But by the time I came home from India, communal travel had come to seem natural to me. I had learned that being isolated in a car was not always or even usually the most rewarding way to travel: I would miss talking to fellow travelers and looking out the window. How could I enjoy getting there when I couldn’t pay attention? I stopped making excuses for being the rare American who didn’t want to own a car. I even stopped citing environmental excuses, or explaining that Jack Kerouac didn’t drive either. As he said, he didn’t “know how to drive, just typewrite.” I did sometimes quote public opinion polls that rated New Yorkers as the happiest of Americans. Why? Because in the nondriving capital of the nation, we actually see each other in the street instead of being isolated in speeding tin cans.
But the truth is, I didn’t decide on not driving. It decided on me. Now when I’m asked with condescension why I don’t drive—and I am still asked—I just say: Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.
I.
I am in a taxi on my way with a friend to JFK, an airport named after a president who was assassinated only six years before. Our older driver is like a rough trade character from a Tennessee Williams play—complete with an undershirt revealing tattoos, and an old Marine Corps photo stuck in the frame of his hack license. Clearly, this is his taxi and his world.
My friend and I are acting a lot like lovers, which we are. We are also hyperaware that the driver is looking at us in the rearview mirror. That’s because, while we waited with our luggage in a darkening street, a low-slung car full of white teenagers sped by, leaving behind in the evening air the lethal word “Nigger!” Now I can feel us struggling to forget that surreal attack and stay ourselves.
When we reach the airport, the driver slides open the divider between the front and back seat. Both my friend and I grow tense. I always think that talking into that opening makes me feel as if I’m ordering French fries, but this time, I am grateful for the barrier. We have no idea what the driver thinks of us.
The driver thrusts something through the opening. It turns out to be an old battered photo of a young man in a suit, standing with his arm around a plump and smiling young woman who is clutching her purse with both hands. “That’s me and my wife when we got married,” he says. “Except for when I was in Korea, we haven’t spent a night apart for forty years. She’s my best friend, my sweetheart—but believe me, we weren’t supposed to get married. Her family is Jewish from Poland, mine is Sicilian Catholic—they wouldn’t even speak to each other until after their first grandchild was born.
“I’m telling you this because today is our wedding anniversary—and if you don’t mind my saying so, you two kind of remind me of us. If you wouldn’t be offended, I’d like to give you a free ride—so I can go home and tell my wife I helped another young couple like us.”
Surprised and touched, we say his words are enough, but we end up accepting because it matters so much to him. At the airport, we all stand outside his taxi, shaking hands—a little awkward with emotion.
“You know,” the driver says, “me and my wife and you two, we’re what this country is all about.”
Later my friend and I will agree that the worst punishment of that racist shout in the street was making us mistrust this man when we first got into his taxi.
Years pass. My friend and I are carried into different lives. He lives on the West Coast, has children, grandchildren, and a life I cannot know. We are only sure that we wish each other well.
When I run into him again almost thirty years later, the first thing he says to me is, “Do you remember that taxi driver?”
And I do.
—
WHEN I ENTER A TAXI, I find myself in someone’s life. Kids’ photos on the dashboard, religious or other decorations hanging from the rearview mirror, name and perhaps ethnicity evident from the hack license on display—plus the sensory hit of the driver’s physical self in a small space—all plunge me into a mobile world. In what writer Pete Hamill calls a “common strategy against loneliness, a fleeting intimacy with their passengers,”1 drivers tell you stories and are happy to listen to yours.
I discovered these worlds on wheels when I was first living in New York. After I began writing “The City Politic,” a weekly column for New York magazine, I depended on cabbies not only to get me to my destination but to give me tips on public opinion and elections. They tend to be shit-free guides to the state of social issues, and are often better political predictors than most media pundits. After all, they spend more time listening to random strangers than any public opinion poll could afford; they overhear more private conversations than a wiretapper; and they often are themselves new immigrants or work with those who are. This makes them treasure troves of information on what’s really going on, not only here but in other countries.
An example came only ten days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks felled the Twin Towers in Manhattan. I was haunted by the televised scenes of office workers diving to their deaths rather than be immolated in that inferno, images so terrible that television stations soon stopped showing them. Downtown streets were covered with surrealistic gray ash and debris, and gutters were filled with the bodies of birds that had been incinerated in flight.
My driver was a quiet young white guy with a gravity that I sensed as soon as I got into his cab. We drove past construction fences covered with photos and notices posted by people who were still searching for missing relatives or friends or coworkers. There were also anonymous graffiti that had appeared as if by contagion all over New York with the same message: Our grief is not a cry for war.
“That’s how New Yorkers feel,” the driver said. “They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren’t here. They’ll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren’t in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.”
He was right. Even before it was clear that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11—despite false claims made by President George W. Bush, who seemed to have his eye on oil more than on facts—75 percent of New Yorkers opposed the U.S. bombing of Iraq. But a national majority supported it.
