Good Time Charlie

What's always good in the taxi business is an immediate turnover of passengers - that is, a new one gets in as the old one gets out. That's what happened on a recent Tuesday night just before midnight on 69th between 1st and 2nd. Actually it wasn't really "immediate". There was a gap of about a minute and a half between the two fares as my passenger-to-be, a thirty-something male, stood on the sidewalk kissing a woman who was staying there on 69th. I was patient. It starts getting slow at that time of night on a Tuesday, so even with a delay it was good business for me. Finally he got in the cab, waving goodbye and blowing a final kiss or two at his beloved.

I drove west on the one-way 69th toward 2nd Avenue. "So... where are you heading?" I asked when no destination was forthcoming.

But instead of a location, I got this: "Man, that was the best make-out session I've had in, what? I don't know, man, a really long time!"

Right away I liked this guy. In his mind I wasn't being viewed as "taxi driver who's just there to take me someplace". I was being elevated into "my man". I was his buddy, his suddenly-appearing pal, his comrade-in-arms. I knew this was going to be a fun ride.

"Yeah, you two were really going at it," I said, smiling. "I was afraid you might get invited upstairs and I'd lose the fare!"

"Hah, yeah, I wish, but, you know, it was the first date."

"No sex on the first date, huh?"

"Well, it depends. Sometimes, maybe. But she wasn't a first-date-sex kind of girl."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I don't know... good, I guess. I don't know. Man, she can really kiss!"

We had hit a red light at 2nd which was now turning green. "So where are we going?" I asked.

"I don't know... go straight."

I drove to 3rd Avenue where another red light awaited us.

"So there'll be a second date?"

"Oh, yeah, she's definitely second date material. Maybe third and fourth date material."

"You think she might be 'the one', as the saying goes?"

"You know, it's not out of the realm of possibility."

The light turned green and I started driving toward Lex, still not knowing what our destination would be. "Could I ask you a personal question?" I inquired.

"Sure."

"Where the hell do you want to go?"

The guy seemed to be more interested in going anywhere than in actually going somewhere. As a general rule, I think that is fine as long as the passenger isn't semi-coherent. But we were going to run into the wall that surrounds Central Park at 5th Avenue if we couldn't decide to make a turn before we got there. So I pressed the issue a little.

"Well, there are basically two things we could do," I said. "We could go uptown or downtown. I know it's a tough call, but what do you think?"

He gave it some thought. "Where are the bars that are open?" he asked.

"They're all open. It's only midnight. The bars stay open 'til four, most of them."

"Well, let's go there."

I made a left on 5th and headed downtown, where most of the nightlife is found.

"Okay," I said, feeling like we were making progress, "so now out of the maybe two thousand bars that are open, all we've gotta do is figure out which one you want to go to."

"One where there's lots of girls," he said.

I was surprised. "You mean after your date and all that kissing you still want to go to a bar and try to pick up some girl?"

"Actually, man, you know what would be better? Just a hooker. Where can we go to find a hooker?"

"Craig's List," I replied, reminding him that since Giuliani had been mayor in the '90s there haven't been any hookers on the streets of the city.

"So should I take you there?" I asked.

"Where?"

"To Craig's List."

Well, this was just unmitigated hysteria for my passenger, who doubled over in laughter and jumped into the concept of the thing. "Yes, take me to Craig's List and make it fast!" he demanded.

"Next stop, Craig's List!" I joined in, and stepped on the gas a bit as if it was really a place we could drive to.

We continued rolling down 5th Avenue in great spirits. I asked him again which bar, or at least which part of town, he thought we ought to be heading toward, but it seemed that once he had actually let it out that he was thinking of looking for a hooker he began to think maybe it wasn't such a great idea, after all. He became reflective.

"You know, I've probably been on something like two hundred dates in the last two years," he said.

"No way," I replied, trying to do the math in my mind, "like two dates a week?"

"Oh, definitely, yeah, I've been dating like crazy."

"How do you find all these dates?"

"Match dot com."

"But no matches?"

"Well, there have been a few who looked like maybes, yeah, but they didn't pan out."

"Too bad."

"Or maybe I didn't pan out," he added, laughing.

The thought crossed my mind that a guy who could go out on what he thought was a great date and then want to go looking for hookers after that date might, in fact, be the one who didn't pan out. But of course I kept my mouth shut, only asking him again for some kind of a destination. We were still on 5th, down in the thirties now.

"You know what, tomorrow's a work day, I think I'll just call it a night."

I expected him to say that. It often happens that someone in a party mode comes down to Earth after riding aimlessly in a cab for a few minutes.

