Writings and Reflections

Hot Town, Summer in the City

by Lloyd B. Abrams

It was a lucrative summer job, driving a taxicab in New York City. Unlike the ten regimented months teaching in a public school, I was able to go where I wanted, stop when I wanted, and pick up whom I wanted, despite the taxi commission's often-flouted rules about refusal. Looking back through a forty-year-old lens, it was a job that forced me to learn about getting around The City of cities, and also about navigating my own interior landscape.

Although I grew up in a mostly white suburb, I came out of college with egalitarian principles and the dream of being part of a just and ethical world. Those possibly naive ideals collided head-on with the hazardous reality of driving a taxicab in the late 60s and early 70s, of transporting dark-skinned men into the bowels of the slums and the barrio.

I usually showed up at the taxi garage on 60th Street near Eleventh Avenue around three in the afternoon to drive the night shift, when traffic moved faster and, I figured, more money could be made. I often spent ten or more grungy, grimy hours behind the wheel of a non-air-conditioned Dodge taxicab - in smoky, fume-filled air before the 1970 Clean Air Act had any effect - subsisting on deli-meat sandwiches I had packed and peaches and plums I bought from sidewalk fruit stands along the way.

I often drove past midnight and returned to the garage only when there no more people hailing me along 42nd Street or at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, or when there were far too many white VACANT lights on the roofs of other cabs competing for far too few fares. Getting a check each week for 49 percent of the meter was satisfying, but being handed a tip in real currency each trip fed an obsessive-compulsive craving that cab-driving had awakened.

Late one afternoon, after dropping off a passenger at Penn Station, I was approached by a young black man, perhaps a few years younger than I. At my open window, he pleaded that he had to pick up his grandmother to take her to the hospital. It was hard to resist both his persuasiveness and the eighty-plus block fare so I unlocked the rear door and allowed him to enter.

I drove uptown to 115th between Park and Madison, a blighted, scabbed-over neighborhood. On many buildings, doors and windows were boarded up. From behind the plexiglass divider, he pointed to a space on the left side of the street between two cars. "There," he said. "Pull over there."

I began to feel apprehensive. When he insisted, "Next to the sidewalk," I maneuvered only slightly closer to the curb, still leaving me enough distance to pull out. I also left the transmission in DRIVE with my left foot on the brake. He got out on the driver's side, slammed the door, and stepped over to my window. In a glance, I caught a glint of shiny metal in his outstretched hand. A split-second later, I floored the gas pedal and tore out of there.

On that desolate, tenement-lined street, I reacted reflexively to what I perceived was a knife and a holdup, or maybe much worse. Through my four-decade-old lens, it was an opened pocketknife, its shiny blade was about to be pressed against my neck, and I barely escaped becoming just another cabdriver robbery-homicide statistic.

Financially, all I lost was 51 percent of that fare due the company - "You got no police report? Can't do nuthin' for ya" - even though I detailed what had happened on my trip sheet. But in my still-evolving sense of fairness and morality, I had lost far more than that 51 percent.

Rev 9 / December 21, 2007

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December, 2007…Copyright © 2007, Lloyd B. Abrams
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