New York Hack

Anyone there?

2008-06-24T12:24:00.005-04:00

I don't know if anyone still reads this blog -- and I'm sure some people will be pissed because all I do on it now is promote my book or whatever -- but it would be a shame if I didn't come here to announce that the paperback of HACK was released today. There's even a picture of my face on the cover (not my idea, but I didn't have too much of a choice). Anyway, I'm pretty proud of it, and I hope you will all enjoy it if you never got around to getting the hardcover.

I guess while I'm here, I'll give a little update. If you're reading this, you're aware that I don't really write on this blog anymore. And there's a reason for that. Or a lot of reasons, actually. One is that I don't drive the cab as much anymore -- I'm burned out. There are so many things I love about being a cabbie -- primarily the people and the adventure, the unpredictability of each shift, and the endlessly fun game of discovering unusual places in New York -- but there are also a few things I could never come to terms with, like traffic and accidents and all the abuse that is so regularly heaped on New York's cabbies. This is why I stay away when I'm not desperate for cash.

But that's the other beauty of cab-driving: you can pick up a shift when you need some fast money, and chances are, you'll make a few dollars. Which is why I drive every now and then, but not very often.

The thing is, I never thought about any of this as a forever sort of deal. I knew when I started this adventure that I would drive the cab until I didn't want to anymore, and the same goes for the blog.

I keep my hack license current for the same reasons I keep the blog online, because who the fuck knows what will happen? Maybe one day I'll need to go back to driving as my main source of income. And maybe one day I'll again have something I want to put out there via blogspot -- and hopefully when that happens, like now, there will be someone left somewhere that gives a shit.

That all being said, I can still bring one small dispatch from the taxi world, via my old-time cabbie buddy Bob. I was walking down Bushwick Avenue Friday night (because, didn't I mention? I'm a hooker now)(just kidding), when I heard my name being called from across the street. It was Bob, sitting in the front seat of his cab, having just dropped off somewhere in the neighborhood and on his way back to where the hipsters are.

He went off-duty and we talked for over an hour. He told me that the gas prices are killing everyone -- taking away another $15 to $20 a night, bringing the fees up to near $200. He also told me that business is dead-slow now too, so everyone's doubly fucked. But he's still hustling, sometimes taking breaks to do some Yoga mid-shift (smart guy -- I need to learn from him) and doing his best to stay healthy. Another friend of ours isn't doing so well -- he got cancer and can't make it back to work. Also, Billy, the guy who used to pee himself, is apparently off the streets for good. Some sad shit, right there.

While sitting in his cab, he pointed out some relatively new apartment buildings on Bushwick Ave and said, "See those buildings there? Back in the '80s this used to be a giant abandoned lot filled with homeless people. It was like a tent city. And around the corner, on Johnson and Morgan, there's a traffic island there that used to be the biggest open-air drug market in the city."

These areas, for those who don't live in the city, have been deeply gentrified and are now brimming with artists, hipsters, post-grads, and nouveau yuppies.

Bob continued, a little mystified, "It's crazy how this neighborhood has changed."

I love seeing the city through Bob's eyes, along with some of the other old-time drivers.

Another buddy of mine from the garage -- who shall not be named to protect his marriage -- sends me picture messages practically every day of girls showing him their tits in the back, and sometimes the front, of his cab. What the fuck man? Why didn't that shit ever happen to ME?

Anyway, that's about it. I hope you're all doing great.

Strike Two

2007-10-23T11:07:00.000-04:00

From today's New York Times:

October 23, 2007
NYC
Something Money Can’t Buy
By CLYDE HABERMAN

Like all labor disputes, the one-day strike by taxi drivers yesterday turned on tangible matters, in this case credit card machines, global positioning systems and the like. But it was also about an intangible, something that cabbies often feel they are denied. It is called respect. It is called dignity.

“It’s 100 percent about respect,” said Jahangir Alam, one of a couple of hundred drivers who rallied in protest yesterday outside the Lower Manhattan offices of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. “There’s no respect for cab drivers. As a driver, you have no control. It’s like I’m a slave.”

Mr. Alam’s feelings were shared by others at the afternoon rally. Again and again, the two words — dignity and respect — came up in conversations and in labor leaders’ speeches.

“They never go to the drivers to ask what we want,” John McDonagh said of city officials. Mr. McDonagh said that he has driven a cab on and off since 1977. He gives the job a rest now and again, he said, “to reclaim my humanity.”

It will be left to others to decide whether the strike was the unqualified success claimed by its organizers or the dismal bust preferred by City Hall. Either way, New York’s technophilic mayor seems unlikely to change his mind about the new gizmos that he wants in taxis.

It was hard to see how effective any work stoppage of preset length could be; most New Yorkers can survive without taxis for 24 hours and not break into cold sweats. The drivers were also not helped by the de facto strikebreaker role that City Hall played.

To help maximize taxi availability, it allowed drivers who worked yesterday to charge special rates that gave them more money than usual. Those rates amounted to “a bribe” for scabs, said Graham Hodges, a history professor at Colgate University who was once a cabby himself and recently wrote “Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver” (Johns Hopkins University Press).

“The people who do this job are desperate,” Professor Hodges said. When an incentive like yesterday’s special fares comes along, “you don’t have to be a Marxist to understand that that will breed strikebreakers.”

Obscured by the to-ing and fro-ing over the new machines is a more basic point, namely that many drivers feel like serfs, and maligned serfs at that.

Recent immigrants for the most part, they perform a tough, lonely duty that few native Americans want to do anymore — even those Americans who are perpetually out of work. “These people work like sharecroppers,” said Edward G. Rogoff, a Baruch College professor who has studied the taxi industry. “They take the risk. They do all the worst work, and relatively speaking, they don’t get much reward for it.”

What they get instead is a steady diet of being portrayed in corners of the press as nothing but fare gougers. They are the butt of lame David Letterman jokes. They run into the borderline racism of a tabloid column that referred contemptuously last week to a generic “crazed, Tagalog-speaking cabbie.” They put up with slanderous labels like one slapped on them in 1998 by the Giuliani administration, which called them “taxi terrorists” for daring to assert their right to protest city policies.

They endure brain-numbing innovations that only City Hall suits can devise, like those maddening Elmo messages of a few years ago, the ones that screamed at passengers to buckle up and take their belongings.

Now we have a new requirement that drivers accept a credit card system that forces them to pay an unheard-of 5 percent fee on each transaction.

They must also install, at considerable expense, G.P.S. technology that is in no way designed to help them navigate city streets. What it can do, in the spirit of Elmo, is blare enough commercials all day long to make anyone batty. If these devices malfunction, as some inevitably will, drivers must get them fixed fast or find themselves effectively forced off the road.

Granted, some cabbies are their own worst enemies. They could win a lot of friends by paying more attention to passengers and ditching their cellphones, which far too many of them use while driving, in violation of city rules.

But a more fundamental concern yesterday was those two little words. They kept surfacing, as they did in a speech at the rally by Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. “This is never about money,” he said. For the drivers, he said, “we demand dignity and respect.”

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Hi! How've you been?

2007-10-16T10:23:00.000-04:00

I've been hesitant to post here lately, mainly because I've been too busy for the past two months promoting the book (which is, of course, available for purchase using the handy little Amazon link to the right, hardy har har). And I certainly don't want to let anyone down, but I have to say, if blogging paid the bills, I'd probably do it a lot more. Writing this blog has indeed given me so much, but the truth is that for the past year or so, the book advance and some overdue settlement money from a long-ago accident are what's helped me get by, with some supplemented income from driving a cab. Call me selfish, but this is the way it is. I live in New York, for fuck's sake.

Still, I've been extremely lucky. For the past two months, I've been doing non-stop interviews to get the word out about my book. I was really happy that people were so interested, but it was weird and exhausting running around like that, answering the same questions over and over and over. Eventually, I got used to it. Plus, it was easier than driving a taxi! In fact, it wasn't totally unlike those long shifts when every single passenger that got in my backseat quizzed the shit out of me with the same exact list of questions ("How'd you get into this? Where'd you grow up? How old are you? What's it like to drive a taxi? What's next?").

What's funny is that I was being asked about driving a taxi so much that I had no time to actually drive a taxi. The side-effect of all this, however, was that after a little while, I needed a little break from thinking about, talking about, and -- yes -- writing about the damn taxi business. Which is another part of why I neglected this blog so badly.

Of course, I still find the job fascinating, and I find myself always coming back to it, no matter how hard I might try to get away. In fact, I just finished reading a great book about the history of the taxi industry in New York. I highly recommend it -- it's called "Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver" by Graham Russell Gao Hodges. It really put me in my place, in a good way.

But, despite my obvious addiction to all things taxi, I'm finally working up the nerve to move on to other things. This whole thing, driving a cab in New York, started in the spirit of seeking out adventure. There was no intention to start a blog or write a book or do a hundred interviews and somehow become the spokesperson for an industry I only entered three years ago. And there was never any intention to make a career out of it and do it forever. I want to hang on to that original mindset for the next thing I do and not worry about all the other stuff, because then it feels like a trap.

Of course, I'm still working on deciding exactly what my next step will be, but I'm so excited by the idea of embarking on a brand new adventure. I've got a few ideas that I'm kicking around, but I'm not ready to talk about anything just yet.

And lastly, I haven't totally quit driving a cab. I don't think I ever will, to be perfectly honest. Now that the journalists are bored of me, I can pull a normal shift again if I need the cash. Which will be soon. And then there will be something to blog about.

The best night ever

2007-09-13T14:12:00.000-04:00

I had an amazing night on Tuesday. So many people came out and the store sold out of my book! The whole thing was pretty damn special. A few cabbies came out, one regular passenger was in attendance, lots of friends and family, and even a bunch of people I didn't know showed up. The room was packed, all the chairs were filled, and there were crowds of people standing in the aisles! It was probably one of the best nights of my life so far.

And I get to do it again next week! If you missed this event, or liked it so much that you want more, come see me read a whole different section of the book next Tuesday, September 18th, at 7:30 at the Barnes & Noble in Park Slope, Brooklyn (267 7th Avenue). Brooklyn people: Come out and represent!

In the meantime, something else amazing happened on Tuesday: I had the honor of reading an essay of mine on NPR's "All Things Considered." You can read it -- and listen to it -- by clicking here.

Come celebrate with me!

2007-09-10T11:23:00.000-04:00

Please come celebrate with me tomorrow night! I'll be reading from the book at Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village, located directly across the street from my favorite late-night cabbie hot dog place, Gray's Papaya.

There will be a party immediately following, from 8 to 10, at a place appropriately called Happy Ending. It's at 302 Broome Street, between Forsyth and Eldridge, near the Delancey F and Essex J/M/Z trains. There will be drink specials.

I'll also be reading again next Tuesday, September 18th at the B&N in Park Slope, Brooklyn (7th Ave). It'll be all different material, so it'll be worth it to come to both if you can.

I hope you can all make it!

Strike!

2007-09-06T08:56:00.000-04:00

There's a taxi strike going on in New York right now. Some cabbies are indeed working, but there are plenty who are off the streets until tomorrow at 5:00 AM. I hope, at the very least, that all the media attention helps our cause a tiny bit.

I'm reprinting here the op-ed I wrote that was published in the City section of last Sunday's New York Times.

September 2, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor

An Unwanted Passenger
By Melissa Plaut

DRIVING a taxi in New York City can be a grueling, thankless job. It is also a unionless job. But on Wednesday, many of the city’s 44,000 licensed cabdrivers are planning to go on strike for 48 hours to protest the new global positioning systems being installed in the city’s 13,000 yellow cabs.

While the Taxi and Limousine Commission supports these devices and has mandated that they be up and running in the city’s entire fleet by January, many cabdrivers — myself included — see this new technology as one big expensive headache. Perhaps the commission should listen to cabdrivers before pushing a device that we’d be better off without.

The device has no navigational abilities. The monitor, which is set into the partition separating the driver from the passenger, cannot be seen or accessed from the front of the cab. It does not give directions or plot routes. All it does is keep track of where you are — both on- and off-duty — and this information is then stored in the commission’s databases.

Officials at the commission say the primary purpose of the devices is to track lost property and make sure cabbies aren’t taking passengers from point A to point B by way of point Z. Sadly, there are some bad cabdrivers out there who take visitors for a “ride,” but in reality, we have much more to fear from our passengers than they have to fear from us.

However, for me and many of my fellow drivers, privacy issues aside, it’s all about money. With prices ranging from around $3,250 to $4,000 to lease and install each unit, the initial costs alone are enough to drive some cabbies out of business. For private owner/operators, this could kill their year.

The costs continue to pile up after the devices are installed. The test drivers who already have the touch-screens have reported finding the monitors covered in spray paint, stickers, soda and scratches.

Even without vandalism, the technology is likely to break down. New computers are often plagued with bugs, and sometimes, as every cellphone user knows, satellites can lose their signals. Because these G.P.S. devices will be linked to the taximeters, when the screen is vandalized, the computer breaks down or the satellite connection is unavailable, the meter won’t work. The driver will be forced to go off-duty and bring the car in for repairs. In a business where lost time equals lost pay, this is unacceptable.

One fleet already using the system recently lost its satellite signal, putting about 250 cabs out of commission for nearly three hours until the problem was resolved. This translated not only into fewer available cabs on the streets, but also lower incomes for those already beleaguered cabbies.

For drivers like me who lease our cabs from privately owned fleets, there isn’t the burden of paying for installation or repairs upfront, but the costs may still be passed on to us in the form of “surcharges” or “tax fees.” However the extra costs will be labeled, it boils down to the same thing: our expenses go up; our income goes down.

The only potential benefit for passengers I can see in these machines is the credit card slide. Matthew Daus, chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, is happy to tell anyone who will listen that our tips are better as a result of this, but I beg to differ. Drivers have to pay a hefty 5 percent transaction fee while most stores and restaurants are charged an average base rate of about 2 percent. So those “bigger tips,” if they exist at all, simply don’t cover the costs. And since most cabs already have the ability to take credit cards, what’s the point of installing a whole new system?

The bottom line is, once we’ve installed the G.P.S. device, paid for its maintenance, ponied up for repairs and shelled out the transaction fees, what most cabbies will be left with is, in effect, a pay cut. The fare increase in 2004 just barely caught our incomes up with inflation, bringing us to just this side of a livable wage. We should not have to pay that back now.

By turning a deaf ear to the opinions and expertise of taxi drivers, the commission has approved a design for an impractical and costly device that ultimately does not provide any useful “service enhancements” to the public. So when cabdrivers go on strike this week, we can only hope that New Yorkers will stand with us in solidarity.

There are plenty of other reasons and arguments that I didn't have the room to include. Yesterday's Metro NY newspaper was one of only a few to hint at the relationship between the companies providing the systems and the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC):

One of the firms providing the devices is owned by Ron Sherman, president of an association of garage owners. That firm’s vice president is Jed Appelbaum, a former TLC commissioner.

Hmph. Interesting.

Another NYC cabbie blogger, G.S. over at Cabs Are For Kissing, has this to say, among other things:

I think it was in 1979 that a city ordinance turned all taxi drivers into "independent contractors". This meant that if you worked out of a fleet garage you were no longer an employee, you were "self-employed" (and the fleets were no longer responsible for any benefits). Instead of paying drivers by percentages of the money they booked plus tips, the drivers now had to pay the garage a leasing fee for the use of the taxi for 12 hours, plus pay for the gas. There was no cap set on what the garages could charge (until recently, which is a good thing), so the only limit the garage owners had on their fees was by attrition of drivers. Busy nights when there were more drivers available meant higher leasing fees. And a cab driver found himself working six hours before breaking even.

Now here is the part that I consider to be a fundamental injustice: although the city made all taxi drivers "independent contractors" it retained the right to tell us what we can charge for our services. This is a blatant hypocrisy. How can anyone be an independent contractor when he can't charge what the market will bear for his services? How "independent" is that?

So it's phony. Taxi drivers are not independent contractors at all. We are actually employees who get no benefits.

But wait. It gets worse.

One would think that if the city government is going to create a taxi system that is unorganizable and then is going to mandate what we can charge for our services, a sense of fair play would ensure that the drivers are able to make a decent living. And be very diligent in increasing the rate of fare at timely intervals to keep up with inflation.

But the history over the last 29 years shows that the opposite is the case. We went from 1980 to 1987 (7 years) without a rate increase. We went from 1990 to 1996 (six years) without a rate increase. We went from 1996 to 2004 (8 years) without a rate increase. And during those years I was told very frequently by passengers in my cab that taxis in New York are much cheaper than in any other city they travelled to, reports that were verified repeatedly through all these years by industry journals and the NY Times.

What the city keeps saying is that we have to pay the 2004 rate increase back now. Apparently they only gave it to us to pay for these stupid, useless machines that we don't want.

This new technology could've been really cool, but it is being implemented in the worst and most expensive way. A good navigational GPS device costs about $500. Why do we have to pay $4000 for a system that doesn't even help us find our way when we're lost?

The taxi industry in New York is so fucked up, it's depressing. But the saddest thing of all, in my opinion, is discovering just how much the city disdains its cab drivers. Mayor Bloomberg talks about us with the utmost condescension, like we're all simple fools who know not what we do. It's offensive.

Rather than paying attention to what we have to say, he's been painting this work stoppage as our effort to "hurt" the city and its residents. We are not terrorists -- though sometimes we may drive like we are! No, rather, we are people who work under third-world sweatshop conditions in one of the richest, most sophisticated cities on the planet. But our billionaire mayor has always held a low opinion of New York's working people, so why should we expect any support from him now?

If the city displayed any faith in us at all and actually tried to improve our working conditions, our morale -- and our driving -- would also improve, and then there would be no need for such derision and no need for a strike.

"Hack" + a shitty gold sedan

2007-08-29T15:20:00.000-04:00

The book finally went on sale yesterday!!! Of course, I went to the store and bought myself a copy for good luck. I'm so psyched.

In the meantime, there was a big USA Today story about me and the book. It can be read here.

You can buy the book by clicking the Amazon link on the right of this page, or go to your local bookstore.

Thank you everybody! The past few days have been amazing, and it wouldn't have happened without the readers of this blog.

In other news, I pulled a shift Monday night (yes, I worked the night before my book went on sale) and this asshole in a shitty gold sedan (seen in the pic below) cut off all of Second Avenue, from right to left, so he could turn east, forcing about six drivers to stop short and almost causing a series of accidents. I figured I'd post his pic for old time's sake. Enjoy!

The Human Computer

2007-08-22T17:09:00.000-04:00

As part of maintaining a hack license, every three years cabbies have to attend a 6-hour defensive driving course. With September 11th being -- among other things -- the third anniversary of me becoming a cabbie, I recently took the class at my old taxi school, LaGuardia Community College's Taxi and For-Hire Vehicle Driver Institute.

Of course, six hours is a long time to sit in a classroom and I wasn't looking forward to it, but when I got there at 9:00 AM, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I knew the teacher. His name was Jim and he briefly had a great taxi blog of his own a while back but he took it offline for reasons unknown. Jim was a good, lively teacher, but that didn't make the day of traffic questionnaires and outdated videos go by any quicker. The boringness was only made worse by the fact that the classroom they had assigned us on this hot day in August was too small and the 20 or so guys (plus me) had to pack in there like sardines. Needless to say, the room smelled pretty ripe by 4:00 PM.

Over the course of the day we discussed such topics as the speed limit and why it matters, the effects alcohol has on the reflexes, and whether or not we thought of ourselves as good drivers. We also watched a couple of movies about road rage.

But really, the shining moment of the day was meeting a big Russian cabbie who called himself "The Human Computer." This guy had been driving a cab for ten years and his unique gift was that, if you told him your date of birth, he could instantly calculate which day of the week you were born on.

On one of the breaks, he took the opportunity to show us all a laminated New York Times article about himself that he'd brought along, and then he demonstrated his talent on each person in the room. When he got to me, he said in his thick Russian accent, "September 1st, 1975? --Have a happy Monday!"

Then he continued, "Now you tell me the birthday of your first, second, and third husbands, and I tell you which day they have." When I answered that I wasn't married, he said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I have very bad news for you: All good things must come to an end!"

Eventually, the million hour class came to its own end and I drove home with the knowledge that cars are dangerous weapons and I was born on a Monday.

Perfectly legal

2007-07-26T12:19:00.000-04:00

I was in LA for a few days last week meeting my seven week old niece and playing with my two and a half year old nephew. I didn't do too much, but when I did go out, I drove my sister's minivan -- a big-ass Honda Odyssey complete with two baby seats and a great navigation system.

Every time I drove this thing, I had to go very very slow so that I could pay attention to the navigation system and figure out where the hell I was going. This, I'm sure, annoyed the shit of many a native LA driver. I most certainly slowed a lot of people down, and generally, when in New York and stuck behind someone like that, I myself have no sympathy.

But the most amazing thing -- and I never cease to be surprised by this no matter how much time I spend out there -- is that no one honked. Not one single person. Not even when the light was green for well over thirty seconds and I still didn't move, or when I was going 20 in a 40 trying to find the right street to turn on. Nobody got out and punched my window, no one gave me the finger. I didn't even get so much as a dirty look. It almost makes me want to move there.

Of course, the minute I got back to New York trouble found me. I landed at Kennedy Airport late Friday night and had to take a car service home. I over-thought the idea of taking a yellow cab, weighing which route would be better for me and which route would be better for the driver (basically, cheaper and more direct versus faster and more expensive) and decided I'd just use a car service based out of my neighborhood so I wouldn't have to direct him. I often find it very uncomfortable to ride in the back of a yellow cab ever since I started driving one myself.

As I waited outside the Delta terminal, there were about five or six car service drivers parked there, standing in front of the doors and soliciting people for rides to Manhattan. This, you should know, is totally illegal. It is basically poaching rides from the yellow cabs who have been waiting in the big holding lot for who knows how long, and who, when finally dispatched to the terminal, line up and wait for people to get on a line and get inside them. And the whole time, they are being monitored and controlled by a taxi dispatcher who keeps them all from cheating, competing, or otherwise causing chaos at the terminal.

These car service guys, on the other hand, are straight off the black market, completely unregulated and working hard only to hustle the unwitting out of their hard-earned bills. Car service drivers are, by law, allowed to respond only to radio calls. That's it. Picking up street hails or waiting curbside at the airport without a prior appointment is the sole domain of the yellow cab. That's what those little metal medallions -- the ones that cost about $600k last time I checked -- give us the right to do. And every time a car service driver breaks these rules, he not only breaks into our business (and therefore our incomes), he also depreciates the value of each and every medallion, making it a waste of money to buy or lease one.

Anyway, this big burly car service driver in a pink button-down shirt kept offering me a ride, saying, "Taxi? Taxi?" while I kept denying. I stood there waiting as he offered a ride to everyone who walked out the doors until, finally, I turned to him and said, "Isn't that illegal? Offering rides like that?"

He looked around at all the other gypsy drivers there and grinned, saying, "Illegal? No! It's perfectly legal."

I said, "Doesn't the TLC have rules about that? You're not supposed to solicit rides like this. You might want to check your rule book."

"TLC? Look at my license plate! It says TLC."

I replied, "I'm pretty sure you're wrong on this."

He smirked and said, "Why? You TLC?"

At this point, it was around 1:30 in the morning. I was exhausted and annoyed by this dude, and all of sudden I remembered all the times a fare that would have been mine got poached by one of these guys. They all stacked up and accumulated in my mind, and I got pissed. Don't ask me why, and I know I'll probably end up in Bellevue for this, but as I looked over at the long line of empty yellow cabs with all these tired, bored drivers inside, I decided that it made sense somehow -- that it was practically my duty to those cabbies -- to pretend that I actually did work for the Taxi & Limousine Commission.

I said, "Yes, I am. And you're lucky I'm not working right now."

Of course, he didn't take me seriously at all. And why would he? The TLC certainly doesn't do much except ticket cabbies and cash in on corporate contracts (seen a TV screen in a taxi lately?). They don't give two shits if we lose money to these guys.

He let out a huge bellow and still persisted, saying, "It's totally legal. You can't do anything!" Then he gestured to the other gypsy drivers there and said, "There's a lot of people here. What can you do? ...Nothing!" Then they all started grinning and chuckling, clearly entertained by me, and with good reason, I suppose. I did indeed look a little ridiculous , standing there in worn-out jeans and a backpack, all of five-foot-four, acting like I was some figure of authority.

But, of course, I couldn't back out of it now. I took out my phone and pretended to call some other imaginary figure from the TLC, presumably someone who could come give these guys a ticket. In reality, I called Diego.

"Hey Diego, let me ask you something: It's illegal for car services to solicit rides at the airport right?"

