by Studs Terkel
The biggest polluter is the thing we produce, the automobile. The livelihood that puts bread on your table. I don’t know if the people in the plant question it. I wouldn’t want to see all the automobiles banned because they pollute the air. Yet I realize what the hell good is my livelihood if the air’s gonna kill me anyway. There are so many priorities that have to be straightened out. I think all this smog control is tokenism, simply that. I heard a plant manager today, he says, “Until the guy learns how to adjust himself in driving the car, there will always be emission. But once he learns how to put his foot on the gas, we’ll pass the standards.” It’s just another gosh damn gimmick. They’re not really fighting air pollution, they’re not concerned.
I’ve never gotten into a rap session with that kind of thing because they keep us busy fighting. Every year we’ve had a potential strike on our hands. In six years I’ve put out six strike letters. There are so many things to do. You major on the minors and minor on the majors. That major being pollution, the minor being our money.
In some parts of the plant, cars pass a guy at 120 an hour. The main line goes at 101.6. They got the most modern dip system in paint. They got all the technological improvements. They got unimates. But one thing went wrong. (Chuckles.) They didn’t have the human factor. We’ve been telling them since we’ve been here: We have a say in how hard we’re going to work. They didn’t believe us. Young people didn’t vocalize themselves before. We’re putting human before property value and profits.
We’re still making 101 cars an hour, but now we have the people back GMAD laid off. They tried to create a speed-up by using less people. We stopped ’em.
“Ten to twelve percent of our people are black or Spanish-American. Most of the seniority people are whites. The best jobs go to the white people. To me, General Motors is a bunch of bigots. The young black and white workers dig each other. There’s an understanding. The guy with the Afro, the guy with the beads, the guy with the goatee, he doesn’t care if he’s black, white, green, or yellow. The older guys still call each other niggers and honkies. But that doesn’t happen with the younger set here. You see them eating their lunch. You see them riding in the same car. You see them date the same kind of girls, going to the same kind of places.
“I think they’re sympathetic to students. They tend to be friends with the guy that’s in college. They’re not isolated. We have some going to school part-time and working.
“Our women have been here only a year. Right now they’re more interested in learning how the union functions and how to get more restrooms. They work on the line just like the men. It’s been a good thing for our union. It has finally dawned on the guys that if a woman comes here to work, she’s able to go on that job. In ‘66 and ’67 the jobs were so physically demanding that a woman couldn’t have done them. They had to be made more normal. I think women really helped our union.
“Drugs are used here. Not so much hard stuff—they use grass, some pills. Young people are on drugs, especially marijuana, like their parents are on alcohol. There’s something else to drugs. It has to do with monotony, it has to do with society. Until you show the kids a better way of life, they’re gonna stick on the grass.”
The guys are not happy here. They don’t come home thinking, Boy, I did a great job today and I can’t wait to get back tomorrow. That’s not the feeling at all. I don’t think he thinks a blasted thing about the plant until he comes back. He’s not concerned at all if the product’s good, bad, or indifferent.
Their idea is not to run the plant. I don’t think they’d know what to do with it. They don’t want to tell the company what to do, but simply have something to say about what they’re going to do. They just want to be treated with dignity. That’s not asking a hell of a lot.
I weave in on both sides of the assembly line. From the right side, the passenger’s side, to the driver’s side. Talking to guys. You get into a little conversation. You watch the guy, ‘cause you don’t want to get in his way,’cause he’ll ruin a job. Occasionally he’ll say, “Aw, fuck it. It’s only a car.” It’s more important to just stand there and rap. I don’t mean for car after car. He’d be in a hell of a lot of trouble with his foreman. But occasionally, he’ll let a car go by. If something’s loose or didn’t get installed, somebody’ll catch it, somebody’ll repair it, hopefully. At that point, he made a decision: It was just a little more important to say what he had on his mind. The unimate doesn’t stand there and talk, doesn’t argue, doesn’t think. With us, it becomes a human thing. It’s the most enjoyable part of my job, that moment. I love it!
