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!
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