Get `Em While They're Hot

What's that?

You still haven't bought my book, Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver?

Well, good news, your holding out is about to pay off, at least if you own a Kindle.   HarperCollins is now offering the ebook edition for a mere $4.99 on Amazon.com. The price had always been $10 and change, so... what a bargain.

Just click here and you're on your way.

Say what?

You need further convincing?

A promotional video or something?

Well all righty, then, here you are:

Harry Belafonte

The great Harry Belafonte and his wife Pamela Frank were passengers in my cab yesterday.  Cheerful and exuberant, he took a minute to oblige my request for a picture.

If you are not familiar with Harry Belafonte, please click on the link above and check out his Wikipedia page.  He has been an inspiration to millions, including myself, since the 1950s, and he continues to be.

Would you believe he is 89 years old?

(Photo by Pamela Frank)

 

The Weeknd

Tuesday nights at around 3 A.M. -- that's an interesting time of the night for a taxi driver in New York City.  It's the time when the streets are not only at their emptiest, but when the "creatures of the night", so to speak, are most likely to appear from the shadows -- and that could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the creature.  I was getting ready to end my shift at that time a few months ago, not in a creature-of-the-night mood, really, so when I saw a relatively normal-looking pair of humans hailing me at the corner of 54th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan, it was a welcome sight.  The two of them -- an attractive, young white lady wearing a tight-fitting party dress and a hip-looking black guy carrying a guitar case -- jumped in and the guy said they wanted to go to the Affinia Hotel at 31st Street and 7th Avenue.  The doors closed and we were on our way, but we went barely a block when there was a problem.

The guy suddenly realized he'd left his card (credit card) in the bar.  This meant we had to loop around to 5th Avenue, cross over on 53rd Street back to 6th Avenue, and then make a right turn on 54th Street, where the bar, a place called Connolly's, was located.  This was okay with me, of course, as it meant more mileage on the ride, assuming he went into the bar, got his card, and we continued on to the hotel.  The young lady, however, was not comprehending the problem.  She thought he said that he'd left his card in his car and didn't understand how that could happen.  After a prolonged discussion, the guy finally realized her confusion and told her the card was in the bar, not in his car.  "My car's in LA," he said.  They both laughed.  Well, he laughed.  She guffawed.  This misunderstanding was not merely funny, it was hilarious, from her point of view.

Overhearing this little episode made me curious about this couple so I kept my attention on them as I made my way back to Connolly's Bar.  I took note of the way they were.  She was clearly a bit tipsy -- a happy, but not drunk, attractive female.  She spoke to the guy ebulliently, full of agreement, listening carefully to his every word, and sitting so close to the guy that a cab driver could only assume that they were more than friends -- or were about to be so.

The guy, though, was much more subdued, laid-back, cool and calm, but not in an off-putting way.  I could see that he liked the girl, liked the affinity and attention he was receiving from her, and was perhaps playing his cards a bit carefully, not wanting to blow what surely must have looked like a winning hand.  He wasn't doing a lot of talking, though.  The girl was the gabby one.

We circled around and in a couple of minutes we arrived at Connolly's on 54th Street.  The guy opened his door and stepped out onto the street, leaving his guitar in the cab.

"Be right back."

"Okay," she beamed back.

He gave her a half-smile and walked into the bar.

The moment the guy disappeared from sight she turned her attention to me.  With wide-eyed  enthusiasm she exclaimed:

"Do you know who he IS???!!!"

I, of course, had no idea who he was, so I said, "The guy who left his guitar in the cab?"

My quip went unnoticed by my passenger and continued on its journey into outer space.

"He's The Weeknd!" she squealed.

"What do you mean?  It's Tuesday."

"No, no, he calls himself 'The Weeknd'."  She became a bit serious for a moment.  "It's his stage name.  But it's not spelled the same.  You leave off the 'e' after 'week'.  So it's not like you say 'The Week End'.  It's more like you say 'The Weakened'.  It's like a double-meaning."

"Oh."

She lowered her voice a notch.  "His real name is 'L.J.', she said, "but he doesn't want anyone to know."  Suddenly she seemed worried.  "Don't tell him I told you who he is when he comes back, okay?"

"Oh, sure, don't worry.  It'll be our little secret."

Her smile returned.

"Okay, so who is The Weeknd?" I inquired (of course).

Her unbridled enthusiasm returned.   "Oh, he's a singer.  He's the hottest thing around right now!  He's HUGE!   I mean HUGE!!!  He's on all the radio stations!  He's all over the place on YouTube!  He's HUGE!"

"Really, wow!  So who are you, his girlfriend?"

