Book-in-Progress Excerpt: A Bizarre Drop-In

In my very first post here, back in mid-August, I mentioned the planned rewriting of my book-in-progress about my experiences as a yellow-cab driver in the rough-and-tumble 1980s.  As time's allowed, I've gotten into the third draft of that project, and now I'm about a fifth of the way in. It's been tough work, and I'm giving myself a few weeks away from it, a kind of rest-and-recuperation period to get my brain recharged.

To keep Return Cabbie moving in the interim, I thought I'd post an excerpt from my rewrite.  At the moment, the excerpt below opens the book.

A Bizarre Drop-In

AS THE light changed to green and I was about to accelerate from a dead stop on Eighth Avenue in the 20s, a scrawny, disheveled Hispanic man of indeterminate age, his frayed shirt held by a single button, burst into the back of my cab, slamming the door shut.

"Go, go, go," he shouted, jabbing one hand and then the other forward while he kept spinning around in the seat, frantically looking through the rear window to see if who knows what was gaining on us from behind, glancing every other second through a side window as well, as if not wanting to be taken by surprise from either of those directions.

"Go, go, go," he shrieked as we picked up speed in a central lane, the late rush-hour traffic giving us some leeway to make progress.

I was in one of those moods, perverse to the point of wanting to get a better taste of what I now found on my plate.  There was no security partition in the cab to separate me from this all-too-berserk person, his hands gesticulating wildly not far from my face, but I didn't feel in any particular danger.  Startled, yes, and amused certainly -- I couldn't help but wonder what in fuck was going on in my visitor's head.  Still, I sensed an opportunity.  After all, the possibility of these kinds of strange encounters had been, for me, one of the initial attractions of the job.  I knew I wanted to keep some hold on the reins, but I decided to cut a lot of slack and see where things ended up.

As I slowed for a light, he again screamed, "Go, go straight, keep going, don't stop," urgency and terror tracking his voice.  There was a break in the cross-street traffic, so I went through the red light, now feeling a real buzz from the action.  I hit another red one block up and, as he scampered back and forth across the back seat like a restless caged animal, I gave myself over to his directives, running a second light and then a third.

There was usually a heavy police presence spanning the blocks I was passing, on up through the Port Authority bus terminal to the gritty western fringes of Times Square.  I wondered why I wasn't already being chased by a cop car.  Still, even if the law-enforcement bunch were to pull me over, I was confident I could convince them a madman had commandeered my taxi and I'd driven it in fear my life was under deadly threat.

Between 31st and 33rd streets, with Penn Station to our right and the main post office's elevated grand facade off to the left, the traffic brought us to a halt.  For the moment, there was no way I could move the cab another inch forward.  The guy in back, darting his sights toward the rear window and then looking front, cut short a wailing cry and flung open the left door, leaving it ajar as he ran out erratically among the stopped vehicles.

He sprinted thirty or forty feet and then started to climb onto a panel truck, in turn bracing himself and kicking his feet until he lay flat on its roof, holding on desperately as he waited for the traffic to start up.  Hearing the thuds, the driver just as quickly emerged, with a baseball bat in his hand, and, a sport, chose to beat the interloper with the handle-end rather than the meat of the bat.  The crazed man offered no resistance and absorbed the blows for as long as he could, at last losing his grip and dropping to the surface of the road.  In a flash, he ran off westward.

I got out of my cab to push the rear door shut.  The other driver got back into his truck, and laid the bat neatly in its place.  Nothing much out of the ordinary had really happened.  This was, after all, New York in the 1980s.  It was why the more sensible drivers kept their doors locked when in search of fares, opening them only when they felt relatively satisfied that a prospective passenger was someone they could trust.

The light had turned green, and I drove up Eighth.  As I crossed 40th Street I found myself looking to my left, drawn by some floodlights high up.  I could see medics and police straining on the Port Authority building's second level to remove the body of an apparent suicide who'd leaped from the top.  It couldn't have been our man, that quickly.  Two separate lost souls, in a sliver of time.

Half-Time Observations

Having gotten behind the wheel again, for a number of nights during the summer, after a twenty-plus years' hiatus from driving a medallion -- "returning to see what's changed" -- I've taken a short break from the shifts.  I expect to drive again sometime in November but for the moment I'm getting in some "mini-vacations" (photography work-vacations) -- most recently to Ohio and Indiana.  And I'm giving myself time to step back and think over what I've found, so far, as a return hack.

Well, for one, the most obvious one -- the money was never anything to write home about, so no change there.  Early in the summer, before the rate increase (that took effect on September 4), my take-home pay ranged from $100 to $200 a night.  So the average on my 10-11 hour shifts came to about $150.  The rate increase has given that an uptick, and time will tell how long that holds (before the fleets and brokers find a way to rechannel some of our paltry earnings back into their bulging wallets).