"Hell yeah it is. Why? What's up?"

"Okay, can you send someone over to the Delta terminal?"

"Huh?"

I walked a few feet away and whispered, "I'm pretending to be from the TLC. I want to scare these guys away so they don't steal rides from the cabs waiting here."

Diego wasn't the slightest bit fazed. "Oh. Okay. Yeah. Those guys are such assholes." He continued, "Just last night I picked up a guy in Manhattan who got totally ripped off by a car service driver from the airport. The guy wanted to go to Weehawken [in New Jersey] from JFK and the car service driver tried to charge him $240! So the guy decided to go to the ferry terminal in Manhattan instead so he could take the boat over to Jersey. But then the driver tried to charge him $180 -- to go to the west side of Manhattan! Finally, the guy bargained him down to $80. But can you believe that shit? Eighty dollars! To go to Manhattan! You should totally call the cops on those guys for real."

In a yellow cab, a ride to Weehawken, New Jersey, from Kennedy Airport would cost about $80, plus tolls and tip. A ride to anywhere in Manhattan is a flat rate of $45, plus a $4 toll and tip.

I remembered a story Elliott told me once about a Japanese man who got totally swindled by another car service driver at the airport. He got conned into one of these gypsy's cars and told him he wanted to go to Staten Island. The driver charged him $250 and dropped him off not in Staten Island, but in the middle of midtown Manhattan. He hailed Elliott and told him what happened and was clearly very confused. Elliott took him down to the Staten Island Ferry because it was the cheapest option for him at that point, and I don't even think Elliott charged him for the ride, he felt so bad for the guy.

Anyway, I stayed on the phone chatting for a while as the car service drivers wandered around the terminal doors offering more people "taxi" rides. The line of yellow cabs remained sitting across the median unused.

Miraculously, not five minutes after I called Diego, a cop car pulled into the terminal with its lights flashing, making all the waiting cars move out. I was delighted with this lucky coincidence. It was almost as if I had actually called them, and my insane impersonation of a TLC bureaucrat was validated. Diego, too, was psyched. He said, "You should tell the cops that they were offering rides to Manhattan for $250!"

At that point, however, I didn't really feel like getting into it. I just stood there and watched as all the "perfectly legal" drivers fled from the airport doors and dove into their respective cars, like a bunch of cockroaches taking cover when the bathroom light is turned on.

I did, admittedly, have a moment of gloating as I waved at the driver in the pink shirt and called out, "It's totally legal, huh? Why don't you stick around and tell that to the cops?" He waved at me and then gave me the finger as he jumped into his Lincoln Town Car and flew out of the terminal.

I waited a few more minutes for my car service to show up and watched as a line of travelers slowly formed in front of the yellow cabs that were still sitting there. One by one, they too pulled out of the terminal, each, thankfully, with a passenger.

Amazon is being difficult

2007-07-20T11:06:00.000-04:00

I'm getting a bunch of emails today about how my book has been delayed for a year according to Amazon. This is NOT true. The book is still coming out this fall, on August 28, 2007.

But, for whatever reason, Amazon has two pages up for my book, and one of them has all sorts of incorrect information, including a June 2008 release date. Unfortunately this is the page everyone pre-ordered from.

I've been trying to get Amazon to get rid of that stupid wrong page for weeks now, to no avail. They certainly don't make it easy to get in touch with them, and I've also asked my publisher to try and fix the problem.

So, for now, if it's not too much of a hassle, please just cancel that order and re-order it here or from the link at the right (same difference). This goes to the correct, good, not fucked up Amazon page. You could also get to it from the link on the myspace page if that strikes your fancy.

Sorry about all this. I hope you'll find the book worth it!

Fun times

2007-07-11T02:31:00.000-04:00

I had a good night.

I realized just now, as I wrote those words, that I don't think I've ever written them before. If so, I certainly don't remember it.

But tonight was great, actually. I had perfect luck and a stable mindset throughout the whole shift. And the biggest shocker? Traffic didn't totally suck.

All night long, each good ride led to the next. It started out early, when I got over the bridge and someone took me to Union Square. From there, I picked up a woman who wanted to go way up to 125th and Amsterdam. I overheard from her cell phone conversation that she'd been going on auditions all day. We made it up to her building in record time.

As I passed Columbia on my way back downtown, I got flagged by a very pregnant, thirty-something lady dressed in hospital scrubs and a stethoscope. She had a phone to her ear and, when she got in, said, "59th and Amsterdam." But then a second later, she said, "Actually 59th and 3rd." And then another second later, "Let's make that 59th and Lex."

Finally she hung up the phone and said, "I'm sorry. My husband was barking orders at me on the phone."

We didn't talk for the rest of the ride.

Downtown, a very young, probably late teen or early twenty-something blonde girl got in. She had one of those blue boots on one foot, the kind you wear on a broken part of your body instead of a cast. On our way over to 5th Avenue and 10th Street, I got to listen in to her end of a phone conversation. It went something like this:

"Yes, he was coming to propose .... Are you still at Burberry? .... Oh, for your therapist? .... Fun times, Fun times."

Then she launched into a whole tirade about how her friend Aaron got into an argument with the promoters at the club Marquee and how he had to be kept separate from Jordan. It was just starting to get juicy when I dropped her off. Sadly, I'll never know what finally happened with them. Damn.

Moving on, I took some girls from the Upper East Side to dinner in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. As we got close to the restaurant, one of them said to the other, "Oh wow, there actually are nice parts of Brooklyn."

On my way back from that, as I was approaching the Brooklyn Bridge, Diego called and said, "Laguardia's stripped," meaning the airport was empty of cabs. He went on, "All these flights were canceled, so tons of people are dying for cabs. Someone actually offered me $800 to take them to Toronto! Can you believe that?"

Apparently the intense heat and haze had caused problems with visibility or something and it grounded most of the planes in the New York area, so the airport was lucrative chaos.

I said, "Don't tell me you're on your way to Toronto right now."

"Hell no! You kidding me? That's a two-thousand dollar job. No, I got someone to midtown and then I'm racing right back. You should go."

I hopped on the BQE and sped over there. It was still stripped and I got someone going back to the city. He was coming from Atlanta and had been sitting in his plane on the runway for four hours before they finally took off for their hour-and-a-half flight. I remarked on his mood, saying, "You seem pretty happy for someone who just sat on a plane for that long."

He replied, "I've had a few drinks."

Later on, I ended up getting extra lucky when I got a job to Edison, New Jersey. It's always good money when you take someone out of town. The guy was from California and got screwed over on his hotel so he was staying at the Hilton out there.

When I dropped him off, I got out of the cab to help him with his bags. As he left and went inside, some fat middle-aged dude with a cane came up to me. He'd been standing outside the hotel, and as he approached me, he said, "Are you the driver?" I said "Yes," and then he looked around, leaned in real close, exhaled his cigarette smoke, and said, "I'm looking for a strip club around here."

Apparently he'd had a few drinks too. Sorry to disappoint, I told him I was a New York cab driver and couldn't help him in this area. He hobbled back to the sliding glass doors as I got back in my cab and hauled ass back to the civilized world.

Book update

2007-07-09T10:56:00.000-04:00

This is a just a quick update about the book, because that's what's been consuming me and my time lately. But, as a side note, I don't really want this space to be used too much for book stuff, so I've crossed over to the dark side and created a MySpace page. This is where I will post updates, information, reviews (only if they're good, of course), and any other crap that relates to the book. Go and befriend me! The page is at www.myspace.com/melissaplaut.

But for now I need to share something here because it's kind of big news: The book is going to be published as a hardcover after all! Fucking awesome, no? And it will still be out on August 28th so I'm getting pretty damn excited.

Anyway, now the thing will cost $21.95, which is still not too out of control and I hope you will all still consider picking up a copy. I'm not sure how this change affects the Amazon pre-orders that have already been put in, but I imagine -- and this is just a guess -- that they'll probably send out an email giving those people the option to buy the book at the new price (that is, when Amazon figures out that there is a new price). As far as I know, they don't charge your credit card until the book ships anyway, so you won't be screwed over.

Also, a few New York readings and signings will be happening in September. The first is at the Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village, on 8th Street and 6th Avenue, right across the street from Gray's Papaya, where I've eaten many a late-night cabbie dinner of hot dogs and papaya juice with my buddy Diego. It's also across the avenue from the McDonald's in which I've peed on many desperate occasions. Plus, there's a "taxi relief" stand just up the next block. So it's a pretty good spot for my first official book reading.

The event will take place on September 11th at 7:30 PM. Definitely not the happiest day in the world, but it was what the store had available, and who am I to be picky? Plus, in a way it almost makes sense since it will be the third anniversary of my very first shift in the cab back in 2004. (I got my license a week and a half earlier but I was too chicken-shit to start right away.) So this B&N reading will be a cool confluence of events that relate to my career as a cab driver.

There will be another reading the following Tuesday, September 18th, also at 7:30. That one will be at the Barnes & Noble in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It's my home borough so hopefully all the Brooklynites will show up and represent!

Meanwhile, I plan to work tomorrow night if Richard has a cab for me, so I should be back to bitching about traffic and jaywalkers and gas prices by Wednesday.

Thanks Oprah

2007-06-04T11:09:00.000-04:00

When I got to the garage last Thursday afternoon, my old friend Gary (seen above in deep concentration) was back from Vietnam, where he's been living and teaching English for the past five months. We caught up for a bit and then he went into the waiting room to play a game of chess.

I got out after an hour and a half of waiting, but spent another half an hour sitting in traffic on the 59th Street Bridge. I tried to think of Gary and his new Zen approach to driving and traffic. It actually helped a little.

Business was pretty steady all night, but I had a long lull when I made a few back-to-back trips to Brooklyn. The first was to Midwood, a suburban-ish neighborhood largely occupied by Orthodox Jews. It was a decent job but it took forever to get there for some reason, so I hustled back to Manhattan as fast as I could. When I finally got over the Brooklyn Bridge, I turned south down Broadway and was immediately hailed by a Hasidic man.

When he got in, he said, "I'm going to Brooklyn, take the tunnel." He was, of course, going to Borough Park, just a few neighborhoods west of Midwood.

Later on, when I talked to my fellow cabbie Allen about this turn of events, he said, "What? You picked up a Hasid?" Allen himself is an Orthodox Jew. "And he went to Borough Park?" When I said yes, he laughed and said, "Well, what did you expect?!"

Again, it took me forever to get back. The BQE was backed up so I decided to take the surface streets instead. Nearly 60 blocks later, in Park Slope, I picked up a passenger. I felt lucky for a second, thinking he was going to the city, but as it turned out, he was only going a short distance, out toward the Brooklyn Museum, a six dollar ride.

He was a young guy, good looking and a little drunk. When I asked what he'd been up to that night, he said, "Oh there's a group of us that started a gay volleyball league. We had a game and then went to the bar."

Then he launched into the very astute observation that I am a female cab driver, and asked if it was harder for me in terms of having to pee. I said, "It's not the easiest thing in the world, mainly because it's hard to park."

He said, "You know it's funny, because I was just now talking about this with my friend and it was the last conversation I had before I left." He gave me some backstory. "Okay, so apparently Oprah has this word for her crotch -- she calls it her vajayjay. Have you heard that?"

I said no, and he went on, "Well my friend made up a parallel term for guys and so before I was leaving tonight, he was telling me about his majeejee."

O-kayyy. I figured he was talking about the penis, and having not much to say on the matter at the moment, I just nodded and watched the street.

He continued, "Yeah, because he was about to go on a date with some guy he'd never hung out with before and the conversation centered around whether or not he should clean out his majeejee."

It took a second to sink in, and I said, "Oh! Wait-- You mean?-- Ohhh...I thought you meant like the front. But I guess you're talking about the back. Huh. Okay." I wasn't quite sure what to say from there, but he was eager, seemingly happy to be communicating, and continued, "Yes! It's our 'mangina.' Hence, majeejee."

Then he stopped for a second, looked around the cab, and said, "Wait, I'm not on 'Taxicab Confessions' right now or anything, am I?"

I said, "No. But you should be."

I dropped him off, raced back to the city, and didn't have a ride back to Brooklyn for the rest of the shift.

Thanks Oprah.

One block

2007-05-09T02:33:00.000-04:00

Sometimes crossing the Brooklyn Bridge isn't all that bad.

There are many ways to get through the long 12-hour shift. Reading a book while stopped in traffic is only one of them.

Tonight was pretty good overall. I mean, it wasn't perfect. I did indeed get my window punched by some stupid angry road raging bitch in Williamsburg (because I wouldn't let her cut me off, mind you), but that's so annoyingly typical, it barely merits mention at this point.

Otherwise, business was steady and people were in good spirits. My favorite fare of the night originated in the theater district. A somewhat elderly couple flagged me down in the middle of 45th Street just as the area began spilling over with the post-theater crowd. They instructed me to go to 79th and Lex and then began an animated conversation with each other about how much they hated the play they'd just seen.

He said, "Well, I didn't think the acting was too bad."

She disputed this. "It was dismal! How could it be any good when they had such terrible material to work with?"

They carried on trashing the play the whole ride uptown and then, as we crossed east on 79th, they told me they were actually going to make two stops. The man would be getting out at Park Avenue and the lady would get out a block away at Lexington. No problem.

When the man closed the cab door behind him, the lady addressed me and said, "Oh goodie, this way he makes sure I get to pay."

I responded with something vague yet polite like, "That's not so nice of him."

She said, "No, actually it's okay. We used to be married and we see each other practically every night so we just switch off paying."

I asked the obvious: "You see each other every night but you're not married anymore?"

"Yeah," she said, "after 42 years, we realized that we get along much better when we live apart." I guess they only needed one city block to make their relationship work.

She continued, "Our kids think we're bizarre." I agreed with her kids and then, as her doorman approached to let her out of the cab, I said, "Just out of curiousity, what play did you guys see tonight?"

"'Deuce.' The one about tennis. It was lousy!" And with that, she got out and the doorman closed the door behind her.

I hate Second Avenue, but I still love New York

2007-04-27T18:03:00.000-04:00

So, I finally drove a cab again after all this time.

When I showed up at the garage for my first shift back yesterday afternoon, my buddy Sam updated me on the situation on the streets these days. This is what cabbies do at my garage. They tell each other where the cops are waiting to give tickets, where there's construction, where they found good fares, and so on. But yesterday, knowing I hadn't driven in a while, Sam warned me about the recent surge in traffic, saying, "When you get out there, you'll find it a lot harder to move than the last time you worked."

I caught my first passenger right away, at the bottom of the 59th Street Bridge. He was a young, hipsterish-looking guy with long bleached blond hair. He was going to Central Park West and 73rd and when he got in, he politely asked me if he could eat his sandwich there in the backseat. I said, "Sure, as long as you don't get it everywhere." He promised to eat it over his bag, and I felt lucky that my first passenger in all these months was a nice guy with good manners. Though I was trying to keep my expectations low, it made me almost hopeful for the rest of the shift.

Of course, things took a turn slightly for the worse an hour later when I had my first near-accident/near-death experience of the shift. I was on Third Avenue and 23rd Street and there was a shitty Hyundai on my left that was running into a construction area and decided it wanted to be in my lane. It looked like they were about to rail right into my door but I had no room to get out of the way, so I just slowed down, leaned on the horn, and braced myself for the hit.

Luckily, at the last second, they skidded to a stop in front of the orange cones and waited for the flow of traffic to break so they could get in. It's a totally regular occurence on the streets of New York but still, I hadn't driven a cab in so long, I wasn't used to the aggression other drivers direct towards cabbies and I found myself a little shaken up.

Then around 5:30, I decided that I despised Second Avenue. It was the third time in less than two hours that I got caught in a bad jam there and I realized Sam wasn't kidding about the traffic. The only saving grace was the increase in the waiting time/traffic time on the meter that happened back in December. It made a significant difference and allowed me to relax a tiny bit despite sitting in hellish traffic. Without that increase, we would all be screwed and I don't think there would be many cabbies left in New York.

But things perked up again a little later. I was taking a guy to a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival downtown on Chambers Street and along the way we realized we both grew up in Rockland County, New York, about an hour north of the city. He was fifteen years older than me, but we had both gone to the same junior high and high schools and chatted about that for awhile. He was running late and we were trying to figure out the best way to the theater from SoHo and we agreed we absolutely must avoid Canal Street. It was just past 6:00 PM and Canal is always backed up because it lead in to the Holland Tunnel. It's seriously like a recurring nightmare for any cabbie.

So we went down Mott with the idea we would cross west at Worth, but Mott, of course, was backed up so we were like, fuck it, and turned down Canal anyway. And -- will wonders never cease -- Canal was clear! We were psyched, and we laughed about how sometimes New York can really suprise you. But, seriously, how pathetic is it that the big gift New York offered us last night was merely no traffic on Canal Street at 6:00 PM?

At 7:00 I passed another female cab driver as we were inching down Broadway, but she looked miserable and so I did not say hi.

At 7:45, I was turning past a couple standing on the median on West Street and overheard them say, "She's kinda young to be driving a cab."

At 9:30, I dropped off a passenger in Elmhurst, Queens. I called Diego to chat on the way back since I was empty but, turned out, he was dropping off just a few blocks away from me in the same neighborhood. We decided to race down to JFK since the hotline said they needed cabs there and it would give us a chance to hang outside of our cabs.

When we got there, it was like a big family reunion. I ran into Joy (pictured above), a female (obviously) cabbie I met three years ago, right after I got my hack license. We used to call each other every now and then but then lost touch. She seemed to be doing well and it was nice to see her again after all this time.

Then Diego and I went inside to get some food in the cafeteria and it was a madhouse as usual. Being in there is sort of like being a Moroccan souk or something, with the Greek guys behind the counter calling out prices and food items as fast as auctioneers and a motley crew of drivers mobbing the coffee urns and registers. I managed to skip most of the line since I only got a bottle of water and a bag of pretzels.

Outside again, I ran into another cabbie I knew. He does a Reggae radio show late night on 93.5 and I met him through another cabbie buddy John who does a radio show on WBAI. We all stood around talking shop and bitching about the TLC -- the usual. It's moments like that when I realize that I didn't so much miss driving the cab itself these past few months, but I missed the drivers, I missed the culture and ultimately, I missed the city.

Anyway, I got a good job out of the airport after only about a half hour and the night ultimately ended without any real mishaps or shake-ups. I considered it a good welcome back.

This makes me remember something else Sam said yesterday afternoon at the garage: "This job is like being a drug addict. You have one great night and you're hooked and keep coming back for more. But when you have those bad nights, you just wish you could quit."

I had a decent night. I'll be coming back for more.

The Cover!!!!!!!!!

2007-04-26T12:25:00.001-04:00

How fucking exciting! Of course, the actual book is not out yet. Plans for a hardcover edition have been scrapped so it will be a paperback original, which means it'll be more affordable. And it looks like August 28th is the big date, but you can pre-order it from the Random House website by clicking here.

I seriously can't wait.

In the meantime, I'm off to the garage for my first shift in a good long while, so there will hopefully be a story or two here tomorrow, but for now I just needed to say HOLY SHIT I WROTE A BOOK.

Not happening

2007-04-19T16:40:00.000-04:00

I went back to the garage today. It had been the first time in months and I was all geared up to work the shift. When I arrived, it was busy and bustling like always and all my old buddies were there. We stood around and caught up for a while as the day drivers trickled in and Richard dispatched the night guys out.

I found myself actually feeling a little nervousness, since I hadn't driven a yellow in so long. I knew I was rusty and wasn't totally confident I could find my way around as easily and naturally as I used to. Luckily the garage has this sign (shown above) posted on the wall outside, just in case.

Not too much else was new around the old garage. The only exception was the sign shown below. I guess the level of general retardation has risen pretty drastically, along with the gas prices.

After about an hour, Diego got his cab and took off. Here he is, trying to look mean but not really accomplishing it. I hung around a little while longer until I heard my name over the loudspeaker. I went inside, but it was a false alarm. Turns out Richard wasn't gonna have a cab for me today after all. He was overloaded with too many guys and not enough cars and had, in fact, already sent a few other drivers home. I couldn't really be upset about this since I did just sort of show up at the garage unannounced.

Oh well, it wasn't a huge deal. I'll work next week and it'll be fine. Plus it was great to catch up with everybody and see their faces again. I do kind of love just hanging out at that garage sometimes. Really the only shitty part was that, as much as I've been dreading and procrastinating getting back in the cab, I was actually pretty disappointed to not work tonight. I mean, I wasn't fucking heartbroken or anything, but I had gotten myself all psyched up to get behind that stupid wheel and make some money. Oh well. So now my big prodigal return to cabbing will have to be postponed for one more week. I better enjoy it.

Civic duty

2007-03-08T11:25:00.000-05:00

So shit is finally slowing down, thank goodness. The book has finally been sent to the printer to be made into bound galleys. After much back and forth (and stressing out on my part), it is officially titled HACK. There is also a subtitle, which is: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with my Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab. I think it's coming out on August 28th but I'm not totally sure about that.

The past few months were pretty hectic. In the midst of finishing up the last edits of the book and dealing with the whole confusing "publishing process," I got called to jury duty. The last time I had been called was about six years ago when I lived in Manhattan. I was dismissed after two days and all I really remember of my time there is that the chairs were comfortable, the lunches were long, and there was a guy sitting near me whose name was Jack Russel. Also, no one had cell phones really, and only a handful had toted along their clunky laptops.

This time, I arrived at the Kings County Supreme Court Building at 8:30 in the morning and waited in a great long line to get through the security metal detectors with a few hundred of my fellow unlucky Brooklynites. Then I proceeded to the Central Jury Assembly Room which, according to the sign on the wall, has a maximum capacity of about 600 people. I'd say, by the time everyone had filed in, there were about 400 of us. We watched a low-budget instructional movie starring Diane Sawyer and a perfectly diverse cast of characters. I think it was supposed to get us all excited about performing our civic duty, but I got distracted because Diane was so obviously reading her cue cards, it was disconcerting. But I guess it was a good thing because, with the lights all dim, it was the only aspect of the movie that kept me from falling straight to sleep.

When the movie was over, a large man with a white goatee sat down behind a grand table at the front of the room and slowly read through the categories that would qualify one for exemption from jury duty. He would call out each category over the microphone and then would wait for the people from that category to get up and file out through some doors to his side. He started by saying, "Are there any jurors in this assembly room who no longer live in Brooklyn? Please come forward."

At this, one lone guy got up in the middle of the giant room and made his way to the front. As he was walking, the guy with the microphone joked, "When you go through the doors, you're gonna have to write an essay on why you left Brooklyn." Everyone in the room gave a tired little chuckle as we watched the poor guy leave. Then he moved on to the other categories, which included non-citizens, caregivers, felons (about 40 people got up), people who've performed jury duty less than four years ago, and people who had a medical reason to not perform their duty.

The last category was apparently his favorite because he kept referring to it the entire time and telling us it would have the largest response: "If anyone in this assembly room has difficulty understanding English -- or understanding me -- please go through the double doors." A hundred people got up and went through the double doors. How they knew to go through the double doors was a mystery to me, but it didn't phase the guy in charge. When they were all gone, he smiled and said, "I told you that category would clear the room. But don't move over to their seats just yet -- the majority of them will be back." And then with a little wink, "They're just giving it a shot."

An hour later, I got called with 70 other people to go up to a courtroom. When we were out of the big room, our attendance was retaken and I thought it was funny how almost all 70 of us responded to our names by simply saying, "Here," except for the two people who felt it was important to distinguish themselves by saying "Present," and the one jolly old man who said "Good morning."

Up in court, we were told we were gonna be interviewed to see if we could sit on a murder trial. Of all the questions they asked, and all the answers given, I was surprised by how many people answered yes to the one about "Have you ever been the victim of a crime?" More than half of us had been, with the crimes mainly being burglaries and muggings, though one person had been held up at gunpoint, and another woman had the misfortune to witness her godson get murdered right in front of her. It was all pretty depressing. They also asked if the police got involved and how we felt about how they handled it, and it was even more depressing that almost all of us were less than thrilled with the NYPD's actions regarding each of our cases.

At one point in the selection process, the judge instructed us on what "prejudice" means. Naturally, he used cabbies in his example, saying, "Suppose you hold the belief that all cab drivers are terrible drivers." At this, there were a few nods of the head and even one "amen" muttered in the galleys. Ignoring this, the judge continued, "If there is an accident between a cab and another car, you might automatically blame the cab driver, right?" More nods. He went on, "We don't want you to do that here. You need to see the man in front of you as an individual human being and look at the facts of the case. Do not judge him based on what you think him to be beforehand -- that is what prejudice is -- when you pre judge someone based on your beliefs."

