My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  I ask the driver to turn the radio off, but he’s too busy yelling expletives at people crossing the street. “Dirty, lazy peoples!” he shouts out the window, “You ruin this fucking country!” This last is aimed at three teenage Latino boys. “Dirty criminals!” This is flung at a young black couple. “I crush you!” This threat is for a bicycle messenger in a Jamaican T-shirt.

  “Please stop yelling,” I say.

  This only causes him to add “black” to his epithets, and make it even more clear why he is yelling.

  I think: Okay, I’m not going to change him between here and Newark, but if I don’t call him on this bullshit, I’m saying it’s okay. On the other hand, if I really get angry, I’ll cry, and that’s embarrassing.

  “You know, some people here think bad things about immigrants from Russia, too, and they’re wrong—”

  “You crazy?” he explodes. “I from Ukraine, no Russia! Ukraine good place. Everybody white! No dirty peoples!”

  Clearly, calling him a Russian is almost as bad as saying he has anything in common with the people he’s yelling at.

  I begin again: “Since there are no black or brown people in Ukraine, how can you know—?”

  “Bitch!” he breaks in. “You know nothing! Black peoples ruin this fucking country!”

  I’m a person who can admit only on Friday that I was angry on Monday, yet this time I get up the courage to tell him that he’s giving Ukraine a bad name—but then, suddenly, he’s screaming at a young black woman with a stroller, as if she were crossing the street just to get in his way, “Fucking bitch!”

  Her startled face is the last straw.

  I hurl at him a few words dangerously close to “Go home to Russia where you belong,” and think, I mean Ukraine. I get out in the middle of traffic and slam the door.

  The drama of my exit is marred when he starts yelling for a cop to arrest me. I realize I haven’t paid my fare. I’m reduced to the ignominy of throwing money in his window and standing there while he counts every bill and coin. My only comfort is seeing the stroller woman give him the finger.

  After throwing myself on the mercy of another taxi driver, I manage to get to Newark, run through the airport until my lungs hurt, and make my plane—barely. All the way to San Francisco, I think of devastating things I should have said. Mots d’escalier become mots d’avion.

  The next day, I learn that Howard Stern has blown himself out of the water—if not off the air—with his horrific comments. They were too much even for his fans and his boss is forced to apologize for him. Somehow I feel this is a defeat for the taxi driver, too. I have a happy fantasy that anger plus overweight will do him in.

  I add up the score: I’ve seen the racist bullshit that still goes on in the streets. I’ve learned that Russia and Ukraine are not the same country. I’ve expressed anger at the time I was feeling it—and I didn’t cry.

  Not bad for one taxi ride.

  · I’m headed to the airport for the third time in a week, trying to hail a taxi in the pouring rain. I’m late, I’m grouchy, and when a driver finally picks me up, I’m in no mood to talk to this scruffy white kid in his twenties. The only personal thing I see is a drawing of a gigantic eye propped up on the front seat next to him. I suppress my curiosity.

  After a long time of quiet, he asks what I do. I offer just three words—I’m a writer—hoping brevity won’t invite conversation.

  “Then I wouldn’t know you,” he says seriously, “because I don’t read.”

  Assuming he’s a smart-ass, I don’t answer. “I also don’t watch television,” he goes on. “I don’t look at the Internet or read newspapers or books or play video games. I haven’t done any of those things in almost a year. I don’t want anything to interpret the world for me. I’m mainlining life.”

  My resolve is slipping. He has made me think of a classics professor who told us to read Plato or Shakespeare or Dante as if we found their books in the street and had no idea who they were. I always loved his trust in the work itself—and also his trust in us.

  Finally, I can no longer resist asking this guy why he is shutting out all the usual signals. He explains that his girlfriend was taking courses like women’s studies and black studies, so she put tape over the names of authors and told him to judge without knowing the identity of the author. He found this so disorienting that he started to count the filters that were telling him what to think. “Filters let in a cup of water,” he says, “but keep out the ocean.”

  It turns out that driving a taxi is just part of a year he’s planned, working his way cross-country, doing odd jobs like repairing cars and picking fruit to support himself, all the while going cold turkey on media. He is seeing America without being told first what he’s seeing.

  I tell him he has a lot in common with organizers. We’re trying to create spaces where people can listen and talk, without first putting each other in categories. After his year is up, I suggest he take what he’s learned and teach it to others.

  “You see?” he says seriously as we pull into LaGuardia, “This is what happens with no filters.”

