I'm A Free Agent

Baseball is king in New York City and has been for over a hundred years. So when the Mets fired their manager, Willie Randolph, this week it wasn't surprising that I had a few fares in which this was the topic of conversation. One fan, who happened to live in the building where Babe Ruth died on West 29th Street (the French Building, formerly the French Hospital), was particularly passionate about the turn of events. On and on he railed about the injustice of it all, the enormity of the incompetence of the owners, and the complicity of the players.

It was as if he was a member of the team himself.

When he finally calmed down, he noticed that someone was actually in the cab with him (me) and asked the question I love to hear from baseball fans: "So who do you root for, the Mets or the Yankees?"

The reason I love being asked this is because it gives me an opportunity to expound on my philosophy as a fan to the passenger, and hopefully create a convert. My answer is this: "I'm a free agent." It always brings a smile.

What is a fan who's a free agent? It's a fan who has thrown off the shackles of loyalty and set down conditions of his own by which he may choose to root or not root for a particular team. Yes, I know this kind of fan will be accused by some of not being a "true" fan or of being a "fair-weather" fan. Phooey. That's just manure that's been fed to you by propagandists. Let me tell you something. As a fan, you have a right to get your money's worth and you have a right to your own dignity. Listen here...

My history as a baseball fan has been a torturous one. I began life with the New York Giants in the 1950s for the very good reason that most people have when they become fans of teams: it was the team my father rooted for. Everything was fine until 1958 when I noticed that the first of many knives that were eventually to be found sticking in my back had been planted there by one Horace Stoneham, the owner of the team. He had moved my Giants, and my Willie Mays, to San Francisco.

Think for a moment, if you will, of the enormity of the betrayal involved here. Millions of little kids being told by their fathers that the heroes whose pictures they worship on their baseball cards were no longer around, they didn't play for "us" anymore. Little kids who had spent so many hours memorizing the most trivial details about these men - these Giants - were now being told it was all for nothing. Willie Mays, Don Mueller, Whitey Lockman, Johnny Antonelli - it was just a hoax. They don't really give a damn about you. Beat it, kid.

Nevertheless, when the Mets were created in 1962, I was first in line. Throughout all my teenage years I was devoted to the team, never deviating in my loyalty, never considering switching over to the Yankees even though they had great teams and the Mets were pathetic. And then they let Tom Seaver go because of a contract dispute. And then they painted Shea Stadium a garish blue and put five-story high neon stick figures of baseball players up as decorations. And then they installed a gigantic apple that comes out of a gigantic hat whenever a Met hits a home run.

I was developing issues with this team that were still unclear to me due to the blindness of my devotion. But in 1985, just before that season was about to begin, fate put a player of the Mets in my cab and a process of clarification began. His name was Rusty Staub, a veteran outfielder and slugger, who had been around the Major Leagues for over twenty years and was about to begin his final season as a player. Rusty was a popular figure in New York. He owned a restaurant on the Upper East Side and was reknown as a chef, even doing commercials for American Express in a chef's outfit.

Well, I of course was excited when "Le Grand Orange" (as he was dubbed when he played in Montreal due to his red hair) and the pretty blonde who was with him plopped themselves down on my back seat. As we set off for his destination (his own restaurant) I asked Rusty how it was looking for the Mets in the upcoming season. And I was pleased to see that he was quite willing to talk baseball. There was nothing aloof about the guy, and he went into quite a bit of detail about what had been going on with the Mets over the winter.

But there was something in the way he talked about the team that caught my attention. Whenever he spoke about the Mets, he always referred to them in the third person. He used the pronoun "they". Not "we" - "they". "They" signed this guy. "They" are going to give a certain pitcher a chance to make the team.

After dropping off Le Grand and the blonde, my attention fixed on this observation. The thought occurred to me that whenever I listen to a sports talk show on the radio, the callers invariably speak about the team they root for in the first person. We need pitching. We need to make a trade. As if they're on the team themselves. And yet here was a guy who was actually ON the team who didn't think of himself as a "Met". To Rusty the "Mets" were the people who acquire and release players and sign the paychecks. But he correctly knew who he was: he was a perpetual free agent who was currently leasing his services to an organization known as the New York Mets.

The psychology of this is fascinating. Apparently if you can get the potential fan to make an emotional attachment to your franchise you can lure him into forever living vicariously through the exploits of your players. Obviously, this is true. I had made that emotional attachment. But I couldn't get the thought out of my mind that if a guy who's actually on the team does not have it, then why should I?

I had reached an epiphany of sorts. My understanding had exceeded my emotion. I had become a free agent.

I started looking at baseball differently. I was appreciating the game itself more than I had before. And I looked at the Mets differently. Was this team worthy of my time? If I was going to pick out one organization to know thoroughly and to care about, should this be the one? After carefully evaluating my options, I decided that in fact the Mets and I were a good match. I continued to buy newspapers in order to read about them, to spend precious hours watching them on television, and to keep their station locked in on the radio dial in my cab.

But that changed in 1989. After assembling a championship team with a great cast of characters in the previous five years, the Mets inexplicably started to disembowel themselves, culminating in a bone-headed trade of star players Lenny Dykstra and Roger McDowell to the Phillies for an infielder named Juan Samuel. I exercised the option in my contract and traded myself to the Yankees.

Eventually I sat back and took a good, long look at what it is I expect of a team with which I was willing to enter into a committed relationship. Here are my four little rules:

1. Be competitive. You don't have to win. You don't even have to make the playoffs. But you need to come close. When September rolls around, you should have at least an outside shot at the wild card.

2. Assemble an interesting cast of characters and keep them. One of the great charms of baseball is that over time you can get to know some of the players extremely well. Good teams cultivate a core group of star players who are the backbone of the team. You don't trade these guys. If you lose them to free agency, okay. But you don't send them away.

3. Don't insult my intelligence. I don't come to a game to hear loud rock music, see fireworks, or watch a cartoon-character roll around on the infield. I come to see a game and to learn more about the game.

4. Don't allow criminals or cheats to be on the team. Somebody can throw a ball 98 miles per hour but enjoys torturing dogs in his free time? Pass on that guy.
Four little rules. If you own a baseball team and want to keep me on your roster, you'd better follow them. Otherwise, I'll walk. And it's always my walk year.

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And when I walk, I usually wind up here (at Pictures From A Taxi).

How To Get A Taxi Driver To Slow Down

Being that I am perceived by so many to be the last English-speaking, American white guy to be driving a cab in New York City, I have often found myself serving as the default complaint department for the entire taxi industry. And the complaint I hear most often is about a ride from hell in which a cabbie drove 90 miles per hour on a highway, zigzagged between huge trucks, tailgated every vehicle on the road, and yet somehow arrived at the destination without an accident.

Interestingly, whenever I hear this story it is told by the survivor with a big smile on his face. Apparently danger is great fun if you come out alive. Nevertheless, I always ask these two questions:

1) Did you put on your seat belt?

2) Did you ask the driver to slow down?

Invariably the answers I get to both questions are, "Uhhh... noooo... ha-ha-ha-ha."

Now as far as the seat belts are concerned, what can I say, obviously anyone should have put them on when being transported by a maniac, and there's no point in belaboring the point. But it's this other question that intrigues me. What is it that stops a person who clearly feels his life is in danger (which it is) from speaking up?

Well, from what I can best perceive, it's fear. Fear that the comment will further anger the driver and that will make him drive even faster, and then there will be an accident for sure. So people just say a silent prayer and hold on tight to their rosary beads and the hand straps.

These passengers, however, do understand, even if it's just on an instinctive level, that asking a driver to slow down is entering a minefield of taxicab etiquette. The truth is that, although a cabbie routinely receives substandard wages and a lower social status than his job deserves, one thing he always feels he has is his professional pride. Like being insulted by a passenger who gives directions to simple destinations (see my last post), being asked to slow down clearly implies that the driver is deficient in the one thing at which he knows he has superhuman powers: the ability to drive an automobile.

