Mister Hess

Well, speaking of the Hess Station at 45th and 10th, here's one from the vault. I've written a couple of times about one of the unique aspects of driving a cab in New York City, the phenomenon of finding yourself suddenly mingling with various strata of the human race with whom you otherwise would probably never have had the opportunity to be in contact.
(See "Running The Gamut". And "Running The Gamut, Part 2" .)

That's what happened during the rush hour one evening in December of 1990. I picked up three men in business attire - suits and overcoats - on the west side of Midtown who wanted to go to a restaurant across town, a ten to fifteen minute haul, depending on traffic. Two of them got in the back and the other, a somewhat older gentleman, perhaps in his '70s, sat up front with me. I owned my own cab in those days and it had no partition (I hate them), so it made for a more comfortable fit for the three of them to seat themselves this way. The two in the rear could move around easily and the lack of a Plexiglas obstruction made conversation from front to back no problem for all three of them.

As the ride got under way, they continued a conversation which had already been in progress before entering the cab. I, a professional fly on the wall, took note that what they were talking about was how the situation in Iraq was affecting the price of oil. Clouds of war were in the air in those days. Sadaam had already invaded Kuwait, the international coalition had been formed, and a deadline for withdrawal had been sanctioned by the U.N. In retrospect I wish I'd paid more attention to exactly what they were saying, but at the moment I thought they were just three businessmen discussing what was currently in the news. I tuned them out and put my attention back on the observation of the particles in perpetual motion on the streets and sidewalks of New York City.

After a couple of minutes, however, my contemplation was interrupted by the gentleman to my right.

"Hey, driver," he said, "what kind of gasoline do you put in your cab?"

"Amoco, usually," I replied.

"Do you ever use Hess?"

"Sometimes."

"Do you know that station on 45th and 10th?"

"Sure."

"Are you happy with the service you get over there?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Tell me something - are the bathrooms clean?"

I noticed in the mirror that the two fellows in the back had big grins on their faces and were suppressing laughter. I knew something was up and needed no further prompting to turn the tables on them.

"All right," I said with a smile of my own, "that's it... which one of you guys is Leon Hess?"

The older gentleman sitting beside me reached over and shook my hand. He was, in fact, Leon Hess, the founder and owner of Hess Oil and, no less impressive, the owner of the New York Jets football team. It was understandable that I hadn't recognized him. Unlike some owners of professional sports teams, Leon Hess never gave interviews and was quite low profile when it came to the media. You never saw a picture of him in the papers.

Having had his identity revealed, which was no doubt his intention, the subject turned immediately to the Jets. I admitted to Mr. Hess right away that wasn't much of a football fan, that baseball was my sport, but that didn't deter him. I think I became for him "The Fan", at least for the moment, and he went into a digression about the current situation in Jets World. The team had been particularly horrible that year and although there were still a couple of weeks left in the regular season, they were already out of contention for making the playoffs. Mr. Hess told me with some anguish that he'd just fired the coach.

"I hated to do it," he exclaimed, "he's a good man. But it's my responsibility to do whatever I can to put a winning team on the field."

He told me he'd been at Giants Stadium the previous Sunday to watch the other New York football team, the Giants, play the Dallas Cowboys in below-freezing temperatures. Although the weather was brutal, he said the stadium had been full. He contrasted that with the fact that his own team had only been filling half the seats in the same stadium for the last few home games due to their losing ways.

"It's not the fans' fault," he said, "Jets fans are the best in the world. It's up to me not to let them down."

I wished I'd been more of a football fan so I could have held my own in conversation with him and I kind of apologized for being so much on the periphery of the sport. It was too bad my friend Harry wasn't here, I told him, because Harry was a guy who probably knows as much about the Jets as he did. Harry was a sports fanatic who could tell you the names of every position player on the team for the last ten years.

"Say hello to Harry for me," Mr. Hess said with a smile as he and his friends got out at a swanky-looking restaurant.

He paid me double the meter, something I appreciated more for its acknowledgement implication than its monetary value. And I noticed that he had not fastened his seat belt even though he was sitting up front seat with me. A sign of trust, I thought, that I also appreciated.

I've had many years to reflect on that ride. It left me with a first-hand experience with, as mentioned, a type of person with whom I might otherwise have never come into contact. Here was Leon Hess, a lion of American business, probably a billionaire, giving me fifteen minutes to form an impression of how someone in his station in life might be. And the impression was quite a favorable one.

Was he aloof?

No, to the contrary.

Was he friendly and conversational?

Quite so.

Did he show any of the social class snobbery, the "I'm over here and you're over there" attitude of people who feel cab drivers are beneath them?

Not at all.

Did he, in fact, demonstrate that most admirable of characteristics, caring?

In a big way, not only when he spoke of his football team and its fans, but when he spoke of his oil company and its customers.

You know, there's no data better than first-hand data. When you've seen something with your own eyes, it doesn't much matter what you read in the papers or hear other people say about that with which you've had personal contact. You know. I can't say that because Mr. Hess made a favorable impression on me that all people at the pinnacle of Big Business are nice guys. But because of this ride I also can't fall into the easy assumption that you've got to be a rat to rise to the top.

And that's one of those little nuggets of wisdom one picks up along the way.

********

Along with this, of course: click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Meanwhile, At The Hess Station...

You've never seen a gas station like the Hess Station at 45th Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan. With twenty-four pumps, it is the biggest in New York City. And the very fact that it even exists on the island of Manhattan gives it the distinction of being part of a vanishing breed. Like record stores and men who smoke pipes, gas stations in Manhattan are on the verge of extinction.

Well, perhaps I should qualify that by saying "south of 96th Street in Manhattan". If you're not familiar with the demographics of the city, let me explain. When you think of "New York City" - the business and cultural capital of the world (some say) and the kind of people who make it so - you're thinking of Manhattan below 96th Street. Above that you have the sections known as Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood. These are neighborhoods which could just as well be in any of the other four boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx) of New York City. They have their own characteristics, good and bad, but they don't have the same flair, energy, or pizazz as Manhattan south of 96th Street.

What's been happening over the last dozen years or so is that real estate developers have been offering the owners of gas stations so many millions of dollars for the purchase of their tiny plots of land that they'd be fools to turn them down. Up goes the thirty-five story luxury high rise with a pool and a spa on the twenty-ninth floor and into memory goes the Gaseteria. In fact, south of 96th Street - a place where 13,287 yellow cabs must fill up their tanks twice a day and hundreds of thousands of other cars and trucks clog the streets - I can count only eleven gas stations still in existence. At the same time, I can count eleven others that have disappeared in the last five years. It's quite common for a motorist to pull up next to me at a red light, roll down his window, and beg me to give him the answer to this desperate question: "Hey, buddy, can you tell me where there's a gas station around here???"

So you can imagine the kind of business those few gas stations which are still around are doing, and none are busier than the Hess Station at 45th and 10th. Five o'clock is when the shift changes for most cabs and this station is in an area where there are several taxi garages, including my own, so you've got an invasion of yellow taxis all zeroing in on the Hess Station at around this time. Picture this scene: every pump taken by a cab or an occasional private car, two or three cabs waiting in line behind the cabs that are already at a pump, more cabs waiting behind them out on the street, a few cars trying to circle the station in order to find a hoped-for empty spot, drivers waiting on line to pay for their gas or to get their change, night shift drivers walking around looking for their cabs, horns honking, people yelling, tempers flaring.

Chaos.

It's so bad that they actually have speed bumps surrounding the station - when have you ever seen a gas station with speed bumps? - and they need a couple of employees out there directing traffic to try to keep order.

"Yo, you're behind 7N86!"

"What??"

"Get behind 7N86!"

"That motherfucker cut in front of me!"

"I don't care, you're behind him now!"

"Hey, fuck you, man!"

"I don't wanna hear your shit, man, just get behind him!"

And on like that. I am quite used to it, of course, and barely pay attention to the craziness surrounding me as I walk around the place looking for the the cab I myself will be taking out on the streets for the next twelve hours. A couple of weeks ago, however, as I was performing this daily ritual, something odd suddenly caught my eye: a pair of legs sticking out from under the opened front door of an unmoving taxi.



I walked around to see what was going on and found a cab driver lying flat on the pavement, face up, eyes open, and not in any apparent pain. He was just lying there. And what was equally strange was that no one was attending to him. You'd think that when someone is lying flat on his back in the middle of a gas station with cars in motion all around him somebody would be trying to assist him. But, no.



I walked over to another cab driver who looked like he knew what was going on.

"What's with this guy?" I asked.

"He's full of shit," he replied.

"Why, what happened?"

"Trying to say the guy hit him. But he just fell down on his own. I saw it."

"Which guy?"

"Him."

I looked over to the person he was indicating, an employee of the Hess Station who was in an animated conversation with another employee who I knew from prior acquaintance to be the supervisor of the place. He seemed to be explaining to her what had happened and she seemed to be believing what he was saying as she, too, wasn't showing any signs of believing that the guy might actually be injured and in need of assistance. Looking back at the guy lying there, I noticed that he was now talking to someone on his cell phone.



The whole thing was comical. I mean, here was this super-busy gas station with cars moving all around all over the place and there's this guy lying flat on his back in the middle of the whole thing talking on his cell phone! And no one is paying any attention to him. It was like one of those What's Wrong With This Picture? things. A farce.

