"Make The Light"

Among the many annoyances in the game of taxi driving is the rare passenger who has the nerve to tell you how to drive. Not where to drive or what route to take, and not even how not to drive ("please don't drive so fast, I'm feeling nauseous"), but how to drive.

Examples:

"Change lanes."

"Get ahead of that bus."

"Go!"

And my favorite: "Make the light!"

Let us consider for a moment the implications involved in making such a statement. It is as if to say:

"Not only do I not regard you as a professional who knows how to do his job, I think I'm better at it than you are, so do what I tell you."

Or, to put it more bluntly:

"You're an idiot. I'm smart. Obey me."

A couple of years ago I was going down 11th Avenue with a passenger in that back seat when we hit a bit of heavy traffic and he abruptly commanded, "Get in the left lane!" Never letting a comment like that go by, I made eye contact with him in the mirror and said, Robert de Niro-style, "Are you talking to me?" And then, not waiting for a reply, "You must be talking to someone else, because no one talks to me like that!" He immediately changed his attitude and we had a relatively pleasant ride across 23rd Street to his destination at 6th Avenue.

It's a good feeling when little mutinies like that are squelched and you can regain the captaincy of your ship. Your dignity is restored and life seems to be worth living again. Which leads me to the latest incident on this chain...

I was cruising on West 63rd Street a little after 6 p.m. a few weeks ago when I was hailed by a doorman on the block between Central Park West and Broadway. He opened the door and in came a 60ish woman in a rush to get to 65th and Amsterdam, a short ride. About fifty yards in front of us was a green traffic light and she barked out those words:

"Make the light!"

I bristled internally and continued driving at my normal speed. Now, there seems to be a Force that decrees that whenever a passenger says, "Make the light!" the light you've been ordered to make will turn yellow just as you're approaching the intersection and you will have a moment of truth to decide whether to speed up and maybe go through a red, or to play it safe and hit the brake.

Right on cue, the Force did its thing and the light turned yellow.

I had my moment of truth, and...

I hit the brake.

My passenger was very displeased. She grunted an "ugh" and barked, "You could have made it," with a scowl on her face that was so pronounced that it was clear that from her point of view stopping for the red light wasn't merely an error, it was a crime.

So the scene was set for conflict. My professionalism had been assaulted, and there would be a response. But rather than turning around and giving her a lecture about safe driving, fines, and suspended licenses, I tried to reason with her. First, I pointed out the layout of the intersection in front of us.

Broadway, as its name implies, is a wide road with an median of greenery separating two directions of traffic, so the width of the intersection has to be considered before crossing it at a yellow light. Following Broadway, a mere fifty more yards away, is the next intersection, 63rd and Columbus Avenue. Having driven through these intersections perhaps a hundred thousand times in the last 32 years, I am quite familiar with the timing of the lights there and I knew that even if we'd made the yellow light at Broadway at the last second, we certainly would not have made the next light at Columbus. However, when the light turns from red to green at Broadway and you drive straight ahead, you will always get a green at Columbus, too. So there was no reason to speed up to "make the light" at Broadway in the first place.

My passenger's response to this perfectly rational and accurate dissertation was to snap back, "We won't make the light at Columbus". It was a direct contradiction to what I'd just said.

"Yes, we will," I replied.

"No, we won't," she returned, as if we were having a verbal tennis match.

The thought occurred to me that here was a situation where I could win a bet. I could say, "Oh, really, if you're so sure of that let's make it double the meter or nothing." I could add a few extra doubloons to my coffers with this ride and, better than that, I could humble this old crab and put her in her place. But I decided not to stoop to that level. It would be like taking candy from a baby. Better than that, I thought, would be to offer her a deal in which she couldn't lose, except if losing meant that she'd have to shut up and eat crow.

I said these words:

"Tell you what, if we don't make the light on Columbus, this is a free ride."

The success of my strategy was immediate. She did shut up, her demeanor changing instantly into an interested facial expression that said, "Well... okay...". The eating crow part would come in just a bit.

In a few more moments, our light at 63rd and Broadway turned green. The light ahead of us at Columbus, the light I had to make, was already green, as I knew it would be. With just fifty yards between these two lights, it was impossible not to make that Columbus light.

My foot pressed down on the accelerator.

You know, there's a military truism that in combat operations, nothing ever goes according to plan. Apparently the same thing is true in taxi driving. For just as I drove through the Broadway intersection, not one, not two, but three cabs suddenly appeared in front of me and stopped to discharge passengers at the Empire Hotel, the only building on the tiny block. These taxis didn't pull over to the side. No, they just stopped in the middle of the street, making it impossible to get around them.

Precious seconds ticked by. A couple of beeps from my puny horn did nothing to move them. The light at Columbus turned yellow. The light at Columbus turned red. And I found myself in the midst of my latest humiliation, a knife in one hand, a fork in the other, and a crow on a platter in front of me.

I tried taking it like a good sport, laughing out loud, and not trying to wiggle out of the noose I'd created for myself by using the cabs blocking the street as an excuse. "Well," I said, "a deal's a deal. This is a free ride."

Of course, what I was hoping she would say was what any fair-minded person would say - that it was all right, that she wouldn't hold me to my offer. But instead, what she said was, "Well, I'll give you a good tip." In other words, "Thanks for the free ride, sucker."

My only solace was that my misery would be brief. 63rd Street runs into Lincoln Center at Columbus, so we had to make a left turn, go down to 62nd Street, make a right, and then drive over to the next avenue, Amsterdam, make another right, and finally go just three blocks to her destination, the Lincoln Center Library, at 65th Street. As it turned out, the reason she was in a rush was because she works in the library and was running late for the evening shift.

In the few remaining minutes of our ride, which seemed like an hour to me, she did an attitude reversal. No longer was she an ill-mannered cow in a china shop, stomping over anything in her way because she was late for work. Her getting something for free had trumped her bitch card, and she became a chatty human being sitting in the back seat. But I even found her attempt to be sociable offensive when she asked me this famous, left-handed question:

"So what else do you do besides drive a cab?"

I am asked this occasionally, and when it happens I usually look at it as a cast-not-your-pearls-before-swine situation. The person who asks it is telling you that the job you are doing is considered by him to be beneath his standard of what a respectable job should be - would he ask a teacher what else does he do besides teach? - and what I normally say is, "This is it, I drive a cab." And then give him a little speech about the good things of taxi driving - freedom, adventure, the whole human race sitting in your back seat, no boss, no four walls, no office politics, no deadlines, no bringing your work home with you. I leave out the parts about twelve hour shifts, no health care, no pension - things like that.

But to this passenger, probably because I was hoping she would realize it would be mean-spirited to hold a working man to his promise of a free ride, I tossed a pearl.

"Well," I said, "I'm a writer."

"What do you write?"

Holding back a temptation to say "words", I told her I had a blog.

"You must have lots of stories."

"Yes, driving a cab and stories are a good fit," I agreed.

"So much material," she added.

"That's the thing - the material just comes right to you," said I, mentally noting the irony of someone who could be "material" herself commenting about the abundance of material.

Amazingly, against all odds it seemed that we were developing some rapport between us and, as I pulled in front of the Lincoln Center Library, it started to feel like this ride might actually have a pleasant ending. I had left the meter running and the total was $6.00, including the $1.00 evening rush hour surcharge and the 50 cent New York State tax. So here was a second moment of truth - would she redeem herself by handing me the full fare, telling me thanks, but no thanks, for the free ride offer? I had already decided I would say that I appreciated that and then, like Harry Chapin in his Taxi song, stuff the bills in my shirt and we'd both be on our way.

But instead she handed me $2.00, opened her door, said, "Have a nice night," and walked away. I watched her enter the library and shot an imaginary arrow through her head. Then, realizing I had an extra arrow in my quiver, I took it out and shot myself, too.

