Angels And Demons

It has oft been said that there's both good and evil in everyone. Another way of saying it is that things are never totally black nor totally white, but in reality are a shade of grey. So it's of great interest to me when I get a passenger in my cab who does not appear to have any shade of grey at all but seems, rather, to be either an undiluted evil or an undiluted good. Characters like this really grab your attention. They've been populating newspapers and novels since observations began appearing in print.

I've had a few lately, and here is my report.

First, the evil...

A few weeks ago I worked a Saturday night shift, something I rarely do anymore even though it's the best money night. I'm just sick of the drunks and, of course, Saturday night is "Drunk Night". I'd much prefer to take a sober business person home from work on a Monday or a Tuesday than to have to endure the party people. But I did work this one Saturday shift and it was a reminder of what a truly wild place New York City is on that night of the week. And it provided me with both of these tales from the dark side.

Marriage Without the "Love" Part

When you drive a cab, especially with passengers who are less than sober, you have an enormous fly-on-the-wall opportunity. There is a definite tendency for people to carry on with each other as if you're not there, and so you have this unique window from which to observe them in an unvarnished state. Some of these people, of course, are married couples.

Now, if you are the survivor of a bad marriage, or if you are currently married and are experiencing some turbulence in your own voyage, you may think you know something about what it's like to be in a destructive relationship. Well, let me tell you something, Charlie or Charlotte, I would bet you dimes for dollars that whatever mess you've been involved in would pale in comparison to the two maniacs I had in my cab on this particular Saturday night.

They were well-dressed forty-somethings who had emerged from a restaurant on the East Side and, from what I overheard of their conversation - which was their entire conversation - they were coming from a dinner party that had been attended by people who were business associates of the woman. So it was one of those situations where "business" is combined with "pleasure", which is often a recipe for "stress". The man abruptly barked their destination - the Upper West Side - at me as they sat down in the back seat without saying the word "please", an indication in itself that I wasn't viewed as being a person of any importance to them, if, in fact, I was viewed as being a person at all. Lack of manners is something I unfortunately am quite accustomed to, so it slid off my back and I started driving up First Avenue toward 66th Street, the road that goes straight through Central Park to the West Side.

Their conversation began with a few back-and-forths about the party in a civil tone. And then the man, who had been walking on a tightrope he wasn't unaware of, made a comment that sent him tumbling toward the pavement far below. He mentioned to his wife that he thought they should have stayed at the party a little longer so she could could chat it up with a particular business associate whom he thought could be a potential ally in some future business scenario.

This one statement was all it took to make the volcano explode. She jumped on him like a lion on an antelope. (Or a lioness in this case.) Her facade of civility disappeared completely and was replaced with a hostility that would have rippled even Jack the Ripper. Not only was he completely wrong in his opinion, she roared, it was utterly, deeply, and unforgivably insulting to her that he should imply that she didn't thoroughly know what she was doing at the party.

He tried to apologize, but his attempts to placate her only seemed to fuel the fire.

Here, she wailed, was yet another attempt to undermine her confidence by someone who was a complete failure in anything he attempted to do. What had he ever done in life? What had he ever accomplished? How dare he suggest that she wasn't adequately skillful in a social situation? Leave the party too soon? All the guests were leaving! Clearly, to try to engage the person he had mentioned in conversation at that time would have been a mistake. You idiot! You idiot! You brainless, thoughtless, trip-over-your-own-shoes idiot!

Like an insect that's caught in a spider's web, he continued to try to wiggle free. Well, he replied, he was just saying. It was just a comment. But she would have none of it. Shark-like, she moved in for more.

"That was your fatal mistake," she snarled. "I'm cutting you out! You're getting nothing!"

I came to understand, as her damnations continued, that she controlled the purse strings in their relationship - she was the one with the money. This conclusion was supported by his complete lack of retaliation to her rantings. Glancing at him in the mirror, he resembled a boxer who had fallen to one knee and was about to receive a salvo of new punches which he realized he was helpless to prevent.

And on they came.

"There will be no third child!" she proclaimed.

"What do you mean?" he said in a kind of stunned apathy.

"I'm getting rid of it," she stated coolly. I noticed a particular perversity in the way she put this forward. There was no sadness or regret in her voice. Rather, there was a hint of the sublime.
He was on his back on the canvas and offered no response. The remaining five minutes of the ride took place in an atmosphere in which the tension could not have been cut with a knife. You would have needed a chainsaw to do the job.

I thought how funny it would be (to me) if I suddenly broke out into the song, I Get A Kick Out Of You. But of course I kept my mouth shut and just kept driving.

After I'd dropped them off, it took me three fares to shake off the effects of the ride. By "three fares" I mean the next three passengers in my cab served as my own personal therapists for downloading on them the emotional strain I'd just been subjected to. Fortunately, they were all good listeners and I felt much better as a result. But I came away with some thoughts.

Firstly, just the amazement at how bad it can get. How evil intentions, dishonesty, cowardice, and propitiation feed off each other until both parties are utterly entrapped by their own personality flaws.

Secondly, I haven't been able to get the thought out of my mind that someday he's going to murder her.

And thirdly, and this is a personal note if you will indulge me, I had the odd realization about a week later that many years ago I had imagined these two people. I wrote a stage play in the early '80s about a married couple who were just like these two. The funny thing is, I'd never actually met anyone like them in real life. I had based my play loosely on the characters in the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and figured there must be people like that out there. Which just goes to show that if you drive a cab in New York long enough, everybody eventually shows up - even people who had previously existed only in your mind.

Now, it often happens during the course of a shift that you find yourself pulling in the same kind of thing that you'd just gotten rid of in a kind of karmic reverberation. And it happened that night. Just as I had regained my aplomb, I encountered Mr. and Mrs. Insane Number Two in Tribeca.

Mobbed Up

I was driving up Hudson Street at around 1 a.m. looking for my next fare when I was hailed by a young guy who turned out to be a doorman for a small hotel about a block and a half away on Greenwich Street. He had been sent by patrons of the hotel to fetch a cab because Greenwich Street at that hour of the night is relatively deserted whereas Hudson Street is full of taxis en route from lower Manhattan to the passenger-rich Soho and Greenwich Village sections of the city.

It's not unusual for a doorman to provide this service. He hails the cab himself as if he were the next passenger and rides in the cab the short distance back to his hotel. Since he is seated in the taxi, the driver instinctively turns the meter on as the trip begins, which is what I did in this instance.

We pulled up in front of the hotel and waiting there were a man and a woman who I would say were in their mid-fifties. He was about five-foot-eight with about 70 pounds more than he needed and with a salt and peppered full head of hair, and she stood out in a party dress and a puffed-out top of bright red.The doorman exited the back seat as we pulled up to the place, and held the door open for his patrons. The meter had already clicked once, up to $3.40 from its initial drop of $3.00. But the couple did not enter the cab. Instead, the woman came up to me and asked, in an accent heavy with a lifetime in Brooklyn, if I knew any good diners.

I told her I did.

"Do you know one close to here?"

"Yeah, we could go to Greenwich Village. I know a couple of coffee shops there."

"Do they have fried clams?"

"They probably do. They all do."

"What about shrimps?" And then, without waiting for an answer, she turned to the man. "Honey, I can't decide if I want clams or shrimps."

He looked at her with an expression on his face that seemed to say that he was the godfather to women who can't decide between clams or shrimps and that all would be well for her if she just continued never to have an intelligent thought of her own. In short, he was the sugar daddy in this relationship, she was Daddy's little girl. This was apparent to me just from this quick exchange.

"Ewwww," she whined, little-girl-like, "what should we do?"

He murmured something to her I could not hear, and then they did a remarkable thing - they started to walk away.

The doorman and I simultaneously glanced at each other with puzzled looks on our faces. I told him there was now $3.80 on the meter, and that I was owed this, which he understood. Although he was just a kid and had been put in an awkward situation, he nevertheless summoned up his courage and approached the man, telling him the meter had been started when he'd gotten the cab.