On an ordinary night I've spent almost $45 topping up my tank at the end of my shift.  (So far, I haven't been assigned any hybrid vehicles.  A hybrid, I'm told, saves you about $20 in gas, though fleets are allowed to charge a higher lease fee on them.)  That contrasts to the Eighties, when I was usually out only $10-12 from gas charges, though at the time that seemed like a lot of money (and surely was).

Maybe it's my imagination, but traffic seems to back up more easily than it did those years before.  So, if I'm guessing right, it's gone from horrendous to worse.  The pedestrian islands (with their fake Parisian ambience) in Midtown don't help traffic flow (though they probably improve air quality) and traffic police may be understaffed in this economic downturn.  I remember being swallowed up on the evening of July 4 in the halting bumper-to-bumper traffic on Tenth Avenue, near the best vantage points for the fireworks.  The cops totally lost control of the streets to the throngs departing the show, and that left me able to inch only a few blocks uptown in a single hour. Fortunately, I had four good-humored passengers from Indianapolis suffering along with me as the meter ran (into big bucks).  Anyway, the good news is that we'd all gotten a close-up look at some really impressive fireworks.

Overall, though, the news is bad.  At least for those who value the richness and diversity of big cities like New York.

Driving a cab, around and around, you see the different neighborhoods and the people who live there and walk them and the kinds of stores that line the streets and what goes on there days and nights. 

What I've concluded is: Sameness has won, and we've lost big.  Homogeneity is the only word now for Manhattan (spreading all too soon to the outer boroughs).  Some could see this newness as pretty but it's on the ugly side of pretty.  And it's hard to imagine how we'd ever get back to real life.  It's no secret that with Giuliani and real-estate interests, homogeneity -- localized globalization -- replaced diversity in New York.  It was a relentless process, changing incrementally day by day, neighborhood by neighborhood, noticed only by those few who cared to see.  It's not just Times Square that's been Disneyfied -- that's just the tip of the family-friendly iceberg.  As Sarah Schulman wrote in The Gentrification of the Mind, "Avenue A went from the centerpiece of a Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood to the New York version of Bourbon Street in less than a decade."  No doubt, the throngs of upwardly mobile yuppies who've poured into Manhattan's norm of exorbitant-rate rentals thrive in this sanitized way of life.  Those like them are everywhere and they don't have to take notice of anyone else.  When you enjoy your free time screeching and bellowing like your television heroes, who needs what a mix of cultures can offer?

What does this mean for a New York cab driver?  Am I being nostalgic for all the wrong reasons?  Would I really like to return to the noir shadows of pre-Nineties crime and grit?  A time when cab driving in New York was sometimes rated as the most dangerous profession in America.

Given this today and that yesterday, weighing the choice of one or the other, then, well: give me back the back then.  Compared with the Eighties, the middle class and poor are today less well off in almost every essential aspect of life, and I'm not thinking merely of finances.  They now have effectively been banished to the rim of habitation outside Manhattan, performing one variety of service job or another (such as cab driving) for the rich and richer.  The quality of life -- the real "quality of life" -- has been watered down to the bland.   For cab drivers, there are few if any surprises during their 12-hour shift.  Work is hard, predictable and dull.  It is mindless drudgery.  You just push on, day after day.  And a shameful degree of servitude is now expected.  If you think this an exaggeration, I only wish you were right.  Give me the Wild West, if the only other option is a home of near-monotony on the range.

On the Road Again

It felt like a cross between a surreal experience and an up-front perspective for reality TV.  I was at the garage, and getting handed the keys to a cab, and walking out to the lot to initialize my meter.

It'd been a while ... like twenty-two years.

But, as they say, you never forget how to ride a bike.

Then it was out onto Northern Boulevard at 3:30 in the afternoon and after a few blocks, catching the ramp for the Queensboro Bridge's upper level.  It felt good, in an odd way, to be taking the wheel of a cab again.  Hey, I had done it!  I listened to the hum of the four tires on the bridge as the Manhattan skyline got larger and still larger.  Then the illusion of the open road fell away and I exited, swinging sharply eastward along 59th Street, stopping at the light so very briefly and keeping an eye out for fares and, seeing not one, pacing my way up First Avenue.  Just like old times.

For some reason I had expected to get a fare right away, and I didn't, and that was good because I didn't really want to.  I just wanted to glide around for a bit, like a Sunday driver, and it was a Sunday, July 1. Even before crossing the bridge I'd told myself I would take the day on the slow side.  I didn't care how much money I made.  I just wanted to experience the whole thing again, to get safely through the shift and see how long I could comfortably drive before my body tired.  Even when I was a medallion driver all those years earlier, I'd have to really push myself whenever I came back after taking a month off from the job -- bringing along several candy bars to be ready to deal with my body when it started to shake within five or six hours.