And for the most part, this is true. In New York City, anyone who has been driving a cab for two years or more is very likely to have mastered the craft of controlling a car to a level that is not understood by the average driver. It's an ability not only to be at cause over his own vehicle, but to be able to predict the motion of all other particles in the playing field - cars, buses, police cars, trucks, fire engines, ambulances, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, maniacs on roller blades, pigeons, and dogs - and make adjustments to his own motion without even thinking about it. It can be compared to a pianist whose fingers can play concertos while what he's actually thinking about it is just how much emphasis he should give to a note that is still two minutes away.

Indeed, one of the most treasured compliments ever given to me as a driver was from a passenger in my cab who turned out to be an instructor of racing car drivers. He was aware of the nuances in my driving and commented to me about it. Music to my ears!

But what can you do when the driver you are stuck with appears to be not a maestro but a madman? Aside from calling your family to tell them that you love them, here's the solution:

1) Compliment the driver on his driving skill. I mean, heap it on. Say something like, "You know, I've been watching the way you've been moving through traffic and I gotta tell you, you have awesome driving ability. It's like you're an acrobat in the circus or something. Really amazing."

2) And then say this: "But, listen, I think I ate something a little while ago that's not agreeing with me. I'm feeling like I may get sick. Would it be possible for you to drive a little slower please? "

It will work, I guarantee it. You've removed the pride button and you've given him his own personal reason for cooperating with you. The three most feared things in the life of a taxi driver are death, paralysis, and somebody throwing up in your cab.

The funny thing is, I've been giving this advice to passengers for years and then recently I had a passenger ask me to slow down because she was feeling a little nauseous!

Irony!

But that's what life is like, isn't it?

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And life is also like this: clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi.

How To Insult A Taxi Driver

Taxi drivers become pretty much immune to the unintended insults of passengers. Someone from out of town gives you a twenty-cent tip on a $5.80 fare and then tells you to "have a good night". Okay, he doesn't know about tipping. No big deal, it sails right over your shoulder.

Or a guy and a girl and go beyond the socially acceptable sitting close together while looking affectionately into each other's eyes and break out into a lip-locking, saliva-exchanging embrace, as if there wasn't another human being sitting right there in front of them. You chalk it up to crazy kids in love (with alcohol) and it flies out the window.

Or something as common as a person getting in the cab and barking out the destination without saying "please". Humph, well, okay, not gonna condemn a person in the imaginary Court of Intolerable Behavior just because of that. We'll give the guy another chance.

But there is one thing I find particularly difficult to endure. One thing that sets off a spark that gets an immediate reaction unless I practically gag myself to stop bullets from shooting out of my mouth. And I'll bet you wouldn't guess what it is.

Being told to drive faster? Or slower?

Being accused of going the wrong way?

Being asked why a smart person like yourself is driving a taxicab?

Being told how competent the cab drivers in London are?

No, it's none of these things, although the one about London cab drivers hints of it. Here's what it is: being given directions to a destination that anyone would know unless you were a complete moron. For example, a person gets in and says he's going to Penn Station. Then he tells you how to get there. He doesn't ask you if you know where Penn Station is, although that would be almost as bad. He just tells you how to get there, assuming you don't already know.

This drives me over the edge. And it happened a few nights ago.

A twenty-something guy and girl jumped in the cab at around midnight at 6th Avenue and 36th Street. In a heavily-accented voice, the young man told me they were going to 75th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Now, this is easy navigation. Really easy. All a cabbie would have to know in order to carry out this assignment would be a) where is Columbus Avenue and in what direction does it run, b) where is Amsterdam Avenue and in what direction does that run, c) where is Central Park West and in what direction does that run, and d) in what direction does 75th Street run?

All right, there might be one other thing: where is 75th Street? The answer to that is that it's the one after 74th Street. The answers to the other questions are that Columbus is the same as 9th Avenue and runs downtown, Amsterdam is the same as 10th and runs uptown, Central Park West is the same as 8th Avenue and runs both uptown and downtown, and 75th Street, like almost all odd-numbered streets in Manhattan, runs west. I grant you that if you knew absolutely nothing about Manhattan, you would not know these things. However, if you were a taxi driver, you would have mastered these basics literally on your first day or two behind the wheel. Certainly within a week.

Unless you were a complete, utter, and hopeless moron.

So I rolled uptown with the green lights all the way up 6th Avenue until we reached the point where it ends at Central Park South (another name for 59th Street) and then I turned left, heading west toward 7th Avenue. My passengers were chatting quietly to each other and had not engaged me in conversation and I had paid no special attention to them, being content to listen to the oldies station that was playing softly on the radio. But then the guy began his massive faux pas by leaning forward and starting to speak.

"Take Central Park West to 75th Street and make a left," he said.

I bristled. This is like telling a hot dog vendor how to put mustard on a frankfurter. But it got worse.

"Central Park West," he explained, "is two-ways, so you can go uptown on it. 75th Street runs west - you can make a left turn onto it."

That was the end. This was the equivalent of telling the hot dog vendor why people like to put mustard on their frankfurters. I had to retaliate.

"Where are you from?" I asked him.

"Italy," he replied.

"I drive a taxi for 30 years," I said, "and then some guy from Italy gets in my cab and tells me how to get to 75th Street! That's like me telling you where Naples is... please... I'm going to shoot myself!"

Now even though my response was gift-wrapped in sarcasm, it was intended to point out the guy's insensitivity with some humor and get a laugh. I said the same thing once to a fellow from Sweden and he took it well. But the giovanotto (that's "young man" in Italian) did not. He sat there as cold as spumoni and didn't say a word. Clearly, I had offended him.

So what we suddenly had here was a) he unintentionally insulted me, b) I tried to retain my professional pride and unintentionally insulted him, and c) I realized the vibe in the cab was now uncomfortably hostile so, always assuming that more communication is better than less, I tried to lighten things up by making small talk.

"By the way, what's the name of the body of water that adjoins Naples?" I asked. It was just something to say.

I was ignored.

Now I was offended again. I was damned if I was going to sit there and be insulted and then be insulted again by being ignored. I raised my voice slightly and put an edge on it. "Excuse me," I repeated, "what's the name of the body of water that adjoins Naples?"

"The Tyrrhenian Sea," the girl replied in her own pleasantly accented voice.

"Thank you."

And that was it on the peace-making. The remaining 60 seconds of the ride were spent in a silent chilliness that could be likened to the Arctic Ocean at midnight, with a supercheap tip at the end and a brief, two-way staring fight between myself in the cab and the guy as he ascended the steps to his brownstone.

I felt bad that what should have been a pleasant ride home for these people had instead wound up in a whirlpool of hostility.

But not as bad as I would have felt if I'd let the insult go by unchallenged.

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And also not as bad as a I would have felt if I'd neglected to mention that you can click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Tagged

I have been tagged by my cyber buddy Jodester, author of the never-fails-to-bring-a-smile blog, DON'T PANIC, and now I am charged with the responsibility of writing six "random things" about myself, and further charged with the task of tagging six other bloggers. And not only that, there was an implication that it would be rude not to participate.

Oh god, the burden of these social commitments! Now I know how Henry Kissinger must feel!

My approach to my own blog has been that it's more about them, not so much about me. Or maybe I should say it's about me commenting about them. My view is that it's more virtuous to be interested than it is to be interesting. (Not to say that there's anything wrong with being interesting, too, of course.) So having said that and therefore washed away any guilt about becoming self-indulgent, okay, Jodester, here are six random things...