The man just looked at him as if he was a bug, gave him a sarcastic little laugh, and continued walking away with his parasite.

And that was it.

Now, this may not seem like such a big deal. One could say it was just two rude people being rude. But let me tell you something - in thirty-one years of taxi-driving, with probably a couple of hundred doormen getting in my cab as this one had, this had never happened before.

It was a first. And firsts are rare after all these years, so it made me examine the incident carefully in my mind. Certainly no huge incident of destruction had occurred. There had been no violence nor bizarre dramatization as had happened earlier in the evening. But still this little episode really stuck in my craw.

I asked myself, who would do something like this? Have a doorman walk a block to get a cab, then not take the cab he'd gotten without a "sorry" or an offer to pay what was on the meter? And then just walk away with a sinister laugh? I couldn't imagine myself nor anyone I know ever doing such a thing under any circumstances. What sequence of events would it have taken to have acquired an attitude like that?

I concluded that it would take someone who was utterly at ease with committing harmful acts upon others. Someone who was a professional at it. Someone who, if he ever thought about it at all, would consider the idea of other people having rights as just an ememy's attempt to stop him from getting what he wants. Someone who, at his core, was evil. And when I say "evil" I mean the continuous intention to do harm to others when there is no need to do harm to others.

So it wasn't what he'd done to me and the doorman that had stopped me in my tracks. It was my perception that this was a person who was capable of an enormous quantity of evil. And the only context I have for such a person are the movies and television dramas I've seen about the Mob, particularly Goodfellas and The Sopranos. The characters in these shows are portrayed as having just these kinds of anti-social traits, and this guy, both in his actions and appearance, fit right into that odd slot.

So I said to the doorman something that I thought might add to his education, or at least make the incident permanently memorable for him. "That guy's in the Mob," I said.

And I drove off looking for my next therapist. I mean, passenger.

The Angels Among Us

I sometimes wonder if there may in fact be such a thing as Intelligent Design when I consider the amazing balancing act between good and evil that exists in the human race. How can there be a species which has among its members ones like the above and others like these...

Several months ago, in the dead of winter, I picked up a middle-aged woman at 3 a.m. in Midtown who was en route to her apartment in lower Manhattan but wanted to make a stop on 23rd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. It turned out she was a lawyer.

Now, I am as cynical as the next person about lawyers but this one was of a different mold, if in fact there is a mold at all. The first thing I noticed about her was that her manners were totally "in". I said "hello" to her as she entered my cab, as I do with everyone. She said "hello" back. She told me her destination and asked me if it would be okay with me if we made a stop. I told her that of course that would be no problem and I noted the fact that she had asked me this even though she didn't have to. So here was a person who just by her nature was considerate of the feelings and the rights of others. In short, a "social personality".

Not surprisingly, she was an easy converstionalist and I soon learned why she wanted to make a stop in the middle of the night. There was a church on that block, she said, which shelters homeless people. This particular church was not licensed by the city to be a homeless shelter, but did what it could, anyway. (She told me something I didn't know, which was that if a shelter isn't so licensed they cannot provide beds to people. So what this church did was provide chairs to people so they could attempt to sleep in a sitting position in a place where at least it was warm.) The reason she was making a stop here was to deliver paperwork she had been preparing to benefit one of the homeless people in the church, a woman from the suburbs of Connecticut who had lost her job and had subsequently lost her home. The paperwork had to do with red tape hurdles that needed to be cleared in order to situate this woman in affordable housing.

We continued the ride to her apartment building in Tribeca, a nice building in a nice part of town. I learned that in these tough economic times there were more and more people who are truly "homeless" - people who have literally lost their homes and have at least temporarily no place to live, as opposed to people who are also classified as "homeless" who are actually substance abuse cases or outright hustlers. I also learned that she does this legal work pro bono (for free) as a matter of conscience.

At the end of the ride she thanked me again for making a stop in the middle of the ride, as if I had done something extraordinary. She paid me the fare and gave me a way-above-average tip, which I accepted but later felt a little guilty about for having done so.

And I realized as I drove away that this was a person who was also looking out for me. She showed kindness and concern when she didn't have to, traits that came naturally from within. I perceived no grey here. She was all good.

Then, a few weeks ago, I had a fare who was almost a duplicate of this woman in character and deed. I picked her up on the Upper West Side near Riverside Drive a bit after midnight. She needed to place several large boxes in the trunk of the taxi, which I helped her to do. Her destination was a city-run shelter on 108th Street in Harlem and, like the previous ride, she asked me if I would be willing to wait for her while she made a delivery and then bring her to her own apartment building on 97th Street.

I noticed the smell of salami as I loaded one of the boxes into the trunk, and this was a clue as to what she was doing. She told me that she regularly takes excess food from a school to this shelter. She does it out of conscience, I surmised, out of feeling a need to take some responsibility for the welfare of others less fortunate than herself. And, like her predecessor, her kind nature wasn't limited to an exclusive charity, but included me. Aside from a friendly conversation and providing me with an example I could write about, she also gave me an exorbitantly high tip. Which I also accepted but again felt a little guilty about, thinking this was a person to whom I really should be offering a free ride.

In looking back at these four fares, I believe the entire human condition on the broadest of scales could be demonstrated by them.

I believe most people are basically good, but are hindered by forces internally and externally that they have difficulty controlling. And I believe a small percentage of people are actively, continuously perpetuating harm. And thus the story line of the human race is the same one you see in movies all the time, good versus evil.

Why this is so and what should be done about it are the subjects of philosophies, psychologies, and religions. I would not attempt to try to explain it.

I would say, though, that as a member of the grey team, I am grateful for the angels among us.

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The Pass/Don't Pass Hall of Fame

You know what you never see anymore? You never see those little messages on the backs of trucks that tell you to pass them only on the left and never on the right. I don't know why they're not around anymore. They must have gone out of style.

What you often used to see as you were approaching a truck would be words to the wise like these:

Left Side - Right Side
Pass - Don't Pass
Go - Stop
Yes - No
Good - Bad

The idea that's trying to be communicated is that it's safer to pass on the left because the truck driver has better visibility on his left than he has on his right (here in America we drive on the right side of the road, don't forget) so be a good fellow and give me a break, okay?

Being a taxi driver I have found myself sitting behind many and many a truck. Years ago I started noticing that for some truckers the simple "Pass" and "Don't Pass" cautions were apparently just too mundane, so they started getting creative with their back-of-the-truck warnings. I began writing down the ones that I liked best and only recently have I dug them out of the vault.

So I present to you now the Pass/Don't Pass Hall of Fame:

Left Side - Right Side
Live - Die
Life - Death
Sweet - Sour
Cool - Fool
Wise - Dies
Fine - Swine
Pass - Ass
Zoom - Boom
Go by - Goodbye
Overtaker - Undertaker
Grateful - Dead
Passing Side - Suicide
Go Ahead - Make My Day
Hagler - Hearns [American boxers]
Happily - Never After
Whoopie Do - Whoopie Don't

And my personal favorite (drum roll please)...

Nirvana - Nerve Of Ya

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The Drunk Drop

In all team sports there are certain set plays that are used as part of a strategy in trying to win the game. In baseball, for example, there's a play called the "suicide squeeze". In American football there's the "down and out". In basketball they have one called the "pick and roll".

In taxi driving, there's the "drunk drop".

The drunk drop is when a patron of a bar or restaurant has become so drunk that he or she is semi-coherent and is bordering on becoming incoherent or even passing out completely. The patron is then escorted, hustled, or just carried from the establishment by bartenders or waiters and is deposited into a taxicab. If the taxi drives away, the strategy has been successful.

I had one a few days ago. It wasn't pretty.

