Читать книгу Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver - Eugene Salomon - Страница 17

A woman of perhaps seventy years entered my cab one evening in September, 1998 whose destination was her apartment building on 96^th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. In her arms she held a cute little Cocker Spaniel whose name, I learned, was Terrence. It took only a few words of admiration from me about her pet to set her off on a tirade. This woman was a firecracker ready to explode.

She told me she had started the day, as she always did, by taking her dog for an early-morning walk in Central Park. Not too far from where she enters the park, she said, there’s a wide-open field where she lets Terrence off the leash for a few minutes to get some exercise before they head back to the apartment house. That day had been no different – she had let little Terrence off the leash.

But this is technically against the law and the violation was spotted by a cop in a patrol car who swooped down on her, she said, like a hawk zeroing in on a mouse. The cop informed her of the infraction and told her he would have to write her a summons for a hundred dollars.

Identification, please.

She didn’t have any.

At this point the policeman could have taken her off to the police station if he’d wanted to, but, she said bitterly, instead he opted to do her a ‘favor’ by hauling her and Terrence in the cruiser to her own building. After they rode up in the elevator to the 6^th floor, she showed him the necessary papers, he wrote her out the ticket, and he departed, leaving behind one pissed-off septuagenarian.

One has to wonder what ‘bigger crimes’ are prevented by cracking down on old ladies who let their dogs off the leash. But one does not have to wonder why, after a few years of this, Mayor Giuliani’s popularity plummeted like a stone and he began to be known as ‘Mayor Crueliani’ in my taxicab.

Upon reflection, I found that I had acquired a new metaphor. This incident symbolized for me what New York City had become – not quite a police state (thank you, the Constitution of the United States), but a too-heavily-policed state. The trauma of being victimized by a thug had been replaced to some degree by the trauma of being victimized by agents of the municipality itself.

But that is not to say that the city has become a place where crime is at such a minimum that you no longer need to have ‘street smarts’. You do. And the most important street smart in a city of strangers is simply good manners.