It took me several blocks to find a passenger, a guy who'd just bought an air conditioner at one of the large home-appliance stores.  He hoped we'd be able to store the box in the trunk, but I couldn't figure out how to spring it open -- my garage hadn't shown me the basics of the vehicle (having focused instead on my knowing the meter and information box), and that'd plague me for the first hours of the shift.  Fortunately, the guy said, "No problem, I'll just slip it in next to me on the back seat."

He lived in Queens so we headed right back across the bridge and then a long, long way up 21st Street, crossing Broadway, crossing Astoria Boulevard, going under the swift road to the Triborough Bridge.  Arriving, I told him the fare total and got ready to take his cash.  But moments passed and I realized he was processing his credit card in the back.  This was a new experience for me.  We hadn't had that facility in the 1980s.    Then my info box showed it was validated and I pressed the "C" on the panel, completing the deal.

I lucked out on the next fare, picking up a guy just a few streets down, who wanted back to Manhattan, near St. Patrick's Cathedral.

So there it was -- I was back into the mode.  One fare after another.  Not too fast, not too slow. 

Second Avenue sloped down through Midtown like it always had.  Swinging downtown through Times Square was a little different -- gentrified, infested with pedestrian malls, trying to look like social-democratic Europe when in fact being the hotspot of runaway capitalism -- in any case, I could deal with it.  The history of Times Square was a succession of changes.  Look at the old movies, you'll see, Camel cigarettes' smoke-ring and all. 

I got through the first two hours.  I was proud of myself.  In the fourth hour I pulled over and found a spot at a taxi stand near the Dil E Punjab Deli, at 170 9th Avenue.  I was looking forward to this, I had staked out the place; it was a hangout, and a respectable one, for Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi cab drivers, taking a break from their hacking while in Chelsea.  It was a nice meal.  Three vegetables, rice, bread, a little sweet and a beverage --highly recommended! -- and I ate it at my leisure standing up.

A driver there showed me how to work most of the interior instruments of my cab, so, like other drivers, I now could get the lights on and handle the essentials.  Some forty-five minutes later another hack pulled alongside me and asked me if I was aware my off-duty light was on.  I wasn't.  I must have screwed up the works when I had first tried to put on my night lights.  I hadn't noticed a fall-off in fares, but I was grateful for the help.

Six hours into the job my body still felt good.

For a while during the evening, things slowed.  I went down Seventh Avenue, across Christopher and up Eighth without a fare.  Then I did it again, and the second time around a black guy hailed me on Christopher near Eighth. 

"Will you go uptown," he asked.

"I'll go anywhere you want," I said.  "Where exactly do you want to go?"

"I wanna go to East Harlem," he said, and after a slight hesitation asked, "How much will it cost?"

"I don't know," I said, and didn't, having not made the trip in two decades, at a time when the fare rate was a lot different.  "You probably know it better than I do.  The cost will be whatever the meter shows."

"All you drivers are the same," he said.  "If I don't know what it'll cost, how can I know if I can pay for it.  You all just want to set me up to rip me off."

"I can't help you there," I said.  "Would you like to get out here?"  If so, you don't owe me anything."

He stared at me, got out and slammed the door shut.  Nothing broke, so that was that. 

My next fare was another black man.  He wanted a midtown hotel and was a model passenger.  That was good.  I didn't want to play hard with my racial psychology too early in my return to hacking.

I put in the hours and it was just basic work all the way through.  Everything considered, things were a bit tame, nothing like the edginess of the '80s, but I knew my observations were still premature.

In my ninth hour I got a long, long ride out to Queens.  Three people, with one bringing the other two home before we got to her address.  It was a hefty fare -- about $65 -- and I was worried she'd pay me with a credit card.  Anything over $25 meant they'd have to sign a receipt, and I hadn't done that yet and wondered if I knew how.  No worry, she paid in cash, with a nice tip.

Already being in Queens and in my tenth hour of a maximum twelve-hour shift, I decided to call it a night.  I got back to the vicinity of my garage and gassed up the cab -- $35 right outta my pocket.

Then to my garage, printing out my totals and handing them in, and settling accounts with the dispatcher.  If I figured things correctly, I made only $100 on the night, less than I thought I had.

Still, I wasn't disappointed.  Things had gone smoothly.  I got the subway back to the West Village and stopped in at my neighborhood bar for a nightcap, where Greg, the bartender on duty, treated me well.

Hooking Up With a Garage

Through the grapevine, I'd been given the name and telephone number of a taxi fleet in Queens looking for drivers to fill its cabs on slower shifts. 

I phoned Wailing Management cab company at 31-08 Northern Boulevard.  They urged me to drop by sometime soon, in an early afternoon, to be interviewed and fill out some forms.