Seeing it as a fraud-in-progress, I, too, felt no impulse to do anything to help the guy and went off looking for my own taxi d'noir, 2K53, with a smile on my face. A couple of minutes later, not finding my cab, I checked back in on the scene. By this time the cops had arrived and, being cops, were all serious and trying to understand what was going on. A female officer was trying to get the cab driver to his feet.



However, he was apparently a helpless slab of meat who couldn't move his legs and she couldn't hold up the weight of his body, so she lowered him back down to the pavement. Another cop was shouting out to no one in particular, "Did anyone see what happened?" Nobody came forward. "No one saw anything," the cop barked out, again at no one in particular, with a touch of disgust in his voice.



I came forward. "A cab driver told me he saw what happened," I offered. "He said the guy was faking it. I don't see him around, though."

"That's hearsay!" the cop growled at me. Then he turned his back and walked away.

Well, excuse me. He was right, of course, but what about that "courtesy" thing? I shrugged it off and resumed my search for 2K53 and, just as the ambulance, lights ablaze and siren blaring, was arriving, I spotted it coming down 44th Street. The day driver told me that, fortunately, he'd already filled the tank at another gas station, so all I had to do was get in and drive away, which I did. This was lucky because, with all this madness at the Hess Station, it was going to take half an hour to get in and out of the place. I drove 2K53 up to 46th and 10th, did ten minutes of clean-up, and set off for my night's adventures.



The next day I was back at the Hess Station at shift change time and was curious, of course, to know what had happened, especially if the cops had arrested the station's employee. So when I spotted him standing around I asked him exactly how the whole thing had gone down. He told me his version of the story, which I found completely believable.

He had yelled at the cab driver, he said, to move his cab behind some other vehicle in the station. The cabbie, probably tired and irritable after a long day in New York City traffic, took offense to the way he was being spoken to and stepped out of his cab to scream back at him. He then "got in the face" of the Hess Station guy and, in retaliation to the cabbie's too-closeness, the Hess Station guy lightly pushed him back. In response to his being lightly touched on the chest, the cabbie collapsed in a heap on the pavement, thus setting off the much ado.

"So were you arrested?" I asked.

He had not been. The paramedics could find nothing wrong with the driver, he said, so the cops saw no reason to make an arrest. And that was it. The driver miraculously regained his ability to walk and drive a cab and he drove away. The EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) drove away in their ambulance. And the cops drove away in their cruisers.

Someday I'm going to write a screenplay.

It will be a comedy.

It's going to be called Welcome To New York City.

And this will be the first scene in the movie.

********

Then again, maybe I'll just call it Click Here For Pictures From A Taxi.

Islands In The Stream

There are three things that can happen between drivers and passengers during the course of a ride in a taxicab:

1) Nothing. The passenger looks out the window, talks on the cell phone, or (rarely) watches the canned programming on the cab's TV monitor. The driver drives.

2) The driver becomes a fly on the wall and either voluntarily or involuntarily eavesdrops on the voices coming toward him from the back seat, whether it be from multiple passengers talking to each other or from a single passenger on the phone.

3) A conversation takes place.

In a huge metropolis like New York, where the flow of particles is so continuous, it's quite natural to think of the motion of the city as having a similarity to the current of a river. The river runs, ever onward, and the taxi driver is a ferryman of sorts, his cab a temporary haven on an endless journey to who knows where. People who may or may not ever meet again engage in conversation, as if to acknowledge that it's better to float down the river in the company of others than to brave the waters by oneself. If a taxi driver has an affinity for this unique situation he is in, it's this third possibility, the things that can happen through communication, that can make the job so interesting.

Some of these conversations, like particularly intriguing islands in the stream, may startle, disturb, reassure, delight, or educate the intrepid explorer. I had three in the course of a single shift a few weeks ago.

5:45 pm, Penn Station to North Moore in Tribeca
It was the "survival of the fittest" time of the evening when the quickest and most alert are most likely to get the next available taxi. As I was assisting an elderly gentleman out of my cab at the Long Island Railroad entrance to Penn Station, an attractive young miss appeared on the cab's opposite side and waited with her hand on the door (as if to say, "It's mine!") until the old fellow's delicate extraction was completed. Getting in with a smile, she told me her destination and we pulled into the heavy traffic on 7th Avenue.

Now, there are certain nuances that tell a driver that the newly arrived passenger is a candidate for a conversation. There's the smile, the return of the driver's "hello", along with, perhaps, an "how are you?"; there's the friendly tone of the voice; there's the position of the seating - the passenger doesn't slump out of sight behind the partition but, rather, sits right in the middle of the seat, perhaps even leans forward a bit; and often there's eye contact in the mirror. The attractive young miss had all of these, helped, I felt, by some admiration on her part at seeing a taxi driver performing an act of kindness for the fragile passenger who had preceded her.

Aware of all this, I started in with some common chit-chat - the traffic, the weather, the difficulty of getting a cab at this time of day in Midtown - and this rather magical process we humans are capable of went into gear. Back and forth, back and forth, and then - wham! - suddenly the person on the other end of the conversation is telling you something that's no longer in the realm of the chit-chat mundane - something personal, a bit surprising, perhaps. Kind of out of nowhere, she tells me she's a boxer. A boxer! This friendly, rather petite-ish, altogether feminine-looking female gets in a ring and tries to punch the beejeebabs out of other women. Not professionally, but at the next level down, in organized matches in gyms. Career-wise, she's in the related field of sports rehabilitation. One of her clients, she said, is the famous boxer Pacquiao.

It's always kind of fascinating when the way a person is does not match one's own stereotype of what a person does and I will admit that I find the sight of women going at each other quite entertaining (what the world needs is more mud wrestling). So this particular conversation was really holding my interest. And then it did something that communication can do when people listen carefully to each other, acknowledge what is said, and create a space that is comfortable and safe: it led to a further, more insightful revelation about the other person, something that opens a window into their inner world.

What was revealed was a situation that was eating away at her, something that was consuming her attention the whole day long, a problem that would not resolve. She told me what it was and, to her credit, it wasn't actually her own problem. It was a tangled mess that was endangering the future - perhaps even the life - of someone who was dear to her, her brother.

Growing up in an environment where one's fists are at least as valuable as one's social graces, he, like his sister, had also become a boxer and a couple of months earlier, at the age of twenty, had turned professional. Shortly after that he had a "bad break-up" with his girlfriend who, to get revenge, did something quite evil - she enlisted the services of some thug she knew to beat the crap out of him. How do you beat the crap out of a professional boxer? You get a dozen of your thug friends to help you. In a modern version of tracking somebody down, the jilted girlfriend gave the thug his Twitter address. He and his gang read his tweet messages to locate him when he was alone, shooting hoops in a schoolyard. Then they ambushed him and battered him so badly that he had broken teeth, broken ribs, a concussion, and needed thirty stitches to close the wounds to his face and head.

"Did he go to the police?" I asked.

"No, he's got some goddamned Sicilian code of silence," she lamented.

Now I understood why she felt a need to talk about this thing. It wasn't over and it wasn't likely to end well, either. Her brother is thick-headed and would handle it "in his own way", which would mean more violence. After that there would be further retaliation and he might be killed or spend the next twenty years of his life in jail. She had the wisdom to understand this, but she had no solution. So she was living each day with a helpless feeling of dread. It was like trying to hold onto someone who was dangling off the ledge of a mountain.

If I'd thought of it at the time, I would have advised her to find someone to intervene in the conflict, someone whom all parties involved knew and respected, if such a person exists. Or I would have advised her to bring her brother and the ex-girlfriend together in some kind of counseling session to confess what they'd done to each other and to apologize for their actions. That might have handled it. But, as is often the case when someone says something startling, you don't think of the right thing to say until later. In my business people enter and exit rather quickly and I'm often left in the middle of the story.

And that is one of the downsides of the taxicab conversation.

1:45 a.m., 47th and 6th to Astoria, Queens
He was a gaunt, middle-aged man - long, black overcoat, no hat - who hailed me with his right hand while taking one final drag on a cigarette with his left. Before even entering the taxi, he gave me the impression that he was a "serious" smoker. He was probably coming from a job where he couldn't smoke and since you're not allowed to smoke in a cab anymore in this NO SMOKING city, the time between the workplace and the taxi becomes the time to have that thing you've been craving for all night. My impression was confirmed when, just a minute into the ride, he asked me if he could light up a new one.

Now, this is a situation I actually enjoy. The taxi driver in New York City is usually taken somewhat for granted and is not accorded the kind of respect that certain professionals enjoy. I mean, you'd never say to a pilot as you entered his aircraft, "I'm late, step on it," right? But a passenger who would ask his driver to break the the rules so he can stick that little white cylinder in his mouth is on the other end of the respect spectrum. This guy is an addict, someone who is living in the moment, and to him the taxi driver is the Gatekeeper Of Bliss, The Man With The Plan. Hey, how ya doin', dude? I mean, sir.

If, after observing how the person seems to be, I think he or she has a sense of humor, I have been known to say something like this:

"Well, I'll consider it, but only under two circumstances."

"Sure, no problem."

"I haven't told you what the circumstances are yet."

"Oh, okay."

"First, you've got to keep the cigarette inside the cab. Don't hold it out the window." (This is because the danger here is that the driver can be fined if a cop happens to see the passenger smoking in the back seat. I've never heard of this ticket actually being written but, who knows, it might be "Give Tickets To Cabbies Who Allow Passengers To Smoke Week" at the Police Department.)

