Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver

Anyway, I was driving this Checker when I was hailed by a middle-aged suburban Workerbee in a business suit who looked like any other commuter on his way home from work. He asked me to bring him to Penn Station, a fifteen-minute trip, and he settled back into his seat and opened up a newspaper. It looked to be an uneventful ride until, about two blocks from where we’d started, the cab ran over a particularly nasty pothole.

Now, the Checkers were strong cars and they had a reputation for being indestructible, but they didn’t exactly give you a smooth ride. When we hit the pothole, the cab kind of went KA-BOOM, and I found myself momentarily bouncing up and down on the front seat. In fact, the car had taken the pothole so badly that I felt a need to apologize to my passenger.

‘Sorry,’ I said with a laugh, ‘I guess they don’t make them like they used to.’ Not that they really made them any differently than they ever did. It was just something to say.

My passenger, who up to this point hadn’t said a word to me, suddenly came alive. He put down his newspaper, opened up his briefcase, and took out a notepad and a pen.

‘I’d like you to do something for me,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to tell me everything you don’t like about Checkers. I’ll write down what you say.’

Well, I thought this was fine. Someone wants to know what I think. I started in with a vengeance.

‘First of all, obviously they can’t take bumps worth a damn,’ I said. He wrote it down.

‘The gas mileage is awful. They only get eight or nine miles per gallon.’ He wrote that down.

‘Lousy acceleration.’

‘What else?’

‘Squeaky brakes.’

‘What else?’

Now I was really getting into it. ‘These dashboards are so old-fashioned. They slope straight down so you can’t put anything on top of them. You know, they stopped redesigning these cars in 1956.’

He wrote quickly to keep up with me, but if I spoke too fast he would hold me up until he could get it all down. It seemed to be a matter of some concern to him that he recorded every word I said.

‘What else?’

‘Well, the trunk doesn’t spring up when you push the button to open it. There’s no place to grip it.’

It was true. Whenever the trunk needed to be opened, the driver had to get out of the cab and pry it open with his fingertips. The privately owned Checkers all had customized handles – installed by the owners themselves, not the Checker Motor Company – on the trunks to overcome this problem.

‘Really,’ I groaned, ‘what kind of a car company makes a car – a taxi, no less – with a trunk that makes it a challenge to open it?’

‘Okay, what else?’

‘The goddamned battery is back there in the trunk where there’s no ventilation. When you start working at a new garage, they give you a big speech on your first day warning you not to hold a cigarette in your hand when you open the trunk because it might set off an explosion if the battery happens to be bad and is giving off fumes! You know, when batteries go bad they emit sulfuric acid, which is flammable. Whoever heard of a battery being in the trunk, anyway? Why don’t they put it under the hood like in all other cars?’

It went on like this until we arrived at Penn Station. I told him everything anyone could possibly imagine could be wrong with Checkers, and it felt wonderful.

‘So what is this,’ I asked, ‘some kind of taxi driver therapy?’

‘Hell, no,’ my passenger said, ‘the Chairman of the Board of the Checker Motor Company is an old childhood friend of mine and I’m having lunch with him in Kalamazoo next Wednesday. I’m going to tell him everything you told me.’ And with that he handed me the money for the ride along with a generous tip and disappeared into the crowd in Penn Station.

I sat there kind of dumbfounded for a minute in my beat-up cab. Gee, I thought, maybe someday this will result in better Checkers being made. Maybe the Chairman of the Board will be impressed with my astute observations and he’ll fix up all the things I said were wrong. Maybe something I said will really make a difference! I thought of all the people in America who would be riding around in better cars.

Well, it didn’t exactly work out that way. Three weeks later I heard on the radio that the Checker Motor Company was going out of business! And, indeed, in July, 1982 the last Checker came off the assembly line.

So here’s what must have happened: my passenger did, in fact, have lunch with his old childhood pal the next Wednesday in Kalamazoo. But unbeknownst to my passenger, his old friend was desperately trying to decide at that time whether or not to take out yet another massive loan to keep the company afloat. He tries to put his troubles out of his mind for an hour by having lunch with his childhood buddy whom he hasn’t seen in years. He wants to reminisce about the good old days.