1. I am a creature of habit. I eat almost the same exact meals every day of the week.

2. When I was 19 I was a student in Kenya for half a year and narrowly escaped encounters with a rhinoceros, an elephant, and a swarm of killer bees.

3. I was at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan "went electric".

4. I grew up in Levittown, Long Island, the world's first sprawling suburban housing development. (The house I grew up in, the 1951 model, cost my parents $8,000 and came with a television built into the living room wall.)

5. My oldest and closest childhood friend was Bill O'Reilly.

6. In 30 years of taxi driving, I have never hit a pedestrian. Every time you think you've got one, somehow they slip out of the way!

Okay, I am now tagging the following bloggers:

1. Lucky 327 at NYC Taxi. A fellow NYC taxi driver, writer, and photographer.

2. Fee at Five Corners at Claonairigh. She writes about family life at a Scottish B&B. (No, I can't pronounce it, either.)

3. Angela at Pondring. Perhaps the world's greatest Dave Matthews fan.

4. John at Dublin Taxi. Dublin taxi driver who claims there are more taxis in Dublin than in NYC. Can this be true???

5. Bob at Taxi Tales. Insightful taxi driver in a place called Furness, Cumbria, in the U.K.

6. Mike at Mike's Mixed Memories. A retired Maine-er with a wealth of knowledge.

The rules, if you want to play, are:

- link to the person who tagged you (me)

- post the rules on your blog

- write six random things about yourself in a blog post

- tag six people you know in your post

- let each person know they are tagged by writing a comment on their blog

- let the tagger know your post has been published.




And one other thing. Just click here for Pictures From A Taxi!

A Lab, A Mortician, And A Gorbachev

Some recent "fares of the night"...

Sunday, April 6, 10:20 pm - My long dog-less streak finally ended with the arrival of Jake, a Golden Lab, and Mitchell, his buddy, who traveled from 14th and 8th in Chelsea down to Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan. It had been so long since I'd had a dog in my cab - not one since November - that I was beginning to think my taxi had been entered onto some kind of canine blacklist. Why were the dogs avoiding me? Didn't seem fair, especially considering the great publicity I've been giving them. Maybe it's just that people don't bring their dogs outside as much in the cold weather as they do in the warm - a law of averages thing. But now that it's springtime, c'mon dogs, no excuses - you've got my scent.

Anyway, Mitchell tells me that Jake is 11 years old and is a great companion. He and Jake hooked up when a former girlfriend wanted a dog. But when that relationship ended, Mitchell's bond to Jake was stronger than the girlfriend's, so it's been the two of them ever since.

Monday, April 14, 2:00 am - it sometimes happens in a conversation that person A is just dying to tell person B something that will really impress person B, really create the BIG EFFECT, and the slightest provocation will be reason enough for person A to suddenly detour the conversation in the direction of the shocking revelation. It was like that on a late night ride I had way out to Fresh Meadows in Queens with a 30 year-old woman who, as we headed into the Queens Midtown Tunnel, responded to my comment that the congestion tax was "dead" by saying that she is studying to be a mortician.

Well, you know that when someone says that that the rest of the ride will be spent discussing dead bodies and undertakers. Someone tells you she sells insurance, no big deal. Someone tells you she's a chef, great, that sounds nice. Someone tells you she's a mortician - you've got my full attention. It's like someone telling you she's a hooker. Full attention.

The story from my passenger was that she'd been studying to become a forensic psychologist - that's someone who counsels criminals - but realized as she was nearing the completion of her schooling that the idea of listening to people tell her about the horrible crimes they'd committed was utterly reprehensible to her and she'd be miserable doing it. She decided she preferred to work with dead people (she actually said this) and began a course of education leading her into that field.

So how do you become a mortician? First you have to go to a college that has a mortuary science department and get a bachelor's degree. And then you have to do an internship in real funeral parlors.

"What do you have to do to finish the internship?" I asked.

"You've got to do forty cadavers," my passenger replied.

Looking at her in the rear view mirror - she had shoulder-length, straight black hair and a pale complexion - the squeamish thought crossed my mind that this is the last person to get her hands on you, the last person to touch you, yet this was a person you would never see. I found myself waxing poetic on her, equating her in my mind to an angel who helps prepare the soul for its journey into the next life. But this balloon fizzled when the conversation turned to the business of undertaking.

"What do you think of cremation?" I inquired.

"Not much," she replied with a scowl.

I knew what she meant. I feel the same way about pedestrians.

Tuesday, April 15th, 1:06 am - like the mortician, this passenger was a person who needed only the slightest prompting to suddenly tell me all about who he was. I picked him up on 52nd and 8th and, as we were driving uptown on Central Park West toward his 95th Street apartment, I mentioned that I sometimes see racoons crossing CPW late at night. For some reason this was all he needed to inform me, in a Russian accent, of two vital pieces of information:

a) that he was an accomplished artist, and

b) that he was Mikhail Gorbachev's nephew.

His name was Yuri Gorbachev and with his exuberance in telling me about his art, his uncle, and his affilitation with Absolut vodka, I think it would be fair to say Mr. Gorbachev could be described as the opposite of an introvert. He could also be described as a good sport as he playfully agreed to pose for this photograph:

If you'd like to find out more about him and his art, click here.

And as long as you're in a clicking mood, why not put your index finger to good use by clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi?

License Plates

I am a person who knows quite a bit about license plates - it's one of the little bonuses you get when you've been sitting in traffic jams for 30 years.

In the United States, each state has its own distinctive plate and most of these have a slogan imprinted on them, usually right beneath the numbers. Sometime in the '80s I thought it would be cool to memorize each state's slogan and then, once I'd done that, to challenge passengers to "ask me any state and I'll tell you the slogan" (if it has one). Rarely would I be stumped and it was (and hopefully still is) a little entertainment for my passengers, if they can tear themselves away from these damned televisions all NYC cabs now have in the rear compartment.

Most of these slogans are really advertisements for how great that state is or why you should go there and spend your money. Maine's slogan, for example, is "Vacationland". Louisiana's is "Sportsman's Paradise". But there are a few that go against the grain, and these are my personal favorites:

1. Oklahoma - "Oklahoma Is OK". This slogan is taken from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! and if you know the show and the song itself you would know that what they're really telling you is, hey, Oklahoma is a really swell place, why don't you come on over sometime? But if you weren't familiar with the show you could easily imagine that the people who thought this thing up must have low self-esteem. "Oklahoma? Well, to be honest, it's not really that great... it's, well, you know... okay."

2. Missouri - "The Show-Me State". Here's a slogan that clearly says, "I don't trust you." Which is awfully close to just saying, "Fuck you!" Gotta love a state that's upfront with its hostility. But maybe if they start to feel better about things they might consider changing it to "The Anger Management State".

3. New Hampshire - "Live Free Or Die". Uh, aren't we being just a bit extreme here? Couldn't we work out a compromise? How about "Live Free Or Live Not Quite Completely Free"? Or "Live Free Or Live A Bit Encumbered By Circumstances We're Not Fully In Control Of"? I mean, do we have to die?

Here in the States, if owners of cars pay an extra fee, they can have their plates personalized. These kinds of plates can be messages which have meaning only to a few people, like this one...

...or they can be Messages To The World, which can be quite interesting. Now that I'm armed with a camera, I've taken to snapping shots of these kinds of plates whenever I can pull up to them at a red light. So, for your viewing pleasure, please check these out...

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Say what? You want more? Well, dude, just click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Psycho

Driving a cab in New York City is like having a private little observation booth from which to observe that most peculiar of the Earth's species, the human race. Any broad observation lends itself to categorization and people can be placed into all sorts of categories, of course, but the two most important ones from a taxi driver's point of view are simply the ones all passengers are placed into as they enter the cab: okay or not okay.

"Okay" is anyone who doesn't cause trouble and pays the fare.

