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.
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