(Apparently) The Taxi God Rides Again

I have spoken here about my former life as a taxi driver and how I am now once again working in that noble occupation. I spoke about how even when I was a convinced atheist it did seem odd that my "luck" was so good, that when bad a thing happened to me (and it was never that bad) something pretty good would soon follow, that at the least evened things out. I had half in jest decided that there is a God of Taxi drivers, or an angel or saint working with God that looked after at least me and probably other taxi drivers who worked the night time streets of New York.



My wife tells me that God was watching over me because although I was not a believer I was doing honest work, not robbing anyone or insulting anyone and in the prcess I was feeding, housing and even at times doing more for a wife and two children, these two children who were working hard at becoming adults and who needed me and the small but sufficient money I could wring out of the night time streets. I still have a problem believing in such a personally involved God. I once had a conversation (in a taxi I was driving, naturally) with a Reform rabbi who admitted to me that God must either not be omniscient or else God is not omnipotent, because a just God (and God is Love and God is Justice and God is That Which is right) would not permit the worst injustices that befall His (for want of a better word) children, who the rabbi did say he believed are all human beings and not just this rabbi's tribe of them.



It seems to me that the universe, or the multiverse of universes that exists, that life, that growing and beautiful trees , life forms that fit together on this planet, could not just have happened, that some force had to be involved in making sure that it happened. The big bang theory to me does not explain much, as far as I know it does not explain how apparent nothingness, or one atom or whatever it was, could explode outward and here we have galaxies, stars, planets and life forms that feed each other, give each other what is needed to breathe, and are so perfectly symetrical. Coincidence? As we New Yorkers would say "you're kidding me."



So these things seem to happen. That on the worse night I earn what is at least minimally acceptable to justify the labor, even with a car that breaks down, even with being dispatched at six instead of five. Then one night last week I got further evidence that some force or power is on my side, for whatever reason I cannot explain. It was a night that had started badly, I got dragged out to Brooklyn during the rush hour and as the trip progressed my passenger got to complaining that the meter was running to fast, that she did not beleive the forty cent increments were the correct fare, that the last time she took this trip it had cost about half what it was costing now. (This has to be either a lie or a reference to a taxi trip she took when she was a little girl on her mother's lap.) I girded myself to be stiffed or to have to negotiate a partial payment. In the end she did pay what was on the meter, part of it in nickles and dimes, but pay she did.



I got back into the city and got a fare outside the criminal court/ overnight lockup at 100 Centre Street. I think the passenger was a cop of some kind, a jail guard or court officer. Anyhow he pretended not to understand the one dollar rush hour surcharge and left me forty cents short of what was on the meter. It would not have paid in any sense to have argued with him. I was not looking forward to a decent night. I struggled on, brought someone who wanted to go to Greenwich Avenue to Greenwich Street, corrected that for free. It was not looking too good.



Near the end of my shift, which is five in the morning, at three o'clock, I was tooling up Amsterdam Avenue and there was not another car within two lights behind me. I was on the left and I spotted a block ahead a man standing outside a bar waving at me. I put on my right turn signal and carefully, with no other vehicles around (I thought) made it to the right hand lane, stopped, waited for my green light and got to the passenger. As he leaned towards the window to ask me something a cop car pulled up out of nowhere, or so it seemed, and the officer at the passenger side indicated that I should roll down my window, and he asked I give him my trip sheet, which was happily all filled out with no blank spaces. "I want you to tell me why you went through that red light" he said. I told him that quite frankly, in my mind's eye and to my memory I had not done that. His partner, in the driver's seat looked at my trip card. He said to the other officer "this poor bastard's been working all night. Leave him alone." The first officer handed back my trip card and told me to be more carefull in the future. The passenger requested a long out of town upstate New York trip. I had enought time to make it back to the garage by five, and got paid really almost the margin of what was my profit for the night, and not too shabby at that.



Last night I brought two moms and two kids from close to Penn Station to Harlem, they paid me and thanked me and went on their ways. I was heading west looking for my left turn to downtown when I saw another mom with some kids standing on the corner with lots of bags and valises and a shopping cart. She waived at me. Almost any other cabbie would have passed her up it was so obvioulsy going to be a losing propostion. I guess it was the social worker in me, I stopped and did not put the meter on till the van taxi I was driving was loaded (maybe ten minutes waiting for free). I took her where she needed to go, she had just been booted out of homeless shelter because, she said, the staff had gone into her room and robbed her of sixty dollars and she had called the police who came to the shelter, run by Hale House and took her complaint. (My wife fully believes this story, and she is a shelter veteran, and I, an old CPS worker find it rings true also.) I turned off the meter before I went back and started to help her unload all the stuff, and there was plenty, and her eight year old daughter refused for a few minutes to leave the taxi saying only that she was too tired and that she wanted to sleep. Well, maybe a whole hour was gone for the ten bucks which the lady insisted on paying, not even enough to cover an hour's lease and gas, let alone pay me, but once in a while one is called on to do little things that matter. Somehow, I came out of the night with my barely acceptable minimum profit in spite of this.



Maybe tonight will be better.