"Well, ha-ha, not exactly... we just met in the bar."  She then giggled in the way that people often do  when they're about to engage in a guilty pleasure.  A "My Bad" grin appeared on her face and remained there.

"Ohh, I got it," I replied.  I smiled back, as if to say, "I'll be your secret coachman."

So now I did get it, indeed.  She was his Thank-You-For-Choosing-Me-Sir pick-up of the evening.  And the place they were on their way to is also known as the Shagalicious Hotel, by Marriott.

"So how did you and The Weeknd wind up in a bar at three in the morning?" I wanted to know.

"Ohhh, well, he just played at a big fund-raiser at MOMA," she said.  "$50,000 a plate!  Can you imagine that -- $50,000 a plate!  He was the entertainment."

It did make sense.  Although the main entrance to MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art) is on East 53rd Street, there's an open-air terrace that extends to 54th Street, right across the street from Connolly's Bar.  So I assumed The Weeknd and his people must have headed there after the show.

We continued to chat it up for a couple of minutes which meant that she went on bubbling all over the top about how big a star The Weeknd is while I pleasantly acknowledged whatever she said.  But then, suddenly, there was a hitch in the plan: the guy who calls himself "The Weeknd" returned to the cab, sat himself down, and announced to my passenger that he was having a problem with his card, so there would be a bit of a delay.  He suggested that instead of waiting for him in the cab that she come back into the bar until he could clear up the trouble.  The girl said, "Oh, okay," and took out her own credit card to pay the fare, which was up to $9.80 at that point.  She swiped her card, the transaction (including a $1.96 tip) went through, and they left the premises, he with his guitar in hand.

"Sorry," he called out to me, which I appreciated.  I like that in a celebrity, no attitude.  He seemed like a nice enough guy.

Well, there I sat in front of Connolly's Bar.  There were still quite a few people inside, so I thought I might as well hang out and see if I can get another fare, or better yet, maybe I could get the girl and this guy The Weeknd again.  It would no doubt be a fascinating eavesdropping situation, based on what she'd already told me.

But no.  Ten minutes ticked by and then finally a middle-aged couple, whose destination was the Roosevelt Hotel on Madison Avenue, came out of the bar and got in my cab.  As I pulled out from the curb I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the girl and The Weeknd re-emerge from the bar and get into another taxi.  I cursed my luck, missing them by just seconds, and drove my new passengers to their destination.  It turned out to be my last fare of the evening.

I was curious about The Weeknd, so the next day I decided to check him out online. I found that he is, indeed, quite the rising star.  He's got dozens of videos on YouTube, with many millions of views, and has performed at lots of major events.  His latest venture was doing the soundtrack for the movie Fifty Shades Of Grey -- very impressive!  I watched one of his videos and found (unusual for me) that I liked the sound of a new recording artist.  This guy was good.  So I clicked on another one, this time paying more attention to the images than I had before.  And then...

...hey, wait a minute...

I looked more closely.  Whoa, whoa, whoa, just a minute, there!

I watched the video again.  Could it be?

Oh my God, yes, it was true.

THE GUY I WAS LOOKING AT IN THE VIDEO WHO CALLS HIMSELF "THE WEEKND" WAS NOT THE GUY WHO'D BEEN IN MY CAB!

On further investigation, I found that there's a fellow called "L.J." in his band who plays the bass!  Aha!

At first my feeling about the attractive young lady in the tight-fitting party dress was one of sympathy.  Poor thing, she'd been duped by what may be the oldest band-member's trick in the book.  But then I became more critical.  I mean, what a disgrace to the good reputation of groupies everywhere.

Come on, honey.

If a guy tells you he's Mick Jagger, you've got to do a little vetting.  Does he know the words to "I Can't Get No Satisfaction"?  Can he at least hum the tune?

Come ON!

Time Magazine Article and Promotional Video

I've had an article published in the online edition of Time Magazine.

Click here.

It's called "The Art of Hailing a Cab". In it I offer sage advice as to the proper way of executing this vital form of urban communication. Here you will also find the official "International Taxi-Hailing Point System" which puts in ink how points are awarded for scoring hails, from 1.0 at the bottom to 6.0 - the "perfect hail" - at the very top. Like ice skating.

It's actually an abbreviated version of a section of Chapter 16, "Taxi!", from my book. Of course you'll have to buy the book to read the whole thing.

So there's the obligatory plug.

Note: When this post was originally published it included a one-minute, promotional video which the folks at Time were nice enough to allow us to include. This was put together by Scooter McCrae, the video wizard at HarperCollins, who rode around with me for six hours one night. Six hours of filming reduced to a one-minute video - that's show biz.