For having offered, and given, a free ride to someone who was not one of the nice people of this world.

********

Target practice? Don't shoot a mean person. Send an arrow over here instead for Pictures From A Taxi.

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.

What She Did For Love

There are certain people who stand there on the street looking like they want a cab, yet they do not raise their hand up as you approach them. The instant dilemma for the cabbie is to stop or not to stop. If you stop and it turns out they don't want you, you feel like an idiot. But if you don't stop and then look through your rear-view mirror and see them hailing the next cab coming up the avenue, you really kick yourself for not having stopped. So what do you do?

A young lady was standing just off the curb in front of the Skyline Hotel on 10th Avenue between 49th and 50th on a recent Sunday night at around 1:30 a.m. She sure looked like she wanted a cab, but she didn't raise her hand up.

I stopped anyway.

She paused momentarily, looking around. Then she reached for the handle, opened the door, and got in. It gave me that feeling you get when your instinct in your area of expertise is validated. I knew she wanted a cab, even if she didn't say so, and now I had the reward of a passenger sitting in the back seat. I applauded myself mentally.

I pulled out onto 10th, a one-way avenue that runs uptown.

"So, where are you heading?" I asked, when her destination was not forthcoming.

There was a further pause, and then, "Just keep driving on this, please," meaning 10th Avenue.

That's the kind of thing people say when they know they're headed in the right direction but aren't sure of exactly where their point of departure will be. But then she added this: "Could you drive slowly, please?"

That's the kind of thing people say when they're a vomit candidate. But I could see that she was alert and looking out the window, and that's definitely not the way people carry themselves when they're holding back an urge to regurge. So I was relieved, but I knew something was going on.

Finally she told me she was going to the Upper East Side, but didn't say exactly where. Then - suddenly - she asked me to make a right turn just as we approached 60th Street, then another right turn onto 9th Avenue. We were now headed downtown, the opposite direction from her stated destination. We hit the automatic red at 59th and then, when it turned green, there were further instructions.

"Could you stay on the right side of the avenue, please?" she asked, kind of meekly.

"Sure."

"And could you drive slowly, please?"

"I am driving slowly."

"I know, I mean, if you could continue to drive slowly, please."

"Sure," I replied, thinking how easy it is to get me to do almost anything if the word "please" is used.

We drove down 9th for a few blocks, her eyes searching intently at people on the sidewalks.

"What street did you pick me up at?" she asked as were approaching 51st Street.

"49th."

"Could you take me back to where you picked me up, and then drive across 50th Street?"

"Sure."

In a few moments we were back where we'd started. I made the right onto 50th as she'd requested, heading east. I drove even slower than I'd been driving on 9th Avenue and, as before, she continued to look carefully at anyone who happened to be walking in the area. Whomever she was looking for was not to be found on 50th between 10th and 9th, so we continued to 8th Avenue, but she still didn't find what she was looking for. I decided to play an experienced hunch.

"This is about some guy, isn't it?" I asked.

Her smile told me I was right. "Yeah," she replied softly and with just a touch of self-deprecation.

"You had a fight with your boyfriend?" I asked. You have to be careful as a taxi driver when you decide to pry into a passenger's world. But with her I had a sense that she would welcome having someone to talk to at this particular time.

"No..." she said, "it's not that." She paused, wondering if she should tell me the whole story. I waited quietly for her reply, giving her the space she needed to make up her own mind. Then she dove right into it.

What had happened had been that she'd been sitting at the bar in the Skyline Hotel and had struck up a conversation with a man who'd also been in there. This man had been part of a group of people who were with a well-known actor, Paul Rudd, who was also in the bar. He was professionally associated with Paul Rudd in some way, perhaps his agent or manager, she wasn't sure. They had sat at the bar talking for a little while and then his party was leaving and it was time for him to go. They said goodbye and he rejoined his group, which soon left the place. She saw them disperse and watched him walk away, perhaps heading east on 50th Street, or maybe walking uptown on 10th Avenue, she wasn't sure. She didn't know his name. He didn't know hers. They had not exchanged phone numbers.

A few moments later she also left the bar. Not being sure what to do, but thinking she should probably catch a cab and go home, she walked out onto 10th Avenue. She stood there looking like she wanted a cab, but she had this man on her mind and she wasn't sure what to do and so she didn't raise her hand to hail a taxi that was coming up the avenue. But the taxi stopped anyway. And she got in.

And so now we were searching the streets for this man.

We went up 8th Avenue until we reached Columbus Circle at 59th Street, but we both knew he couldn't have gotten that far in that amount of time. So we turned around and went back down 9th and zig-zagged several blocks in the fifties, to no avail. She was about ready to admit defeat and head home, but decided to give it one more try and go down Broadway into Times Square - maybe he'd decided to walk a few blocks and catch a subway over there. It was a long shot but worth a try, she thought, so we drove up 8th again to 57th Street and then down Broadway toward 50th.

"So what's so special about this guy?" I asked. By this time we were teammates and I felt no sense of inappropriateness in posing this kind of question to her. She confided that it was the feeling she had when she was talking with him. In her words, she just felt comfortable being with him. It felt "right". And then she made this comment:

"You have to understand," she confessed sadly, "I don't like anyone!"

But she liked him.

But by my own analysis, after over thirty years of studying Homo sapiens, what she was really saying was this: this fellow had passed through an internal, kind of genetic, filter. The qualities she was searching for in a mate, consciously and unconsciously, he possessed. His physical appearance, his smile, the way he looked at her, the way he tilted his head when he reached for his drink, her perception of his kindness, his confidence, his hands, his strength, the hair on his arms... these and other nuances had passed through the filter. He just possibly might be "the one". And she had let him slip away.

Men and women are clearly different in this regard. Due to the biological clock, females tend to be much more serious and even businesslike about locating, corralling, and branding (marrying) their potential mates than are their male counterparts. They may say it's something else, but what's really going on here is the mysterious and somewhat magnificent imperative to procreate the species. It's serious business. A few years ago I had a guy and a girl in my cab who'd just been out on their first date. The young man got out first, giving her a polite kiss and a non-specific suggestion that they should get together again soon. "The search goes on," she said to me with some resignation as we drove away. There would be no second date. He had not made it through the filter.

After scrutinizing the relatively empty streets of Times Square for a bit longer, my passenger had finally had enough and I was directed to head back uptown to the Upper East Side. I tried to cheer her up by pointing out that there was still a way she might be able to find this guy. Her window of opportunity was that she knew he was associated with Paul Rudd. What she had to do, I said, was find out where Paul Rudd was located, show up there, and find him.

"Wouldn't that be like stalking him?" she wondered.

"It would only be stalking him if he didn't want you to be there," I said. "What I'm talking about is being true to your own reality and following the dictates of your heart."

Well, those words of wisdom may or may not have made an impression on her. She did seem to be considering it, but most of the rest of our time together was spent chit-chatting about other, more mundane, things. When we finally arrived at her destination, what should have been a ten-minute cab ride had stretched out into twenty-six minutes, and what should have been a ten-dollar fare had turned into twenty-eight, including the tip.

As I watched her walk up the steps of her brownstone and look through her bag for her keys, I had one of those time-progression visions that you get sometimes. I could see her in my mind's eye as a much older woman, long since settled in with whatever her searching may have ultimately brought her, reminiscing with a perhaps wistful smile about the things she had done for love.

Her name was Gina.

She lived at 341 East 85th Street.

********

And I'd like to think that one of the things she did was to click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

The Heat Is On

There are certain people who, when you see them coming toward you, you're thinking, "Oh, please, don't get in my cab. Just keep on walking, don't stop, keep going. whatever you do, don't open the door, don't do that!" And then, as they do open the door, it's "Oh, shit." Because you already know they're going to be trouble and now your job description has been changed from "taxi driver" to "trouble-person-handler".

