Thank You For Picking Me Up

Friday, June 30, 2006
In the 1960s, the black comedian Godfrey Cambridge used to tell his audience that there was only one way a Negro man (that was the correct wordage of the time) could get a taxi in New York.You take all your clothes off. You wrap yourself in a bedsheet. You go downtown and stand in front of the United Nations. And you go "Oooga booga booga." Back then we thought that was pretty funny.

It's been known that in New York City taxi drivers pass by black people and particularly black men who hail them. It happened to David Dinkins, our former mayor. It's happened to other celebrities, and incidents have gotten into the media from time to time. The Taxi and Limousine Commission and the NYPD run sting operations to catch taxi drivers who do this. The penalties are pretty severe, and they ought to be so, and yet it still happens.

Rumor has it, I read it ages ago but cannot find reference on the internet, and it might have been a malicious lie, that Godfrey Cambridge himself got a few tickets for doing just this, back when he was a struggling taxi driving comedian/ actor and a driver could get caught doing this a few times and keep his license (not true now) . Sometimes black taxi drivers, usually immigrants, do get caught doing this.

Now I never made it my practice to not pick someone up because of his race. I think lots of taxi drivers can honestly say that. I never made it my practice to refuse to pick someone up for the various real and honest reasons that are not legal excuses and that can sure look like racism - the passenger wanted to go to a dangerous area, and my car is bright yellow, an advertisement that I have money and no weapon; the passenger wanted to go to an area where people don't take yellow cabs and I'd be stuck for half an hour empty burning gas and paying rent on an empty moving taxi. Hasidic Jews are routinely passed up by cabbies who love to ferry other Jews between the Upper West Side and the theater district or Wall Street or Greenwich Village twelve hours a day. The Hasid has "Brooklyn" written all over him, and during busy heavy traffic times the above excuses or reasons apply to him. People trying to stop a yellow cab in Manhattan while in religious Muslim garb will have the same experiences as the Hasid and for the same reasons.

At any rate, because I am one of the many taxi drivers who do respect the law and decency I have black passengers in my cab every shift. So, a few times a week people thank me for stopping for them. I wish they wouldn't. I go where they want me to go. Usually, once I drop them off I seek the fastest route back to Manhattan if I find myself in one of the "outer boroughs", or back to downtown, where my customers are waiting, if I find myself in Harlem. Wouldn't you?

Also I try to know when hockey games, rap concerts and heavy metal concerts are letting out of Madison Square Garden. I don't want to be caught within a quarter mile of there when they do. This has nothing to do with anyone's race. it's based upon hard learned lessons, the kind of lessons one does not want to learn more than once.

I've been back driving taxi this week, for the first time in a decade and the business has changed. I do fewer rides in an hour and they tend to be for longer distances, so I remain busy (with a passenger) about the same proportion of my time. The fares are much higher. The fare structure seems to be designed in part now to do what taxi drivers risked tickets to do in the past, that is to keep inconvenient passengers on the sidewalk, heading for the subway station, or the bus stop.

I've learned a few things these few days I've been back driving. I should check "Gridlock Sam" on the internet before I go to the job and take a printout with me.

I've read that in Tokyo there are no street and building addresses as we know them here. New York is becoming a bit like Tokyo. Many of my passengers are generic whites who were born in the interior of the continent who perhaps went about their lives going from landmark to landmark instead of from address to address. This wasn't so often the case even ten years ago. All the hundreds of restaurants and nightclubs and even hotels have changed names probably twice since 1996. So even I get that "I can't find the place you want to go to" feeling. This too shall pass.