But noooo, his old pal pulls out this goddamned list of goddamned complaints about his cars that was dictated to him by a real, goddamned New York City taxi driver – as if he doesn’t already know what’s wrong with his own cars. Later that night, after kicking the cat and screaming at the kids – or maybe kicking the kids and screaming at the cat – he decides screw it, it’s just not worth the frustration. He’s got enough to retire on anyway, so he’s going in tomorrow to tell the Board it’s all over.

And there went our beloved Checkers.

So you see, it really wasn’t my fault. If blame is to be placed, it should rest on the shoulders of that guy who was in my cab, not me. The trouble was he didn’t ask me what I liked about Checkers. If he did, I would have told him about the jump seats and the miles of room in the back. I would have told him about the flat floorboards and how, if you were driving a Checker, it would bring you extra business every night because there were always some passengers who would let other types of cabs go by when they saw you coming. In fact, I once missed getting Andy Warhol in my cab because the cab I was driving was not a Checker. Although no one was in my cab, a Chevrolet, he let me drive right past him so he could take the Checker that was behind me.

But, alas, history cannot be rewritten. The Checkers are gone. And I do apologize for whatever role I may have played in bringing about this catastrophe.

Don’t hate me… please.

Come on, don’t throw my book in the garbage can. That’s not nice. Forgiveness is an important virtue, didn’t someone say that once?

Sorry… okay?

4 Celebrities

Certainly one thing that has not changed is a scene such as this: two teenage girls and their mothers, Agogers (people who are ‘agog’) from Georgia on their first trip to New York, piled into my cab at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on a Saturday evening at 7.30 p.m., en route to the Broadway show Beauty and the Beast.

‘Hey,’ the teenager sitting beside me said as we hit traffic heading into Times Square, ‘have you ever had a celebrity in your taxi?’

‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘I’ve had lots of them.’

‘Really?!’

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I once had the man who co-wrote the songs of the show you’re going to see.’

‘Wow, what’s his name?’

‘Howard Ashman.’

No response. She’d never heard of the late, great lyricist.

‘Have you ever had a movie star?’

‘Sure.’

‘Wow! Really? You have? Who? Who?’

‘Well, I’ve had Lauren Bacall.’

No response. Obviously this girl was not a fan of classic cinema.

‘How about Leonardo DiCaprio?’ I replied, hoping to hit a home run.

‘Holy Jesus! Leonardo DiCaprio! In this cab?’ At which point all four of them began fondling the upholstery, hoping some of Leo’s charisma would rub off on them.

What is it about celebrities, anyway? Are they really any different than you and me? Well, in a sense, no. Their food goes in one end and comes out the other, just like everyone else’s (although it may start out as sushi from Nobu’s for them and a tuna melt from Frank’s deli for you and me). But the nature of the lives they are living is really quite different than any other type of person. For example…

Starlight

I was cruising down Columbus Avenue one evening in 1987 when I was hailed at 77th Street by a middle-aged man wearing a tuxedo. He opened the rear door, but instead of getting in, he leaned forward and inspected the condition of the compartment and picked up a couple of errant pieces of paper from the floorboard. Deciding that my taxi now met his high standards, he then asked me to wait a minute while he retrieved his friends from a restaurant on the avenue. One of his friends, he said, was a ‘major VIP’.

Well, my curiosity was certainly aroused. Who could this Very Important Person be? In a few moments the man in the tuxedo reappeared from the restaurant with another man, also wearing a tux, and two women in fashionable evening dresses. The cause of all the fuss, it turned out, was this other man. He was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

It was a name you would recognize if you were past a certain age. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, had been a movie star, a leading man, in the 1930s and was the son of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, himself a big star from the silent movie era. I was familiar with Jr mostly because he was a pitch man for the wool industry and would appear in that capacity in television commercials.

We drove down Columbus Avenue a mere eleven blocks, to Lincoln Center. As Mr Fairbanks opened the door of my cab and stepped out into the plaza there, he was immediately surrounded by photographers snapping away, their strobe lights creating an explosion of brightness in the cool night air. He posed for the paparazzi, flashing a winning smile and looking altogether dapper. Apparently a special event of some kind was being held that night at Lincoln Center and the media were waiting for the stars to arrive.

