Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver. Eugene Salomon

you what,’ he said as he started to step out of my cab into the freezing afternoon air, ‘if you can get George to sign the papers, I’ll give you a percentage.’

      And with that he smiled, waved goodbye, and went on his way.

      I drove less than a block down Broadway, already doing the math in my head of what a percentage would bring me, when my next passenger, a middle-aged woman, hailed me from the frozen street and jumped in. She sat in the same spot in back where Paul Simon had just been sitting.

      ‘Hey, you know who I just had in my cab?’ I said to her… ‘Paul Simon!’

      ‘You did?’ she said in amazement. She then started moving her body back and forth against the seat. ‘You mean I’m sitting in Paul Simon’s warmth?!’

      

      

       A Woody Allen story

      Of all the celebrities in New York, I don’t think there is any who is as much identified with the city nor as visible in the city as Woody Allen. I have often seen him around town – going into Knicks games at Madison Square Garden, directing or acting in his own movies on the street, or just walking around. It’s easy to spot him. He looks exactly the same in real life as he does on the screen.

      He has also always been the most locatable celebrity in New York City. You always knew where this guy would be on a Monday night – at Michael’s Pub on 55^th Street between 2^nd and 3^rd Avenues. For many years Woody played the clarinet in a Dixieland band there without ever missing a date. He was always there on Monday nights.

      In 1977, for example, when the Academy Awards ceremonies were still being held on Mondays, Woody’s movie Annie Hall won Oscars for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture. Was Woody in Hollywood to pick up his Oscar? No, he was playing the clarinet at Michael’s Pub.

      It so happens that Michael’s Pub, before it moved in 1996, was situated on the ground floor of a high-rise office building that is occupied almost entirely by lawyers. Many of them work late so this building is an excellent place to look for a fare between the hours of seven and ten on any weeknight. If a taxi driver waits there for a few minutes between these hours, he will be sure to get a customer. Therefore I would often be there, and if it was a Monday night I’d always wonder if I would be seeing Woody Allen.

      At 9.25 p.m. he would come out of the place. It was that predictable. Sometimes he’d be alone, sometimes he’d be with Soon-Yi, sometimes with his father. He had a Mercedes and a driver waiting for him. If people gathered around him and asked him to pose for a photograph, he would oblige for a minute and then his driver, in what appeared to be a rehearsed drill, would wrench him away and usher him into his car. I saw this many times and I always considered it to be a treat, one of those special, little New York experiences. And there was an additional treat from a business point of view. The people who had come to Michael’s Pub to see Woody Allen would also become taxi customers, so adding them onto the lawyers made Monday nights even better over there. For some reason nearly all of them were Europeans, usually from France, Denmark, Sweden, Germany or Holland. I supposed that Woody was big in those countries and apparently it was well known that you could see him in person at this particular location. Perhaps it was even better known over there than it was here, because my passengers were rarely Americans.