You can now see the video by going to the post "Get 'Em While They're Hot" in this blog.  Here you will find me navigating the streets of New York City while pontificating at the same time, a thrilling display of multi-tasking which took me years to master.

Hope you'll enjoy watching it.

Can You Solve The Mystery of the Union Square Numbers?

In the Union Square area of New York City - on 14th Street between Broadway and 4th Avenue, to be exact - there is a building with a row of fifteen huge numbers brightly illuminated and always on display. The digits on the left and right sides remain relatively constant, but as the eye moves toward the middle of the row, the digits are seen to be moving more and more rapidly from zero to nine in endless repetition.
There is no explanation given for what these numbers mean.
For many years I didn't know what they meant, if anything, and I finally decided out of frustration that it was merely "pretentious art". I thought it was just somebody's idea of a joke - how to drive everyone crazy by putting up randomly moving numbers that meant nothing.
Now it just so happens that if you're driving down Broadway you will inevitably hit red lights at both 17th Street, where Broadway and Union Square East melt into each other, and then again one block further down the road at 16th Street. From both of these vantage points you can easily see the numbers and, if you're a taxi driver, that will mean as years pass by that there will be a significant amount of time spent at both these places with nothing better to do than to look at the numbers until the light turns green.
And I guess that is why I eventually understood what the numbers meant. I wasn't trying to figure it out. It just hit me one day, as if by osmosis, after about ten years. I suddenly saw it and once I saw it there was no denying what it meant. It was indisputable, and it turns out it wasn't pretentious art after all.
Being armed with this revelation, I naturally wondered when stopped at these intersections with passengers in the cab if they knew what the numbers meant. I found that, even with passengers who lived in the general vicinity, that only about one in twenty knew it. And some of the others had completely incorrect assumptions, such as:

--the "national debt". This was a confusion with a different set of numbers that once flashed on a different sign on 6th Avenue around 44th Street. It showed the accumulating total of the national debt (and no one seemed to know exactly what that meant) and, if that didn't depress you enough, it also displayed "your family's share".

--the amount of time that has passed since the beginning of the millenium.
--the number of people in the world who have died of AIDS (not bothering to notice that the number on the building would be higher than the actual number of people in existence in the world).
--and, my favorite, the "amount of records sold in Virgin Records" (which until recently had occupied one of the stores beneath the numbers).
I noticed that passengers I enlightened were often quite grateful to learn the truth about the numbers as this turned out to be something they, too, had wondered about for years. This gratitude often translates into bigger tips, so I've probably made hundreds of dollars from this revelation.
So, you wanna try your luck?
Step right up, take a look at what we've got here. I took a two-minute video of the numbers. It's a little blurry at the beginning, but then it goes into focus and you can observe what the numbers are doing. Hopefully it won't take you ten years to figure it out!
If you give up, click on the "comments" at the bottom of this post. The answer is there.

********

And while you're wracking your brain, why not take a break to click here for Pictures From A Taxi?

J. Fred Coots

Bloomingdale's had the best Christmas windows this year, I thought, because of the originality and delightfulness of their concept. They took a Tony Bennett CD of Christmas standards and created windows for several of the songs, depicting visually what is being suggested by the words and melodies. Then they set up speakers and played the Bennett renditions so passerby on the sidewalk could not only see the scenes in the windows but could also hear the tunes that were their inspiration. It worked well.

One of the windows was of particular interest to me - Santa Claus Is Coming To Town - because, amazingly enough, I once had its composer in my taxi. I say "amazingly" because this song was written in 1934 - it's been around forever - and it wouldn't seem possible that a taxi driver in 2008 would have ever had the person who wrote it in his cab.  But it did happen early one evening in July of 1983.

I was cruising down Lexington Avenue looking for a fare and turned right on 69th Street. A doorman from a luxury high-rise hailed me and directed me into the driveway of his building. Waiting at the entrance were an elderly couple. The gentleman was rather frail and was assisted into the cab by the doorman. Their destination was the New York Athletic Club, an old-school establishment on the very exclusive Central Park South, about a seven-minute ride.

I love it when I meet people who are well up in age yet who are still active and enjoying themselves. Here was just such a couple. They had a pleasant air about them and I could easily tell that they were both  conversational types. I had been driving a cab for about six years at that point and that was plenty enough time to be able to perceive the talkers from the leave-me-alone-and-just-drive-ers. So chat we did.