The day ended up running long and the lawyers hadn't been able to agree on twelve people so they made those of us who hadn't been interviewed yet (which included me) come back for a second day. The next morning, when the lawyers finally got to me and asked what my occupation was, I said "writer and cab driver." The judge did a double-take, then smiled and said, "Sorry about my cab driver example yesterday." I just said, "It happens all the time."

Around 2:00, the lawyers decided that most of us were not what they wanted on this particular jury and I was, much to my relief, dismissed.

Stars fell on Alabama

2007-01-18T14:55:00.000-05:00

It's getting down to the wire with the book. I'm almost there. Just a few more tweaks to the last chapter and then I only have to spend the next few months plagued with self-doubt and insecure thoughts about how much it probably truly sucks. Oh, and it turns out Villard doesn't love "New York Hack" as the title... Don't really know what to do about that for now since I haven't been able to think of a non-suckass alternative.

In the meantime, while I continue to procrastinate getting back in the cab, I've found myself driving around the city here and there in a friend's car. (I got rid of my Buick a month ago. Junked it and even made $25 off the transaction!) But, what I've realized is that, even though people hate you and drive against you when you're behind the wheel of a yellow cab, you still at least get a little bit of respect. The car I've been driving lately is quite possibly the least respected car on the road: a white Volvo station wagon with motherfucking ALABAMA license plates. Shit, I don't even respect myself when I'm driving that thing. It's just embarrassing.

The worst part is, my sensibilities and ego are so offended by the other dickhead drivers, mainly because I know they think I'm some hick driver from down south. I have never been cut off more in my life than I have been in this goddamn car. And now I understand why out-of-towners say New York drivers are assholes. Because it's true, WE ARE ASSHOLES. I would probably even cut myself off if I was behind me in this car. If that makes any sense.

But aside from the unfortunate vehicle, for the past few days I've had zero tolerance for being in a car at all, regardless of whether I'm driving or passengering. This is because I have finally gone ahead and quit smoking. It's been fairly easy so far and, surprisingly enough, I've actually been feeling pretty mellow and spaced out...except when I'm in a car. Then, all of sudden, it feels like I'm at war with the world, everyone is an enemy -- or just frustratingly stupid -- and I lose my shit entirely. It's a pretty ugly scene. So my plan for now is to just take the subway everywhere until the war ends and hope that I'll be able to eventually get back to work without feeling tempted to smoke my stupid brains out.

Or maybe I should just give up the cab for good and drive down to Alabama where I clearly belong.

The Five-Nine

2006-12-15T11:19:00.000-05:00

The 59th Street Bridge was a wreck yesterday. I know this not because I was behind the wheel of a cab sitting in the traffic myself, but because I caught up with a bunch of my old taxi buddies yesterday while they were driving, so I got to hear all about it.

First I called Gary back. We hadn't spoken in maybe six or seven months, ever since he left the garage to do alternating 24-hour shifts with a private taxi owner for a cheap price. Gary is an actor and a playwright, in his mid-to-late fifties, completely bald, and totally sharp and edgy. We became very good friends when we drove out of the same garage but sometimes when people leave a place and you don't see them regularly, it becomes hard to keep in touch, no matter how much you like each other.

Apparently, since the last time we talked, he'd been traveling around, and had settled into teaching English at a Buddhist temple in Thailand. He left me a message telling me he was back, and when I got him on the phone last night he was sitting in a back-up on Crescent Avenue, leading in to the lower level of the bridge, and telling me about how he was saving up to go to Vietnam for four months starting in mid-January.

The entire time we were catching up, he was stuck in this traffic. At one point he said, "I can't believe this. It's so bad, cars are starting to drive on the sidewalk to get up to the front of the line."

I said, "You must be going nuts, huh?"

But Gary replied, "Actually I'm not. If I learned one thing from the monks in Thailand it was this: 'See clearly and you will always act morally.' It sounds a little simple, but I've found it really works. So like right now, I figure, I'll get in to New York when I get there, and I'll make the money I'll make, and the night will be what it is."

So Gary's doing well, getting all Zen and shit, and enjoying his life.

After talking for nearly half an hour, we hung up as he finally made it onto the bridge.

Next I called Elliott back. He picked up on the last ring, right before his voice mail got it, and said, "Hello! Good to hear from you! But I'm driving and the city's a mess. I'll call you later."

When I woke up this morning, there was a message from Elliott at 5:00 am, just getting off his shift, apologizing for not calling me back sooner.

After that, I reached Allen. Allen has a funny, childlike way about him. He's also in his fifties, is an orthodox Jew, and lives with his mother and his brother in Williamsburg. He picked up and we just said "Hello?" back and forth to each other a few times until he realized it was me. Then he said, "Melissa? It's Allen!"

"Hi Allen. I knew it was you -- I called you... How're you doing?"

Allen simply launched in and said, "Yeah, so I was thinking about your book yesterday. I got an idea for you."

"Oh yeah? What were you thinking?" I knew it was gonna be weird, whatever it was.

"You should make some of your characters into cartoons!" He said this with glee in his voice, clearly thinking it a brilliant and clever idea, but also knowing I would never do such a thing.

"What?"

"CARTOONS!"

"Uh, yeah, okay, but I don't think that would work so well with the rest of the story. You always have the weirdest ideas."

Allen didn't say anything because he was laughing too hard at his own bizarre joke.

I changed the subject. "Where are you?"

"Brooklyn. The five-nine is all screwed up. You can't get into the city. I got some jobs and then got taken back out here. Now I'm trying to get back in."

"Traffic's bad, huh?"

"It's terrible."

We talked for a few more minutes and, as we started wrapping up the conversation, Allen assured me that he would come up with some more ideas for the book. I thanked him and wished him a happy Hanukkah.

I had been off this marathon phone session for about two minutes when Diego called. Me and Diego still talk regularly, so it's much more casual with us.

"What's up Diego."

"Nothing. I'm pulling in to LaGuardia. The 59th Street Bridge is all fucked up so I took the tunnel and the second I got through, right across the street at that corner, a woman gets in and takes me to the butt-end of Astoria. I didn't even call the hotline, I just came straight here."

"Yeah, I heard the bridge was bad. Is the airport full?"

"Nah, it's not that bad." He must've parked already because I heard him going up to the coffee shop in the taxi lot and buying a pack of cigarettes. Then he said, "Yo, you ever coming back to work or what?"

"I hope I won't have to, but I might. If I don't find something else, I'll probably come back in February."

Diego said, "Well I miss you, buddy. I wanna see you soon."

We hung up while he was still at the airport.

It's true. I've been working hard on this book (almost done with Draft 2) and I really don't want to go back to the cab, at least until it's finished. If I can avoid it for a while longer, I will. But if my bank account and bills demand it, which may be sooner than I'd like, I'll have to get back behind that wheel.

In the meantime, I'm much happier keeping in touch with the streets vicariously through my cabbie pals.

Hi

2006-11-09T15:25:00.000-05:00

I'm still here. But I am not driving the cab these days, which is why I haven't been writing online. Instead, I'm hauling ass on Draft 2 of The Book. And so after each day of work on this, I'm too burned out to write something even marginally interesting here. I feel bad about it, but more than that, I feel bad about not driving the cab. It has been such a huge part of my life and identity for the past few years, it's just weird to not be doing it. I keep saying I'm simply on hiatus, but who the fuck knows? Maybe I've actually quit and I just don't know it yet.

Strangely, my life has never been more insular and sheltered than it is now, which is the total opposite of what it was when I was driving. But each day I'm reliving my experiences in the cab and writing (and rewriting) them all down. It's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's a lot more fun than actually driving. My body has never felt better either, so that's another thing that's keeping me from going back. I never fully realized how sitting in a cab for 12 hours at a time was destroying my muscles and my kidneys and my mental health.

Anyway, this is just to check in and say hello. A lot of people have written with questions for me and I've been really bad at writing back. So I'll address two of the most common questions here:

1. The book is tentatively titled "New York Hack." Very original, I know. It is slated to be published in the fall of 2007.

2. Seems a lot of people want to become cab drivers and want advice on how to go about getting their hack licenses. I can only recommend you do what I did and go to the TLC website and follow their instructions. But make sure you follow them very carefully, because if you make one little mistake, they will make you start the whole damn process over again. Good luck with that.

This blog totally sucks now

2006-10-16T11:13:00.000-04:00

But that's because I'm writing a book, which I'll be reading from tomorrow night. You should come!

It's part of a reading series called "Writers at the Alliance" and there are two other readers, both much more accomplished than me, so it shouldn't suck.

Anyway, it's FREE, so come out if you can.

Tuesday, October 17th, 7:00 pm
at the Educational Alliance, in the Mazer Theater
197 East Broadway
(F train to East Broadway, walk two blocks to Jefferson)

Here's the official info:

HERE IS NEW YORK: THEN AND NOW
Tuesday, October 17
7:00 pm
In his foreword to "Here is New York," written in 1948, E.B. White asserted that "it is the reader's, not the author's, duty to bring New York down to date." The Alliance has enlisted three very different writers with that task, beginning with Caleb Crain who chronicles the extravagances and vanities of New York's upper class in the nineteenth century. Next, Brandon Stosuy delves into the downtown music scene of the 1970s and continues through to 2006, noting outerborough shifts along the way. Finally, Melissa Plaut, a blogging cab driver, keeps us "down to date" with her present-day account of life behind the wheel in New York City.

CALEB CRAIN has written essays and criticism for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. He is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (Yale, 2001), and is at work on a history of the divorce of the nineteenth-century theatrical couple Edwin and Catharine Forrest.
See http://steamthing.com.

MELISSA PLAUT was born in 1975 and grew up in the suburbs of New York City. After college, she held a series of office jobs until, at the age of 29, she began driving a yellow cab. A year later she started writing "New York Hack," a blog about her experiences behind the wheel. Within a few months, the blog was receiving several thousand hits a day. She is currently working on a book based on "New York Hack" to be published in 2007 by Villard. See http://newyorkhack.blogspot.com/

BRANDON STOSUY, a staff writer and columnist at Pitchfork, contributes regularly to The Believer and The Village Voice and has written for Arthur, BlackBook, Bookforum, LA Weekly, Seattle Weekly, and Slate, among other publications. His Danzig-heavy meditation on Sue de Beer appears in her EMERGE monograph (Downtown Arts Projects, 2005) and an essay he co-authored with Lawrence Brose is collected in Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper (FDU Press, 2006). He's currently curating The Believer's 2007 Music Issue Compilation CD while finishing a discussion with Matthew Barney and essays on Wayne Koestenbaum and Gordon Lish, also for The Believer. Up Is Up, But So Is Down, his anthology of Downtown New York literature, will be published in October by NYU Press. See
http://www.amazon.com/but-So-Down-Literary-1974-1992/dp/0814740111/sr=8-1/qid=1158554986/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2161039-3765661?ie=UTF8&s=books

Writers at the Alliance, the Educational Alliance's reading series, brings together established and emerging novelists, poets and essayists whose work, in both form and content, reflects the energy, diversity, and history of dissent which have always characterized the Lower East Side.

For more details, visit http://www.killfee.net/alliance.

2007

2006-10-11T03:41:00.000-04:00

When I got to work today, I was assigned a brand-new 2007 model taxi. It only had about 6400 miles on it, which probably makes it about six weeks old. It was clean and pristine and it still smelled new, and as I was pulling out of the lot, one of my fellow drivers joked and said, "Don't scratch it!"

Of course, within an hour, the bus seen above nearly took my right side mirror off. Luckily, I was able to avoid it, even though I was still a bit rusty from having not driven any kind of vehicle in a month.

It took me that first hour to warm up and get my rhythm and confidence back. But after that, everything was back to normal. The only real problem for the rest of the night was that I was constantly distracted by some gum on the sole of my shoe that kept sticking to the pedals.

Things could definitely have been worse.

Guess who's still not working?

2006-10-04T00:25:00.000-04:00

I'm back, but it seems I've got a low level case of whatever this plague is that's been going around, the one with the incessant coughing and foggy head. It seems I caught it a few weeks ago, gave it to a few friends, got better, went away, came back, and then caught it again. So I'm avoiding the cab until next week. I wonder if those Canadian cigarettes had something to do with it.

And, on top of not feeling 100% health-wise, I'm having trouble finding the enthusiasm to get back into the swing of cab driving. Have I ever mentioned that I hate not only driving a cab, but also just driving at all? Or even being a passenger in a car? I much prefer the subway, even with all the pushing and positioning that goes on down there. It's just so much less stress. Even when I'm stuck in a tunnel in a crowded train, I'm still much more at ease than when aboveground, stuck in traffic.

My tolerance for the street was never this low until I started driving a cab. And now it appears I have some sort of visceral aversion to being strapped in to any kind of road vehicle. I've also become the worst back-seat driver that ever existed. If you knew me and owned a car, you would not want to take me anywhere at all, ever, because not only would I tell you how to drive, I would also tell you exactly which route to take and why you should take it. I would not only aggravate the shit out of you, I would bore you to tears describing traffic patterns, light times, bad intersections (and why they're bad), bridge & tunnel approaches, red-light cameras, and so on.

So, yeah, I hate to drive, but I'm real good at driving other people crazy.

Perhaps this means my next adventure should be some sort of job with the MTA or the Department of Transportation.

Or not.

Vancouver

2006-09-28T12:49:00.000-04:00

[Updated to include photos]

So I'm in Vancouver. "On vacation," as they say. I haven't driven a cab in a few weeks. Instead, I spent that time completing the first draft of the book. Which I accomplished. And when I get back home next week, I will probably have my editor's notes for the second draft and get back to work on it. But I also plan to get back in the cab, even if it's on a minimal level.

Anyway, I arrived here in Canada yesterday and, of course, I'm experiencing a tiny bit of culture shock. It's been a little while since I left New York last, and everytime I do, there's a small transition. It's really quite beautiful here, and also incredibly quiet, to the point that it's creepy. I'm not used to it, but I can see the appeal.

So, of course, the first thing I did after leaving the airport was get into a taxi. The one we got was green and white, though there are plenty of yellow cabs around. I was a little skeptical at first that our ride would be slow and boring because this city seems so clean and pristine, but it turned out to be okay. Our driver had on flip-up shades under the brim of a tan Vancouver baseball hat. In the taxi, he sat up so completely straight that the top of his head was in constant contact with the ceiling of the car. He also had on spotless white gloves and drove with his arms at the strangest angle.

At the end of the ride, I decided I totally approved of his moves. I mean, he didn't do anything particularly special or out of the ordinary, but he definitely had that quick, efficient, get-you-there-in-one-piece-but-fast style that I have tried to perfect in my own driving.

The only other thing of note was that when I tried to buy cigarettes, they didn't have my brand. I didn't recognize most of the others either, so I resorted to treating the girl at the 7-11 like a salesperson who works on commission, asking her, "Can you recommend a good light cigarette?"

She handed me a pack of "Canadian Classics Lights" and said they were "popular." I bought them. They're alright.

Co-star

2006-09-13T11:41:00.000-04:00

The woman pictured above was my first passenger last night.

Actually, she was my only passenger last night.

And, actually, it was all totally staged. Do you recognize her? In case you don't, she's an actress and her name is Tilda Swinton. I was recruited a few weeks back to play her cabbie as part of a project by artist Doug Aitken. He's working on a bunch of film scenes that will be projected on the facade of the Museum of Modern Art this January.

Last night was a little piece of the project and I was happy to participate, even though I don't think my presence will be too prominent in the end. Still, hopefully I'll be able to see myself on the MoMA walls it when it's all finished. There will also be a companion book that will feature, among other things, an interview with me.

Anyway, it was a totally new and fascinating experience, despite the initial waiting around that, I gathered, is the norm for any kind of film shoot. I showed up just before 3:00 pm and just sort of hung around for an hour or so while the crew got everything ready. Then Tilda pretended to hail me and I pretended to pick her up a few times. After that, the cab was rigged onto a trailer and we "drove" around the upper west side and Times Square.

I think that was my favorite part: Riding around a foot above the normal height pretending to drive a cab. It's far better than actually driving a cab. I was struck by how many people on the street gaped and gawked at us, took pictures, and yelled stupid comments. I'm so used to being sort of invisible in the cab, so this was utterly strange to me.

At one point, when we were passing FlashDancers, the Gentleman's Club, one of the doormen there called out, "A lady cab driver? Now I really don't believe it! There are no lady cab drivers in New York!"

Under normal circumstances I might have given him the finger, but I decided to hold off on that this time. The stupidest part of this guy's comment, though, was that I actually met him in my cab not too long ago. When a cab drops off its breast-hungry schmucks at FlashDancers, the doorman usually hands the driver an envelope containing a three dollar "tip," a letter written in every conceivable language encouraging cabbies to continue dropping off at this particular strip club, and a voucher or two for free entry to the club that we can give to our "favorite passengers." This very doorman, who couldn't believe a "lady cab driver" existed, had himself handed me this little package not too long ago. Clearly he has a short memory.

Overall, the night was a lot of fun. The lights were pretty, the not-actually-having-to-drive was wonderful, the people were all really great, and I think the project is going to look incredibly cool when it's finished.

At the end of the night, the director and his cast posed together for a picture.

Now I know what my next career move needs to be: Professional Fake Cab Driver.

The year in review

2006-09-05T19:19:00.000-04:00

It's been just over a year since I started this thing, and since I'm not working this week, I figured I'd do a little yearly wrap-up/question-answering thing.

Basically, I started this blog last August after my dad gave me a digital camera for my 30th birthday. (And since so many people ask, it's a Canon Powershot SD 300).

I just turned 31 on Friday.

In the meantime, sometime around March I think, I got a book deal with Villard, an imprint of Random House.

Also in the meantime, over a million "unique visitors" (whatever that means) have looked at this blog.

I'm in the process of finishing up the first draft of said book, and these next few weeks are the final push, so I will probably be driving the cab even less while this is happening.

I've decided along the way that I'm not sure what's more difficult: driving a taxi in New York or writing a book about driving a taxi in New York.

Let's see. What else?

Even though I just renewed my hack license last month, I don't plan on driving the cab forever, or even for too much longer for that matter. But, then again, I've been saying that for almost a year already, so who knows. This job is like quicksand in that it just has a way of sucking you in, it seems.

I did my first public reading last month as part of a fundraiser for the Taxi Worker's Alliance. Despite my utter stagefright (I'm more afraid of reading in front of live actual people than I am of driving a cab at night in New York), it seemed to go pretty well and the Taxi Worker's Alliance gave me a free t-shirt. A week after this, a friend of mine took a cab home to Brooklyn and had Kevin Fitzpatrick, one of the organizers, as her cabbie. When she told him she saw him at the fundraiser, he gave her the ride for free and refused to take any money from her at all.

I will be doing another reading on October 17th at the Educational Alliance as part of a series called "Writers at the Alliance." I'm already scared to death.

Anyway -- and this is where it gets a little corny -- I just wanted to say that driving the cab these past few years, and even doing this blog for the past year, has made me feel brave enough to try anything, to embark on other adventures, and to push for a variety of new experiences in my life. That was the whole point of getting my hack license to begin with: I wanted to try something new and completely foreign to me while making a living and without having to settle and commit to some shitty "career" for the rest of my life. And it has worked out pretty well so far, all things considered.

Everyone knows I'm not in love with driving a cab -- I mean, it is indeed a love/hate relationship, but the hate definitely wins out as the more prevalent feeling. Still it's been precisely these ups and downs that have brought me the greatest amount of joy, heartbreak, and of course, aggravation, none of which I ever would have experienced to this degree doing any other job.

I'm still driving, though much less these days, as some of you have noticed. On top of trying to finish the book, I am in the process of trying to figure out what my next step will be job-wise. So, who knows, you may log on to New York Hack one day only to discover that it's the blog of an ex-cabbie turned animal welfare cop, or Red Cross worker, or Peace Corps activist, or weirdo ranch hand, or whatever else I may try my hand at in the future.

So, anyway, this is just to say happy new year! And thanks for reading.

***[UPDATE: Because there seems to be some misunderstanding here, I would like to clarify that I have not quit yet! This was not supposed to be a farewell message or anything. I'm still driving and will probably pick up more shifts once the stupid UN General Assembly is over later this month (even though it hasn't even convened yet), because I no longer have the heart for that kind of traffic (see September 2005 Archive for why). Anyway, yeah. You can't get rid of me that easily.]***

You're alright

2006-08-29T02:41:00.000-04:00

There was a weird vibe out there tonight. Maybe it was the rain these past few days, or the change of season, or the noticeably earlier sunset, who knows, but there was just some sort of odd mood happening. It should go without saying by now that business was slow. It's August. Everyone who can afford to be is out of town. And those that are left are not necessarily taking cabs.

I did get a little lucky out at LaGuardia this evening. I was flagged down by a hotel doorman on East 42nd Street and, as the trunk was being loaded up with luggage, another cabbie that was parked in front of the hotel came over and told me he was "giving" me this job because he would rather go to Kennedy than LaGuardia. Sucks for him, though, because I found out not long after that the Taxi Hold Lot at Kennedy was at like a thousand percent of capacity and moving slow.

I got to LaGuardia without any traffic hassles and waited in the US Air lot, which is next to the Delta terminal (seen above). It's always a gamble to pull into the airport, and then a further gamble deciding which lot to wait in. For the first time in months it seems, I made the right choice. The lot moved relatively quickly and I was on my way back to Manhattan with a passenger within 40 minutes.

Back in the city, though, the streets were tough. Competition was fierce and the regular "civilian" drivers were moving like zombies. I had one altercation that could've been bad, but ended up being a nice moment.

I was changing lanes at the same time as this Nissan Altima on the other side of Third Avenue. The problem was, we were both trying to get into the same lane at the same time but from opposite directions. I swerved back over just in time to avoid a collision, but not in time to avoid hearing the driver of the car, a young black man, call me a motherfucker. He sneered at me and I just shook my head and shrugged my shoulders, like, "Whatever."

As we approached the next light side by side, he took another look at me and said, "Oh, I thought you were a guy." His two passengers were now staring. I just nodded my head and looked away, not knowing what he was getting at and not really wanting to get into anything.

Five minutes later, we ended up next to each other again. Smiling this time, he called over and said, "You're alright, man. You're alright!"

I don't know what brought on this change of heart, but I didn't question it. All I knew was that, somehow, I went from being a "motherfucker" to "alright" in a matter of minutes. And it was certainly a better outcome than having him take his dick out at me.

If only it was always this easy.

Cow catcher

2006-08-22T03:34:00.000-04:00

It almost seemed like the usual last-two-weeks-of-August empty-city curse might have been lifted when I got stuck in massive throngs of people walking in the traffic lanes near Penn Station, but, alas, the curse has hit, and hard. It took me 45 minutes to find my first passenger tonight, which is just frustrating. That's not supposed to happen in the beginning of the shift, and it makes the night look hopeless.

I often tell myself, All I need is the first one, and then everything will fall into place, which is usually true, but when getting that first passenger proves to be more difficult than it should be, my outlook starts to look real dark. Of course, eventually, someone deigned to get in my cab and pay me to drive them somewhere, and slowly but surely, other fares followed, but the damage was done. The night proved to be dead slow, worse than usual, and I spent a lot of time by myself between jobs.

Sometime during rush hour a man and his teenage son got in the cab. They were visitors from Canada. Shortly after getting in, the man commented on the "Passenger's Bill of Rights" posted on the partition. We laughed at how ridiculous it is, and how sad. And also what it says about how the city feels about its taxi drivers, and so on.

We also got along because, when a bunch of genius pedestrians walked in front of my cab against the light, the man suggested I invest in something called a "cow catcher." He explained that it's that slanty thing seen on the front of locomotives and they serve to move animals and objects out of the way and off the tracks. I agreed that I absolutely needed a cow catcher. Especially today when the pedestrians seemed particularly suicidal.

They told me they were visiting the man's brother and leaving tomorrow. The son had never been here before, the father hadn't been here in over 20 years. We had a pleasant ride together and when they got out, they left me a decent tip.

Anyway, when my next passenger got in, he handed me a wallet and said he found it on the backseat. I immediately knew it belonged to the Canadian man. It contained only a Canadian "Operator's License" and a credit card, nothing else.

Now, I have to admit, had this guy been a dick, I might've taken some pleasure in throwing the wallet away, but he hadn't been. So I found the 800 number on the back of the credit card and called the company. I explained what happened and gave them my number. I felt bad for the guy. There was no way he was gonna be allowed on a plane tomorrow without his ID.

