Public Lewd Versus Private Lewd

Quite often during the course of a ride a taxi driver gets to learn - either by being a fly on the wall or through direct conversation - something about a passenger’s interesting story that is still in progress. But then the ride ends, the passenger departs, and the driver is left wondering how the hell it will all turn out.

But of course he never gets to know this.

Well, almost never.

Recently I had a fare with a passenger who had a wild story that she was right smack dab in the middle of. And I did find out how it all turned out…

It started on a Tuesday evening around 8 p.m. when a nice-looking, twenty-something female hailed me in the East Village and said she wanted to go to Garden City. Now, two things were good here: first, I know where that is. It’s a town on Long Island quite near to where I grew up, about a forty-minute ride from Manhattan. And secondly, since it’s an OT (“out-of-town”) job, it’s lucrative.

Cha-ching!

I did some math and came up with $100 as a fair price - mostly fair to me as it’s more than an hour and twenty minutes of my time is worth. She agreed and we were on our way.

“So where in Garden City are we going?” I inquired.

“It’s a lawyer’s office. They’re waiting for me.”

Wow - intriguing! Anyone would have been curious to know what this was all about, but it would have been inappropriate for me to ask. After all, it was none of my business. I was merely providing a service here. If she wanted to tell me about it, she would. If not, not. So we drove on in silence through the Midtown Tunnel and out onto the Long Island Expressway while she stared out the window and I looked the highway.

But it was sitting there in the air between us.

Five more minutes of silence and it was really bothering me. This was so unusual. Could she be a lawyer herself and was going all the way out there to sign some document or something? I suppose, but, looking at her in the mirror, she didn’t have that sort of cocky professional demeanor that lawyers often have, even the female ones. She seemed worried about something, which might be expected if one were in some kind of trouble and the urgency of the situation required a hundred dollar cab ride and lawyers waiting for you in Garden City.

And there was that other thing, too - there was the distinct possibility that I could drive her all the way out there, drop her off, and then realize that not only would I never find out how it had turned out, I would never even know what it had been about. And I knew it was something, and that it just had to be a good one. It just had to be!

So I decided to put aside my professionalism and delve. I told her I was a writer, that I had a blog, even a book, and I knew it was none of my business but I just couldn’t help but be curious to know what was going on, if she didn’t mind. Now she could have just said, sorry, it’s a personal matter that she couldn’t talk about, or some such, but instead she was quite forthright, perhaps even glad to get it off her chest, and told me the story.

It concerned lewd behavior.

Definition: lewd adj. obscene; bawdy; indecent.
(Macmillan Dictionary for Students)


She was a kid from Vermont, whom we shall call Gloria. Her journey to New York City had begun a couple of years earlier when she took a job at a tech start-up company in Vermont and got to know the owner of the company, whom we shall call Jeff. Jeff was a nice young man who owned a particularly cool dog, whom we shall call Arthur. Gloria took an avid interest in Arthur, often dog-sitting for him, and so, in addition to their relationship in the workplace, they had become friendly outside of that environment.

Eventually Gloria left Jeff and Arthur for greener pastures in the Big Apple, taking a new job in a similar tech start-up. Within a year, however, Jeff, seeking greener pastures himself, moved his company to New York City and the two of them began seeing each other again. One night at about 1 a.m. they were seeing each other in Jeff’s car, parked in the busy-at-night Meat Packing District. And as often happens when nice young men and women find themselves alone in a car, they were soon in each other’s arms.

And legs.

Or at least that’s what the cops who saw them thought. In actuality what they had seen was Gloria straddling Jeff in a passionate embrace while kissing. Due to their position, however, it looked like outright public fornication, even though both were fully clothed.

There was a time in New York City when such behavior, even when it really had been outright public fornication, would have been handled with a blast of a siren and some flashing red lights. And then some chuckles as the miscreants scrambled to put their clothes back on. But that was then and this was now, an era when even minor sins must be handled with the full weight of the law, lest the pillars of civilization come tumbling down.

They were ordered out of the car, placed under arrest, handcuffed, charged with “public lewdness”, and driven to the precinct on West 20th Street, about half a mile from the scene of the crime.

Gloria was already shocked and humiliated, but her ordeal had just begun. At the precinct, after being separated from Jeff, she was handcuffed to a pole for two hours. Then she was transferred in a van to another precinct on West 54th Street and placed in a cell by herself. This cell had no running water other than a toilet which, if she used it, would make her fully visible to anyone who walked by. She was spoken to rudely by the police personnel. She was not allowed to call anyone. And for breakfast she was fed an orange soda and a Happy Meal (a taste of station house irony, there). Finally she was arraigned and released the next afternoon at 2 p.m. So making out in Jeff’s car had resulted in thirteen hours of incarceration and a sample of what it’s like to lose one’s freedom and be at the mercy of the police department.

That had been five weeks ago. And now she was in a taxicab heading to Garden City. The reason for the trip, I learned, was that a hearing before a judge was to take place the next day and at the last minute Gloria decided it might be a good idea to hire a private attorney rather than take her chances with a free public defender. It had suddenly dawned on her that a conviction of Public Lewdness might not look great on her resume. Or on the internet. And that getting a dismissal was worth the expense. So she called a friend who recommended her own family’s attorney, but she would have to go out to Garden City immediately to pay $1,500 for the service in advance.

So that’s what it was all about.

We found the attorney’s place, an office building on the periphery of the Roosevelt Field Mall, without too much trouble. I was about to head back to the city when Gloria realized she might have a problem getting back to the city herself, so she asked me to wait. Half an hour later she emerged and off we went to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where she lived. The charge for the taxi ride came to $162, including the waiting time and the tip.

As she departed I told her I was dying to know how this story ended and gave her my card with my email address, asking her to drop me a line. She promised that she would, but I doubted I would ever hear from her. People who take your card rarely get back to you, even if they were sincere at the time. So I was delighted when her email arrived in my inbox a few weeks later.

What had happened? She and Jeff, who used a free public defender, were “put through the system” by their lawyers. Behind closed doors a deal was made by which they agreed to plead guilty to the charge of Public Lewdness and perform six hours of community service, picking up leaves and things in Tompkins Square Park on a Saturday at eight in the morning. They were given what’s called an “A.C.O.D.” (Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal), which means that after six months of “good behavior” the whole thing would be taken off their records, as if it never happened.

So it turned out to be a case of “all’s well that ends well”. No stocks or pillories in the town square. No rotten tomatoes being thrown at one by the outraged citizenry. No scarlet letters.

“Was it worth the expense of driving all the way out there and hiring your own attorney?” I asked.

“A complete waste of money,” Gloria replied. “But at least I get to feel that I’ve contributed to the economy.”

Indeed she did - my economy. That $162 certainly helped make my night.

But my night turned out to be not over regarding the subject of Lewd Behavior. As if being watched over by the gods of Lewd themselves on a break from a Bacchanalian ritual, I was shown that when it comes to this kind of activity there are right ways and there are wrong ways to go about it.

At three in the morning I was hailed by a young lady in tight clothing coming from the Penthouse Club at 45th Street and 11th Avenue who was heading out to Astoria in Queens. She was pleasant and conversational and I soon found out what I already knew: that she was a - what’s the right word? Dancer? Entertainer? Performer? Oh, all right, she was a stripper, okay? Which of course means that she’d just spent the entire evening strutting around naked, or almost naked, and sitting on men’s laps whom she didn’t even know in exchange for money.

Uh, I believe that would be defined as “lewd” according to Mr. Macmillan.

What I didn’t know, but found out from her, was that she didn’t live in Astoria. She was on her way to the apartment of one of the laps she’d been sitting on in the Penthouse Club where, I assumed, some further lewd behavior was about to take place.

So what have we learned? Sit on your lover’s lap in a car, you go to jail and pay a lawyer fifteen hundred bucks to get you off. Sit on a stranger’s lap in the Penthouse Club and he pays you fifteen hundred bucks to come over to his place to get him off.

It’s all about location.

An Almost Non-Human Sound

Something occurred a couple of Sundays ago - at nine-thirty in the evening - of short duration - but one of those things you realize almost immediately you will never forget.

It was a sound.

I had picked up two guys and a girl, thirty-somethings, at 72nd Street and 5th Avenue, and we headed across Central Park toward their destination of 84th and Amsterdam on the Upper West Side. The ride was mundane - they spoke among themselves - about food, I think - until we were cruising across West 83rd, a one-way street, halfway between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues.

