8 Million Stories: Death and Taxis

I caught a cab at First Avenue going west on 14th Street, and asked the driver to take Second Avenue downtown to Broome Street in Soho.

We had the green turn signal onto Second, and so the cabbie started to make a left. One of the pedestrians, a fairly normal-looking guy waiting to cross the same avenue (and who didn’t have the light, but so what?) launched himself into the street, pointed at the cab and shouted “Hey! Where’d you get your driver’s license, you idiot! Yeah, you!”

Z“Some people are just…inconsiderate,” he said with a kind of calm conviction. The driver was young, maybe in his mid-thirties, with an Eastern European name on the hack license; he had no accent.

“Yep,” I said.

“They can be so hurtful to other people’s feelings, even when they are in the wrong. I had the light, he didn’t, and he called me an idiot.” He posed this as if it were some kind of philosophical problem to be examined.

“Yep,” I muttered again, not feeling all that philosophical myself.

“You know, I’ve had people spit on my cab, throw coffee on my cab, pound on the hood with their fists, and for what? I drive safely, legally, courteously—it doesn’t matter. They’re just inconsiderate.”

The cabbie spoke so reasonably that I couldn’t help myself; I slipped out from under my normal mental Kevlar of sidewalk indifference to empathize with him. “Hey, it’s New York,” I offered, as if the cliché was an explanation. I waxed poetic: “People bang into each other here like bumper cars and think it’s fun.”

“Fun,” he repeated, flatly. He went silent for a few blocks as we hit mostly green lights. When we were stopped momentarily at the Houston Street intersection, he resumed his meditation.

“About a year and a half ago, I’m driving empty up Eighth Avenue. Around 23rd Street, I see some big guy on rollerblades coming at me, skating like a maniac against the traffic. I expect him to skin by me on my right side, but something happens and he goes down. Maybe he hit a hole or some crap in the street, I don’t know, but he suddenly starts falling toward me. I have a bus on my left and no way to avoid him, so I just slam on the breaks and have one of those out of body experiences. I’m sailing on the treads, he’s rolling and tumbling. I think, ‘Here it comes…’ and then, for no reason on earth, he somehow flips to the right, and I miss him. The whole thing takes maybe five seconds.”

“I jump out of the cab. He’s trying to sit up by my rear right fender, bleeding, scraped to shit, saying, ‘Ow, ow, ow.’”

“‘Are you OK?’ I ask him. ‘You want 911?’ He has on a helmet and pads, and as he starts to check himself out, I sense he’s not badly hurt. It’s like a second miracle. Man, am I relieved. ‘You’re one lucky fella,’ I say. ‘You coulda been killed.’”

“Then he looks up at me from his torn T-shirt and…he said this, I swear, ‘Yeah, by you, cocksucker!’ And then he gets on his feet and starts calling me every name in the book. Can you imagine? He was skating in the traffic, he was going the wrong way, he fucking fell—and he was screaming at me! I couldn’t even follow half of what he was saying, he was so pissed off; and I was so keyed up after almost running him over. I didn’t do anything except miss the guy and I was the ‘cocksucker.’ You see what I mean when I say ‘inconsiderate?’”

“Jesus,” I said, giving it up for the taxicab Buddha. “I get it, I really do! So what did you say to that guy?”

“Say to the guy? I beat the living crap out of him. And I’ve spent the last year in court over it. I just got a suspended sentence last week.”

I pulled the Kevlar up to my eyeballs.    

We reached the corner of Broome Street. It was maybe a 15-minute ride and the fare was $6.70. I handed him $9 as I got out of the cab.

“Thanks,” he said, adding gently, “be good.”

Steven Doloff is a writer in New York City.