I had a character like that a couple of weeks ago on a Friday night at around midnight at 31st and 8th, just south of Penn Station. He lumbered toward me as I was waiting at a red light doing the semi-coherent shuffle - one foot forward, one foot to the left, one foot forward, one foot to the right - and came to a landing on my right rear door, which he proceeded to open a bit too slowly. He plopped himself down on the back seat and I was stuck with him.

He was in his early thirties, I would say, and seemed to be a mix of ethnicities. Maybe a little Hispanic, maybe a little Italian, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, it was hard to tell. He wore the black leather jacket of someone who might have signed up for membership in the rough side of town, like he could belong to a gang, but you couldn't be sure. His black hair was shaved in some areas and was long in others, very I've-gotta-be-me, probably the product of some East Village hair styling Picasso.

Most people, when they enter a taxi, they tell the driver where they want to go, but this guy just sat there as the rear of the taxi filled up with smoke from the cigarette he held in his hand. With some passengers a lit cigarette, currently forbidden by the nanny state, would be the subject of some negotiation as to whether or not it could stay or go. With this guy I knew instinctively that a hard line was the right approach.

"No cigarettes in the cab, sir," I said, not leaving room for discussion.

He tossed it out the window without protest. That was easier than I thought it would be.

"Where are you heading?"

Four seconds, five seconds... no reply.

"Where are you going?"

And then, in a voice barely audible, "one sisteen."

"Sorry, what?"

Slightly louder, "one sisteen."

"116th Street? 116th and what?"

Three seconds, four seconds... "Amsherram."

"Sorry, what? 116th and what?"

"Amsherram."

"Amsterdam?"

Three seconds... "Yeah." And then this: "I got plenny-a money, man," and he pulled out a wad of bills and held it up so I could see for myself in the mirror. I pulled out into the traffic on 8th Avenue and headed uptown.

Now, there are three things you worry about with passengers like this. First, he may be so stoned out that he's unaware of whether or not he has enough, or even any, cash in one of his pockets and then, when you get him to his destination, the new game is, "Let's Find Your Money". But the guy obviously had enough money, so that was not an issue, and that was good. Second, does the passenger really know where he wants to go? You get him there and then he announces that this isn't where he wants to be and he accuses you of "taking him for a ride". And third, is he a vomit candidate?

I looked him over carefully in the mirror and decided that, although it wasn't out of the realm of possibility, he was not likely to throw up. Pukers are almost always drunks. They usually display their condition by slumping over to one side, often winding up horizontally on the seat, and the alarm goes off for the driver when he realizes he can no longer see them in the mirror. This guy didn't do that. He remained upright and, although his head would droop forward, I didn't think he'd been drinking. I did think he was stoned and in a daze from whatever drug he'd been taking, but he didn't strike me as someone who was about to part with his dinner. So that was also good.

Whether or not he really knew where he wanted to go remained to be seen. Now that I had a destination, I put my attention on navigation and made a left on 33rd and shot over to 10th Avenue, which changes its name to Amsterdam when you cross 59th Street. So we were on our way. For the next forty blocks or so the ride was uneventful. He seemed semi-okay. He was on his cell phone and was mumbling with someone who must have been able to understand what he was saying, although from what I could hear, it sounded unintelligible. When we reached 79th Street, he mumbled something in my direction.

"A hunriddafor," was what I heard, or something like it.

"Sorry, what?"

Three seconds, four seconds, and then, softly, "A hun'red." Three more seconds, and then, "An' four."

"A hundred and fourth street?"

He grunted agreement.

We continued up Amsterdam and arrived at our new destination in about three minutes. I pulled up on the right side of the avenue and stopped.

"Argunmuggawishkeygumma," he garbled, or some such sound that was completely undecipherable. I looked at him wearily in the mirror, having gotten to the point where I was just sick of dealing with the guy. Realizing I couldn't understand a word he was saying, he tried sign language and pointed to the right to indicate that he wanted me to make a right turn and continue driving toward Columbus Avenue. I complied. We drove slowly across 104th and finally, just before the end of the block, he made another sound that meant that I should stop the cab. I did so.

The fare was $12.70. He reached for his wad of cash and handed me two bills. One was a ten and the other... whoa, the other was a hundred dollar bill.

For a taxi driver, this is a moment of truth. Here is a passenger who is ripe for the taking. Semi-coherent, drugged-up, a dumb-looking thug with a fistful of money - it would be easy to take advantage of him. I held the two bills up so he could see them through the partition.

"Sir," I said, "you gave me a ten and a hundred."

He made some sounds and a gesture that meant that I should return the bills to him, which I did. He then handed me a twenty.

"Out of twenty," I said, and started to count out the difference from my own money. Before I could give it to him, however, he opened the door and told me to keep the change in words I could actually understand. This was a great tip and I said "thank you" at above normal decibel level to be sure he could hear me. He then closed the door and disappeared into the darkness of Columbus Avenue.

I turned the corner and my honesty was rewarded by an immediate fare of three kids from Spain who were en route to Times Square. You don't really expect to get another fare until you are back in Midtown, a ten minute hike, so it was like money found. The Spanish kids were tourists who were all agog at finally being in the Promised Land of New York City, a dream come true for them. We had a lively run downtown and when I dropped them off at 47th and 7th I was feeling a bit exuberant myself, except for one thing.

There was something about that last ride that was keeping my attention on it.

As I started driving around Times Square looking for my next fare, I reviewed everything that had happened with that guy. For one thing, the amount of smoke coming from his mouth just after he go in the cab was abnormally huge. When people enter a taxi with a cigarette burning (a rarity today) the entire back area never fills up with smoke within five seconds. People know you're not supposed to smoke in a cab, but this guy made it obvious. And when I'd told him to put it out, he suddenly didn't seem particularly semi-coherent as he complied immediately without protest. That was an outpoint. It didn't fit.

Then, although he couldn't coherently tell me where he wanted to go, he didn't have any trouble showing me all the money he was carrying. The only time a passenger shows you his money without being asked to do so is when he is an inner-city guy who is going to the ghetto and wants to assure you that he's not going to rip you off. People who are so stoned that they can't pronounce the name of the street they want to go to don't have the mental acuity to offer you assurance by showing you their cash. It was another outpoint.

Finally, at the end of the ride he had held up the two bills separately in his hand, so it would be easy to see what they were. Usually when a bill is mistakenly rendered by a passenger, the mistake is hidden by the other bills that surround it. In this case it was glaringly obvious that he was overpaying. It was also an oddity.

I drove around for awhile running the incident over in my mind. And then it hit me.

That guy had been a cop!

The Taxi and Limousine Commission or the Police Department will occasionally send out decoys to test the integrity of taxi drivers. Many years ago I had a middle-aged, conservatively dressed African-American man hail me in Midtown and direct me to drive up to Harlem. I went a block in the right direction and he then identified himself as a TLC inspector. I had passed the test and was actually given a receipt to prove it. So these things are done, particularly after something has hit the fan in the industry. And, indeed, something had hit the fan a few days prior to this ride.

The news had been widely reported that out of approximately 44,000 taxi drivers in New York City, about 30,000 of them had been ripping off passengers by hitting a button on the meter that automatically adds an out-of-town charge to the fare. This was according to the GPS tracking mechanisms that are now installed in every cab in the city. It was an astoundingly large number of drivers and the TLC chairman and other city officials were duly upset at the revelation.

So the heat is on. This was further borne out by stories I began to hear from other taxi drivers of tickets being handed out for offenses that are normally overlooked, such as failure to signal a lane change or discharging a passenger more than twelve inches from the curb. Also there were stories of other set-ups, such as decoy cops hailing New York cabs on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel in Hoboken to see if the driver will pick them up (a no-no since New York cabs can only pick up passengers within the city limits).