Then there was something there in the middle of that block, an obstruction that brought us to a temporary halt. A police car just ahead of us, with its lights flashing but no siren, was driving slowly around a rental truck that was just sitting there, as if it had chosen the middle of the street to be its parking space. Not knowing if I should follow the cops around the truck, I stopped and we paused for a few moments.

Suddenly there was a howl - actually three or four staccato screams, each about three seconds in length - coming from the area just in front of the rental truck, but out of my sight.

Right away I knew this sound was different than any I’d encountered before - it just didn’t fit into any of the categories of types of sounds on my experiential track. First of all, the loudness of it. It had to have been made by a large male human being for its low pitched wavelength to have been created, but it sounded almost non-human, more like an animal.

Then, the abruptness of it. There had been relative silence on the street just moments before it began - and then, bam! - out of nowhere, this howling.

Also there was an involuntary quality to these screams. Almost always when people make loud noises you know they have some control of the sound that is emanating from their bodies. But this noise was out of the control of the person making it, as if it were being squeezed out of his body, like toothpaste from a tube.

“That is the sound of something not good,” I said to my passengers, who had ceased conversation and were also trying to figure out what could be causing it. Then the girl in the back made a statement that answered the question. You know how when the truth is indicated all the nuances fall into place and you know, yeah, that’s it, that’s what it is. Whether the recognition is of something that is good or bad, there is a release of mental energy when the confusion is resolved, a feeling of relief when the correct item is indicated.

“Someone is being tasered,” she said.

Sure enough, as we slowly drove around the rental truck, we could see that three or four cops had pinned a large man face down on the sidewalk and were putting cuffs on him. I stopped the cab momentarily to comprehend what I was seeing and thought of taking out my camera, but then decided against it, thinking - who knows? - the cops may be offended and decide to write me a ticket for blocking traffic, or whatever.

I moved along, wondering if the police had been justified in using such force. Of course I had no way of knowing, as I hadn’t observed what had come before. My passengers, not appearing to be affected by the incident, ended their momentary pause and picked up the conversation where they’d left off, demonstrating some hefty nonchalance.

New York, as I wrote in my book, is a place where unexpected realities can very suddenly appear before you and then just as suddenly disappear. If we’d driven down West 83rd three minutes earlier or later, we’d probably not have known that anything unusual was about to happen, or had just occurred.

It’s a city that is so capable of these sudden mood swings.

The Card Game

“There was something in the air that night.”

Looking back at it later, that’s the way it seemed.

Someone less familiar with the nuances of a scene - its details, the usual flow of its particles - might not have noticed that something was not right.

But I did. Something, some nebulous something, was out there.

I sensed it at the beginning. I even took action to avoid it, but it happened anyway. Later I concluded that it had all been a karmic phenomenon, like a greeting card from Fate, a scene in a movie in which you sidestep your way around the danger, you even compliment yourself on having been sharp enough to have avoided it, and then, as you open the door to your house, it’s sitting there in your kitchen eating a tangerine. “Hello.”

It happened on a midsummer night last year, July 31st to be exact - around midnight - and that’s about as midsummer as you can get. I took a twenty-something female from lower Manhattan to McDonough Street in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, a so-called “inner city” part of New York. She was fine, paid with a credit card and gave me a twenty percent tip. But there was a little thing that happened a few blocks before we got to her destination that caught my eye. While we were stopped at a red light a group of about twenty kids, teenagers in that danger-zone between fifteen to twenty years old, walked by on the opposite side of the street. It was the way they were moving, along with a group attitude and a certain buzzing among them, that created the blip on my radar screen. I’ve been watching people walk across the street for thirty-five years. This was a particle that was not flowing smoothly. It was sticking.

Have you ever heard of something called a “wilding”? It’s defined as “the activity of a gang of youths going on a protracted and violent rampage in a public place, attacking or mugging people at random”. I saw one in action a couple of years ago, not far from Times Square. It’s an internet phenomenon made possible by the anti-social media, and it’s very scary. Could it have been that what had caught my attention was a prelude to a wilding? Probably not, wildings are rare, fortunately.

But then, as my passenger departed on McDonough Street, I heard sirens from a few blocks away. They have a language of their own, these sirens. Police, fire, EMS, they’re all slightly different. These were police, I knew, and in the parlance of police sirens they were in the “we mean business” band. (You can tell this by the duration of the wailing and by the speed the police car is traveling which, even if you can’t see it, can be determined by the time it takes for the siren to increase in volume if it’s moving toward you or to decrease in volume if it’s moving away from you. It also lets you know how serious they think the emergency is.) That there was more than one siren was significant, as well. There were two, about a block from each other, and moving in the same direction. Then there was a third, this one from a bit further away.

Something was going on.

Then I heard distant shouts, coming from that same vicinity. And not from one source, but from two or three.

My sacred Taxi Driver Instinct told me, quite clearly, “get the hell out of here”. I flicked on my “Off Duty” light, locked the doors, and began heading back toward Manhattan, the opposite direction from where the commotion, whatever it was, was originating.

But then, just as I was beginning to breathe easier, Temptation appeared in the form of a person approaching from the street. No, not a woman in a red dress. Temptation appeared, oddly enough, in the form of a middle-aged, thuggish-looking man who might have been the guy the song “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown” was written about. He would have been the last person you would have thought I would allow into my cab at this particular moment, but he came up to my window and said the magic words.

“Take me to Manhattan?”

It was free money. I unlocked the doors and he slid onto the back seat.

“Where in Manhattan do you want to go?”

“Chinatown.”

Perfect. Right across the Manhattan Bridge.

I turned the meter on and thought about what I had just done. It was all right. This guy, although a rough kind of character, represented no threat to me in a physical sense. Just by his age I was certain of that. Morons who think it’s worth the risk of possible consequences to pull out a gun just to get a hundred dollars from a taxi driver are either in jail or dead before they get to the age of thirty. This guy appeared to be around forty-five. Plus he was taking me away from the area where I perceived the danger to be. No need to even use my
“Three Strikes And You’re Out” system to protect myself. Just get on Atlantic Avenue and make a right.

But I hadn’t driven half a block when my passenger spoke. “Pull over, he’s getting’ in,” he said. I looked around. A guy who looked like Bad Bad’s older brother was approaching the cab. I didn’t like it but I was in a situation where I had no choice.

I stopped.

The second passenger got in.

It set off an alarm. My happiness at having an unlikely return trip to Manhattan evaporated in the night air and was replaced by an anxiety, which was only heightened by the next development in the plot.

“He’s goin’ to Buffalo Avenue,” the first guy said.

“Buffalo Avenue,” I repeated, rather robotically. This was not what I wanted to hear. Not only was Buffalo Avenue in the opposite direction from Manhattan, it meant that in order to get to it I was going to have to drive toward whatever was causing the commotion that I’d already been trying to avoid.

“Goin’ to a card game,” the second guy said.

“Then you’re going to Manhattan?” I asked the first guy.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Then, abruptly: “Make a left, make a left!”

I didn’t like the tone. It had suddenly gone from “I’m doing you a favor by picking you up when my Off-Duty light is on” to being ordered around by my passengers, who were seizing control of the ride. And to make it worse, the street they were ordering me to turn onto was Fulton, a two-way road with a single lane in each direction.

I didn’t want to take that route, I wanted to take a parallel avenue, Atlantic, which also has two directions of traffic but with two lanes in each direction. On Atlantic you could move around if something got in your way, but on Fulton you’d be stuck if there were to be an obstruction.

I momentarily considered just telling them forget it, I’m only going to Manhattan, not the other way, but then I would be in a confrontational situation with the Brown brothers which could lead to who-knows-what. Besides, I wanted that ride to Manhattan after the Buffalo Avenue drop-off.

I made the left onto Fulton.

We went two blocks and then came to a dead stop behind a line of cars that looked to be a block long. Not good. After thirty seconds of not moving at all, I realized that the cause of the delay was the thing I’d been trying to avoid. In the distance there were people running. There were people shouting. Like a tornado, it seemed to be coming toward us.

“I’m getting out of here,” I called back to my passengers, who were immersed in a quiet conversation between themselves and oblivious to the outside world. And with that I made a U-turn on Fulton and headed back in the opposite direction, away from the tornado. After a couple of zigs and zags we were on Atlantic, the avenue I’d wanted to take in the first place, heading swiftly toward Buffalo Avenue. I thought there might have been a protest from the back seat since I had countermanded their instructions and had taken them a few blocks out of their way, but there was nothing.

