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.