A half hour later, he called and asked if I could go back to where I dropped him off and return the wallet, telling me he would make it worth my while. Those words are like magic. They just make it a lot easier to go off-duty during rush hour for a complete stranger. It's like, at least the person knows you're going to be losing time, which equals money in this business, and they don't have an unhealthy sense of entitlement, which many New Yorkers definitely seem to have when it comes to cabs. But it's also a gamble, because you never know at what rate a person values your time.

Still, at that point, it didn't really matter. This guy deserved a favor, and I was happy to do it, even if it ended up as a loss for me. I hit my off-duty light and, of course, that was the moment when a hundred people decided they absolutely needed my cab, but I was on a mission to do a good thing and be a good person for a change, so I ignored their hails.

When I finally made it back to him, I jokingly told him that I only did a little shopping with his credit card at Circuit City and Best Buy, but I hadn't maxed it out yet. He was so relieved that I came back, he just laughed. Then he handed me fifty bucks and said, "You're my favorite New Yorker ever."

The whole interaction, plus the generous reward, pretty much made my night. So, ultimately, I came out way ahead.

I'm totally gonna use that fifty bucks as a down payment on a cow catcher.

Reminder

2006-08-18T13:15:00.000-04:00

I'll be reading from my book at the cabbie fundraiser tomorrow night at Rocky Sullivan's on Lex between 28th and 29th. The event goes from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm.

Also, I will be among a bunch of cabbies telling cabbie stories on WBAI tomorrow afternoon from 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm. Listen in at 99.5 FM or www.wbai.org. We will be taking calls too.

Update on how to hear the show:

You can hear the WBAI show live at www.wbai.org. About 10 minutes after the broadcast it will be up on the www.wbai.org archive under Radio Free Eireann.

The Saturday night show will also be available on www.nysoundposse.com by Sunday night.

Brooklyn

2006-08-15T04:19:00.000-04:00

I know it's inconvenient for a lot of people, but I have to say thank goodness for MTA construction. The night was pretty slow until the L train to Brooklyn shut down at midnight, and I ended up making lucrative little circles between 14th Street and Williamsburg. It helped my earnings quite a bit.

My oddest ride of the night, however, happened earlier in the night when I picked up a 20-something-year-old woman coming out of Flashdancers, the strip club on 52nd and Broadway. She was going to Park Slope to look at an apartment and her speech was slurred in a really weird way. She didn't seem drunk, just out of it, or maybe a little crazy. Or on pills, perhaps.

Anyway, she was busy on the phone for a lot of the ride. The first call sounded like total nonsense. I only caught snippets, but they were weird enough to get stuck in my mind.

She was speaking to someone named Elizabeth and she was mad at her because she wanted to go out and party tonight. She said, "I'm tired. I'm not going out. I did my deal, and I totally need liposuction. But I'm off work tomorrow." After a brief pause, she said, "You really need to move out of your dad's house. You're seventeen. I practically raised you."

When she hung up with Elizabeth, we rode into Brooklyn in silence until she got another call. After her initial hello, she slurred, "Anyway, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.... Do you know how much I love you?"

When we pulled up to her destination, she paid the fare, but then wouldn't get out of the cab because she dropped her phone somewhere in her huge purse and couldn't find it. She turned to me and said, "You're hot," and then, "Oh, my phone! My boyfriend is gonna think I'm crazy."

She sat there for a few minutes calling out to her boyfriend on the other end of the phone, saying "Hello? Hello? Hello?" and instructing him to yell really loud so she could hear him and locate the phone. After a few tries, she finally found it.

She held it up like a prize, grinning like a chimpanzee, and then shoved it through the partition at me. She looked and sounded completely insane when she tried to get me to say hi to her boyfriend.

Not wanting to be rude, I said "Hi," but I also found myself really wanting her to get out of my cab already, so I added, "Okay, well, have a good night!" But she apparently wasn't ready to go yet. She got back on the phone with her boyfriend and just sort of continued casually chatting with him while not making any motion to leave. She was laughing and still slurring as she explained to him exactly how she lost her phone in her bag but now she found it. I'm sure he was fascinated.

At this point, the meter had been off for a while and I just wanted to get her out and get on with my night, so I repeated myself two more times, getting louder and louder so she could hear me over her own conversation.

"OKAY, have a good night!"

There was no response from her as she just kept chattering along.

"O-KAY. HAVE. A. GOOD. NIGHT."

This snapped her out of it and she seemed to remember where she was. She said, "Huh? Oh, right, yeah. Thanks cab driver!" as she got out and slammed the door.

Yeah. It wasn't only her boyfriend who thought she was crazy.

Just saying

2006-08-14T12:03:00.000-04:00

So I'm doing my very first reading this Saturday at a fundraiser to help the Taxi Worker's Alliance in their attempt to deal with rising gas prices. I'll be reading a section from the book I've been working on. I hope some of you that are in New York can come out and lend your support.

The press release is as follows:

HELP DRIVE CABBIES BACK OUT OF POVERTY
Join us on SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 2006
At a fundraiser to help cab drivers earn a living wage

With gas prices soaring, manhole covers blowing, and power outages knocking out traffic lights, it has never been harder to be a cab driver in NYC. Join the Taxi Worker's Alliance and NYC cabbies for a night of music, comedy, poetry, and prose.

Saturday, August 19th
Rocky Sullivan's Bar, located on Lexington Ave. at 29th Street
from 6:00 - 9:00 pm

Performances by cabbies:

John McDonagh, founder of CAB Cabbies Against Bush, doing comedy

Randy Credico, project director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, also doing comedy

Davidson Garrett, author of King Lear of the Taxi, reading poetry

Melissa Plaut, writer of the New York Hack blog, reading an excerpt
from her upcoming book to be published by Villard in 2007

Also featuring:
Music by Moogie Klingman with a new song about cabdrivers
Kevin Fitzpatrick
Steve Smith
Seth "The Kaballagh Kabbie"
Bhairavi Desai
Jerry Hassett (Green Party)

Suggested donation is $10.00 or 3 gallons of gas.
All donations go towards the Alliance's ongoing efforts to petition the NYC administration in order to help cab drivers earn a livable wage in the face of the gas-price crisis.

ALSO:
Tune in to WBAI, 99.5 FM or wbai.org, that afternoon from 1:30 to 3:00 pm to hear NYC cabbies tell their favorite stories from behind the wheel. You can listen live at www.wbai.org.

Gimme all your money

2006-08-01T02:08:00.000-04:00

[An omen?]

[Apparently German Shepherds are licensed to drive in Brooklyn.]

It was another ghost town night. The streets were virtually empty and I imagine the heat was keeping everyone indoors. At first I thought the theme of the night was gonna be babies since I had a three-month old child in the cab followed by a four-months pregnant lady. But then that ended when an old Polish lady got in on the upper east side and proceeded to describe the three times she got mugged.

One of these times, she had stopped at the candy store on her way home as it was apparently in the process of being robbed. When she entered the store, the robber grabbed her and locked her in a closet with six other similarly terrorized people. He then stripped her of all her money and jewelry.

In her mind, the mugging was somehow related to the misfortune of owning a car in New York, saying, "If only I hadn't found that parking spot in front of the store, I would've just gone straight home and it would never have happened." She got rid of her car soon afterward.

The night went on in the usual boring fashion, but when I got back to the garage, another driver told me a story about how he was once mugged at gunpoint by three guys (he was not working at the time). Unfortunately for them -- and him, I suppose -- he only had one single pathetic little dollar on him. He was on his way to buy a can of beer. When they found the dollar, he told them, "I guess you picked the wrong guy." They took the dollar anyway.

Luckily, I was not mugged tonight, but I was mugged several years ago when I still lived in the East Village. (Note to my parents: Stop reading this right now.) I was walking alone when two guys approached me. When they got close, one of them actually said, "Gimme all your fuckin money."

I almost laughed, thinking he was kidding, since it was such a clichéd movie line. But then I looked down and saw the knife pointed at my stomach, and I quickly stopped smiling. I gave them what I had, which amounted to about $40, but they were thorough, and made me face a wall as they patted me down to check for any hidden cash. When they were finally satisfied they had gotten it all, they ran off, and I staggered home in a terrified daze.

The driver at the garage tonight assured me that "it will happen" again. He also informed me that hiding my night's earnings in my sock was not really very effective. But I guess I already knew that.

I wonder if, using the logic of the Polish lady, any future muggings could possibly be avoided if only I got rid of my car. And maybe the cab, too. But I bet that German Shepherd up there in the driver's seat won't be getting mugged any time soon.

I should start a blog

2006-07-25T02:55:00.000-04:00

On Ninth Avenue tonight, two guys were walking in the middle of the street. When I pulled up behind them, one of them turned around and, instead of getting out of the way and walking on the sidewalk like a normal human being, said, "Calm yourself, you fucking CUNT."

This was so out of nowhere and so utterly uncalled for, I snapped. I was, at that point in my shift, just so sick of the abuse, sick of the idea that some idiot crossing in traffic can turn around and use some shitty sexist slur against me, and sick of the fact that it even bothered me at all. But it did. In fact, I'd rather be called an asshole, or even a motherfucker, but cunt? It hardly fits.

So, yeah, I lost my cool. Despite the fact that I had a passenger in the backseat -- a circumstance under which I usually have much more restraint, since the point here is to work and make money and not let shit get to you -- I yelled out the window a very boring and tired old "Why don't you come back here and call me a cunt to my face, you fucking retard."

The guy, of course, returned my unoriginal question with his own very unoriginal move of grabbing his balls at me. At that point I had unbuckled my seatbelt and was reaching for my camera, but just then the light turned green and I remembered I had a passenger, remembered that I was working, not playing some stupid ego game, so I pulled myself together and just drove away.

I felt pretty stupid and weird and pissed off, and I felt I had to say something to my passenger so he didn't think he was riding with some psychopath -- though, at that point, he was. I said, "Sorry about that. I'm just sick of these guys who walk in the middle of the street and then think that I'm like trying to hit them or something, and then say shit to me like I shouldn't be driving on the street they're walking on."

The guy didn't seem phased, saying only, "Oh, it's okay." Maybe he really didn't care, but I have a feeling he might have been scared of me, and I ended up feeling like a total fool. Maybe even a bit of an asshole, but definitely not a cunt.

Later on, my last job of the night, I took a middle-aged heavyset guy to Glendale, Queens. The entire ride there we talked about the rising price of gas and he explained to me in complicated detail the mechanics of our economy and how gas prices were going to exceed people's need for the stuff and eventually prices would go down, etc, etc.

After a while, he asked if I was a student. I get asked this one a lot since I look a lot younger than my 30 years. I said no. Then he asked, "Well do you do something else besides driving the cab?" I've learned over the past few years that people really like it if you're doing something else. They don't like to hear that you're just a cab driver, they want you to be working towards something.

I've started to tell people different things, but a lot of times I just give some vague, weird, embarrassed answer like, "I guess I'm trying to be a writer these days," or something like that. Sometimes I'll even tell them about the blog, but most often not.

This guy got all excited when he heard this answer. He went on and on about writing and then said, "You should use the internet to leverage that -- have you heard of blogs?"

I said yes, and was about to tell him I had one, but I couldn't really get a word in as he quickly went on to explain, again in meticulous detail, how I could start a blog and get Google advertising on it and get twenty- to thirty-thousand hits a day (not likely) and make a ton of money. By then we were in front of his house and talking with the meter off already, so I didn't really feel like getting into it and prolonging the conversation. I just let him talk himself out until finally he paid me, wished me luck, and jumped out.

I probably really should start a blog, shouldn't I.

$150

2006-07-19T16:17:00.000-04:00

A few months ago -- in fact, it was May 18, "Taxi Appreciation Day" -- I got a ticket by the Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC) for making a turn during daytime non-turning hours. I figured it wouldn't hurt to fight it, since the fine was for $150, no small amount of change, so I went down to the big TLC building in Long Island City last week and -- guess what? I lost.

I don't know why I ever thought for a second I might get out of it, since I was indeed guilty and the TLC is definitely not renowned for forgiveness, but I was determined to try nonetheless. When I got into the hearing room, the ticketing officer recognized me right away. He had seen his own picture posted on the site and amiably complained to me that he looked like he was sleeping in the shot. He wasn't. He was simply looking down, writing my ticket.

We chatted for a few minutes while the administrative judge finished up the case just before mine, and then we got sworn in. The officer gave his testimony, I gave mine, then showed the judge pictures of how there are no signs at the intersection of 49th and 2nd Ave warning drivers that, if they turn on 49th, they'll be trapped on a "Thru-Street," meaning you can't turn off until Park. This didn't really matter, I guess. I still made the turn, even though I didn't mean to break the law.

The whole thing took about ten minutes, and when we got out of the hearing room, I joked with the officer, saying "I hope I never see you again." Then I spent close to an hour waiting for the decision, and here I got to observe the unruly chaos of the TLC adjudication floor. Men streamed in and out of hearing rooms, chatted loudly on cell phones in the waiting area, and cheap lawyers in shiny suits "advised" drivers about how to plead.

Finally, my name was called over the loudspeaker and I approached the information desk. They were handing back decisions, and when I got up to the front, the woman behind the counter handed me a piece of paper and said, "Go to the cashier. Have a nice day." There was no joy in her voice, just a not-quite-polite monotone that seemed to come from repeating the same words over and over all day everyday.

The paper read as follows:

The Inspector credibly testified that, during an assignment at the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 49th Street, on May 18, 2006 at 4:02 pm, he observed the driver/respondent in a taxi approach the intersection in a westbound direction and make a left onto Lexington Avenue (southbound) from East 49th Street. He testified that a sign was posted (facing east on 49th Street onto Lexington Avenue) stating "No left turns Monday thru Friday, 10:00am - 6:00pm." He then stopped the vehicle and personally issued summons to the respondent.

In her testimony, the respondent stated that the testimony of the inspector was accurate, but that she did not intentionally violate the "no turn" rule. She testified that she did not see the sign due to the volume of traffic.

Even though the respondent may not have intended to violate the "no turn" rule, this is not a valid defense to a violation of TLC Rule 2-21B2, as set forth in this summons.

Accordingly, a violation of 2-21B2 is sustained.

I guess the judge wasn't interested in my little "lack of a sign on 2nd Avenue" defense. (Note to DOT: Put a damn sign up there already.) But my main problem with the whole thing was that I'd rather get a ticket for something I actually meant to do, rather than just for some stupid mistake I made.

I paid my $150 at the cashier and vowed to never make that stupid mistake ever again.

Neil

2006-07-11T03:39:00.000-04:00

So things went a little better tonight. The afternoon consisted of passengers that were eager to talk about the building explosion on the upper east side (photo above of the blocked-off end of 62nd Street at Park Ave). The radio was going on about it over and over, so I was able to give everyone up-to-the-minute updates. It's funny to see so many reactions to a bizarre local news story. It seemed like most people were mildly amused by the whole thing, mainly, I think, because no one died and because the guy was clearly a lunatic.

Anyway, later in the evening I picked up a well-dressed French man going to a hotel in SoHo. We chatted for a bit and, of course, the World Cup came up. I'm not a big soccer fan or anything, but I did happen to see the final game on Sunday. The poor guy, I actually felt a little bad for him. He talked about the game with deep regret, saying, "It would've been better if it was the Germans, not the Italians."

Just to be sure, I clarified. "You mean, you would prefer to lose to Germany than to Italy."

He laughed a tiny bit and said, "Yes. That is correct."

In other World Cup news, near the end of my shift, two girls and a very drunk guy got in at Ludlow and Stanton. The girls entered the cab by the curb, but the guy entered street-side. When he got in, he took one look at me and started yelling, saying, "Oh shit! You look Italian! Are you Italian?"

Then he started singing, but the whole time, his door was wide open and cars were starting to zip by with only inches to spare. A few more seconds like that and I knew the door would be gone. But when I asked him to close it, he refused. He just sat there staring at me and yelling that I was Italian. (I'm not.)

I turned around and threatened to kick him out of the cab if he didn't calm down and close the door, but the girls persuaded me not to. Then they took a turn yelling at him to shut the door, and finally he did.

I was, by that point, considerably annoyed. The two girls were sweet, though, and began apologizing for his behavior. I was ready to let it go, but he continued yelling, and finally went to reach through the partition. As far as I'm concerned, this a big no-no. With one hand on the wheel, I reached back with the other and slammed it shut in his face. He drew his hand back in time but, unfortunately, I could still hear him. He turned to his friends and said, "This is the worst cab experience ever. Isn't it?"

They said, "No, Neil, it isn't. She's just doing her job and you're being an ass."

I was happy that they understood where I was coming from. I was also happy that it was only a short ride. Neil continued acting like a dick, singing Pearl Jam songs and demanding I put on Hot 97, until we finally reached St. Mark's and First Ave. I opened the partition and said, "That'll be $4.60." The girls apologized again, handed me a ten, and told me to keep it.

Then, as they exited on the curb side, Neil, staying true to his asshole form, got out on the street side, flinging the door open on to oncoming cars. Me and the girls yelled, but he ignored us and continued exiting as cars swerved around us up First Ave.

When my next passenger got in, he said, "Do you smoke?"

I said, "Yeah, why do you ask?"

"Oh, someone left a full pack of cigarettes on the seat."

He handed me a brand-new unopened pack of cigarettes. I was sure they were Neil's and felt gratified that he at least paid some small price for his stupidity, and that I got a little something extra out of the deal, in addition to the nice tip.

My gratification turned to disappointment, however, when I noticed the brand: Marlboro Light Menthols. I would've happily smoked just about any brand, especially when it's free, but you have to draw the line somewhere. Of course, it made perfect sense. Only a dick named Neil would buy those -- and then lose them, unopened, in a cab.

Stupid mistakes

2006-07-07T15:03:00.000-04:00

Last night was a total bust from beginning to end. I made a number of mistakes and bad decisions, the first of which was showing up to work at all. When I got to the garage, the first thing anybody said to me was "Did you gain weight?" I'm not a big person and I don't think I'll ever manage to be overweight, but still. The question is tough to hear. No one wants to gain weight, even if it's just couple of pounds from too many burritos.

Granted, the question was asked in a well-meaning way, followed by a "No, I mean, you look good!" But the damage was done. I mean, how could someone notice if I gained a few pounds when there are a bunch of fat cabbies hanging out not 10 feet away. Anyway, I just woke up and checked myself out in the mirror but I don't seem any different. A few nights ago I wasn't anorexic enough, and now this.

Anyway, when I pulled out of the garage, something smelled funny. I couldn't tell if it was coming from my cab or just from the area I was in so I continued on over the bridge. When I got to the other side, I knew for sure it was my cab. This time it smelled like some kind of horrible toxic oil was burning. I thought maybe it was something spilled on the engine and that it would burn off after a little while, but it never did.

I checked with a few of my passengers to see if they smelled it to, in order to make sure I wasn't going crazy, and they did. But when I checked under the hood, the smell wasn't there. After about an hour, I realized it was coming from somewhere underneath the car, and it didn't seem to have any plans of going away. Now slightly dizzy, nauseous, and with a small headache, I went back to the garage to get it looked at.

I know nothing about cars, but apparently the "rear end was blown out." Or at least that's what it sounded like Lincoln, the head mechanic, said. Then I think he was playing with me because he said, "You ruined my car!" I said back, "Your car ruined my night!" But my night wasn't ruined enough yet, apparently. Walter, one of the cashiers, set me up with an SBV (stand-by vehicle), which is a back-up cab that borrows the medallions from regular cabs that are being worked on. At that point, I didn't want to work anymore -- my rhythm was gone, my head felt weird, and I had lost heart, but Walter, who is a buddy of mine, had no intention of letting me get away with that. What he did say was that he would give me a hundred dollar discount (which I'm sure he would never really do, but it's worth a try) if I mentioned him on the site. Hi Walter!

I lost over an hour of my shift to that stupid car, and when I finally got back on the streets, it was spotty business. Two hours later, I got a lady going to Queens. When I dropped her off, I got another fare deeper into Queens. And here's where the mistakes really start to stack up. It's almost as if I was a brand new driver last night, because when I finally dropped those last people off, I tried to head over to LaGuardia (mistake), but ended up getting lost and taking a long stupid way there (mistake).

When I got there, I pulled into the Delta lot (big fucking mistake), and sat there for over an hour. When I finally got to the front of the line, bad luck kicked in and I got a fare going to Far fucking Rockaway. It's called "Far Rockaway" for a reason, as it's a million miles from the city, but what it is near is Kennedy Airport. So after I dropped off, I made my biggest mistake of the night and drove into the Central Taxi Hold lot at Kennedy.

By this time it was midnight. The lot looked promising as it was only about 40% full, which is usually a good thing, but not last night. I sat there and waited. And waited. And waited. I got stared at by some disgusting, pervy cab driver, who wouldn't even stop staring after I took his photo (featured above). I sat in my cab and read a book, bought a buttered roll (that lacked much butter), talked on the phone to Allen and Diego, and smoked a ton of cigarettes.

Finally, two and a half hours later, I couldn't take it anymore. When you pull into that lot, you get trapped in a lane, with cabs parked in front of you, next to you, and behind you. But by 2:30, a bunch of the cabs in the lanes around me had given up and reversed out of there empty. The lane next to me was now clear, so, being tired, frustrated, and utterly disgusted with the piece of shit night I had been having, I gave up too.

I pulled out empty and drove straight back to the garage, but, of course, not without having to take the long way, since the Van Wyck was closed for construction. But I guess that was just a little extra bonus for me, courtesy of the Department of Transportation.

The only good thing that happened last night was that when I got back to the garage, I stood around bullshitting for a while with Merrill, Abe, and Allen. In the post-shift delirium, those guys made me laugh so hard, I think I actually may have lost those few extra pounds I had supposedly gained. So maybe the night wasn't a total bust after all.

The 3rd of July

2006-07-04T05:27:00.000-04:00

It was a hot, glorious day when I left the garage and drove over the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan. The only problem with this Monday afternoon was that the city was virtually empty. The usual rush hour business was nonexistent, with most people either taking the day off of work or gone out of town. The whole rhythm of the night was affected and it was just a weird pace for the entire shift. I had little clusters of passengers and then would spend up to 30 minutes driving around empty looking for work. But with the holiday, those who were left in the city decided to go out and as the night wore on, it began to look more like a weekend night than a Monday.

Of course, the later it got, the drunker everyone became. Luckily, everyone, drunk or not, seemed to be in a good mood. Two girls got in the cab outside of an Irish bar on the upper east side wanting to go to Bowery Bar on Great Jones and Bowery. After gossiping for a few minutes about some friend of theirs who they suspect has an eating disorder, they noticed me. One of them leaned up to the partition and said, "Hey, is that place any good, Bowery Bar?"

I replied, "I'm not sure. I was there once or twice a few years ago, but I don't know what it's like now. What was wrong with the bar you just left?"

"It was full of ugly guys."

"Oh."

"Yeah, they should call it McUglies, not McFaddens."

Then they grilled me for a few minutes about what it's like to be "a female cab driver," and, when I gave them my boring, routine answers, they went back to trash talking about their anorexic friend.

I guess I didn't look skinny enough to hold their interest.

Private parts

2006-06-27T03:36:00.000-04:00

After sitting at LaGuardia for an hour this afternoon (US Air lot pictured in my mirror above), I finally got back to a very slow city. Business was thin pretty much all night. But I did manage to have one interesting/strange conversation with a man who took my cab for five blocks. It went like this:

Him: "Let me guess -- you're an artist."

Me: "An artist? No. Why do you say that?"

Him: "Well, I'm an artist and you just strike me as one. You have very meditational eyes."

Me: "Meditational eyes? What does that mean?"

Him: "I can only see your eyes in the mirror, I haven't seen the rest of your face yet, but your eyes say that something needs to come out, like off your skin. Like sweat."

Me: (confused, turning on the air conditioner)

Him: "I just feel it from you.... You know, I'm married to a priest."

Me: "A priest?"

(At this point I decide I need to stop repeating everything he says because I'm annoying myself.)

Him: "Yes. We got married in San Francisco."

Me: "That's nice. That'll be $4.20 please.

Him: (counting) "One, two, three, five. Bye!"

Don't ask, because I have no idea.

The only other thing worth mentioning concerns the little girl whose parents took the time to teach her about her "private parts" while in my cab. It came up because she started talking very loudly about her "giny," screaming the word gleefully over and over again and, I assume, either touching or pointing to it.** Her parents gently told her not to talk about such things in public. When she insisted on knowing why, they responded, "Because it's private. That's why they're called your private parts."

I privately cringed and sped to their Upper West Side destination before the conversation could move on to bowel movements or some such other "private" topic.

Oh, and one other thing. I don't think I've mentioned yet that, ever since summer started, people have been jaywalking like crazy. It's out of control and I noticed today that it's finally taking its toll when I saw no fewer than five people hobbling around on crutches. Perhaps some people have learned their lesson? As someone who's been hit by a car and spent an entire summer on crutches, all I have to say is, just wait for the light. It's so much easier than breaking your foot on a car and ruining your summer.

