it seem like fifteen. Next, when I told her I intended to take 5th Avenue downtown she ordered me to go straight on 42nd and make the left on 7th Avenue. Then, after circumventing heavy traffic at Broadway and making the turn she ordered, she took issue with me for not turning on Broadway since it would have taken us more directly to her destination. I started to lose my cool.

"Look, you told me to take 7th Avenue, so that's what I did!"

"Broadway would have been more direct."

"You told me to take 7th."

"You've been driving a cab for twenty-nine years and you don't know that Broadway is more direct? I don't buy it."

"I don't care if you buy it or not. You told me to take 7th and that's what I did. And anyway, there was heavy traffic at Broadway and if we'd taken it we'd still be back there waiting to make the left turn."

In divorce proceedings this would be called "irreconcilable differences". We had reached a point, after being together in a cab for only twelve minutes, of hating each other's guts.

"And now you're going to tell me you can't make a left on 34th Street?" she asked in a hostile tone. (She had ordered me to stop on 7th Avenue at 34th Street and there's a no left turn sign at that intersection until 8 pm. It was then 7:30.)

"That's right."

"Here."

She handed me a ten dollar bill for a $9.10 fare. I handed back to her 90 cents in change, not expecting or wanting a tip. She had decided she'd rather walk the long block to 6th Avenue than endure any further futility with a retarded taxi driver and left the cab with no further words exchanged.

But those invisible arrows were flying all over the place.

What I didn't tell her was that if we'd driven down to 32nd Street and made a left, I could have had her within a short block of her destination in thirty seconds. But by this time, of course, I was rooting for her not only to be late, but to lose her job and wind up sleeping in a cardboard box on the street.

So it seemed that with the way the shift was going, I was being set up by forces beyond my control to have a completely disastrous night. Who knows what else might happen when you start pulling in people like this? A flat tire? An accident? The cab breaks down in the Bronx?

So I confronted what was going on. Yes, I was somehow attracting negativity. I couldn't see two monsters like this in a row as being a coincidence. But wait, by simply observing this I could bring an end to it. There was no need for me to take a karmic whipping. I could simply decide that okay, that's it, no more bad rides tonight. I'm a good guy. I'm a great cab driver. No need for these things to happen to me.

And right away my night turned around.

Immediately I picked up a great fare who was all smiles and seemed to think she was just the luckiest woman in the world to have me as her taxi driver. And then there was a Japanese couple who were big Yankee fans. And a man from Philadelphia who discussed with me the importance of Alexander Hamilton to United States history. I was having one great fare after another, culminating in this at 10:30:

Pictured here are newlyweds Eric and Sabina and Sabina's parents from Poland. I drove them (and a lot of flowers) from a restaurant on the West Side where their wedding reception had taken place to their apartment on 40th and Lex. Eric and Sabina had been dating for about a year and decided to get married to coincide with Sabina's parents visit to the United States. I want to tell you, if you drive a cab you can't get a ride that's more joyous than this.

So it taught me a lesson. You don't have to go into agreement with what would seem to be the inevitability of bad karma. We're not the dimwits of destiny. We write the words to our own music and we dance the way we damn well decide we want to dance.

Right? Right!

I continued to drive on into the night wondering if I could get anything to top a bride and a groom being in my cab. What could come next? How about a Hollywood film director who decides he wants to use me in his next movie about taxi drivers? Maybe Martin Scorcese himself! My mind began to wander... Taxi Driver 2... hmmm...

The night went on. A little after midnight I was hailed in front of a gay bar called "Therapy" on 52nd between 8th and 9th. Some guy was saying goodbye to a young lady and kind of escorted her into my cab. (It has become fashionable in NYC for girls to hang out in gay bars.) She told me her destination was in Astoria, Queens, and after a brief discussion about the best way to get there, we were on our way.

I was still in a great mood and wanting to communicate with everyone, so I attempted to start a conversation with this person but found, after a couple of failed tries, that she was not the chatty type. So I put my eyes on the road and just drove. C'est la vie.

However, as I was crossing the lower level of the 59th Street Bridge, I became alarmed at something - I could no longer see her in my rear-view mirror. I turned around to see what was up and saw that she was lying face down across the back seat. Oh my god, she was a vomit candidate.

"Are you all right?"

Her head tilted upward slightly. "Yeah, I'm okay. I'm just tired."

