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.