Good.

But better than that, I’d avoided the fracas, whatever it was. It is rare in life that we are grateful for things that didn’t happen, right? This was a case of an experienced cab driver relying on his knowingness to keep himself and his passengers out of harm’s way. There’s no virtue in becoming a victim, mate.

Two minutes later I got them to their building, a tenement, on Buffalo Avenue with $8.70 on the meter. The first guy then surprised me by handing me a fifty and telling me to keep ten.

“You can pay the fare when we get to Manhattan,” I said, as I tried to return the bill.

“We’re both gettin’ out here,” he replied.

“You’re not going to Manhattan?”

“Nah, I’m goin’ to the card game,” he said.

Damn. There went my “free money”. It pissed me off - I immediately wondered if he’d ever intended to go to Manhattan in the first place. Maybe he’d just used that as a ploy to get me to take him deeper into Brooklyn. But what could I do? I can’t force people to stay in my cab. Especially this guy.

I handed him two twenties as his change, said “thanks”, and expected to hear the rear door open and the two of them depart. But instead the second guy handed me my twenties back and said he needed smaller bills.

“Smaller bills?” It was an odd request. I’m not a bank.

“For the card game.”

“Oh… all right.” Okay, that made sense. I counted out eight fives and handed them over.

“Thanks.”

“What do you play? Poker?” I asked as they opened both rear doors simultaneously.

“Yeah.”

“Hey, good luck!”

My blessing was either ignored or not heard as it brought no response - they walked away and disappeared. I drove off toward Atlantic Avenue, disappointed, but not overly so - after all, even though they’d delayed my return to Manhattan, I did make ten dollars for the inconvenience, and that’s not to be discounted. I kept the “Off-Duty” light on, locked my doors anew, and got back on Atlantic wondering if I should take the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridge back to the city.

When I had driven about a mile past the general area where the commotion had been, and knowing I was beyond the reach of that problem, I began to feel hungry. I’m a creature of habit when it comes to meals - you could set your clock by my stomach - and midnight is feeding time in my taxi. So I found a quiet spot and pulled over. Out of my backpack came my pre-prepared chicken fingers and my whole wheat bread and I began munching away.

I was reviewing mentally what had just transpired with my last ride and suddenly I was jolted by a thought. Wait a minute… they’d paid me with a fifty… and I hadn’t bothered to check it. I pulled my wad out from my pocket and found the bill.

Cautiously, I held it up to the dome light of the cab.

And then, oh, oh no, nooooo… Shit! SHIT!

Forget about teenagers and wildings, if anyone on the sidewalk had heard my wails of anguish they would have thought that I was a source of danger and they’d have crossed the street to avoid me.

The bill was a fake.

How can you tell? There are three ways:

1) First, and easiest, you hold the bill up to a strong light and look for the “ghost” in the blank area on the right side. Pictured on a fifty is Ulysses S. Grant, the commander of the Union forces during the American Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. A ghostly image of Grant can be seen in that blank area if the bill is genuine. The high-tech copying machines that are used to produce counterfeit money are not high-tech enough to reproduce the image of that ghost. This bill had none. A fake!

2) Second, similar to the first, is to hold the bill up to a light and look for the bar. On a fifty the thin bar runs the width of the bill, just to the right of Grant’s head and reads, repetitively, in tiny print, “USA 50”. This bill did not have that, either.

3) The third, and not known to most people, are the grooves in the General’s coat. If you run the edge of your fingernail against the coat, you can feel the grooves. Although I didn’t notice it until later, this bill, amazingly, did have grooves. But they hadn’t been somehow duplicated there by a copy machine. Whoever made this bill had cut out a small piece of grooved cellophane tape and carefully adhered it to the left side of Grant’s coat. So to that degree this counterfeit bill had actually been created by hand. Amazing.

When my anger eventually subsided I realized I had an ethical dilemma on my hands. What to do with the damned thing?

Hold onto it until the next time a passenger pays the fare with a hundred dollar bill and then give it as change? No, that wouldn’t be right. It would make me no better than the lowlife who’d handed it off to me. Besides, it could be months before a passenger tried to pay with a hundred.

Try to deposit it at a bank? Forget it, they’re money professionals and I’d probably wind up on some kind of surveillance list.

Turn it in to the government? As if.

Or just the obvious choice, use it to pay for something at a retail store. Yeah, that seemed like the way to go. But where?

It was this that was on my mind as I crossed the Manhattan Bridge, touching down on Canal Street in Chinatown. Immediately, as if Manhattan itself had supernatural powers, my luck turned. My next passenger, a middle-aged fellow who’d perhaps had too much to drink and didn’t want to wait around at train stations, took me out to Jersey City, New Jersey. These OT (out-of-town) jobs are flat-rate and lucrative. We charge much more than the normal, metered fare because a) we can, and b) by law, we’re not allowed pick up passengers outside of the New York City limits - we are required to come back to the city empty.

I was paid $45 plus an $8.50 tip for the twenty minute ride. Travel time back to Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel would be only another ten minutes, and that’s good money, but even better than that, I suddenly realized I had a perfect opportunity to pass off my fake fifty. A godsend, really.

There are about a dozen gas stations lined up in a row near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Gas is always cheaper in New Jersey than in New York due to lower taxes, so it saves a few dollars to fill up before entering the tube. What better place than an oil company to pass off a counterfeit bill? After all, haven’t I been getting raped by these people my whole life?

And there was one particular joint, a Gulf station, which I decided was especially worthy of my wrath. A few months earlier I’d had a run-in with an attendant there. New Jersey is one of only two states in the U.S. where, by law, there is no self-service at gas stations - an employee always comes out to do the task. The guy who pumped my gas at the Gulf station had made a hostile comment to me because he thought my fifty-cent tip should have been more. Now, I always tip well above average in situations where tipping is appropriate. I’m in a tipping business myself, after all. But I happen to know that tipping pump boys is not customary in New Jersey. I also happen to know that they make better money than New York City taxi drivers. So the guy had been out of line, in my opinion.

And now, ha-ha, it was get-even time.

I pulled into the station. Funny, even though it was where it was supposed to be, the place looked different. I realized it had been renovated - it was bigger, shinier, and better lit. The attendant came over immediately, but he wasn’t the same guy.

“Fill it?” he asked with a smile.

“Uh, yeah, regular, cash,” I replied.

Well, what to do? I no longer had a justification for using the bad bill. Or did I? Okay, I had no gripe with this particular attendant, but wasn’t he a party to an industry which is keeping me poor? I mean, when I started driving a cab in ‘77 I was paying $10 for a shift’s gasoline. Now I’m often paying more than $50. And I’m not making five times as much as I did in 1977. So what more justification did I need? The plan remained in place.

The total on the pump came to $29. Giving no indication by voice or body language that I was trying to pull a fast one, I handed him the $50 bill. A moment of truth was at hand, and that’s what it was - a moment. It took the guy maybe two seconds to recognize that the bill was a phony. He abruptly handed it back to me.

“This is counterfeit,” he said. Interestingly, there was no great outrage in his voice. Perhaps he was used to this sort of thing.

“What do you mean?” I replied, showing surprise and very genuine concern at hearing this startling revelation.

“It’s a fake.”

“How do you know?”

“Hold it up to the light.”

Throwing what may have been left of my personal integrity completely out the window, I jumped headfirst into an impromptu act of being utterly shocked that I had received and was now unwittingly attempting to pass on a counterfeit note of the United States Treasury, followed by outrage at whoever had done this to me and the deepest, most sincere apology to the attendant.

“I’m really, really sorry about this, man.”

I handed him some actual money to pay for the gas.

Oh, and I tipped him a dollar.

Cruising back toward Manhattan in the Holland Tunnel, the flaw in my thinking edged its way into my consciousness. I had been assuming that if I’d been able to get the guy at the Gulf station to take the fifty that the entity which would be out the money would be Gulf Incorporated, and that would be okay. But what if they had a policy of making their attendants pay for any phony money they’d accepted out of their own pockets? Maybe they do that, for all I know. Then I’d be victimizing the attendant, wouldn’t I? And that would not be okay.

Emerging from the tunnel in deepest thought, I realized I had been given an integrity wake-up call. There was simply no way out, integrity-wise, but to swallow the loss. Right away I started feeling better about myself. Hey, it wasn’t the end of the world. All I’d actually lost was forty dollars (the change I’d given for the fifty) and the time it had taken me to drive those guys to Buffalo Avenue. Not that big a deal in the larger scheme of things.