"So where's home?"

"39th between 2nd and 3rd," he said, and then made the faux pas of giving me directions to a simple destination. "Just cut across 32nd to 3rd, then go up to 40th and cut over to 2nd," he said.

I gave him a painful look through the mirror and, being an astute observer of taxi driver attitudes, he realized his mistake. "I guess you knew that already," he apologized.

I searched for the proper analogy and came up with this little gem:

"It's like telling a kindergarten teacher what a crayon is."

Well, I hit another bull's eye with that one. He again doubled over in laughter and the rest of our ride was spent in Glee Land. That's a place where anything that's seen or heard is hilarious simply because it's there. I decided right then that if I ever became a stand-up comedian I would want to order a couple hundred duplicates of this guy and bring them with me to every show. He was a perfect audience.

When I got him to his building, a luxury high rise, I was given a twenty dollar bill for a $12.70 fare and was informed that I was the best cab driver who ever lived. The door of the cab was opened by Johnnie, the best doorman who ever lived, and as I drove off my final glimpse of my passenger was of him and Johnnie, his new comrade-in-arms, laughing uproariously together about something. Or anything.

It occurred to me later that if the woman I wrote about in my last post might be considered typical of what a female goes through in her search for a mate, Good Time Charlie might be nominated as a candidate for the quintessential male.

As a taxi driver, particularly as one who's been doing it for quite a while, I see them from a distance. And I find a kind of beauty in their bumbling around.

********

And if you happen to be looking for a place to bumble around, might I suggest clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Running The Gamut

You know, one of the truly great things about driving a cab in New York City is that on any given night you will encounter individuals who are from totally opposite ends of the social spectrum. People sort of carry their own worlds around with them, so a taxi driver has this opportunity to get up close and personal with people who are so dissimilar, one from the other, that they might as well be from different planets.

To illustrate my point, I had these two fares a few days ago in the same night...

At 11 pm I was hailed by a blonde at 64th and West End Avenue. She said she wanted to go to a building that was somewhere in the 30s on 1st Avenue, so I went up to 65th Street and we headed across the Central Park transverse to the East Side. She was talking to someone on her cell phone and I wasn't really paying too much attention to her, but then when her conversation ended she suddenly says, "Hey, could you tell me something? How do you spell 'first'?"

"You mean like, first, second, third...?"

"Yeah, is it f-r-i-s-t or f-i-r-s-t?"

"You know, I charge extra for consultations."

"Ha, ha, come on!"

"Okay. It's f-i-r-s-t."

"Thanks!"

Why she needed to know how to spell a word in the middle of a cab ride I did not know, but I liked her easygoing attitude. No airs here. Just a friendly person who was grammatically challenged. I guess she was a little embarrassed by her inability to spell a simple word because she then admitted that she wasn't the brightest starfish in the sea.

"You weren't cut out to be one of those nerdy kids in a spelling bee, huh?" I said.

"Nah, but I'll tell you something - they may know how to spell but they don't know how to fuck."

Whoa. If she didn't have it already, she now had my full attention. There are only three ways a female would ever say that to a cab driver: 1) she's with two or three other girls and she's showing off by trying to create an effect, 2) she's totally shitfaced, or 3) she's a professional. My passenger was alone and she wasn't drunk, so it had to be number 3.

I was trying to figure out a way of asking her about this, but as it turned out the answer was given to me in the most unlikely of ways. She had found out from the person she was talking to on her cell phone that the building she was going to was on the corner of 33rd and 1st and then for some reason added that this person who lived there made great chicken soup.

33rd and 1st... chicken soup... It rang a bell.

"Hey, wait a minute," I said, "I once picked up a woman coming from that building who told me she had gone there to see her friend because she was sick and her friend made great chicken soup."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, it was on New Year's Eve. "

"I wonder if I know her."

"She told me she was an adult film performer," I said, carefully glancing in the mirror to catch her reaction.

"Oh, I must know her!"

"She was in her thirties, I think, with blonde hair. She said she was going to LA to be in a film the next day and had to get better because she couldn't give blow jobs with a stuffed nose."

"Oh, I know who it was! Her name is Houston!"

When she said it, it totally clicked in my mind. That was her name. I had actually written about this person in a post. (Here.)

"So you're in the same business?" I asked.

"Well, kind of," she said with a smile. "I've done some porn but now I'm mostly working on my own."

"You mean, like, as an escort?" An "escort", of course, is another word for "hooker".