"Not okay" is everyone else.

Like workers on an assembly line who deal with the same particles day after day, a taxi driver can usually spot the slightly defective widget almost instantly. It's a filtering system that automatically detects the oddity and sets off an alarm in the driver's mind that commands him to watch this one carefully.

But every once in awhile somebody slips through. He or she seemed fine but then, oh my god, I have been fooled - this person is trouble! I have a certain amount of anger and frustration when I find myself in this situation (because I should have been sharp enough to spot it), but I also have some fascination at being given an opportunity to observe this type of personality in action. Because, after so many years of driving a cab, if someone can slip under my radar, then, man, this guy must be good! And from observing this person, I may be able to learn something.

All of which leads me into telling you about a fare I had a couple of Saturdays ago.

I picked up this person at Penn Station a bit after midnight. He was a twenty-something white male with neatly combed dark hair, normal height and weight, and rather conservative looking, like he might be a young banker or something. He wanted me to take him way out to Douglaston into the farthest reaches of Queens, close to a twenty-mile ride. It's not a fare I want on a Saturday because Manhattan is totally busy all night long and with this passenger I will have close to half an hour of dead time on the return ride without anyone in the back seat. And that's money lost. Nevertheless, I gave him no attitude whatsoever and just started driving across 36th Street en route to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

Without my even thinking about it, my passenger had cleared the "Okay" hurdle - he showed no signs of being a candidate for inappropriate conduct, danger, or beating the fare - so I wasn't paying any special attention to him. He told me that when I got out of the tunnel to take the Long Island Expressway to the Douglaston Parkway exit and that he would direct me from that point on. That was fine with me because I haven't had a fare to that part of Queens for five years and certainly don't know the streets out there. So off we went.

As is my normal procedure when the passenger is alone and it's going to be a long ride, I tossed out a couple of comments to see if he was a conversationalist.

He wasn't.

In fact, his demeanor was kind of blank. It was hard to get a read on this guy. He was neither hostile nor friendly, but, whatever, it didn't matter. Some are chatty and some ain't, I don't take it personally. So I turned the radio up a bit to keep myself entertained as we got through the tunnel and began our trek on the L.I.E. Otherwise it would have been a long, silent ride and that in itself can be a little uncomfortable when two people are together that long without any conversation.

The trouble began as we approached the Douglaston Parkway exit. What should happen when a passenger has elected to give directions is that he should be right on top of things. Instead my passenger wasn't paying attention to where we were on the expressway and I had to bring it to his attention that I was approaching the exit which he had told me to take.

"I get off here, right?" I called back to him, wanting to be totally sure we'd had no misunderstanding.

He didn't respond immediately, so I repeated the question. Looking at him in the rear view mirror, I feared I might find him slumped over in a deep sleep or something. But he wasn't asleep. He was looking forward with that blankness I had noted when he got in the cab.

Finally he responded with one word: "Yeah."

This guy had now become visible on my radar screen. He wasn't responding normally and I began to get the idea that there may be trouble ahead. It wasn't any kind of personal danger signal. It was more of a somehow-I'm-not-gonna-get-paid signal or a some-other-kind-of-trouble signal. I went on full alert, particularly because this was a very long ride and if I got beat it would be a loss of $40 or more, and that, combined with the dead time coming back to Manhattan, would really hurt.

We proceeded along a service road that ended at a red light at the intersection of Douglaston Parkway. He should have told me well before we arrived there in which direction to turn, but he said nothing.

"Left or right?" I asked.

There was a pause. Then, "Right".

I turned in the direction indicated and went straight ahead for about half a mile, waiting for further directions, but none came. I checked him in the mirror, again wondering if he'd fallen asleep, but, no, he was fully conscious.

"Just keep going straight?" I asked again, feeling a need to be reassured that he knew where he was going.

"Yeah."

I thought it would be a good idea to re-establish the understanding we had that I needed directions from him, so I reminded him to keep an eye on where we were going so I'd know where to turn. He replied that, yeah, he knew that and to just keep driving straight.

Which is what I did for about another mile until we came to a red light. And that's when this fare descended into the ride from hell. For me.

We sat at the light for twenty seconds or so. There were no other vehicles anywhere around, so the silence and stillness around us amplified the tension I was feeling being around this guy. And then he said this:

"Where have you taken me?"

Oh, shit. I was alone in the middle of relatively nowhere with a nut. Or at least he might be a nut.
"Where have I taken you? What do you mean? I've taken you where you told me to take you."

"Where are we?"

"I don't know - we're on Douglaston Parkway, where you told me to go!"

"You made a wrong turn."

I turned around and looked him straight in the eye through the opening of the partition. "Look, buddy," I said with barely contained anger, "how could I have taken a wrong turn when I went where you told me to go? I was following your directions!"

He just sat there staring at me without saying a word, the expression on his face indicating that he was of the opinion that I was somehow trying to deceive him.

The light turned green, but I didn't move the cab an inch. We just sat there in the middle of the road - no other cars around - in a bizarre, stony silence. The meter clicked an additional 40 cents due to the waiting time.

"The meter's running. Why aren't you moving?"

"I'm not moving because we don't know where we're going!"

I was becoming furious and it was showing in my voice which, although restrained, had been raised a couple of decibels.

"Why are you raising your voice to me?" he replied in a calm, even tone.

Oh my god, the guy was a bona fide psycho. The normal and expected reaction of a passenger in this situation is to be apologetic or at least supportive toward the driver as it was obviously he who has caused the problem. But this guy was not trying to create a resolution to a simple, human situation. He was turning it into a mind game, with he being the matador and I the bull.

And I was stuck in a taxicab with him in the middle of the night with no one else around.

I tried to calm myself down, realizing that, psycho or not, I was somehow going to have to handle this guy and my own indignation and anger at him were not going to be the way to go. I tried to negotiate. "Okay," I said calmly, "what are we going to do here? Where are you trying to go? To somebody's house?"

"I don't see why I should have to keep paying because you're lost."

I looked at the guy in the rear view mirror. "Look," I replied, using all my restraint to keep from screaming at the son of a bitch, "if you think I'm trying to rip you off, I'll tell you what - you just tell me what you expect to pay for this ride and that's what the price will be."

I was of course outraged that I would feel I needed to placate somebody who was so clearly out of line, but that is something a cab driver can always say to make peace with the customer. The expected reaction is then one of conciliation. The passenger should feel at ease and whatever the level of affinity had been before the problem began should be restored. But that's only if you're dealing with a sane person.

What this guy said was - nothing. Instead he got on his cell phone and called someone. The conversation took about a minute, during which time we continued to just sit in the middle of the road at the traffic light, my passenger uttering occasional mono-syllables and myself feeling the effects of severe mental stress. During his chat I heard him say the words "train station".

I turned around and spoke to him. "Do you want to go to the Douglaston train station?"

"Yes."

It was the only piece of information I needed.

"Then we should have turned left at the light when we got off the L.I.E. The train station is north of the L.I.E."

"I told you to go north at the light."

"You told me to go right at the light."

Those turned out to be the last words we spoke to each other until we arrived at the station five minutes later. But rather than having a feeling of relief that our mutual problem had been solved, I instead continued to experience great anxiety during these five minutes about what might happen next. Would he jump out of the cab at the station without paying me? Would he insist that he'd been ripped off and pay me a fraction of what was on the meter? Or would he come up with some other completely unexpected insanity? I was stressing out.

This guy was driving me crazy!

When we got to the train station the meter was $47.80. He handed me three twenty dollar bills and left the cab without another word. A $12.20 tip, excessively high.

Now you might think that this meant that he was sorry about the hard time he'd given me and wanted to make it up to me. But there was no smile, there was no "sorry", there was no indication in any way that that's what he intended. Instead, his act of handing me the money and leaving without a word was in itself another strange action that left me feeling ill at ease.