Still, it stung.

But onward into the night. My next fare was a drunk, middle-aged man coming out of a gay bar. He seemed friendly, so I thought I’d use him as a sounding board for the woes of my evening and started telling him about the counterfeit fifty. He slammed back that, forget it, he knew all about these cab driver tricks, I was just trying to get him to feel sorry for me so I could get a bigger tip out of him. Then he accused me of being a Jew.

What was going on? I’m a karma guy. I felt like I was in a rowboat and was being tossed around in Somebody’s Ocean. Why was all this happening to me? I believe, as I wrote at the end of the “Karma Versus Coincidence” chapter of my book, that “what can be fully viewed will vanish” (if I may quote myself). What was I not fully viewing? I did not know. Shouldn’t my slate have been wiped clean, so to speak, by the realization that the ethical thing to do was to not pass along the fifty? So why was I continuing to pull this crap in?

I did not know.

I decided to finish the shift in silence. Passengers had become too dangerous to communicate with, and that was that. I spoke not a word to the next fare, a couple of tourists traveling from the Village to the Upper West Side, nor to a finance guy on a long ride from Midtown way up to Washington Heights. I felt if I could just tip-toe my way around Whatever It Was, maybe it would blow out to sea by tomorrow.

Well, the strategy seemed to work. I had no further trouble with passengers for the final three hours of my shift and had almost forgotten about my extraordinarily lousy night when I pulled into the Hess Station on 44th and 10th at 5 a.m. to fill up.

Now, in New York City you pump your own gas. You go up to the cashier who sits in a secure, box-like structure, push the money through a slot, and then go back to your vehicle and pump away. Since I’d already spent $29 on gas in New Jersey I figured I only needed another $30, at most, to fill up the cab, so I placed a twenty and a ten into the slot, turned, and walked a few steps toward my taxi.

And that’s when the screaming began.

“THIS BILL IS NO GOOD!” screeched the voice of the cashier, a female who is normally surly without any special reason to be. I turned and looked back at her, quizzically.

“THIS IS NO GOOD!” she screamed again, waving the twenty dollar bill in the air.

What??? I walked over to the booth. This information was not being processed mentally.

“What are you talking about?” I almost screamed myself. “You want to see a fake bill, look at this!” And with that I pulled out the fifty and held it up. “This is a fake bill!”

On some moronic level I must have been thinking that I’d already met my quota of counterfeit money that night so there couldn’t possibly be more. Of course this made no sense whatsoever to the enraged cashier who continued to wave the twenty in the air as if it were a flag.

“THIS BILL IS NO GOOD!” she screamed again and shoved it back at me through the slot.

I picked up the bill and looked at it. Oh my God, it was indeed a fake. Not nearly as well made as the fifty - the green ink was too bright and anyone who handles money could see at a glance that this one was suspicious. Except me, apparently.

Stunned, I apologized profusely to the cashier. Oddly, this time my apology was quite genuine as I’d really had no idea that I’d handed her a fake. But unlike the attendant at the Gulf station in New Jersey, she was not inclined to be so forgiving, screaming again that the bill was no good and giving me the evil eye of death. Talk about karma being a bitch, indeed.

I handed her another twenty dollar bill from my wad, making sure this one was not also a fake, and then, as I walked toward my cab in a daze, it hit me. Oh, God, no, could it be?

I opened up my roll of bills and looked warily at each of the twenties. There was the counterfeit she’d just returned to me. The next twenty was perfectly fine, nothing wrong with it. Then another, also fine. And then… oh, shit, there it was - another fake twenty!

Yes, I had not one, but two counterfeit twenties - both with the same serial numbers - in my roll. And now I finally understood what had happened: when the characters in Brooklyn handed me the fifty, I’d given them two twenties as change for the ten dollar fare. Then the guy going to the card game said he needed smaller bills. He handed me two twenties back and I gave him eight fives. But the twenties he’d given me weren’t the twenties I’d given him! He’d switched them for his counterfeits. It was dark in the cab and I hadn’t noticed.

So the whole thing had been a set-up, beginning with the first guy telling me he was going to Manhattan, which he’d never intended to do. There had been no “card game”. They didn’t need “change”. I’d been royally conned by a couple of very smooth operators. Damn, I’d even told them “good luck” as they left the cab.

Ouch!

It's been just over a year now and I still have attention on the events of that shift. Had there actually been “something in the air that night”?

Yes, there had been danger without, the turbulence in the vicinity of McDonough Street.

But there had been danger within as well. Something else, the nebulous something I had been vaguely aware of, had come from within, a mental phenomenon. What exactly it was I do not know - it has not been fully viewed.

So what is one to do?

Be more alert.

Be more honest.

Try to raise your level of confront.

And may the storm pass you by.

The Best Day Of Your Life

I wrote something in my book that already needs to be revised. 

It's what I consider to be my favorite type of ride. 

Favorite Type of Ride Number Two, I wrote, is the one with the "elderly active" passenger.  That's when you get someone in the cab who's way up there in years - like over eighty - but who's still enjoying living.  I find myself exhilarated, with hope renewed that I still have many more years to go with vitality and good health. 

And Favorite Type of Ride Number One was said to be the fare with someone who's coming in from the airport who, with great anticipation, is seeing Manhattan for the very first time.  Wide-eyed and agog, this person is like a pilgrim finally setting foot in the holy land.  His excitement is contagious - I assume the role of the embedded tour guide, but with the secret agenda of absorbing his thrill vicariously.

I had a passenger a few weeks ago, however, who brought me to the realization that there is another type of ride that trumps these other two.  It's a very specific kind of ride.  It has to have a hospital as its starting point.  It has to be a man.  And it has to be the first time this man has left the hospital after having been there for many hours.  You've probably guessed what it is - it's the father of a newborn infant returning home after the birth of his first-born son or daughter.

He hailed me at the entrance of Mt. Sinai at 5th Avenue and 101st Street a little before midnight, a thirtyish fellow en route to the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn.  Although I'm always curious, I'm usually hesitant about asking anyone about why they've been at the hospital.  After all, it could be something terrible and they may not want to discuss it with their cab driver.  So I just say hello, perhaps offer some small talk, and try to give them enough space so they know if they want to talk about it, I'm approachable.  But this guy looked happy, so I jumped in.

"Visiting hours over?" I asked.

That was all it took. 

Slowly at first, suppressing emotion, and then with an open faucet of joy, he told me the story of the birth of his daughter.  Surely there can be nothing in the realm of communication between humans that is more certain to create an instant, Krazy Glue kind of bonding than this. Here was a young man who had just been through what for many will be the most dramatic episode of their lives.  Would the baby be healthy?  Will the mother be okay?  So much of everyone's future depends on the outcome - and it had all turned out fine.  A newly minted father, if he's to be any kind of father at all, is a fountain of exuberance at a time like this. 

And my passenger was.

But it had not been easy.  In labor, the obstetrician observed that the baby's heartbeat was fluctuating between too fast and too slow, a danger sign.  He therefore bypassed the natural birth process and, with his team, performed an emergency C-section.  It worked.  And a brand new, eight pound member of the human race reported in for muster.

"What's her name?"

"Harper."

He went on to explain that all the names he and his wife liked were already the names of people they knew and they didn't want anyone to think they'd named the baby after them when in fact they hadn't.  But they liked the name "Harper" because it's the name of one of their favorite authors, Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, and no one they knew had that name.  Also because it has a nice sound - "Harper".  I agreed.

"And her middle name is Francesca," he added.  "After Dr. Francesco - the obstetrician.  Who saved her life."

Somebody tells you something like that, the beauty and the correctness of the acknowledgement is so profound - you may never forget having been told such a thing.  I guess it was that which made me realize that this was my very favorite kind of ride.

Along with one other thing.  It gives me the opportunity to spring on the new parent one of my favorite, albeit corny, jokes.

First I tell him that I'm the father of a grown-up daughter myself.  Then:

"I hope you don't make the same mistake we made."

"What?"

"Don't teach her how to talk.  Go with the deaf sign language.  It will save you a fortune in telephone bills."

Always gets a laugh.

It was a half-hour ride to his place in Brooklyn.  Along the way I was able to indoctrinate the Parent Club initiate with a few gems of observation and insight that I've gathered in my tenure as a father.  I told him there are few, if any, lines of demarcation that are as distinct in your life as the line that divides Before and After the time you became a parent. 