"Oh, yeah, man, no problem, no problem."

"Good. And the second thing is... you've got to beg me."

"Beg you?"

"Yeah. You see, this is the only time I can ever get anyone to beg me for anything. It's good for my self-esteem. So if you wanna smoke, you gotta beg."

Now, as I said, I wouldn't say this to someone if they seemed too solid mentally. You've got to size them up before saying it. But so far I haven't missed and they jump right into it with a smile.

"Oh, please, please, Mister Taxi Driver, can I smoke a cigarette? Please? Pretty please?"

"Yes, you may."

And it's off to Puffland.

Looking at my current passenger in the mirror, I decided right away, nope, no begging joke with this guy, he looks like he hasn't laughed in two years. So I just told him about the no-holding-the-cigarette-out-the-window rule and not to light up until we got onto the 59th Street Bridge, about a minute away. He thanked me.

Well, although he may or may not have appreciated my sense of humor, there was something in the way he was that made me curious about him. I wasn't sure what it was. He just seemed to be someone it might be interesting to talk to. So I decided to delve, as is my tendency.

"You must be a serious smoker," I said, as we were approaching the bridge. Being that smoking was the subject at hand, it seemed like an easy way to get a conversation going.

"Why?"

"Well, I've noticed that when people ask me if they can smoke in the cab, it's because they want a cigarette really, really badly."

"I just wanted to finish the one I started."

"Yeah, you see, that's what I mean. You're a heavy smoker?"

"Just three or four a day."

"Packs?"

"Cigarettes."

This surprised me. I would have bet he went through a pack a day, at least.

"Since I quit."

Ah, so there it was. I was right. The thing about him that I was trying to put my finger on, I realized, was that it was impinging on me subconsciously that heavy smokers have a certain kind of demeanor. Something about the way they look, their body language, their voice, that has cigarette smoking as a component part of it. That's what was making me curious about him.

"Oh, so you had been a heavy smoker?"

"Yes," he replied, rather half-vacantly. Sometimes when people say something you have the feeling they're only half-speaking to you, the other half being diverted to another, invisible, entity.

"What did you do, a pack a day?"

"Two or three."

Heavy smoker, indeed. "Wow... well, and now you're down to just a few cigarettes a day?"

"Yes," he said flatly. There was no sign of pride in his voice at making progress toward an objective. You would have expected a bit of positive emotion here, but this guy was flat as a board.

"Good for you."

"Since the cancer," he said, the focus of his eyes extending no further than the partition which separates driver from passenger.

I had stepped on a landmine and I knew it. What the hell do you say to a stranger who's just told you he has cancer? I didn't know what to do. I could say nothing, pretend that I hadn't heard it. But I thought that would be cold-hearted, even cruel. I could acknowledge it - just say, "I'm sorry" - and leave it at that. But quite possibly he'd said it because he just felt a need to talk about it with another human being, another island in the stream. God knows the despair and loneliness this man might be enduring, and although listening to him might not be able to do anything to cure his disease, it might help him change the way he dealt with it. And that could be a very good thing. I waited until we reached the Queens side of the bridge (so we might better be able to hear each other - bridges and tunnels are tough on the acoustics inside a taxicab), and then attempted to resume the conversation.

"What kind of cancer do you have?" I asked.

There was silence. Not just any silence, a dreadful silence. Had I gone too far? Had I trivialized the seriousness of his situation by reducing it to taxicab chit-chat? Or had he just blurted it out and then regretted having said it? I looked at him in the mirror. He had that same solidity, what appeared to me now as a half-dead look, and gave no sign of having heard my question.

I didn't know what to do. Should I ask him again? Probably not, I thought. I mean, what could be more of an imposition on someone than to pry into his perhaps-terminal illness? But he'd brought it up. Wasn't it possible that he simply didn't hear me? What was I going to do, ignore him? I gritted my teeth and raised the volume of my question a quarter of a notch.

"What kind of cancer do you have?" I repeated.

I watched him in the mirror, almost praying that he'd say something. But he was gone. He sat there silently, his gaze fixated on the parade of darkened buildings passing by on Northern Boulevard. Not only had my attempt at conversation been a failure, my attempt at offering him some comfort had nose-dived into an abyss. The remaining two minutes of the ride, not surprisingly, made my Top Ten List of Most Awkward Silences of All Time.

He paid with a credit card, giving me a $1.90 tip on a $13.10 fare. Other than my "thank you", no other words between us were exchanged, and he disappeared into a shadow on Steinway Street.

He never did light that cigarette.

A fare like that can haunt you, and some cabbies may conclude that it's better not to attempt to communicate with their passengers at all. I have always resisted this. That's not to say that you have to communicate with everyone. You've got to respect a person's right not to communicate, too. It's just that the interplay with passengers is the essence of this job and to let the occasional disaster shut you down is to lose a lot. So I soldiered on.

3:45 a.m., 79th and Columbus to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn
Now here was a ride that from a driver's point of view was just about perfect. For one thing, it was the final hour of the shift and what you want at this point in the night is a good, long, money ride with just enough time to make it back to the garage by 5 a.m., the shift end. And this ride was that. And for another thing, the passenger, an upbeat, intelligent, well-mannered thirty-something fellow, was as easy to talk to as you as your favorite drinking buddy, if you have such a thing.

Now, this wasn't a drama ride or a pathos ride like the ones I've been telling you about. This was simply an educational ride, quite common in a taxicab, by which you learn something about life or the world that you didn't know before. Drive a cab for a few years and these conversations accumulate into an impressive reference file, making a cabbie a walking encyclopedia with an opinion about everything.

I don't know how we got into it, but he started telling me about his wife and her job. He described her as an Armenian by birth ("How did you meet her?" "In a bar."), lovely to look at, highly organized, a go-getter, and she was now working for what he described as a "Russian oligarch".

"And what is a 'Russian oligarch'?"

He told me about what's been going on in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Industries which had been owned and controlled by the state became privatized. This opened the door for big-time entrepreneurship and the accumulation of great wealth and power by a relatively few aggressive individuals in a short period of time. It was kind of like the "robber barons" in the United States a hundred and fifty years ago. And that's what a Russian oligarch is.

My passenger's wife worked for one of these people. He'd made a fortune as an arms dealer and then legitimized his business by moving into the metal refining industry in a big way. Due to his nefarious background, he can't enter the United States because the State Department won't issue him a visa. But that doesn't stop him from doing business all over the world. His wealth is so great that he owns a private yacht, complete with a crew of five, that he has never set foot on. It's used to entertain clients.

The wife's job is to manage the finances of the yacht. She does this primarily from their apartment in Brooklyn, but she does have to travel occasionally to Europe, where the yacht is located, to personally oversee matters. And that's where she was on this particular night, somewhere in France.

As I said, there was no drama or pathos here. It was just a typical example of a taxi ride that includes a conversation between driver and passenger. As I entered the Belt Parkway and headed back to Manhattan with my off-duty light illuminated above me, I had gained not only an $11.50 tip on a $43.50 fare, but a bit more understanding of the world in which we live. Who would ever imagine that, walking down a street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, you could walk by an apartment building and behind one of the windows of that building would be a woman sitting behind a computer who was managing a yacht anchored off the coast of France which was owned by a modern-day Jay Gatsby with a Russian accent?

As is usually the case, the stopover at an island in the stream had left me better off for having been there, and happy to have made the visitation.

********

Looking for a nice little island in the stream of your own? Click here. Plenty of 'em at Pictures From A Taxi.

Television Appearance

Hear ye, hear ye, I will be appearing in a documentary program called Super Systems, which will make its first broadcast this Sunday, Dec. 11th, at 8:00 pm Eastern Time here in the U.S. It's part of a series about how certain successful "systems" work, in this case the system of taxicabs in New York City.

I was located via this blog by the production company doing the show back in September. We spent a few days taping interviews, in and out of taxicabs, about my experiences as a taxi driver and my opinions about the taxi industry. It was a nice validation and I was told I did well in the edits and am included in a sizable portion of the show. So please check it out if this sounds of interest and, I should add, if you can. There is kind of a catch here, at least at this time, which is that the show is in 3D!

Back in February Sony, I Max, and the Discovery Channel launched a new network called 3Net which is meant to be viewed on televisions that are equipped for 3D viewing. It's a thing of the future kind of thing. If you go to this website, http://www.3net.com/show/23/supersystems/category/6,
you can learn about the channel and find out how to find it in your area. Super Systems may also be able to be seen on regular tvs sometime in the future, I am told, perhaps on the Discovery Channel, but for now it's only available on 3Net. In the New York area the cable service which carries the 3Net station is Directv.

Here I am soaking in a bit of my fifteen minutes...


... I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille!

Welcome, New Inductees

It takes something really special to make it into the Traffic Jam Hall of Fame. In fact, since its inception in 2007, there has been not a single addition to its ranks. So imagine my astonishment when last week not one, but two candidates showed that they had what it takes to achieve traffic jam immortality and were immediately nominated for admission into the sanctum sanctorum of the Hall. Two in one week!

