Spitting Off Tall Buildings (8 page)

GETTING A HACK license and becoming a taxi driver in New York City is not difficult. In fact it’s not even necessary to know the city in order to get the license.

You take the subway downtown to Center Street to the Hack Bureau, fill out an application, pay a fee, then pick up a stack of photocopied sheets they give you that list the questions and answers that will appear on the hack exam; two hundred names and locations of hotels, hospitals, airports, and other prominent places. You study the material on your own time, then you come back to take a two-hour exam. The test is given every other week. You are permitted to repeat taking it until you come up with a grade of 60 percent or more. I was desperate to earn money so I memorized everything and got a passing grade my first time out.

Rodney Transportation was located near the docks in Hell’s Kitchen, Fifty-fifth Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenue. The garage was a ten-minute walk from my rooming house at Fifty-first and Eighth. The boss/day dispatcher was a bad-tempered black guy, a mean little runt-prick named Shorty Smith.

Cabbies start early. Before dawn. My first day hacking I walked into the freezing garage where two hundred yellow cabs were parked. I waited in the long line until I got to the dispatcher’s cage. Shorty assigned me cab number 7912,
yelled that I should have the ‘muthafucka’ back by no later than 4 p.m., punched my trip card in the clocking machine, then roared, ‘Next.’

It took five minutes to locate the cab buried deep in the yellow sea, then move half a dozen others to maneuver it out. 7912 had a full tank of gas but the inside was filthy, garbage on the floor, cigarette butts everywhere, gum wrappers, a half-empty, leaking take-out Chinese food container.

In order to get all four car doors open I had to back out onto the street. I let the motor continue running so the heater would take the chill from the passenger compartment. There was an oil-stained shirt in the trunk that I used as a rag to clean the floorboards. With wet and dry newspaper I did the windows, inside and out. I asked. Another driver said newspaper works better than anything. Ten minutes later I was ready to work.

I started out rounding the block on Twelfth Avenue, then heading east on Fifty-sixth Street. The cab’s odometer showed over 130,000 miles. It was a late-model Dodge, less than two years old. I found out that most fleet taxis in New York run seven days a week, twenty hours a day.

The car’s front shocks were completely gone. The front bumper, the dash, and everything else rattled. There was a moderate shimmy at twenty miles an hour. I tested the brakes. They pulled to the right.

My first fare hailed me from the corner of Eleventh Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. A guy going to the Bronx. Tremont Avenue. I’d learned the subways well enough. I’d driven the airport shuttle van back and forth from Kennedy and La Guardia to Manhattan a hundred times but I had little practical knowledge of how to get around the streets by car, so I said, ‘I’m new. Can you direct me?’ The guy said, ‘Sure, turn left here.’ Three months later I was an expert.

I started out working the day shift, ten-hour days, Monday
and Tuesday off. I liked the job from the first. Liked having a steady income. I didn’t have to talk to people and I was my own boss except for Shorty Smith.

If you want to make decent money hacking in New York, the first important information you learn is that you have to be behind the wheel driving 100 percent of the time. Moving. No lunch breaks. Eat what you want but eat it while you drive. No wasting time hanging around hotel cab lines hoping to get an expensive airport trip. You grind it out. One fare at a time. Forty to sixty fares a day. When you have to piss you use a milk carton or an empty coffee container and you pull over or piss while you drive.

Because of the job my drinking stayed under control. I had beers after work and on my days off but I managed to keep away from wine and the hard stuff. The depressions kept on but I managed okay. I was alone a lot but for me being alone was good.

Things changed. I liked driving, the freedom, the routine of going to work every day. But in time, off the sauce, I began to notice things; behavior that I didn’t seem to have any control over.

I was in my second month of hacking when a thing happened: I had to stop and break my work rhythm that day by calling the Rodney administration office at the taxi garage. The payroll people had me down for one dependant only and were taking too much withholding from my pay. Another cabbie who had experience in these matters advised me that I was not claiming enough dependants, that they would take less money out if I claimed twelve to fifteen dependants, so I was calling in to alter my tax status.

Between Thirty-fourth Street and Eighty-sixth Street on Third Avenue there are pay phones every two blocks. They
are mounted on poles next to each other and separated by a metal partition for privacy.

I pulled my cab over, double parked, pushed in the taxi’s flasher signal, then clinked out some change in quarters and dimes from my change maker.