"In looking back, you will always see it that way."

Then I told him something about his daughter.  "That tiny little baby back there that you could pick up with one hand?  In about two years, three at the most, she's going to see you doing something.  Then she's going to tell you that you're doing it wrong.  And she will be right." 

He liked that, so I felt I'd been given a green light to expound on something else. 

"You know, there's only one kind of love that can really be called 'unconditional'," I offered, "and that's the love from parent to child.  That's the strongest love that there is. It's very powerful.  It will change you.  No matter how good a person you already are, it will  make you a better one."

I believe that to be true.

He paid with a credit card and the meter spit out a receipt.  I held it out to him through the partition.

"Oh, no, that's okay," he said.

"Take it," I insisted, "it's got the date that your daughter was born on it."

Big smile. 

He took the receipt.

And we shook hands.

Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver

Well, off she goes on her own into the big old world.  Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver was officially published in the U.K., with distribution to the Commonwealth countries, on Jan. 17th.

I received a couple of advance copies on the 16th and placed one conspicuously on the dashboard of my taxi on the 17th, Publication Day, which was also a driving day for me.  It was a cheap ploy to attract attention from alert passengers onto the freak occurrence that their taxi driver had written a book about taxi driving in the same city in which they happened to be riding in a taxi.  This desperate plea for attention resulted in two sworn intentions to buy the book, several lively conversations, and in each case above-average tips.

So now I know that even if the book is a complete flop commercially, I have found yet another way to increase my tips.  Brilliant!  Or "brill", as my U.K. friends would say.

I am enthusiastic about how the book looks and feels.  The spacing of the paragraphs between the stories in each chapter is easy on the eye.  Its size and weight make it consumer-friendly, I think, and its length of 391 pages seems to me to be not too small to feel that there's not enough and not too big to confront the idea of reading it.   

And I think you'll find that the book "moves", meaning it takes you from one place to another rather effortlessly, like a ride in a taxi with a good suspension.

Now all you've got to do is get it.  And since you're a reader of this blog you are morally obligated to do so, or my agents at HarperCollins will track you down.  They know where you live!

If you're in the U.K. or in a Commonwealth country, you should be able to find it in your local bookstore.  Or if not, you can order it from Amazon.co.uk, of course.

If you're in the U.S. it can be ordered from Amazon.com. But you could also order it here for no shipping charges.

I hope you'll get it, read it, love it, and want to marry it.

And your comments would be most welcome, as always.

Be Lovely Day

My dear friend from Liverpool, Jodie Schofield, for whom I would swim the River Mersey if she asked, has requested that I lend my voice to "Be Lovely Day".

The idea is to be, well... lovely... on this coming Saturday, January 12.

Read all about it here.

And at Jodie's own blog, here: http://jodesters.blogspot.com/2013/01/be-lovely-day.html.

Brill, Jodester!

 

In Case You Missed the Radio Interview...

...and you'd like to hear it, here's a link that will bring you to the station's website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01phn2f

When you've got the website up, first click on "See all previous episodes from Up All Night" which is on the right-hand side of the page.  Then, when the next page comes up, scroll down to the episode of 02/01/2013.  Start the video and go to two hours, thirty-four minutes into the show.  That's where my interview begins, and it goes for about twenty minutes.

It says there are only five days left to hear it, and that was two days ago, so better make it quick!

The interview went quite well, I thought.  The presenter, Andy Crane, had already read the book (given to him in advance by the PR company organizing the promotions) and I think this was why the conversation moved along rather fluidly.

On The Radio Tonight

A quick announcement for anyone who may be interested... I will be doing an interview tonight on a late-night radio show in the U.K., BBC Radio 5 Live Up All Night which is scheduled to be aired at 10.30 p.m. Eastern Time in the U.S.  That would be 3.30 a.m. in the U.K.  Not exactly prime time, but, hey, one takes what one can gets.

The show is accessible on the internet, so you can hear it from anywhere in the world.

I hope you will read this in time to be able to tune in.  Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Me Bewk

Oh my God, how I have been longing to write this post.  Here's a story about something that's been in the making for a very long time.

As you may know, I started driving a taxi in New York City in 1977.  Already a writer at heart, I recognized from the start that this profession of taxi driving automatically provides a continuous source of what writers refer to as "material", and I started compiling notebooks of my more interesting fares. 

In the mid-nineties I decided it was time to take a crack at writing a book of my favorite taxi stories and I produced a relatively thin volume.  I shopped it around a bit, received some encouragement, but no bites.  I put it aside and placed my attention on other projects, mostly stage plays.

In 2006, having by then a better idea of how my taxi book should be structured, I decided to rewrite it.  I started working on the project, but, wait, we were now in the cyber-age and it hit me like a feather that a better idea would be to start a blog (this blog) first, then rewrite the taxi book.

If you've been a reader here for a long time (and I thank you), you may have noticed that at some point - around 2009 -  my posts became less frequent.  That was because there are only so many hours in a day and I was spending more and more of them writing the book. 

I am not a particularly fast writer.  I tend to turn phrases over and over until they sound just right to my mental ear, and I am a ceaseless self-editor.  These are not necessarily virtues in a writer, but I seem to be stuck with them, so I carried on in this fashion until, finally, the book, a full-sized 250 pages, was finished - yes, finished! - in the spring of 2011.

An analogy that has often been made to artistic creation is that it's like having a baby.  So much labor and care goes into the thing, and when it's finally born your dearest hope is that it will not only exist but grow and meet its potential.  You want to see that baby acquire strength and be able to make its way in the world on its own, sort of as an independent entity.  In a way, you also come to see your creation as a gift from yourself to the world, even if "the world" never knew who you were, and even if you never made a dime from it.  To know that your gift had been delivered, that it had created some worthwhile effects on those who had been willing to receive it, that would be a great satisfaction indeed.  But as many of us know, that is where the greatest disappointment awaits you.

In 1981, after two years of disciplined toil, I completed a full-length comedic drama written for the stage, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II set in modern times.  I thought then, and still do, that it was well-written enough to warrant professional production.  I tirelessly sent letters off to all sorts of theatrical enterprises and put it into the hands of whomever I could find who had hands.  My friend Ed, who reads a lot, called it "literature".  My friend Tom, a Shakespearean actor, said it was "better than Henry IV, Part II".  Wow.  And my mother described it as "a charge card at Bloomingdale's".  How could it miss?  Well, to this day A Creator Of Superior Realities has yet to have had even a staged reading.  So I know that disappointment well.

I knew, however, that the taxi book would be different because with a book, even if everything else failed, at least you could always self-publish.  And some self-published books actually do quite well.  After you've written a play or a screenplay you still have a whole series of production hurdles to jump over.  One never likes to think about what the chances are of ever making it past all these hurdles, but the sad truth is that of the vast quantity of plays and screenplays that are written, only a very few make it onto a stage or a screen.  This can be quite a slap in the face, considering the effort that went into its creation.

But this was a book, not a play, so shortly after completing it last year I began the process I have learned to loathe of sending out communications to literary agents.  The idea is: a) get a literary agent, b) the literary agent gets a publisher, c) the publisher publishes your book.  I researched the names and email addresses of dozens of agents, wrote a query letter which in itself was so well-crafted it could have won the Nobel Prize for Query Letters, and started sending them out.  After several months of this activity, though, my results were fruitless.  A few "thanks but it's not for us" replies and the rest simply never bothered to respond at all.  But I was not terribly discouraged.  I knew self-publishing was a route I couldn't be shut off from and I was pretty sure that the readers of this blog would want to read the book once it became available.  These two things kept me in motion.

And then something happened, I guess the kind of thing every blogger dreams about.  Through what might be called karma, fate, determination, intention, or just the residue of design (luck), I was able in January of this year to get the manuscript into the hands of a major publisher in England without an agent and that publisher, HarperCollins, offered me a book deal.  My book, which is to be called Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver, will be published in the U.K. in print and as an ebook this coming January, and subsequently in Canada, Australia, and Ireland.  Publication in the U.S. is still pending at this writing.

How's that for some front-page Cabs Are For Kissing news??!!!

I'd like to tell you a couple of things about me bewk.  The stories are categorized into chapters - for example there's a chapter of celebrity stories, another of road rage stories, and so on - and are connected together by an opinionated, first person narrative, kind of like if the reader were a passenger in my cab.  In fact, these stories have a verbal tradition.  I've been testing them out on passengers for over thirty years.  Nothing like having a captive audience to practice on!