After I drove away in anonymity, I had some thoughts about this phenomenon of celebrity. Consider this: although the glow of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr’s movie career had faded away nearly fifty years prior to that night, he was still being treated by the mortals around him with the care and adulation that you and I never receive for even a single day in our lives.

No, they are not the same as the rest of us. There is truly a phenomenon at work here. It’s like a force of nature, a type of energy. The physics of mass communications, if you will.

It can be interesting to observe how different celebrities deal with it. Some, like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, are quite comfortable with it. Others, like John Lennon the two times I saw him on the street, resist it by trying to remain unrecognized behind dark glasses, scarves and various disguises. And then there are those who, like rodeo cowboys riding on the back of a bull, can’t seem to get enough of it and will go out of their way to let you know who they are.

Leonardo Di who?

One pleasant Tuesday night in the summer of 1996 I found myself waiting once again in the taxi queue in front of the Bowery Bar in the East Village. The popular Tuesday night party Beige was in full swing there and it was a good place to get a fare during an otherwise slow night shift.

I finally got to the front of the line when a group of rowdy kids, probably too young to have been in there in the first place, emerged from the bar, playfully pushing and shoving each other as they approached my cab. Other than the fact that they were loud and goofing around, I noticed three things: 1) one of them was smoking a cigar that was bigger than his face, 2) one of them was a model-gorgeous female and the others were all guys, and 3) there were five of them.

Now there were two problems here. Cigars, of course, are a no-no in a taxicab. And New York City taxis by law are only allowed to carry four passengers. But this group was probably drunk, definitely raucous and they had jumped into my cab so quickly that I decided that playing taxicab cop was too much of an effort and decided to just drive them where they wanted to go without a protest. Three of the guys and the girl crammed themselves onto the back seat and a fellow who must have weighed in excess of three hundred pounds joined me in the front. And off we went.

Our destination was a club called Spy on Greene Street in Soho, a short ride. I opened the windows to allow for some ventilation of the cigar smoke and was being pretty much oblivious to the laughter and clamor surrounding me when a male voice from the back seat suddenly grabbed my attention.

‘Hey, driver,’ the voice said.

‘Yeah?’ I called back.

‘Hey, you know, this is Leonardo DiCaprio you’ve got back here!’

‘It is?’

‘Yeah!’

‘Leonardo Di who?’

‘Leonardo DiCaprio!’

‘So – who is Leonardo DiCaprio?’ I asked. This was before Titanic and I’d never heard of him.

A second voice belonging to the blond-haired kid smoking the cigar now joined in the conversation.

‘Don’t you know who I am?’ he cried out.

‘Uhhh… nooo…’

‘I’m an actor, man!’

‘Oh.’

‘Did you see This Boy’s Life?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I’ve heard of that movie,’ I said, ‘but I haven’t seen it. You were in that?’

‘I played with De Niro, man!’

‘Wow! Really!’

‘How about What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Did you see that?’

‘No, sorry, I didn’t see that one, either. You were in that?’

‘Yeah!’

I was certainly out of the loop. I would have liked to have discussed some of his work with him, but I hadn’t seen any of the kid’s movies.

‘Are you in anything that’s coming out soon?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, we just finished Romeo and Juliet,’ he said.

Well, here was something we could talk about. I know my Romeo and Juliet well and a lively conversation ensued between the two of us about this new version.

‘Who plays Mercutio?’ I wanted to know. ‘Who plays Tybalt? It’s set in modern times? Really! Hmmm… I wonder if that will work,’ and so on.

Our discussion continued until we arrived at Spy. As everyone else piled out of the cab, Leonardo DiWho surprised me. He stayed inside and started asking me questions about what it’s like to be a taxi driver.