Nevertheless, I was glad the ordeal was over and that I'd been overpaid. I drove off quickly, noting that he was getting into the driver's side of a parked car as I pulled away.

In retrospect, I found that I couldn't stop thinking about this ride. Experienced as I am, I did not see this guy as just another difficult passenger. No, this guy was more than that. He has a special significance which, if understood, I think provides a valuable "life lesson", and I'd like to share that insight with you.

You noticed that I referred to this guy as a "psycho". I wasn't using the term loosely. We often think of a psycho as a wild-eyed maniac with a gun in his hand. Or someone screaming nonsensical babble as he walks down the street. Those are the easy ones to spot.

But there's another understanding of the term that I like much better because it helps us spot the most insidious of our species. It's someone who is motivated by a continuous intention to harm or destroy. This person is also a "psycho" but is much harder to detect than the loud ones because he can go through life seeming to be a normal person. But if you look closely at this character, you will find a path of destruction everywhere he's traveled.

I looked back at my own thirty minutes with this passenger. Instead of having a pleasant experience with this guy, instead, for no rational reason whatsoever, I was put through the hoops of anger, frustration, anxiety, and resentment. I felt genuine relief to be rid of him.

Then I imagined what my life would be like if this guy was my boss. What would it be like if he was my brother? What kind of existence would a woman have who was married to this guy? Or, worst of all, what if he was your father when you were still a little kid?

Your life would be hell. Your days would be filled with endless problems that would never be solved and you would experience stress all the time. Your confidence and self-esteem would be nonexistent. You would conclude that life was no fun and you might even become suicidal.

Do you know someone who's causing you trouble all the time? Upon close inspection, is it your honest opinion that this person is motivated by a continuous intention to harm or destroy? Does this person leave a path of destruction everywhere he or she has been?

If so, take some advice from a taxi driver.

Get this person out of your life.

Bernie The Bartender

Back in December of 2005 the Transit Workers Union in New York was making a lot of news with threats of a subway and bus strike if a settlement was not reached with the city by the 19th of that month. I thought it was just a lot of noise and would never happen.

But a passenger who was in my cab on the 18th disagreed with me. He predicted the strike would indeed occur and we had a lively conversation on the subject all the way from the Midtown start of the ride to its conclusion in Astoria, Queens. In fact, the conversation led to a bet. If the strike happened he would get a free cab ride and if it didn't he would pay me double the meter - should he ever ride in my cab again.

Seemed like a safe bet to me.

Well, to my surprise, there was indeed a subway strike the next day. It lasted three days, paralyzed the city at the height of the Christmas season, and made life miserable for everyone except cab drivers - we did great!

I was counting my money for weeks but in the back of my mind I knew this guy was out there somewhere looking for his free ride. I found myself thinking, after having a good money night, that, yeah, sure, I just had a good night, but what if that guy I owe the free ride to had gotten in my cab? It wouldn't have been such a good night then, would it have been?

As time went on I would go through phases. For a while I would be cocky, thinking Ha! He'll never catch me! And at other times I'd resign myself to my fate - yeah, as sure as the sun rises, this guy is gonna wind up in my cab again. And then I'll have to pay! A black cloud was beginning to find that it enjoyed hanging out over me.

Well, if you read this blog you know how I feel about fate. It took nearly two years, but he finally tracked me down last September. If I'd been a little sharper I would have recognized him from the street and just kept on driving. But I'm not as fast as I used to be so I stopped the cab when he hailed me and then realized too late what I'd done as he sat down in the back seat.

"You! It's you!" I exclaimed.

"You! It's you!" he replied.

The Reaper had arrived and there was no way I was going to be able to weasle out of it, so I thought, why try? I just told him right off, okay, a bet's a bet and I always pay my bets, so this ride is free. And headed off to Astoria. And I'm thinking maybe it's best to just put this thing behind me and start enjoying life again.

But he wouldn't hear of it.

In an act that can be described only as a blatant disregard for the welfare of others in general and for me in particular he refused to let me settle the debt I had incurred and then went so far as to give me an extremely generous tip despite my protests. And to make matters even worse, he did all this while maintaining a cheerful disposition and engaging in a friendly conversation.

More time passed and it seemed I might never recover from this assault to my self-esteem. I had been turned into a welsher and now a new black cloud had settled in over my domain. My life had gone from merely miserable to completely horrible and I didn't see any way out.

Until I came up with a plan which, I'm happy to say, I was able to execute two nights ago.

I knew it was just a matter of time before I'd get this guy in my cab again. That's just the way life is. So on Tuesday it happened and I was ready for him. I knew it would do no good to bring up the subject of my continued indebtedness so I didn't even mention it and drove him once again out to Astoria, once again enjoying a lively conversation with him, and once again receiving an outrageously generous tip.

But then I tricked him. I told him about this blog and got him to agree to let me take his picture. And here it is...

His name is Bernie and he works as a bartender at a bar inside one of the best hotels in town, the Michelangelo on 7th Avenue and 51st Street.

Now here's what I need you to do. The next time you're in New York put it on your list of things to do to drop in at Bernie's bar in the Michelangelo. Start a conversation with Bernie. You'll find him to be one of the friendliest guys you've ever met. Then, as you're about to leave, put a scowl on your face and tell him you know all about him because you read about him in Cabs Are For Kissing and slam an extravagently generous tip down on the bar just before you head for the door. He'll never know what hit him.

And Revenge, thou sweetest berry on the vine, shall be mine.

******

Also for your "to do" list: click here for Pictures From A Taxi. Please... don't make me beg.

Goodbye, Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani has dropped out of the presidential race and, like the Munchkins who showed up after Dorothy's house came in for a landing, I feel it's safe to emerge from the hole I've been hiding in since he announced he was running over a year ago, and air it out about this guy. Actually I was going to write this post whether he won or lost in Florida, but the fact that I no longer have to worry that Giuliani is going to be our next president does make me feel a bit more comfortable at my keyboard, I must admit.

I have an unique perspective about Giuliani, one that you wouldn't hear from the usual political commentators. I can write about him from the point of view of a taxi driver who was directly affected by him for the eight years he was in office, from 1994 - 2001. When you're a taxi driver in New York, although you're deemed an "independent contractor", in reality the conditions of your working life are very strongly influenced by the government agency called the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which is headed by its own Chairman. This person is appointed by the mayor and, if the mayor is a strong-willed, hands-on guy like Giuliani, he pretty much does whatever the mayor says he should do.

So in a sense a taxi driver is only two steps down from having the mayor as his boss. Therefore, to that extent, I know Giuliani.

For the first four years, I liked him. The changes I noticed about New York were that the "squeegee" guys disappeared and the numbers of hustlers and destitute on the streets were greatly reduced. This was attributed to his policies. But then, from the moment he was re-elected in 1997 (and could not be elected again due to the term limit law), it was as if an acorn had dropped on his head and he just went wild in taking New York from being not merely a safer place than it had been before, but to what many were saying was a similarity to a police state.

The first sign of trouble I noticed was this: only a couple of weeks into his new term in 1998, a man got in my cab who was in a state of agitation and apparently needed to tell anyone who would listen what had happened to his brother the previous night. His brother, he said, owned a bar on the Upper East Side. A man and a woman whom he'd never seen before entered the bar, put a quarter in the juke box, and started to dance. This dancing was witnessed by two people sitting at the bar who turned out to be undercover cops. They promptly got up and wrote his brother a summons for $2,000 for allowing dancing in his bar when he does not possess a cabaret license. 