It was already near the end of June and time was rushing by, so I made sure to get there the next day.  They liked the looks of me and me of them, leaving the preliminaries to go smoothly.

I told the dispatcher Milton (or was it Harry -- I mean, who can tell their Harry's from their Milton's without a real bit of practice) I hadn't driven a cab for a long while and that the taxi school didn't get around to teaching us all the details on how to operate the taxi meter.  He called over Paul, who was waiting to be assigned a car for the night, and asked if he'd show me the ropes.

We went out to the lot and used one of the free cabs parked there.  Paul was a veteran driver who did some writing on the side, and he appreciated how important it was for me to be able to handle the meter with some degree of ease.  He did his best to help me get it all down pat, but let's be honest: it was complicated stuff -- involving a lot more options than I faced in the '80s.  Back then, cabs didn't process credit cards ... there was no flat rate to the airports ... and you doubled the fare rate as soon as you crossed the city limits -- plus you didn't have to sign on or off on an information box.  Through the 1990s it was all about entering info on trip sheets.  Now there are no trip sheets, which is both a good and bad thing.

Unlike in grammar school, I paid close attention, as Paul outlined the procedures in the limited time we had.  I mostly picked it up, remembering the fundamentals and then some.  I knew I didn't have it all down and I hoped I wouldn't get passengers early on who wanted to go to Jersey or Yonkers.  But I told myself that if I did, I'd just do my best and negotiate the foggy bits.

The dispatcher (Harry or Milton) told me to phone in whenever I was ready to take a shift.  "We have 200 cars here," he said.  "You shouldn't have any trouble getting out."

Outta-towner 1: Tampa: Searching for Tim Fasano

Comparatively speaking, Henry Morton Stanley had it easy.  He just had to trek through 700 miles of disease-rampant, dense tropical forest in Africa until, in 1871, he at last found the missionary-explorer Dr. David Livingstone living near Lake Tanganyika in what is today Tanzania. 

Would H.M. Stanley have been able to find my man?  If he thinks so, let him try.

Needing a break from New York, I had decided to fly down to Tampa and stay in St. Petersburg four nights so I could catch up with friends in the Tampa Bay area.  I'd been reading the blog "Tampa Taxi Shots" and thought I would try to hook up with its author while there.  Maybe I'd knock out a short profile on him for "Return Cabbie" and in the process get some feedback on how the cab business in Tampa compared with what New York hacks come up against.

So I emailed Tim Fasano at the address he gave in his blog, proposing a meeting, but heard nothing back.  I gave it three or four days and emailed him again, a day before my departure, and still nothing.

I knew he drove for United Cab, and added stopping by his garage to my Tampa to-do list.

I arrived in Tampa last Thursday evening, picked up a rental car and, after dropping my stuff off at my hotel room, phoned a friend.  We made plans to link up within the hour.  I headed off over the Gandy Bridge to meet up with him, only to run into a horrendous thunder-and-lightning storm.  Torrential rainfall flooded the highway and power was intermittently knocked out, blocking the route and sending me back to my hotel.

That put me behind the eight ball for the first half of my Tampa Bay stay, as I rescheduled get-togethers and places I'd hoped to visit.  In the end, I got out and about quite a bit, including to the Salvador Dalí Museum, but didn't reach the United Cab garage -- under the big Gulf Coast Transportation sign at 1701 West Cass Street -- until around noon on Monday, just a few hours before my scheduled return flight to La Guardia.

Gulf Coast has a garage and office and sizeable lot, and runs both United Cab and Tampa Bay Cab.  It probably wasn't the right time of day to expect a shift change but I did run into a few drivers coming in and waiting to go out.  Not one of them knew Fasano, so it wasn't going to be my lucky day.  I learned that drivers had a choice to lease their cars for 12 or 24 hours but not much else.

Who knows, but maybe I'll get back to Tampa again one day.  In the meantime, Fasano goes onto my "missing persons" list. 

But if there is a next time, my luck could change.  The hand behind "Tampa Taxi Shots" might have returned an enquiring wave.  I can see myself approaching him in the United Cab lot, putting on a serious face, and saying, "Mr. Tim Fasano, I presume."

Pass or Fail?

  

A week to the day after taking the TLC exam, I went back out to the taxi school at LaGuardia to find out my test score.  Anything less than a 70 and I'd have to retake the thing again, at my own expense, further corroding my minuscule bank account.

I was both excited and apprehensive.

An office worker asked for my name and the new hack license number I'd been assigned several weeks earlier.  She also wanted to see my MVD license as a further validation on my identity.

"I'd be happy with just a 70," I said, both to her and myself, as she ran her finger along the list of test scores in search of my result.  Her hand came to a halt and she hesitated a moment before looking up at me and asking, "What did you expect as a score?"