Now, this impressed me – a lot. It brought to mind the difference between interesting versus interested. I don’t think there’s anything wrong about trying to be interesting, but I think it’s more admirable by far to be interested. For one thing, being interested makes you smarter. You will learn things by being interested. And, in addition to that, being interested gives the people you are talking to the feeling that they are important and that you care about them. It bolsters their self-esteem and makes them stronger. In my opinion, simply being interested is one of humanity’s most noble virtues. It doesn’t have to be a dog eat dog world.

So here was this kid smoking a cigar, a movie star, who you might expect to be the epitome of being interesting, instead turning the tables and being interested. What a breath of fresh air.

‘Who was the biggest celebrity tipper you ever had in your cab?’ he asked me.

‘Believe it or not, it was John McEnroe,’ I replied. ‘He gave me double the meter.’

‘Well,’ Leonardo DiWho said, ‘I’m gonna give you triple the meter!’

And he did.

I had a feeling this kid was going places and I didn’t want to forget his name, so I wrote it down on my trip sheet. My daughter, Suzy, was fourteen at the time and I’d never once been able to impress her by dropping the names of any of the celebrities I’ve had in my cab. Nevertheless, when I saw Suzy the next day, I told her I had a celebrity in my cab the previous night.

Looking down at my trip sheet, I read the name with some difficulty.

‘Have you ever heard of this guy… Leonardo… Di… uh… Cap… rio?’

A shriek came out of the mouth of my daughter that nearly shattered the wine glasses in the cabinet. This was followed by moans of the deepest anguish when it was learned that I had failed to obtain his autograph, a sin for which I have never been forgiven.

Oh, yes. She knew who he was.

Another question I’m frequently asked is, ‘How many celebrities have you had in your cab?’ I’ve wondered about this myself, so I made a list of every celebrity, big or small, I could think of who’d ever climbed into the back seat. By ‘big’ I mean a major star, like Leonardo DiCaprio. ‘Small’ would be someone who is known only locally, like a radio DJ or broadcast news personality.

The grand total, as of this writing, is 114. Some of these celebrities I’ve had more than once (Dick Clark – three times!), so if I counted each time that happened the total would be 122. And if I were able to count the ones I didn’t recognize, I’m sure the number would be God knows how many. But however you look at it, it’s a lot of celebs. So many, in fact, that it lends itself to categorization. Here are some of the stand outs:

Movie Stars – 17 – Lauren Bacall, Sean Penn, Dennis Hopper, Jane Seymour, Richard Dreyfuss, Robin Williams, Matt Dillon, Dan Aykroyd, Eli Wallach, Kevin Kline, Bill Pullman, Diane Keaton, Carroll O’Connor, Kevin Bacon, Tom Hulce, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr and, of course, Leo.

Pop Music Stars – 9 – Ray Davies (The Kinks), Johnny Rzeznik (Goo Goo Dolls), Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Carly Simon, Diahann Carroll, Gregg Allman, Derek Trucks, James Taylor.

Crooners – 3 – Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Jr, Eddie Fisher.

Folk Singers – 3 – Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul and Mary), Suzanne Vega, Richie Havens.

Famous Writers – 5 – Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, Harrison Salisbury, Rex Reed, Liz Smith.

Offspring of Celebrities Who Are Celebrities Themselves – 4 – Caroline Kennedy, Lucie Arnez, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, Steven Mailer (son of Norman).

Talk Show Hosts – 3 – Dick Cavett, David Susskind, Tom Snyder.

Band Leaders of Late-Night Talk Shows – 2 – Paul Schaeffer (Letterman), Max Weinberg (Conan O’Brian).

Big-Time Businessmen Who Named Their Companies After Themselves – 2 – Leon Hess (Hess Oil and owner of the NY Jets football team), Frank (‘it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’) Purdue.Writers of Famous Christmas Songs – 2 – Mel Tormé (‘The Christmas Song’, aka ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’), J. Fred Coots (‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’).

Porn Stars – 3 – Hyapatia Lee, Sharon Mitchell, Cara Lott.

Mick Jagger Exes – 2 – Marianne Faithfull, Bianca Jagger.

Fugitive Hippies – 1 – Abbie Hoffman.