I'd also like you to know that of the 108 in the book, only nine of the stories have already been published in this blog, so the book is not a compilation of what's already been written here.  You see, I've been holding out on you.  You've never read my best stories unless you've been sneaking into my room while I was sleeping. So if you were thinking, why buy the book when it's already here, fageddabowt it.  You're gonna have to fork over some dough, yo.

The truth is, I'm pretty confident you will enjoy reading Confessions Of A New York Taxi Driver.  It was a labor of love and to say I'm proud of it would be an understatement - it's my personal best, maybe even my justification for having lived.  I will be posting updates here (of course!) about exactly when it will be published in various parts of the world and how you can order a copy.  Or ten copies! 

So that's the big news.

I thank you again for being there.

:)

The American Way

As I entered the voting booth yesterday here in the United States, I was, as happens every year, reminded of what was for me a very special Election Day experience I had in 1984.  Although it's a divergence from the taxi theme of this blog, I would like to share that story with you.

In 1984, also a presidential election year, the contest was between the Republican incumbents, President Ronald Reagan and Vice-President George Bush (the elder), and the Democrats Senator Walter Mondale for president and Representative Geraldine Ferraro for vice-president, the first female to run for the second-highest office in the land in American history.  I lived in a part of Queens called Forest Hills at that time and, as it happened, that was also the area of New York City where Geraldine Ferraro made her home.  Now, my home was a one-bedroom apartment and hers was an expensive single-family house with a front and back yard, but that didn't matter.  We were neighbors.  

My polling place was located in the gymnasium of an elementary school, P.S. (Public School) 101, several blocks from my home, and I walked there at around 1 p.m. on Election Day.  As I approached the school, I could see that the place was more or less surrounded with media and police vehicles, and I realized why they were there: this was the same polling place where Geraldine Ferraro voted.  I entered the gym and as I was busy signing in (which is how registered voters record that they have shown up and cast a vote), there was some commotion around the entrance, and in came the candidate herself.

Well, the place went abuzz.  She smiled and waved to everyone and was immediately surrounded by television reporters and the like.  Many in the room, including myself, approached her to shake hands and wish her well.  And then something happened that struck me as being unseemly.  A group of Republican supporters on one side of the gym started chanting, "Four More Years", repetitively and in unison, the message being that they wanted her opponents, and not her, to be elected.  That went on for about a minute and then kind of fizzled out on its own.

Ms. Ferraro was quite used to this sort of thing, of course, and it did nothing to alter her smile nor to abate the excitement in the room.  After a while she entered a voting booth, one of those contraptions with a lever that opens and closes a circular curtain for privacy, to cast her vote.  A few booths down, I entered one of my own.  So what we had here, only several feet apart, were the candidate for the second-highest office of the United States of America and a taxi driver both exercising their right, considered sacred by many, to vote.

To me, this demonstration before my eyes of how we in America choose our leaders was a truly wonderful and inspiring event.  What I realized during my walk back home was even more wonderful and inspiring, however.  It was that when the chanting of "Four More Years" suddenly interrupted the mood in the gym, nothing happened.  Not only did none of the many police or Secret Service agents in the room move forward to hush them, no one even thought of doing so.  It was a public place and they had the right to express their opinion, period.  The freedom of speech, guaranteed to all by a constitution that has stood since 1789, is so engrained in the psyches of the citizenry that it is completely unquestioned. 

And that is the American way.   

Speed Of Particle Flow

I had a little episode a few nights ago that could serve as a model for the efficiency that is possible in today's world.  The chronology went something like this...

11:41 p.m. - I pick up two ladies, one a twenty-something, the other middle-aged, coming out of the Mark Hotel on East 77th Street.  They tell me they will have two stops, the first on Central Park South.  As we head downtown on 5th Avenue, I can tell from their conversation that they are business colleagues.

11:46 p.m. - The older woman gets out across the street from her hotel on CPS.  I'm told that the next stop will be the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square.  "Do you know where that is?" the twenty-something asks, demonstrating that she is an out-of-towner.  Any cabbie would be familiar with the gigantic Marquis.  "Sure," I reply, unoffended.

11:47 p.m. - We stop at a red light at 7th Avenue.  Looking at her in the mirror, she seems friendly so I decide to liven up the ride by making an out of the blue comment to her.  "Do you see that building on the left?" I ask, indicating the stately New York Athletic Club. 

"Yes," says she. 

"You know the Christmas song 'Santa Claus Is Coming To Town'?"

"Yeah."

"Thirty years ago I brought the man who wrote that song to that building."

Her eyes widened.  "Really!  Wow!"

Bingo, we were off to the races.  I tell her my J. Fred Coots story as we make the left onto 7th Avenue and proceed toward the Marquis on 45th Street.

11:50 p.m. - As we wait at the red light at the special right-turn-only lane at 45th Street, she asks me what time the stores close tomorrow, a Wednesday - she's catching a plane in the morning and wonders if there'll be enough time to do some shopping.  I tell her I think the stores open at 10, but caution that I can't be sure because I haven't seen that hour of the day for years since I drive the night shift and sleep in the morning.  In fact, I add, I'm not even sure that there actually is a ten o'clock in the morning, a little joke.  She smiles.

11:52 p.m. -  We pull up beside the Marquis on 45th.  Somehow the conversation has meandered onto the subject of what the odds would be of getting a passenger twice in a cab in New York City.  I wind up telling her a story about having had a Major League baseball player from the California Angels in my cab twice in two successive years.  This then leads into a related story about how the only way to have an advantage when betting on baseball is to have some inside information about particular circumstances that could affect the outcome of a game, and that these two rides had provided me with just that.  She appears to be fascinated.

11:54 p.m. - The conversation finally comes to an end.  She pays the $11.00 fare with a credit card, adding a $3.30 tip, then smiles, leaves the taxi, and disappears into the hotel.  I drive off down 45th Street toward 8th Avenue, looking for my next passenger.

11:56 p.m. - Not finding anyone after driving up 8th for ten blocks, I decide to take a break as it is almost midnight and that is routinely when I stop and eat.  I make a few turns and wind up on 59th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, a quiet block where I won't be disturbed. 

11:58 p.m. - Stepping out of my cab, I continue my routine by opening the back door to search for any debris left by passengers and, whoa, sitting on the seat is an iPhone.  I pick it up and bring it to the front for examination.  I find two things, one good and one bad.  The good is that it is not locked.  The bad is that it says it's down to only ten percent of its charge remaining, which means that if its owner doesn't call me soon, the phone will loose its charge and will likely never be able to be returned.  However, since it's not locked I am able to open the address book and look for the name of the person, I have learned from experience, who is the single best person to call for help.  And that person's name is "Mom". 

12:00 a.m. - I scroll and find Mom.  I call Mom.  The call is immediately answered because Mom thinks her daughter or son is calling.  "Hi, honey," says Mom.  I explain that I'm not honey, I'm a taxi driver in New York City who has just found this iPhone on the back seat.  She thanks me for calling, mentions that she is in Ohio, and tells me it belongs to her daughter.  I tell her the iPhone is nearly out of charge and that I'd like to leave my own cell phone number with her so that in case I'm not able to make contact with her daughter she will still have a way of reaching me after the next time she talks to you.  I give Mom my number, who then says that if she knew what hotel her daughter was staying at, she would call her herself to give her my number.  I tell her that it's likely her daughter was my last passenger and that she's staying at the Marriott Marquis hotel in Times Square.  Mom thanks me again and gets off the line.

12:03 a.m. - I am munching on my grilled chicken and whole wheat bread while adding up the money numbers thus far into the shift .  My cell phone rings.  It is my last passenger calling me from the Marquis.  I tell her I'll be there in ten minutes.

12:11 a.m. - I arrive back at the Marquis.  After a minute of waiting, my relieved former passenger approaches on the sidewalk and is reunited with her precious iPhone, which, in today's world, pretty much contains her life within it.  She thanks me profusely and offers me a twenty dollar bill as her way of showing her gratitude.  Thinking it would be noble to refuse the reward, upon seeing the bill coming toward me I accept it anyway, thinking it's important for a person's self-esteem to be able to keep their exchange in.  We chat for a minute and go our separate ways.  I stuff the bill in my shirt.          