I was cruising down 2nd Avenue on the Upper East Side at around 9 p.m. looking for my next fare, having just returned empty to Manhattan from the Bronx. As I crossed 89th Street someone with his hand in the air appeared from the left side of the avenue so I deftly cut over and pulled to a stop. There's great craft in being able to cut through traffic safely and swiftly, but there's also great craft in being able to instantly size a person up before you allow them access into your vehicle. And in this I was lacking.

As I stopped my cab what I saw approaching from the curb were three people - two men in waiter's attire flanking a middle-aged woman, a blonde, and kind of half-carrying her. In other words she was walking on her own volition, but just barely, and the men had their arms under her arms to catch her should she stumble or fall.

It was a drunk drop in progress.

I think it was because it had been about twenty minutes since I'd dropped off my last fare in the Bronx, plus the fact that it had been a slow night up until that point, that caused me to pause a moment longer than I normally would have in this situation. Normally if I see a drunk drop coming toward me I either just keep on driving or, if I'm already at a stop, I lock the doors. But due to these financial considerations I just froze for a moment. And in that moment one of the waiters got his hand on the door and opened it.

And in came the drunk.

The waiters turned around and walked back into their restaurant, a chic little Mediterranean joint. One of them said something to the other that made him laugh.

For the briefest of moments I let myself think that maybe she'd just turned her ankle or something and wasn't actually drunk at all. Maybe she just needed some help walking and I'd probably be driving her to the emergency room of a hospital. But one look at her as she plopped down on the seat with her head tilted to one side told me that was just wishful thinking.

I asked her where she wanted to go.

There was a long pause. I repeated the question. Finally she said, rather conclusively... "I don't know."

Yes, not only did she not know where she wanted to go, she was sure she didn't know where she wanted to go. But at least she could respond to a question, even if it took half a minute to do so. That was a plus. After another futile attempt to get a destination out of her, I realized I had to pull a play of my own...

The Reverse Drunk Drop.

It's a wise cabbie who realizes that he mustn't step on the gas pedal in a situation like this. There is potential trouble in all directions here, especially if the semi-coherent inebriate is a female. So the play is to reverse the drop that has given you the drunk. Or, to put it in postal terms, "Return To Sender".

I got out of my cab, leaving the woman in the back, and walked into the restaurant. The two waiters were nowhere in sight, but a fellow who looked like he was some kind of a maitre d' was standing there. I told him in a voice that was calm yet had an element of restrained anger in it that two waiters from his restaurant had just put a woman in my cab who was so drunk that she couldn't so much as tell me where she wanted to go. And that they'd better come back and get her out of my cab.

Or I would call the police.

And with that I turned around and walked out of the place.

I returned to my cab, opened the rear door, and confronted the unwanted cargo that was sitting there. She had opened her bag and was looking through the objects in it, apparently hoping to find a clue as to what her destination might be. I was searching for a way to tell her that she was too wasted to meet the minimum requirements for membership in my taxi club when I was confronted myself by one of the waiters who had dumped her there.

He wasn't too happy with the situation.

I was perfectly willing to handle the matter in a civil tone, but the guy, a slightly-built man in his forties who was a bit shorter than I, was in a non-negotiating attack mode. Immediately he was yelling at me, demanding to know who the hell I thought I was, walking into his restaurant like I was some kind of authority. The implication being that taxi drivers should be seen and not heard.

Well, I would say that the guy was clearly an asshole, except that I don't use language like that in this blog. Instead, I will just say that he was clearly an orifice that is found at the very end of the alimentary canal. What followed was one of those scenes that seem comical in retrospect, but in the moment are red-hot episodes of human idiocy.

The waiter got right in my face, giving me about an inch of space between us and also providing me with an opportunity to learn that he'd been sampling the garlic bread in the kitchen. With a "how dare you" this and a "the nerve of you" that, he flew into a self-righteous rage which would have given the passerby on the street the impression that I was the offending party.

Of course it was all pretense. It reminded me of an incident that happened about two and a half years ago in which a passenger in my cab had flown into a weird, out-of-context tirade that was so insulting that it brought me to the verge of a physical assault. (Go to Doctor Evil for that story.) People who have secrets that you're a bit too close to discovering have a definite tendency to become quite upset with you, and the neon sign that announces this is their self-righteous indignation.

This waiter's secret was, no doubt, that he's served the woman far too many drinks. This could be a big problem to the owner of the restaurant (and thus to the waiter) as it could lead to the revocation of their liquor license if harm should come to her as a result. And there may have been other things he didn't want revealed, as well. Perhaps he'd lifted money from her purse after she'd been reduced to a semi-conscious blob. Perhaps he'd overcharged her. Perhaps he'd decided to give himself a $50 tip when he ran her credit card through the system.

Of course I didn't know what it was, but I did know it was something. And what I also knew was that this guy's aggression toward me was about to become a shoving match. And that could lead to a punching match. And that could lead to - well, it could lead to a very bad night, indeed.

But then, as often happens in life -at least in my life - a sort of divine intervention occurred.

In a scene that seemed reminiscent of something that happens in a silent movie, the woman suddenly emerged from the back seat of the cab, took a couple of wobbly steps forward, and then fell straight down like a sack of blonde potatoes onto the pavement.

There was a sudden break in the action.

The waiter looked at the woman.

The waiter looked at me.

The waiter looked back at the woman.

It was decision time.

Fortunately, the waiter went with the woman. He dropped his "you wanna fight, taxi-schmuck?" demeanor and with a new demeanor of frustrated desperation began attending to his fallen customer, first propping her up and then guiding her into one of the outdoor seats on the sidewalk in front of his restaurant. I got back into my cab and called 911 on my cell phone, telling them there was a semi-coherent woman who needed assistance in front of this particular establishment.

They said they'd send an ambulance.

And that was good enough for me.

I took off down 2nd Avenue in search of my next fare with thoughts of drunk drops past and present racing through my mind. And wondering what in the hell my next out-of-nowhere adventure might be.

Which is the best part of being a taxi driver.

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One Thug Too Many

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immediately the doorman caught my eye. This guy:

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

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

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

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

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

Like hell.

I didn't move.

"Beat it!" he repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No pictures!" he grunted.

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

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

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

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

Out came Thug Number Three.

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

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

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

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

It was just one thug too many.

The Fourth Worst Thing That Can Happen To A Cab Driver

I have long held the opinion that the three worst things that could happen to a cab driver are

1) Death

2) Paralysis

3) Some subhuman pukes in your cab.

In that order.

But I never knew what the fourth worst thing might be.

Until now.

Here's what happened...

A few nights ago at around 10 p.m. I was cruising for a fare on University Place in Greenwich Village. It's a narrow, one-way street that runs for only seven blocks from Washington Square up to 14th Street. I like University Place because it has several bars and restaurants on it as well as one of the great rarities in Manhattan, a bowling alley. These are all places where a cabbie is likely to find his next passenger. It's also a late-night area due to the high population there of New York University students who may be hitting the midnight oil or, more likely, hitting the midnight gin and tonic in a bar.

As I passed 13th Street, moving slowly in order to be able to stop in case I was hailed, a figure came rushing out at me from my left (driver's) side. He was a white-skinned, wild-eyed guy in his twenties whose facial expression and frantic body motion immediately struck me as WRONG. In taxi-driving, like anything that you do repetitively over a long period of time, you develop an instinct for the particles that stand out from the usual. And I could see in an instant that this guy didn't fit. People simply don't hail you like that unless there is something wrong.

Sometimes you're stuck with a person like this. You're waiting at a red light and he gets in. You know immediately that he's trouble but there he is in your cab and you've got to deal with him.

But sometimes you're not stuck with him.

You just keep driving and pass him by.

Of course you hope that he thinks that you didn't see him and that's why you didn't stop. You never want to hurt anyone's feelings. But any veteran cabbie knows that his feelings are quite secondary to your own gut instinct. The guy is trouble, you know it, and you keep your foot on the accelerator.