It was later reported that this initial report of widespread overcharging had been grossly exaggerated, by the way. Most of the instances of the out of town button being wrongly hit on the meter have turned out to be mistakes, and the number of cabbies who had done it repeatedly was closer to 3,000 not 30,000. Still, that is unacceptable as there is no excuse to ever rip off a customer and this sort of thing gives honest drivers a bad name.

So we'll see if the heat gets turned off.

********

Rumor has it that another way of getting the heat off is to click here for Pictures From A Taxi. Just a rumor, of course.

Stranger In A Strange Land

I was driving down Columbus Avenue on the west side of Manhattan a couple of Sundays ago at 2 a.m., doing what I am often doing at that time of the night - looking for my next fare. Columbus is a one-way avenue with synchronized lights that move like a wave, and the best way of getting that hoped-for passenger is by riding the front of the wave, much like a surf boarder. This gives you the best chance of being the first cabbie to get to someone who may be looking for your services somewhere down the road.

It's a routine thing for me, something I've been doing for so long I could probably do it blindfolded, just based on the timing of the lights that becomes internalized as years go by. But as I approached 79th Street, something not at all routine occurred quite suddenly. A pedestrian was crossing against the light, from the west side of Columbus to the east, causing me to slow down a bit to avoid hitting him. There's nothing unusual about that, of course. Pedestrians are known to be reckless in New York City. What was unusual was who this pedestrian was.

It was a coyote.

I think that's worth repeating: I braked for a coyote crossing Columbus Avenue!

Now, if you have ever been to New York City or if you live here, you know without need of further explanation how impossible that is. But in case you've never visited the Big Apple, let me tell you that Manhattan is an island upon which Man has evicted all but a few select members of the animal kingdom (pigeons, sparrows, chipmunks, rats, mice, a few raccoons, and a hawk or two) and created a world of skyscrapers, subways, and coffee shops that is meant for HUMANS ONLY. So the sudden appearance of a coyote on Columbus Avenue is almost as unheard of as would be the sudden appearance of an elephant or a camel on East 34th Street (which I have also seen, by the way, but they were a part of the annual parade of circus animals en route to Madison Square Garden, so it doesn't count).

The coyote moved just quickly enough to avoid the oncoming vehicles, as many humans do, and stopped on the sidewalk at 79th Street. Realizing I was witnessing an extraordinary event, I brought the cab to a halt, as all the other vehicles proceeded down the avenue without me. For about ten seconds, separated by not more than thirty feet, we checked each other out. I had thought that perhaps it was a dog, but as he turned to face me I could see that, although they were quite similar, this was not a member of that group known as "man's best friend". It had a wolfish face and an independence in its bearing that was not like that of a domesticated animal. It was definitely a coyote.

My immediate thought was to get his picture. I carry a camera with me at all times that sits beside me on the front seat and I grabbed it. But, as often happens in street photography, by the time I had the power on and had brought the viewfinder up to my eye, my subject had moved away, trotting into a four-block-long park that surrounds the back of the American Museum of Natural History. He was gone.

Nevertheless, I knew I still had a great photo opportunity on my hands, so I pulled the cab over to the curb, took camera in hand, and walked into the park at 79th Street in pursuit. The coyote had gone north, toward the park's 81st Street boundary, and I caught sight of him again from a distance of about one block. There then began a fascinating game of cat and mouse (so to speak) between the two of us.

Envision this scene, if you will: just myself and this animal in a snow-covered park at two in the morning, with no pedestrians on the streets and the only sounds to be heard coming from the occasional rumblings of automobiles moving down Columbus Avenue. The stillness, silence, cold air, and light from a full moon evoked an appropriate feeling of actually being in the wilderness. I could tell that the coyote had caught sight of me and was aware that I was following him. Whenever I moved, he moved. When I stopped, he stopped. And, as if to frustrate me, whenever I was about to snap a picture, he would move again.

Even so, I was able to take a few pictures. I shot a distance of about a hundred yards with a hefty zoom lens, but with the darkness and the unwillingness of my subject to stand still, I must admit these pictures are not very clear. Here's what I came away with...

I spent about ten minutes in the park with the coyote until he finally exited near 81st Street, went back out on Columbus Avenue, and lost me. I circled the area a couple of times in the cab, but couldn't spot him again. I pulled over to the curb to check how my pictures had come out and had a few reflections about the experience. First, how completely odd and curious it was that, of all the locations he could wander into, he chose the grounds of the Museum of Natural History. It was as if he was seeking sanctuary in the one place that humans have set aside for the study and understanding of nature and its creatures.

Next, how astonishing it was for a shift of taxi driving to be interrupted by a wildlife adventure in the middle of Manhattan. That is surreal.

And finally, I found myself empathizing with the plight of the coyote. He had somehow wandered away from his natural habitat and found himself a stranger in a very strange land. It's a feeling I've often had in my own life.

I wondered if I should call the police and report the sighting. but I decided against it because of a previous occurrence. A few years ago there had been another coyote in Manhattan and, amazingly, I saw that one, too, walking alongside the wall that adjoins Central Park on 5th Avenue one night at 3 a.m. The next day it was on the news that the cops had been chasing the poor animal around Central Park all day and finally were able to capture it and turn it over to the wildlife service. Unfortunately, two weeks later it died in captivity. I really didn't want that to happen to this one, so I didn't call the police and wasn't even going to write this post about it unless the media reported its presence, which they did a couple of days later. It was reported that a coyote had been sighted in Chelsea and was being pursued by the police around the West Side Highway, but had slipped away. No one knew how it got into Manhattan, but speculation was that it might have wandered south through Westchester County and come across the river on railroad tracks.

To this point the coyote hasn't been seen again.

I hope he made it back home.

********

And when he got there, it would be great if he clicked here for Pictures From A Taxi.

My Cab Runneth Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, shit."

"What's the matter?"

"Uh, the paint spilled."

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

"What do you mean?"

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

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

"Uh, yeah. Sorry."

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

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

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

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

"Thank god!"

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

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

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

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

My Cab Runneth Over.

********

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

Mission To Haiti

One of the little side-benefits of driving a cab in New York City is that you occasionally have a window presented to you through which to gain an insight into major world events. For example, to go way, way back, I once had a military man in full uniform get in my cab who was en route to New York's Sloan-Kettering Hospital. It turned out he was a general in the army of the overthrown Iranian government who was going to visit "His Excellency" in the hospital. "His Excellency" was the Shah of Iran who had been overthrown by the Islamic revolution and was at that time receiving treatment for cancer at the hospital (from which he died shortly thereafter). I didn't have a conversation of any substance with this military man, but his seriousness, his stiffness, his continuing to wear the uniform of an army that no longer existed as a show of respect for the deposed Shah, and his use of the term "His Excellency" have remained with me all these years. An abstraction had been given some mass, a face. Whenever the Iranian situation was mentioned after that I could think back on this ride and get a feeling for the way it was, just based on the way this general in my cab carried himself.

I had a ride like that a few days ago.

I picked up a young man in Manhattan who was headed for Kennedy Airport, and from there he would be flying home to London. New York was a stopover in his journey from his original point of departure - Haiti, a place that, of course, is very much in the news these days. He told me he is a photographer and had donated his services to record some of the relief effort that is in progress on the devastated island.