As I recall, our conversation began on the subject of the New York Athletic Club. Since it's called an "athletic" club I naturally assumed that athletic activities of one kind or another would be occurring there. But my passengers, although they were certainly out and about, let's face it, they were well beyond whatever "athletic years" they may have enjoyed. So I said something along the lines of, "The New York Athletic Club? What are you going to do, work out?" This, of course, was meant as a joke and was taken as one. Whereupon I was informed that the NYAC has on its premises an excellent dining room and that was their specific destination.

Nevertheless, the subject of athletics had come up and this led to some talk about tennis, which led to some talk about John McEnroe, the tennis player who at that time was the biggest star of the tennis world. And in conversing about McEnroe I brought up the subject of his infamous temper and then I inadvertently said the "secret word".

And the secret word was "pout".

As in...

You'd better watch out,

You'd better not cry,

You'd better not POUT,

I'm telling you why...

Groucho Marx used to have a quiz show in the '50s called "You Bet Your Life." One of the gimmicks of the show was that if any of the contestants happened to use the "secret word" in conversation with Groucho, they'd automatically win a hundred dollars. And if this happened, a "duck" with a cigar in its beak (Groucho always had a cigar handy) would suddenly descend on a string along with musical fanfare.

Well, it was as if I'd been a contestant on that show. I had said the secret word - his word - and the gentleman in the back seat suddenly told me, in what appeared to be a complete non sequitur, that he was the person who had written the song "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" and that his name was J. Fred Coots.

Santa Claus is coming to town -- in a taxi! -- in this Bloomingdale's window.

I, of course, was fascinated and delighted to be so informed and this led to a brief conversation about the song and about his career. He had been what is known as a "tin pan alley" composer, had written hundreds of songs, and many Broadway shows as well. One of his songs that I was familiar with was a hit for Pat Boone in the '50s called "Love Letters In The Sand".

When we arrived at the New York Athletic Club I got out of the cab and came around to help him out, as he was well into his '80s and needed a little help in the taxi-extrication process. He put his right hand into my own and I hoisted him up a bit so he could get his legs into the proper exiting position. And the thought occurred to me as I did this that the hand which had written this song - so much a part of our culture and something which has brightened the lives of millions of people for decades - was in my own. It was an honor, really.

His wife, who also struck me as a lovely person, came around and gave me some motherly advice as she began walking toward the NYAC entrance. "Don't drive late at night," she said under her breath, as if this was something no one else should hear.

Here's a video I took of one of the Bloomingdale's windows while Tony Bennett's version of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" was playing for the benefit of anyone who happened to be passing by...

I think of that ride every Christmas season.

********

And I also think this: why not click right here for Pictures From A Taxi?

Shea Goodbye

I believe that in America the edifices that have the most meaning to the greatest numbers of people - more so than any other public structures - are our baseball stadiums. First there is the love of the game itself. And what follows right behind that is an attachment to the stadium where the game is played at its highest level.

I grew up on Long Island, about 30 miles east of New York City. Throughout my entire childhood I played baseball in one form or another. There were the organized Little League games and the less organized choose-up games; there was stick ball, wiffle ball, softball, and made-up games like "Catch A Fly, You're Up" and "Running Bases". There were even table games (the forerunners of video games) like Parker Brothers Baseball. And of course there were the endless, solitary hours spent throwing a rubber ball against a wall or the roof of the house and catching it as it came back to you.

What went hand in glove with playing these variations were the sacred trips into the city with my father to see his team, and therefore my team - the New York Giants - play Major League Baseball in the ancient stadium that once stood in Harlem, the Polo Grounds. The Giants abandoned New York for California in 1958 but the Polo Grounds was not torn down. It proudly held its position in space until it was occupied by its new tenants, the New York Mets, in 1962. By that time I was 12 years old and, in those days, that meant you were old enough to get on a train with your friends and ride the rails all the way from Long Island to Harlem. To see the Mets!

Not that I didn't still go to an occasional game with my father. I did. But now I went to lots of games with my pals. Then, in '64, Life dealt me a winning hand: Shea Stadium was completed, the new home of the Mets, and it was much closer to my home on Long Island. I was set. In that summer of '64, I was at Shea so often that it became my home away from home and its address in the landscape of my mind would become the place where so many memories of the final days of boyhood would be stored.

Now, as the last game has been played in Shea and it awaits the executioner's wrecking ball, I find myself inevitably reminiscing about the place. I remember in particular two extraordinary games that I attended that year with my friends. The first was on May 31st. It was the second game of a double-header with the San Francisco Giants which lasted 23 innings. Aside from being the longest baseball game ever played, this game had several notable things happen, each of which was so special in its own right that, if you watched baseball games every day for your whole life, you might never see even once: there was a triple play executed by the Mets; there was a steal of home by a player on the Giants, Orlando Cepeda; Willie Mays played not only his usual center field, but played the shortstop position, as well (yes, I saw Willie Mays play shortstop!); and it was later revealed that a pitcher on the Giants, future Hall-Of-Famer Gaylord Perry, threw his first "spitball" in that game.