In New York City traffic jams are a way of life. Veteran New Yorkers have been known to laugh in the face of out-of-towners who think they know anything about what a traffic jam really is. You got stuck on the interstate for fifteen minutes on your way to the mall? Whaddaya kiddin' me? It took me an hour and a half to get from 31st and 2nd to 58th and 9th! And that was on a Sunday!

As common as it is, however, to be trapped in the misery of going nowhere forever, it is not the length of time of the jam up that earns even consideration for admittance into the Hall. Roadwork, an accident, bridge or tunnel delays? No, these are routine. It has to be much more than that. Indeed, it has to be something so outrageous, so unexpected, so never-seen-that-before that one considers writing a letter of recommendation to the Committee.

So I'm happy to report that my two nominees were put on the fast track and, after a late-night session, have been granted admission by the Powers That Be. I present them to you now... trumpets and drums, if you please... our newest members of the Traffic Jam Hall of Fame!

57th and 5th

I was waiting in front of the Apple Store on 5th Avene between 58th and 59th Streets at one a.m. on November 12th, hoping to get a computer geek (or anyone else for that matter) as my next passenger. In true New York style, this store is open 24/7 and has turned out to be a spot where a cabbie can find some business all night long. Sure enough, within five minutes four nerdy type fellows jumped in and asked me to take them to Grand Central Station, a three-minute ride.

I pulled out from the curb to the intersection at 58th Street where the light had just turned red and while we were waiting there I was informed by the guy sitting next to me in the front that they had ten minutes to make their train. Plenty of time, I told him, but to add a bit of tension to the ride he explained that if they didn't make this particular train the next one wouldn't be leaving the station until 6 a.m. Still, I told him, there was nothing to worry about. After all, it was one in the morning and, as we could both plainly see, 5th Avenue was empty in front of us. So relax, I said, there's never any traffic at this time of the night.

Right?

There are those who believe you must never say things like that. It's called "tempting fate". There's some kind of Force, you see - call it Fate, God, Zeus, or Google - that overhears everything we say and then, just for sport, starts fucking with us. I should have kept my mouth shut.

The words had barely left my lips when a police car with lights flashing entered the intersection a block down the avenue at 57th Street and just stopped there. This was followed by two more cruisers, lights also ablaze, who did the same. A big cop wearing those knee-high black boots of the Highway Patrol (and the Gestapo) jumped out of one of the vehicles and held his hands over his head, bringing the cars on 57th Street to a halt. A few moments later our own light on 58th turned green and we moved up to 57th where we were greeted by a second cop, also with his hands in the "stop" position.

It looked to me like some V.I.P. motorcade was about to come on through. Perhaps a prime minister from Somewhere Special or a Secretary of State or something. Government big shots who are considered security risks do get this kind of treatment in New York. But at one a.m.? Odd, but possible.

"Probably someone much more important than you or me," I said to my front seat companion with a trace of sarcasm in my voice. I understand the need for security, I guess, but it does interfere with my making a living. You wonder if it's really necessary.

"Do you think it will be long?" he asked, a bit of concern apparent in the tone of his own voice. The sure thing of making the train was appearing to be not such a sure thing anymore.

"Nah, don't worry," I replied. "I'm sure they'll be out of here in no time at all."

Well, "no time at all" becomes magnified when every minute counts. In what was becoming forever, our light at 57th turned red. The cops remained in the intersection and nothing happened. Another thirty seconds ticked by. The light turned green. The cops just stood there, looking down the street. With tension mounting, there was finally activity to our right on 57th Street. Another couple of police cruisers appeared in the intersection and made right turns onto 5th Avenue. And then, at last, we were able to see what the cause of the delay had been.

It was a tree.

Yes, the enormous tree that had been chosen to be the star of the show in Rockefeller Center this Christmas season was making its final leg of a trek from a town in Pennsylvania to its new home in Midtown, New York City. A future of being oohed and ahhed at by millions of tourists lay before it. So why not kick things off with a little traffic jam in the middle of the night on November 12th, just to get things off on the right foot?

Flanked by a couple of those cars with "oversized vehicle" warning signs attached to them, the tree made a right turn onto 5th Avenue and proceeded at five miles per hour toward Rockefeller Center at 50th Street. The cops kept us sitting there at 57th for another minute before finally clearing out of the intersection and joining their caravan a couple of blocks down the road.

What had started as a routine little ride to Grand Central Station had now entered crisis management mode. With only five minutes left to make the train, my passengers, who up to now had seemed relatively unconcerned, had become silent and tense. Visions of five hours of camping out in the station were creeping in on them. I put on my Racing Driver hat.

Zipping down to 54th Street, I made a quick decision to take a detour to Park Avenue in order to avoid further delays by the Great Tree Procession in front of us on 5th. With some extra speed and a cautious running of a red light, I got them to Grand Central with three minutes remaining on the clock. After a quick payment of the fare and a thank you, my passengers bolted out of the cab and headed for the entrance to the station, four nerds doing the hundred-yard dash with what should have been just enough time to catch the train.


Now, in my day I've weathered some of the greatest traffic jams in the history of New York City. I've been filibustered by several presidents of the United States. I've been blockaded by Fidel Castro, held hostage by Ahmadinijad. I've been rendered into collateral damage by a Mafia hit in Midtown. I've been stopped in my tracks by the camels, elephants, and zebras of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. And now I've been humbled into submission by something that's not even a member of the animal kingdom.

But it is a member of the Traffic Jam Hall of Fame.

The Entire East Side

My favorite shift of the week is the Sunday night shift. Even though it's usually quite slow after midnight, the passengers on Sundays tend to be friendlier and certainly more sober than any of the other nights of the week. And with a little luck you might get an airport ride early in the shift, say, between 5 and 7 pm - the time when there are tons of flights coming in - and that means a quick turnaround with a new fare, hopefully back to Manhattan. And that means good money. Cha-ching!

And so I was quite pleased to pick up, as my first fare of the night on Sunday, November 13th, two people who were LaGuardia bound. After putting their luggage in the trunk, we had a brief conference to reach agreement on the best route to take. Should it be the Queens-Midtown Tunnel (a $4.80 toll and all highway on the Queens side), the Triboro Bridge (longer, less chance of traffic, also a $4.80 toll, and all highway after the bridge), or the 59th Street Bridge (free, and closest to us from where we were located on 46th Street and 10th Avenue)? Since they said their flight was to leave at 7:00 and it was then 5:00 (plenty of time), the choice was obvious: the 59th Street Bridge. I made a right on 56th and we were on our way.

My passengers were a young, married couple from Sweden who, they said, were living and working in Dublin. They were both cheerful and the fellow was particularly conversational, telling me that part of the reason for their trip to New York was for a surprise reunion with his sister, who lives in California and was in New York herself for the weekend to celebrate her thirtieth birthday. His wife was pleasant, as well, although not as chatty as her husband. She struck me as the more practical of the two, showing some concern about any potential traffic problems that could lie ahead of us. I set her mind at ease by saying that they had wisely left more than enough time to get to LaGuardia, which is normally a twenty-five minute trip, but added that, of course, you never could know for sure what might happen with the traffic in New York City.

"Don't worry, though," I reassured her, while showing my age, "you'll be at LaGuardia so early you'll be playing Ms. PacMan for an hour just to pass the time."

Remember what I said about tempting fate? You would have thought from the previous night's debacle that I would have learned to keep my mouth shut.

We proceeded at a decent pace on 56th Street until we got to Lexington Avenue, two and a half "avenue blocks" from the bridge (in the New York street grid the distance between the avenues is considerably longer than the distance between the streets) and then we hit a wall. The trained eye (mine) can very quickly ascertain the degree of severity of traffic jams in the city and I knew immediately that something was amiss here. Not only was the traffic backed up all the way to the next avenue, 3rd, but it was solid, meaning it was moving forward at a pace of only three of four car lengths for each change of the light. It took us five minutes to get close enough to 3rd Avenue for me to see that the problem on our street was due to massive gridlock in the intersection - our backup on 56th was being caused by an even bigger backup on 3rd Avenue. And this translated to me instantly that there was huge - huge! - traffic on the bridge itself.

My passengers had remained calm and cheerful. Time was on their side and a five-minute delay on the crowded 56th Street wasn't enough to raise an eyebrow. But in my mind a little alarm clock was ringing. Something was wrong here - you just never see this kind of traffic at this particular place and at this particular time - but I couldn't imagine what it could be. However, I did know the 59th Street Bridge was no longer an option.

"Listen," I announced, "Something's really bad on the bridge. I'm gonna take the Midtown Tunnel. I know it's $4.80 more for the toll, but it's the best thing to do with this kind of traffic. God knows how long we might be sitting in it."

They were fine with it. So when it was finally my turn to zigzag around the cars jamming up the intersection, I went straight on 56th toward 2nd Avenue instead of making the left onto 3rd, which had been my original intention. 56th was relatively clear on that block, and that was a good thing, but when we reached 2nd Avenue I saw that our traffic problems were not only behind us, but ahead of us as well: 2nd Avenue, which should have been free-flowing, was also a solid wall of barely moving vehicles.

So now we were stuck in whatever it was. The entrance to the Midtown Tunnel is at 2nd Avenue and 36th Street, exactly one mile from where we were. To get to the third possible route, the Triboro Bridge, would mean circling back in the direction of the 59th Street Bridge traffic. I decided our best bet was to just stick with 2nd Avenue, even though it was a river of brake lights as far as the eye could see.