I wasn't convinced. Sometimes people who are drunk and on the verge of barfing in a cab are afraid the driver will throw them out if he thinks they're about to be sick. So they con the driver with lies.

"Listen, if you feel like you're gonna be sick, just tell me so I can pull over."

"I'm okay. I'm just tired," she said in what was almost a whisper.

What can a driver do in this situation? You can't just throw somebody out because you think she's going to vomit. Maybe she was just tired. I had no choice but to keep driving and hope she was on the level.

It took six or seven more minutes to get her in front of her apartment building on 28th Avenue. I looked back at her and observed the seat, half-expecting to see barf on it. But the seat was clean. The girl, however, was still sprawled across it and was now out like a light. I had to yell at her to get her awake enough to realize she had arrived at her home.

She opened her eyes. And then she sat up.

And that was all it took. The change of position of her body was the impetus that sent about a gallon of creamy puke spilling from her mouth, down her arm, and all over the back seat.

I sprang like a leopard to the back door and opened it in the same way that cops do when they're raiding a house where drug dealers are living. I was outraged, to put it mildly.

"Oh, shit!" I screamed. "Why didn't you tell me to pull over? Dammit!"

But my rage drew nothing but a pukey blank stare. The alcohol had kicked in and she was out of it. It took her about five minutes in her semi-conscious state to find the money to pay for the fare and kick in an extra twenty dollars at my not too subtle suggestion. And all the while covered in her own vomit.

She then stood up, took a few steps toward her building, and collapsed on the sidewalk. As pissed off as I was, I still did the right thing and took her by the arm and guided her to her place and made sure she got into it all right. I then had to wipe her puke off my own hand and deal with the mess she'd left me. Just fucking wonderful.

I went to work with my paper towels, Windex, and air freshener spray. After about twenty minutes of disgusting, humiliating labor, I thought I had it licked (pardon my choice of words) and went back to work. But after a passenger asked me if someone had thrown up in the cab, I had to confront the fact that I needed to bring the damn thing back to the garage. There the hard-working Tonio, one of the all-night guys, helped me remove the back seat and hose both it and the floorboards down. The fact is, her vomit had seeped under the seat through the seat belt openings and onto the floorboard. After we wiped it down with cloth towels, the job was finally done for real.

I took a few more fares that night, but that was basically it. The puker had put a pretty heavy exclamation point onto what had already been a very memorable evening.

And what that exclamation point meant to me was this: remember all that stuff I was saying about how we write the words to our own music and all? Well, who or whatever's in charge of that karma thing doesn't seem to like hearing talk like that. It might be a good idea to keep your voice down when talking about all that free will stuff, all right?

Just a thought.

Of course, we still have free will to click here to see Pictures From A Taxi. Right?

The Dwindling Spiral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then they left. 

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

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

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

 "You mean to sell your house?" 

 "No, I'm not leavin' there." 

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

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

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

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

He was in a dwindling spiral.

********

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

Traffic Jam Connoisseur

I was traveling south on Broadway a few days ago with a passenger in the cab when I unexpectedly hit bumper-to-bumper traffic at around 83rd Street. Traffic flows and stops flowing in predictable patterns in New York City and this was not a place, nor a time (9 pm), where I would expect to be suddenly at a crawl. I told my passenger it was probably just a double-parked truck and we should be moving along at normal speed within a minute or two.

But two, three, four minutes went by and we'd only moved three blocks. I was about to suggest that we detour over to Columbus Avenue, when the traffic began to pick up just a bit and I could see some flashing lights not too far in the distance. Since these lights were yellow and not red, I thought it was some kind of road work or utility work in progress and figured it made more sense to stick to Broadway rather than make a detour as the source of our delay had been identified and wasn't too far away. My passenger agreed. And then the traffic started moving a little quicker and in another minute I could see what was actually screwing things up.

It was a house!

A pre-assembled house on a flatbed truck and a couple of cars with "oversized load" signs on them were taking up two of Broadway's three moving lanes, causing all other vehicles to squeeze into one lane to pass them. Who in the world would ever have guessed that that was actually the cause of the problem! As I waited my turn to merge into a single file and then was finally released onto an unobstructed Broadway, I was reminded of something that has happened to me after all these years of taxi driving.

I have become a connoisseur of traffic jams. Some people are connoisseurs of fine wines. Some are connoisseurs of cigars. French cuisine, Chinese vases, antique cars, shoes, Barbie dolls, Civil War memorabilia, ladies' undergarments - they all have their connoisseurs. But I, the New York taxi driver, I am a connoisseur of traffic jams.