Of course, the Mets lost, but who cared? My friends and I were baseball savvy enough to realize we'd seen baseball history, and our appreciation of the game was senior to the game's final score. Also, we had a little code that we were proud to adhere to: we never left a game before it was finished. That day we had arrived at Shea Stadium at 11:30 in the morning and we didn't get home until 1 a.m. - a baseball fan's badge of honor.

Then, on June 21st, we went to another Sunday double-header, this time versus the Phillies. In the first game of the afternoon a pitcher on that team, Jim Bunning, pitched one of the rarest of all baseball events - a perfect game. Not a single Mets player reached first base. It had happened only seven other times in Major League history. That pitcher, Jim Bunning, is today a United States Senator from the state of Kentucky. Another less-than-once-in-a-lifetime, extraordinary baseball masterpiece.

But in looking back at my days with Shea, I can see that the memories I take from it that are the most meaningful to me are not recollections of particular games where I happened to be in attendance. They are the memories of the adolescent adventures my friends and I perpetuated in that arena.

This was a time in our lives - between the ages of 13 and 15 - when we were in the process of stepping away from our childhoods and testing out the world of adults, trying to figure out not only where we would fit in, but also experiencing by trial and error what we could get away with. And Shea fit in perfectly with this rite of passage. It wasn't just a stadium to us - it was a challenge.

One thing we knew was that we didn't like to pay to get into the place. So we discovered there were certain gates which, if we felt daring, we could sneak under and get in for free. But usually we did pay the $1.30 general admission, which gave you a seat in the upper deck. However, we never stayed up there. We always snuck down into the box seats and, more often than not, we wound up sitting right behind one of the dugouts.

As the season went on, and our boldness increased, we found new frontiers to conquer. For example, we'd always wanted to catch a foul ball, but we'd never gotten one. Then at one game during batting practice we noticed an errant ball lying near the stands which no one had retrieved. My friend Billy, a bit more bold than the rest of us, climbed over the fence onto the field to get it, then climbed back into the stands where he belonged. He was soon pounced on by a stadium cop who gave him a choice of either returning the ball or keeping it and getting tossed out of the park. The choice was obvious: Billy kept the ball, was escorted outside, then promptly snuck back in and joined us for the remainder of the afternoon.

As the season wore on it seems, in retrospect, that we were beginning to think of Shea Stadium as being ours. What else could account for this kind of impudence: we discovered that if we hung around in our seats for as long as possible after a game had ended and left only when being ordered to do so by security, we could duck into the men's room on our way out and hide there for about twenty minutes. Why would we want to do this? Because when we finally emerged from the men's room, everyone had gone and we then had the stadium all to ourselves. We would actually go out onto the field and run around the bases and talk to each other on the telephone that connects the bullpen to the dugout. A sign that hung above the top step of the Mets' dugout which said "Watch Your Step" wound up in my friend's bedroom.

We had balls, all right.

But what turned out to be our piece de la resistance occurred on Sept. 7th when the Mets played a game with a team then called the Colt .45s (now the Houston Astros). Billy and I decided to go up to the press box level of the stadium in the 9th inning to watch the end of the game. We discovered that if you carried yourself as if you belonged there, security probably figured you were the sons of some big-shot executive and they wouldn't bother you. So there we sat with the media, as if we ourselves were reporters. Then, just as the game ended, we opened a door we shouldn't have opened and found ourselves standing in the broadcasting booth with Lindsey Nelson, the Mets announcer, who was live on the air! The technicians in the booth froze in horror and begged us in pantomime not to interfere with the show, which we did not. Later, as a souvenir of our good behavior, they gave us the lineup card that had been shown on television prior to the game. It listed the players for the Mets on one side and the players for the Colts on the other. Billy and I later flipped a coin for who would get the Mets half. I won the toss, as you can see. That's Casey Stengel's signature at the bottom.

The success of our impertinence may have had an effect on the psyche of my friend, as he went on to have a career as a broadcaster himself. You may have heard of him. His name is Bill O'Reilly and what you just read is the story of the first time O'Reilly ever set foot in a broadcasting booth.
Ahhh, the good old days... sigh... anyway, that's my own story about a ballpark and what it meant to a kid. Thank you for indulging me in this bit of pure nostalgia that has nothing whatsoever to do with taxi driving.

And goodbye, Big Shea.