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.