** A little update to prevent any confusion over how this special word is pronounced, because these things are clearly important. The closest phonetic I can come up with is jie-nee, like the word "tiny" but with a J instead of a T.
I hope I never hear this word ever again.

Heat

2006-06-20T15:41:00.000-04:00

Since so many people leave New York for the summer, the taxi business gets slow. Which also means not as many interesting things happen in the cab. Or, at least, not my cab.

Last night, the big event had to do with my air conditioning. After driving for a short while, I noticed it was blowing out a funny smell and I was starting to feel a little lightheaded. I dropped off some tourists at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street and called Allen, an old-time driver, and told him I was having a problem.

Allen is a strange, funny, almost child-like guy. An orthodox Jew from Williamsburg by day and a human global positioning system by night, Allen knows how to get anywhere from anywhere in the five boroughs with block-by-block precision. He also has plenty of answers for any other question a younger, stupider driver like me might have, but his answers to non-directions-related questions can be hit or miss.

I got him on the phone and our conversation went something like this:

Me: "Hey, my A.C. smells weird. It's giving me a headache and making me a little dizzy. Do you know what that could be?"

Allen: "Oh I know what it is -- does it smell like coffee?"

Me: "Uhh, no. It's more chemical like."

Allen: "Okay. Does it smell like crap?"

Me: "No, it just smells sort of toxic, like I'm losing brain cells."

Allen: "Is it blowing warm air?"

Me: "No."

Allen: "Does it smell like plastic?"

Me: "Yeah, sort of. It's in that family."

Allen: "Oh, okay, yeah. It must've been the day driver ran over a plastic bag and it melted onto the pipe. You're fine. It's no big deal."

Me: "Okay. Thanks."

Allen: "I'll call you later to see what's doing."

Allen took the night off yesterday, but calling each other when we're not working is something we can't help but do. If one of us was supposed to work and didn't, we'll check in to find out how business is, to hear what the traffic is like, and basically to see what we missed. If we discover it was a slow night, we feel good for having taken the night off. If it was busy, there's a pang of regret that we missed out on it. I don't know if other cabbies do this, but I do it all the time with Allen and Diego. Last night was nothing special, so Allen should be happy to know he didn't miss much.

In light of that, I felt no regret at quitting only seven hours into the shift as the chemical fumes from the A.C. were starting to turn my head around. I returned the cab and called it a night.

Meanwhile, the driver of this cab clearly had a more eventful night than I did.

Sometimes it's just better for it to be boring.

Yes, I do own the road

2006-06-16T04:35:00.000-04:00

I don't really have much to report. Nothing all that interesting happened tonight. There were no celebrities in my cab and not one person gave me the finger. Of course, the same old out of state drivers pulled the same old idiot moves, which is nothing new, but it made me think some introductions might need to be made. You know, like, "Connecticut, meet the gas pedal," and "Pennsylvania, meet the turn signal," and of course, "New Jersey, meet all of the above, as well as the 'end call' button on your cell phone." It almost seems like these states require their drivers to be either brain dead or a meth head in order to get a license. I'll never understand it.

Oh, and around 2:30 am there was one crazy, possibly drunk, lady in a Nissan Maxima. She pulled up alongside me at a red light and started yelling at me. My window was up so I couldn't really hear what she was saying, but it sounded like she was telling me I was disgusting. I just ignored her, but when the light changed, she veered directly into me, forcing me to swerve into the other lane to avoid getting hit by her.

I still have no idea why she did that. I did nothing to provoke her. But I was sufficiently pissed, so I, in turn, pulled the reactionary asshole move of getting in front of her at the next opportunity and slowing way down, ultimately stopping at the green light. It was late, I was tired, and since business was slowing down, I had nothing better to do. It's not my usual way of handling these things but I couldn't resist the impulse to annoy her for a minute. She was trapped behind me and leaned on the horn, which was somewhat gratifying. But eventually I got bored of that and got away from her.

That was about it by way of excitement for the night.

Earlier in the evening, I saw the best sign ever. It was on this cabbie's rear windshield:

The picture didn't come out very well so you may not be able to read it. The sign says, "Yes, I do own the road." I think I need to get one of these. I'll probably get the finger a lot more that way.

Handicap

2006-06-13T02:19:00.000-04:00

So after a week with an ear infection, I got back to work and was greeted by the wanna-be thugs pictured above. They got mad at me because I wouldn't let them cut me off when their lane of traffic was blocked. At the next red light, they pulled up next to me and yelled, "Asshole!" Determined to try and stay cool for at least one full shift (which, for some reason, has been a lot harder these days), I just laughed and said, "That's very original."

This must've pissed them off even more because one of them said, "If you were a guy, I'd spit on you." Then they gave me my favorite finger, so I pulled out the camera. The best part of all this was, as others have done before him, the finger-giver held his pose for the camera. In fact, I almost didn't get the shot and said, "No, wait!" So they rolled the window back down and he politely held on for another second until I got the shot. Of course, afterwards he said, "You want a picture of my dick?"

I replied, "Sure, right after I get a picture of your license plate." The light finally changed and, just for the fun of it, I actually did take a shot of the plate (but not the dick). As I took the picture, I saw that the plate had the little wheelchair symbol that indicates that the driver of the car is disabled. I realized then that the symbol was probably there to warn other drivers about this guy's handicapped mental abilities. Though, on second thought, it's too bad I didn't take him up on his offer of the dick shot, because perhaps that's where his disability lies.

The shift continued on and traffic was refreshingly light. But just as I was wondering if anything interesting, other than dicks and middle fingers, would ever happen in my cab again, the guy pictured below got in.

Recognize him? I did immediately, and I don't even have cable. (It's Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, in case you weren't sure.) Much to my own surprise, I was a bit starstruck. So much so that I actually forgot to turn the meter on for about 15 blocks. He was on the phone and remained oblivious to me for the entire ride until finally, as I dropped him at his destination, I worked up the gumption to interrupt his conversation. And you know what? He was cool as hell. So many cabbies have celebrity stories where the person turns out to be a total asshole, but not Jon Stewart.

I sputtered away at him for a minute and finally told him about the blog and asked if I could take his picture. He graciously posed for me and was incredibly modest and nice. And thank goodness, because it would've been depressing if I had to write about one more dick.

Oh yeah, and he tipped well, too.

Shortcuts

2006-05-31T16:37:00.000-04:00

I was sort of quoted in today's New York Post, in the "25 Things Every New Yorker Should Know" section.

The excerpt is here:

How to shortcut like a cabbie

Higgins of "Taxi Talk" and Melissa Plaut, editor of the cabbie-themed newyorkhack.blogspot.com, recommend a few favorite routes to save time and hit the coveted sea of greens:

Shortcut One: If there's traffic on the way to JFK Airport, take the back route through Brooklyn (Bushwick to Pennsylvania to Atlantic to Conduit Avenue).

Shortcut Two: If the goal is to cruise uptown during the day, take 10th Avenue uptown for 40 or 50 blocks, which is better than grinding it out on Eighth Avenue.

Shortcut Three: If it's after 9 p.m. and you're commuting from the West Side to the Upper East Side, try 56th Street. The green lights are like ducks in a row.

The link is here if you want to read the whole thing.

Nothing special

2006-05-26T03:13:00.000-04:00

The Thursday night before Memorial Day weekend is always hectic. Rush hour traffic reports were truly apocalyptic, and it seemed that the congestion lasted long into the night. I stayed busy, though, which is always good. And, luckily, that was really the only semi-interesting thing that happened tonight.

It seemed like most people were in a good mood, probably due to the upcoming three-day weekend, and those who tipped at all, tipped pretty well. I spent quite a bit of time in the outer boroughs, including the Yankee Stadium area, Williamsburg, and Flatbush (on the way, I got a shot of the arch at Grand Army Plaza, shown above). The Yankee Stadium guy gave a large tip, the Williamsburg girl tipped the standard, and the Flatbush guys didn't tip at all. That's just how it breaks down sometimes.

My final passenger of the night also tipped nicely. But I deserved that one more than all the others because he let out a rancid fart the second he got in. But he turned out to be a really nice guy, so I almost didn't know who to feel bad for -- him or me. I think he might've been a little embarrassed and, on top of being a little grossed out, I was embarrassed for him.

Other than that, nothing too special really happened.

Hotline

2006-05-22T11:45:00.000-04:00

Last night was ok. The day started off slow mainly due to all the street fairs and random parades and marches, like the one pictured above, which was proceeding up the east side of 6th Ave. Not sure what it was for, but I'm already fed up with street fair/parade season. The only reason to work on a Sunday is to have a little break from the weekday traffic hell but, come spring and summer, Saturdays and Sundays become a test of one's patience and endurance -- at least until 6:00 or 7:00 pm, when they finally clean up and give the streets back to the cars.

Business picked up after dinner time, and it was actually pretty decent for a Sunday night. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the picture of the cop car/taxi collision that I drove past on 14th Street around midnight. Nor was I able to get a shot of the new parking spot for the police cruiser that sits on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, but this new placement came as a pleasant surprise. For the first time in many months, there was no late night traffic getting on the bridge. I guess the police department finally realized there was a better place to put their cars, one that doesn't terrorize every driver who needs to get over that bridge at night.

One funny thing I should mention is the little taxi-driver phone network that goes into operation during each shift. Last night it was in full effect. Around 11:30, Elliott called and said, "I'm at LaGuardia. It's stripped," meaning there were no cabs there. "You should get over here if you can make it. There's a huge line of people at American waiting for cabs." I was near the 59th Street Bridge at the time, but there was traffic due to construction, so I decided to skip it and stay in the city. I didn't want to risk going out there empty and arriving too late for all the action, which has happened too many times before.

Two minutes later, Diego called and said, "I just talked to Elliott. He said LaGuardia's stripped. I might head over there." I told him I wasn't going out there and we hung up. Five more minutes passed and the phone rang again, this time with Allen on the other end. "Yeah, hi. Elliott's at LaGuardia. He says it's stripped. I don't know if I'm gonna go over, but I thought I'd let you know."

There's actually a hotline we can call to get updates on the capacity of the taxi hold lots at both airports. It's supposed to be updated hourly, but LaGuardia is notorious for rarely changing their outgoing messages, especially at night. For example, I was in Astoria around 9:00 and called up to see what was doing over there. The most recent update was from 5:00 pm, a mere four hours earlier. Later, when they finally did update the message, the announcer never said what time it was, making it impossible to know how relevant the information was.

Occasionally, the message will include a number that you can call to complain about the "service." Apparently no one ever actually uses it because Diego tried once and the guy on the other end cursed him out.

Diego did end up going out to LaGuardia three times last night and got three good jobs out of it, catching the last of the wind-delayed flights. I guess I should've gone.

For updates of LaGuardia's taxi lots, call 866-296-2238.

Welcome home

2006-05-19T02:35:00.000-04:00

So tonight was my first night back in the cab. I got into the city around 4:00 and found my first passenger on 50th and 2nd. She wanted to go to 8th St and Broadway and, seeing that 2nd Ave was all backed up, I turned right on 49th. When I hit Lex, I turned left to head downtown. But somehow, I totally overlooked the sign that was posted that said no turns allowed between 10 am and 6 pm, Monday through Friday. I mean, I guess I always knew it was there, but I was distracted and rusty and not really thinking. I just didn't see it, and was still clueless as to what I did when I got pulled over by the TLC police.

They were just standing there, actually, waiting for idiots like me to do just what I did. The TLC officer waved me to the side of the street and made my passenger get out and find another cab. When he finally told me what I did wrong, I just felt stupid. I've made this mistake once before, over a year ago, and I got a ticket for it then, too.

I handed over my license and sat there feeling annoyed with myself. After a moment, though, I realized I needed to just roll with it and not let it get to me, so I got out of the cab. I walked up to the TLC police car and started talking to him, saying, "You know, I'm sure you hear this all the time, but I really didn't see the sign. I feel pretty dumb, actually, but I haven't worked in a few weeks and I guess I'm a little out of practice."

At first he was stern and a little cold, but maybe because I was sort of smiling and laughing about the whole stupid ordeal, he seemed to loosen up and all of a sudden we were almost friends. Of course, he still gave me the ticket, but I already knew there was no getting out of it. The worst part of it is the ticket holds a $150 fine.

It needs to be said that the TLC is notorious for being extremely unfriendly and unforgiving to cab drivers. They're our built-in enemies, mainly because their job is to ticket us -- and our job is to get away with what we can without getting caught by them.

My experience this afternoon, however, was actually not that bad. Sure, giving out a $150 ticket is not necessarily a compassionate act, but the officer writing it was at least decent to me when he could've been a total dick, and that makes all the difference. I think he even felt a little bad, since I was being so casual about the whole thing, and eventually he smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and with just the tiniest tinge of guilt in his voice, said, "I'm just doing my job." This I understood, but I was just doing my job, too. Unfortunately my job is one in which I run the risk of starting my shift $150 in the hole.

The rest of the night was fine. But the ticket sort of put a little damper on things.

I guess this was my official welcome back to New York.

A lame update

2006-05-17T15:41:00.000-04:00

After my little vacation, I was happy to be home. However, I returned to a screwy internet connection, which made it difficult for me to post, much less do anything else online. Each click led to an eternity of waiting, so I have not been able to update the blog. This was probably a good thing since I needed to get some book writing done.

But now the cable technician just left and everything seems to be back in order. My only real update at this point is that, after I left California, Acid Casualty was spotted doing a "hip hop dance" on the Venice boardwalk. I'm heartbroken that I missed it.

I'm scheduled to work tomorrow night, barring any unforseen circumstances, so there should be a proper post by Friday morning. Thanks for being patient.

All this for $1.25

2006-05-10T00:29:00.000-04:00

I survived the bus ride and it was actually pretty fun. I borrowed my friend's iPod and created a soundtrack to go with the scenery, which was itself quite fascinating in its repetitive suburban blandness. For an entire hour, as the bus cruised down Venice Blvd towards Downtown LA, all I saw out the window was a seemingly endless series of auto repair shops, used car dealerships, smog check stations, window-tinters, fast food chains, carpet shops, and furniture stores, plus a few check-cashing places, Western Unions, and taquerias mixed in for variety's sake.

The ride gave me a feeling I imagine many visitors to New York get: the feeling that this is a city so big, you can get lost in it. That never happens to me in New York, it seems too small and familiar, and there are always too many people around. But something about the way the sun shines so unforgivingly on everyone in LA makes this place seem huge and impersonal. The sidewalks are not constantly crowded with people, and there's something private and nice about that, if not a little isolating.

The ride was peaceful but, of course, there's always that one eccentric crazy person that is a requirement on every city bus the world over. She sat in front of me and carried on an enthusiastic conversation with herself. When she spoke, her sentences were punctuated with a short air-pump of her right fist, index finger extended to further drive her point home. Over the course of an hour, as the bus grew full and then empty again, she remained, her conversation continuing uninterrupted. Finally, as we entered downtown, she got off the bus and I was the last one on.

As we worked our way through the downtown area to Union Station, things looked familiar again. The streets were smaller, the buildings taller, and instead of selling car parts, all the storefronts were displaying baseball hats and t-shirts and socks. It looked a lot like 14th St west of Union Square, with all those random low-budget luggage and t-shirt stores. But instead of saying New York, Brooklyn, the Knicks, or Puerto Rico, all the shirts and hats here said Los Angeles, Compton, the Lakers, and Mexico. I quite liked downtown, though I didn't really get to spend a lot of time there.

Anyway, after a week of listening to non-stop drum circles and Hare Krishna chants, I left Venice and came to stay at my sister and brother-in-law's house up near Pasadena, where I am now. But before I left, I made a point of spending extra time on the boardwalk in search of Acid Casualty. I'm disappointed to say she never reappeared.

And now my trip has finally come to an end. I am leaving this afternoon and I'm eager to get home. I would like to be able to get back to work tomorrow, but that depends on how tired out I am by the flight and jet lag. If I don't drive tomorrow, I'll be back in action next week, and back to dealing with gridlock, Jersey drivers, and drunk passengers. It'll be good to be home.

Acid Casualty

2006-05-05T11:59:00.000-04:00

My friend drove us on no fewer than five freeways in a row yesterday as we made our way to my sister's house in Altadena. She's getting a little better at the driving, though my hair has turned white from the twelve heart attacks I had on the ride.

What I didn't realize is there's no "hands-free" cell phone law in California. I couldn't believe how many people I saw driving while holding a phone to their ear. It's really fucked up. I thought this practice was bad back in New York, but it's seriously out of control here. What I don't understand is where this need to talk on the phone while driving comes from. Like, if it's important and really can't wait, then fine. But if you're just talking to your buddy or your wife or whoever about what you want for dinner or something equally mundane, then can't it wait until you're not behind the wheel of a two-ton vehicle? Seriously, what is so fucking important?

Meanwhile, now that I'm over my initial culture shock, Venice has begun to amuse me. It appears the cosmos have decided to link me somehow to the girl who haunted me on that first day, the one now known as "Acid Casualty." I ran into her again on the boardwalk on Tuesday. She had on an entirely different outfit, which consisted of a gaping-open backpack and black tight jeans that hung more than halfway down her underwearless butt. She passed me quickly at first, only stopping to turn and cackle at some random strangers nearby.

I spotted her again ten minutes later, this time going in the opposite direction. She zig-zagged up to me, laughed a little bit again and asked me for a cigarette. She was standing so close to me and sort of peering into my mouth, it seemed. I had already given out a bunch of cigarettes that afternoon so I said no, but I immediately regretted it. I should've kept her there so I could examine her blown out pupils, which also appeared to be white, in that cataracts sort of way. But it couldn't be cataracts as she's got to be no more than 23 years old, if that.

So now I'm obsessed and have been looking for her every day since, cigarettes and camera at the ready, but she's disappeared. I think I miss her.

Today I will be taking a city bus from Venice to Downtown LA. It's estimated to take an hour and a half and to cost $1.25.

California so far

2006-05-01T19:27:00.000-04:00

I'm staying in Venice for now. So far I've gotten a Henna tattoo, had my belly button pierced, bought a huge bong in the shape of a penis, purchased an oversized painting of a peace symbol, stocked up on tie-dyed t-shirts, blasted The Doors music while rollerskating, and got my Tarot cards read.

Or not.

But all of these amenities are at my fingertips should I develop the vomitous urge to make use of any of them.

What the hell am I doing here? It's like St. Mark's Place times a thousand, but with an extra helping of hippies and hobos. Oh, and strangers actually try to, like, talk to you here. It's utterly bizarre.

The reality of my trip so far (I arrived yesterday) is that I rode shotgun from the airport to Venice with my friend who just got her driver's license all of two weeks ago. It was a huge effort resisting the impulse to knock her out and take over the wheel as she either accelerated into stopped cars or drove ever so slowly, unintentionally veering into the other lanes of the freeway.

When I wasn't screaming in fear or silently gripping the dashboard, I tried to be supportive and teach her some little things about driving, like how to change lanes without causing an accident, or the one about how green lights mean "go" as opposed to "slow down and think for a second," which is what I think they teach the students in Driver's Ed classes out here. Oh, and the rumors are true: No one honks in Los Angeles. There must be lithium in the water or something.

I also ate chicken wings on the Venice boardwalk while some hippie acid casualty with track marks on her arms and an inside-out umbrella in her hand stared vacantly at us and laughed like a hyena from the other side of the outdoor cafe's ropes.

At this point I'm just hoping to make it back to New York in two weeks without any bad tattoos, white-girl dreadlocks, or an STD.

More vindication

2006-04-28T11:29:00.000-04:00

I have to admit I relish this moment. This one's for all the haters out there who love to generalize and say all cabbies drive like shit. Today's New York Times discusses a study that proves this so wrong. In fact, the numbers demonstrate that, if you're wearing your seatbelt, it's safer to ride in yellow cabs and livery cars than it is to ride in regular cars.

That Wild Taxi Ride Is Safer Than You Think, a Study Says
By THOMAS J. LUECK and JANON FISHER

In a city where almost everyone has a story about zigzagging through traffic in a hair-raising, white-knuckled cab ride, a new traffic safety study may come as a surprise: It finds that taxis are pretty safe.

So are livery cars, according to the study, which is based on state motor vehicle records of accidents and injuries across the city. It concludes that taxi and livery-cab drivers have crash rates one-third lower than drivers of other vehicles.

"This is one of the most important studies we've seen," said Matthew W. Daus, chairman of the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission, who said the city had not asked for the analysis by a Brooklyn consulting firm or paid for it, but was nonetheless happy to receive it.

"Our drivers get a bad rap," Mr. Daus said. "Our hats go off to them."

The study was undertaken by Bruce Schaller of Schaller Consulting, a former staff analyst for the taxi commission and New York City Transit who now works as an independent transportation consultant for several cities and transit agencies. He said that he was not paid, that he obtained his state accident records through a Freedom of Information Act request and that he pursued the analysis out of personal interest.

"The public perception is that taxicab and livery drivers are less safe than other drivers in New York City," said Mr. Schaller, citing surveys by New York City Transit showing that riders, when asked to rate "safety from accidents" on a scale of 1 to 10, give private cars a 7.6, and taxis a 5.7.

But Mr. Schaller, pointing to the strict licensing requirements of taxi and livery drivers, their knowledge of the streets and the financial risks they face by driving carelessly, said the results of the study "are not so surprising."

He said the city's own records show that the job longevity of cabbies has steadily increased since the early 1990's, to 9.2 years in 2005 from an average of 5.7 years in 1993. Drivers with more experience tend to drive more skillfully, and more safely, he said.

Some of the findings set off alarm bells about passenger safety. When cabs are involved in accidents the passengers are about twice as likely to suffer serious injuries than the passengers of private cars, the study concluded.

It documented one of the reasons: Relatively few taxi riders wear seat belts, and are under no requirement to do so by state law or city rules. Another reason for the serious injuries is the partitions in taxis, which are designed to protect drivers from passenger attacks, but can cause head and upper body injuries to passengers when the cabs crash or stop suddenly.

And if you are riding a bicycle, watch out. The study concluded that bicycles are about twice as likely to collide with a cab than other vehicles, a danger that experts attribute to the risks of "dooring," in which passengers in parked cabs throw their doors open in front of oncoming bikes.

Still, the overall findings of Mr. Schaller's report are that the safety of taxis and livery cars has improved over the years, and that it compares favorably with other vehicles by several measures.

In a calculation of accident rates per million miles on city streets, it found 4.6 crashes for cabs, 3.7 crashes for livery cars and 6.7 crashes for all vehicles, including public and private conveyances. A livery car was defined as a black car, for-hire livery or limousine carrying fewer than nine passengers.

For a Manhattan resident who takes 100 cab rides a year, Mr. Schaller found, the chance of being injured in a crash is 0.4 percent in 10 years.

On the streets of Manhattan yesterday, the findings provoked a widely varied response from riders and drivers.

"It's not true," said Philip Lee, 42, a delivery driver from Flushing, who drives into Manhattan five days a week and finds the driving habits of cabbies a constant source of irritation.

"They only care about time," he said. "They only care about money. Even at red lights, they cross. They don't care."

But Liz Loughery, a financial executive from Philadelphia who hails cabs several times a week on business trips to Manhattan, said she had no fear.

"The windows were down, and it was fast and furious," she said as she jumped out of an uptown cab yesterday on Eighth Avenue and headed into Pennsylvania Station to catch her train home. "I'm more afraid inside Penn Station."

Charles Bwuah, 50, a cabby from Newark, who has been driving a New York medallion cab for eight years, said he was not at all surprised by the study.

"You see, most people think taxi drivers don't know how to drive," he said. "But that's what they do for a living."

The link is here if you want to read it on the New York Times website.

Wanna know what sucks?

2006-04-27T18:59:00.000-04:00

My car broke down on the way to work today. Which meant that I was no longer going to be working today, and therefore this update is not about anything really taxi related.

In fact, I was lucky. I had to make a detour through Manhattan before heading towards the garage this afternoon and, as I fought through traffic to get on the 59th Street Bridge on my way back to Queens, I just knew my car was about to crap out. It started shaking and shuddering as I got on the bridge so I stepped on it, just hoping I'd make it to the other side before it died. And die it did. When I got to the light at the bottom, it stalled and I had to stick it in neutral and roll it off the exit ramp and on to 21st in Long Island City, just under the Silvercup Studios sign and six blocks from the garage.

This is a problem I've had "fixed" by random mechanics no less than four times already, but clearly nothing has worked, despite the enormous amount of money I've spent on it.