It turned out this was a law that had been sitting on the books for a hundred years and up until then had rarely, if ever, been enforced. And it was not an isolated incident. I heard numerous similar stories as time went on and concluded that this was part of a citywide sweep that could only have come from the mayor himself, as no police commissioner in his right mind would ever dream of sending his cops out to do such mean-spirited and absurd enforcement. It has been conjectured, and I believe it, that the two "dancers" were themselves cops, which would have made this operation nothing better than a set-up.

 
One thing is not conjecture, however. If you go into any bar in New York City today and look around at the walls, you will find a sign that states quite clearly for all to read: NO DANCING PERMITTED.

It turned out this no-dancing-in-bars action was a harbinger of things to come, particularly for taxi drivers. Within weeks we were hit with a bolt from the blue. The mayor announced new rules for taxi drivers and taxi owners. Using statistics about increasing traffic accidents (which turned out to be false) as his justification, these were some of the conditions we suddenly had to contend with:

1) If a taxi driver was being ticketed for a moving violation, he would receive not one, but two summonses. One from NY State, like always, and an additional one from the Taxi and Limousine Commission. One offense, two tickets. (Many months later, this was struck down by the courts.)

2) If a taxi driver accumulated six points on his driver's license within 18 months he would automatically have his hack license suspended for one month. Six points is normally the equivalent of two moving violations. This rule applied not only if you were ticketed while you were driving your taxi, but also if you were driving your own personal car. Thus a taxi driver could make an illegal turn in Wyoming and lose his job for a month in New York City. (This rule still stands, except it's been reduced to 15 months.)

3) Owners of taxi medallions were required to submit a list of all their personal assets to the government.
Following this decree from Giuliani, resistance, previously non-existent, began to build. A group formed calling itself the Taxi Workers Alliance and made attempts to protect the rights of taxi drivers. Using nothing but word of mouth and flyers distributed by hand, they called for a one-day strike in May, 1998. Amazingly, the word spread like fire and on that particular day it was impossible to find a yellow cab in the city.

 
I considered this to be a labor miracle. I had been saying for 20 years that the biggest problem of the taxi industry in New York was that there was no union. Drivers were powerless to stand up to the whims and injustices perpetuated against them by the powers-that-be and yet here, at last, was at least a real attempt to correct that situation. I was exhilarated.

Giuliani went on television that night and with a crooked smile on his face made this sarcastic comment:

"You know, the streets were nice and empty today. It was nice. They should do it more often."

 

He then stonewalled the people who were trying to represent the drivers. He wouldn't even speak with them.

 
However, he did do this: he sent his police force out to ticket taxi drivers for any imaginable offense for the next two years. There was no question, if you were a taxi driver from 1998 through 2000, that "the heat" was always on. Even if you were not pulled over yourself, on any given day you could observe in disturbing numbers the other cabbies who had been. Plus there were the endless stories you heard from these drivers and even from passengers about the harrassment taxi drivers were being subjected to.

I heard stories of drivers being ticketed because the receipt paper sticking out of the meter from the previous ride had not been torn off. Or an entry was missing from their trip sheets. Or a driver was wearing a shirt with no collar. Or he was wearing sandals. A friend of mine who had been a taxi driver for 25 years was pulled over by one of the TLC patrol cars and written up for several such tickets. Rather than sacrifice his own sense of dignity by paying them, he instead mailed his hack license in to the TLC, quitting the business.

It was abundantly clear to me that taxi drivers as a group had been singled out by Giuliani as targets for punishment. But whenever the subject came up in my cab (and it was a daily topic of conversation), the question I always heard was, "Why?"

 
What did Giuliani have against taxi drivers, anyway?

 
I never had an answer for that question.

 
Not until a passenger in my cab volunteered some information in the year 2000 that made sense to me. He was a middle-aged man going on a long ride up to the North Bronx and in the course of conversation mentioned that he was a police officer who worked "in the mayor's office". This interesting statement of course led to an in-depth conversation about Giuliani and eventually this man asked me a rhetorical question: "Why do you suppose," he asked, "the mayor has been so tough on three groups - the taxi drivers, the food vendors, and the video store operators?"

I didn't know the answer yet but I did know that aside from my own group, these other two industries, particularly the food vendors, had often been under attack during Giuliani's reign. The answer then given to me by my passenger was this: 

"These groups currently all have within them large numbers of Muslims. The mayor sees Muslims as being terrorists."

I don't repeat this comment as if it were a matter of fact or anything that Giuliani ever said in public. It can easily be dismissed as hearsay. I'm just saying that, given everything I knew about how Giuliani conducted himself, this statement was the only explanation I ever heard that made sense to me. It fit, in my opinion.

 
Of course, this conversation took place well before 9-11 and in hindsight some people might say Giuliani was right. But obviously it is fundamentally wrong - and dangerous - to lump entire groups of people together and make them targets for attacks from government agencies because some of them may be criminals. That's how genocides get started.

So I was deeply concerned that this man could possibly get his hands on the United States military and the nuclear arsenal. And even more concerned when he was actually leading in the polls. I had serious questions about the ability of the voters to see through a person like this.

But I was wrong. Rudy put all his resources into the Florida primary and came away with only 13 percent of the vote and one delegate to the convention. And then he quit. The voters had more sense than I had given them credit for, and it has rehabilitated my confidence in the democratic process.

So in that sense, now that he's lost, I'm actually glad he ran.

 
The "streets" of political thugs are much emptier now.

It's nice.

Maybe he should do it more often.

Then again, maybe not.

********

But one thing anyone should seriously consider doing more often is clicking here for Pictures From A Taxi.

The Three Strikes And You're Out System

Quite often, after a passenger learns that I've been driving a cab in New York City for thirty years, they will ask me if I've ever been held up.

"You mean tonight?" is my usual wiseass reply.

"Noooo... ever!"

"How many times would you guess?" I ask.

They think about it for a minute, doing some kind of math based on a thirty-year time span.

"Ten?"

"Nope."

"Twenty?"

Wrong again. Sorry to disappoint anyone who's hoping to get a juicy tale out of me, but the answer is actually ZERO. Throughout all those years in the '70s and '80s when New York had such a high crime rate, I was driving cabs that had no partitions to protect me from passengers and I was taking people to the worst neighborhoods in the city almost every night, yet I have never been the victim of a robbery. I've had people rip me off by not paying the fare, sure, and once a kid on the street tried unsuccessfully to grab the money that was in my shirt pocket, but I've never had a passenger pull out a weapon or in any way attempt to separate me from my money. Never.

When I tell people this, what I usually hear is, "Knock on wood."

Like hell I will. If I thought it was luck, then I would also think that any day now my luck is about to run out. It isn't luck.

I have a system...

Many years ago - I think it was in 1978 - I had a conversation with a passenger in my cab which may have saved my life. The passenger was a woman who was an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn. Our conversation had to do with violent crime, a subject that was on everybody's mind in the city in those days. She told me she had prosecuted hundreds of violent criminals and had come to this conclusion: the one you think it is, it is.

"The one you think it is, it is." Those words remained in my consciousness, big time, and it led to the development of my taxi driver's anti-crime system. What she meant was that people who commit stupid, violent crimes look the part. And holding up a cab at gunpoint or knife point in the hope of getting, what? - a couple of hundred dollars? - is a really stupid crime because the idiot is risking years in jail in order to get so little.

The beauty of it, if you want to call it that, is that someone who is that stupid is also not smart enough to dress up in a three-piece suit in order to fool the cab driver. Because if he was smart enough to do that, he wouldn't commit the crime in the first place. He'd commit a different kind of crime, like stealing pocketbooks in restaurants, instead.

After you drive a cab for six months or so you begin to become quite familiar with the various types of passengers you tend to get on any given day. Generally speaking, your customers are people who can afford to pay the fare and fit into certain categories, like business travelers, tourists, working New Yorkers, etc. So the odd person who does not fit into one of these categories stands out like a sore toenail and that is the person you pay careful attention to.

