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.