We plunged into it.

Well, the conversation quickly changed from how a couple of Swedes wound up in Dublin to, gee, do you think we're going to make our plane? I told them they probably had enough time to walk to LaGuardia and still make the plane but secretly, since I had no idea what was causing this mess, I was wondering the same thing. For the next ten minutes we moved so slowly on 2nd Avenue - not even one block for each change of the light - that the possibility of missing the flight was becoming less and less remote.

More than anything, though, I was dying of curiosity to know what was causing the problem. It had to be something huge. An accident? No, couldn't be, accidents only tie up traffic for just a few blocks. A fire? No, fires cause only small delays and detours, never anything like this. I decided it had to be a disaster - something like a plane crash, a building collapse, or a terrorist attack. Yeah, it had to be on that order of magnitude. I turned the radio on to the news station and within a couple of minutes I had my answer...

...the Upper Level of the 59th Street Bridge was closed in both directions.

Yes, it immediately fit. That would do it. The 59th Street Bridge is the busiest passageway in New York City. It takes, by far, more vehicular traffic than any other bridge or tunnel. Close down half of it and you have an automatic traffic disaster. It explained both slowdowns: the gridlock on 3rd Avenue was from cars trying to get onto the bridge; the inch-by-inch on 2nd Avenue were the cars doing what we were trying to do - get away from the bridge and get to the Midtown Tunnel instead.

So the mystery was solved, except for one thing: why? Why in the world would they do such a thing? It had to be an incident of cataclysmic proportions.

Now I will tell you why it happened, but before I do, let me remind you that it is not merely the size of the traffic nightmare that earns one consideration for entrance into the Hall. It has to be something special, something that makes it a champion. It's like professional athletes. Sure, you have to be damned good to even make it to the pros, but we don't place laurels on the heads of the average players. We bestow immortality only on those who have proven to be the best of the best. And so it is with the Traffic Jam Hall of Fame.

So without further ado, here it is. Here is why the entire East Side of Manhattan was brought to a standstill for the entire afternoon (as I later found out): they were filming a scene from the latest Batman movie!

Yes, a movie company paid, I assume, a large amount of money to get permission from certain city officials who, in the "let them eat cake" style of our current mayor, chose to close down our most traveled bridge for several hours in the middle of the day. How many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people suffered for this? How many lost an hour out of their day? How many missed the first act of the Broadway show they were trying to get to? How many missed their train? How many missed their plane?

Fortunately my own passengers did make it to LaGuardia before their flight left without them. But not before it took them forty-five minutes to travel one mile on 2nd Avenue in a taxicab which cost them an extra $17 in waiting time and another $4.80 for a toll they shouldn't have had to pay.

As outraged as I am about this latest concession to materialism (our bridges are now for lease), it would be unfair to take it out on the jam itself. Just as certain athletes who were known for being antisocial sons of bitches off the field are nevertheless honored for their achievements on the field, proper acknowledgement must not be denied when it has been earned, regardless of how the damned thing was brought into the world.

And so, in the spirit of fair play, I now open wide the portals to our newest member. Welcome, The Batman Jam, to the Traffic Jam Hall of Fame!

********

And I welcome you to click here for Pictures From A Taxi.

Spider Man

The guy got in at three a.m. wearing a Wo Hop t-shirt. This was interesting because who would have thought that Wo Hop, my favorite all-night Chinese joint on Mott Street, would ever be the kind of place to have a logo on an article of clothing? And what kind of person would boastfully display it on his chest, as if to say, "You want dumplings? My Wo Hop dumplings will scrub the floor with your stinkin' Golden Monkey dumplings. You got that, lucky boy?"

So it had to be properly acknowledged.

"A Wo Hop t-shirt! Wow, you don't see many of those!" I exclaimed before he could tell me he wanted to go to Astoria.

"Yeah, man, Wo Hop rules," he replied with a happy-face smile and a certain half-here, half-there demeanor that told me immediately that he was a jolly drunk who was ready to expound. This would be a fun ride.

"I love that place," I continued. "For one thing, its location. You drive down Mott and there's that dog-leg to the left and late at night the street is as slippery as ice from the fucking garbage truck spillover and it looks kind of creepy like a scene from a Bogart movie at four in the morning, it's so dark and deserted, but look, wow, Wo Hop is open."

The guy was right on it. "Yeah," he joined in, "you do down those stairs and there'll be, like, five Asian guys sitting there looking at you like what the hell are you doin' here?"

"The Chinese mafia."

"No doubt! No doubt, and they keep lookin' at you like you're a cop and before you can sit down the tea kettle arrives and in like thirty seconds you've got your wonton and a minute later there are the egg rolls and the duck sauce."

"And the mustard sauce."

"Yeah, and the mustard, man, and then a minute after that the dumplings show up and you're in piggy heaven, man!"

"You like 'em fried or steamed?"

"What?"

"The dumplings - fried or steamed?"

"Oh, yeah, fried, definitely, mucho on the soy."

"Mmm, so good!"

Pavlov-like, I could feel my saliva glands kicking in. Damn, those dumplings are good and, as I steered the cab onto the Upper Level of the 59th Street Bridge, I started thinking maybe I should shoot down to Chinatown after I dropped the guy off. There are times when it's best to just give in to the dumpling urge. Mucho on the soy.

"Hey," I said to my passenger as a thought came to me, "have you ever ordered anything particularly freaky at Wo Hop? Don't they have some really weird stuff on the menu?"

"You mean like octopus or something?"

"Yeah."

He thought about it for a moment and smiled. "Oh, yeah, snails."

"Snails?"

"Yeah, snails in black bean sauce."

I laughed. "Oh my God," I said, "you ate a snail?"

"Shit, yeah, I ate a bunch of them," he replied, still smiling.

"Ewww, I don't think I could eat that," I said. "Isn't a snail an insect?"

"No, no, a snail's like a mollusk or something. It's got a shell, like a clam. You eat clams, don't you?"

"Uh, yeah." The guy had a point. "How was it?"

"Oh, it was delicious, man. You stir it up with the rice. Really good, actually."

I had to admit that, since it wasn't an insect, I could see myself trying it someday. I draw a hard line in the sand when it comes to eating insects, though. I wouldn't get very far on The Fear Factor.

"What was the weirdest thing you ever ate?" I inquired. It was a logical question to ask at this point in the conversation.

A goofy smile came over his face. "I ate a tarantula once," he said.

I was stunned for a moment as my mind's computer tried to process this information. Did he just say "tarantula"? Yes, he did. Isn't "tarantula" a huge, hairy spider? Yes, it is. There isn't some chocolate bar or energy drink called "Tarantula", is there? No, there is not. So what he's saying is that he ate - that is, he put into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed - a huge, hairy spider? Uh, yes, that's what he's saying.

I looked at him again in the mirror. The goofy smile was still there.

"You ate a tarantula!!!???" I all but screamed. "Are you serious?"

"Uh huh," he confirmed, with a just perceptible trace of pride in his voice.

"Oh my God! How did that happen?"

"I was in Thailand and these guys I was with, we went into this restaurant and it became like a dare thing. So one guy says, 'I'll eat it if you will', then another guy says, 'I'll eat it if you will', and it was like I wanted to show them that I was as crazy as they were."

"So you ate it."

"Yeah."

"Did they cook it?"

"Yeah, they fried it in some sauce."

"Isn't a tarantula poisonous? What about the fangs?"

"Yeah, they took that shit out before they cooked it."

"You hope!"

"Right!" he said with a dumbass-me laugh.

"So how did it taste? Don't tell me it tasted like chicken."

"Actually, it did taste like chicken."

"That's funny," I replied, Groucho Marx style, "cause I once ate a chicken that tasted just like a tarantula."

The joke went whizzing by his head and on into outer space without being noticed. After couple more minutes of tarantula talk, we arrived at his apartment house on 30th Avenue. He paid me the $12.30 fare and threw in a $2.70 tip - not bad for an insect-eater - and stepped out of the cab.

"I once ate a centipede, too," he called back as he started to walk off toward his building.

"Was that in Thailand as well?"

"No, that was in Mexico."

So the guy had the distinction of having eaten disgusting, multi-legged creatures on two different continents. He disappeared into his place and was gone and I turned the cab back toward Midtown, the urge to go to Chinatown having somehow suddenly left me.

The thought came to me back on the 59th Street Bridge that had this guy told me all this and had not been just a passenger in my cab but instead was, say, a friend or a coworker, I would always think of him, before I would think of anything else he might have done in his life, as the guy who had eaten a tarantula. Let's say he had once done something great, like spending two years of his life in the Peace Corps. I would think of him as the Peace Corps volunteer who had once eaten a tarantula. Or if he had once rushed into a burning building to save someone's life, he would be the guy who had rushed into a burning building who had once eaten a tarantula.

Sometimes it's just better not to know.

********

But then again sometimes it is better to know. Like knowing that when you click here you'll suddenly find yourself at Pictures From A Taxi. And no one will try to talk you into eating a bug.

The Caveman Lullaby

Anyone who lives in a big city is familiar with the Caveman Lullaby. It's that melody that can be heard when a female, or a group of them - always unaccompanied by a male - walk by a neo-Neanderthal, or a group of them, on the street.

"Eww-eey, eww-eyy, eww-eyy!" they chime.

"Momma!" they groan in utmost pain.