"Uh-huhhh..." she replied, the tone of her voice suggesting that now we both shared in her little secret.

Now I'm not an expert on the subject, but I have observed over the years that there seem to be two broad categories of hookers (pun intended). There are the street hookers ("hos") and there are the indoor "call girls" or "escorts". The street hookers, who have almost disappeared from the streets of New York over the last ten years, by the way, are usually drug addicts and are desperate and pathetic. But the call girls, who are frequently ex-strippers, tend to be smart, witty, and charmingly candid about what they do for a living.

So what followed with my passenger was an informative conversation about her life and her profession. She had gone to L.A. after finishing high school in Texas, with the idea of becoming an actress. She wound up working in strip clubs, then did some porno movies, and now is an escort. She travels around the country building up a list of clients using a website (eros.com) and a cell phone. A cell phone which rang several times during our ride together.

One of the calls she ignored. It was from someone she described as a "stalker". Another one was from a steady client from Argentina whom she had to sadly inform that she wasn't available tonight but that tomorrow a little after 1 pm would be good.

"I like foreign men," she confided. "They don't want to talk."

"How many calls do you get per day on the average?" I asked.

"Around seventy."

"Seventy!"

"Yeah, but when they find out how much I charge, they're usually not interested."

"How much do you charge?"

"$350 for half an hour."

Which just shows you the relative worth to society of the services I offer compared to the services she offers. Not that her business doesn't have its pitfalls. She told me that screening out crazies is a definite skill. And that there is always the possibility that someone who appears to be a client is actually a police officer. But the solution to that, she said, was to have a good lawyer. "For five thousand dollars the only thing you're found guilty of is jaywalking."

As she departed the cab on 33rd Street, I suddenly realized I had a question that she would surely know the answer to. "What does MILF stand for?" I called out to her. This was an acronym I'd seen on certain websites but I'd never had a definition for it. I knew it had something to do with "older" women.

"Mothers I'd Like to Fuck!" she called back with a smile.

So we were even. I told her how to spell "first" and she told me this. I guess we all have our own areas of expertise.


Now compare her to the passenger I picked up at 2:45 am...


He was a middle-aged man in a business suit, no tie, well-groomed, standing on the corner of 8th Avenue and 55th Street. He had the appearance of someone who is considered to be "successful" in our world. His clothing, haircut, and demeanor all would give the casual observer the impression that here was someone who was a professional at something and was doing well in life.

Now I'm not saying that to lead you into discovering that he actually was not what he seemed to be. He was quite successful, as it turned out. But he was also quite drunk. Not incoherently drunk. But rambling on and on drunk. A happy and very overly talkative drunk.

What I normally do with drunks, once I realize that that's what they are, is to patronize them. I agree with almost anything they say, listen to their tales, and acknowledge them so they know that they have actually been heard. There's no sense in arguing or originating my own ideas to them. Because they are in digression mode.

The first thing we had to handle was where he was going. Did I know the location of such and such a bar, he asked. I did not. Then, after a bit more deliberation, he decided he might as well go home. And he gave me his address, a very prestigious apartment building on Central Park South.

As I headed in that direction, he began his dissertation. It was the kind of thing in which he was going to talk half to me and half to himself or to whomever he mentally conceived might be there with him. But I was free to jump into the conversation at any time. The truth was I wasn't really paying that much attention to exactly what he was saying until he said this...

"...and the call comes through early in the morning and I'm still in my bloody pajamas and they tell me he wants me! So what the hell am I supposed to do, I've got to get up and get my ass out the door, because the man wants me!"

It aroused my curiosity. "Who wanted you?" I asked.

"The president!"

"The president of what?"

He looked at me like I should have understood. "Of the United States!"

"Bush?"

"Yes!"

"Wanted you?"

"Yes!"

"For what?"

It turned out that the inebriated gentleman in the back seat was a deputy Secretary General of the United Nations. President Bush had been in the city that day to address the General Assembly of the U.N. and apparently the protocol calls for a high-ranking official there to act as a host for visiting dignitaries. He said he had served in that capacity on one other occasion for President Bush and it turned out Bush remembered him, liked him, and requested him. So he had spent the day kind of hanging out with the President of the United States.

"So what kind of guy is President Bush?" I asked.

"He's the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with," my passenger said, "but, you know, it's kind of like you're leading a child around."

"Yeah, I think I know what you mean," I chimed in. "I've always thought he was probably a nice guy on a personal level but that when it comes to being the president he's in way over his head."

"Yeah, now take Clinton," he said, "there's a guy who knows what he's doing."