Getting a report about something from someone who was actually on the scene makes a deeper impression on me than just seeing it on the television or hearing about it on the radio. And the stories he told me were inspirational:

- volunteers who in the morning would have recoiled at the sight of someone receiving an injection were taught how to do it and by night's end had administered hundreds of inoculations to Haitians at risk of disease,

- a volunteer took half a day to teach himself to identify all the instruments used in surgery so he could then serve as an assistant and thus free up a doctor to perform surgery who otherwise would have been doing the job of handing instruments to surgeons himself,

- volunteers were sleeping in tents, eating food packets provided by the military, using makeshift latrines as bathrooms, and taking showers from water coming down from elevated buckets,

-people were experiencing the exhilaration of knowing that they were actually saving other people's lives and knowing as well that their reach was expanding and that they would never be the same again.

It occurred to me later that changes for the better often go unnoticed and unacknowledged. Here is a country literally being invaded by people who have come to help. Some of them are specialists, some of them are there to just help in any way they are needed. Soldiers arrive in huge planes and are deployed to distribute food. These kinds of things have not been the normal way the history of the human race has been written.

It brings to mind the dream of a brave new world and it's enough to make an optimist out of you.

The name of my passenger was Felix Kunze.

You can see his photography at felixkunze.com.

Inside "Taxicab Confessions"

As I walked out of my taxi garage one evening last June to start my shift, a smiling young lady approached me and handed me this flier:

I immediately called and was given an appointment for an interview.

Thus I was able to get my foot in the door of the famous American television program, "Taxicab Confessions". I've long been a fan of this show and I'll admit it's been a dream of mine to be one of their drivers. If you're not familiar with it, click here. What they do is equip a real taxicab with several hidden cameras and microphones and record conversations between passengers and drivers. Passengers are unaware that what's been going on in the cab - often things that reveal their innermost thoughts, problems, and realities - has been recorded and are asked at the end of the ride to sign a release form, allowing HBO (Home Box Office, an American cable tv station) to use the material for broadcasting. If they sign, it may get on the air. If they don't, it won't.

This show started in 1995, and due to its popularity it has actually become a little part of the experience of driving a cab in New York City. A passenger will sometimes be having an in-depth conversation with me and then suddenly pause and say, "Hey, this isn't Taxicab Confessions, is it?" Of course, it isn't. But sometimes it is. One night a passenger told me he'd once actually been in the Taxicab Confessions taxi and had spilled his guts out about his sexual proclivities to his driver. But he wouldn't sign the release. "I don't want the world to know about that shit," he said to me... "especially my wife!"

I will occasionally refer to the show when the moment presents itself. For instance, a young man once told me that when he'd been an undergrad at Columbia University he not only was a student, but he also had a little business of manufacturing fake New Jersey driver's licenses and selling them to underage students so they could get into bars, a felony for which, if he'd been caught, could have sent him to jail and ruined whatever he was planning to do when he graduated from the prestigious and ultra-expensive university.

"Wow," I said, "now that's a 'taxicab confession'!"

Another time I had a group of four half-drunk, twenty-something man-boys on board en route to the next whiskey bar. The guy sitting up front with me was explaining his modus operandi for picking up girls for all to hear. What he does, he bragged, is simply to approach girls in the bar one by one and ask them point blank if they'd like to come to his place with him to have sex. No chit-chat, no lines, and especially no buying them drinks. "Twenty-nine will tell me to go fuck myself," he said, "but the thirtieth one will say 'yes'." A lively discussion ensued concerning the pros and cons of such an approach and what the odds actually were. At the end of the ride, as I was being paid, I asked these guys if they'd ever heard of a show called "Taxicab Confessions"? Their jaws dropped and they started rollicking around like the alcohol-soaked glee club that they were. "Are you shitting us, man? Are we on that show?" they howled, obviously hoping it was so. "No, sorry, you're not," I replied, "but you could have been!"

Now, I am the kind of person who likes to categorize data. I enjoy it when someone asks me to name my top ten movies of all time, or to list my favorite pizzerias, or whatever. I suppose that theoretically, at least, there could be a list of the "best taxicab confessions" I have ever had in my cab. And if there was such a list, I know immediately what confession would be at the top. Not because the confession itself was so outrageous, but because it was uniquely in a sub-category of its own. It was a gourmet item, a connoisseur's treasure.

It was a taxicab confession about a Taxicab Confession. And to put the cherry on it, it came from a celebrity. For fear of being sued, I'm not going to name this celebrity, but here's the story, anyway, the short version.

Quite a few years ago there was an episode of Taxicab Confessions, taped in Las Vegas, in which a young man and a young woman were in the back seat making out while the driver tried to find out who they were and what they were up to. It was obvious that they were really into each other - in fact you might say that she was ga-ga about this dude and that he was goo-goo about this doll. As the driver kept prying, we learned that the young man was a member of a certain rock band and that the girl, who had just been in attendance at one of their concerts, had more or less been plucked from the audience by this guy. So they really had known each other for only about an hour and yet they were on their way to a hotel, presumably to consummate their acquaintanceship. When the driver revealed to them at the end of the ride that they were being videotaped by Taxicab Confessions, the young man eagerly signed the release form, exclaiming that it was his favorite show.

Fast forward a couple of years to the year 2002, as I recall. Quite late one night I picked up two thirty-something guys in Hell's Kitchen and started driving them to their destination, the Soho Grand Hotel, about a 15 minute ride. One of them was quite friendly and conversational, which opened the door for me to begin a Taxicab Confessions-type interrogation. Knowing that they were en route to a hotel told me that they were not New Yorkers, so I asked why they were in town. The talkative one said he was doing some recording. In fact, they were just coming from the recording studio. That made it easy for me to ask him who he was, and he told me his name and the name of his band.

Bingo! It was the same band as the guy who had been in that episode of Taxicab Confessions a couple of years earlier. "Oh," I said with considerable interest, "you're in that band?" He replied, correcting me, that he wasn't just in that band, he was the main man of that band, the lead singer and the songwriter.

Years of experience have given me a good sense of what I can get away with with certain types of passengers, and I knew I could have some fun with this guy. I immediately went into my imitation of a John Belushi sketch character from the early days of Saturday Night Live.

"Well, EXCUUUUUUUSE MEEEEEEEEEE!!!!" I squealed, mocking him. "Excuuuuse me! I did not know! You're not just in the band, you're the main man in the band! Excuuuuuse meeeee!"

He took it well. Both he and the fellow sitting next to him (who turned out to be his bodyguard and never said a word through the whole ride), laughed at the well-deserved ribbing which, in its own way, created some rapport between us. The conversation continued. I told him that, probably because I haven't been keeping up with rock bands since the Beatles broke up, I wasn't familiar with his music or with his group except for one thing: that time a member of his band was on Taxicab Confessions.

"Oh, yeah, that," he said disdainfully.

"What do you mean?"

"That guy got himself fired because of that," he said. "I hope he enjoyed his five hundred dollars."

This was shocking to me. Why would this guy have been fired because of that? Was it because plucking pretty girls out of the audience was considered to be bad public relations? Hell, that was the kind of behavior we expect from rock bands. That would be good public relations. But his answer was something I never would have thought of.

It was because, he said, the guy wasn't really in the band. He was a hired back-up musician who was touring with the band but, by his statements and by signing the release form, he represented himself on national television as being "in" the band, something he actually was not. The five hundred dollars is what Taxicab Confessions pays people whose material is actually used by the show.

I continued to give my rock star more good-natured ribbing about what a mean guy he must be to have fired the poor fellow just because of this. I reminded him that I never would have recognized the name of his band if it hadn't been for that episode.

"Oh, he's all right," he replied. "He wound up with Fiona Apple."

So there it was. A taxicab confession about a Taxicab Confession. Gourmet, indeed!

With all my years of experience and with my knowledge of and affinity for the show, I felt I had a decent shot at being chosen to be a Taxicab Confessions driver. So a few days later, at the appointed time, I showed up at an office in Chelsea with my friend Annie at my side for support. I was greeted by a staffer who provided me with a bottle of water to offset the effects of the hot afternoon, and explained what would be happening. First, there was a questionnaire to be filled out about my experiences as a taxi driver. And then I would be miked up and interviewed on camera by Harry Gantz, who along with his brother Joe is one of the co-creators of the show.