I called Richard at the garage and asked him to send someone to come tow me in, since I was so close, but I knew my chances of working a shift tonight were doomed. I was too late. They were already loaded with too many drivers and I wasn't going to get a cab. At least they were nice enough to send someone to rescue me, and I appreciated that.

Of course, my car decided to start again right when Danny, one of the taxi mechanics, showed up, so he just followed me to the garage to make sure it didn't stall on the way. When we got there, Lincoln, the head mechanic, looked at the engine and disconnected something that he said might help. If it didn't, he told me I'd have to replace some part that I don't remember the name of.

It would probably really help if I knew the first thing about cars. But at this point, it will have to be enough to know a few expert mechanics who will be honest with me and not try to gouge me out of more money than my 1989 piece of shit Buick is worth. I guess this is one of the "perks" of being a taxi driver working out of a garage. Actually, it's when stuff like this happens that I'm happy that I've stuck with this garage. They've been very good to me since day one.

So with the car working again and my day freed up, I stood around for an hour bullshitting with some other drivers before heading home. Those afternoon pre-shift story-telling sessions are sometimes my favorite part of the workday.

And now for some other news: I'm going out of town for the next two weeks, which means this shitty blog update is probably all there will be for a little while. I'll be in LA, though, and I have a feeling I may have a thought or two on the traffic situation there, so if you want to read more non-cab-related posts, check back from time to time. If not, I should be back to work by the end of the second week of May.

In the meantime, another cabbie friend just alerted me to his new blog, so hopefully that will keep you entertained. It's called The Hungry Cabbie and it's about his on-duty discovery of the best food in the five boroughs. It's pretty much all you could ever ask for from a New York cabbie. But be warned: You'll get hungry just reading it.

Just another night

2006-04-21T03:41:00.000-04:00

I had a decent shift tonight but there are no great stories to tell. People seem to be behaving these days. So since I don't really have much to write, I will try to illustrate my shift with photos:

I was not pleased when I saw this sign posted at the garage:

$3.15 a gallon? What the hell? Is there another hurricane somewhere driving gas prices up again? It's back to Katrina levels but this time it's for no good reason. At least none that I know about. I spent $40 on gas tonight, and that sucks shit, but supposedly it's only gonna get worse. (UPDATED to say that was only for half a tank, NOT a full tank.)

These two knuckleheads were just waiting to bother me when I showed up this afternoon. That's Merrill on the left and Abe on the right. They're a couple a wise-asses, but I like them anyway. When Merrill gets called over the loudspeaker, John the crazy Romanian dispatcher always calls him "Merrill Salami."

I had a nice late afternoon ride through Central Park when I took an opera singer to the Upper West Side.

There's a huge ad in Times Square picturing that kid Teddy Geiger. He was in my cab once.

Later, I saw a Prius taxi for the first time. It looked small.

At the end of the night, a young drunk guy passed out in the back on the way to Ocean Parkway. He didn't puke, and he tipped well.

Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the very drunk girls who gave me the finger as I was stopped next to them at a red light on my way home. I wasn't even in my cab. One of the girls rolled down her window and stuck half her body out, giving me the finger (for no reason, mind you), while her friends tried to pull her back inside and apologized to me, explaining that she was drunk. The driver looked perplexed. I was just happy I was on my way home and not driving that cab. I'd rather have a dead drunk than a dumb drunk in my cab any day.

Easter

2006-04-17T03:15:00.000-04:00

As you know, it was Easter. This kid (poorly photographed above) was highly aware of that fact and was getting into the spirit of things with her bunny ears, going for a ride in the back of the cab in front of me. She was fun to drive behind as she seemed to be having a great ride.

Overall, though, my shift tonight was actually pretty boring. Which is a relief. Most of my passengers were in a happy, laid back mood and, most importantly, were tipping nicely. I got stuck in a weird JFK/LaGuardia vortex early on, during which I dropped some tourists off at Kennedy, saw that the taxi lot was filled to capacity and decided to race up to LaGuardia to see if I would fare better there.

I did, in a way. I got to the front of the line at US Air after only 10 minutes, but when my passenger got in he said, "Kennedy airport." This is called a "shorty." Anywhere in Queens from LaGuardia is considered a short-haul ride, and the taxi dispatcher will you a shorty ticket which allows you to return to the airport (within 90 minutes) and cut to the front of the line.

I got him to Kennedy in record time, thanks to light traffic. I dropped off again, passed by the overflowing lot once more, and once more decided to go back to LaGuardia. I used my shorty ticket, which brought me to the front of the line at Delta and I got some passengers right away. Luckily, they were going back to the city.

The night went smoothly after that, and I was busy for a while. People on the streets were at the same level of retardedness, but the aggression level was much lower than usual. The only real asshole I encountered was some guy who was strolling across the street against the light with his family. As I was bearing down on them, I tapped my horn so they would hurry it up and get out of the way before I, or any of the other cars on the avenue, ran into them.

The women of the group quickened their step but the man slowed down. I guess that meant he was tough or something. He really showed me.

But this kind of thing really annoys me because it's almost as if he expected me to not only see him there, crossing when he shouldn't be, but he also seemed to trust that I'd be able to stop in time to avoid hitting him. Having been hit by a car once as a pedestrian, I know first-hand just how easy it is to get knocked down and royally hurt by a moving vehicle. It's not fun. And when guys do stupid macho shit like this, they're not only fucking with their own lives, their fucking with mine.

So when I saw this guy slow his pace to show what a big tough guy he was, I made sure to lean on the horn to express my disapproval. He, of course, gave me the finger. My passenger at the time read my mind and said, "I hate guys like that." I said, "Yeah, he wouldn't be so tough and brave if he got hit." She replied, "You're so right. I'm a nurse at New York Hospital and it's exactly that type of guy who comes in every day all full of bravado. But it all disappears the second you have to give them an injection. Then they're not so tough."

I understand getting angry at a driver because you got scared, even if you were the one in the wrong, but the above type of behavior is different. It's got nothing to do with fear and everything to do with ego. It's dangerous, completely unecessary, and utterly stupid. This guy wanted to prove something, and boy did he -- he proved that he is a total idiot.

More assholes

2006-04-10T04:27:00.000-04:00

This drunk fuck really pissed me off. He and his friend hailed me in Williamsburg on Bedford Ave and wanted to go to Grand and Graham. I started driving but then stopped when I realized this guy was still smoking a cigarette. I myself am a smoker, but I don't like people to smoke in my cab because the smell lingers and non-smoking passengers get mad when they get in after. Plus, it's illegal and I can get a huge ticket for allowing it. So I said, "Hey, are you smoking? Can you throw it out?"

His hand was still out the window, but when I said this, he drew his hand in, took a long obnoxious drag off the cigarette, and then blew the smoke out all inside the back. The whole cab was full of smoke now and I was pissed. It was too late in the night for me to have any reserves of patience left so I said, "That was fucking rude. You know what? Get the fuck out of my cab. Now." The cab was already stopped but they didn't feel like getting out just yet. Instead, they started cursing and yelling at me. I yelled back, telling them to just get the fuck out and so on, and finally they said, "You're a CUNT!"

I said, "That may be so, but it's the most cunt you'll ever have in your life. Now GET OUT."

They jumped out and slammed the doors as hard as they could so that the whole car shook.

But apparently the drunk fuck with the cigarette didn't get enough of me because he ran up to my window and started yelling some more. Which was good, because I was able to shoot a few pictures of him.

I finally left and circled around, looking for a different fare. They were still standing there when I came back around and I had to resist the urge to run them over. Farther up the block, I got hailed by two Indian guys going to Queens. I dropped one off in Long Island City and, after he got out, the remaining guy said, "Would it be okay if I smoked a cigarette?"

I almost said yes, just to spite those stupid drunk guys but, realizing the pointlessness of that, I said, "I'm sorry, you can't. But I appreciate you at least asking."

An announcement

2006-04-04T19:11:00.000-04:00

So. Some exciting news, though for some reason I seem to be having trouble figuring out a way to announce it.

Basically, I went ahead and got myself a book deal! And a real live, not-imaginary book deal, at that. It's with Villard, an imprint of Random House, and I'm still not even sure how to contain my disbelief and excitement over this.

Here's what happened: After the AP story came out in January, I got approached by a few literary agents and started seriously considering whether or not I wanted to write a book. To be honest, I wasn't sure. After meeting with some people and stressing myself out about it, I decided to go ahead with it. I chose an agent and began writing. That was two months ago, and I haven't been able to stop ever since.

When I felt I had enough pages to show, I put together a book proposal which was sent out to publishers last week. Villard offered me a deal and I gladly accepted it.

Needless to say, I'm fucking thrilled.

I want to thank you all for reading and responding so positively to this blog. Many of your comments and emails are what gave me the confidence to actually go ahead with this. Who ever thought I'd go from cab driver to "blogger" to soon-to-be-published author in just a year and a half? I still can't quite believe it myself.

Anyway, I plan to continue driving the cab and doing the blog, so if you keep reading, I'll keep writing.

Spring

2006-04-03T04:21:00.000-04:00

Spring has officially begun in New York. All the blossoms are out and daylight savings took effect. I, of course, completely forgot about the time change and showed up at the garage an hour later than I intended. Luckily, I still managed to get a cab by 4:30 pm. The day was warm and I pulled out with my windows down for the first time in months.

And with the nice weather came the people and the cars. The traffic report kept telling me that the Holland Tunnel had an hour delay from all approaches. This meant that every street near there was utter hell and, as has been my luck lately, every person who flagged me needed to go in that direction. At one point I happened to pull next to another cabbie from my garage while we were stuck on Broadway for about 10 minutes. His passenger had given up and gotten out mid-block, and I said, "Now you get to sit in this by yourself." He replied with a smile, "That's what we do. We sit and we suffer."

With this weather also comes the OTB guys lingering outside between races. They're fun to look at while stuck at nearby red lights.

Justice

2006-03-27T03:15:00.000-05:00

Tonight was one of those rare nights when everyone seemed to want my cab. I haven't had a good shift like this in a while. And I needed it. Somehow, even during the slow patches when all the other cabs were empty, I got jobs, and decent ones at that.

Early in the evening I had a passenger to JFK, and I waited in the taxi hold lot (pictured above) for just under an hour, which, for JFK, isn't bad. I've been so screwed at the airport lately, I half expected to have to sit there for at least two hours. I got a sandwich, used the bathroom, and read a book while waiting.

When I got to the terminal, I got a guy going to 87th and Broadway. At the end of the $45 trip, he didn't tip. Not one single penny. This pissed me off, but only for a little while, because I got my rhythm back right away and had generous, friendly, non-aggravating passengers for the rest of the night. They more than made up for this guy's tiplessness.

Even on my way to the airport, when something bad happened, a good thing turned up to balance it right out. The guy pictured above was driving one of those Air Link vans and he tried to cut me off sharply so he could jump to the head of the long line in the left turn lane going onto South Conduit off Cross Bay Blvd. He just sort of came over into me and I had to swerve left, nearly hitting the median. Then he stopped and began cursing me out. When he saw me taking pictures, he pulled out his shitty camera phone and we engaged in a ridiculous little photo war.

My passenger, who was on her way to Las Vegas, asked me what I do with these pictures. I said, "I put them on the internet. It's the only form of revenge available to me." The guy finally pulled away and cut off the car at the very front of the line to make the turn. We talked about what an asshole he was and I said, "Yeah, the only thing that really sucks is, if he complains about me to the TLC, I'll probably have to pay a fine, even though he was the one who was wrong. And if I complain about him to Air Link, most likely nothing will happen." She agreed that that did indeed suck.

When we got to her terminal, she gave me a nice tip and her business card and said, "Take this and call me if he complains about you. I'll gladly be your witness. That guy was wrong, and I believe in justice."

I sincerely hope this woman wins big in Vegas.

More cable television

2006-03-20T03:39:00.000-05:00

It was a weird night. I waited almost three hours at the garage for my cab to come in, and when I finally got out, it seemed like there were fires breaking out all over the city. Around 6:00, 3rd Ave was closed at 26th St with fire trucks and cop cars taking up the entire avenue. It stayed that way for the next few hours, but the radio didn't have anything to say about what was going on, so I don't know the story. Then an hour later, the fire trucks descended on Lafayette and Astor Place. I had a passenger, so I didn't stick around to see what happened.

Meanwhile, last night there was a fire in the building across the street from mine. When I told a few of my passengers about all this, some of them had recent fire stories of their own. One said that she entered the subway this morning and it was filled with smoke, but the train came anyway and she got on. Another said her office building caught fire yesterday. Is it fire season or something? What the hell?

Anyway, around 8:00 I picked up the guy pictured above. He was going to a hotel on the east side and I didn't pay much attention to him until I heard him talking on the phone. His voice sounded oddly familiar so I turned to look at him when we were stopped at a red light. I recognized his face from somewhere but couldn't pin it down just yet. I said, "I hope you don't think this is weird, but you look really familiar." He answered, "Well, I'm an actor, it could be because of that."

Right when he said that, I realized he was the guy who played Brenda's boyfriend for a while on the HBO series "Six Feet Under." His name is Justin Theroux. When I got home and looked him up online, I realized I also recognized him from David Lynch's Mulholland Dr., in which he played a movie director.

I felt a little weird, calling him out like that, but he didn't seem to mind. I apologized for it and said, "You probably get people saying stuff like that all the time." He said, "Yeah, sometimes. I imagine you get the same thing in a different way, with people always commenting on the fact that you're a female cab driver."

I was kind of surprised that he realized this. Most people just get in and think they're the first person in the whole entire world to observe that I'm a female cab driver. What they don't know is that I hear some version of "Oh, a woman!" or "You're my first female cab driver!" or "What's it like to be a female cab driver?" somewhere between 20 and 30 times a night.

I try to be gracious about it, but it gets grating after a while. Usually around number 15 is when I start to lose it and say snarky obnoxious things like, "I really don't know what it's like to be a female cab driver as I have nothing to compare it to, you know, because I've never been a man." One time an elderly man, in response to this, said wryly, "Oh, you haven't? Are you sure? Well, there's still time."

I did not ask Justin Theroux what it was like to be a male actor, but I did almost forget to collect the fare from him. Almost. He paid, tipped decently, and got out. I drove away and spent the rest of the relatively slow night trying to avoid the fires.

Italian food

2006-03-16T13:59:00.000-05:00

Speaking of The Sopranos, I had a guy in my cab the other night who grew up in the town of Verona, New Jersey, which is apparently the town the show is based on. He was a guitar-player-turned-money-manager and I picked him up from the Allman Brothers concert at Beacon Theater. He told me that growing up Irish in a predominantly Italian neighborhood was no small feat. In fact, most of his friends and neighbors suggested he change his name by taking the "O" from the front and putting it on the back, going from O'Corman to Cormano, to make him sound more Italian.

He also told me a story about how his best friend's old Italian grandfather stole their next-door-neighbor's pet rabbit from the backyard, skinned it, cooked it, and ate it. Was that customary in Italy in the old days? I doubt we'll ever see any meals of cooked pet rabbit on The Sopranos, though it'd certainly be more fun than watching the characters eat all that boring old pasta.

Feng Shui

2006-03-13T03:27:00.000-05:00

It's sort of sad how a "television event," such as tonight's Sopranos season premiere, can cause New Yorkers to spend an unseasonably warm Sunday evening at home in front of the tv instead of going outside and actually, you know, doing something. This explains why the city was a total dead zone after 8:00 pm tonight. The only people out were the cabbies, the cops, and the garbage men, as well as a few random stragglers and tourists.

The Hustler Club (shown above) certainly had good reason to be closed, and there was a strange absence of shady characters outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I guess everyone, including the regular strip-club patrons, the loiterers, and the homeless, managed to find their way to a cable-equipped television tonight.

Notable events of the night: Not many actually. I got stuck for 20 minutes on Mott Street (seen above) and renewed my utter and complete hatred of New Jersey and its "drivers." They are usually the ones to blame for my traffic woes, especially this evening, with Holland Tunnel traffic on Canal overflowing on all possible side streets. If I were king, I would close the tunnels completely and say good riddance.

When I finally got out of this mess, I picked up a Feng Shui instructor who was visiting from San Francisco. Feng Shui is the Chinese art of placement, which means that where you put stuff in your house is important and helps with your "flow," or something like that.

We started talking and I said, "I read somewhere that if you put money in the northeast corner of every room in your house, it's supposed to increase your money flow. Is that true?" He replied, "Actually, it would be the southeast corner, since the sun rises in the southeast and has the most energy and pull in the morning. And you should really only do it in a room where you pay the bills or take care of business. You can also use stuff other than money, basically anything that signifies abundance in your life."

I responded by saying, "Well, in my apartment, that would be cat hair." Then he said something that I didn't really catch but sounded like something to the effect of, "Yeah, that would [something inaudible] your pussy." I was a little taken off guard and just paused for a second before saying, "Um, what?" But I guess he didn't feel like clarifying because he just said, "I have a dog."

Murder

2006-03-10T04:11:00.000-05:00

It seemed like everyone was driving like a stroke victim tonight. Either they were on the phone and swerving all over the place, like the asshole above, or they were drunk. Depending on my mood, it can really make me crazy getting caught behind all these fuckfaces who don't know how to drive, and I sometimes find myself wishing I had something other than a camera to shoot them with.

Speaking of murder, this girl got into my cab tonight and was like, "Oh wow, a female driver. I'm so relieved. I stopped taking cabs since that cabbie murdered that girl by the Belt Parkway." She was, of course, talking about Imette St. Guillen, and referring to the week-old headlines that suggested a livery cab driver was behind the slaying.

I half-jokingly said, "Oh, I doubt it was a cabbie. It's all just part of the campaign of hatred against us." She asked me what I meant, and I elaborated, saying, "It just seems like every time something bad happens to someone, a cab driver is always somehow implicated. I once read an article about a guy who lost his leg after getting hit by a regular car and the author suggested the car lost control because a cab must have been speeding nearby, even though there was no evidence to that effect. It was ridiculous." And it's true, every time I read the paper, cabs are mentioned in what seems like every other article, no matter how remotely they might be connected to the story, and they're usually referred to in a negative light.

I reconsidered this woman's fear, which I originally thought irrational, as I was walking home after my shift just a little while ago. The streets were relatively deserted when, a block from my building, a silver livery cab pulled over right next to me. Two men were in the front and the passenger rolled down his window and said, "Taxi? Taxi?"

What the fuck? Did these guys actually think I was gonna get in the car with them? I was just walking on the sidewalk, clearly not looking for a cab. Would they have approached me all unsolicited like that if I was a guy? It made me so mad that, after a 12 hour shift, I suddenly had to worry for my safety a block from my house. They were still rolling alongside me, so I summoned all my anger and yelled, "Do I look like I want a fucking taxi?" They peeled out down the avenue and I continued home.

Maybe the killer was a cab driver after all.

So a gay cowboy gets in my cab...

2006-03-06T04:23:00.000-05:00

This is Elliott and Allen, two of my friends from the garage. They're standing in front of a retired roof ad for a band I never heard of but I thought it was funny -- and kind of stupid -- that they're called "Train" and their album is called "Cab."

On one of the lockers behind them is this old sticker advertising the defunct NYC Taxi Drivers Union. Believe it or not, taxi drivers once had a union that sort of protected them, sort of not, according to the old-timers. Apparently the union lost what little power it had and faded away after the taxi leasing system was put into effect. The quote above the image of the hands says, "It's nice to be nice." Perhaps the union would've survived if their slogan told drivers it pays to be nice.

As for my shift tonight, it wasn't great. In fact, it was pretty fucking slow. Early on I picked up a middle-aged guy from Penn Station who unloaded a whole story about how he just broke up with his boyfriend of 15 years. When I asked why, he told me that the boyfriend had begun doing a shitload of crystal meth, staying up all night having sex on the internet, and just generally acting like an asshole. I asked, "How'd he get into doing crystal?" He explained simply by saying, "We have a house in Fire Island." That explains everything. (For those who don't know, Fire Island is a predominantly gay beachfront party town on Long Island where lots of guys go to get away from the city, relax, have sex, do drugs, and/or engage in other forms of debauchery.)

Once the big awards show was over, a very drunk gay cowboy flagged me down. I'm not kidding. He was wearing a cowboy hat, a fringed suede jacket, and cowboy boots. He was so wasted, probably from trying to drink away the pain of losing to "Crash," that he could barely tell me where to go. I said, "Where to?" He responded, "Down the street." I might've enjoyed having a gay cowboy in my cab, or even this city boy dressed as a gay cowboy for Oscar night, but it's just no fun when people can't tell me where to go. "Okay, which street? Do you know the address?" He was having trouble speaking, but finally managed to slur out an intersection that made sense.

When we pulled up, he said, "Where's the gay place?" When I told him I had no idea what he was talking about, he replied emphatically, "The gay place. There's a gay bar around here somewhere." I looked around but only saw some shitty bar & grill type place that definitely looked straight, so I just said, "I don't know, but good luck finding it." It was a bit rude of me, but there was no way I was gonna get stuck driving around looking for a bar with someone that drunk. He spilled out of the cab mumbling some unintelligible jumble of words and I just drove away. The incoherent drunks are always annoying, but I guess if there had to be a theme to my night, I'd rather have it be "Brokeback Mountain" than "Crash."

Free Tan

2006-02-24T03:05:00.000-05:00

This guy had a sign on his hat that read "Free Tan." I'm wondering if he was offering a tan for free, or if he was protesting to win a person named Tan's freedom. Either way, weird hat.

Tonight I picked up a woman who is a business manager for gay porn film companies. When I asked, "How'd you get into that?" she replied, "Just lucky, I guess." Then she added, "I mean, I got into it the same way any 63-year-old straight woman gets into this business -- by chance."

We started discussing how watching porn all day could really kill a person's sex drive, and at one point she said, "It doesn't really bother me at all. I just woke up one morning and realized I wasn't interested in sex anymore. It was a great feeling, actually. Of course, my husband wasn't too happy with it." I asked her how he dealt with it and she said, "Every now and then I'll give him a token blowjob to keep him satisfied. But other than that, he's got two hands. He can take care of himself. Besides, he's 65 years old! How much sex does he really need anyway?!"

Cab Olympics

2006-02-20T15:33:00.000-05:00

It was a long, disjointed night. I got into a screaming match with the cabbie pictured here. What sucks about writing this is that I spend so much time trying to defend cab drivers, but I have to admit, there are quite a few who drive like fucking animals. This guy in particular pulled a really fucked up move that forced me into oncoming traffic. We were both making the left turn from 11th Ave onto 23rd St. There are two turn lanes, so two cars can turn at the same time as long as they stay in the lane they were turning from.

I was in the left lane, this guy was in the right. But as he made the turn, he cut over into the left lane on 23rd, where I was heading, thus making me swerve onto the other side of the street. Luckily there were no cars coming and I was able to fall back in time. He must've seen this happen, because when I pulled up next to him after he finally moved back into the right lane, he rolled his window down and started yelling at me. Of course, he believed very strongly that he did absolutely nothing wrong and that I was an asshole for trying to turn next to him, even though that's what the traffic markers called for.

I was so pissed off, I started yelling back, and we drove side by side for a minute just screaming like maniacs at each other. He was saying, "You have a problem? What's wrong with you?" He was just so innocent. I replied, "I wouldn't have a problem if you learned how to fucking drive." He gave me the typical "Suck my dick." And I gave him my standard answer to that request, which is, "I would if you had one, but since you don't, you can suck mine!" My intention was to imply that his penis is so small that even a girl, who has no penis, still has a bigger dick than him. I couldn't tell if he was confused or offended, but right after that he turned down 9th Ave while I got hailed and picked up my next passenger. Either way, I considered it a victory.

As the night wore on, the club business increased. I picked up a guy on 7th Ave and W. 4th St going to the gay leather bar The Eagle on 28th between 10th and 11th (which is, incidentally, just down the block from Scores West). When we started talking, I found out he works for Virgin Airlines and is the guy who listens to your phone calls when you hear the message that says, "This call will be recorded for quality purposes." I am thrilled to know that someone really does listen to our phone calls when we talk to these companies. I did not reveal to him that our conversation was being recorded for blog purposes.

I had to take a bathroom break at one point, so I went to one of the places cabbies frequent for such purposes on 8th Ave between 55th and 56th Sts. This sign is posted there so that cab drivers can park without difficulty. Actually, the sign designates the block as a "Taxi Stand," which means we need to be in or near our cabs awaiting passengers. This is slightly different from the signs that say "Taxi Relief Stand," which means we can park there and leave the cab to eat and pee and do whatever else needs to be done. Both of these types of sign are posted in various locations all over the city. However, regardless of what the signs say, private non-cab cars always seem to be parked on these blocks.