"Baby, baby, baby!" they squeal, with visions of ecstatic copulation reeling them back to the glory days of Homo erectus.

Painting with the broadest of strokes, let me say, there are only two kinds of men in this world: a) those who would engage in this kind of behavior, even once, and b) those who would never so much as consider doing such a thing. I, of course, belong to the latter category and hold in justifiable disdain all the cavemen with whom I have the misfortune of sharing my gender. Unfortunately, as a taxi driver, I am occasionally forced to render my services to these morons and, worse, to overhear their pathetic conversations.

I had just such a ride recently.

Four of them piled into my cab on a Friday night around 10:30 - three in the back and one up front with me - and told me to drive them to a certain club on East 21st Street. This turned out to be one of those four-passenger rides in which you wind up feeling like you're the Invisible Man. They just carry on with whatever they were talking about exactly as if you weren't there. It's one thing if they're all in the back and there's at least a semblance of you're-over-there-and-I'm-over-here. But with one of them up front, you feel like you've been hijacked and forced to join the gang, even if they see you as nothing more than a temporary robot-guy. The best thing to do is to just grit your teeth and bear it. I pulled out from the curb and the endurance began.

The topic of conversation had moved from which parties they'd been to lately, to how fucked-up some guy named Schmizel was, to who supposedly got laid last week, when we pulled up next to another taxi at a red light. Sitting in the back seat of the cab was a blond, a party girl type, who was busy texting. The guy in the back on the left was directly across from her and rolled down his window.

"Hey, baby," he brayed.

She looked over at him.

There was a brief pause of anticipation on her part, as if to say, "Yeah?"

"Hey, baby," the guy regurgitated.

She immediately turned back to her smartphone as if the annoyance had never taken place.

I thought this rejection would be pounced upon by his buddies, but there was nothing. It was as if this was just part of the expected flow of the evening: you stop at red lights and grunt at whichever female happens to be beside you in the next car, your advance is denied, and you move on. Nothing personal, just business.

The topic of conversation then turned to a girl named Lorraine, who apparently was well known to all of them.

"You did Lorraine?" a voice in the back asked.

"Fuckin' uh-huh!" the guy sitting next to me said enthusiastically.

"Whoa, when ja do her, dude?"

"At Lenny's party, like, what, three weeks ago?"

"Oh, Lenny's party, shit, yeah, there was some crazy shit at that party! I remember that!"

There was some talk about how crazy the shit had actually been at Lenny's party, but the subject soon turned back to Lorraine. The information shared included:

a) what a super hot fuckin' slut she was;

b) how her left tit was bigger than her right tit, or maybe it was the other way around;

c) the vast extent of her bush and how the guy sitting up front with me needed a weed whacker to get through it;

d) the surprising discovery of some dried-up little pieces of fecal matter when he finally was able to make his way down there.

As the three guys in the back roared in laughter at this foray into the realm of gross-you-out-with-something-you-never-thought-of-before-dude, we arrived at our destination on East 21st. Keeping in harmony with the tone of the evening, they each cried out, "You pay!" at the guy sitting next to me, sticking him with the fare, as they hurriedly filed out onto the street.

"Motherfuckers!" the guy in the front yelled back, realizing too late that the last person leaving the taxi is the one who has to pay. It's an urban form of musical chairs.

"Motherfuckers," he then said in my direction, the first communication that was even slightly meant to be received by me. I felt honored.

"Motherfuckers," I agreed.

He paid me the fare, promising some sort of vengeance to be wreaked upon his buddies in the near future, and exited the premises. Noting the details of the ride on my trip sheet, I turned off the meter, looked up, and noticed an elderly gentleman hailing me a short distance down the street. I started to move in his direction, but before I could go ten feet I was surprised to see the four guys who'd just been my passengers coming back toward me with an attractive brunette in tow. They barreled right past the elderly gentleman, opened the door of the cab, and with some exaggerated and uncalled-for chivalry presented her with this handsome prize, my taxicab. As it was tough to find an available cab at this particular time, she showed her gratitude by giving them a smile and a thank you in return.

My first instinct was to tell the brunette sorry, but the elderly gentleman had already hailed me, but then I thought better of it. The four merry cavemen had just paid me and given me a decent tip, so it would have been perceived as a dis on my part to do so, even though their "chivalry" was nothing more than Neanderthal dressed in lambswool. And besides, it wasn't the brunette's fault. She probably hadn't even noticed the elderly gentleman. I shrugged my shoulders and pulled out from the curb. Horatio and Washington was her destination, in the West Village.

Well, she turned out to be quite a nice person and a ready conversationalist. After a couple of minutes of benign chit-chat, I turned the subject to what was really on my mind.

"Those guys who got this cab for you..."

"Yeah?"

"...what did you think of them?"

"Seemed like nice guys. I'd been trying to get a cab for ten minutes, so they really helped me out back there."

"Have you ever walked by some guys on the street and had them start whistling and making kissing sounds at you?"

"Sure... God, I hate that. It's so degrading."

"Well, those guys were those guys."

"They were? How do you know?"

I gave her a censored version of their conversation about Lorraine and went on to tell her about the "hey, baby" guy in the back seat.

"Men are such pigs," she said, smiling.

It was turning out to be one of those great rides in which a female passenger is so free and open in talking to her driver about relationships between the sexes that you'd think the cabbie was a trusted female friend and not a guy she'd met five minutes ago who was just driving her someplace. I take it as a feather in my cap when I am accorded this honor. It's right out of Taxicab Confessions.

"What amazes me," I said, "is that guys who do this haven't noticed that it never works."

"Never works!" she echoed, laughing.

"It's true," I continued, "never once in the history of Men and Women has a guy gone into that "hey, baby" routine and gotten even a smile, much less gotten laid. It's automatic rejection."

"Automatic!" she agreed. "Why can't they ever learn this?"

When she departed the taxi at Horatio and Washington, she left me with not only an above-average tip, but an afterglow. I drove around for the next fifteen minutes with a smile I just couldn't get off my face from thinking about how funny and satisfying my last two fares had been. "Never once in the history of Men and Women" I replayed in my mind. How hysterical was that?...

And then it hit me.

"Oh my God!" I cried out loud as a certain almost-forgotten incident knocked on the door of my consciousness.

"Oh my God!"

On a Saturday night many years ago, sometime back in the '80s, a not unattractive girl, a twenty-something, got into my cab. She was particularly friendly, full of smiles and chatter, and was on her way so some disco (as clubs were still called in those days) on the West Side. After a few minutes of conversation she surprised me - no, hell, she shocked me - by suddenly asking if I wanted to be her date and come into the disco with her. This startled me because, for one thing, I have never been in the Brad Pitt category of boy-toy taxi driver. I am the Woody Allen knockoff, so this kind of proposition never happens to me. And for another thing, I was married at the time, and unless you happen to have been Nastasia Kinski, my fantasy sexpot in those days, I was not to be so easily swayed into tiptoeing around on my marriage vows.

So I was in the process of saying gee, thanks, that's so sweet of you, but I've gotta work, you know, so no thanks, when an incredible thing happened. A car with four guys in it pulled up next to us at a red light. The guy closest to my passenger rolled down his window.

"Hey, baby," he blurted out at her.

The Rules of Sexual Etiquette clearly state that she is required to ignore the barbarian, but that's not what she did. Instead, she smiled back at him.

"Hey, how ya doin'?" she replied.

That was all it took. In less than ten seconds she had shoved some money in my hand, opened her door, and gotten into the car with the four guys. Off they drove with the girl and disappeared into the kaleidoscope of traffic on the West Side, leaving me stupefied and alone in my empty cab. The incident was so contrary to anything I'd ever seen before that it became one of those mile markers on the highway of life that every once in a while jumps out at you in memory.

"How in the hell could that have ever happened?" you ask yourself, never expecting to receive an answer. Well, only now, twenty-five years later, do I finally have an explanation for the phenomenon.

It's like this. There are forces in the physical universe that we know exist, but we cannot see them. Magnetism, for example. Or microwaves. Or even the wind, for that matter. And then there are forces that we suspect must exist, but we don't really know what they are. Like bird migration. How do those birds know how to fly in formation and go to some exact location every year that's five hundred miles away? How do some animals seem to know a couple of days in advance that an earthquake is coming?

In a similar way - I'm sure of it now - there is a force at work that affects only the neo-Neanderthal, and not the rest of the men on the planet. You see, whenever a "hey, baby" is met with a "hey, how ya doin'?", even if it's once every twenty-five years, it sets off a carrier wave that only the caveman can perceive. He knows, on the deepest instinctual level, that she's out there somewhere. It's just a matter of finding her.

So what this means is that my supposition - "it never works!" - turns out to be not true. Actually, every once in a rare while it does work, as we have seen with that girl in my cab. And that's what keeps the whole damn thing going.

So there's no fighting it, the Caveman Lullaby is here to stay. In fact, I'm thinking maybe even I, the Mister Well-Mannered, Intellectual Taxi Guy, should give it a try. I mean, it's a numbers game, lots of people read this blog, and, who knows, the "hey, how ya doin'?" female could be reading this post at this very moment.

I'm gonna roll my window down right now.

Here goes.

Hey, baby...

********

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Ten Years Later

Apparently time flies not only when you're having fun and when you're having rum, but also when you're thinking back to That Day. Can it really be ten years? I'm afraid it can because I have the proof of it - a teenager got in my cab recently, somehow the subject of 9/11 came up, and he said, "Well, I was only six years old then so I don't really remember it."