Harry Gantz

The whole thing took about half an hour and was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Here, finally, was a place where I had a resume. Harry Gantz, as you might expect from someone who does Taxicab Confessions for a living, is friendly, inquisitive, and easy to talk to. Plus he looks a little like Fred Astaire, don't you think?

Being inquisitive myself, I found out quite a bit about how they do the show. Since here you are reading a taxi driver's blog, I thought you might find this of interest:

1) First of all, the show is for real. The passengers you see in the back seat are not set up in any way. They are indeed picked up off the street, always very late at night, with no knowledge that they're about to participate in a television documentary.

2) The taxi drivers are not actors, they're licensed cabbies. We had to bring our hack licenses with us to the interview to prove that we were the real thing.

3) In order to get material that would be useful for the show, the drivers tend to be unabashedly prying. They are helped in this endeavor by a director who is in a van that follows the Taxicab Confessions taxi wherever it goes. The driver is connected to the director via an earpiece through which he receives suggestions as to how to steer the conversation (steering the taxi he does on his own). If you ever watch an episode in which the driver has short hair, look carefully at his left ear. You will see the earpiece. The director has a tv monitor in the van and can see and hear everything that is going on.

4) Although the show is for real, there are two things about the way it's done that could give passengers an idea that something is going on. First, there is a large interior light inside the taxi that is always on. This isn't the normal dome light that all cabs are equipped with. It's a narrow, custom-made lamp that extends halfway across the interior of the cab, just above the windshield on the passenger's side. It's there to provide sufficient illumination for the hidden cameras. Second, the taxi moves at an extraordinarily slow pace. I've seen it several times on the street and I could always spot it because it goes at about half the speed of all the other vehicles on the road. The reasons for this are that if the taxi gets too far away from the van, they lose contact with each other and, probably more importantly, one of the problems they have is that sometimes a "good ride" (one that is providing potentially usable material) ends too soon. So they drive slowly in an attempt to get more stuff that might make it onto the air.

5) They go through an enormous amount of footage that they don't use. Either the material isn't good enough or the passenger won't sign.

6) The drivers who are initially chosen go through a filtering process in which they drive around in the cabs they normally use (not the Taxicab Confessions cab) with hidden microphones in place and suggestions being given by the director in the van, but without any television cameras set up. If they make it past this stage, these drivers are then used for real.

Now, I wish I could end this post by telling you that I was chosen and can be seen in an upcoming Taxicab Confessions show, but unfortunately I never got the call. I wasn't given a reason for this, but I can't help but wonder if my problem wasn't my gender. The flier I was initially given actually encourages female drivers to apply, and, if you've watched the show, you will have noticed that a disproportionate number of the drivers are women. I say "disproportionate" because the rarest kind of taxi driver in New York is a female taxi driver. You could watch cabs go by on the street all day and never see one. Yet, on Taxicab Confessions, at least half of the episodes have female cabbies behind the wheel.

So, Harry, listen up. You were probably too embarrassed to ask me to do this, but you shouldn't have been. Of course I'd be willing to cross-dress to do the show.

You've got my card. Give me a call!

********

But before you do, click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

How I Ended The War

I am a great believer in the ripple effect of communication. That a word whispered into an ear can cause a castle to crumble or another to appear.

I have often wondered, after having had a conversation with a passenger, what effect may eventually be created by that exchange. The taxicab is a unique human situation in that it's a business relationship, but its closeness in a shared space, its anonymity, and its protection from external interruptions can create conditions in which real contact can occur. The only trouble, from the driver's perspective, is that you almost never find out what the far-reaching effect of that amazing conversation may have been (although it does happen every once in a while - click here for a story about that).

So, even though it's quite unlikely I'll ever know if I've specifically changed somebody's life for the better, I like to think that I improve the world by showing respect to passengers, being a good listener, and occasionally offering what seems to me to be a sage comment or two. And that gives me a needed feeling of having "done something about it".

Now, as you know, in New York City every type of human being is wandering around and eventually gets into a taxicab. People get in and people get out in an endless and grand or not-so-grand procession of the human race. One passenger is going home to Queens after staying too late in a bar, the next one tells you he was once declared legally dead, the next one is a professional call girl who has an attentive audience as she discloses inside information about her trade, and the next one says he'd just spent the day chaperoning the President of the United States around in the U.N. (For the story about that, click here.)

With this great variety of humanity coming and going through his doors, a taxi driver every once in a while finds himself in the sudden company of a certain person who is either known by reputation or is discovered through conversation to be a "key player" in some particular sector of the world stage.

The thoughtful driver might see this as an opportunity. "What could I say to this Very Important Person," he might think, "that could create an effect on him and thus on the entire sector of the world in which he is so influential?" Such opportunities are fleeting, indeed. There are only a relatively few moments in which to establish a rapport and make your strike. More often than not, the brilliant things to say are thought of only after the person has left the taxi forever.

But not always.

Many years ago I had such a fare. Its exact location in time is a bit vague to me, but I think it happened in the mid-nineties. I had been cruising down West 43rd Street, approaching 11th Avenue, when I was hailed by two men coming out of the Market Diner. They were Irish - they'd been drinking - (no, I did not say that if they were Irish it goes without saying that they'd been drinking. I would never say such a thing!) - and their destination was 6th Avenue and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village.

These guys were around 40 years old and eager for conversation. Rather than just giving me their destination and talking to each other, they engaged me right from the start of the ride, as if for some reason I needed to be convinced of something. It turned out that what I needed to be convinced of was why it was okay for the I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) to set off bombs and use other violent tactics against the British.

Now, I knew very little about the struggle in Northern Ireland other than what I'd read in the headlines. It wasn't my fight and I never considered it my responsibility to learn the history of the conflict or to form an opinion about who was right and who was wrong. The only real contact I'd had with it, in fact, had been from another passenger who'd been in my cab several years prior to these fellows. She was a middle-aged Irish woman who expressed herself about the situation in Northern Ireland with such passion and outright hatred that I'd always remembered her. I didn't remember which side she was on, but I recognized in her emotion that she'd been personally affected by the conflict, quite possibly by the loss of someone who'd been dear to her. I believed that her passion was fueled by a gut-level, perhaps insatiable hunger for vengenance against whichever side had caused her loss and I had gleaned from her an insight into why the conflict never seemed to end. It was an "I hit you, you hit me, I hit you, you hit me" endless cycle of retaliation. From this insight I formed my only opinion about the whole mess and that opinion was that somehow the individuals involved in it had to overcome their desire for retribution and resolve to learn to live together in peace, for the sake of the future.

I listened carefully to what my two passengers had to say without challenging them. An angry comment one of them made particularly struck me as being a flimsy justification for violence - "the British cannot be reasoned with!" he exclaimed, perhaps trying to convince not only me but himself that this was so - but I didn't attempt to contradict him or even play devil's advocate. These were serious people who were speaking emotionally and, although I didn't know or want to know specifically who they were, I did know with certainty that they were in the I.R.A. and that they were in agreement with and participating in the activity of killing people who were their political enemies. Some would call them terrorists, others might call them freedom fighters, but whatever you call them, they were scary and perhaps drunk and for my own safety's sake I just wanted to be rid of them.

But there was this other thing.

It was the knowledge that words can change minds and changed minds can change conditions.

So I decided to take my shot. And my shot consisted of a single word.

As they were exiting the taxi at their destination in the Village, I said this:

"I have just one word for you guys."

