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.