The first pay telephone I tried was out of order. I lost my coin. The phone next to the first one was broken too. I remember slamming that one down.

Back in my cab I drove the two blocks to the next phone stand, double parked and got out. The first paybox worked; I dialed my cab company’s number and someone answered. I could hear the person I was speaking to, the receptionist, but she could not hear me. She kept saying, ‘Hello, hello,’ and finally hung up.

The phone on the stand next to the one with the bad connection felt light. The receiver part was missing components. I unscrewed the mouthpiece section to check. The interior metal voice gadget had been removed. Vandalized. I got back in my cab and moved on.

After arriving at Fortieth Street on Third Avenue, seven-in-a-row non-working units later, I located an instrument that appeared functional - the hearing and listening parts were both okay. But it turned out that the push-button dialing mechanism didn’t work. Press any number other than zero and nothing happened. When I hit the zero by itself the operator came on and made the call for me.

Rodney’s office answered. But the person in the payroll department that I had needed to speak with twenty minutes before was unavailable, gone on a coffee break. The company receptionist twat hissed, ‘Call back later,’ then clicked off.

It was then that I yanked the hand piece with the cord completely out of the phone, flung it into a street garbage can and walked off.

Back sitting behind the wheel of cab number 7912, about to drive off, I remember having the thought: I hate the motherfucking fucking phone company!

Snapping on my taxi’s
OFF-DUTY
switch, I returned to the paybox I’d just disabled. On the front of the phone I located the unit’s stenciled pay phone number. I copied the number down.

As I found out, there are more than thirty pay phones between Forty-second and Eighty-sixth Street on Third Avenue. The main cross-town two-way streets, like Fifty-seventh and Seventy-second and Seventy-ninth and Eighty-sixth, have several units installed on each corner, not just two. I decided to report all the ones that didn’t work.

Because I was in the middle of the busiest part of midtown New York, it wasn’t that easy to stop, double park my cab, make my way to the phone stands, check each unit, then copy down the number along with a description of why each one of the damaged and vandalized cocksuckers was nonfunctioning. It took time. Over two hours. People would hail me, occasionally even try to get in when I’d be delayed at a red light. But I had my doors locked. I ignored all distractions.

When I got past Eighty-seventh Street on Third I considered the job done. The busy part of midtown technically ends at Eighty-sixth Street. I tallied the phone numbers I had written down then counted the torn-out handsets on the floorboard of my cab. The numbers corresponded. Eighteen.

I pulled over one final time, double parked at the next paybox stand. The unit was working okay. I punched zero. The operator answered, ‘Operator.’

‘There are eighteen non-working pay phones on Third Avenue in midtown,’ I announced. ‘I’ve copied the telephone numbers down and I want to report them.’

There was a funny interval of dead air but I could hear breathing on the other end. Finally I said, ‘Are you there? Hello?’

‘…Sir…I’m here. Go ahead.’

‘I’m trying to give you the numbers and information on out-of-order pay telephones on Third Avenue. Pay telephones that belong to your company. This is AT&T isn’t it? Are you with me here?’

Another pause, then, ‘Go ahead, sir.’

‘Should I be speaking to a supervisor or a repair person?’

‘…I’m okay…Report ‘em to me…How many you say?’

‘Eighteen. Are you ready?’

‘Go ahead, sir…I just say go ahead.’

‘Okay,’ I began, ‘at Forty-first and Third on the southeast corner is where your first non-operational piece of phone crap is located. I lifted the receiver off the hook and nothing happened. No tone. Dead air. Zip. The number on that piece-of-junk unit is 212-473-4407. Okay?’

Again dead air.

‘You there, operator?’

‘…Sir, go ahead.’

‘I didn’t know if you were still there. You should say something. That way I know you’re still there and I’m speaking to a living, alert homo sapien.’

‘…Next, sir.’

‘Next is number two. Number two follows number one and is also located at Forty-first and Third on the southeast corner. That paybox number is 212-473-4887. Somebody’d ripped off both the earpiece and the mouthpiece on that malfunctioning piece of dog crap. Okay?’

‘Sir, I just need the numbers…you gonna give up the numbers?’

‘That’s what I’m doing. But I’m also reporting the existing problem with the unit, and the location.’

‘Just give up the number.’

I kept going after that, without pausing, listing only the telephone numbers on the broken boxes. When I was done I said, ‘That’s it. That’s all eighteen.’