To think that all of this - from picking up a passenger at the Mark Hotel, to having an extended and enoyable conversation with that passenger, to contacting her mother halfway across the country in the middle of the night, to reuniting the passenger with a lost possession - all of this took place within half an hour. 

Amazing.

What a world we live in today.

The Hotel Room

I have wondered from time to time if it's just because I'm getting older or if it's because the mores of our society have changed or if it's simply that I don't drive on Friday or Saturday nights anymore that have caused a particularly outrageous activity to vanish from the back seat of my taxi. No, not slopping up the upholstery with cheese nachos.

Sex.

It's been something like four or five years since it last went down. And then it annoyed me so much I threw them out of the cab in the middle of Times Square. Maybe that's what did it. But it finally happened again a couple of nights ago after such a long intermission - a throwback, it was, to the good old days.

Enter the stars of our show at exactly 1:52 a.m. at 2nd Avenue and 84th Street. She, an attractive brunette and he a not unattractive guy with a normal haircut and a bit of a beard, both twenty-somethings. There was nothing over the top about their appearance, nothing that would have made you think that defects in their character were showing up in the way they carried themselves or by the way they looked. In fact, they struck me as a couple of nice kids as they climbed in and told me their destination, 117th Street and 8th Avenue in Harlem. The girl, in particular, greeted me with a warm hello and a smile which gave me a sense of inclusion in their world, something that is appreciated by a cab driver in the middle of the night. It can be a lonely profession.

But that sense of inclusion quickly evaporated when I made a right on 83rd and headed crosstown. Their togetherness was too together for me to feel anything but excluded as she cuddled up on his chest and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. This would be another purely functional ride after all, the driver a mute extension of the taxicab itself, the passengers in their own space and bubble. So be it.

We stopped at a red light at Park Avenue. Having the chance to take my eyes off the road and glance around at the environment, I sensed that something was wrong here. Looking in the mirror, the girl had disappeared. Could she be taking a quick snooze on the guy's lap? Not unless she talks in her sleep, as her little female giggles were loud enough to carry over into the front of the cab. I feared the worst but carried on, turning right on Madison in the direction of the 97th Street transverse. Before we had progressed a block on the avenue the giggles had morphed into murmurs and there were some upper body movements of the guy which gave a further indication that what was going on in the back was an activity of the oral variety that is actually illegal in a public place.

No, not brushing your teeth.

Now, what is a cab driver supposed to do in this situation? Stick his head through the partition's window to catch the perpetrators red-handed (all right, perhaps "handed" is not the correct word here)? And if you do that, then what do you do? It's just too awkward to be confrontable. Besides, what if I poked my head through the partition and found that nothing untoward was actually going on, after all? Wouldn't that make me out to be the jackass?

So to hell with it. I would endure it all the way to Harlem if I had to. I made the left on 97th.

But then, as we began our trek across the Central Park transverse, they crossed the line. Looking in the mirror, they had assumed the "Taxicab Position" - the male sitting normally, facing forward, the female straddling him, facing the rear window. It means their activity had gone from "presumed innocent" to "you've got to be kidding" in the mind of the taxi driver. It was over the top, right in your face, and for the sake of one's dignity it begs for some kind of response.

I have two forms of retaliation to the appearance of the Taxicab Position and I immediately put the first one into motion. It is to attempt, by means of hard braking and sharp turning, to knock the female off her joystick. It's kind of like a party game like "Pin the Tail on the Donkey" - "Knock the Girl Off the Penis". So when I came to the next red light at Central Park West I slowed, then hit the brake with a noticeable thump. No good, she remained attached and continued to sway gently in place. When the light turned green I made the right on CPW as sharply as I could without putting the cab into a spin, but again it was to no avail. This girl could have a career in the rodeo.

By the time we came to the next red at 106th Street the party had ended, at least for the time being. She had dismounted somewhere around 101st and the two of them sat tight together, smiling and cooing at each other the rest of the way up to their destination at 117th. Still, it was not over as far as I was concerned. You simply cannot do this in the space of another human and not expect a settlement of accounts. This is my taxicab. This is my workplace. To fail to respond would be a humiliation in itself, an admission to myself that I was, in fact, just a mute extension of the taxicab. Something needed to be said, so the second form of retaliation was begun.

As I brought the cab to a stop at 117th and awaited payment of the $14.50 fare, I began a little end-of-ride conversation. "You know, the taxi rates just went up," I said in the general direction of the back seat. It was a true statement. There was a fare increase on September 4th.

"They did?" the girl responded.

"Yeah, there's a $10 surcharge now for the hotel room."

The guy laughed but his partner in crime did not get the joke. "I hope you're kidding," she said as she handed me a $20 bill.

I took the bill and held it in the air. "Yes... I am..." I replied, in a not unfriendly way.

"We're going to a hotel room!" she exclaimed, happy-faced, as if it were quite a coincidence that I happened to mention that.

"You've just been in one," I zapped back. Touche.

"Can I have three dollars back?" she asked, her smile still in place.

"Three dollars back," I repeated, with just the slightest hint of sarcasm. I slowly counted out the bills from my roll and offered them through the partition to whomever would take them. She moved forward to accept the money but as she did so her boyfriend interceded.

"Tell him to keep it," he told her, sotto voce style.

She paused a moment as the suggestion was processed. "Oh, you can keep the change!" she said with just the slightest hint of airhead.

"Gee, thanks," I replied in pretended surprise. I didn't need their three bucks. But this gesture in the fragile territory of Manners, Lack Of, at least did do something to compensate for their transgression.

They stepped out of the cab and closed the door. I looked over at them for a final mental snapshot and found that the girl was waving me goodbye, still smiling.

"Thanks for the hotel room!" she called back.

Means Of Exchange

Recently I had one of those iffy passengers who fell right in the middle of the Trouble/No Trouble Line of Demarcation. He might be okay, he might not be okay - I couldn't tell.

He was a twenty-something, medium height, medium weight, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, with a Detroit Tigers baseball cap topping off the package. So he looked all right as I approached him, his hand in the air, on 2nd Avenue up in the Upper East Side. But a moment after I brought the cab to a complete stop I noticed the first sign of trouble. It was a nuance thing, just a little tiny thing only a veteran cabbie would spot: it took him just slightly too long to open the rear door. Normally you stop and there is a one to two second elapse of time before you hear the click of the door handle being lifted. It took this fellow three to four seconds to accomplish that task. If he'd been with other people it wouldn't have appeared on the radar screen as he could have been saying goodnight to his friends, but this guy was alone. Figuring in the additional factors that it was two-thirty in the morning and he was in an area where there is a multitude of bars all still open even though it was a Tuesday, and it translates to the driver as only one thing:

he's drunk.

Now, some of us realize this and drive off immediately. But I'm not as quick as I used to be and, besides, it's dead slow on Tuesday at 2:30 a.m. and if I don't take this guy it could be - who knows? - half an hour before I get another passenger in my cab. And karma being what it is, that next passenger will probably be a drunk, too. So I stayed put and awaited fate. The question now became, how serious would it be with this guy? How drunk was he?

The first thing you have to do is put him through a little coherency test. Is he capable of communication? Can he tell you where he wants to go? Obviously if he can't do this the ride never begins. So you don't start driving or turn on the meter until he clears that hurdle. This guy, although he was taking too long to respond, was not so drunk that he couldn't tell me that 7th Street between Avenues C and D was his destination. So I started moving forward.

"Do you want to take the Drive?" I asked. We would either jump on the FDR Drive, a highway, or head down to Alphabet City on 2nd Avenue. The Drive would be faster.

No answer.

"Take the Drive?" I repeated.

I looked at him in the mirror. Oh, shit, he was slumping over. Immediately the possibility of three bad things presented themselves to me mentally:

a) he may vomit;

b) he may be so out of it that he doesn't realize that he has gotten into a cab and has no way of paying for the ride;

c) he may descend into complete unconsciousness and be unable to be awakened.

And now I was stuck with him. He'd given me an address, he'd closed the door behind him, and we were moving. I could think of nothing to do but hope for the best and take him where he'd said to go.

"I'm taking the Drive," I called out, knowing I was speaking to an inanimate object. I made a left on 79th and within a minute we were on the FDR's 73rd Street entrance ramp at the edge of the East River. The tension was mounting up within me. The biggest fear of the three bad things is a) above. Puke spilling out onto the back seat of the cab is a horror of Stephen King proportions to a taxi driver. But there are ways of trying to handle the vomit candidate and the best of them is to keep him talking. Unfortunately that wasn't possible with this guy. All I could do was get him to his place as quickly as possible in order to reduce his window of opportunity. So I picked up my speed and whispered a little prayer to the Patron Saint of Please Don't Throw Up In My Cab.

