A couple of years ago I flew back to New York early on the morning after Christmas. I was meeting friends from England up on the Connecticut shore that morning so I was going straight from LaGuardia airport to the railway station in Harlem. It is a short ride, fewer than fifteen minutes, an easy ride on the bus but it was cold and snowy and I wanted to catch the earliest train possible.
So I got on the taxi line and got a cab immediately. In New York City, the law is that a yellow cab has to take you anywhere you want to go within the city limits. I got in. The driver took off and I told him my destination. He stopped and backed up to the dispatcher. He didn’t want to take me. The dispatcher asked me where I was going, “Harlem,” I said.
“Then go!” the dispatcher said to the driver.
One of the other laws is that if you’re going anywhere in the city limits, the cabbie must use the meter. “It would be better for you to play a flat fare,” he said. He must have thought I was from out of town. I knew better but I said, “How much?” He said, “$20!” “No way,” I said, “Turn on the meter.”
He turned it on but started yelling in some South Asian language. I’m sure it was swearing because if it wasn’t, what was the point? He was really angry. He turned to me and said, “I’ve been waiting in the taxi line for two hours and now I get a ten dollar fare. Why didn’t you take the bus?”
I said, “I didn’t take the bus because I didn’t want to and if you don’t like driving a cab, maybe you should do something else.”
He drove recklessly and kept yelling in his native tongue. We crossed the bridge but when we came near the train station, he stopped about a block short and turned off the meter, indicating it was time for me to get out. The fare came to $15 and change. I wanted to give him exact change but I didn’t have it and I was a little afraid to ask for change so I gave him $16.
“You’re not tipping me!”
“Are you kidding me? Of course I’m not tipping you. You don’t deserve a tip. But I am writing down your number.” I actually had already written it down.
I got out of the car and to give myself a head start in case he decided to come after me, I left the back passenger-side door open so that before he could move the car, he’d have to get out and close the door. That didn’t make him any too happy and he was still yelling at me when I entered the station. I called and reported him and took him to taxi-cab court. The day of the trial, I couldn’t get there because of work but I hope he took time out of his busy day to appear.
One of the perks of my job is that I get picked up every night to go to work in a Lincoln Towne Car or something similar. The fare from my house to work is $36 at that time of night. The firm pays the tab. It is a pretty decent fare and the drivers jockey for it since it is a quick trip, about 20 minutes.
One night I got the usual call telling me my car number and what time it would arrive. I went out at the right time and there was no car. I waited for about five minutes and then I called. The dispatcher told me that the driver said he was in front of the building. “Well I’m in front of the building and I promise he’s not here. Can you find out what street he’s on?”
The dispatcher came back and said, “He’s on 133rd street.” I was between 204th Street and 207th Street at number 133. It was going to take the driver about 30 more minutes to get there. So I called work and told them I’d be late. Forty-five minutes passed. I called again, “He’s still not here.”
When the found the driver, he was at my old address about four blocks away. How he got that address, I have no idea. I had them patch me through to the driver and I told him how to find me though his English was nearly non-existent. I finally saw him at the end of the street.
I got in and he turned to me and started yelling. Though his English was bad, I could understand him saying, “Don’t you know where you live?”
“You’re not going to blame me for this,” I said, “I’ve been in the right place all the time. Now, we need to turn around.”
So he gunned the car and went into the next intersection and made a dangerous u-turn, recklessly close to an oncoming car.
“Okay, stop,” I said, “I’m not riding with you.”
He pulled over and I got out. He kept trying to get me to get back in, obviously not wanting to lose the fare (after more than an hour) but I wasn’t getting back in with him. I called for another car and got to work about two hours late.
But one of my favorite cab stories happened just last weekend. It was early Saturday morning and I was going to work. I had called for a car. It was raining when I went out and I didn’t see the car. I went out into the street and looked up the block and I could see a black car sitting about a block up the street. I knew it was mine because what are the odds that someone else on my little block would have a car coming that early on a Saturday morning?
I waved for him but he didn’t budge. So I gave in and walked up the block to him.
“What address do you have?”
“Number 70.” He said confidently.
“Then why did you stop outside of number 58?”
“Oh, sorry sir, GPS tell me I reach my destination.”
You can’t really argue with that, can you?
To be fair, I’ve met some amazing cabbies. I’ve met men who were doctors, lawyers, architects and molecular biologists in their birth countries but they can make a better life for their families as cabbies in New York City. I even met one man who told me he gave up a multi-million dollar grant in nuclear physics at a university and became a cabbie. I believe him.
Just last week a driver who took me home looked like he came straight out of the mountains of Pakistan. He looked like a Pakistani country bumpkin. But he emigrated to Spain in 1973, lived there and learned fluent Spanish, then came to American 15 years later and learned to speak very good English too.