One of the great topics of conversation in a taxi is, "What the hell is causing the traffic to slow down?" (Or stop completely.) Usually it's the mundane - the expected delay as you approach the 59th Street Bridge; the inescapable backup as you head toward the Theater District around showtime; the agony you feel as you realize the Lincoln Tunnel traffic is backed up on 11th Avenue all the way to 55th Street.

Most traffic jams are quite predictable and can be taken in stride. Or avoided altogether if you're a savvy driver. It's the unpredictable ones that are the province of the connoisseur. There are two types: a) the jams where you never know what caused them. They're just there and no explantion is ever found. b) the jams that, when you do learn what caused them, you say to yourself (like with the house going down Broadway), "Who in fucking hell would ever - ever! - have possibly guessed that this was what was causing me to sit on my unmoving ass for the last half an hour?"

Here's one of my favorites of all time. It happened in 1997.

I had a fare to Forest Hills in Queens at about 7:30 pm. It was a lousy ride because it means a twenty-minute trip back to Manhattan, most likely without a passenger, at a time of day when it's very busy there. So it's a money-loser. But I never refuse a fare so off we went. When we were about five minutes away from my passenger's destination we hit a mother of a traffic jam on Queens Boulevard. It just suddenly came to a dead halt at a time and in a place where the traffic should have been moving along with no problem.

After trudging along for ten minutes I could see a multitude of red lights flashing in the distance and thought it was most likely a serious accident so, after a conference with my passenger, I took a detour and did some zig-zagging in order to get him to his apartment building. It was a great move which saved us both some wasted time.

After dropping him off, I found myself quite near to whatever was happening, but fortunately I was on the opposite side of Queens Boulevard and the traffic was moving along pretty well on that side of the street. I naturally tried to see what was going on but all I could see were police cars with their lights flashing. I was ready to forget about it and just get back to Manhattan as quickly as possible when a minor miracle happened. I got a fare going back to the city, a middle-aged woman en route to Midtown.

After getting over my shock and joy of getting this lucky ride, I of course asked her if she knew what was going on. And, miracle number two, she did! I was certainly expecting to hear a story about a gruesome accident or a disturbing crime - but no. Here's what she told me...

It seems a woman who was an amputee went into a hair salon to get a new haircut. She was so displeased with the result that, as a protest against the morons who had done this to her hair, she decided to take off all her clothes and just sit there. The salon people called the police and when it went out on the police radio that a nude, female amputee was refusing to put her clothes back on, every patrol car within ten miles showed up. The traffic jam was caused by all the police cars which had nowhere else to park, so they just blocked up the boulevard.

Well, of course. That's what was causing the traffic jam. Why didn't I think of that in the first place?




Click right here for Pictures From A Taxi. It's free and there's no waiting in line.

Sketches

Usually when I write a post I'm trying to make some kind of a point - choosing certain people or incidents which illustrate a theme - but I'm falling short of points to make right now, so here are some notes about some of the more memorable passengers who were in my cab last Saturday night, on March 10th.

Just some sketches, not complete portraits.

6:30 pm, from Grand Central Station to Hope Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn: a 40-something man tells me the address he's going to in Brooklyn is a house his father bought in 1952 and that he's lived in all his life. I immediately think how wonderful it must be to never have to worry about paying rent or a mortgage because about a third of the money I make goes to that cause, but I don't mention this to him. He tells me he is soon going to have the house, an old three-story building, demolished and a new structure with 2.4 times as much square footage built in its place. (2.4 times whatever the square footage is that already exists is the formula the city codes permit for tearing down one building and putting up another one, he told me, an interesting fact about the city that I didn't know.) He's going to put in one-bedroom apartments and rent them at the going rate ($1,500 per month) when it's done. Is he going to live in the building himself when it's rebuilt? He doesn't know. Where will he live while the construction is under way? Again, he doesn't know. He goes on to tell me that there are pitfalls involved in this project, particularly in the area of the funding. That if you're not careful and savy you can really be screwed. I see clearly that my passenger is not one of the sharks that normally swim in these waters - he's a straighforward and unpretentious man - and suggest that he should follow the advice of someone he already knows who may have some experience in this game. A nice guy, I wish him success.