Oh my God. And I thought I was getting old when some kid said he didn't know that Paul McCartney was once in the Beatles.

Well, time marches on, but if anyone ever doubted that 9/11 was the seminal event of our lifetimes, just notice the extent to which it is not being forgotten. There are elements about the tragedy that fiercely demand that we hold onto it, that we do not let it go, that we sift out from the figurative ruins what the lessons of the event have become and use those lessons to improve conditions however we can.

On an emotional level, I know it is embedded in my psyche. I still get choked up in the middle of a sentence when a tourist asks me where I was on that day. I can still privately break out in tears when certain memories are evoked. Not that I dwell on it or feel stuck in it. But it's always there.

On an intellectual level, I take this with me, as grim as it is - that there exist, and I believe have always existed, certain beings on this planet who will use whatever pretext they can get their hands on to do harm to other people. It's not good enough to just come out and say, "What really turns me on is maiming and killing other people". You've got to have a cause if you want to do it in a really big way. Hitler and those who avidly followed him were stellar examples, as are the current crop.

So what can we do? For me, the lessons of 9/11 are threefold. First, you've got to find a cause of your own. Find an activity that is truly beneficial to mankind and do what you can to contribute to it. Second, speak out. Do not be afraid to make your opinions known. Write letters to the editor. Vote. Start a blog. Thoughts, when expressed, are like ripples in a pond. Never underestimate the effects of your ripples. And third...

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11 I visited Ground Zero late at night to pay my respects. Each year a certain area on Church Street was set aside for expressions of sympathy and support. I was drawn to one in particular, a large board with about fifty different messages on it which had been created by elementary school students in California. One of these messages was profound in its simplicity and affected me deeply.

"Be nice to people," was all it said.

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To read other posts I've written about 9/11, please click on the labels below.

The Agony And The Idiocy

Agony: Great pain, suffering, or anguish, of mind or body (Macmillan Dictionary for Students).

In the lexicon of the world-weary, "agony" turns out to be a big word, indeed. As years go by it becomes increasingly understood that efforts to reach even the most minor of goals will inevitably ripen into fiasco and be attended to along the way with spoonfuls, nay, bucketfuls of agony. Yet still we soldier on, what's left of our optimism buoyed up by the scratch-off ticket that puts an unexpected five bucks in our pockets. Life ain't so bad after all. Until the next thing comes along.

Like this...

Four in the morning is cut-off time at the bars in New York City which creates, potentially, yet another source of revenue for the cab driver. The late-night drinkers - uh, "drunks" - emerge from their lairs, hands in the air, waving at anything yellow that might get them home. As troublesome as they may be, drunks are nevertheless a welcome sight for the cabbie. The shift ends at five, so if you can get another ride or two in at the end, it feels like free money.

That's what I was thinking as I was driving through Chelsea at that hour a few Thursdays ago in search of that last good ride. There's a popular gay bar called "G" on 19th between 7th and 8th, so I thought I'd give the place a look before heading over toward my usual cruising routes. Sure enough, two guys, twentyish, emerged from the place and hailed me. (Driving a cab in New York is like being a fisherman. You have to know where they're biting at any time. It's a skill.) Their destination was the Upper East Side, so our route was going to be a straight run up 8th Avenue with a crossover through Central Park on the 65th Street transverse.

We were on our way.

It was a non-conversational ride, at least between me and them, which was fine with me as I'd been driving for eleven hours straight and feeling it. A joie de vivre at this hour I am not. They just sat there in the back, talking to each other a bit and not moving around too much, and I was riding the wave up 8th. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Now, when I say "riding the wave" I am referring to the synchronization of the traffic lights on the one-way avenues of Manhattan. If you drive at a speed of about twenty-seven miles per hour, theoretically you will never hit a red light if there aren't many other cars or obstructions on the avenue. And, if you're at the "front" of the wave, the red light in front of you will turn green just as you approach it.

Riding the wave requires a high level of driving ability, especially when you're trying to do it safely. And that means never - never! - running a red light. Just before entering each intersection, the masterful driver must first ascertain that the other guy's light on the intersecting cross street is already red or at least yellow. Then he must adjust the speed of his own vehicle so it will enter the intersection at the nanosecond his light turns green. But before actually doing that he must first turn his vision for just a split second toward the direction of traffic on the intersecting street to make sure no other vehicle is about to run his own red light and crash into him. Only then does he actually enter the intersection. This is all done on an automatic basis, without thinking.

Master cabbies use this technique when in competition with other drivers for business. It's basically a horse race to hold "position" on the avenue. Should there be a passenger somewhere up ahead, you want to be the first to get to him. Since I already had passengers in my cab, however, I was not riding the very front of the wave. I was close to the front, just out of habit, about three seconds off the pace of the lights, but I was not in competitive mode. Why drive like a racing car driver when you're not in a race? Three seconds is a ton of time in this situation.

Then, just as we were approaching 48th Street, it happened.

You can ride the wave for ten years, using the skillfully safe technique as I've described it, and never once find yourself in a situation in which you actually had needed to be so cautious when coming toward an intersection. And then - pow! - it suddenly pays off in the form of not having what would have been a ghastly accident.

Out of nowhere, coming from my left on 48th Street, was a car racing through at about forty miles per hour. Driven by a drunk or a psycho (choose one), this thing was not even close to going through a green light. His signal had been red for about four seconds, yet there he was in highway mode, a two-ton rocket with no intention of checking what was coming toward him on 8th Avenue, no intention of slowing down, and no intention of stopping. It was a death charge, the thing you most fear encountering as a driver, of the suicidal or homicidal variety (choose one).

It was that quick, automatic glance to my left that saved me. "Jesus!" I screamed, as I simultaneously slammed on the brakes and brought the cab to a very abrupt stop. The fuckhead behind the wheel of the oncoming car, whoever it was - I didn't have time to notice age or gender - just kept going without braking, missing me by about twenty-four inches, and miraculously making it across 8th Avenue without crashing into any of the other oncoming vehicles who all - very, very fortunately - were also about three seconds behind the changing of the light.

"Jesus!", I screamed again, "unbelievable!"

I watched the car continue speeding down 48th Street for a moment until it was out of sight, half expecting to next see a police car in pursuit, but there was nothing. Then, as I began to recover from the shock of the close call, I cautiously stepped on the gas again and started moving forward on 8th Avenue. Combined emotions of disgust and relief rippled throughout my psyche. I was pissed. It felt like I'd been assaulted, actually, and I began wishing for some kind of retribution against the driver. I didn't like sharing the road or even the world, come to think of it, with maniacs like this. I imagined what the person would have said if he'd crashed into someone, killing or maiming them. "My light was green!" he would have said. It was disgusting.

I decided to put my rage aside and get back to work. Onward to the Upper East Side.

Now let me tell you something. All of the above - this near-death experience - this wasn't "agony". No. In the world of the taxi driver, this was merely short-lived annoyance, something, outrageous as it was, that would be forgotten about in five minutes because, after all, there had been no collision.

The Agony was about to begin.

A voice came up from the back seat. "Stop over here," the voice said. Puzzled, I nevertheless complied, pulling the cab over to the curb on the left side of 8th Avenue.

"What's the matter?" I asked. "Are you okay?"

I received no answer. Instead, the back door opened and my passengers got out. Then they started to walk away without paying me.

"What's the matter?" I repeated. "Where are you going?"

"We're taking another cab," one of them said as he stopped and looked behind us on the avenue to see what was coming.

I was startled.

"What?"

No response.

"Why?"

Again, no response, but I already knew why. These guys had no idea why I'd braked so hard. All they knew was that they'd been jolted. So I tried to explain.

"Didn't you see what happened? Some lunatic ran the red light! If I hadn't braked so hard we would have crashed into him!"

"I hit my head," one of them said.

"You did? Are you okay? Do you want me to take you to a hospital?"

No response. Again they started to walk away.

"Wait a minute," I said, opening my door and stepping out onto the pavement. "Hey, look, I'm sorry you hit your head. But if I hadn't braked like that we'd have been in a big accident."

"We're taking another cab," the guy who said he hit his head said, the implications being that a) he thought I was full of shit, and b) I was a lousy driver.

I felt like I was being slapped in the face. Their reactions were all wrong. The right response would have been to express some understanding of what I was telling them. It would have been to make some kind of comment about how badly the guy had been been hurt if, in fact, he'd been hurt at all. Instead they were trying to walk away indignantly as if they'd been assaulted by me. It was all wrong and I wasn't buying it.

"Are you kidding?" I called out, the anger now showing in my voice, "didn't you hear what I said? We would have crashed into that guy if I hadn't braked so hard! You should be thanking me!"

Once again they ignored what I was saying and then turned and started walking away from me across 8th Avenue. "Where are you going?" I yelled as I followed them into the middle of the street. "There's seven dollars on the meter. You can't just walk away without paying me!"

"Don't you touch me," the guy who said he hit his head said.

Allow me to step away from the action for a moment to introduce another term which has become a favorite of mine...