I also noticed the political smarts of taxi drivers in other cities. When I was in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in the early 1990s, for instance, a driver with a Swedish name predicted that Sharon Sayles Belton would be the first African American woman to be elected mayor of Minneapolis. I had campaigned for her when she was a candidate for city council, and even that office was supposed to be a stretch. No professional politician or pollster gave Sharon a chance of winning in this overwhelmingly white city. Nonetheless, my taxi pundit, as blond and blue-eyed as the children in Village of the Damned, said, “If I’m voting for her, and my family is voting for her, and my passengers are voting for her, then she’s going to win.” He had his own test group. He was right.
In rural America, small-town drivers warned me about the growing power of such neofascist groups as the Posse Comitatus in the Midwest and the Aryan Nation in the Northwest. Local banks were afraid to foreclose on their farms, and police hesitated to help repossess farmhouses and barns when they knew their occupants to be well armed. When I carried this news back to New York, my friends dismissed it as an exaggeration or a few crazies.
However, driving is a loner profession that attracts rebels of many kinds, and one was an extremist himself. In Billings, Montana, a rancher moonlighting as a driver told me that the United Nations was using black helicopters to spy on Americans and was planning to establish a world government. I also dismissed him as one crazy guy—but a year later, newspapers carried reports of rural militia members in Montana who gathered on the ranch of one of them, threatened to shoot down all helicopters, and had the weapons to do it. I wondered if my driver was among them.
Still, when I came back to New York and said, “You know, ther
e are ultra-right-wing groups out there, and they’re well armed,” urbanites would reply, “Just a few nuts, nothing to worry about.”
Only later did the media begin to take extremist groups seriously. By then they had committed racist murders in several cities—starting with the liberal Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, who was shot down in his driveway by a white nationalist group—then also bombing a government building in Oklahoma City, shooting Jewish children in a child care center in Los Angeles, and attempting to bomb a Martin Luther King parade in Spokane.
I still don’t see reports in newspapers about white supremacists who are trying to establish an armed and separatist homeland in the rural Northwest and parts of Canada, yet when I ask drivers or gas station attendants or other down-home authorities, they are quite matter-of-fact about the local Aryan Brotherhood, or methamphetamine labs operating with impunity in small towns, or certain rural areas where it’s best not to go.
Since drivers have time and a captive audience, they can also be vectors of modern myths. In Boulder, for example, I learned that Jack Kennedy was the Lindbergh baby. A Salt Lake City driver told me that “godless Communists created the women’s movement,” and a Dallas driver said feminism was “a Jewish plot to destroy the Christian family,” something I would hear a lot from right-wing Christian fundamentalists. Because it’s a long ride to the Denver airport, I got the entire story of the Trilateral Commission as part of an international Jewish conspiracy that stretched all the way from the killing of Jesus Christ to David Rockefeller, the founder of this private group of leaders who came from the United States, Europe, and Japan. I thought he had won the Conspiracy Prize—until another driver picked me up at Newark Airport and was sure that the Trilateral Commission was behind the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. No kidding.
I can also tell which new immigrant groups are going to what cities, since driving is so often a first job. In Washington, I always get a disproportionate number of drivers from African countries. They may not know the fastest route, but they instruct me on more important issues. From the late 1960s to the present, drivers from Ethiopia and Eritrea kept me up to date on the armed conflict between those two countries. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Castro’s Cuba all supported Ethiopia in a thirty-year war—assuming that this much larger country would defeat Eritrea. But according to drivers, it was always clear that Eritrea would prevail. Drivers from that country were proud of their independence fighters in the mountains, yet I never met an Ethiopian driver who wanted to fight for Emperor Haile Selassie or for the militaristic governments that followed. On the other hand, Eritrean drivers told me with pride that a third of their army was made up of women, some of them generals; that fighters had built schools and a hospital in mountain caves that were invulnerable to bombs; and that musicians in their “cultural troops,” as they called them, performed for the fighters and even toured Europe. “When an Ethiopian general is killed, the troops are in disarray,” one Eritrean driver explained to me. “When an Eritrean general is killed, every fighter becomes a general.”
Tiny Eritrea did win the war. However, its revolutionary leaders broke the hearts of taxi drivers from Eritrea by taking over all the media and otherwise betraying the revolution. When another border war broke out between those two countries, I noticed that neither side wanted to go home and fight.
Recently, an Ethiopian and several Kenyan drivers have sounded a bigger alarm. As one said, “I never thought I would see a second wave of colonialism, but there is one and it’s Chinese. Our countries are becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of China.”
Maybe U.S. policy makers should talk to taxi drivers.
II.
As my father’s daughter, I know that being one’s own boss is the reason taxi driving attracts free spirits, philosophers, and people who are too independent to do anything else. The hours are flexible enough for students and even the occasional homemaker, though women drivers are still rare. Whenever I have one, I tell her how glad I am to see her. Altogether, getting to know the human being inside the driver is an adventure, too.
· I’m glad to get a lifetime taxi driver in Manhattan. This one tells me he’s been at it so long that he’s writing a book called Behind My Back. I tell him it’s an inspired title. His book has already made him the rare American who feels equal to the rich and famous, and he spends the ride telling me about his subjects. “Robert Redford is much shorter than you think….Cher is down-to-earth and a big tipper, but she’s had too much plastic surgery….Donald Trump has such an ego, he even tried to impress me….Toni Morrison is more queenly than Queen Elizabeth….I told Caroline Kennedy she should run for office….Just from listening to bankers, I knew the subprime mortgage market would crash….”
