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  • Tags: New York Sunday News Times

TAXI<br /> By SHEILA MICHAELS<br /> This cabbie feels you have a right to a ride home, even in you live in Brooklyn. But please don’t call her.<br /> You have to drive a cab 12 hours a night to make it worthwhile, which means you’re just working and sleeping in order to make a living. After a few days, you’re not sure you’re heading uptown or down.<br /> I was ending my work week. The first couple of passengers were good talkers, pleasant — a policeman from Smithtown in for a two-week method course, an English businessman going for supper with a pretty woman. When I stopped at a light near Grand Central, a man knocked on the window and asked if I’d take him to Rockaway Blvd. I hadn’t gotten a long view of him, just the face at the window. My only impression was that he was working-class Irish, and that is damn near perfection in a passenger. I wasn’t quite sure where Rockaway was—somewhere near the airport—so I told him I’d go on his directions.<br /> I noticed he was pretty rumpled, when he got in, but not drunk. By law you can throw out a drunk. They forget where they’re going and if they don’t get sick they fall asleep, and they make trouble over money. But he wasn’t drunk. I figured he’d had a couple of drinks after a long day and decided he’d treat himself to a cab.<br /> I was going to connect to the Van Wyck, but he said to take Queens Blvd. straight out and he’d direct me. He was a very difficult passenger to talk to. I can usually think of a conversational opener, but nothing I thought of seemed right, so I just drove.<br /> When we hit Jamaica Ave., he told me to turn left. I thought the airport would be to the right, but he said he wanted to make another stop before he went home. A sick aunt he was worried about. He’d only look in and come right out. I said he’d have to pay me before he got out. He said he’d pay double if he had to; just keep going, it was another few miles. So I kept going and I kept checking to see if he’d fallen asleep, and he kept telling me to keep going. And then we passed a sign for Floral Park and I pulled over and said that if we were going out of the city limits, he’d have to pay double the meter. He said he knew that, just keep going. New Hyde Park, Garden CityPark, Mineola.<br /> One of the reasons I live in the city is that all trees and grass are the same, and the minute they surround you, you’re lost. What I would have given at the moment to be taking a youth gang in the South Bronx. It was raining and I could hardly see, and I was in nightmare territory with a passenger who didn’t talk and wasn’t worried about money. People ask if I don’t get scared. In the city, no; but anything can happen in Mineola. You read about it all the time. By Westbury the meter was already $15.95. I pulled off and asked for the full fare before we went on. He said he’d dropped his money in the back seat. I said we were going to the police.<br /> At the first filling station, I pulled over and asked the attendant to call the police. He ran over and caught the passenger as he was slipping away from the cab. The passenger, a guy about 50, aid that if I called his father, he would pay me. I was itching to get to the police and file a report. I’d lost two hours’ work and I owed the cab company $19.95 so far, and I was in Westbury. But I called the number and asked the answerer if he knew the man. The old father said, “You’ve got my son. Thank God! Don’t let him get away.” He was the last thing in the world I wanted to hang onto just then. I explained in a very shaky voice where we were, and why, and that out-of-town calls were double the meter. The father asked for my name and address and license, in case I should be up to something. The passenger misdirected me twice on the way there. <br /> We wound up in Lawrence, still outside the city limits. The house lights were blazing, and a jeep with lights trained on the driveway waited on the road. I left my motor running, and locked the car with a second set of keys. I carried my ear-shattering alarm with me, stood in the rain, and asked the passenger to ring the bell. If it was “Psycho” inside, I wanted him to get him first.<br /> The passenger walked in and sat down in front of a television set. His old father asked me in, a younger brother stood guarding the door. My meter read $35.85. The father gave me $40 and told me to keep the change. I reminded him that, aside from my grief and time, the law required double payment outside of the five boroughs. The old father patted me on the shoulder and said it had been difficult for him in the three years since his wife died. The house was neat but too warm and the paint was peeling. I had the feeling I was supposed to do something about his dead wife, besides expressing regrets. The brother was still standing by the door with arms folded. I took the $40 and went back to my cab.<br /> The time I found the road to the airport. I don’t usually work Kennedy, because I don’t like to wait there for hours and then pull a call to Jamaica. But it was 11:30, and where can you go to work in that neighborhood? Luckily, because of the rain, the airport was stripped. I was the only cab at the terminal. And I got a call to mid-terminal. And I got a call to mid-Brooklyn. You never ask a dispatcher whom you haven’t bribed to double up, because he’ll write you up. But it was raining, and there wan’t another cab, so he gave me a second Brooklyn, a woman nearer the bridge to Manhattan.<br /> The first passenger told me to take the Belt. The rain had caused an accident which tied up traffic for nearly $4 in waiting-time. When we reached his house, the fare was $18. We were almost as far from the second passenger’s house as if she had come straight from the airport. I suggested that he pay the full fare and she pay the difference. He said he would only pay $12. I thought it was unfair. She hadn’t insisted on the Belt, or urged me into the traffic. But he refused to pay his full share, and I had to accept the arrangement. The second passenger was a telephone representative, returning home from her son’s wedding in California. When we reached her house the meter read $22.50. She gave me $15, I said I still thought he had done her out of $6, and she told me that another cabdriver had offered to take them for $15 each, but he had refused.<br /> A passenger at Smith and Fulton then took me to Keap and Whyte in Williamsburg. And so I took the bridge back to Beautiful Manhattan.<br /> Dan Greenberg recently wrote about traveling with the police of the 9th Precinct in the meanest, vilest, rottenest, roughest, smelliest, baddest section of New York City. It happens to be where I pay $200 a month to live, but he never said it was cheap. So I decided to work my neighborhood: Baruch Houses, Riis Houses, Every street was flooded and it was raining too hard to tell when I was about to plunge up to the fender in water and eliminate my brakes for another 15 minutes. Finally the whole world was asleep, except Chinatown. At Kum Lau Square the restaurants that close to 5 a.m. were finally releasing their cooks and waiters. Eldridge, Essex, Allen, Pike. Splintering doorways, mildewed tenements thrown together a century ago. People carrying tips are easy marks — one reason I don’t turn in before dawn. Chinese waiters take cabs home for a five-minute walk. The cabbie waits until each man unlocks his door at home and waves.<br /> A Puerto Rican grocery clerk has been waiting at Essex and Delancey in the rain for 15 minutes for a cab to take<br /> continued on Page 19<br /> SUNDAY NEWS MAGAZINE*NEW YORK* JUNE 10, 1979
Taxi! Article written by Sheila MIchaels in 1979.

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