The Driving
BOOKER PAGE
He drives his own cab in Manhattan. He is sixty-one. It is early evening—the end of his day. A heavy man, he has plopped into a chair, visibly exhausted. As he tugs off his shoes, wiggles his toes, he sighs, “Oh, my feet!”
He has been a cabdriver for about a year. For thirty years he had been at sea, 1942–1972. Once during that time, “I was ashore for a year. My brother and me bought a diner. I was very glad to get rid of it. I went to sea again.” Years ago he had worked in an auto body shop. He quit because “I’ve always enjoyed seeing ships, always hoped I’d be able to go to sea.”
I’m using muscles I haven’t used before. Sometimes I have to stop the cab and get out and walk a while, just to stretch out. Sitting for ten, eleven hours a day got me so that I’m all cramped up. I have to take soap, hot water, my wife rubs my feet, my ankles, ’cause my muscles are actually sore. I don’t get no exercise at all like I usually do.
I was a cook and baker on a ship, a freighter. My last ship, I was making runs to India and South Africa. It wouldn’t take me too much to do my work. I walked around on deck all day. I enjoyed it. I was getting my exercise. I put on twenty pounds since I been on the cab.
I promised my wife I’d quit the sea. One time when my ship came back from India she came down by bus and drove eighteen hours, but just stayed overnight around Savannah. She asked me to give it up because she was just tired of being alone. I said, “Give me one more year,” because we’d been saving and had plans of what we wanted to do. This Indian run lasted two years. I gave my youth to the sea and I come home and gave her my old age.
It used to be that every seaman ran away to sea. ’Cause he’s a drunk, a wastrel, running away from his family. You found the scum that went to sea. Today you find some college graduates. We have on board two or three young fellas that are studying to be doctors. They made the trip to get some extra money. Seamen are mostly young now. It’s better than when I first went to sea. Where once a fella was glad to eat his three meals a day and get paid and get drunk, the young man feels they’re not paying him enough. Sometimes he has a chip on his shoulder.
The big topic at sea is still exploits with women. Because there’s always loneliness. A traveling salesman, he has a means of picking up a phone. But a seaman is one month, two, three months before he’ll get a letter from his wife. I used to phone my wife three, four times every trip. In Calcutta I waited five hours to get a phone call through. If I didn’t get it through one night, I’d call again and wait three, four hours the next morning. The feeling you get, just hearing her voice . . . I’d stand on the phone and just actually choke up. My wife would be crying on the other end and I’d say, “Woman, listen, I’m spending too much money on this phone call. Stop crying.” (Laughs.) But it was just so happy.
“My wife and I always loved each other. Matter of fact, we liked each other. Everything we do, we do together. Even when I get up at night to go pee, she gets up and dances with me to the bathroom, The family that pees together stays together. (Laughs.) I take water pills for my weight and it runs me to the bathroom four times a night. She’ll walk ahead of me and I’ll put my arms around her waist and we’d fox trot up the hallway. It could be two, three ’ in the morning, it doesn’t matter.”
It’s impossible to pay for the loss of family life. The time away is like being in jail. I used to tell
my wife that when the whistle blew, even if we’re still tied up in dock, I was automatically three and four thousand miles away. The lines are goin’, the gangway’s goin’—even though I’m only a few feet from the dock, I’m separated. I would put myself in suspended animation, knowing nothing’s going to bother me until I come back. No matter where I went, how many times I called her on the phone, I was never home. Even though I would reach two, three American ports, it was no more than to touch my wife. We’re losing so much, giving up so much of family life. You should be compensated for it. But no one forces you to go to sea. It gets in your blood . . .
Some of the major ports like Calcutta, Karachi, we stay eight days, twelve days picking up cargo. I’d stay aboard ship. I’d go to movies almost every night ’cause I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t gamble. I was just a poor ass seaman. (Laughs.) I’d do other things, naturally. (Laughs.) There’s always women. (Laughs.)