No response.

‘Operator,’ I said, ‘that’s it. That’s the last one. I’m done…Hello?’

‘…Okay, you done?’

‘Yes. I just said that was the last one. Did you get all of them? All the numbers?’

There was no reply. She’d hung up.

AFTER THE DEAL with the pay phones things went back to normal for a few weeks. But within me, more and more, I was becoming aware that I was crazy. My mind, my thoughts, attacked me constantly. Old incidents and humiliations from years before got re-viewed like the newsreel footage of rotting concentration camp bodies. My insatiable sexual behavior, my blackouts and drunkenness; all of it. I would be driving the streets in my cab and the pictures would come back again and again. Sometimes I’d have to pull over, pound the steering wheel, curse myself and scream out loud until the noise stopped.

An entire week was spent in my mind reenacting the five-minute occasion of my firing from the Night Manager gig at the East End Hotel. The embarrassment of being caught out by the ass-licking Shi, being talked down to by Mistofsky. Every remark was gone over, every phrase, every glance analyzed and replayed again and again. I became unable to focus on anything else.

My sleep got down to an hour or two a night again. I went back on the booze. Often it took a fifth to two fifths of Ten High at night after work to shut the noise off.

At the diner on Twelfth Avenue where I got my coffee every morning and where many of the cabbies from the Rodney garage ate, they had a new waitress, Betty. She was my
height, five-five or five-six, but she easily weighed four hundred pounds. So fat, I noticed, that she was unable to fit properly behind her side of the counter. She had to scooch sideways like a huge crab in order to serve her customers. The vastness of the lard clinging to her caused her to huff and wheeze and snort as she oozed along.

After seeing her there for two mornings in a row my mind could not leave the shock of her fat alone. I found myself unable to stop staring at Betty. Studying her. Why, I said to myself, why in fucking punctured Jesus would Milt, the owner, hire such an odious, absurd, pig-faced amalgam of dog shit? Did he think that his cab driver clientele would put up with a sweaty-chested, belching, rhinoceros-butted blimp, dripping perspiration and body smell, serving their meatloaf and tuna salad sandwiches? What the possible fuck could his reasoning be for having her around?

I was paying Milt for my coffee and buttered bagel at the register and eyeballing the aberrant monstrosity when my mind went ‘external’ before I could stop it. ‘Milt,’ I blurted, pointing, slamming my dollar and change down to pay, ‘is that new?’

‘What?’

‘That…human.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, skewering my check on the paper spike by the register, ‘Claire quit. Moved to Fort Lee. Better schools for her kids. That’s Betty.’

‘Okay, but why…why did you hire…that?’

‘That’s name is Betty.’

I leaned toward him to speak confidentially. The thing was traversing the counter a dozen or so feet away, grunting and snorting, refilling a customer’s coffee cup, raising and lowering its eighty-pound arm to reveal a huge dark circle of sweat. Beads of moistness coated its massive cheeks and hog snout. ‘Milt,’ I said, ‘Your Betty is the fattest fucking bloated
distended pile of living waste I have ever seen. What the hell is she doing here…around normal people?’

‘She’s my niece.’

I had to go on. It was impossible to stop myself. ‘There should be fucking legislation about keeping something that sickening out of sight.’

‘Soo…you don’t like fat people?’

‘That’s not
people,
that’s oil mountain! That huge bitch is a rolling vat of bacteria, a living, wheezing, farting health department violation. Man, don’t you know that it’s physically impossible for a fucking hippo her size to reach her feet with a bar of soap, let alone her twat and private parts?’

Milt pushed my change across the counter. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t come back in here again. Take your coffee business somewheres else.’

I scooped the coins up. Consciously, somewhere in my brain, I was aware that I’d lost it completely. ‘Let me ask you a question,’ I bellowed. ‘What the fuck do you think a lard-globe that huge has to do to have sex? To procreate. How does it fuck? A person would have to have a twenty-inch dick to have intercourse with an elephant brontosaurus of her dimensions.’

Milt was walking away.

‘Hey,’ I yelled again, pushing the paper bag containing the coffee and bagel back across the counter and off the end so that it fell to the floor, broke open and spilled, ‘fuck you, zoo keeper! Fuck you and her and all the pig-animal infected human hogs everywhere!’

Milt perused me, untying his apron and coming around from behind the counter. But I was too quick; out the door and down the street to my taxi.