  Instead of a tip, he asks for a bargain. “Write about my experiment,” he says. “Explain that you met this recovering media addict who used to dream about people in movies instead of real people. I never read a book unless some reviewer told me to. I was such a news junkie, I went to sleep with my headset on. I even worried about missing email while I was making love to my girlfriend. I had media-itis, but now I’m trying to see life unmediated.

  “I’ve been clean for eight months,” he says seriously. “I’m just beginning to believe I exist.”

  Finally, I ask about that drawing of a huge eye. “My girlfriend made that,” he says, “to remind me to see with my own eyes.”

  I learned from him. I’m trying to see with my own eyes, too.

  · In Kyle, Texas, driving is a way of life. Taxis are mostly for people too drunk or too old to drive, on welfare with no car, or visitors like me going to the Austin airport. I see that my Chicana driver has turned her taxi into a world. She has a baby in a laundry basket on the seat next to her and a mobile toy secured by the glove compartment. When I remark on this inventiveness, she explains that this way, she makes a living without being separated from her baby daughter. Since it’s six a.m. on what is going to be a very hot day, I ask if this is hard. “No,” she says firmly. “What’s hard is worrying about my older daughter coming home from school by herself. Driving with each of my girls has been the happiest part of my life.”

  · I notice that a tough-looking, youngish white driver in Detroit is dressed in a shirt, bow tie, and suit jacket, like a Mormon missionary. He says it’s his wife’s birthday, and asks my advice about buying her a gift of lingerie. Gradually, his questions about panties grow ever more detailed. I begin to realize there is no wife. Even his pronouns switch from she to I. Then he’s off on the relative merits of string bikinis, and trying to get me to talk about my own underwear.

  It’s like a dirty phone call on wheels. Not only that, but he seems to be enjoying my escalating discomfort. I bet I’m not the first female passenger who’s been left with the choice of getting out or letting him reach what is clearly his climactic destination.

  Since we’re speeding along a highway with no place to find another taxi, I try for a third option. With all the stern authority I can muster, I tell him that if he doesn’t stop laying his fantasies on me and passengers, I’ll report his name and taxi number to his boss and to the cops.

  He apologizes frantically, swears he’ll never do it again, and even promises to go into therapy. Then all is quiet. Too quiet. We’re at our destination and I’m almost out the door when he says with suspicious calm and an air of release, “I’m so glad you were severe with me. Thank you for punishing me.”

  I’m on the sidewalk before I realize: I’ve done exactly what he had in mind.

  Years pass, and I forget this weird guy. Then I’m in Detroit again and I get a rare woman d
river in her forties, overly made up and drenched in perfume. As usual, I tell her I’m glad to have a woman driver. She says not a word. Only at the end of the ride does she ask: “Do you remember a young man who drove you long ago and wanted advice about lingerie?”

  I say yes, I definitely do.

  “Well, I was that miserable man,” she says. “Now I’ve had tops and bottoms done, and I’m a happy woman.”

  I congratulate her on what has become a choice. A growing number of people have been able to match their inner sense of self with a place on the continuum of gender that wasn’t assigned to them at birth. But hearing the same voice, I have a sense memory of sitting in the same position and feeling this driver’s pleasure in dominating me. One can change gender, but what about character?

  · As I get into a taxi to Friendship Airport, not far from Annapolis, the driver puts a textbook back on the stack next to him. Clearly, he’s been using every moment to study. He’s moonlighting from his food service job at the Naval Academy, as he explains, and is studying to be an engineer.

  For me, this is a big déjà vu. Long ago, in 1972, one of my first lectures with my speaking partner, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, was to the more than four thousand cadets at the Naval Academy. We were the only women in a lecture series that otherwise included a quarterback from the Dallas Cowboys, the novelist Herman Wouk, and a deputy secretary of defense. The cadets themselves were all male, and only about eighty of the four thousand were other than white. We did our best to introduce the women’s movement to this huge crowd seated far away from us in regimented rows, but we couldn’t tell whether the roar of response was approval or disapproval. Some cadets carried oranges from dinner and tossed them at the stage. We weren’t sure whether this was the equivalent of roses or rotten eggs.

  Just before that lecture, there had been a seated dinner at the home of Admiral James Calvert, the Naval Academy superintendent. Dorothy and I were surprised that only Filipino men were serving us. For many years, assigning this domestic role to male Filipinos had been the navy’s way of getting women’s work done without women, yet I thought the 1960s and the civil rights movement would have changed all that. When we asked, Admiral Calvert assured us that Filipinos were happy to get these jobs. Dorothy replied, “Like my folks in Georgia were happy to be picking cotton?” I could see the admiral was relieved when we returned to arguing about Vietnam.

