Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver

The cab driver who does not speak English

As mentioned before, it’s quite common in my case to have someone get in my cab and suddenly express amazement that I’m an American. Or, if they don’t actually say ‘American’, they often say something like, ‘Wow, it’s really nice to have an English-speaking cab driver for a change.’ Immediately following this comment I will be told a story about how my passenger was recently in a cab with some driver who spoke absolutely no English and had to use hand signals to make this driver understand where he wanted to go. I’ve heard this story so many times that it began to give me the impression that there must be a small army of cabbies out there who speak virtually no English.

And yet I had never met one.

It struck me as odd that with all these reports about cab drivers who don’t speak English, I, who meet cab drivers all the time on the street, in garages, in front of hotels and at the airports, had never once found myself in a situation in which I could not communicate with a cabbie. Sure, there were lots of guys whose English was accented because their native language was Hindi, Arabic, Russian or whatever, but never did I have to resort to sign language to make myself understood, nor did I ever really have a problem communicating with words. So what was going on here? Why do I keep hearing about cab drivers who don’t speak English?

I had to become a crime victim myself to find out the answer.

On Christmas Eve, 1987, I was mugged. I had been at a party at a friend’s apartment on 9th Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets with my wife and young daughter. The party went on late and it was after three o’clock in the morning when we were finally ready to leave. My daughter had long since fallen asleep so I decided to walk to 10th Avenue, where I’d parked my car, and then bring it around to 9th Avenue to pick up my family.

I made a mistake that I, as a veteran New Yorker and a cab driver, should never have made: I attempted to walk down a deserted street (45th), in a not-so-great part of town (Hell’s Kitchen), late at night, carrying something that showed some value (two wrapped Christmas presents). When I was halfway to 10th Avenue, I was attacked by three thugs.

The whole thing took less than fifteen seconds: I heard running footsteps coming toward me from behind, I was shoved into a doorway, and I had a knife held against my throat by one man while the other two grabbed the Christmas presents and went through my pockets for my money (about a hundred dollars). Having gotten what they wanted, they then started to run down 45th Street, back toward 9th Avenue.

They say you follow your instincts in these situations, and my instinct was to let them get a bit of a lead and then run after them in the hope of finding a cop who could catch them and arrest them. I didn’t want to get too close to them – they had a knife – but I wanted to keep them in sight. So I started running after them in pursuit.

When the muggers got to 9th Avenue they ran to the right and then were momentarily out of my range of vision. Then, as I got to the avenue myself, I saw them approaching 44th Street and run east on that street before disappearing once again from my view.

I stopped for a second and looked around, hoping to find a cop, but there were none around. I then realized that I was bleeding from the neck and that my shirt was covered with blood. Oddly, I wasn’t terribly concerned about that at that moment. All I wanted to do was to catch these bastards. And they were getting away.

Suddenly I had a brilliant idea. I would hail a cab and then follow the thieves in the cab until we found a police car. I ran out onto 9th Avenue. Yes! – there was an available cab heading right toward me! My luck had turned. I threw both hands up excitedly to hail the cab and it pulled up next to me. I jumped in the back seat. This cab had no partition, more good luck because I’d be able to see the muggers more easily.

The driver was a young guy who looked like he might be Moroccan. He turned around to look at me so he could get my destination. I was obviously in a state of great agitation, but I calmed myself down enough so I could communicate.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I was just mugged. The guys who mugged me are running down 44th Street. I want to follow them ’til we can find a cop!’

My driver did not react. He just looked at me.

‘Go left on 44th! Please! Go! Drive! They’re getting away!’

He continued to stare at me blankly. Then he started to speak. Out of his mouth came these words, and this is an exact quote:

‘Obbie de bobbie de bah.’

I was completely desperate.

‘Listen,’ I begged the guy, ‘I’m a cab driver myself and I just got mugged! Please! Go left on 44th Street! Go! Go! I’m a cab driver!’

‘Obbie de bobbie de bah?’ he asked.

I tried pantomime. I pretended I was holding a steering wheel in my hands and then pointed toward 44th Street.

‘Obbie de bobbie de bah?’

Defeated, I got out of the cab in disgust, slammed the door, and walked back to my friend’s apartment to tend to my wound. Although the cut in my neck had produced quite a bit of blood, it fortunately wasn’t very serious and a visit to a hospital wasn’t necessary.