But it was different in this case. He came running right up next to me on the side of the cab. We made eye contact. I slowed down momentarily and glanced forward to see if the light at the next intersection, 14th Street, was red or green. It was green. This meant if I kept driving I could make the light, turn right, and be gone from this guy and whatever storms were brewing in his universe forever.

I kept driving.

There was no "Sorry, I didn't see you" about it. It was a blatant "I see you, I don't like your face, and I reject you. Goodbye." It was ugly.

I saw him still waving frantically at me in the rear view mirror, but REJECTED had been stamped on his application form and that was that. The decision of the judges is final. I made the turn and he was gone from sight and mind.

On 14th Street the distance between University Place and the next intersection, Broadway, is quite short. Because of this and its key location at the south end of Union Square, there is normally a ton of traffic at that particular spot. And it was no different at this time. It took me close to a minute to reach Broadway and then make another right to head back downtown in search of my next fare.

It was a fare I didn't have to do much searching to find. My next passenger jumped in as I stopped at the red light at 13th and Broadway.

Unfortunately, it was the same guy.

In all my years of taxi driving, this was a first. Never before had I had to confront a rejected passenger and answer for my sin. Never before had I had to speak to such a person. But there he sat in the back seat, almost surreal, looking at me like the Ghost of Misdeeds Past.

I was in shock. I immediately wondered how he'd been able to get over to 13th and Broadway so quickly on foot, and then realized that if he'd been running he could have done it in just that amount of time. I then hoped maybe he wouldn't recognize me as the driver who had just passed him by.

No such luck.

"Why didn't you stop for me, man?"

I considered the situation. There was no way I could bullshit my way out of it. So I just told him the truth.

"I didn't stop for you because I didn't like the way you came running up to me waving your arms so frantically," I said. "When people do that it usually means there's some kind of trouble going on and I don't want to be a part of it."

Interestingly, he could accept that. Truth has a way of doing that, even if it's an unwanted truth. He just accepted my explanation without feeling a need to get into an argument about it.

"Okay," he said, "Listen, I've gotta get down to 7th Street and Avenue A fast. In a big rush here, man!"

It was as if the whole rejection incident had not taken place. I felt relieved.

But as I started to drive down Broadway, I realized this was a good thing and it was a bad thing, too. Good because what could have been a major confrontation and even disciplinary action against me by the passenger had evaporated into nothing. But bad because the truth which had caused that potential trouble to disappear nevertheless meant that this passenger was, in fact, going to be trouble himself.

Now, I am supremely confident about my own instincts as a taxi driver. I had rejected this guy on a gut level that is never wrong, from my point of view. I knew that anyone who comes running up to a cab like that and who looks the way he looked was just surely going to mean some kind of trouble for me. And now I was waiting to see what the trouble would be.

It didn't take long. The ride we were taking was a short one. So short, in fact, that he could have walked it in five minutes, which was an outpoint in itself. This was not the kind of person who spends money on a taxi like that. Although he didn't tell me why he was in such a rush, his demeanor and his hurried speech told me it was drugs. My evaluation of the guy was that he was a junkie and this was a drug "emergency" of one kind or another.

We got to Avenue A and 7th Street in about a minute and a half. I pulled over to the curb so as to not block the traffic. And then he hit me with it.

"I've gotta meet someone in that building across the street. She's got the money for the ride. I'll be right back, man."

It was literally the oldest trick in the Book of Passengers' Sneaky Tricks.

Normally what I would do in this situation would be to try to stop the passenger from exiting the cab without leaving something of value behind. Or I'd just take off with him still in the taxi and look for a cop. You don't take a ride in a cab and then announce at the end of the trip that you have to disappear into a building to get money. That's a taxi no-no and it takes just one rip-off at the beginning of a cabbie's career to learn that lesson.

But this case was different. For one thing, it was a really short ride with little time lost and only a few dollars on the meter. But, more than that, in the wider karmic view of things I kind of felt I owed it to him.

So I let him go without a dispute. I waited there for a couple of minutes if only to validate what I already knew - that there was no way this guy was coming back - and then I drove off.

But I did go away with two things of value. One was that it showed me once again that my instincts are rock solid. I knew instantly when seeing this guy first coming toward me that he was bad news and that I was right to have not stopped for him.

And the other was discovering what the fourth worst thing is.

It's the dead returning to life and coming to get you.

The horror of it.

The horror!

********

Of course there's no horror in clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi. It's like strumming a banjo in a meadow on a summer day.

Good Cop

Well, I wrote a "bad cop" story - "Two Kinds Of Tickets". In the interest of fairness, and as required by the Taxi Driver's Code of Honor which doesn't exist, I am compelled to file the following report.

It's a "good cop" story.

It happened a few days ago and it had to do with something I knew would happen sooner or later (and turned out to be later).

Yellow cabs in New York City have been required to accept credit cards for just over a year now. Since it began I've been wondering what would happen when:

a) the only credit card the passenger has is declined. Or all the credit cards the passenger has are declined, and

b) the passenger has no cash and no apparent way of getting cash.

This situation is a bit different than what the same situation would have been in the days prior to credit cards. In those days, the passenger presumably knew that he didn't have any money in his pockets. I mean, who would get into a taxicab without knowing he had money to pay for the ride? You get the guy to his apartment building and then, after a minute of putting his hands through his pockets...

"Oh my god, I'm so sorry, I don't have any money on me!"

And then...

"I'll go upstairs and get some money. I'll be right back!"

And then...

Nothing. And you can't believe you've been suckered again. Plus you've wasted ten or fifteen minutes of money time. "He (or she) seemed so sincere..."

But this declined credit card situation is a little different. It's much easier to believe that the person genuinely didn't know his card would be declined and there's a presumption of innocence. Right?

Well, wrong. It turns out that, if you're a veteran cabbie and you've been ripped off whatever the requisite number of times is, the assumption is that this is just another, more modern, way of beating a fare. It's a presumption of guilt, actually.

Here's what happened...

A few days ago I picked up a fare at 3:45 a.m. in Midtown at 6th Avenue and 56th Street, a good part of town. It's an area where you might find office workers who've been doing an all-nighter heading wearily home or you might find someone who's been in an upscale bar all night heading wearily home. My passenger was an attractive 30-something female, professional in appearance and sophisticated in demeanor, whose destination was 84th Street in the Upper West Side. There was nothing "street" about her, nothing that would seem to be a tip-off that she would even consider the possibility of not paying a cab driver his fare.

So when, after several swipes, her credit card was declined by the taxi's satellite-connected system, I wasn't concerned. She would just use a different card, which is actually not that unusual.

But she didn't have another card.

Still, I was not concerned. She would just reach into her bag and pull out enough cash to pay the $7.80 fare, probably giving me a ten and telling me to keep the change. Or, if not a ten, then certainly nine, since eight would be a 20 cent tip (also known as an "insult") and this person would never give a 20 cent tip.

But then came an alarming confession. "I don't have enough cash," she said.

Now this was not good and quite immediately I was concerned. In prior years when the passenger had no cash but did have a credit or debit card, an option at this point would have been to go to an ATM. But since her card didn't work in the taxi's system, there didn't seem to be any point in trying the declined card in a bank. Nevertheless, there was still another way. I suggested that she go upstairs to get money from her apartment but leave something of value in the taxi as collateral.

And this is where she lost me.

She told me that there was no money in her apartment and she then handed me two dollars and offered to give me her business card so that I could call her the next day to arrange to be paid the remaining $5.80 of the fare.

Now I was offended.

Her gesture reeked to me of deceit and manipulation. I'm afraid I've been around the block too many times (literally) to see this as anything but an attempt to take me for more of an idiot than I actually am. Plus telling me there's no money in her apartment - not even ten dollars - sorry, even in the unlikely chance that this is true, couldn't you find something in your apartment to pay the fare with? How about a tea kettle? (That actually happened once.)