“Women-chasing was my weakness. You can love your wife, but a man is like a dog. He’ll chase anything with a skirt on it. Drop the skirt, he’ll still chase. I’ve never cared for women singly. There’s always two or three at a time. I found in traveling the most beautiful women are less sexy than others. In India, they’re beautiful, delicate. Chinese women, delicate—like a piece of porcelain. In bed? Nothing. In these countries, you find a great deal of prostitutes, because they need it for survival. The seaman doesn’t meet the better class, the families. His time is limited.”
I love nature. I’m so fed up with man’s so-called superiority. I’ve seen things happen at sea. I’ve seen a beautiful day change in minutes to a storm so hazardous you can’t describe it unless you see today’s pictures on TV. More strength and terrible power’s been exerted in five minutes than man has concocted in all his atom bombs. Storms that would lift the ship up and toss it like a match. Think of the power, think of the weight and strength of nature. Man with all his egotism . . .
I can’t think of the sea now, I’m so busy with a cab. It keeps you so occupied with traffic that you can’t think of anything else. The only time I think of the sea is when I’m going up the East Side and I see a ship in the harbor or hear a ship blow. It’s only a fleeting moment . . .
It’s like changing a life. It’s like being born again into something else. I’m talking to people every day, meeting different people. They’ll get in a cab and discuss all their problems. I’ve had people talk over certain things that should be kept in the family. I had a man get in one time, said, “Get me away quick before I kill the sonofabitch.” Him and his partner fell out in business and he was overwrought, he had to get him a drink. He got off in two blocks and gave me a dollar.
You must be alert every moment to everything that happens. You can’t relax yourself while you’re driving. I’ve got this brand-new cab and I got three dents in it already, as careful as I am.
Oh, I’m so tired. My bottom gets so . . . Oh, every muscle aches in my body. It’s my legs and feet, ankles and so forth. I figure in another few months I’ll be able to sit up, stand up, do anything else. I’ll be used to it then. But right now, I’m so . . . My pedaling the gas and brake, gas and brake, all the time . . . At sea I never had no aches and pains. Then it was just blahs. You’d get tired of the same monotony, day in and day out. The only time I think about the sea is at home or going to my cab in the morning.
Right now my outlook is making as much money as I possibly can. To make back what I put into the investment of buying a cab. It’ll take about four years. I don’t stay out after dark, but I put in eleven hours a day. I make good money, but I just have to keep going right now.
No matter how much you love your wife, the sea is drawing you . . . I have so much love for the sea, my whole dream is I want to buy a schooner and live aboard and then charter—in the West Indies. That’s what my wife and I are both planning for. A cab is just a steppingstone to a car wash and then a car wash will be a means of buying my boat. Even at my age, I haven’t given it up. Nothing’s going to stop me. That’s how much I love the sea. If I get a schooner, that’ll be tops, that’ll be it. I’ll have both my loves: my wife and my sea. I would like to die at sea and be buried at sea, and then spread out at sea . . .
LUCKY MILLER
I hate to admit that driving a cab is no longer the novelty to me that it once was. It has its moments, but it’s not the most ideal job in the world as far as determining one’s attitude is concerned.
He is twenty-six. He has been a cabdriver for four years. “My original intention was to drive for a couple of years. It’s the sort of job where I could have fiexible hours while I was going to school.” Ne had begun as a part-time driver, but he now puts in a forty-four-hour week. “During the past four years I’ve been going to school off and on. More off than on.
“Drivers are more transient now than they used to be. I’d say there’s well over a fifty percent turnover every year. Companies are always hiring and don’t care what you do. I suspect the younger part-time drivers outnumber the older ones.”
Cabdrivers can no longer be stereotyped. One time the popular conception was of the balding, pot-bellied, cigar-chomping, middle-aged man, who’d drive like a bat out of hell and yell at all the other drivers that they had their heads up their asses. There are as many different types of cabdrivers, with as many different dispositions, as there are among the entire human race.