7:04 pm, from Houston and 1st Street to Bleecker and LaGuardia Place: a couple in their 50s, en route to Kenny's Castaways, a honky-tonk bar in the Village. Through conversation I learn that the man is a retired fireman. He left the department in 2002 and was one of the heroic people who spent the month following Sept. 11 digging through the rubble in hope of finding survivors. And now he is paying the price. Polyps were found on his larynx and spots on his lungs. He discusses the treatments he is receiving for his condition and I ask if by any chance he knows a friend of mine who is also a retired fireman, John McCole. And he does! Small world! But he didn't know that John wrote a book, THE SECOND TOWER'S DOWN, about his own experiences at Ground Zero and his path to recovery from the ordeal. So I am able to recommend the book to him. He offers me has hand to shake, a gesture of kindness I find just a bit humbling because I have so much respect for this individual.

8:02 pm, from 43rd and 2nd to 23rd and 7th: a young couple en route to a comedy club. They can't figure it out themselves, so they ask me this question... what does it mean when they advertize the comedy club as having a "no drink minimum"? They are baffled by this. I tell them that a lot of clubs have a one or two drink minimum added on to the price of admission but this place doesn't. Thus, it's a "no drink minimum". Case closed. Smiles return to their faces.

8:54 pm, from 16th and Park to 157th and Riverside Drive. A married couple with their infant daughter. It takes a minute or two to buckle up the baby's car seat (smart move on their part) and we are on our way. They tell me the route they want to take: the FDR Drive to the 155th Street exit! My attention immediately goes onto the humiliation I described in my last post (I needed help from a man from Mexico to navigate the streets at this exit) and, as we head up the Drive, I explain to them what I had written, including the part about how either I was an idiot or the city was unfathomably huge. The young mother, who turns out to be a wiseass and completely on my wavelength, suggests that perhaps it's not a matter of either/or. Perhaps the city is, indeed, unfathomably huge and I am an idiot. To make matters worse, I have forgotten the route that the Mexican showed me and once again I need directions from my passengers. This time, however, I am taking notes. (If you want to see what the route actually is, look at the "comments" section of the last post.) As we approach their destination, I divert their attention from my incompetence by telling them I know the slogans on the license plates of all the states in the union. (Florida - "The Sunshine State", etc.) It's one of the few perks of this job, obtained from year after year of staring at license plates in traffic jams. They test me out with a few tough states and I pass with flying colors. They are delighted and have forgotten about the 155th Street thing. Even the baby seems happy.

10:35 pm, Perry Street and Hudson. I am hailed by a frat boy who then opens the back door and starts talking to his frat boy friends on the sidewalk. I sit there for over a minute before they decide they do not want a cab after all and then close the door without so much as saying a word of apology. I am infuriated and step out of the cab (a no-no) and announce to the group that they need to work on their manners. There is a moment where they were wondering if I was going to take a swing at one of them, but I just get back in the cab and drive away thinking how bad can it get to be my age and still having to put up with this shit.

12:51 am, from 58th and Madison to Van Dam and Varick. How bad can it get? My question is answered as three semi-drunk frat girls get in and demand that I turn my radio to 97.1 (hip-hop) and blast the volume. We get into a disagreement about it that starts to turn nasty before one of them suggests a compromise: turn the radio to one of the stations I like and blast the volume to that. I go along with that idea but still find the seventeen minute ride feels like an hour and a half.

12:57 am, from Van Dam and Varick to Union, New Jersey. My spirits pick up again as two perfectly nice girls jump in and negotiate a price for a ride to Union, NJ. I suggest $40.00 plus the Holland Tunnel toll to which they readily agree and we are off. As we we get through the tunnel, however, I realize why they were so agreeable about the price. I had thought they meant Union City, a much closer destination. Nevertheless, we ironed out what could have been a tense situation very easily, and they agreed to pay $65 for the ride. I am back in the city in just over an hour, so that was good money. I begin to think life ain't so bad after all.

3:05 am, from 6th Avenue and Bleecker to 48th Avenue and Vernon in Long Island City. Four thirty-somethings in the cab, with one of them sitting up front with me. I learn through a circuitous conversation that my front-seat companion and I went to the same high school! (Clarke High School in Westbury, N.Y.) I ask him to tell me the names of some of his teachers, as I'm wondering if any of the ones I had (twenty years earlier) could still have been there during his time. Oddly, though, he could only remember the names of two teachers, neither of whom I had myself. I find this strange because I could easily name twenty or more. Nevertheless, I think this is a wild coincidence.