The funny thing in a situation like this is that getting paid is no longer the real issue. If someone gets in the cab and tells you up front that he doesn't have enough money to cover the cost of the ride, well, all right, you can decide right there to either take him or leave him. No harm done and you respect his honesty. And, most importantly, I haven't been made a fool of.

It's when someone thinks he can pull a fast one on you - make you a sucker - that the game becomes "You Can't Do That To Me!"

And that's what this game had become. What I do in a situation like this is to become a not very nice guy. If the person appears as a threat to me, I will suddenly slam the plexiglas partition window shut, lock it, and announce that we're now going to drive to a police precinct. If the person does not appear to be a threat, as in this case, the window stays open but we still take off for the police station. Sometimes the passenger will try to bolt from the cab at this point, so the trick is to drive to the cops without ever stopping, not even for a red light.

And that is what I was about to do.

Except something happened that only happens in the movies. It's like when a screenwriter is creating a scene and knows that in order to keep the audience involved in the story he has to "cut to the chase" or in some way bend the rules of reality. Because what happened next was almost unbelievable.

At the very moment I needed a cop, a police cruiser - without being signalled to in any way - suddenly pulled up next to my cab and the officer closest to me asked me if everything was okay.

My god!

Apparently the cops had been watching the block and had noticed that the time it was taking for the passenger to depart the cab had been unusually long. And that was enough to ask if I was okay. When I told them that my passenger's credit card had been declined and she had no money to pay the fare, this sequence was set into motion:

- one of the officers informed my passenger, in so many words, that she was damn well going to have to pay the fare

- she decided to give an ATM a try anyway and told me her bank was two blocks away, on 86th Street

- I told her I was turning the meter on again and did so

- we drove to her bank with the police car following right behind us

- she got out of the cab and went into the bank's lobby where the ATM machines are located (pictured below)

- one of the officers actually got out of his cruiser and followed her into the lobby! (he's standing out of sight behind the white pillar in this shot)

- with the cop standing ten feet behind her, she tried to withdraw funds

- she could not

- she returned to the cab and we drove back to her apartment building

- the cops followed us there

- she told me she was going to go upstairs to see if indeed there was any money in her apartment and that she was leaving her wallet on the back seat until she returned

- I said okay

- she left the cab and disappeared into the building

- the meter kept running

- she returned in two minutes with a twenty dollar bill, saying that luckily her boyfriend was there which she hadn't known before and that he had given her the money

- I didn't believe her but let her save face by pleasantly saying okay

- the original fare of $7.80 was added to the second fare of $4.60, bringing the total to $12.40. She took $3 back from the twenty, thus leaving me with a $4.60 tip "for your trouble".

- I said thank you and thought that was the right thing to do and a decent thing to say

- she left the cab and went back into her building

- I got out of my cab and walked back to the cops and thanked them, telling them I had been paid in full

- they said I was welcome and one of them added that "you've got a hard job, too"

As I drove off looking for one last fare for the night, the whole incident seemed to me to be what a fantasy of a cab driver might be after he'd been ripped off by a passenger and had received no justice at all. I mean, we expect no justice. So what happened here was surreal.

And it also answered the question of what to do when a passenger has neither a valid credit card nor any cash.

You just sit there for a moment and from out of nowhere a cop will come along to help you.

A good cop.

********

And while you're celebrating your good fortune, click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Suicide Watch

The night of the Oscars is always an interesting night to drive a cab in New York City. Nearly everyone is into it and so it provides a whole nightful of conversation possibilities. Also there's a big rush of business around midnight when it's finally over and people are leaving "Oscar parties" and going back to their own apartments. So that's extra money on a Sunday night which is ordinarily a slow time on the streets.

Of course not everyone sits through the whole, four-hour thing. These are the people, when they get in a cab, who can give their driver an update on what's happened on the show so far. One such person, a man whose age I would estimate to be in his late'30s, jumped in at Houston and 6th at around 9:30 en route to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. I asked him if he'd been watching the Academy Awards - he had been - and this began what I thought would be a typical back-and-forth about the show.

But you never know with whom you're chatting in a taxicab, especially in New York where there is so much variety among the taxi-riding population. How was I to know that this guy was on the brink of suicide?

But let me back up...

I don't think I've ever known a movie that had such excellent word of mouth as Slumdog Millionaire. "You've got to see this movie!" I was told from all directions: by passengers in my cab, by friends, and even in a post card from India from my brother. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I saw it myself with my pal, Annie. And, I must say, I immediately became one of the converted. Here was a movie that had it all - action, romance, humor, rags to riches, villains, children, heroes, characters you could really root for, and things to be learned about a part of the world we Americans for the most part know little of.

Being something of a writer myself, I particularly admired the originality and brilliance of the script. I know a little bit about the world of script submissions and script rejections, and I mentioned to Annie on our way out of the theater that this story was so good that it must have created quite a buzz in the Hollywood community, maybe even resulting in a frantic bidding war for its rights.

So now fast forward to this guy getting in my cab on Sunday night. I asked him if anything interesting had happened on the show so far and according to him nothing much had, other than Slumdog Millionaire already picking up a couple of Oscars. Well, this set me off jabbering away about the wonderfulness of this movie. I asked my passenger if he'd seen it himself and he said he had not.

The guy was a good conversationalist so the speedbump of his not having seen the film didn't matter as far as our chat was concerned. We entered into one of those fast-moving discussions that's kind of like a maze of back and forth pinballs, one thing leading to another until you finally arrive at something rather remarkable that stops the conversation in its tracks, but then immediately starts it going off again in a new direction.

And the thing we arrived at was that he himself worked for a movie studio. As a reader of scripts, he said, among other things.

This was of great interest to me. I was curious to know how the process of script submission was done where he worked. What it came down to, he said, was that he deals with agents and known contacts who pitch a script to him or send it to him. He reads the script and either recommends it to a decision-making executive or rejects it. He said scripts come to him in great numbers, and he reads as many as 40 per month.

I realized I had an opportunity to verify what I'd thought after seeing Slumdog Millionaire. I asked him if he knew if there had been a buzz about the script that had set off a bidding war. And he said that there hadn't been. In fact, he said, it had been shopped around to all the major studios and no one wanted it.

This surprised me and I quipped that I wouldn't want to be the person at a studio who had rejected Slumdog Millionaire.

Uhh... wrong thing to have said.

Yes, you guessed it - this guy in my cab was that guy! He'd read the script of Slumdog Millionaire two years ago and had rejected it!

Now that was a "taxicab confession" if I'd ever heard one!

"Why didn't you want it?" I asked.

His reply was that first of all it was from India and Bollywood wasn't box office in the United States. But the main reason was that it had only one known "name" on board, the director of the movie, Danny Boyle. And he felt that wasn't enough to warrant the gamble of money invested to expected return.

"What does it cost to make a movie like that?" I wanted to know.

"Ten million dollars," he said.

I asked him if I might know any movies made from scripts he's read that he had recommended.

"Juno," he replied, "but the studio executives didn't agree and it went somewhere else."

"Which studio do you work for?"

"I'd rather not say."

"Why haven't you seen Slumdog Millionaire?"

"Too painful."

I was glad as we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge that there was no traffic holding us up. If I'd had to stop the cab in the middle of the bridge - who knows? - this guy might have been inclined to do something rash... there's the rail... there's the river... and on the other side of the bridge is Brooklyn with two million people watching Slumdog Millionaire win yet another goddamned fucking Oscar.

It may have been difficult for him to choose life.

A decision that couldn't have been any easier as the night wore on.

********

Hopefully, even if he did decide to end it all, he clicked here first for Pictures From A Taxi. And you should, too. Not end it all. Just click.

Two Kinds Of Tickets

Something happened to me a few weeks ago that hardly ever happens to me: I got a ticket. Not a parking ticket, a moving violation ticket. The kind that adds points to your license. And this reminded me of a truism I discovered quite a few years ago when it comes to tickets. And that is that there are two kinds of tickets: 1) the ticket where you are mad at yourself for having made such a dumb move, and 2) the ticket where you are mad at the cop for having been so mean that he would have written the ticket at all.