We soon finished the short ride by arriving in front of his building on Central Park South. As he staggered out of the cab he told me what a wonderful cab driver I was, but then he had some trouble finding his money. Finally he yanked some bills out of his pocket and handed them to me and I was on my way. When I got to the traffic light and counted them I found he had neglected to give me a tip on the five dollar fare. But that was all right. It wasn't a mean or a cheap thing, it was a drunk thing.

Later on in the night I reflected on the diversity of these two memorable rides and what different worlds these two people came from. A woman who had spent the day having sex with people for money and a man who had spent the day playing host to the President of the United States.

Why, I wondered, did she get to be the lucky one?




And you can get to be the lucky one, too, by clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Chinese Call Girl

Isn't it amazing what can happen when you put your attention on something? Within 24 hours of writing in my last post that I sometimes suspect, but rarely find out, that certain female passengers are call girls, I had this ride:

I was cruising up 6th Avenue shortly after 3 am and picked up a woman at 54th Street. She was in the middle of a cell phone conversation as she entered the cab and, like many passengers who regard the phone call as being more important than the taxi ride, she merely told me the general direction in which she wanted to go (Queens via the upper level of the 59th Street Bridge) and then went back to the phone.

I made the right on 57th Street and headed toward the bridge. Since she hadn't told me exactly where we were going, I had a bit more attention on her than I normally would have had. I checked her out in the mirror. She was a tall Asian with a rather thin, long face and straight, black hair extending below her shoulders, about 35 years old. She had a rather exotic look to her, and it occurred to me that she could have been cast in an old movie as the wife of Dr. Fu Manchu.

Not that there was anything evil about her. In fact, she was quite nice.

It wasn't until we were over the bridge and driving down an empty street in Long Island City that her cell phone conversation finally ended. As she resumed giving me directions ("make a left on Borden Avenue"), she said, half to me and half to herself, "what a night!"

"Had a rough one?"

"Yeah."

"What happened?"

"You don't want to know."

Now whenever someone says, "You don't want to know", you do want to know. And I did.

"I do want to know, but I don't think you want to tell me," I said.

Apparently that was all I had to say for her to feel safe telling me what she really did want to tell me anyway. And this was her story...

She said she was Chinese and she and two other Chinese girls had gone to a hotel in Midtown to give "massages" to three gentlemen. But when they got to the hotel room, there weren't three gentlemen - there were six. And they weren't really "gentlemen" after all. This, to these professionals, was a dangerous situation. She told me that girls in her group have been beaten and raped in scenarios such as this one, especially if they go to a private residence. So now they only work in hotels. And even though this was a hotel, the unexpected additional men made her feel they had to get out of there. But how? Two of them were blocking the exit.

What she did, she said, was to take a big chance. She excused herself to the bathroom, locked the door, and called the police on her cell phone. The reason it was a big chance was that she couldn't be sure how the cops would react. She and the other two girls might be arrested for prostitution. But she felt so uneasy with the situation they were in that she did it anyway.

Luckily for her, the cops arrived quickly and were cool. She was the only one who spoke English, she said, so she did the talking. She said the cop interviewing her looked her in the eye and told her to tell him the truth. She told him they had come to give a "bachelor party" (a bit of a spin but pretty close to the truth) and were frightened by the additional men. Then the cop asked her if they had stolen anything and she truthfully replied that they had not. He believed her and sent them on their way.

A few minutes later she is getting into my taxi and heading back to Queens. And I am reminded once again of the "things you learn driving a taxicab".



Click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Contact

Contact - some would say it's the most basic of human needs, perhaps even more important than food. As a taxi driver I am often witness to the permutations that arise from the attempt to obtain it...

Saturday, April 14th, 4:35 am - my last fare of a long, busy night is a 40ish white male with some kind of a European accent which I could not decipher. He enters my cab at 77th Street and Columbus Avenue with a plastic bag and a newspaper in his hands and tells me to drive him to 39th and 9th. I am immediately put off by his brusque manner and decide this is not someone I want to have a conversation with and, in fact, I want to be rid of as quickly as possible.

So when we get to his destination and he tells me to pull over while he finishes a conversation on his cell phone, I am not pleased. Several minutes go by and, after a couple of nudges from me - "excuse me, are you getting out here?" - he tells me to drive him to an ATM on 38th and 6th. It is late, I am tired, and I have become annoyed with the guy as his behavior has crossed the line into peculiar.