I felt like she was preparing me for the worst and I didn't know how to respond.

"Well," she continued, "as I'm sure it's no surprise, you handled the language questions without a blemish, but ... on the geography part you scored ... a whopping 86.  Were you really that worried?"

What, me worry?

My new hack license arrived in the mail a few days later.  It was a tiny thing, compared to the licenses we carried around in the 1980s.  Also, the woman who'd photographed me at the TLC office hadn't been particularly clever at setting an adequate flash output -- the photograph on my new hack license pictured a nondescript, haggard person in a darkly lit room.  Not that anybody, including me, particularly cared.

With June near its end, I was now free to begin to look for work.

The Day of Reckoning

The test site was, by custom, the same location as the taxi school the applicant had attended.

We'd been told to provide our own pencils and erasers and pencil sharpener; to be there at nine in the morning and expect long waits; and to bring along something to snack on, because once testing began we couldn't leave the general area until the whole process was concluded.

I ate a larger-than-average breakfast, and, enjoying the early heat of summer, got to LaGuardia Community College on time, joining an already-long line.  We were all checked to see whether we'd brought the correct forms and receipts, and then shunted into a side room where we were to wait.  There were a lot of us (about six dozen people took the exam at LaGuardia that day), and I was probably the only one of western European descent (as I had expected, based on the ethnic composition of the classes I'd attended).  Only one woman was taking the test, and she was clearly from the Indian subcontinent.  While waiting, most people earnestly studied their workbooks.  I alternately looked over a few notes and walked around outside the room to damp down my restlessness.

After a long while we were told to assemble outside the test room on an upper floor.  There we had another lengthy wait before being ushered into a spacious area and slowly directed, one by one, to our individual seats among the rows of desks.

There were to be two parts to the exam, the first a 30-question segment on English-language proficiency, and then, after a short break, the main 50-question test that covered geography and rules and regulations.  An applicant had to achieve a minimum score of 70 on each to get their hack license, but anyone who failed the language test would have the rest of their exam disqualified.

On that day, there were some dozen repeat attendees for the English-proficiency exam, and I didn't envy them.  As an immigrant-intensive industry, English was the native language of only a minority of New York's current generation of drivers.  I was fluent in English alone and couldn't imagine ever being able to pass a test in any other language.

Things had changed quite a bit since I took the test back in 1983.  Then, there was no English-proficiency segment and (probably because of that) you were allowed to fail the test twice (rather than just once).  Only if you flunked it three times running did you have to wait several months before you could give it another go.

And the whole test atmosphere was tighter this time around.  As part of the preliminary remarks, a security officer joined the TLC-appointed officials to say he'd personally escort out anyone suspected of cheating.  The burden of proof would be on the applicant.  This was in stark contrast to the ambience of my 1983 test site, when a single monitor casually roamed the room, and a guy sitting nearby was able to urgently whisper to me during the exam, "Which way is uptown?"

We rolled through the language test, which largely consisted of listening to audio simulations of passengers saying where they wanted to go, and then entering our multiple-choice selection on our test sheet.

After a brief break that allowed us to munch down a candy bar or half a sandwich, we were back at our desks, taking on the core test.  The first ten questions were an open-book segment on map reading, a skill that was seen as no-nonsense in light of most beginning drivers' flimsy knowledge of the complex street alignments of the city's five boroughs.

Within a few minutes, the security officer rushed to the desk in front of me, took its occupant firmly by the arm and steered him quickly from the room on suspicion of cheating.  "Please, sir, no; please, sir," the would-be cabbie pleaded, without effect.

In the last minutes of testing, a second guy was tossed out for having his street atlas on his desk at a time when it was supposed to be inaccessible.

After we put our pencils down at the test's conclusion, we were told that we'd have to wait about six days for the exam to be scored, and then we could drop by the taxi school and find out our exact results.  We couldn't phone in for the scores -- they'd only be given out in person, for "reasons of privacy and security."

I took the subway back to Manhattan and went to a neighborhood Mexican restaurant for some cheese enchiladas.  After ordering, I tried to conjure up the test questions I had doubts about, the ones whose answers I had mulled for a long time before settling on a best guess.  I pulled out my study guide and New York City street atlas.  I had guessed wrong on what Bronx street the Macombs Dam Bridge fed into (Jerome Avenue).  I didn't luck out in knowing which section of Queens a particular avenue ran through.  I had forgotten the location of a hotel and messed that one up entirely.  In fact, it seemed I'd mostly guessed poorly and I knew I had guessed a dozen or more times.

I put the books away and tried not to think about it any more.  I told myself that my guess was that I had passed the test, but was immediately taken aback by my awareness that thinking about my guessing abilities was the very thing draining me of my confidence.  There was nothing further I could do about it all at this point.  In any case, I'd have to wait some six days to know one way or the other.