An example of the first kind of ticket would be, say, you make a left turn at an intersection where there is a sign that clearly says, "No Left Turns". You see the sign but you make the turn anyway. A cop sees you do this, pulls you over, and writes you a ticket. You are mad at yourself. You knew you were doing something illegal but you did it anyway and you got caught. "Stupid dumb ass me," you say to yourself.

 An example of the second kind of ticket would be this: you are approaching an intersection where there is a stop sign. When you get to the intersection you check to see that no other vehicles or pedestrians are present and bring your car almost to a stop but not completely to a full stop. As you proceed your speed is less than three miles per hour. A cop pulls you over for failing to stop at a stop sign and writes you a ticket.

 You are mad at the cop. What you did might have been technically illegal but you were in good control and knew that your actions in that situation were completely safe. You don't introvert and call yourself a goddamned freaking moron for not having come to a full stop. You curse the cop instead (in your mind, of course).

 Well, guess what kind of ticket I received? Here's a hint - I wasn't mad at myself. 

 Okay, this is what happened... On a Monday night at 4 AM - the time of the night when the "city that never sleeps" is taking catnap - I was cruising down 2nd Avenue in Manhattan with a couple of cars in front of me but no cars behind me. I was in the middle of the avenue. Suddenly a person appeared on the sidewalk to my left waving at me in the classic "I want a taxi" fashion. As a veteran cabbie who has been in this situation once or twice during every shift for the last 31 years, I did two things: a) I instantly checked my side view mirror to make sure no vehicles were behind me, and b) I turned sharply, cutting across two lanes, and got to the passenger. 

I knew, before I made the turn, that it was a safe move. No one had to swerve out of the way to avoid hitting me. No one had to step on their brake. In actuality, it was an expert maneuver made by a professional driver in order to do his job. But the cop didn't see it that way.

 

The passenger, a twenty-something female, entered the cab and told me her destination. During the time it takes to open and close the rear door, our light turned red. Then, just after it changed to green and I began to move forward to begin the ride, a police car pulled up beside me and a not pleasant officer informed me that he wanted to see several pieces of identification. The passenger departed to seek another means of getting to point B. 

As I handed over my driver's license and the taxi's identification card to the officer, I knew immediately that I was in trouble. Because just as there are two kinds of tickets, there are two kinds of cops you may encounter in this situation: 1) The "let's talk about it" cop, and 2) The "there's nothing to talk about, so don't talk to me" cop. With a "let's talk about it" cop you at least have a chance of talking your way out of it. Even by allowing conversation, the cop is saying, in effect, that he is willing to allow the possibility that he will let you off with a warning. I must say that in the past I have been quite successful in this situation. 

 But not this time. This cop was a "there's nothing to talk about" cop. In fact, he might have even been a "if you dare to try to talk your way out of it I will find something else to write you a ticket for" cop. So, actually, there are 3 kinds of cops in this situation. And apparently this cop was of that third variety because, even though I didn't say a word to him and handed him the papers he wanted to see, he thought multiple tickets for a single offense, if in fact there was an offense at all, was the way to go. 

Did I say that I got "a" ticket? Uh, correction... make that four tickets. 1) Unsafe lane change. 2) Failure to signal. 3) Not stopping within 12 inches of the curb when pulling over for a passenger. (Believe it or not, this absurd rule is actually on the books in New York City.) 4) Stopping in a crosswalk. This was from a cop whose powers of observation were so good that he could see all of this from a full block behind me, but whose powers of observation were not so good that he couldn't avoid making several errors in trying to copy over the information from my driver's license onto the tickets he was writing. 

When I got back to my garage and told the dispatchers and a couple of the drivers what had happened, I was informed (belatedly) that "the heat is on" in the city. And, in fact, I noticed in the following couple of weeks that an inordinate amount of taxis were being pulled over, and presumably ticketed, by the cops. 

This situation - the possibility of being selected as fodder for ticket blitzes - is one of the crosses that New York City taxi drivers bear and I suspect is one of the main reasons that many competent people decide to get out of the taxi driving business. It's just too much to take, considering everything else we have to put up with. And it reminds me of what I consider to be a fascinating observation about an aspect of life in New York City that I have made and I don't think anyone else has noticed. 

I would like to invite every New Yorker who may read this blog to consider this. Here is the observation: we have over 13,000 yellow medallion cabs and many more thousands of car service vehicles roaming the streets of the city. Some of these drivers are amazingly competent and some of them are not. But competent or not, one thing even a casual observer would notice is that taxis are pulled over by police cars all the time. I see it every night. 

 However, we also have in New York, thousands of buses crowding the streets. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of garbage trucks roaming around, apparently, with impunity. And we also have quite a few newspaper delivery trucks making their rounds. During my years as a cabbie I have seen countless instances of buses gridlocking intersections, running red lights, and cutting off other vehicles (although I do think, generally speaking, that bus drivers are highly competent). I have seen garbage trucks commit every imaginable traffic offense frequently. And I see newspaper delivery trucks running red lights and speeding every night. But here's what I have not seen. And I think this is so amazing that I will put it in boldface: 

  I have never seen, not even once in 31 years, a bus, a garbage truck, nor a newspaper delivery truck pulled over by a cop. Not once!

And if you're a New Yorker, I'll bet you haven't either. Isn't that amazing? I have always assumed that the reason for this is that the fix is in with the city due to agreements made with their unions. The taxi drivers, of course, have no union. Anyway, I pleaded "not guilty" to the tickets and now have a court appearance scheduled for April. The story of which I will post in this blog. So stay tuned.

********

And while you're staying tuned, why not click here for Pictures From A Taxi? It's free and you won't get pulled over by a cop. I mean, unless maybe if you're also driving while you're clicking. That would be bad.

********

Epilogue (here's what happened at my hearing):

On the appointed day I showed up in Traffic Court in lower Manhattan.  I did not hire an attorney, but I did not arrive empty-handed either.  I came prepared.  I had written up my defense meticulously to explain the circumstances of the incident and made notes to use as references so I could coherently present my case to the hearing officer.  Included in them were that errors had been made on the tickets by the police officers.  This was to imply that their abilities of observation could be lacking.  I've noticed in prior appearances in these traffic courts that the defendants often appear without evidence or even a plan of action after they plead "not guilty".  That's not the way to win. 

When my case was called and I and the cop who wrote the tickets approached the bench, the hearing officer actually asked me if I was prepared.  I replied with a sense of fatalism, "Hopefully".

Without saying another word, he made a mental review of the tickets.  Hearing officers can size up the nature of the tickets very quickly, being that this is their job and they see tickets all day long.  I believe they can also size up the defendants and the police officers very quickly, as they see them all day long, too.

So without even starting the proceedings the hearing officer said to the cop, not unkindly, words to the effect that he was not going to go forward with this one, and the charges were dismissed.  Although I was prepared to defend my case and I expected to win, it turned out I hadn't needed to say a word.  I think the hearing officer could see that I was a veteran cabbie, that I was civil in demeanor, and perhaps he knew that these tickets had been part of a recent and unwarranted campaign of summonsing taxi drivers. 

So there were no fines, no points.  Case dismissed. 

The Misfits

Here's a little story I intended to write a few months ago but didn't get around to. It's on that recurring theme that has been following me around like a puppy, karma vs. coincidence.

But before I get into it, let me remind you that driving a cab in New York City is like being spun in circles on the Wheel of Fortune. We who drive the iconic yellow cabs do all our business off the street. No one calls us on a telephone to get our services. It's just a random coming together of a person on the street - one person out of millions walking around in the city - with one of the 13,187 cabs that are in their own random motion from east side to west, from west side to east, like a kaleidoscope of yellow. So to speak.

