Book-in-Progress Excerpt: A Bizarre Drop-In

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.

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.