The muggers were never caught.

I spent the following week ranting and raving to anyone who’d listen about cab drivers in New York who don’t speak English. What’s the matter with this city, I wailed, that they’ll let anyone whose breath can fog a mirror push a hack here? Why should we have to pay good money to morons who think Madison Square Garden is some place where they grow tulips? Why, why, oh WHY does the Taxi and Limousine Commission allow these hordes of immigrants who can’t speak a damned syllable of English to clog our streets with this morass of yellow clunkers?

And then I had a brilliant realization. I knew what it was! It wasn’t that there were dozens or hundreds or thousands of cab drivers who don’t speak English – it was this one guy! Everyone who’s ever been in his cab is driven so crazy by this one guy that they start to generalize like mad and tell everyone they meet that there are no English-speaking cabbies anymore in New York City.But it’s really just this one guy! Too bad I had to become a statistic myself to acquire such a profound insight.

It’s just this one guy, I tell you!

3 Changes

I was driving a friendly, female Gonnabee to Williamsburg in Brooklyn one night in 2005 when she asked me that famous question: ‘How long have you been driving a cab?’

‘How old are you?’ I replied.

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘I’ve been driving a cab since you were eighty-six in your last lifetime.’ Which is my way of saying, ‘Since before you were born, honey.’

Big smile and wide eyes.

‘Wow,’ she marveled, ‘you must have seen so many changes!’

Well, the answer to that is kind of both yes and no. Certainly some things have changed. You don’t dare light up a cigarette in a public place anymore, not even in a bar, or you will be immediately arrested by the cigarette police. The hookers have been driven off the streets (almost). And there aren’t nearly as many New York ‘characters’ begging for our attention on the sidewalks as there used to be. (Like the ‘Opera Man’ who could often be found screeching out arias on the corner of 57th and Broadway.)

But for the most part I think things have stayed more the same than they’ve changed. The buildings are tall, the streets are crowded, and people are in a big rush. Donald Trump is rich and has a beautiful wife. And whoever was elected mayor has turned out to be an idiot.

The truth is I don’t really know any more about what has changed or not changed in New York City than anyone else. Except for one thing – the taxi business. This is the one sector of life in which I proclaim myself to be the grand master, an all-knowing sage whose opinions must be given the utmost respect. So if you want to know what’s changed in the taxi business, hey, listen up and take notes. There will be an exam the next time you’re in my cab.

By around 1995 I became aware of an ominous trend which had seeped into the trade. People started to get into my cab, plop themselves comfortably in the back seat, and tell me they wanted to go to some destination in Brooklyn on the expectation that I would actually be willing to take them there.

This represented a significant change in the taxi industry. More specifically, it marked a change in the attitudes of drivers. Since time began, taxi drivers in New York City had been known for being crusty, hard-nosed men, often short on manners, fearless of authority, and willing to drive you to your destination only on the condition that they were in the mood to do so.

A ride to Brooklyn or one of the other outer boroughs at most times of the day is considered undesirable because it almost always means the driver will be coming back to Manhattan without a passenger – and that is dead time. So the driver sees such a fare not as money made, but as money lost. Thus he refuses the ride, even though he may be fined if the snubbed passenger makes an issue of it with the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

So prevalent were refusals to Brooklyn that the mantra of the New York City taxi driver had become – and this was a citywide joke – ‘I don’t go to Brooklyn.’ An old friend of mine who drove a cab in the ’70s, Dennis Charnoff, used to claim that he never had taken a fare out of Manhattan. Not to Brooklyn, not to Queens, not to the Bronx, not even to the airports. Never.

In the spirit of the great talk show host Johnny Carson, who once joked that he planned to have the words ‘Johnny will not be back after these messages’ written on his tombstone, I myself have considered having the following epitaph written on my own grave:

Eugene Salomon

1949 – (a really, really long time from now)

TAXI DRIVER

‘I DON’T GO TO BROOKLYN’

(Just don’t bury me in Brooklyn. It would kill the whole joke.)

So what happened to the brassy driver with an attitude? What changed? The ethnicity of taxi drivers, that’s what changed. By around 1995, by my own estimation, something like seventy-five percent of cabbies were from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They had taken the place of drivers from such countries as Greece, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Romania. And, oh yes, America.