That’s right. I had a famous fugitive hippie in my cab, and there aren’t too many of those around. Or perhaps I should say a ‘former’ fugitive hippie…

Abbie Hoffman

I was cruising up 8th Avenue one night in February, 1982, when I was hailed by two men on the street. One was a normal-looking, forty-something fellow and the other turned out to be a dark-haired, raving motormouth who spoke to his traveling companion in a semi-hysterical rant without giving him a chance to get a word in edgewise. We continued up 8th Avenue to Central Park West until we reached 65th Street, where the man with the obsessive outflow got out of the cab, leaving the other passenger with me. I turned right onto transverse and we proceeded across the park to the East Side.

‘That was Abbie Hoffman,’ the man said. ‘I’m his parole officer.’

Abbie Hoffman, if you’re too young to remember him, was an iconic counter-culture figure from the ’60s. He founded the Youth International Party (the “Yippies”) and received vast amounts of publicity by engineering stunts and demonstrations which mocked some of the dubious values of American society. He had been convicted of dealing cocaine in 1973 and became a fugitive until 1980, when he re-emerged and served a brief prison term.

It was a surprise and something of a revelation to be able to be a ‘fly on the wall’ during this ride. A surprise because Abbie Hoffman had seemed to me to be something of a folk legend, more like a Johnny Appleseed or a Paul Bunyon than a real person. Yet there he was.

And a revelation to observe the condition he was actually in. I was saddened but not altogether surprised several years later to learn that he had committed suicide.

However, it is another iconic personage from the ’60s (and beyond) who is the answer to this frequently asked question: ‘Of all the celebrities you’ve had in your cab, which one is your favorite?’

Paul Simon’s warmth

On two occasions I have been honored to transport the derriere of the great Paul Simon in my taxicab. The composer of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Mrs, Robinson’, ‘The Boxer’ and so many other wonderful songs, Paul Simon is someone who I can truly say has enriched my life through his music. It can be a little overwhelming, however, to meet someone in person whom you have admired for so long. What do you say to a living legend? What, when you find yourself suddenly face to face with such a larger-than-life character, do you talk about?

Why, baseball, of course.

I was heading uptown on Central Park West on a lovely day in June, 1983, looking for my next passenger, when I spotted him standing there with a doorman on the opposite side of the street. They both had an ‘I want a cab’ expression on their faces which I took as my cue to make one of those sweeping U-turns that taxis in New York City are famous for. Taking care not to run over my favorite songwriter and thus bring to an end the long series of Simon and Garfunkel reunions, I pulled my cab around to where they were standing, and Paul got in.

He wanted to go to the East Side, so we headed through Central Park in that direction. I noticed Paul was wearing an unusual baseball cap with an insignia on it that I didn’t recognize so, seeking an entrance point from which to start a conversation, I asked him what his hat was all about. He told me it was a hat from a Japanese baseball team, that he’d ‘played a stadium over there’, and that the hat was a souvenir. I asked him jokingly which position he had played and, matching the spirit of my question, Paul replied that he’d played ‘guitar’.

I noticed that we had found some common ground upon which to communicate and that there was some rapport between us, so I decided to steer the discussion to an area of fertile soil when baseball is the subject of conversation in New York – the Yankees. I had heard or read somewhere that Paul was a Yankee fan, which might be expected of the person who wrote the line, ‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’, and I was not wrong.

As our chat about the Yankees got going, I could see that Paul was emotionally involved with the franchise and its meaning to New York. He spoke knowledgeably about the players and the problems the organization was having. And he had nothing positive to say about George Steinbrenner, the owner of the team, or Billy Martin, who was in one of his many incarnations as the Yankee manager at the time, even going so far as saying that the two of them were not only bad for baseball, but bad for New York City as well.

I was quite impressed by the passion with which he spoke. It was obvious that baseball in general and the Yankees in particular were things that were important to him. So involved had Paul become in our discussion of the subject, in fact, that he stayed on in my cab for a minute after we reached his destination in order to wrap up the conversation – a great honor, from my point of view. Once he finally did leave I was left with the impression that in Paul’s world the travails of Julio down by the schoolyard and Cecilia up in his bedroom were of no more importance than the slings and arrows of Willie Randolph at second and Dave Winfield in right.