We drive to the ATM. He exits the cab but brings his plastic bag with him. I keep my eye on him all the while as he has been deemed a flight risk in my mind. But he returns and, in the same abrupt manner, orders me to drive to 33rd and 2nd without any explanation of what's going on. He gets back on his cell phone and, now that I am suspicious of the guy, I try to listen to his conversation and am able to pick up only pieces of it. With great seriousness he is describing his physical characteristics to someone on the other end. "I am white, I am thin... yes... yes..."

When we arrive at 33rd and 2nd he once again does not pay me and get out, but instead continues a conversation on his phone. This time he's getting an address and an apartment number from the person on the other end. He says this aloud a few times, the sound of his voice creating a memory of it in his mind. Then, finally, he decides to end the ride. The fare is $15.40. He gives me an additional 60 cent tip. I am so happy to be rid of him and the anxiety he carried with him that I'm not even upset about the cheapskate gratuity. In fact, I expected it.

My night is over, so I drive to the gas station to fill the tank for the next driver. As I clean up the cab, I find that The Village Voice has been left on the back seat and is opened to a large section they have at the end which is a listing ("body work") for prostitutes.

Now I understand.


Tuesday, April 17th, 11:37 pm - a 30ish guy, white skin, about 6 feet tall, jumps in at the intersection of 5th Avenue and 34th Street. Our destination is DeGraw Street in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. As the ride begins I overhear him say to someone on his cell phone that he just punched someone on a subway platform. A minute later that conversation is over and, unable to resist asking him about it, I do. (Which turned out to be a good thing for him, as he needed to talk to someone.) He told me this story...

He'd been at Yankee Stadium and was on a subway filled with people coming from the game. The Yankees had just played the Indians. He grew up in Cleveland and, although he's lived in New York for ten years, he was wearing an Indians hat. A group of "white, suburban gangster wannabes", all teenagers, decided to harass him due to his hat as they exited the subway car and stepped out onto the platform. This led to an angry exchange of words and one of these kids in particular, showing off to his friends, got in his face.

And that's when my passenger slugged him.

He said they were all in shock and just stood there as he hastily went up the stairs and left the station. He then jogged a couple of blocks and jumped in my cab, thinking about stupid, teenaged punks and lawsuits. So actually it turned out I was his getaway driver.

Interestingly, as he told me about the incident, he was filled with regret and chided himself for losing his cool and hoped maybe it will have taught the kid a lesson. It reminded me of the time another person used my cab as a getaway car after being in a bar fight and thinking he may have just killed someone. (See "The Wrong Guy". )

But this one wasn't as serious. "Worst case scenario, the guy's got a broken nose."


2:42 am - two girls, both in their twenties, one a platinum blond and both of them wearing skimpy clothes, get in at 87th and York. Their appearance translates immediately to the male eye as a neon light flashing "sex" - not quite as obvious it would be if they were street hookers, but it's close. That they are standing on a street in a residential neighborhood where there are no bars around adds an element of curiosity about them to my expert eye.

Their destination is 7th Avenue around 24th Street, but they are not sure of the exact address. When they get on a cell phone and are then told the number of the building, added to the fact that they speak in strong Russian accents, I have no doubt that these are call girls en route to a client. It's something I sometimes suspect with certain female passengers, but it's not often I am so sure about it.

Well, they seem pleasant enough and the way they jabber away to each other in Russian is rather melodic to my ear, so I am thinking whoever is paying for them may be getting his money's worth. But halfway into the ride their phone rings and after a short conversation I am told to please turn around and take them back to where I picked them up. Which I do.

I am thinking about asking them why their customer cancelled out on them but decide that would be pushing it and I just keep my mouth shut. We return to 87th and York, they pay the fare, and disappear into a deli.

4:11 am - my final fare of the night is a dancer/stripper from Flashdancer's. The girls all leave the club at 4:00 and I'm told there are as many as 50 of them working each shift in the joint, so it's a good spot to get one last ride.

Since I work the place often, I've had many conversations with these girls. I find the ratio of conversational to non-conversational to be about 50 per cent. In other words, about half of them do not want to speak with their cab driver. This in itself is interesting to me because, if you think about it, here's someone who has just spent several hours dancing almost naked around a pole and then trying to lure guys into a back room so they can do twenty-dollar "lap dances" for them. It's a come-on dressed up in a heightened degree of "friendliness" (pardon my pun). But then, just minutes later, they are often quite out of communication.

This last passenger fell into that category. It was a long ride out to Queens during which she stared blankly out the window. She seemed to me to be a lonely and unhappy person. And if that's true there's some irony there considering the type of work she does.

One of the permutations of the attempt to make contact, if you will.