But it gets me thinking. Earlier in the evening I had a passenger who knows my friend John McCole. And then I got another fare to that 155th Street exit, a destination I had been to a few days earlier and still had my attention on, but before that I hadn't used that exit in, what? -- five or six years. And finally there's this guy who went to my high school. It raises an age-old question: is it coincidence or is it karma?

Could be the subject of a new post...




Click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

The Ding

Bad karma is like bad weather. You're doing nothing out of the ordinary, or at least that's how it seems, and then suddenly out of nowhere - you're in it. One bad thing after another happens.

I had a shift like that recently.

First there was a woman who gave me a ten-cent tip on a $7.90 fare. She probably thought she was giving me a $1.10 tip but didn't notice that there is a one dollar surcharge added to the total on the meter during the evening rush hours (in this case, $6.90 + $1.00 = $7.90). That was no big deal but it annoyed me and most likely set me up mentally for the next bad thing.

Which was getting the finger from a pedicab driver. Pedicabs have multiplied like cockroaches in the city, even in the winter, and, although I admire drivers who provide their own horsepower, they are becoming a traffic nuisance. This one particular person was pedaling up 6th Avenue in a moving lane, apparently suffering from the delusion that he was a Chevrolet. So I tapped my horn. The guy, who had a face that looked like it belonged in a penitentiary, flipped me the bird and threatened to fuck me up but good. That was a first. So much for the thought that the pedicab drivers were just a bunch of swell, good-natured college kids.

But these incidents were merely preludes to the ding.

The ding. The dreaded ding. It's an occupational hazard for a cab driver and a big-city quality of life item for anyone who dares to drive a car into Manhattan.

The ding is when the door of one vehicle opens too widely and knocks into the door or fender of another vehicle.

They come in two varieties. One is the ding that happens when the owner of the dinged vehicle is not anywhere around. The other is when he is. In the first instance the handling is to say to yourself, "Oh, damn, that's terrible, gee, I'm sorry that happened". And then drive away. In the second instance you must actually confront and handle an angry human being.

Since I was having a bad taxi karma day it meant, of course, that the owner of the other vehicle was right there. Here's what happened...

I was waiting at a red light on 68th Street, facing Columbus Avenue, with no passengers in the cab. On my right was a black, expensive-looking SUV. A sixty-ish woman appeared from the sidewalk and walked toward me. Like when you can see an accident coming but are helpless to prevent it, I surmised immediately that a spatial problem was at hand. I was too close to the SUV and there was no room to move forward. Unless this woman opened the door of my taxi very carefully the potential existed here for a ding.

As she came closer my apprehension grew. Because I could now see, simply from her facial expression and demeanor, that she was not the open-the-door-very-carefully type. To the contrary, she appeared to be an old-fashioned, quintessential battleaxe. If Oscar the Grouch had a 65 year-old sister, this would be her.

And to add to the tension - considerably - I then noticed that a middle-aged man was sitting in the driver's seat of the SUV and he was watching this woman with the same apprehension that was impinging on me. Like a meteor that has been on a journey of a hundred million miles and is finally turning into a firey ball as it hits the atmosphere, a moment of truth was suddenly at hand.

The woman put her fingers on the handle of the right rear door... she pulled the handle up... the door began to open...

DING!

True to her character, she then climbed into the back seat and pretended that nothing had happened. The driver of the SUV - of course - jumped out in great alarm to inspect the damage. But then, acting on an instinct that I didn't really know that I had, I did something that turned out to be a karma-crusher.

I grimaced. And my grimace was noticed by the other driver. It was a facial expression that said, "I could see this coming but there was nothing I could do about it. Nevertheless, even though I have been victimized by the actions of a careless person, it is my responsibility."

My expression of pain actually made him sypathetic to my own plight and gave us both a common enemy. So when he noticed a smudge of yellow paint on his black door - although he could have made an issue of it - he dismissed it as no big deal and let me go on my way. But not before shaking his head and rolling his eyes as if to say, "Too bad you and I both have to live on the same planet with the moron sitting in your back seat."

I could feel the jaws of fate release me, no doubt to go off seeking fresher meat somewhere else. But I still had to deal with the black mass sitting in my back seat.

"What does he expect? I have to get into the taxi!" she barked.

"He expects the person opening the door to be careful not to put a dent in his car," I said with an edge in my voice.