So with all this random motion, when something happens that seems to defy the randomness of it - something that would make coincidence seem like a naive explanation - one begins to get the idea that "something's happening but we don't know what it is". It's like sensing that there's a phenomenon going on and if we could just isolate exactly what that phenomenon is we would really be onto something.

In my case, I know that when I have my attention on something - especially when I have started to do something but have not completed it - I have a tendency to "pull in" whatever that thing is. It happened again recently...

My favorite television station is TCM - Turner Classic Movies. Here you can find more great, classic films than anywhere else in TV land. It's a premium channel, but to me it's worth a few bucks a month because I'm a big classic cinema fan. One day last July I was looking over the schedule and saw that a movie I'd always wanted to see but never had was slated to be on the air. So I set my video recorder to copy that movie. Its name is "The Misfits".

Some of the great names of cinema were in front and behind the camera in this film from 1961. The screenplay was written by Arthur Miller. It was directed by John Huston. And it starred Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift, who were all big names then (it was Gable's and Monroe's last movie), and co-starred an actress named Thelma Ritter and an actor named Eli Wallach.

The movie remained unwatched in my recorder for a few weeks, but it didn't matter because I could watch it whenever I felt like it. Finally, one day in August, I turned it on. I watched it for about half an hour and then, although I was enjoying it up to that point, I had to attend to other matters so I turned it off. But, again, it didn't matter because I could continue watching it whenever I felt like it.

Well, two months went by and I still hadn't gotten back to it. I record a lot of movies and sometimes I wind up with a backlog. C'est la vie. Having too many great films to watch is a problem I like having.

Then on October 13th I was driving 9J72 and stopped for three passengers at 16th and Park Avenue South. A 30-something fellow sat up front with me and an elderly man and woman were in the back seat. They were a pleasant group which created an easy air of conversation in the cab. The fellow up front with me would alternately chatter with the couple in the back and with me, talking about nothing in particular at first but eventually mentioning that they were all actors. In fact, he said, the passengers in the back seat were both renowned thespians who'd been in the theater for many, many years. Their names were Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach.

Eli Wallach!

I ask you, what are the odds of watching half an hour of a movie that was made 47 years ago and then having one of the stars of that movie walk into your cab? It was almost like having a character on the screen jump out and sit down next to you in the theater. Or reading a book about the Civil War and then there's a knock on the door and Abraham Lincoln is standing there.

Eli Wallach, now 92 years old and kicking, and his wife, Anne Jackson, were delightful passengers, happily fielding questions from me about their careers. I took great pleasure in being able to tell Mr. Wallach that I was in the middle of "The Misfits" but hadn't finished watching it yet.

"Don't tell me how it ends!" I pleaded.

So what do you think? Was this just a random coincidence? Or was it "something's happening but we don't know what it is"?

********

And if you were to click here for Pictures From A Taxi, would that be karma? Or just following orders?

J. Fred Coots

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the secret word was "pout".

As in...

You'd better watch out,

You'd better not cry,

You'd better not POUT,

I'm telling you why...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think of that ride every Christmas season.

********

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

What Actually Does Drive Me Crazy

It's quite common for passengers to ask me for how long I've been driving a cab. After I tell them it's 31 years and wait for them to stop gasping, a frequent comment I hear is:

"Doesn't it drive you crazy?"

"Doesn't what drive me crazy?" I reply.

They think about this for a moment. "Well... the traffic, for one thing."

"Let me tell you something about traffic," I say. "What actually drives people crazy about traffic is that they can't get where they want to go and there's probably someone getting pissed off at them for being late. But that stress is with the passenger, not the cab driver. Imagine you were cruising around town with no place to go, just listening to the radio. You might find it relaxing. That's kind of what it's like to be a cab driver."

This seems to make sense. Most people never looked at it that way.

Then, just to have some fun, I will say this: "There are, however, two things that do drive me crazy in this business. But you'll never guess what they are."

Passengers love this because it gives us a game to play. Can they guess what drives the veteran cabbie around the bend?

"Mean people?"

"Nah... what would be stressful would be having to be around a mean person all the time. But when you drive a cab the mean people you do encounter are out of your life in ten minutes. That's one of the perks of the job, actually."

"Bad tippers?"

"Noooo."

By this time there is a long pause. They start to go for the long shot.

"People who bring dogs in the cab?"

"Of course not, I love dogs!"

"People who throw up?"

"Well, yeah, but that doesn't count 'cause it only happens about once a year."

"Trips out of Manhattan?"

"That can be annoying but it doesn't classify as something that drives me crazy. Remember, we're looking for two things that are really stressful here."

"Short rides?"

"No, come on, there's nothing wrong with a short ride."

"People who don't know where they want to go?"

"No, what do I care? The meter is running."

"People talking on their cell phones?"

"No, at most that is merely slightly annoying. Definitely not 'drives-me-crazy' material."

Finally there is a long silence and I can see by the expressions on their faces that they're out of guesses and ready to give up.

"So what is it?"

Drum roll, please. But before I give you the answers, I want to say that I think any cabbie in New York who's been driving for more than a year would agree with me on this. And I think you probably have to be on the inside of any activity in order to be able to correctly say what it is about that activity that most infuriates the people who actually do it. Outsiders aren't usually aware of the subtleties.

Okay, enough suspense. Here they are, the two things that actually are the most stressful about making a living as a New York City taxi driver:

1. Any contact whatsoever with the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

The TLC is the city agency which makes the rules for the industry and administers those rules. Although I admit that there have been some improvements recently, its history in my 31 years has been sordid. Without getting into a diatribe about the shortcomings of this bureaucracy, I'll just say that cab drivers have to accept whatever mindless or mean-spirited dictates come down the line (like televisions in the rear compartment that are under the control of passengers and blast out the same commercialized drivel over and over and over into the ears of the drivers) and that even the routine of renewing one's hack license every year has enough potential stress connected to it to make one dread opening the renewal form which arrives annually (maybe) in the mail. (One year, for example, I had to make seven trips to various city agencies to clear up the TLC's own bureaucratic errors.) I could go on and on, but I'm sparing you the horror.

It's the second cause of stress that is by far the worst, however, and although it seems the most obvious to me, no one has ever guessed what it is.

2. I can't find a passenger.

That's right. I am cruising the streets of the city and I can't find a damned passenger! Nearly everyone who ever takes a cab in New York assumes that cabs are always busy because whenever they want to get one, it seems it is difficult to find one that's available. This is true, but it is true only because the taxi business is a peak-hour business. During the rush hours (7 to 10 a.m. and 4 to 8 p.m.) demand exceeds supply. But that's only 7 hours of the day. There are 17 other hours and during many of them, quite the opposite is the case.

Try getting a cab at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday night, for example. Before your hand goes into a full wave, you will find three or four empty taxis cutting in front of each other in their attempts to get to you first. The 13,187 yellow cabs in New York City derive all their business from street hails. You don't get on a phone and call for a yellow cab. You go out on the street and wave your hand. This means we're all in competition with each other and, when supply of cabs exceeds demand for service, it's a horse race, believe me. Did you ever dream of being a NASCAR driver? Come to New York and drive a cab at night instead.

So how bad can it get? Twice I have gone two hours of desperately cruising the streets without getting a single fare. Being empty for 45 minutes is not all that unusual. And that is stress because you have paid a leasing fee for the use of the cab for a period of 12 hours and therefore time is money (or no money).

It is also a bit humiliating in my case because, if I don't say so myself, I think of myself as the Grand Master of finding fares. So for me to go long periods of time trying every trick I know and still finding another empty cab in front of me wherever I turn, well... it can drive me crazy. I start behaving like the maniac taxi drivers I hear passengers complain to me about. Last week, for example, I was cut off viciously on 7th Avenue South by another cabbie who then beat me to a passenger standing off the sidewalk at W. 4th Street. Instead of shrugging it off and continuing on down the avenue to hopefully find another passenger, I tossed a cup of water through his window as I drove by. Idiotic, certainly, but it shows you how crazy even a non-crazy fellow like myself can get.