I’ve always known the city quite well. I figured it was a way of meeting a lot of interesting, live, colorful people. Oh, sometimes you get an occasional fella or woman who’s a little high and they’re more talkative . . . When I first started, I used to work till eleven at night. I drive strictly days now, from about seven thirty in the morning to maybe five in the evening. A driver doesn’t get live wires during the day. They’re mostly drab businessmen with nothing much to say, who don’t have much to discuss other than the weather. But it’s a lot safer.
I’m sorry to say I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t initiate conversations any more. Ninety percent of them would come to dead ends. These businessmen are preoccupied with whatever policy they’re trying to sell or whatever advertising they’re trying to put together in their heads.
Business isn’t nearly as good as it was four years ago. We used to get a lot of expense account fares. We don’t get nearly as much now. They’d ask for receipts. They’d tip about the average. I think a lot of them would tip better, yet they fear if they’re too generous the company might react. I’d say a fare than runs eighty cents, a twenty-cent tip is sufficient. For longer trips, we don’t expect as great a percentage.
Whether it’s a long day or a short day depends on my meter and tips. A good day is about forty-five on the meter and ten in overs, as we call tips. I get about forty-eight percent of the meter. It averages to about thirty or thirty-three a day, or about four dollars an hour. I usually clear about $125 after taxes. No driver declares the tips he actually makes.
I don’t react violently to getting stiffed—which means not receiving a tip. A lot of drivers do. I realize there are some people who are barely just able to afford cabs, who really can’t afford to tip. People who live in fairly rough neighborhoods, who are afraid to walk the streets and feel much safer taking a cab. There are others, who may have recently immigrated, who aren’t familiar with the custom. Puerto Ricans generally tip. Mexicans don’t, as a rule. Apparently Mexican cabdrivers don’t expect to get tipped. A matter of custom. I don’t feel I’m the one to familiarize them. Some other driver will, one way or another. I can say for sure that the best tippers are not the people who live on Lake Shore Drive, or the businessmen. They’re generally the blue-collar people I pick up in the neighborhoods.
A lot of drivers, they’ll agree to almost anything the passenger will say, no matter how absurd. They’re angling for that tip. I’m not just going to nod my head in agreement with someone I don’t agree with, just for the sake of getting a tip. After five years I can handle myself pretty well in downtown traffic.
A lot of drivers wind up with ulcers. They’re the most likely candidates for a heart attack. Driving a cab tends to shorten your life span—if one does it for a career—especially if the driver spends most of his time downtown.
And the fumes and the traffic. That driver is breathing in the exhausts all day. This applies specifically to drivers of Checker cabs.34 The ventilating system in this type of car is not constructed for the convenience of the driver. The vents are right in back of the engine. So we’re breathing in fumes from our own engines, as well as those of the other cars and trucks,35
The company doesn’t give a damn about the conditions of their cabs. Some of them are pretty wretched, low brakes, bald tires, bad valves, most anything. These cabs are given to part-timers. I see new drivers driving these junks day after day and breaking down with them. A cab has to break down five or six times before something is done about it. They’re dangerous. Neither the company nor the union gives a damn about us. As far as they’re concerned, we’re machines—as wretched as the cabs.
A person who’s driving a cab a number of years tends to become hardened. I hate having to turn somebody down. On the other hand, I think of the reality. I may have sixty, seventy dollars on me at the end of a good day. The money itself is expendable, but my life isn’t. I read of incidents in which drivers have been shot even after surrendering their money. This may sometimes happen in the case of junkies. I think most guys who hold up cabdrivers are junkies. They can’t control themselves. It’s not that they’re malicious people, it’s just that they’ve got this habit and they’re desperate. It’s fear. It’s fear that results in a lot of cabdrivers passing up black people. This includes black drivers.