Why did this occur? Because the working conditions of the industry were allowed to fall so far below the standards of other available jobs in the United States by uncaring city officials that experienced drivers were leaving the business in droves.

In 1979 a change in the rules made all taxi drivers ‘independent contractors’. (Even though the city retained the right to tell us what we may charge for our services. How ‘independent’ is that?) ‘Independent contractor’ means ‘self-employed’. Thus, no benefits. No sick days, no overtime, no paid vacations, no health care, no pensions. Add onto that twelve hour shifts, a job that is dangerous, and no union to demand timely rate increases (yes, a workforce of forty thousand and no union) and you no longer have to wonder why you can’t remember the last time you had an American at the wheel of your cab. Or a Russian, Israeli or Greek, for that matter.

The void was filled by the Indians and Pakistanis. When immigration regulations allowed these workers to enter the country and get green cards, the bosses of the taxi business discovered they had finally found the perfect cab driver – someone whose present working conditions are so much better than what they were in the old country (a Pakistani driver once told me he made better money driving a cab in New York than he would if he were a medical doctor in Pakistan) that he actually puts great value on his job as a taxi driver and will do whatever he has to do to make sure he doesn’t lose it.

In short, taxi drivers have become compliant and timid. Gone is the guy named Lenny smoking a cigar who drops you off on Lexington instead of Park because ‘Park is out of my way’. Gone is the maniac who speeds past police cars and runs red lights. It makes me nostalgic, it does, for the good old days…

Jackie oh my God

On a beautiful summer day in 1981, unfortunately with a passenger already in the back seat of my cab, I stopped at a red light on Central Park South, right next to the Plaza Hotel. Suddenly appearing from out of nowhere, as if from a dream, and walking right toward me was a sight that stunned me completely and utterly.

It was Jackie Kennedy.

I’m not sure if my jaw literally dropped, but if someone told me it was down on the floorboard I would not have been completely surprised.

‘Oh my God,’ I blurted out to my passenger, ‘it’s Jackie Kennedy!’

‘Oh my God,’ she replied with equal amazement, ‘it is Jackie Kennedy!’

Yes, Jackie Kennedy, accompanied by another woman, was looking for a taxi and had sighted my taxi. Like most New Yorkers, I am relatively blasé about celebrities, but this was not just any celebrity. This was the ultimate celebrity. This was Jackie Kennedy. To say I was completely mesmerized would not have been an understatement.

Now you have to remember who Jackie Kennedy was. Throughout the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s it is safe to say she was second only to Queen Elizabeth as being the most famous woman in the world. You saw her image just about every day of your life in magazines, newspapers, books or on the tube. You heard about her on the radio. She was nearly as familiar to you as a member of your own family and it would have been impossible not to have recognized her instantly. And there she was, from the land of the surreal, suddenly walking directly toward me.

Certain moments in your life create such an impact that they remain frozen in time forever in your memory. You replay them over and over in your mind, noticing and renoticing every detail in the mental image. This was such a moment for me.

She wore a loose-fitting burgundy blouse with narrow, vertical, gold stripes and a black skirt cut at the knees. Her hair was the brown, shoulder-length style we were so used to seeing in photographs. In fact, although she was over fifty at the time, Jackie appeared remarkably to have aged not a day since she had been the First Lady of the United States. She looked exactly the same.

And she was gorgeous. Drop-dead gorgeous, as the expression goes. Stunningly, exceedingly beautiful. A woman everyone would look twice at, even if she weren’t already so overwhelmingly famous.

Jackie walked out onto the street in front of my cab and peered inside, trying to see if there was already a passenger in the back seat. If I could have pushed an ejection button and sent my passenger flying off into the stratosphere I would certainly have done so, and Jackie would have gotten in.

But it was not to be. She saw that my taxi was occupied and then spotted another cab, a Checker, without a passenger in it directly next to mine on my left. As she walked around the front of my cab and entered the narrow space between this other cab and my own, I realized that in a moment she would be right next to me and, because my window was already rolled down, I would be able to speak to her. I felt a distinct rush that must have been a release of adrenaline, and then, as the moment arrived with Jackie Kennedy standing beside me, I found that my mouth had opened and words had begun to dribble out of it.