Theater of the absurd: twentieth century dramatic movement based on a belief in the irrationality of man and the absurdity of life. Theater of the absurd uses incongruous or meaningless dialogue and unconventional plot structure and characterization to express a feeling of alienation and futility. (Macmillan Dictionary for Students)

Yes, like an actor interrupting his Hamlet soliloquy to suddenly start strutting around on the stage clucking like a chicken, the scene on the street had taken a sharp turn, at least for me, into the realm of the absurd. You drive a cab on the Wild West streets of New York City for thirty years, perfecting your driving technique to the point of being virtually accident-proof, and then, even though you'd been on the shift for eleven hours, your reaction time is still so fast that you are able to rescue yourself and your passengers from what certainly would have been a gruesome, perhaps even fatal, collision. And the reward for your competence? You are treated as if you were the scum on the inside of a toilet bowl. Plus you are being ripped off for the fare.

It was theater of the absurd.

And I was livid.

"I'm not gonna touch you," I screamed, "I just want to get paid for what's on the meter!"

They kept walking.

"Okay, let's get a cop," I said, not really knowing what to say.

The guy who said he'd hit his head stopped and turned. "If you get a cop, I guess I'll have to tell him what happened," he said, the implication being that I would be accused of some kind of criminal behavior.

At this I balked. I had to suddenly consider whether it would be worth my while to pursue justice over this transgression on my dignity. As I was trying to decide, they hailed an empty taxi coming up the avenue. As the cab stopped and they were about to step into it, something within me prompted me to add one final touch to the absurdity of the scene, just to put a cherry on it.

A little Idiocy, s'il vous plait...

"I saved your lives!" I screamed.

No response.

"I saved your lives!" I screamed again.

The door of the cab closed and it started moving up 8th Avenue.

"I saved your lives!" I screamed a third time, adding "You fucking idiots!" to the sentiment, even though by now they were out of earshot.

I returned to my cab with an internal volcano ready to explode. It was bad, and I knew this incident was going to be hanging around in my universe for quite a while. How pathetic had I become, standing on an avenue at four in the morning, trying to get drunk morons to understand that I'd just saved their lives? What I needed was a therapist, and she appeared five minutes later in the form of my next passenger, a considerate and caring woman who was kind enough to listen to my tale of woe as I drove her up to Harlem. God bless that lady, now I no longer feel a need to carry a machete around with me in the cab.

Nevertheless, when I got back to the garage half an hour later to end the shift, I was still reeling. All I wanted to do was take out a cigarette, stand by myself in a dark corner somewhere, and sneer.

And I don't smoke.

********

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Celebrity Look-Alikes

Has anyone ever told you that you look like a certain celebrity?

Over many years of taxi-driving, I have found this question popping up from time to time between myself and various passengers. It, like the question posed in my last post - "Have you ever met or known of anyone with the same first and last name as your own?" - is a sure-fire conversation spark plug. Really, it never fails to get a response. By actual survey, I've found that the majority of people say "yes" to that question when asked. And then they'll tell me which celebrity it is and I'll usually see a vague resemblance. ("Ah, yes, you both have two eyes and a nose!")

But sometimes the passenger really is a celebrity look-alike. Many years ago (before he died) I had a man in my cab who was a dead ringer for Henry Fonda. This fellow looked so much like Henry Fonda that I thought he was Henry Fonda.

"Uh, are you Henry Fonda?" I asked, figuring the straightforward was the best approach.

"Nope," he said with a smile, "just look like him."

I still wasn't sure. Maybe this was the real Henry Fonda's way of avoiding annoying people. Only after a few more back and forths was I able to discern that, indeed, my passenger was not Henry Fonda. Then he told me a story about a time he'd played in a charity golf tournament in which Henry Fonda himself was a participant. With great pleasure in the recollection, he remembered the reactions of all the people who saw him there and had no questions in their minds that he was the actual item. What an opportunity for the accidental wannabe.

Another time I had a young man in my cab who told me he made his living as Michael J. Fox's body double. Seeing him close-up, you would not have mistaken him for Michael J. Fox. The face was similar, but not convincingly so. However, his height, weight, bone structure, hairline, and hair color were identical. His job was to stand in for the star when only long-distance shots were on the schedule. This enabled the real Michael J. Fox to not have to show up on the set that day so he could do other things. What a gig!

It can also happen that the person you thought bore a resemblance to a certain celebrity turns out to actually be that celebrity! One night I picked up a man coming out of a bar on the Upper West Side who was wearing a skullcap that covered most of his head. He told me he wanted to go to a building on Central Park West, just a few blocks away, and asked if I could wait for him for a few minutes while he went inside, explaining that it was his daughter's birthday and he wanted to drop off a present.

Not a problem. He made his delivery and, upon returning to the back seat, took off his hat. Suddenly his appearance caught my attention.

"Say, do people ever tell you that you look like James Taylor?" I asked.

"Yeah, it happens all the time," he replied, "...I am James Taylor."

I looked at him more closely in the mirror. Goddamn, it was James Taylor!

"Oh. Hi, J.T.," I said.

And then I drove him back to the bar.

It is not always me who brings up this subject of celebrity look-alikes. I have often been told by passengers on their own origination that they think I look like such and such a famous person. Going back to the late '70s, when I started driving, and throughout the '80s, I was frequently told that I bore a resemblance to three celebrities in particular: Dick Cavett (an American talk-show host who peaked in popularity in the '70s); Chevy Chase (the comic actor); and Richard Dreyfuss (the movie star). Of the three, the only one I myself could see a resemblance to was Chevy Chase, particularly from certain angles. In fact, a couple of times people on the street approached me thinking I was Chevy Chase, which gave me a little vicarious thrill. However, as years went by and the aging process affected Chevy and me differently, the similarities kind of mutated and disappeared. Now I have to settle for the occasional half-blind passenger telling me I look like Dustin Hoffman or Woody Allen, neither of whom I look anything like, at all.

Now, to jump back to Karma Versus Coincidence again, what are the odds of this happening? Of the three celebrities I just mentioned whom I'd often been told that I resemble, two them - Dick Cavett and Richard Dreyfuss - eventually became passengers in my cab. What are the odds against that? A million to one? A hundred million zillion to one? But it did happen. And in both cases it gave me an opportunity which I think anyone who's ever been told that they look like a celebrity would love to have: the chance to ask the celebrity what he thinks.

Dick Cavett was first, in the autumn of 1980. He and his wife, Carrie Nye, hailed me as they emerged from a rear entrance to Lincoln Center on Amsterdam Avenue, and jumped in. I recognized him immediately and greeted him with a smile.

"Dick Cavett," I said cheerfully, "hi!"

I've had over a hundred celebrities in my cab over the years, most of them more famous than Dick Cavett, but his response to my greeting put him in a special celebrity category that is his alone: "Snob".

"79th and Park," he replied.

No return of my greeting, no show of being glad to be recognized, no smile, no "hello". Just "79th and Park". No "please", either.

Ouch.

Well, the nuance of his response was clear to even the oft-obtuse me. He was not allowing for the temporary equality of stature between taxi driver and passenger which - it may surprise you - is usually the case with very famous and influential people. (Read my Robin Williams story, for an example.) Instead, he had erected a little wall which said, "I'm on this side, you're on that side. Stay where you are."

Having been put in my place, I drove toward his destination without any attempt at conversation. I was heading for the Central Park transverse at 81st Street when a request came forth from the back seat to make a stop at a building on 83rd and Central Park West and wait there for a minute or two.

Sure.

I navigated the route and pulled up to the apartment house there in two minutes' time. Dick Cavett got out and scurried off into the building, leaving his wife behind with me. Rather than sit there in an uncomfortable silence, I attempted some small talk with her and found her to be a pleasant and conversational person. Perhaps that loosened me up a bit, as when her husband returned to the cab a couple of minutes later, I felt comfortable enough to pose the question to him that had been on my mind all the while.

"Mister Cavett," I said (he is the only celebrity I've ever felt that I needed to address as "mister"), "I have been told by people from time to time that they think I look like you. Do people ever tell you that they think you look like me?"

To his credit, Dick Cavett (who made his living as a quick-thinking wit) was right on it. He looked over at my name on my hack license and said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I was having lunch with Greta Garbo just the other day and she mentioned to me that I look like that taxi driver, Eugene Salomon."

This was very funny because, in case you didn't know about Greta Garbo, she was a big movie star in the '30s who quit the movie business, retired to New York City, and never gave an interview again in her life. So it was a talk-show host's ultimate wet dream to ever be able to have a meeting with her, as she was so completely unobtainable.

I never did get Dick Cavett's opinion as to whether or not he thought I looked like him, but by this time it didn't matter to me. I was happy enough just to get any reaction at all, so I left it at that.

Richard Dreyfuss, on the other hand, was a piece of cake. As is usually the case with big-name celebrities, he was friendly, courteous, and very easy to talk to. I picked him up in the Theater District, where he was doing a Broadway show, and drove him to the Upper West Side where, he said, he was going to go shopping for a new watch. We chatted it up all the way to his destination on Columbus Avenue and then, just as he was about to get out, I hit him with my big question.
Turning around in my seat so he could easily see my face, I said this:

"I've often been told by passengers that they think I look like you. Do you think I look like you?"
He studied me carefully for a few moments before rendering judgement. I turned a bit from side to side and changed the expression on my face to give him more to work with, the tension mounting. Finally, he spoke.

"Hmmm..." he said, "no... but you've got a Richard Dreyfuss attitude."

And I've been a fan ever since!

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