There was a pause. They had just spent the last ten minutes using me as their sounding board and were at least for the moment all talked out. So the moment was right. Their facial expressions seemed to say that they wanted to know what this one word could be and, whatever it was, that they would give it their full consideration. So I told them the word.

"Gandhi," I said.

The one who had just given me a ten-dollar bill for the ride seemed a little stunned by the comment. He thought of saying something in response, but he didn't. Then he closed the door and they were gone.

After that, time went by. I continued to not give any special attention to the conflict in Northern Ireland but eventually I did notice something. I noticed that things were getting better. And then the conflict was resolved and today no more bombs are being set off. The war is over.

Did the comment of a taxi driver in New York City end the war in Northern Ireland?

Of course not.

Or did it?

I write this story not only to overstate my worth to the world and to boost up my always fragile self-esteem, but because it is my New Year's message to you, a much-appreciated reader of this blog. I suggest that we resolve to never forget that thought precedes, and is senior to, action and to further resolve to never underestimate the power of communication. Let us resolve to continue to make our voices heard and to always remember that the easiest way to recognize a tyranny is by its attempts to stifle the free flow of communication.

Best wishes to you for a great New Year and a great New Decade from a taxi driver...

May your best days be yet unseen,

And may all your lights be green.

********

And one other resolution, while we're at it: let us all resolve to click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Sunday On A Roll

There's a certain phenomenon that exists in sports, gambling, and taxi driving called being "on a roll". If you're "on a roll" it means that you just can't miss. Things are going your way without effort, without even trying. If you were throwing dice at a craps game, you would just win, win, win. If you'd bought a ticket at a raffle, the name that would be picked out of the hat would be yours. It's as if you're on a psychic toboggan ride. Nobody seems to know how it happens, but, if we could bottle it, surely our troubles would be over.

I had a day like that last Sunday. I found myself on a roll. Didn't know how it happened, but it was great while it lasted.

5:25 p.m. - My first ride of the night. A nice little old lady was assisted into the cab at 46th Street and 10th Avenue by someone on the street and then rode with me uptown to the corner of 62nd and Broadway. After she paid me I saw that she might need some help getting out so I came around and literally give her my hand in order to provide that extra little pull she needed to enable her leg to come up high enough to get over the raised area where the back door meets the floorboard. It's something you have to watch out for with the elderly if you're a cab driver. Many older people will refuse an offer for assistance, so I've found it's wise to just come around without asking and open the door for them if it's not already opened or, if it is, just stand there and be ready to lend a hand. Perhaps it was this little good deed that led to the roll. For standing there before I could close the door was my next fare, a blonde.

5:34 p.m. - She was off to LaGuardia with no luggage. This in itself is enough to start a conversation - "no luggage?" - and that simple question led to a discussion about her life and aspirations and a bit of my own story, too. Why no luggage? Because she was a day tripper who'd just come in from Boston to audition for admission to Julliard's graduate school for opera singers. She'd already graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music and New York is the next very logical place to continue to pursue such a career. I asked her if she was able to read music as a singer - that is, to be able to sing by looking at the notes on the page and she replied that she could. This ability impresses me even more than being able to play an instrument from the written page since it seems to me to be more difficult to do, and I told her so. I was then able to impress her a little by telling her that I once had the opera star Beverly Sills in my cab. It pleased me to see her reaction to this revelation - "Wow! You did?!!" - because, really, how many people out there are going to be interested in knowing that? Opera is kind of a cult. It has a strong following, but not in great numbers. It shows me, though, that I must have some kind of a celebrity story for all tastes. (The latest count I did of the number of celebrities who've been in my cab came to 124. They add up over the years.) I went on to tell my aspiring diva that we had something in common in that I, too, once studied music in Boston. I'd spent one misbegotten semester at the Berklee School of Music in 1969 when the school was so new that they'd let anyone (me) in. By the time we got to LaGuardia we were in a pretty good affinity due to the abundance of communication, so I asked her name in case she should someday be famous herself and I could say, "Yeah, I had her in my cab when she was still an unknown", and she said it was Charley something. It occurred to me that there's never been an opera singer who went by one name, so I suggested she might want to just go with "Charley". She could be the Madonna of the opera world. Or the Cher, at least. If that happens, remember you heard it here first.

Now, getting a fare to LaGuardia in the early evening on a Sunday is in itself a sign that things are going your way. It's the time of the week when you are most likely to get an immediate ride back to the city, and that's fast money. I did a quick check of the taxi waiting areas (there are five of them at LaGuardia) and decided that the American Airlines lot was the best bet. In ten minutes I was on my way to Greenwich Village with a cheerful couple who appreciated my traffic-avoiding navigation and tipped generously. Back in Manhattan by 7:04. On a roll!

7:10 p.m. - I drove up 6th Avenue looking for my next fare and pulled up in front of the Bed, Bath and Beyond at 18th Street. No passengers, but the doorman of the place came up to me and handed me a little yellow card with little pictures of 30 shopping bags on it. He explained that if I either pick up or deliver customers to the store 30 times on Saturdays or Sundays between 3 and 7 p.m., I will receive a $20 gift certificate from the store. And then he punched the first bag with his hole puncher. I thought it was a creative way for the store to attract taxis when they apparently need them the most. It's not a lot of money, but in the world of taxi driving any reward from an establishment for servicing their public is a rarity, indeed. In fact, the only other place I know of in all of New York that gives a cabbie a prize for delivering a customer is a certain strip joint in Midtown. Just after the newly-arrived patron enters the place, the doorman will come over and adroitly hand the taxi driver an envelope with a $5 bill inside.

After just a minute of hanging around, a couple of guys jumped in and we drove up to 92nd and Central Park West. I showed them the yellow card I'd just been given and this somehow began a convoluted conversation about animals, politicians, and celebrities. When we arrived at their destination the more talkative of the two gave me a $5 tip on a $15 fare and told me it was the most interesting taxi ride he'd ever taken. Which gets me thinking it's not me, it's the roll, and I start feeling a bit in awe regarding the roll, wondering how long it could continue.

9:00 p.m. My next six fares were unremarkable, just so-so rides with nothing special going on, and I'm thinking my lucky streak is over. Nine o'clock is break time and since I found myself on the Upper East Side I decided to flick on my "off-duty" light and head over to the Starbuck's on 87th and Lex, one of my favorites (easy parking and two clean bathrooms). As is my custom, once I park the cab and step outside, I first open a back door and check for garbage before locking up. Something immediately caught my eye on the floor. It's something that, to a cab driver, is like a row of five cherries popping up on a slot machine to a gambler.

It was a wallet.

Ding-ding-ding!

Now, there are two kinds of wallets you can find on the floor of a taxicab. One is a wallet that has been emptied by a previous passenger. And the other is one that has not. This wallet was of the latter variety.

Ding-ding-ding!

I don't want you to think that I'm the kind of person who would find something of value and not try to return it. To the contrary, I have a very solid policy in this regard. I will make every effort to return the item unless the person who lost it was, in my opinion, outrightly evil. And that has happened only once in 32 years. My success rate is quite high, probably around 90 per cent, not counting things like umbrellas, gloves, and hats whose value isn't worth the trouble it would take to hunt the person down. I'm talking about items such as cell phones, wallets, and bicycles (yes, someone once left a bicycle in the trunk of my cab). The reason the bells of the jackpot go off when you find something like this is that invariably the person who gets it back is going to give you a significant reward.

I snatched the wallet from the floor and returned to the front seat of the cab. Examining its contents, I found about $60 in cash, a single credit card, a Medicare identification card, some phone numbers of doctors, and, fortunately, the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the person who owned the wallet and her children. This meant that returning the wallet was going to be easy to do.