And that is where my system begins.

STRIKE ONE: the passenger looks like Godzilla and I would have driven right past him without stopping, but somehow this guy (it's never an unaccompanied female) made it into my cab anyway. Maybe I was stopped at a red light and he got in or maybe he got in before the previous, departing passenger could close the door, but one way or the other, there he is in my cab. I am stuck with him.

When I say he "looks like Godzilla" what I mean is that he looks like a thug. This is a guy who, to my eye, looks conceivably like someone who is low-life enough to think it would be worthwhile to stick up a taxi driver. It is a judgement call by me based on years of experience. I do not compromise my own reality.

However, this is only Strike One. I do not make any attempt to get him out of my cab or give him a hard time. I merely ask him where he wants to go and start driving in that direction. If the place he wants to go is a well-populated street in a decent part of town, I have no problem with it. Even a stupid criminal is smart enough not to try to stick you up in the middle of Herald Square. But if he wants to go to the South Bronx at two in the morning, then it's...

STRIKE TWO: he's taking me to a bad part of the city at a time of the night when I don't feel safe going there. If the guy is planning on holding me up, this is where he wants me to be. He could direct me to drive into a dark, deserted street in an area where he feels safe and commit the crime there.

When a passenger has two strikes, I have a distinctly uneasy feeling about him. The fare seems wrong. My instincts tell me I am heading into trouble. This is the critical time for a cab driver. The incorrect thing to do is to "hope". You don't want to find yourself in that dark, deserted street with this guy. On the other hand, it would also be wrong to refuse to drive him there. Maybe he's okay. But you don't know that yet, and what must be done at this point is to find out.

I emphasize "must be done". Finding out if this guy is intending to hold you up is the difference between being at Cause or being at Effect, possibly even between life and death. And you must remain at Cause in this situation. How can that be done?

I do it by forcing myself to have a conversation with him. I will just start talking to this guy about ANYTHING. It could be sports, politics, the weather, the economy, traffic, giraffes, people passing by on the street, the color of my true love's eyes, if Burger King's fries are really better than McDonald's... ANYTHING. As I am talking to him, I am carefully watching his reaction to my communication in the mirror. I am trying to determine, by his response or lack of response, what is going on in his mind. I am trying to get a "feel" for the guy.

Interestingly, 99 percent of the time he turns out to be okay. I can see by the way he talks that he does not have an evil intention. I continue on with the ride and he pays the fare. But what about that one percent? What if the guy speaks with some hostility, is sarcastic, or won't communicate at all? What if, after forcing myself to converse with him, I still have a bad feeling about the guy? Then it's...

STRIKE THREE: he is out. I must get this guy out of my cab and I must do it in a busy place where there are lots of people around. How to get rid of him? There are three basic ways:

A) Overtly. You pull up next to a police car and announce to the passenger that you don't like the feeling of this ride and you're not continuing on with it. You don't charge the guy for the ride but if he has a problem, there's the police officer. Or, if there's no cop around, shut the partition and lock it and order him out of the cab. Again, no charge. Make sure you stop in a place where you can pull away the moment his foot touches the pavement.

The overt method is not recommended. It could lead to a confrontation or a ticket for a refusal from the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Better than that are the other two methods, the sneaky methods, both of which require a little acting skill...

B) Covertly, Part 1. There is something wrong with the car. Years ago, when I owned my own cab, I had a cut-off switch installed in the taxi. Whenever I hit the switch, the engine would stop running and wouldn't start up again. It was (and still is) illegal, of course, as it could be easily abused to refuse fares you don't feel like taking. But that was the perfect tool. However, if you can't get a cut-off switch installed, there is another way.

Press your foot lightly on the emergency brake to the point where the red "brake" light appears on the dashboard. It will not affect the movement of the car if the pressure of your foot is very slight, but the red light will come on nevertheless. Then announce to the passenger that the brake light just came on and the brake pedal is going all the way down to the floorboard when you step on it, so you're going to have to end the ride and call a tow truck. Don't charge him for the ride as he leaves the premises. Then lock the doors, put your off-duty light on, and drive away.

C) Covertly, Part 2. There's something wrong with you. One way of doing this is the fake cell phone call. You pull out your cell phone and pretend that you're having a conversation with a family member. There has been a terrible accident and a relative has been taken to the hospital. You must get there at once. Sorry, but you're going to have to drop him off right now. No charge.

And then there is the most drastic, yet effective, way of all: "Very sorry, it's really embarrassing to say this, but I have diarrhea." No need to elaborate! Just remember to do this only in a busy place with lots of people around.

So there it is. If you are a cab driver yourself, I urge you to study and practice the Three Strikes And You're Out System even if you have a two-way radio in your cab. (In New York, we don't have radios - all our business comes right off the street.) And if you know someone who is a cab driver, please print out this post and put it in his or her hands. You never know, you might be saving a life.

Celebrity Stories From My Passengers

There are certain subjects that are common grounds for conversation in a taxicab - the weather, traffic, sports, politics, whatever's in the news, things that you see on the street. Dogs. And celebrities.

New York is a celebrity town. Nonchalant New Yorkers may not gawk at or bother the celebrities they encounter around the city, but just about every New Yorker has a personal list of celebrities they've spotted. And I have found that asking a passenger if they've ever seen a celebrity on the street is an almost foolproof method of starting a conversation with that passenger.

As a taxi driver for many years, I have a very long list of celebrities I've either had in my cab or seen walking around. And I've posted a couple of these stories already. But I've never written about a celebrity story that was told to me by a passenger. In the last couple of weeks, though, I've heard two stories that I thought were exceptional enough to pass them along. So here goes...

A few days before Christmas I was taking a forty-something man across town when the song "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" came floating out of my radio. I mentioned to my passenger that about 25 years ago I had the man who wrote that song in my cab (J. Fred Coots) and I told him about the ride. I like telling that story because it's so exotic. I mean, the celebrities you might expect to see or meet would usually be movie stars, musicians, or TV talking heads. Who would ever expect to run into the author of a popular Christmas song? It was a very unusual category of celebrity.

My passenger, not to be outdone, told me a story of his own. He said he works in the New York Public Library and one day a few years ago a woman came up to his desk who wanted to apply for a library card. She looked familiar, but he wasn't sure who she was until she filled in a form and he read her name.

It was Monica Lewinsky.

Other people in the library had already spotted her and were kind of staring at her through the corners of their eyes, he said, and then she suddenly turned around and addressed them. "Yes," she exclaimed, "it's me!"

Monica Lewinsky - now that is an exotic celebrity sighting. Ms. Lewinsky is the sole occupant of her own particular category of celebrity.

And then last Saturday night there was another one. I picked up a middle-aged man and a younger woman in Midtown and drove them down to Soho. The lady got on her cell phone with her mother and excitedly told her that she'd just come from a restaurant called Cipriani's and had made a celebrity sighting - Tony Bennett. When that conversation ended I mentioned to her that I'd once had Tony Bennett in my cab and told her about what that was like. I then asked her if she'd ever spotted any other celebrities and she thought about it and said, "Well... there was O.J. Simpson..."

There's another celebrity who has a category all to himself. But my passenger hadn't merely spotted him. She actually had an interesting story to tell.

She said she used to be a nanny for a couple of children whose parents lived just down the street from O.J. Simpson's house in Los Angeles. Yes, that house. In fact, she said, the children she was caring for often played with the Simpson's children. And she would see Nicole and O.J. frequently at things like soccer games. And then she said that she had actually seen O.J. Simpson and Nicole Simpson on the night of the murder. Both he and Nicole had attended, separately, a ballet recital that their daughter was participating in. And my passenger had been at that recital.

It reminded me of another story I'd been told by a passenger years ago. He said as a teenager in Dallas, Texas, he had seen John F. Kennedy drive by in his motorcade just minutes before he was assassinated.