By the time my meal arrived, I was no longer in the mood for eating.

Sprinting the Last Mile to Reach Test Mode

  
On the Sunday preceding my scheduled Friday exam, I vowed that I'd get to my second taxi-school class the following day, whether or not insomnia kept me awake the night before.  I'd just get there and drag myself through the day, whatever it took.

Coffees must have helped.  At one point that afternoon I found myself the only student in the room who wasn't dozing, whether slumped over in some distorted position, eyes shut, or with their head cradled on their desk and out to the world.  It was the class on driver-passenger relations and everyone already knew the TLC exam wouldn't include much on the subject, so most of those present concentrated their efforts on just putting in a day.  The teacher, an older guy who still did a few days behind the wheel each week, tried patience, but suddenly he stopped talking, looked round the room in exasperation and, turning in my direction, said, "It's just you and me here right now."  He ended his sentence on a raised voice, and a few of the students stirred and tried to rouse themselves, but with only two hours to go in the class day, it was the clock that spoke loudest.

I got home exhausted, which helped me get to sleep a little earlier that night and push myself to a second consecutive day of class on Tuesday.  This would be my third and final class, on geography.  It was taught by Klee Walsh, who'd also led the class I took on TLC rules and regulations.  Klee, an occasional taxi driver in his thirties, liked teaching and was sharp at it, helping the time flow more easily for the rest of us.  (Surprising me, all the LaGuardia taxi-school teachers showed a high level of professionalism.  I must have assumed, like the average Joe on the street, that, well, there'd just be some tired, dumb cab drivers running the class.)

During that day's lunch break, I hurried a few blocks away and managed to do my drug test, for the police files.

I had showed up at the taxi school thinking that, with seven years' driving experience under my belt, I essentially knew it all.  But I was pleasantly stunned by how much I had learned, and how valuable it was to have learned it.  I'd forgotten quite a bit, and things had changed.  There had always been a lot of traffic rules -- not a few of which seemed unnecessarily burdensome and exposed drivers to getting fines they thought undeserved -- but by 2012 there were a whole lot more.  ("Today's cab driver has to be more circumspect -- it's a different world," I remember Jeff, the defensive-driving instructor, telling me.)

I hoped to use parts of Wednesday and Thursday to study for the exam, but I first had to run back up to the MVD office on 34th Street.  More than two months earlier they had given me my new, temporary license, but the permanent version was to have come in the mail a few weeks later and I still hadn't received it. 

There was a long waiting line at the License X-Press office.  Eventually, they were able to tell me that my license hadn't been delivered because the mailing didn't have my apartment number on it. So an employee there added that detail to my file (which had somehow been deleted from my earlier records), and requested a redelivery.

The envelope had initially been mailed with my full name and street address (excepting my apartment number), and my name and apartment number were posted at both the entrance to my building and on my individual mail box, but my postal carrier of zip code station 10014 had refused to slip it into my box and instead returned it to the MVD headquarters in Albany, complaining about a lack of delivery information.  When I told a postal employee at another post office what had happened, she said, "And they wonder why we're going out of business!"

I didn't study all that hard for the exam, but I did make a point of reviewing the major roads and routes, the water crossings, the traffic restrictions dealing with priority bus lanes and prohibited turns on "thru streets," and, because there were so many new hotels, I tried to memorize their locations, as best I could.

The more I studied, the more I saw how much more there was to know.  I'd already invested about $550 toward getting the new hack license and I couldn't afford to blow it.  I tried to relax and not worry too much about the following day's exam but I knew there were no guarantees against getting a string of tricky questions and coming up short on the minimum 70 score I needed.

Back to School

Given that my old hack license had expired some fifteen years earlier, I needed a new one to drive again.  I was aware it was going to be a more lengthy process this time around because, unlike when I initially got my permit in 1983, there was now a classroom requirement.

So, as I enjoyed the first hints of spring, I checked out the website of the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC) and printed out their application requirements for new yellow-cab drivers.

Hitting the road running, I renewed my soon-to-expire New York State driver's license at the DMV's License X-Press office on 34th Street, retaining my class E chauffeur classification.  Then I got my (uncharacteristically amused) doctor to fill out a medical certification form, attesting that, in his opinion, I was "medically fit to safely operate a TLC-licensed vehicle."  Arming myself with the requisite application forms, documents (it took me quite a while to dig up my social security card) and payments, I dropped by the TLC's Long Island City office in Queens, where my photo was taken and I was finger-printed, initiating a formal police review of my background.

I decided to do my classroom work at the Taxi & FHV Driver Institute at LaGuardia Community College, which was just down the street from the TLC's Long Island City office.  There weren't any Manhattan locations offering the classes, and the subway ride from my West Village neighborhood to Queens would involve only one change of trains and wasn't that inconvenient.