"There was hardly any room!" she protested.

"It's one of the skills," I replied. The implication being as a veteran New Yorker she should know better.

"I have a bad leg! I need room!"

"Okay!"

The light turned green and we headed to Central Park West and then uptown toward her destination, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A minute of stony silence was suddenly interrupted by her angry voice propelling itself toward me from the rear.

"Well, why do these people insist on driving their cars into Manhattan? There's no room for their damned cars and they think they're too good to ride the trains!"

I realized by this time that there would be no point in arguing with her (since she was incapable of admitting that she'd done anything even slightly wrong), so I employed the same technique that is used on drunks who go on a rant about politics: I patronized her by agreeing with everything she said. You may say it was the coward's way out, but it was quite effective in getting us to the museum in peace.

I pulled up in front of the Met, where tourists were waiting at the taxi stand for a cab to arrive. She paid the fare and gave me a surprisingly decent tip and then swung the door open to its full length, very nearly knocking down my next passenger.

As I watched her make her way to the stairs that lead into the museum's entrance, it seemed that a storm system had left my cab and was headed into the building where so many of the world's art treasures are stored. I listened to the news the next day to learn how many Van Goghs and Cezannes had been destroyed, but, oddly enough, there wasn't any mention of it at all.

Click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

A Pedestrian Thing

Last night I had a "thing on the street" that involved a pedestrian. I'll tell you about that in a moment, but first a few words about this group of people as a whole.

Pedestrians - I have no use for them. Really, what good are pedestrians to a taxi driver? If I don't already have a passenger in my cab, I see them as people who should be giving me some business. And whether I have a passenger in my cab or not, here is a whole segment of the population that slows me down when I'm trying to make a turn. A pox on them, I say.

The truth is, pedestrians in New York should be looked upon as tourist attractions. Many of them are daredevil lunatics, right up there on a level with people who jump off cliffs with an elastic cord tied around their leg. Admission could be charged for the privilege of seeing these people risk their lives for nothing.

An avenue with cars, buses, and trucks zipping by? Hey, man, I ain't gonna waste twenty seconds of my life waitin' for no light to change. I'm goin' NOW! And I'm gonna eat my fries while I do it.

Have you ever actually witnessed someone being hit by a car? Most people haven't, but I have, four times. It's a gruesome thing to see, even if it happens at a slow speed. But it gives you a healthy respect for the physics involved after you see a human body bouncing across the street like a rubber ball.

But most pedestrians here do not have that reality. The walk/don't walk signs are universally ignored. The majority of people will wait for the moving vehicles to pass by, but there is a growing contingent of fools who will just walk in front of cars on the assumption that they are seen and the car will stop.

I ran into one last night. Not literally, but almost. Here's what happened...

I picked up a fare, a middle-aged man headed for Penn Station, at 60th Street and 5th Avenue at 10:40 PM. I drove down 5th to 37th and made a right turn with the intention of catching the green at 6th Avenue and then proceeding through Broadway to 7th Avenue, making a left, and driving to Penn Station at 34th Street.

There were no cars in front of me on 37th Street, so making the light, which had just changed to green as I turned onto the street from 5th, was definitely possible. I picked up my speed to about 30 mph (the speed limit in NYC) and I could see as I got about three quarters of the way to 6th that pedestrians were crossing through their "don't walk" sign at the corner. Nothing unusual about that. So I sounded my horn as I approached to warn them that I was coming.

Everyone stopped - except one woman.

What happened, quite quickly, was a "this is my turf" confrontation. Like animals with territorial instincts, some people just won't give ground on the notion that this is sacred soil and it is mine. So she stopped in the middle of the crosswalk and stood there, daring me to run her over.

Now most people would say that was insane, even if she had the right of way, which she didn't. But it was worse than insane, it was criminal. Because she was holding in her hand the hand of a small child! She wasn't just sacrificing herself to the cause, she was taking her kid with her.

So, of course, I stopped. And then we had "words", since I had missed the green light and was now waiting on the red. What exactly those words were I could not say, not because I don't want to repeat expletives, but because we were shouting at each other at the same time and neither of us could hear what the other one was saying. Not that it would have mattered. This was not a person who was going to admit that there was even the slightest thing wrong about what she had done. And yet my passenger and I agreed that she should have been arrested and charged with endangering the welfare of a minor.

God, sometimes I wish I was a cop.

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.