I took the long way to the Houston Street exit, knowing he wouldn't object, since it was the fastest way to get him there. In less than five minutes we were off the Drive and cruising up Avenue D toward 7th Street. I made the left there and steeled myself for what was to come - how bad would it be?

"So where should I stop?" I kind of yelled toward the general vicinity of the rear compartment.

Not surprisingly, once again there was no response.

I pulled the cab over to the curb, stopped, and turned around in my seat, fearing I would see the guy covered in vomit. But, hooray, there was none - just a human body lying flat on the seat in marinated slumber. My task now was merely to wake him up, a far better situation than having to clean up the former contents of his esophagus.

"Hey, buddy, we're here, wake up!" I announced.

He stirred slightly. There was hope.

I raised the volume. "Buddy, we're here - WAKE UP!"

He opened his eyes. Good man.

"We're on 7th between C and D," I said in a normal voice. "So where is your building?"

Arousing from his dreams, he looked around at his surroundings. I could see from the expression on his face that he understood that he was in a taxicab and that I was a taxi driver. So of the three possibilities listed above, he'd made it past a) and c). All he had to do now was tell me where exactly he lived and pay me the $16.30 on the meter.

"Where's you building?" I repeated.

He looked a me a bit oddly, not as if he didn't understand the words I was saying but as if he didn't understand why I would want to know. There's a certain stage of drunkenness in which the gears are turning but they don't mesh together and result in forward motion, like a car with a transmission problem.

"Your building - where is it?" I asked again, thinking if I rephrased the question I might get an answer.

"Go downa da cawna," he said, still half-asleep. This was progress. I drove down to Avenue C, made a right at the corner, and pulled into an empty space at the curb. Okay, I'd done my job, now it was time to get paid and be on my way. Time is money in my business. Or at least hopefully it is.

"It's $16.30 on the meter," I said flatly.

Silence.

I looked at him again in the mirror and saw that his head was slumped over on his shoulder and his eyes were closed. The motion of the cab on our little half-block journey to C had rocked him back to sleep. He would have looked cute if he'd been a six-year-old boy.

"It's $16.30," I called to the back in a near yell.

He stirred.

"16.30," I repeated, calmly.

He now understood that it was his job to find either $16.30 or a credit card on his person and he began to move his hands around into various pockets in his clothing in order to accomplish this task. I sensed trouble but gave him the benefit of the doubt in my mind as I awaited payment. Like many drunks he probably had the money but didn't remember where he'd put it.

I waited.

A minute went by.

Turning again to the back seat, I saw that he'd suffered a setback in his mission - he was slumped over again with eyes closed. I would have to take control of the situation. God, how I hated this, you have no idea.

"Buddy, wake up."

He stirred.

"C'mon, it's $16.30 on the meter. You gotta pay me so I can get back to work."

"...yeah...okay..."

Once again, his hands began searching. What was good here was that at least he wasn't trying to be evasive. I had no sense that he was going to try to beat the fare. From this we could progress. I still thought it was a better than even chance that I'd be paid.

So I waited.

Thirty seconds went by, but I could here the sounds of his hands patting himself down. Still hopeful.

Sixty seconds.

Nothing. Time's up.

"What's happening?" I asked in a not-friendly way.

"All I got is two dollars."

"How about a credit card? You have a credit card?"

"Uh... no..."

Damn.

"You mean you got in my cab with two dollars in your pocket and no credit card?"

"uh... well..."

And with that he resumed his search of pockets and any other crevices he could get his hands into. I was pissed but not outraged. Again, I appreciated that he wasn't trying to bullshit me. He wasn't trying to tell me to "wait here while I go get the money" and then of course you never see him again. He wasn't trying to pay with just the two dollars. To the contrary, he was earnestly, albeit drunkenly, trying to find the money which was somehow mysteriously eluding him.

Still, I wanted to get paid. So I decided to do something that has proven to be remarkably effective in similar situations in the past. And that is, to get a cop. It is amazing how often a passenger is suddenly able to find his money when a cop shows up.

Now, New York must be the most policed city in the world. In most areas of Manhattan you can't stand in the same spot for more than two minutes before a police car drives by, even at two in the morning. This can be intimidating if you're a driver and you're worried about being pulled over for some stupid infraction. But it's great if you actually need a cop.

Sure enough, after about a minute and a half of watching in my side view mirror with one eye and and keeping my attention on my passenger in the rear view mirror with the other, I spotted a cruiser coming up slowly behind me on Avenue C. I opened my door, stepped out of the cab, and waved at the cops.

They stopped beside me. As always, there were two in the car. The officer sitting on the right rolled down his window. With that blank, neutral gaze that cops have when they're entering a scene, he asked me with only the expression on his face what was up. I told him the situation: passenger, probably drunk - $16.30 on the meter - two dollars - no credit card. In unison, they stepped out of the patrol car, walked slowly to the rear of the cab, and opened the passenger's door.

"Good evening, sir, the driver says you don't have enough money to pay the fare," one of them said, flatly.

My passenger, replying in a new found coherency, indicated that he was trying to find his money, it must be here somewhere. The cop said okay, find it. After another minute of futile hand motions, Mister Sobering Up Quickly admitted to the cop that all he had was two bucks. And no credit card. The officer suggested that perhaps he could call someone who could come over and pay the fare. And added that if he could not produce the required sixteen dollars and thirty cents that he would be placed under arrest for theft of services.

That will get your attention.

Like a surreal reversal of the hit TV show Cash Cab, my passenger had a shout-out with which to call a friend and beg for help. I could almost hear the sounds of quiz show music in the background as he nervously dialed a number and waited for a connection to come through. And then, good news, his friend was on the line. He told him the situation, adding that he was about to get "fucking arrested" for not being able to pay for a taxi ride. But his face turned from hope to despair as he learned that his would-be saviour was nowhere in the vicinity at the moment and could not help him out.

Perhaps he could call someone else, the cop suggested.

He could not, my passenger replied, since he didn't know anyone else who lived anywhere around here.

The jig was up. Like a condemned man about to walk the plank, he told the officer he was out of options and resigned himself to his fate. The cop who had been standing beside the first cop came over to me and started to take my information for his police report. Meanwhile the first cop was informing my passenger in a formal manner that he was about to be placed under arrest. He had him step out of the cab and place his hands behind his back as a prelude to being handcuffed.

It was an awful scene and I was not pleased with it as I did not perceive my passenger to be an evil person. In fact, I had come to kind of like the guy. I saw him as a basically well-intentioned individual who may or may not have a drinking problem. And I admired him for not trying to insult my own or the cops' intelligence.

Being hauled off in cuffs was way too much of a penalty here. But, on the other hand, I still wanted to get paid. I knew that if he was arrested I would eventually get a phone call from the precinct informing me that I could come down and pick up my $16.30. No one was going to sit in jail for very long before somehow coming up with that relatively paltry sum. I mentally searched for a solution to the problem and after a few moments I found it.

It was sitting on his head.

I turned around in my seat and called over to the about-to-be jailbird. With the first cop's permission he leaned back into the rear compartment to hear what I had to say.

"I'll make you a deal," I proposed. "In exchange for the ride, I'll take your Tiger's cap. Give me the hat and we'll call it even."

You have never seen the word "elation" better expressed than by the look that appeared on my passenger's face. His baseball cap was immediately placed into my possession and both his hands reached forward to embrace my own as he thanked me, thanked me, thanked me from the bottom of his heart.

"The offending party and myself have reached an agreement in this matter," I declared in mock seriousness to the officer standing beside me who'd been filling out his report, "and I consider the situation to be resolved." A slight smile appeared on his face, the only expression of emotion that was made by either of them. He closed his book and walked over to where the first cop was standing, who was already sending my passenger on his way.

And so, that was that. My passenger was released from custody, headed back toward Avenue D on 7th Street, and disappeared into the shadows, hatless. I thanked the cops and they, too, quickly vanished. I was left sitting there on the corner of C and 7th for another minute, filling out the details on my trip sheet and reflecting on what had just gone down. The truth is, it would have been enough of an exchange for me to just have been thanked so profusely like that. But now I had a new hat, to boot.

All I could think was one thing.

Go Tigers!

********

That, and one other thing: click here for Pictures From A Taxi.