Prospective drivers had the choice of completing 24 hours of classroom work (lasting three days) or 80 hours in class (spread over ten days), as preparation for the TLC's hack-license examination.  Driver-applicants could choose either option, though the (more-expensive) 80-hour training course was set up to allow those who were new to the city or non-native English speakers a slower, more in-depth approach.

I signed up for the 24-hour course, but before starting that I decided to take the mandated six-hour defensive-driving course, also given at the taxi school.  I didn't look forward to it, and struggled to get myself up early enough for the 9 a.m. start of class.  There were only a dozen of us there that day, including one other older former driver who was also beginning the whole process over again.  Because the defensive-driving course was required of all TLC drivers every three years, not everyone in class was a new applicant, and one of the other guys (all the attendees were male) told me he had come straight from his night shift without sleep.  Jeff Walsh, a former driver who ran the class, somehow managed to keep us all awake and interested and the yawns to a minimum.

Sometime in the early 1990s, about a half dozen years after the immigrant cab driver became the new stereotype, the TLC had made the classroom sequence a prerequisite for getting a New York City hack license.  Like myself, many ex-drivers of that time had continued to renew our licenses year after year, at ever-spiraling costs, so as to avoid having to attend the school if we ever ended up deciding to have another go with yellow cabs.

The three-day course consisted of separate days of instruction in geography, TLC rules and regulations, and driver-passenger relations.  It was all very flexible.  No particular sequence was required, classes were offered every day except Fridays (a day set aside for TLC testing) and driver-applicants could even attend half days, as long as it all added up in the end.  But for me it immediately became a big strain.

I was keeping late hours, getting to sleep each night between three and five, and I couldn't seem to shake myself free of that routine.  Several times I tried to get to sleep early in the hope of making it to class the next morning, but just as often I'd get struck with insomnia and bail out on the idea.  At the same time, I was trying to push forward on some personal photography projects I needed to get into shape, and taking another Spanish course in the beginner's tier, and trying to keep a bit of depression under control, amid all the dread and frustrations that my being in New York, rather than with my partner in Brussels, represented to me.  I was just trying to keep afloat while somehow paddling forward.

From the date of filing my TLC license application, I had a full 90 days to fulfill all the steps, including completion of the classroom work and passing the exam.  We were allowed to fail the exam once, and reschedule it; two failures, however, meant having to wait six months before trying again.  But it was already June and my procrastinations had put me in a corner.  After the first 80 days I'd made it to only one class (on TLC rules and regulations) and I knew I had to get serious and quick.  I telephoned in to schedule my exam date, at LaGuardia, for the Friday of the following week, but that left me with no breathing room to take the exam a second time if I flunked it.  With two eight-hour classes still to go, I dearly had to find a way to get my act together.  I knew from experience that that wasn't going to be easy.

Looking Down the Road

So there I was, in early March of this year, on the verge of driving a cab once more, after almost two dozen years away from the job and a whole lot of ups and downs in between.

This time around, it's not really for the money, though with the depressed economy and limited work, anything that eases the drain on my savings will help.  Now, my real motivation to drive comes from the fact that I'm sitting on a manuscript I recently wrote about my (arguably bizarre) experiences as a yellow cab driver in New York -- from 1983 to January 1990 -- at the height of the city's crime wave. 

I've got a second draft of 80,000 words, book length, that I had decided to set aside last year and rethink, after literary agents I queried seemed only luke-warm to the project.  I'm confident I've written a good read, but I know I need to make it much better.  And I want to be sure I've now got my story right -- that there really was something quite special, or disturbingly odd, about what went on in the '80s.

I knew also that I had to get behind the wheel again and see to what degree and in which ways things had changed for night-shift drivers of medallion cabs.  I wanted to be able to compare the '80s to the present, so I could rewrite my book from a savvy perspective.

Perhaps I should back-track a bit and explain how I came to write down my adventures, after all these years.

In September 2010 my partner Eva and I found ourselves treading water in Brussels.  We'd just come from a year and a half in London after six months in Abu Dhabi.  In Abu Dhabi I'd worked as a rewriter on a government-sponsored start-up English-language newspaper, a workplace of infighting, cliques and drunken prima donnas that left Eva and I adrift when the paper declined to renew my contract.

Both of us had lived in London before, and with the depression turning global, economic opportunities for Eva, a journalist with a Spanish passport, looked more promising in London than they did for either of us in New York.  So we set up camp in Dalston, a gritty east London neighborhood.  But more than a year passed and in the increasingly dismal economy, Eva couldn't find work there -- and under Britain's stringent immigration laws I wasn't allowed to stay much longer in the country unless she did.  So Eva decided to relocate to the European Union capital of Brussels, where nongovernmental jobs were more plentiful.  After a short stay in Brussels, I'd head back to New York and wait until our situation got clearer.  I didn't expect that to take too, too long, given that Belgium was more accommodating than the UK in issuing family-renuification visas to non-EU nationals like myself.