‘Hello, Mrs Onassis,’ I said sheepishly.

Right away it didn’t sound right. Sure, her name was actually ‘Jackie Onassis’ because she’d married Aristotle Onassis, but it didn’t fit her. In my mind, and I think in everybody’s mind, she would always be ‘Jackie Kennedy’. I thought maybe I should have just said, ‘Hello, Jackie’, but, anyway, it was too late. The words had been said and she’d heard me and now she was putting her attention on me. I feared she might scowl at me or just ignore me entirely, but she didn’t – she smiled at me.

It was a warm smile that, interestingly, made me feel special, as if somehow we had known each other for a long time. It was a smile that communicated that she knew who she was and was quite aware of and caring about how her presence affected other people, and that she had mastered the elements of fame.

But more than that, it was a smile that brought back an era. Here was Camelot, not gone, but returning to life once again. Here was John F. Kennedy and the idealism of my generation. Here was the woman in the pink suit covered with the president’s blood, catapulted out of history, standing right next to me, undefeated, triumphant.

Jackie reached forward to open the door of the Checker cab on my left and as she did so I could see through the window that the driver of that cab was an old-time professional, an American, about fifty years old. Here was a guy who could easily be typecast in a commercial or a movie as ‘taxi driver’. He had an Archie Bunker kind of appearance.

Jackie Kennedy opened the rear door of his cab and started to get in, but before she could sit down, this driver turned around in his seat and looked right at her – he had something to say. With his face contorted into a snarl, and with a voice that was somewhere between a growl and an outright scream, out came these exact words:

‘I’M ONLY GOING UPTOWN!’

‘Oh my God,’ I said to my passenger, ‘I can’t believe he spoke to her that way!’

‘Oh my God,’ she echoed, ‘I can’t believe it, either!’

But Jackie batted not an eye. She was, in fact, going uptown and stepped into the guy’s cab with her companion, completely undisturbed by the driver’s incredible lack of manners.

So there he was, the taxi driver of old, himself a vestige of a bygone era. I believe I can safely say that if this guy wasn’t going to take Jackie Kennedy downtown, he wasn’t going to take you to Brooklyn. But not to worry, today a perfectly nice fellow named Ramesh will drive you to Brooklyn, or to the Bronx for that matter, without a word of protest.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s changed in the taxi business in New York City.

Along with one other thing – did someone say ‘Checker cab’?

How I brought about the demise of the Checker Motor Company

Now here’s something I can’t blame on the mayor. In fact, I hate to admit it, but it may have been my fault: the Checkers are gone. The beloved Checkers – these were the taxis you see in any movie set in New York City between 1956 and about 1990. Built like tanks, they had extended room in the back, flat floorboards with no uncomfortable ‘hump’ in the middle, and two folding ‘jump seats’ that enabled five adults (or twenty midgets) to sit back there. These vehicles have become nostalgia items for anyone who grew up or lived in New York during those years.

Most people don’t know that the Checkers were manufactured by the Checker Motor Company, which was not a subsidiary of General Motors or any other conglomerate, but was an independent company on its own. Located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, nearly all the cars that rolled off that assembly line were specifically built to be taxicabs. To make it easier for taxi fleets to replace broken parts and to keep costs down, they stopped redesigning the Checkers in 1956. So the Checkers looked like they were old cars even though they may have been relatively new.

But the Checker Motor Company had big problems. After the gasoline crisis in 1979, many taxi fleet owners switched to Chevrolets, Fords and Dodges. In the highly competitive world of automobile manufacturing, Checker was losing ground and by 1981 was barely treading water.

How was I to know that an innocent conversation between myself and a certain passenger would provide the coup de grâce for these fabulous cars? I’m asking you in advance to please not hate me. Okay, here’s the story…

In the second week of July, 1981, I was driving a Checker cab that was owned by my friend Itzy at a garage called West Side Ignition. At West Side Ignition they had a saying: ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. And if it is broken, don’t fix it.’ So when I’d bring the car in for an oil change and mention to Itzy that the shocks were basically gone, Itzy would tell me that as long as the cab was in running condition, to hell with the shocks, just go out and drive. Apparently ‘running condition’ meant that your condition would be better if you were running instead of trying to drive the damned thing.