I did a little detective work to try to figure out which passenger it could be. The clues I had were that it was a female who was old enough to be eligible for Medicare and had at least two grown children. I looked over my trip sheet and reviewed who'd been in my cab that night, and I realized it could only belong to one person: it was the little old lady who had been my first passenger. She must have dropped it when I was assisting her out of the taxi. The amazing thing is that I had taken nine fares since then and, counting the numbers in the column of the trip sheet that tells you how many passengers had been in each ride, these nine fares consisted of 17 people. In other words, 17 people had come in and out of my cab and no one had noticed the wallet on the floor! And that is quite remarkable.

I got out my cell phone and dialed her number. The call was answered by the desk clerk in what turned out to be an assisted living facility on the West Side. I asked if this certain person lived there, he said she did, and I told him I was a taxi driver who had her wallet. He told me she was out of the building and suggested that I just drop it off with him, but of course that was not going to happen. Trying not to insult the guy, I told him that I'd be working all night and that this was something I could give only to the lady herself. I gave him my number and asked him to give it to her when she came in. If I give the wallet to him, there goes the reward, there goes the satisfaction I get from seeing someone's faith in humanity rehabilitated, and how would I know if he would actually give it to her, anyway? I don't know this guy from Adam. Or Eve, for that matter.

I went into my Starbuck's, used the restroom, got my tall black, returned to the cab, opened up my bran muffin from Trader Joe's, and went back to work, cruising down Lex without a fare (but with caffeine) until I got to Midtown.

9:33 p.m. - My phone rings. I immediately flicked on my "off-duty" light once again and pulled over to the curb, knowing the call would be for the wallet. It was the daughter of the little old lady, overjoyed. She told me the address of her mother's facility and I told her I would be there in about ten minutes.

Just as I was about to drive off, three exuberant women came rushing up to the side of the cab seeking my services. I told them I was off-duty but if they were going my way I could take them. Not forgetting that I was on a roll, it didn't really surprise me that where they wanted to go was only two blocks away from where I was heading. They jumped in the cab. We rolled on.

Well, it turned out they were from Virginia and were having themselves a great time in the big city. They told me they come to New York every year during "this week" and, from what I could gather, it was an annual, get down and boogie, what-happens-in-New-York-stays-in-New-York weekend. They were so bubbly that I felt comfortable telling them, in order to show that New Yorkers in general are wonderful people and that I in particular am a wonderful person, that, hey, look at this, I am on my way to return a passenger's wallet. And I held it up for all to see. I might as well have told them that I'd discovered that the cure for arthritis was drinking martinis. I was an instant hero. They gave me twenty dollars for a $6.30 fare and, in the immortal words of Harry Chapin, I stuffed the bill in my shirt. It occurred to me about ten seconds later that maybe I should always have a wallet handy to show passengers that "I'm on my way to returning it". I could make a fortune.

9:46 p.m. - I arrive at the assisted living facility and the daughter of the little old lady was right there, waiting for me just outside the entrance to the place. She was about my own age, filled with gratitude, and I could see from the way she spoke that she cared deeply about her mother who, she said, was sure that "that nice cab driver" would return her wallet to her. She handed me a couple of bills, thanked me again, and we went our ways. Stopping at the red light at the next intersection, I looked at what she'd given me and saw it was two twenty dollar bills. A bit exorbitant, I thought, but much appreciated.

9:53 p.m. - At this point, I'm beginning to feel impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and, as if to test me, two passengers get in at 47th and 8th who, under normal circumstances, would have been able to get under my skin. They were two middle-aged, obese females, one of whom not only had great difficulty simply getting into the cab, but also was attempting to gain sympathy from the other by whining and moaning on about her range of motion difficulties. They were coming from a play and I overheard the whiner say, "if it wasn't Mamet, it never would have made it to Broadway". In other words, it was a new David Mamet drama and they didn't care for it. Now, I am a David Mamet fan so that comment, along with their upper crust, academic-condescension way of speaking, would normally have been enough to bring me down a notch. But not tonight. Even their ten per cent tip when I dropped them off at 89th and Riverside didn't put a dent in my elan vital. I was on a roll, after all.

But then things seemed to even out. I took several unspectacular rides. I thought it was over. But, no!

11:35 p.m. - I pick up a couple near Washington Square in the Village who are en route to the posh Regency Hotel in the Upper East Side. They were from another country - I'm not sure which - in great spirits, and enjoying each other's company. We didn't have much conversation during the ride other than my pointing out that the Park Avenue Tunnel, through which we passed, was originally built for trains. Then when we got to the Regency, the gentleman told me that he "likes the way I drive" and gave me $25 for an $11.90 fare. And asked for my card. As I drove off, I'm thinking I'm so hot I may have to be declared a fire hazard. The roll!

But I hit another lull. It had to be over. Then, this...

2:55 a.m. - I pick up a middle-aged man in Midtown who wants to go to a section in Brooklyn right under the Manhattan Bridge that's known as "Dumbo". It's pretty much a non-conversational ride, but about halfway there, just to break a bit of monotony setting in, I asked the fellow if he knew what "Dumbo" stood for. He didn't, so I told him - it's an acronym for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass". He seemed to appreciate this, so I went on to ask if he knew what Tribeca meant. He didn't know that either, so I told him it was for "Triangle Below Canal". Another five minutes or so went by without much conversation, and then as we were getting close to his destination he suddenly asks me if I know what the numbers in Union Square mean! Now, this is not a question that is normally asked of a cab driver - in fact I don't think anyone has ever asked me that, ever - which wouldn't be any big deal in itself, but when you consider that the last post in this blog was on this very subject, then his asking me this question at this particular time is something that might be considered beyond coincidence. So I told him what the numbers mean and also told him that of all the people in the world of whom he could have theoretically asked that question, I am undoubtedly the only person in the world who could hand him a card containing the web address of his own blog and direct him to the most recently written entry which would explain and demonstrate, via video, the answer to his question. And I gave him my card.

At this point I had to consider the very real possibility that for reasons unknown I had been imbued with godlike powers and should seriously consider starting my own religion, but of course you know that whenever you start blowing bubbles like this someone shows up with a pin...

3:31 a.m. - I pull over on Carmine Street in the Village for a young lady who has just finished kissing some guy and wants to go to 40th between Broadway and 6th. She was kind of pretty and seemed tired and done for the night, so there was no talking, really, just a straight run up 6th Avenue. And then these horrifying words: "I don't feel good". Oh my god, that translates immediately as: "I'm going to throw up now". Without needing to ask for any further information, I knew I had to instantly bring the cab to a halt and get her out because within a few moments there would be puke all over the place. But I was in the middle of the avenue and, wouldn't you know, there was a vehicle at this hour of the night blocking me, meaning it would cost me an extra three or four seconds to get over to the curb. And that additional time could mean that God was about to spit on me for my arrogance as well as whatever the girl was about to do. It just suddenly seemed somehow ironically fitting that my perfect night would end with me cleaning up vomit.

But it didn't happen!

We made it to the curb and she puked on the street.

Still on a roll!

4:30 a.m. - I finished the night off by taking a young man who was a systems troubleshooter to Brooklyn from Midtown. He'd just spent the night repairing a company's computers on an emergency basis and I realized here was the perfect person to ask about some trouble I've been having with my own computer. One of the few perks of driving a cab is that you can always get free legal advice and free computer advice from passengers. So I told him my computer, a pc with Windows XP, has been slowing down lately. He made an analogy with a truck that is carrying a heavy load - the more weight, the slower the truck can go, and recommended that I quit some of the always-running programs whose icons appear at the bottom right-hand side of the screen. I did this and it has helped enormously, which is why I pass it along to you, a little cherry to top off my Sunday on a roll.

********

Along with Sundays on a roll, I would also recommend ham and Swiss on a roll with a dash of mustard and a click right here for Pictures From A Taxi.