For the weekend before I left for New York, we decided to do an overnight trip away from Brussels.  We rode the train two hours' southeast to Liège, a good city for walking.  We criss-crossed Liège on foot, and at night wore ourselves out in the colorful and daunting Funfair, strung along several blocks of Avroy Park.  Thinking we might have a few drinks back at our hotel before calling it quits, we arrived there a few minutes before midnight only to find the hotel bar closed.  When we were told even room service was no longer available, effectively leaving us in a dry venue, we opted for coaxing our tired legs back out onto the streets, vowing that we'd walk no more than five minutes in search of a bar and if unlucky, just go back and sleep. 

          We found a tavern, whose genre was that of a rowdy neighborhood bar.  Everyone was shouting and it didn't look like it'd close anytime soon.  There was a free table just off to a side, so we grabbed some beers and settled in.  It was hard to ignore the boisterous surroundings.  People were bad-mouthing each other left and right and pushing each other around, threatening to duke it out.  As soon as it appeared to calm down, it started up again.  Faces were flushed and veins pulsing.  The two bartenders, older women, tried to stay calm and polite but, when cornered, showed themselves capable of standing up for themselves.  It was only when the proprietor was himself harangued that the police were called in.

The cops arrived and took a number of people outside, one at a time, for questioning.  Somehow, they let off the real thugs, who were allowed back in to resume their drinking.  In all the ruckus, the cops arrested only one shop-worn woman, who had seemed to me a minor offender.  It then quieted down a bit, though Eva could hear a few French-speaking guys characterizing us as uppity Italians who they didn't like the looks of.  One of them was intrusive but I ignored him, and he staggered away.

Amid all this I began telling Eva about some of my experiences as a New York cab driver.  In between trips to the bar for more beer, I told her one story after another, enjoying her responses of horror and delight.

"Didn't I ever tell you these before?" I asked.  Surely I must have told you a few of them."

"Very few.  They're amazing.  A lot of them are a real riot," she said.  "You ought to put a book together.  People would welcome the humor, especially the black humor, in this fucked-up economy."

I didn't take her suggestion seriously at the time but it must have hung around in my head.  Still, when I got back to New York and dove into the hard work of reducing my possessions, so as to cut down on storage costs, it didn't prevent me from throwing out the diary I had kept while driving a cab. 

I didn't exactly throw it out. 

After coming across it in one of the scores of cardboard boxes whose contents I was re-evaluating, and flicking through the pages, I concluded I'd have no more use for it during my earthly existence and so put it in the "out" pile.  I only wanted to own what I really needed -- all the rest was just a drag on my mobility.  But it was late at night, and I decided to take the diary along with me to the corner tavern, and look it over one last time, for old time's sake, while I ended the day with a drink or two.  Then I'd toss it into the trash on my way home.

The diary was in the form of a wirebound notebook, the kind kids use at school.  The taxi union had distributed them to us during a newcomers' orientation session, and I'd appreciated having something with lined pages to write in.

I opened the notebook in the available light of the bar.  Billy Ryan, a musician, was tending to drink-making that night and after watching me turn the pages for ten or fifteen minutes, he came by and said, "I've noticed you've been smiling quite a bit.  What are you looking at?"

I told him it was the diary I'd kept while a cab driver in the Eighties, and was giving it a last look before getting rid of it.  "You're not serious!" he said.

One thing led to another and we agreed that, rather than my throwing it away, I'd give it to him after my final drink of the night.

When I was leaving, he took the diary appreciatively into his hand.  "I'll hold onto it," he said, "at least for a while, in case you want it back."

"Do with it what you want," I said.  "It's yours now.  I'm never going to need it again."

Destiny, chance, whatever, five weeks later I found myself at work on my taxi book (I'd concluded that, well, yeah it wasn't such a bad idea and I could certainly use the money), counting on the strength of my memory and a few isolated notes I'd come upon to see me through.

So, where do I want to go with this blog?

More than anything, I want to see in what way things have changed from the tempestuous '80s.  So I needed to get a new hack license and get back on the road, real-life, real-time.  Along the way, I'm going to give myself some quiet moments to think about things ... how  things work ... maybe why they work the way they do.  I'd welcome feedback from readers, to keep me sharp and open to insights.

On and off, I'll be traveling outside New York a bit in between hitting a fresh rewrite of my '80s experiences (if in fact the book keeps that story-line).  So perhaps I'll talk with cab drivers in the cities I visit and see how life is with them, and share that with you.

I won't say the sky's the limit here, but all options are on the table.

And, no doubt, I'll occasionally be posting excerpts from my work-in-progress.

We'll see.