Only in retrospect do we realize that the person who had been standing next to you on the street was Fate.




However, no retrospect is needed to click here for Pictures From A Taxi. You could just do it right now.

A Brave New World

You know, this blogging phenomenon has to be one of the greatest things that's ever happened to humanity. We are living in an age of freedom of the press that would have been beyond imagination just a few years ago. The idea that a person such as myself can sit in his home and instantly publish communications with hundreds or even thousands of people all over the world... well, it's staggering if you think about it.

Let's be resolved to never let anyone take it away from us.

Having said that, I'd like to thank every single person who has come to this site in this passing year and found it worthwhile to actually read anything I've had to say. Time is valuable. Thank you for spending some of it here.

Here's hoping we all have a 2008 we can look back at and say, "Wow, that was a great year!"

May your best days be yet unseen,

And may all your lights be green.

(A picture I'm rather fond of from the post A Day In The Life. Happy New Year everybody!)

Christmas Windows

People come from far and wide to see the window displays at the major New York City department stores. Here's a sampling...

Bloomingdale's

Sak's 5th Avenue

This window was my favorite. (Of course.)

Macy's

Boomerang

Something happened a few days ago that has only happened three other times in the 30 years I've been driving a cab: I had the same passenger twice in the same shift.

If you're like me, when something like this occurs you immediately start calculating the odds against it. In this case, it's not difficult to do. There are 13,187 medallion (yellow) cabs in New York, so there are the odds right there - 13,187 to 1. But also if you're like me you wonder if it's strictly coincidence or if there's some other intangible force (let's call it karma) at work.

If you've been reading this blog you know that karma vs. coincidence is a recurring theme here. I don't say that there's actually no such thing as coincidence (as some extremists do), but I am definitely on the karma side of the fence. So please read what happened, and then you tell me: karma or coincidence? Here goes...

At 6:30 pm a woman got in my cab at 42nd and Lex who was going up to 55th and 3rd. She spent most of the ride on her cell phone and only when we were approaching the destination was there any conversation, and that was merely me asking her which side of 3rd Avenue she'd like to be dropped off on. She said she was going to 919 Third Avenue and didn't know where the building was, but she'd find it, so wherever I wanted to stop the cab was all right.

As it turned out, I know the building well because it's a 45-story office tower I often wait in front of to get a passenger. I pointed it out to her and made a humorous comment about the place as she handed me the fare.

"Make sure you don't bump into anyone when you enter the lobby," I said. "Everyone who works in that place is a lawyer."

It's true. Nearly the entire building is occupied by law firms, and that's why I often wait there for a fare. Lawyers work late and they're still streaming out of the joint between 7 and 9 pm.

My passenger seemed amused by my comment so I added another quip. "In fact," I said, "if I ever need free legal advice, I just wait in front of 919 Third Avenue. Everyone who gets in is a lawyer. It never fails."

This brought a big smile. She handed me the fare and an above-average tip, waved goodbye, and was on her way. I pulled out onto 3rd Avenue feeling good about the ride. It's always nice to leave them with a laugh.

My next passengers, two businessmen going to the Penthouse Club on 45th and 11th, got in almost immediately. The crosstown traffic was awful and it took nearly half an hour to reach the place. The following passenger went to Central Park South between 6th and 7th. And the one after that brought me back to the East Side, to Sutton Place at 56th Street.

In the perpetual hunt for the next passenger, my normal move from this location is to drive west on 55th and pull up in front of 919 Third Avenue. The entrance to the building is actually on 55th Street and there's usually room to stand there so you're not blocking traffic. So off I went on my usual route, but I didn't have to wait as I approached the tower. A person who was leaving the building had already spotted me and was giving me a hail.

It was her - the same woman whom I had dropped off at this building an hour ago was now leaving it. We recognized each other before she even opened the door and of course as we began a new trip to her new destination - 40th and Lex - we remarked on how slim the chances are of this ever occurring.

Nevertheless, if this was all there was to the story I would probably say it was just coincidence. The odds are 13,187 to one, not a hundred million billion kazillion to one. 13,187 to one can happen.

But there's more.

My passenger went on to tell me why she had gone to 919 Third Avenue in the first place. She represents a construction company and was there to make a presentation to a law firm that is considering doing business with her group. This meant that she had to stand in front of a bunch of lawyers she'd never met before and speak. So as a way of breaking the ice she told them she'd been taken to their office building by a cab driver who knows the place is filled with lawyers and gets free legal advice by waiting there for fares.

She said they were "in stitches".

Now for me, this was beyond wild. This never happens! In the taxi business you quite often have conversations with people you never expect to see again. Sometimes you wonder what future effect you may have created by the things that you have said to that person, but you never - never! - actually get to find out. They go on their way and disappear from your universe.

But this time I did find out. Like a boomerang that's been tossed out into the atmosphere, it turned around and came right back to me.

I just can't believe that was coincidence because there was a factor involved beyond two ships merely passing in the night. There was an incomplete cycle of communication in the middle of this. My passenger perhaps wondering what that cabbie would have said if he knew that his comments were cracking up a bunch of lawyers as he continued to drive around the city. You get the sense that you've entered the uncharted territory of telepathy here. Something is going on. It's not just coincidence.

Okay, you're not convinced? Then come with me. There's more.

My passenger was now curious about me as a taxi driver. She wanted to know how long I'd been driving and how I liked the job. She then asked me what my most interesting story was. I replied that she'd have to give me a category of "interesting". She chose "poignant".

Well, I went immediately to the vault and pulled one out. Here is the story I told her...

One rainy day about twenty years ago a woman got in my cab with her young son, a toddler who was in the area of two years old. As she entered the taxi she suddenly realized that the top of a ring she had on her finger was gone. The ring had contained a pearl surrounded by diamonds but now all that remained of it was the thin gold band. She was distressed about the loss and was trying to come to grips with the reality that it was gone and she'd never see it again.

The little boy, meanwhile, was not particularly concerned with his mother's loss and was as cute as could be. He had no apprehension about chatting with his taxi driver and for the whole ride kept up a lively conversation with me. One thing he told me was his name. It something Eberhardt (I have forgotten the first name). He seemed to have just recently learned it and was quite proud of the fact that he did indeed know his own name.

When we got to their destination, a street on the Upper East Side, the building we stopped in front of had a sign above a ground-level office that said "Eberhardt Architecture". I said to the little boy that I bet that his daddy worked there and he enthusiastically told me that yes, his daddy did work there. The woman then paid me the fare and left the taxi with her son.

Nine hours later I had ended my shift and was gassing up the cab. In the normal course of cleaning up any debris that had been left by passengers, I opened the back door and looked for anything in the ash trays or on the floor. There, under a rubber mat on the floorboard, was the part of the ring that had been lost by my passenger.

The next day I went back to "Eberhardt Architecture" and returned it to Mr. Eberhardt, the boy's father. Only because the child had been so proud of knowing his name was I able to remember which building it had been where I'd dropped them off. If it had not been for his eagerness to have a conversation with his taxi driver, the ring, which I was told had belonged to the lady's mother and was a family heirloom, would never have found its way back home.

And that was the story.

My passenger had listened carefully.

"I know him," she said.

"What? Who?"

"Eberhardt."

It turned out that my passenger, who is in the construction business, knows Eberhardt, the architect, on a professional basis. Get out your calculators and figure out what the odds are against a person who asks me to tell her one of my taxi stories actually knowing one of the characters in my own story!

And when you've figured that out, please send me the answer to my new address. I'll be just beyond that signpost up ahead.

In the Twilight Zone.

(Of course you do not have to actually be in the Twilight Zone to click here for Pictures From A Taxi. But it probably wouldn't hurt.)