I can’t decide whether I like this guy or not. He’s so celebrity-obsessed that I wonder about his attitude toward ordinary passengers. Just then a homeless woman wheeling a shopping cart—probably holding all her life’s possessions—darts out in front of us, and the driver almost sideswipes a bus while trying not to hit her. I’m expecting a string of expletives, but instead, he just calls out to her, “Be careful, sweetheart!”
After a quiet moment, he says, as if to excuse himself for being a softie, “Well, she’s somebody’s sweetheart.”
· Another lifetime driver offers to photograph my hands, make a drawing of them, and deliver it to my door—all for thirty dollars. There are samples of his artwork plastered around his dashboard and on the passenger door, like ghostly hands applauding. He used to set up his easel in Central Park with other street artists, he explains, but here, he has air-conditioning in summer and heat in winter. I tell him I don’t want a drawing but would like to contribute thirty dollars to his mobile art studio. First he declines, then says he’ll take twenty-five because that’s the entrance fee at the Metropolitan Museum—he goes there to look at paintings and copy just the hands. I tell him he’s one of the happiest people I’ve ever met.
· I’m not surprised to get a taxi driver who is moonlighting as a film extra. Manhattan is one big movie set, and cops, firefighters, and homeless people sometimes try to make a little money as extras. But this guy is also an expert on taxi stories as a genre. He repeats, as if from something he read, “The combination of intimacy and anonymity make a great dramatic device.” He also gives me a filmography that starts with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and ends with Taxicab Confessions, a cheap-to-produce reality show in which drivers elicit voyeuristic sexual stories from passengers who are caught on a hidden camera. I can’t believe people let their private lives go public, but when I say this, he tells me I’m a sucker if I think any reality show is real. “Hollywood people, a bunch of phonies in ripped jeans and thirty-thousand-dollar Rolexes…not one of them could survive in Bed-Stuy or Harlem….They just pay people to tell phony sex stories….They don’t give a damn about drivers getting robbed or shot, that’s reality….They should all go home to L.A.”
Chastened, I pay my fare. On the front seat is a pile of eight-by-ten glossies of the driver, bare-chested and as sexy as an athlete, with a little Bob Marley thrown in. “Do you know anybody at Law and Order?” he asks me anxiously. “My kid is sick—I need the gig.”
Suddenly I guess why he’s so angry. All those shows tell the stories of passengers, not drivers. When I ask him, he says, “Exactly! This country thinks people with money are interesting, not people who need money like me.”
I think he’s right. I’d rather watch a show called Taxi Drivers’ Confessions.
· I’m being driven by a woman with bottle-red hair who could be anywhere between thirty-five and sixty. When I say I’m glad to have a woman driver, she tells me that an Orthodox rabbi refused to get into her taxi at all, and her garage has so many male drivers that it’s like a locker room. Then she lists her previous jobs—house painter, school bus driver, and welder of decorative iron—as if to prove that she doesn’t need my help. She also yells expletives at drivers who try to cut he
r off, knits a row on an afghan square while we’re waiting at a tollbooth, and, altogether, is as in command of her small ship as a pirate on the high seas.
To make up for underestimating her independence, I ask about the five male photo booth images on her dashboard, below a statue of the Virgin Mary and a blue Krishna. “Those are my old lovers—anyway, the ones I remember,” she says. “I find the path to spirituality lies through ecstatic sex—and the path to ecstatic sex lies through spirituality—don’t you?”
Thankful that this is a rhetorical question, I just keep quiet while she goes on. “I had kids with two of them, a rock band with one of them, and they’re all still my best friends. Why? Because I taught them about sex, that’s why. Not just sex-sex, but stay-in-bed-all-weekend sex, Tantric sex, go-to-a-place-otherwise-only-music-and-drugs-take-you sex.”
Trying to be cool, I ask why she has the Hindu god Krishna. “Because he’s the only male god who’s into Tantric sex. That’s why he’s always surrounded by women. I told my old lovers to pass that kind of sex on to their girlfriends and wives. Do you know, one guy’s wife called last year to thank me?”
She pulls in at the airport, beating a limousine to the last open space, then lifts my bag filled with books out of the trunk as if it were a feather. “You should write about take-no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules. If the nuns had told me that, I could have saved twenty years.”
As I’m walking away, she calls after me, “You pushy broads helped—even a loner like me.” From her, this is high praise.
· I leave home for Newark Airport and end up sitting behind a heavy older driver who looks like an angry Buddha. He brakes and careens his way through midtown traffic, muttering in Russian over the sound of Howard Stern’s talk show on the car radio. Stern is surpassing even his shock jock self by making jokes about two white teenage boys who have just shot and killed their classmates and teachers in Littleton, Colorado. He is suggesting they should have had sex with their girl victims first.
My Life on the Road Page 9
