Читать книгу Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver - Eugene Salomon - Страница 21

I was driving a friendly, female Gonnabee to Williamsburg in Brooklyn one night in 2005 when she asked me that famous question: ‘How long have you been driving a cab?’

‘How old are you?’ I replied.

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘I’ve been driving a cab since you were eighty-six in your last lifetime.’ Which is my way of saying, ‘Since before you were born, honey.’

Big smile and wide eyes.

‘Wow,’ she marveled, ‘you must have seen so many changes!’

Well, the answer to that is kind of both yes and no. Certainly some things have changed. You don’t dare light up a cigarette in a public place anymore, not even in a bar, or you will be immediately arrested by the cigarette police. The hookers have been driven off the streets (almost). And there aren’t nearly as many New York ‘characters’ begging for our attention on the sidewalks as there used to be. (Like the ‘Opera Man’ who could often be found screeching out arias on the corner of 57^th and Broadway.)

But for the most part I think things have stayed more the same than they’ve changed. The buildings are tall, the streets are crowded, and people are in a big rush. Donald Trump is rich and has a beautiful wife. And whoever was elected mayor has turned out to be an idiot.

The truth is I don’t really know any more about what has changed or not changed in New York City than anyone else. Except for one thing – the taxi business. This is the one sector of life in which I proclaim myself to be the grand master, an all-knowing sage whose opinions must be given the utmost respect. So if you want to know what’s changed in the taxi business, hey, listen up and take notes. There will be an exam the next time you’re in my cab.

By around 1995 I became aware of an ominous trend which had seeped into the trade. People started to get into my cab, plop themselves comfortably in the back seat, and tell me they wanted to go to some destination in Brooklyn on the expectation that I would actually be willing to take them there.

This represented a significant change in the taxi industry. More specifically, it marked a change in the attitudes of drivers. Since time began, taxi drivers in New York City had been known for being crusty, hard-nosed men, often short on manners, fearless of authority, and willing to drive you to your destination only on the condition that they were in the mood to do so.

A ride to Brooklyn or one of the other outer boroughs at most times of the day is considered undesirable because it almost always means the driver will be coming back to Manhattan without a passenger – and that is dead time. So the driver sees such a fare not as money made, but as money lost. Thus he refuses the ride, even though he may be fined if the snubbed passenger makes an issue of it with the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

So prevalent were refusals to Brooklyn that the mantra of the New York City taxi driver had become – and this was a citywide joke – ‘I don’t go to Brooklyn.’ An old friend of mine who drove a cab in the ’70s, Dennis Charnoff, used to claim that he never had taken a fare out of Manhattan. Not to Brooklyn, not to Queens, not to the Bronx, not even to the airports. Never.

In the spirit of the great talk show host Johnny Carson, who once joked that he planned to have the words ‘Johnny will not be back after these messages’ written on his tombstone, I myself have considered having the following epitaph written on my own grave:

Eugene Salomon

1949 – (a really, really long time from now)

TAXI DRIVER

‘I DON’T GO TO BROOKLYN’

(Just don’t bury me in Brooklyn. It would kill the whole joke.)

So what happened to the brassy driver with an attitude? What changed? The ethnicity of taxi drivers, that’s what changed. By around 1995, by my own estimation, something like seventy-five percent of cabbies were from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They had taken the place of drivers from such countries as Greece, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Romania. And, oh yes, America.

Why did this occur? Because the working conditions of the industry were allowed to fall so far below the standards of other available jobs in the United States by uncaring city officials that experienced drivers were leaving the business in droves.

In 1979 a change in the rules made all taxi drivers ‘independent contractors’. (Even though the city retained the right to tell us what we may charge for our services. How ‘independent’ is that?) ‘Independent contractor’ means ‘self-employed’. Thus, no benefits. No sick days, no overtime, no paid vacations, no health care, no pensions. Add onto that twelve hour shifts, a job that is dangerous, and no union to demand timely rate increases (yes, a workforce of forty thousand and no union) and you no longer have to wonder why you can’t remember the last time you had an American at the wheel of your cab. Or a Russian, Israeli or Greek, for that matter.

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…