I once had a passenger in my cab who was a waiter and we got into a conversation about our professions. He told me about his recurring dream of not being able to keep up with business in his restaurant. He said in his dream the space of the restaurant kept expanding and the tables extended out beyond the entrance right out onto the street. He would run and run from the restaurant out into the street trying to take orders and serve food, but the tables kept multiplying faster than he could cope.

My scary dream is kind of the opposite. I am cruising the streets of New York after midnight making every sage move I've learned over the last 31 years. And yet, everywhere I go I find an empty cab already in front of me. I can't find a passenger no matter what brilliant maneuver I make. This goes on for an hour. Then another hour. Finally, completely exasperated, I find myself driving uptown on Broadway. I decide that all my knowledge of where to find a fare has failed me so I just chuck it all out the window and just drive. I know nothing. Further and further I go on Broadway, up into the Bronx, and then even further up into Westchester County. I am now out of the city limits, but I don't care. I just keep going. Broadway is a continuing road and becomes State Highway 9 up there. I find myself passing through small towns and noticing deer on the sides of the road. I don't care, I just keep going. After two hours I find myself in the town of Kinderhook, not that far from Albany, approaching a red light. It is nearly 4 a.m. and of course the town is completely dark and deserted. I'm thinking I ought to turn around and go back to the city, but then, as I come up to the red light, something catches my eye just beyond the intersection. It's a broken-down limousine with two dressed-up party people at its side waving at me frantically. I realize they want my service! No doubt they had rented the limo, now disabled, and see me as a miracle sent to them to take them back to New York! And I see them as a miracle of my own, a signal from the Almighty that my travail has not been in vain, that my insane journey into the wilderness was actually guided by the Divine. I wave back at them through the windshield, trying to communicate that as soon as my red light turns green, I will be there to rescue them. But just before the light changes...

...another yellow cab from New York City appears from out of nowhere, speeds through the intersection, screeches to a halt beside the limo, and picks up the stranded party people before I can get to them.

And you know when you start having dreams like this that it won't be long before you pick up a couple of husky fellows in white coats who take you for a ride to the funny farm. Although, come to think of it, then at least for awhile there you would have had some passengers!

It has also been rumored that failure to click here for Pictures From A Taxi can also cause one to go crazy. But that is just a rumor, of course.

BBC Breakfast and the Art of the Plug

I got a lesson during the course of a single shift last week that is something any guest on a talk show must learn when he's trying to "sell" something. And that is, when you're being interviewed you've got find a way to get in the plug. It turns out to be something of an art. Here's what happened...

It began with a prearranged meeting at 6 p.m. with a couple of Australian journalists in front of the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street. They had contacted me a few days prior with a request for an interview with a "real New York cabbie" about the election results. It was to be on a radio station known as 3AW in Melbourne with a talk-show host named Neil Mitchell, the most popular talk radio guy in those parts, I was told, with an audience of a million people.

So off I went at the very beginning of my shift to the CBS building and there I met my two Aussie contact fellows, Justin and Sebastian, who climbed into my cab. We chatted for a few minutes and then I was handed a cell phone. On the other end was what might be called a Professional Voice. Do you know how someone sounds who speaks for a living? It's smooth and kind of resonant without the "umms" and "uhhs" that punctuate the sentences of non-professionals. It was Neil Mitchell, and we were on the air in Melbourne.

I was asked a few questions about the election and about taxi driving in New York. I thought I answered them adequately and then, after less than a minute - zip - it was over. I had another five minutes of conversation with Justin and Sebastian and then - zip - they were off to attend to other matters and were gone. I drove down the street, picked up my first fare of the night, and the rest of my shift was underway.

But as I headed toward the East Side with my passenger, something didn't seem quite right. They had told me that I had just communicated to a million people and yet it felt like nothing. There had been no feedback. I mean, when you communicate the idea is that there's someone on the other end to receive it and an effect is created, right? Here there was just a vacuum, and it was unsatisfying. And worse than that, I had intended to mention the name of my blog on the air but the thing went by so quickly that the opportunity had slipped right past me. So I felt a bit frustrated, as well.

However, I took it as a learning experience - practice, really - because I knew there would be an even bigger fish to fry that very night. Just before I'd left my house to drive into Manhattan I had received an email from a contact person from the BBC asking me if I'd be interested in appearing on one of their shows, BBC Breakfast, at 3 a.m. They also were interested in interviewing a real New York cabbie to get a local reaction to the election, and I had called the number they'd given me and accepted the invitation.

Now you have to understand, I am not a movie star nor a head of state. I am merely a New York cab driver. I am not used to receiving one - much less two - invitations to go on the air in the very same night. So my mood was elevated and this helped me to have a better than usual night as a member of my own profession, culminating in a lucrative out-of-town job to Ridgewood, New Jersey, that on any other night would have been the highlight of the evening.

In fact it was during the return ride to the city from Jersey, just as I was crossing the George Washington Bridge, that I received a phone call from Emily, the charming producer of the show, who asked me to bring my cab right up to the site from which the show would be broadcast, the Skylight Diner at the corner of 34th Street and 9th Avenue. The plan was that I would be interviewed while sitting in the taxi. In speaking to Emily, I found out a bit more about BBC Breakfast. It turns out to be Britain's primary early morning show on the "telly". It's on the air every day for three hours and has an audience all over the U.K. of - gasp - FIVE MILLION PEOPLE.



Somehow the concept of five million viewers in the U.K. was much more intimidating than one million listeners in Australia, which I took in stride. I did the math - I get about 50 people a day in my cab. I would have to drive 100,000 shifts to reach five million. And it would take me 274 years to do it if I drove every day of the year.

But it was the next part that really got to me:

IT WAS LIVE.

Suddenly it occurred to me that a live mike equals power. I could say whatever I wanted and it would be heard by all these people, imagine that. I started to think of interesting things to say...

"The Revolution is here. I am your leader."

"REDRUM!"

"Paul is dead."

"All of you children watching, go to Mum's pocketbook right now and send the money to ______ (my address)."

"You have been abducted by aliens but when I say the words 'fidgity-doo' you will remember none of it. Fidgity-doo."

Of course, I said none of these things. What happened was I arrived at the diner at 3 a.m. and was greeted by Emily. It was an interesting sight, actually, to see this 24-hour diner with so much activity going on at that time of night. The streets in that area are quite deserted at 3 in the morning, yet here was this hub of busy-ness with the ability to transmit images and sound to the other side of the planet. I know we take this technology for granted now but, really, that is incredible if you think about it.


Emily briefed me on what was to happen which was that in about half an hour the show's host (or "presenter", as he is called) Bill Turnbull, would come out to the sidewalk, approach me in the cab, and ask me a few questions. That was all the preparation I had. So for the next 30 minutes I hung around the diner watching how the show is done while other guests were interviewed, and then, at the appointed time, I went into my cab. Out came Bill Turnbull - lights, camera, action - and the interview was underway.

He asked me a few questions about the city's reaction to the election, what's on people's minds,

and about being a taxi driver in New York, and was about to wrap up our little chat when I realized the moment of truth was at hand. If I was going to let five million people know the name of my blog I was going to have to act boldly.

So I did it.

Even though he hadn't asked me, I acted as if he had and shamelessly let the plug drop. "The job is so adventurous," said I, "that I started writing an online blog called 'Cabs Are For Kissing'."

And then, bless his heart, Bill Turnbull picked right up on that and repeated the name of the blog for all to hear again.

The result: over 3,000 hits and more than 50 comments and emails from all over Britain. And that is a great, great feeling to know that an individual can create what is essentially a personal magazine from his own home and have that kind of reach around the world. Mind boggling, really.

And so I'd like to thank everyone who took the trouble to find me here. Welcome aboard! Please come by often, and I'll try to keep it interesting for you.

********

And if that's not enough and you want even more New York, just click right here for Pictures From A Taxi.