When I pulled up to this one, there was one cab parked there and about eight or nine regular cars taking up the entire block. I really needed to pee, though, so I just double-parked and ran inside. There was no way I could afford to drive around looking for a legal spot. I wasn't gonna make it. And it just sucks because, even though these blocks are supposed to be reserved for cabbies, the cars that park there never get ticketed. On the other hand, if a cop came along at that moment, there is a high likelihood that I would've received a ticket for double-parking next to them. Why doesn't the NYPD enforce taxi stand parking, but then ticket the hell out of cabbies for parking illegally when we need to use the bathroom? I wonder if the cabbies who drive like animals would be nicer on the streets if they didn't always have to pee so bad.

Earlier in the evening, I watched a kid unsuccessfully attempting to throw a pair of sneakers over the lamp post in front of this 7-11 store. The funny part of this is it was on York Avenue. (For those who don't know, that means it's a nice part of town). So of course an old man came up and yelled at him to stop.

Also early in the shift, one of my passengers had a great idea. I picked up a group of four on 5th Ave and 55th St going downtown. We were catching every green light until we got snagged in a small snarl of traffic and had to stop at the red at 35th. The guy sitting in front with me said, "We had a good run there for a while." I said back, "Yeah. But, actually, I'm a block off schedule. I can usually catch all greens until at least 34th St." To which he replied, "Cab driving should be an Olympic sport." If it was, I'd like to think I would qualify for at least a silver medal.

This is just to say...

2006-02-18T02:11:00.000-05:00

...I'm back.

On my trip I noticed two things:

1. No one in Florida uses their turn signal. Seriously. NO ONE.

Oh, wait, except for the old people. But they put their signal on three miles in advance, so it doesn't really count.

and

2. Florida Turnpike tollbooth operators are extremely nice. To the point that it's utterly disconcerting.

Yesterday

2006-02-13T12:35:00.000-05:00

I didn't work last night for blizzard reasons. I initially considered trying to pull off at least part of a shift, but when I realized I had no way of getting to the garage since my car was completely buried, I said forget it. Besides, this is what part of my street looked like from my kitchen window before the storm was even over:

In other news, I'm going away this week to visit my 95-year-old grandmother. New York Hack will have to be neglected while I'm gone as I don't think I'll have easy access to the internet around there. I am turning this "Comment Moderation" thing on for while I'm gone, just so you know, so your comments will appear on the site eventually, just not right away. I'll be back to work Sunday night so check back after that if you want.

Scores

2006-02-10T04:31:00.000-05:00

It was another night of relatively well-behaved passengers. My favorite ride of the evening was when I picked up two teenage girls who gabbed about boys the whole way home. After they got settled in the back, one turned to the other and said, "Okay, so who do you like more -- Simon or Andrew?" The other girl replied, "Well, Simon's cuter, but... I don't know... Andrew's cooler." Then she continued, "Oh, fuckin' Gabe! I found out he does like me. He is SO annoying." They continued discussing the ever-important boy situation until I dropped them off at their Upper East Side apartment building. By the end of the trip, it sounded like Simon was coming out the winner.

Later, a 20-something-year-old woman got in and, after a minute or two, said "I don't think he likes me." I turned around and was about to say, "Excuse me?" when I realized she had made a call and wasn't actually talking to me. Apparently she was just coming from a first date that didn't work out the way she had hoped. From what I could hear of her conversation, the guy had given her the old unenthusiastic "I'll be in touch" line at the end of the date and didn't kiss her when she gave him the opportunity. The moment sounded utterly cringe-worthy. When she got out, it occurred to me that I should've offered to set her up with Andrew. I hear he's cool and I think he's still available, even if he is all of fourteen years old.

And the most annoying ride of the night (which, luckily, wasn't even too annoying compared to other nights) was when three people got in at the Meat Packing District (of course) and wanted to go to Scores West. When I told them I didn't know exactly where it was, they stared at me blankly and just kept repeating "Scores West, Scores West" over and over again, as if that was gonna make me suddenly know the address. After saying it a few more times, they added, "It's a strip club." I replied, "That still doesn't help me." I could've taken them to any number of strip clubs, quite a few of which I'm very familiar with (from bringing passengers there, of course), including the Scores on the east side (60th between 1st and 2nd), but they were set on Scores goddamn West. Finally they figured out they could call 411. They got the address and I was able to deliver them to their fill of tits and ass. Now I know: Scores West is on 28th St between 10th and 11th Aves. Make a note of it.

Status quo

2006-02-03T04:19:00.000-05:00

So I finally felt well enough to get back to work tonight. Most people seemed to be in a generous mood tip-wise, but not all. And I know this is a gross generalization, but I'm really starting to believe there is something wrong with French people. Most cabbies know that the second they hear a French accent, it means there will be no tip. Tonight, the French lived up to their reputation yet again when the ones I was transporting kindly let me keep the 30 cents change from the $9 they gave on an $8.70 fare. Granted, tipping is not customary in France, but still, isn't it spelled out in all the New York visitor's guidebooks? What the hell? Sometimes it's hard to resist the urge to say something to these people, to try and educate them on this city's customs, or even to be simple and snarky with something along the lines of, "Thanks, now I can buy that pack of gum I've been saving up for." But they probably wouldn't get it, so why bother? Fucking French people. Luckily the New Yorkers I picked up tonight were extra kind and made up for the few idiots I had to deal with.

Other than that, the night was pretty much status quo. Of course, the French not tipping is also status quo. So, yeah, a typical night.

Television

2006-01-27T04:05:00.000-05:00

I just got home and I'm exhausted. It was a weird shift, but it turned out okay. My second fare of the day was the guy pictured above, named Teddy Geiger, who is some up-and-coming 17-year-old musician, and who also was on that new tv show called "Love Monkey" recently. He's opening for Brandi Carlile at Mercury Lounge next month.

After dropping him off, I ended up back uptown on Central Park West when I got stuck behind some Nissan that was driving like a zombie. They kept stopping at green lights and swerving into the other traffic lanes and just generally driving like fucking idiots. When I finally pulled up next to them, I saw what the problem was. The occupants of the car were leisurely smoking a joint. I tried to get a picture, but when the light turned green, they were actually paying attention and started driving again.

Later on, one of my passengers got in, took a second look at me, and said, "Wait, weren't you on tv tonight?" I said, "I believe so, though I haven't seen it yet." So he proceeded to describe the entire ABC News segment for me in detail. It was so weird having a passenger tell me stuff about myself, but I have to admit, I kind of liked it. It was certainly better than having to answer the same tired old questions over and over again.

15 minutes and counting down

2006-01-24T13:45:00.000-05:00

So the Associated Press did an article about me, and the result has been a whirlwind of attention. To be honest, it's all a little overwhelming, but I figure I'll just enjoy it while it lasts. So this morning I agreed to be interviewed by Kemberly Richardson (pictured above) for ABC News, and, though I was nervous, it turned out to be a lot of fun. The segment should appear on either Wednesday or Thursday during the 5:00 p.m. broadcast. I'm only now beginning to wrap my brain around all this, it's just so utterly surreal, but it has certainly made the past few days interesting, to say the least.

UPDATE: Supposedly the segment is gonna run tonight (Thursday) during the 6:00 pm broadcast. I won't be able to watch because I'll be in the cab by then, but I'll be taping it.

Prizzy R.I.P.

2006-01-23T03:11:00.000-05:00

It was another slow shift tonight. And though there weren't many people taking cabs, there were more than enough asshole drivers on the streets. Seen above is yet another Jersey fuck who doesn't know how to drive. This guy decided that, rather than pulling off to the side, he needed to stop dead in the middle of Bleecker St to ask a parked cab driver for directions. When I honked at him so that maybe he would make enough room for other cars to pass, he refused to move, despite the fact that about 10 cars were now stuck behind him. Only when he finally did start driving again did he decide to pull off to the side, but only for a second because apparently he wanted to get behind me so he could honk back at me. So not only was I stuck behind this idiot for five minutes, but now I was stuck in front of him with him leaning on the horn non-stop. A lady standing on the sidewalk finally got so annoyed with him, she yelled, "Shut the fuck up and go back to Jersey!" Too bad she wasn't looking for a cab because I would've given her a free ride.

Meanwhile, anyone know Prizzy is? Or, I mean, was? There were four cars painted with this message driving west on Houston, and they were speeding like maniacs and weaving in and out of traffic. When I commented on this to my passengers at the time, they said, "Whoever he was, if they don't stop driving like that, they'll be joining him soon."

The police

2006-01-20T03:01:00.000-05:00

I got to see the sunset tonight from underneath the FDR, facing the Brooklyn Bridge.

Later, while on the FDR going towards the Brooklyn Bridge, I got stuck in this fucked up traffic. What annoys me most about this is it's a totally unecessary backup. For whatever reason, the NYPD seems to think that placing two cop cars in the left lane at the beginning of the bridge will act as a deterrent to terrorism, when in fact all it does is create a long slow-moving stream of tired and angry drivers that reaches all the way up to the Williamsburg Bridge. I don't really see the point. It's not like they ever pull anyone over to make sure they're not terrorists, and besides, how could they possibly know? Meanwhile, anyone who has to go to Brooklyn at night is completely terrorized by the traffic.

My passengers at this time were two drunk ladies who needed to go to Coney Island Ave and Ave H. When they saw the traffic, they told me to take the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel instead. Of course, there was construction work on the tunnel, so that ended up creating even more aggravation, with everyone merging into one little lane. So, basically, the message the city's sending is, if you live in Brooklyn and need to get home at night, sucks for you.

Speaking of cops, earlier in the evening, about 30 or 40 cops, all with lights flashing, lined up on both sides of 1st Ave above 34th St. I have no idea what they were doing, but I'm assuming it was some sort of exercise. Still, with news on the radio that Osama Bin Laden has resurfaced and has renewed his pledge to fuck with the U.S., it was slightly alarming to see this many cops in one place. And yet, despite their great number, all these cops still managed to cause less traffic than those two that sit on the goddamn Brooklyn Bridge.

And one more related item: Tonight I saw a new form of undercover cop car. As you may know, many precincts have taxis that are used as undercover vehicles, which is pretty smart as it is. But tonight, for the first time ever, I saw a church van with tinted windows blow its cover by flashing its police lights to get through a particularly bad traffic snarl. Most drivers were so surprised that they didn't take it seriously enough to pull over and make room until the van made the sirens blare. Who knew?

The finger

2006-01-13T04:03:00.000-05:00

The usual. I have no idea what I did that pissed this woman off so much, but she told me I could kiss her ass, gave me the finger, and even held it for me when I pulled out the camera.

Not so usual was seeing a roll of toilet paper hanging off the back of a parked cab. It's like the cab walked out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to its shoe. How embarrassing.

Later on, I took these two guys, named John and Steve, to a hotel in Livingston, New Jersey. They were extremely friendly and curious about me and, somewhere along the way, the blog came up. After that, they were desperate to be mentioned on it. I told them they had to do something interesting for me to write about it, so the whole rest of the ride they said things like, "Okay, there's a bank over there. Pull over and we'll rob it. Will that get us on the blog?" Ultimately, nothing out of the ordinary happened on the trip except that they were very nice to me and tipped generously. So, though they didn't give me the finger and tell me to kiss their asses, I'm happy to fulfill their wish here.

A publicist, an actor, and a porn star

2006-01-09T02:57:00.000-05:00

These are the rules posted in the taxi hold lot at JFK, where I spent some time tonight, as usual. I think my favorite is "Do not prepare any types of food."

The most annoying thing that happened today was when some lady tried to stop another lady from getting in my cab in front of Bed, Bath & Beyond on 6 Ave and 18th St. I was dropping off a passenger there and the first woman was hailing a cab. I pulled up right next to her because that's where my passengers wanted to get out. The meter was off, which means that the roof light was on (the two are connected: when the meter is on, the roof light is off, and vice versa), and the people were paying me. The lady on the street scowled at me and walked back to the cab behind me. Then, when another woman started getting in my cab, she walked back up and told the woman getting in that she shouldn't take my cab. Then she turned to me and through the window said, "It's really tacky to do that." I was completely confused, so I asked, "Do what?" She replied, ""Your light was on but you still had people in your cab, and you were trying to get me to take you. It's not right. There are other cabs behind you that are free." The lady getting in looked at me to see what I was gonna say, so I was just like, "I have no idea what you're talking about. They were paying me. That means the meter was off, which makes the light go on. I don't have any control over that." But she just walked away in a self-righteous huff and the other lady ultimately got in, but what the fuck? I am so utterly sick of people thinking every cabbie is out to rip them off or do some shady shit. Has this woman never taken a cab before? We drop people off, and other people get in after the first people have paid. That's how it works. And besides, it's the nature of the game that we cabbies have to play with each other. We try to get the next passenger we see, at the expense of the cabs behind us. It was a minor event, but it was annoying. And since I went to work in a bad mood to begin with, this ignorant bitch only made it worse.

But eventually the night got better, especially when I picked up three people in the Meat Packing district going to the Waldorf Astoria. One was a publicist and the other two, a man and a woman, were her clients. The guy said he was "on MTV." I didn't recognize him though, since I don't have cable, and who watches MTV anymore anyway? The other woman said she was a porn star. Apparently these two had been married for a little while until the guy came out as gay. When I asked to take their picture, the guy said no because he couldn't be seen in a picture with the porn star. Then they tried to guess my age and I half-jokingly proposed a wager. We decided that if they guessed correctly, their ride would be free. If they guessed wrong, they said they would give me triple the fare. I look much younger than my age, so I was pretty confident they would guess wrong, which they did. When we got to the hotel, the fare was $9.40. They gave me $11 total. I wonder if they would've insisted on the free ride if they had guessed correctly.

Later on, a young guy and girl got in on the Lower East Side wanting to go to Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. Immediately the guy said, "Do you do a blog? I think I recognize you." He had read the blog! I was pretty excited and told them how Diego had a passenger last night who recognized him from the picture I posted a month or two ago. (And it appears this passenger has left a comment under the previous post, by the way.) We had a pleasant chat and, at the end of the trip, he gave me $20 on an $11 fare. Funny how that works: nice regular people from Brooklyn tip much more generously than porn stars and publicists who stay at the Waldorf.

In the meantime, though I may only be able to make money from doing this blog in the form of generous tips from the few passengers who've happened upon it, someone else appears to be capitalizing off of it. I recently noted one commenter on this site has created New York Hack t-shirts (albeit with the image of a London taxi on it, not a Crown Vic). Whoever you are, can I by any chance get one of them? For free?

You're hot

2006-01-03T04:13:00.000-05:00

I got out early from the garage this afternoon and it turned out to be a pretty good night, even though I thought it would be dead with everyone at home recovering from the holiday weekend. And luckily, there wasn't too much drama in the cab tonight either.

The only marginally interesting moment was when three young drunk girls got into the cab around 10:30. They were all revved up and talking at the same time so that I couldn't hear them tell me where they wanted to go. I had to act like a parent for a minute and say, "Okay, one at a time. One of you has to tell me where to go." When this was finally accomplished, they peppered me with all sorts of questions about being a cab driver. One of the girls got really excited and told some story about her dad's friend named Sam who was a cab driver and who was the smartest man her dad ever met. She was like, "Yeah, and my dad went to Oxford and Columbia. Class of '66. But he thinks this guy Sam is the most brilliant man ever. He recommended all these books to him, like Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Have you heard of it?" I responded, "Yeah, didn't you read that in high school?" And she said, "No! I'm in high school now and we haven't read it! I'm a junior!" They couldn't believe I had actually read Siddhartha, and all of a sudden, I felt sort of old. I read that book maybe 15 years ago, when I was 15. It's odd to think that way. Thirty isn't really that old, but when you're driving a gaggle of drunk giggling teenage girls home, it sure feels like it.

Anyway, as they were paying and getting out, one of the girls goes, "You're really hot. I'm sure it's annoying because you probably get hit on all the time, but I just have to tell you, I think you're totally hot!" Then they got out and waved as I drove away.

I actually don't get hit on in the cab too often, which I consider to be a good thing, but it does happen from time to time. And when it does, it's usually pretty uncomfortable for me. I've been asked for my number and I've been offered drinks, food, and massages. I've also had one woman jokingly (I hope) offer to pay me in sex instead of cash while she had her girlfriend (who was in Portugal) connected on the cell phone. For some reason, however, the girls tonight didn't really bother me. It was almost cute how energetic and excited they were, and the girl who told me she thought I was hot had major balls, and that needs to be respected.

On a related note, I once drove a woman home who told me she had married her cab driver. He picked her up and they made a connection. Numbers were exchanged, dates went on, and eventually a marriage was had. At the time of our conversation, they had been married for nine years.

18-wheeler

2005-12-29T03:49:00.000-05:00

I watched a cab get hit by an 18-wheeler tonight. It was around 7:00 p.m. down 2nd Ave in the 60s somewhere and the street was all clogged. This cabbie pulled what would normally be a relatively harmless move when he tried to get over into the next lane. However, the 18-wheeler that was already in that lane didn't stop in time and hit him. I'm assuming the cabbie wasn't too injured because the truck driver jumped out and started screaming at him, and usually you don't scream at dead people, or even at people who are bleeding much. Of course, there's a chance he was hurt, but the trucker was so angry, he didn't really give a shit. He was saying, "How the fuck do you expect me to see you from up there? What the fuck is wrong with you? You fucking idiot!" I kinda felt bad for the cabbie, since it must suck to get chewed out two seconds after almost getting killed by a big fucking truck. Unfortunately I was in the flow of traffic, so I couldn't stick around to see what happened next.

Meanwhile, Times Square was a nightmare tonight. They've already begun setting up for New Year's Eve (part of which is shown above), and then they closed it off entirely so they could seal manholes and remove mailboxes, or whatever it is they have to do there. New Year's is the biggest money night of the year for driving a cab, but I don't even bother with it. It's too crazy, with too much traffic and too many drunk people puking in the cab. I'd much rather get drunk myself and puke in someone else's cab.

Monday night

2005-12-27T03:29:00.000-05:00

I never did update about the strike, but it's over now, so it doesn't really matter anymore. But in case you didn't see enough of it, here's a picture of some of the treacherous traffic. This was taken on the Pulaski Bridge, on my way back to the garage at the end of that one day shift I worked last Thursday. I'm happy to be back to nights and back on the meter.

Tonight's shift was pretty boring though. It was the post-Christmas shopping frenzy, and the city mainly consisted of tourists (shown above in, where else, Times Square). I had one girl in my cab who was crying hysterically into her boyfriend's shoulder, but that was pretty much the only thing out of the ordinary. She was talking too low, so I couldn't hear what the problem was. But it reminded me of some passengers I picked up last year just after the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the World Series. A man and a woman got in, and the woman sounded like she was crying, saying, "Oh my god. I can't believe it. I just can't believe it." I was concerned because she really sounded upset, so I asked, "Is everything okay?" She tearfully, yet cheerfully replied, "Oh, yes! We're Red Sox fans."

Sightseeing

2005-12-09T03:49:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it seems like part of these sightseeing tours include an attraction called "Dead Cabbie." I imagine the tour guide saying something like, "Now, if you'll look to your right, you'll see what happens to a yellow cab when our bus cuts it off and tries to flatten it and kill the driver."

Luckily I swerved and hit my brakes in time when this particular bus got to that part of the tour.

Despite murderous sightseeing buses, the night was uneventful.

195 miles

2005-12-05T04:57:00.000-05:00

I drove 195 miles tonight and my fingernails are, as usual, black with dirt from touching all that grubby money. With the snow (shown above in Central Park) came good luck for me. Or, as Diego calls it, "the Diego luck." I got a job to Newark Airport early in the evening, and found no traffic there and back. I'm assuming most people opted against driving into the city tonight because of the weather, even though the worst of it was over by this morning. I heard on the radio that New Jersey registered nearly 600 accidents today alone. Figures.

Later in the night, when business had already gotten slow, I found a fare going to Westchester. Two stops. This pretty much made my night, since out of town fares are the most lucrative. Money-wise, I think this was actually my best shift ever driving a cab.

Sanitation

2005-12-02T04:49:00.000-05:00

So the tree was lit Wednesday, as was the big snowflake that hangs over the intersection of 57th and 5th. And with these events came the crowds, which will continue to increase until the end of the year. I have been trying to brace myself for this. So, yeah, traffic was bad tonight, but I actually expected worse. I was able to maintain a relatively calm mental state, until about 7:45, when I got stuck behind the garbage truck you see below.

I was on 22nd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, when it happened. The truck stopped and two sanitation guys got out and began to leisurely haul a huge heap of garbage bags into the back. I had a passenger with me, so we chatted, waiting for them to be done as the meter ticked away it's shitty 40 cents every two minutes. After about 10 minutes, the truck moved up three car lengths and stopped again, this time to collect another 20 or so bags of trash from the other side of the street. But near this pile of bags was a huge empty space in between the parked cars. After continuing to sit there for what seemed like forever, I started to lose it. I got out and asked the guys if it would be possible to pull into this space on the side so me and the 15 cars behind me could pass. They simply smirked at me and said, "Nope," and continued to ever so slowly throw the trash in the truck. Ten more minutes passed, and the truck kept moving a few car lengths and stopping for more trash. The whole ordeal lasted about 30 minutes, and by that time, my cool had evaporated and I was completely drained.

The thing about driving a cab is, I can make it through a 12 hour shift without feeling too tired or sleepy as long as I'm busy and moving. Once I get stuck in a really bad traffic jam, or behind an asshole garbage truck, as the case may be, my energy depletes. It's not driving the cab that exhausts me, it's the sitting still that does it.

Anyway, I finally got the woman home, and she was sweet and gave me a nice tip, despite the extra time and money it took to get her there.

Meanwhile, at one point in the night, I found myself behind a car with this curious license plate. I had some tourists in the back, so I made a little joke and said, "Look! We're behind the mayor of New Jersey!" I think they thought I was serious, though, because, after a pause, they politely corrected me, saying, "Well, it would have to be the mayor of a town in New Jersey. There can't be a mayor of a whole state."

Trips

2005-11-24T12:33:00.000-05:00

Since I'm not working tonight, I figured I'd post a brief list of some memorable passengers from recent months:

1. The young suburban couple who were "waiting for the mushrooms to kick in." They offered me $20 to let them smoke weed in the cab, but I wouldn't. Instead I showed them a relatively dark street near Grand Central, where I let them off, so they could smoke up before getting on their train.

2. The British manager of a bunch of bands, including the Pet Shop Boys and Tears for Fears. I took him to the Beacon theater, where Tears for Fears were playing later that night. He had lost his cell phone earlier that day in a taxi, but had managed to retrieve it in time for the show. He ended the trip by offering me free tickets and passes. Unfortunately, I had to decline.

3. The young well-mannered black guys who wanted me to take them on a long round trip, saying they were just meeting a friend for a second and there would be no waiting. Five minutes before we got there, one of the guys made a call from his cell telling their "friend" to be on the corner. When we pulled up, a preppy white guy walked up to the window of the cab. One of my passengers said, "Yeah, you wanted two tickets?" The guy said, "Huh? Oh, yeah." A discreet exchange was made through the window of the cab, and then I took the guys back to where I picked them up.

4. One of my very favorites, as you may have read in the Gothamist thing, was the oddly-mannered late-middle-aged lady who told me she only watched shopping channels on TV. She rattled off all the different shopping networks (QVC, ShopNBC, HSN, etc.) and described the merits and drawbacks of each one. When I asked her how much money she spent on home shopping, she said, “Oh no, I don’t buy anything anymore, I just watch. I used to buy from them. Ten years ago I drained a bank account, and a good bank account, too, but I don’t do that anymore. Now I just watch them.” I guess they warded off loneliness or something. Her husband, after all, was a Bush-voting, NRA-card-carrying Republican.

5. The rich young gay guy who voted for Bush and was dating the son of Decker, of the Black & Decker fortune. I took him to the Four Seasons while he told me all sorts of stories about his boyfriend. He gave me an $8 tip on a $12 fare.

6. Jim and Mim Herr, owners of Herr’s Potato Chips. They were on their way back to Pennsylvania and, since it was right before Christmas, they wanted to see the holiday lights on the ride to Penn Station. Traffic was pretty bad though, so I told them they couldn’t see the tree from the street and just took them through Times Square instead, since it was on the way. They were sweet and gave me a nice tip. Later, passing Rockefeller Center, I felt a twinge of guilt as I caught a spectacular view of the tree and listened to the blasting Christmas music while sitting in a traffic deadlock.

7. The 23-year-old gay guy who had lost his virginity the day before to a much older, self-proclaimed spiritual guru.

8. The middle-aged woman who got in at Lincoln Center and told me she used to be a cab driver in the early '80s. She quit driving because she went back to school and became a doctor.

9. The deaf girl who signaled for me to give her a pen and paper so she could write down her destination.

10. The woman who had just had dental work and was still numb from the novocaine. She got in saying, "Hheventy-Hhhiff and Hhirst," which I finally realized meant, "Seventy-fifth and First."

11. The psychic who didn't read my mind about what kind of tip she was gonna give me.

12. The guy who claimed he produced three Beyonce songs. I took him to Howard Beach and the whole time he was flirting with some girl on the phone. Then he hung up and called his mom and asked her to cook "platanos y huevos" for him.

13. The Japanese diplomat who was working at the UN to try to get Japan into the UN Security Council.

14. The young woman who worked as an oncology nurse, administering chemotherapy to rich people's pets.

15. The two gay guys from Brooklyn Heights, one of whom was planning on coming out to his entire family by way of a note.

Reading it over now, this list seems kind of tame. I suppose one reason for that is because I'm saving some of my better passenger stories for full posts of their own when I get around to it. And another reason is because there are just so many bankers and lawyers taking cabs in New York, and all of them are relatively sane and well-behaved. As one old-time driver from my garage told me once, "Manhattan's so boring these days, the cab drivers are more interesting than the passengers. It's just a jerk store out there."

Quarter back

2005-11-14T17:51:00.000-05:00

Apparently I'm not the only one this happens to. I was amused to read this in today's New York Times Metropolitan Diary:

Dear Diary:

As a longtime taxi driver and avid opera buff, I always enjoy driving customers to Lincoln Center. On a recent rainy evening, a fashionably dressed Upper East Side woman hailed my cab and asked to be taken to the Metropolitan Opera. I asked her what opera she was going to see, and we began a lively discussion. This well-heeled passenger asked me if I attended the Met regularly. I informed her that I rarely go any more because the tickets are too pricey on a taxi driver's salary. She replied: "Well, I agree with you about how expensive the tickets have become. Even though I can afford it, I am very discerning about which performances I attend. My box seat is costing me around $300, and a Champagne dinner at the Grand Tier Restaurant will be close to $100."

When we arrived at Lincoln Center, she told me how much she enjoyed the ride and that I was a great cabdriver. The meter read $6.70 and she handed me $8. I thanked her profusely, thinking she intended for me to keep the change.

She then said, "I'd like a quarter back, please."

As I drove away, I wondered if that quarter was going to help pay for that $300 opera ticket!

Davidson Garrett

I always wonder what these people are gonna do with that quarter, make a fucking phone call? I've been considering carrying around pennies and giving them out in 25-cent batches when these rich cheapskates want their precious little quarters back. And it's weird, because it really only ever seems to be people with money who do this. No regular working person would ever be so petty about some change. And if they were, it'd be excusable, because they're NOT RICH. The problem is that rich people probably don't even remember what a penny looks like. I guess it's up to me to remind them.

Marathon

2005-11-07T03:31:00.000-05:00

This is a picture of the trash left behind on McGuiness Blvd in Brooklyn after the big NYC Marathon today. I went to work late in order to miss most of the traffic caused by all the street closures, and I got lucky and was able to stay away from what was left of it after 4:00 p.m. I had no accidents or middle fingers tonight, so I guess it was a pretty uneventful shift.

But back to the aggravation. Sorry the picture's so shitty. I'm a little freaked out about taking pictures of cops because cops are scary. But come on, do they need to be blocking the entire fucking street just so they can chat while sitting in the comfort of their cruisers? What the fuck? This picture is from 14th Street, facing east, just past Broadway. And, in case you can't tell from the photo (try clicking on it to make it bigger), there are two cop cars blocking both lanes of the street, and one is facing the wrong direction, so their driver's sides were closer, making for a better conversation, I'm sure. All eastbound traffic basically had to swerve halfway into the oncoming traffic lane to get around them.

I see cops breaking the law all the time in a variety of ways (and I'm sure everybody has seen the one where a cop abuses his lights and siren by turning them on to get through a red light, just to shut it off again once he's through), but it infuriates me when they needlessly put everyone in danger like this. They clearly think they are above the law. And, you know what? They are. Who's gonna give these guys a fucking ticket? Themselves? Their dangerous, bad behavior has effectively caused me to have zero respect for them. And it sucks, because, as with people's opinions about cab drivers, I realize I am judging the many by the behavior of a few. But still. So if you, or anyone you know is a cop, you can make it all up to me by giving me a PBA card. Thanks.

Ramadan

2005-11-04T04:49:00.000-05:00

I got screwed at the airport not once, but twice tonight. It was extra busy in the city with a slight shortage of cabs due to it being the last night of Ramadan, but I was not to benefit from this. At 4:30 p.m., a half hour into my shift, two guys got in and wanted to go to the airport shuttle bus by Grand Central Station. When they realized they missed their bus, they asked if I would take them to JFK. Sucker that I am, I said okay. Traffic, as usual, was a nightmare. I arrived at the airport at 6:00 (not good) and pulled into the taxi lot. At 7:00, I was sent up to the Delta terminal and got a "shorty," which means it's a short-haul ride to anywhere in Queens or Brooklyn from JFK (from Laguardia, it's just Queens). The taxi dispatcher gives out little tickets that allow you to get on a shorter line if you return to the lot within 90 minutes. I was back in 15. My next passengers, luckily, were going to Manhattan, and I was back in business by 8:30, four hours after I left the city.

I had steady fares for the next few hours until I got taken out to deep Bay Ridge around midnight. I was close enough to JFK, so I called the airport taxi hotline to see what was going on in the lot. The message had just been updated to say the lot was at zero percent, so I jumped on the Belt and raced over, figuring I'd get lucky, that JFK owed me something good tonight. When I pulled in, there was one main line in front of me, and two shorty lines. The picture above is of the rest of the lot, gloriously empty.

After about twenty minutes and no movement, all the cabs behind me started leaving. I asked another driver what was going on and he said, "There's only one more flight, we're not gonna make it." I called the hotline and found out the last flight was landing at 1:30 a.m. I didn't know how heavy the flight was, but by then there were three full shorty lines, and more coming in. All the shorties would get out before me. That's about 45 cabs, plus the 15 in the main line in front of me. I said fuck it, and left. Fucked again. But, actually, I found out later, I fucked myself, because when I got back to the garage at the end of my shift, an old-time driver told me that the last flight to JFK is a 300-person Jet Blue plane from California. With 60 cabs in front of me, chances are I still would've gotten a passenger. Oh fucking well.

Meanwhile, this picture is just a continuation of the pissing theme. Some lockers were removed from the parking lot at the garage, and this is what was written on the wall behind them. I wonder if Billy had anything to do with this.

We interrupt this program

2005-10-31T16:32:00.000-05:00

One thing I forgot to mention about last night is that, though it was "Mischief Night," or "Hell Night," or whatever you want to call the night before Halloween, I was happy to have absolutely no trouble. I did see a few people in costumes, but my favorite was seeing someone's dog dressed up as a punk, complete with pink mohawk and army shirt. I guess I got in my egging quota a few weeks back.

Meanwhile, a local college radio station rebroadcast the original radio adaptation of "The War of the Worlds" from October 30, 1938. This radio play, performed in honor of Halloween by Orson Welles and his theater company, semi-accidentally convinced people there was an alien invasion in New Jersey (I wish). Since most people missed the disclaimers at the beginning of the broadcast, the program inspired widespread hysteria and panic. Listening to it now, it sounds so completely outlandish, it's hard to believe it had such a real impact. But, from what I've read, America was pretty tense in the days before WWII, and many people thought the aliens were a metaphor for the Germans. I'd never heard it before, so it was good entertainment for one of the slow late hours in the shift.

Aside from that, the oddest moment of the night was when three rabbis -- real rabbis, not Halloweeners -- got in the cab and had me take them to Borough Park, Brooklyn. It was exactly like the beginning of a politically incorrect joke: "Three rabbis get into a cab..." Too bad there was no real punchline to the ride.

Here's my card

2005-10-25T13:15:00.000-04:00

I had minor surgery yesterday, so I probably won't be working until Thursday night. Meanwhile, I forgot to mention in my last post that I happened to pick up the CEO of a very useful website that I've consulted in the past. It deals with city traffic and it's called Metrocommute.com. We both got so excited about our common interest (traffic, and how to avoid it) that I almost forgot to collect the taxi fare from him. He also gave me his business card so I could give him my opinion about his upcoming site redesign. This card is the newest addition to my business-cards-given-to-me-in-the-taxi collection. At some point along the way, I decided to save them, along with pamphlets and flyers, instead of just chucking them. Here is a list of some of the company names that have appeared on these souvenirs:

Amazing Builder, Inc.
DG2L Technologies
Knowledge Movers
Massage Therapist...at your service, Arturo (photocopied flyer)
Pre-Paid Legal Services: Protection... Security... Peace of Mind (pamphlet)
The Hetrick-Martin Institute, Home of the Harvey Milk High School
The Jewelry Queen, Designer Jewelry
Composer, Bassist, DJ, Multi-Instrumentalist (personal business card)
Moneyworx, Solutions for Today's Financial Needs
Makeup Artist (personal business card)
Flushing Town Hall, Flushing Council of Culture and the Arts
Deutsche Bank
Fountainhead Films
Swiss Effects
The Dead Betties (band flyer)
Affinia Dumont, An Executive Fitness Suite Hotel
Flashdancers Gentlemen's Club (handed to me by the doorman there as I dropped a passenger off in front)
NuTech Integrated Systems
Sly Bar
Guy Carpenter & Company
The Museum of Modern Art
Prudent Protection Service, Inc.
Metrocommute.com

On tipping

2005-10-24T03:07:00.000-04:00

Somebody fucked up, but, thankfully, it wasn't me. This piece of work was dragged into the garage this afternoon when I was waiting for my cab.

Overall, it was a boring night. I drove around, picked people up, dropped them off, and sat at traffic lights. Apparently, people weren't in the mood to tip tonight. I guess it's time I addressed this, so here are a few helpful tips on tipping for clueless cabbers:

1. Most basically, tip like you would if you were in a restaurant. This means add about 15 to 20 percent of what's on the meter, or even more for exceptional service. This means if your fare is $15, don't just tack on a single precious dollar. Give at least two, but three or more is preferable and customary.

2. Try not to ask for a quarter back. That's just cheap.

3. If you ask your cab driver a million questions about his or her life, and he or she is nice about answering you and pretends like you're not the millionth person to ask these questions, give a little extra. Remember, most of the time we are just humoring you so that you'll give us more money. We are not necessarily driving around looking to make friends, though, if that happened, it'd be a nice bonus. However, this is a rare occurence. Driving a cab is an exhausting job, made even more so when at least half of our passengers ask us the same tired old questions night after night, expecting some sort of entertainment. A nice friendly conversation is one thing -- and that is certainly welcomed and helps us get through the day -- but being repeatedly grilled about who we are, where we come from, and why we are doing this job, well that's something entirely different. And please don't get offended if your driver doesn't want to answer all the personal questions you may be asking. We might just be too tired and bored with ourselves to be able to force ourselves to answer.

On a related note, do not ask your cab driver about the money he or she makes. We will not tell you the truth. It makes us nervous, mainly because we don't know if you're just innocently asking, or if you're trying to figure out if we're worth robbing.

4. If you need a cab to wait for you, compensate. We do not, by law, have to wait for passengers, since this means we will basically be losing money. Yes, the meter is running, but it is running at a much slower rate than if the cab was actually moving. The meter adds 40 cents for every two minutes of waiting time. This translates into $12 an hour. If we sat with the meter on for the entire 12 hour shift, we would ultimately end up paying out more money in lease fees and gas than we made for the night. Additionally, do not act like it is your god-given right to have a cab wait for you. It is not. If you ask nicely, the driver will probably do it, but don't feel entitled to it.

5. Obviously, overtipping is very welcomed. Just know that when you give even just a dollar or two more than the driver might have expected, it has a huge impact, not only financially, but mentally. I will never forget the people who surprised me with amazingly generous tips. But even just mildly generous tips have helped to revive my ever-fledgling faith in humanity. On the other hand, it's also hard to forget those who leave no tip at all.

6. If you fart in a cab, tip extra.

First lady

2005-10-18T02:53:00.000-04:00

Some asshole driver clipped my mirror tonight. Traffic was heavy going up 6th Ave and he was trying to get over into my lane, which would've been fine and all except I already happened to be there. I had no room to move, but he must've thought my cab would just magically fucking disappear once he decided to move over because he just came straight at me. When my cab didn't dematerialize for him, our mirrors met. Luckily, Ford Crown Victorias are extremely resilient and my mirror just sort of sprang back into position. I got out and checked the doors and fender, but there was no mark that anything happened. Not that it would have mattered since the guy drove away as fast as he could. Still, I was pissed. And the Texan tourists in the backseat seemed a little freaked.

Meanwhile, I have no idea what is wrong with this cab driver. He was driving really weirdly and was kinda pissing me off, fucking up my rhythm. When I pulled up next to him, the problem became obvious: He was counting his money.

The most notable event of the night was when two classy black ladies got in at 5th Ave and 25th. They were making two stops and talked politics the whole way. One was middle-aged, the other was older. After I dropped off the older one, the other lady said, "That was the former first lady of New York City that just got out of the cab." I said, "Really? Wait, what?" And she said, "Do you remember David Dinkins? He was the mayor before Giuliani. He was the good mayor. That was his wife." So, yeah, I had Mrs. Dinkins in my cab. Does she count as a celebrity?

The other thing that sticks in my mind from this shift was when I picked up a young couple and the guy informed me that I had driven him home last week. That's actually happened to me two other times, where I've met the same passenger in the cab more than once. The first time it happened with some old French guy who I didn't remember but who remembered me, and the other time it happened with a young woman who I did remember. More recently, I was approached in a book store by a young man asking, "Excuse me, are you a cab driver?" I had driven him home in a blizzard last winter and, since it took a while, we got to know each other. It's kind of astonishing each time this happens since there are about 13,000 cabs in New York.

Hacking

2005-10-17T04:24:00.000-04:00

One of my predecessors. According to the dictionary, a hack is defined as:
n.
1. A horse used for riding or driving; a hackney.
2. A worn-out horse for hire; a jade.
3. a. One who undertakes unpleasant or distasteful tasks for money or reward; a hireling; b. A writer hired to produce routine or commercial writing.
4. A carriage or hackney for hire.
5. A taxicab.

Tonight I mostly felt like a combination of 2 and 3a. Add to this the fact that my sore throat and cough is back, and I become a stupid play on words, a hack with a hacking cough. Either I got sick again or I never fully recovered from my illness of last week. Whichever it is, it put me in a bad mood for most of the night.

The one really nice thing that happened tonight was when some people I know randomly got in the cab at 42nd and 8th. This is Nico and his friend Nadia.

Some gentle suggestions for drivers and pedestrians

2005-10-13T14:53:00.000-04:00

No pictures today as I’m not working, nor will I be around much until next week. So I figured I’d just post this list I’ve been compiling of suggestions for how to walk and drive in New York City. It’s a work in progress, so I will probably add to it as more issues arise.

Drivers:
1. Use your turn signals. I promise you, this is not the hardest thing in the world. Simply locate the little lever to the left of your steering wheel and push it down if you’re turning left, or pull it up if you’re turning right. It takes the most minimal amount of energy, and when you get good at it (after only a few days of practice, or even just minutes if you’re a precocious learner), all you need is a quick flick of the fingers.

2. If you’ve almost missed your turn and are in the middle lane of a busy avenue, do not stop and try to turn from where you are. It’s not worth the accident you will probably cause. Since most of Manhattan is a grid, it is all too easy to drive two more blocks and make that left you were originally after, or simply turn right at the next block and box around (this means, make three rights to get back to the block you wanted), making sure this time around to position yourself in the proper lane for your desired turn.

3. Do not cut off a yellow cab.

4. If you must cut off a yellow cab, at least try to warn the driver by using your turn signal (see number 1 above for instructions). This really does make it better as it gives the car you’re cutting off time to hit the brakes.

5. Additionally, if you cut off a taxi, and the driver honks at you, DO NOT give him or her the finger. Remember, YOU were the one at fault and a good angry honking was only in order.

6. If there is space in front of you and you see a taxi signaling to get over into that space, do not speed up so as to not let it in. I will never understand why people do this, but if you do it, you are an asshole. What, do you really need to be First? Does it affect your ego that much to be driving behind a yellow cab?

7. The speed limit on most New York City Streets is 30 mph. Do not drive slower than this unless you have a good reason. And, no, having an important conversation on your fucking cell phone does not count as a good reason. Which brings us to:

8. Do not talk on your cell phone, hands-free included, while operating a vehicle in New York City. People who do this drive worse than most drunk drivers. I know this sounds hypocritical coming from a taxi driver, since many taxi drivers are on their phones throughout an entire shift, but, perhaps because of the amount of time they spend on the streets, these drivers seem to be able to handle it. Personally, I am not good at talking on the phone while driving, so I avoid doing it. Civilian drivers are not good at it either. They weave and swerve and go too slow. They try to turn from the middle lane of an avenue without using their turn signal because, whoops, their conversation was just too important to think about actually paying attention to how they are driving and where they are going, not to mention what the other cars around them are doing. Either pull over or hang up. Thank you.

Pedestrians:

1. When waiting to cross the street, wait on the sidewalk, not three feet into the intersection. You never know when a car may have to swerve to avoid something on the other side, which might cause that car to hit you instead.

2. If you see a car coming, do not cross in front of it against the light. It’s just rude.

3. If you are crossing in the middle of the street (i.e. not on a marked crosswalk), do not get angry at a cab for actually driving on the street where you are crossing. Also, do not give the finger or threaten to punch the cab driver in the face for driving on the street where you shouldn’t be crossing. Can you handle that, tough guy? You won’t be so tough when the brakes don’t work or the driver doesn’t see you (because you shouldn’t be there in the first place) and you get hit. Despite what you may believe, cab drivers really don’t want to hit pedestrians, so let’s all work together on preventing that, okay?

4. Do not point or wave to your friends while standing on the edge of the sidewalk. This is the universal signal for “I want a cab.” If you must point or wave while standing on the edge of the sidewalk, do not look disdainfully at the cabs that stop in front of you expecting you to get in.

5. If a car gets stuck in an intersection due to heavy traffic, do not cross in front of it, thus not letting it move safely to the other side. This puts both you and the car you are crossing in front of in danger until the light changes.

6. If you must cross at an intersection against the light (see number 2 for pedestrians above), please hurry the fuck up. Also, do not run halfway across and then slow down to a walk for the rest of the distance. Lackadaisical pedestrians are selfish and stupid and are likely to either get hit or cause an accident.

Like I said, it’s a work in progress. I’ll probably have more to add when I get back next week. In the meantime, study this list carefully and be nice to cabbies.

Recession Special

2005-10-11T03:01:00.000-04:00

My cab smelled like puke tonight. I actually gagged a little when I first got in. I considered asking for a different one, but I didn't want to deal with the potential wrath of John the crazy Romanian dispatcher. I wiped down the floor and seats with the bleach wipes I usually use to clean the steering wheel and buttons, and pulled out with all the windows down. The whole night, the smell was there, like an annoying passenger that wouldn't get out. On top of that, it was a slow night. This picture is an illustration of what I saw in front of me for most of the shift: empty cabs.

I stopped at Gray's Papaya to eat around midnight. It's crap food, but it's quick and cheap, and there's parking right in front. I usually get the "Recession Special," which consists of two hot dogs and a juice for $2.75.

The blur

2005-10-10T03:33:00.000-04:00

This was my view for most of the night: blur. The shift was relatively uneventful, despite my shitty wipers. I did have more drunk passengers than usual, but they were just happy and sloppy and in good spirits, for the most part.

More assholes, and where you shouldn't put them

2005-10-06T02:28:00.000-04:00

Take a good look at this cab. I wish I had the daring to have photographed the driver himself, because he is an ASSHOLE. Notice his position in relation to the double-yellow line. This photo was taken on Avenue A. Traffic was a little backed up approaching Houston, and business had just drastically slowed down, so this asshole decided that it was important to drive like, well, an asshole. He tried to pass me on the left, using the oncoming traffic lane as a passing lane, and came within, literally, an inch of hitting me. And the stupidest part of it was that he was gaining zero advantage from doing this as there were about five other empty cabs ahead of us further up the block. This is the worst part of slow business. Cab drivers get desperate, and this makes them vicious and irrational. Perhaps this is why everyone thinks cabs drive like maniacs. Because sometimes they do.

I would like to point out, though, that, contrary to popular belief, cab drivers are actually in the minority when it comes to assholic driving. This guy, for instance, felt that closely cutting me off wasn't enough. No, he had to give me the finger as well. Then, when he saw me taking pictures of his macho truck (and his wimp-ass Florida license plate), he decided to get out and yell at me. Mind you, a cab driver would never do that.

Meanwhile, this sign has always puzzled me.* It's posted in the US Airways taxi lot bathroom (which is unisex, sort of) at Laguardia. I have no idea what the writer was trying to say. Don't get on the toilet? Please sit in the toilet? I'm never quite sure what to do when using this bathroom because, apparently, the rules are different here.

*(Sorry about the blur. I was in a hurry.)

Checker

2005-10-03T02:59:00.000-04:00

I think this is one of the last checker cabs in the city. From what I've heard, this guy just drives around giving people free rides. I have no idea why he would want to do such a thing. Apparently the TLC (Taxi & Limousine Commission) got after him in the past for accepting tips, which is against the law if you don't have a medallion. Or something like that.

Exhibits A and B

2005-09-26T14:23:00.000-04:00

From outside:

From inside:

Off Duty

2005-09-22T14:45:00.000-04:00

I was away for a few days and was scheduled to return to work tonight. But I just got a call from the garage that they already have too many drivers for the day, and would I mind not coming in? I never really mind not working, except I am, of course and as usual, desperate for money. So now I'm not scheduled to work until Sunday, though I'm gonna try to get them to give me a cab on Saturday night as well. This means I don't really have any new pictures to post or stories to tell. I'm digging up the dregs here with this picture of the foot bath in the women's bathroom at the JFK holding lot. At least I
think it's a foot bath. The only reason I assume this is because I've seen men washing their feet in a similar contraption in the unisex bathroom at Laguardia's US Airways holding lot. From the looks of it, this foot bath in the separate and pristine women's bathroom at JFK remains unused. Perhaps I'll use it next time I'm there and try to figure out what the point might be.

Asshole

2005-09-15T02:13:00.000-04:00

This guy was driving a black Jaguar with Pennsylvania plates. He almost hit me when he ran an all-way stop sign on W. 13th and Washington. But it was kind of him to pose so nicely for the camera.

Sometimes Billy, the neighborhood lush, greets me from under the stairs in my building with a loud snore when I arrive home at night.

JFK

2005-09-14T02:01:00.000-04:00

The UN General Assembly opened today, causing major gridlock on the east side, so I wasn't too upset when my second fare was to JFK. It did, however, screw up my entire night. It took an hour to get there, and then I sat in the taxi lot for another two hours. Still, the JFK Central Taxi Hold lot is a pretty awe-inspiring place. It's just one enormous lot, as opposed to Laguardia's separate little lots. At full capacity, it holds about 500 taxis. (Click here to see what it looks like from above when it's about half full. You might want to zoom in to view it better.)

To pass the time, drivers play backgammon and dominos, but mostly they just stand around and shoot the shit. They also buy food in this little building, which is a coffee shop.

And behind the coffee shop, when the weather is warm enough, they lay down mats and pray. In the winter, the praying takes place inside.

This fence is at the far end of the lot. The planes land practically next to us. I was standing here when a cab stopped on the other side on its way to a terminal. There's really no reason for a cab to stop here as it's a roadway and the drivers are usually speeding along it trying to get to the terminals as fast as they can. When I peeked inside this cab to see what was up, I saw the driver pointing his dick into a cup, peeing. Then he dumped the cup on the roadway and drove off.

This is what he left behind.

Car service

2005-09-08T03:14:00.000-04:00

In addition to drivers from New Jersey, I also hate car service drivers. This guy refused to let me over and caused me to lose a fare. The thing about car service drivers is, half the time, they're drunk. Seriously. If you take car services regularly enough, you should know this. There's a 24-hour Indian restaurant in Queens that caters primarily to taxi and car service drivers. On a shelf behind the counter are huge jugs of White Horse scotch, which they pour into paper coffee cups and mix with Canada Dry club soda. More than once I've seen a car service driver come in and do a shot with the waiter before taking his little paper-cup cocktail back to his black Lincoln and continuing on his shift.