  During dessert, the naval cadet sitting next to me whispered that one of the Filipino servers must not be all that happy. He had asked to borrow that cadet’s engineering books.

  Now I tell my Annapolis driver about my memory. “I can’t believe it,” he says. “I think that guy serving you was my older brother. He did become an engineer—and he helped build the Folk Art Theater, one of the biggest arenas in Manila.”

  As I head into the airport, I look back to see the driver in his taxi, overhead light on, studying. If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.

  —

  MY TWO LONGEST-LASTING TAXI stories are ones that I owe to friends as well as drivers.

  · In our co-lecturing days, Flo Kennedy and I were sitting in the back of a taxi on the way to the Boston airport, discussing Flo’s book Abortion Rap. The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!”

  Would she have wanted to own her words in public? I don’t know, but I so wish we had asked her name. When Flo and I told this taxi story at speeches, the driver’s sentence spread on T-shirts, political buttons, clinic walls, and protest banners from Washington to Vatican Square, from Ireland to Nigeria. By 2012, almost forty years after that taxi ride, the driver’s words were on a banner outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when the party nominated Mitt Romney for president of the United States on a platform that included criminalizing abortion. Neither Flo nor the taxi driver could have lived to see him lose—and yet they were there.

  · Years ago, when I was often staying with a friend in Brooklyn, I began to use Black Pearl, a car service in that oldest borough where residents are more than a third African American. Because Yellow cabs in Manhattan often avoid black neighborhoods and also refuse long trips to other boroughs—though by law they are required to take passengers wherever they want to go—many gypsy cabs and car services have sprung up. Among the oldest is Black Pearl. Its slogan has always been “We’re Not Yellow, We’ll Go Anywhere.”

  Every time I called the dispatcher, a driver showed up within minutes, always in a big old low-slung American car with such comforts as incense, seats covered in fake fur, surround-sound music, and no safety barrier to interfere with talking to the driver. It was like riding in a placenta with Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, or Chaka Khan—listening to anything from the oldest blues and reggae to the newest dance or rap music.

  The first time I thanked a driver for this peak experience—I’d been blissed out and unaware of traffic—he just smiled. “One day I turned around,” he said, “and a couple on the backseat were—dancing.”

  I discovered from drivers just how important this car service was. Not only did many Yellow cabs bypass black people on the street—or say, “Sorry, I don’t go to Brooklyn”—but black women close to giving birth couldn’t count on a taxi to take them to the hospital, and had to find a car service in advance. Then an African American man named Calvin Williams returned to Brooklyn after serving in the Korean War and invented Black Pearl. It became so popular that voters elected him to the New York State Assembly, where he served two terms.

  Within Black Pearl, every driver has a story. After getting the same one on a couple of trips, I asked why he had the only venetian blinds I’d ever seen in a car.

  “Around here,” he says, gesturing to the streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, “money is easier to come by than privacy. You can borrow or steal money, but you can’t find a private place. When I was coming up with seven brothers and sisters, I met my girlfriend under the stairs, dodging rats and winos, or I froze my ass off on street corners with my buddies. Even when I went to the Brooklyn Fox to see Little Stevie Wonder—he was a little kid then—security guards would shine flashlights up and down the aisles. All I wanted was to be cool in summer, warm in winter, and listen to music—to have just a little private space for happiness.

  “So when I retired from my city job and started driving for Black Pearl, I thought, This is it! I’m a rescuer! I’m a Black Knight in Silver Armor! I always make sure nobody has guns, drugs, or alcohol in my car. Then I turn up the music, turn down the blinds, and drive around for as long as my customers want.”

  Among his regulars were girls from a local Catholic school who rode around with the boyfriends they weren’t supposed to have, a Black Muslim father of five whose wife wouldn’t let him listen to sinful music, two male firefighters who rode home together after work in the most famously homophobic agency in the city, a single mother who needed time away from her job and kids, and an elderly unmarried couple who held hands where their children and grandchildren couldn’t see them.

  “Only food and water are more important than music and privacy,” he says seriously. “I’m a rescuer.”

  III.

  Taxi drivers are entrepreneurs of the road. Like my father, they drive and dream. But flight attendants experience work as a group.

  When I first began flying a lot in the early 1970s, planes meant only mindlessness, escape from phones, maybe a movie, and most of all, sleep. Even if I took work on board, I nodded off as soon as we were aloft. Like a flying version of Pavlov’s dog, just being carried through space made me feel I needed to make no further effort.

  Once when I stayed awake long enough to admire the olive twill pants of a flight attendant’s uniform, she let me order a pair at her discount, thus combining shopping with travel. It was the beginning of a lifetime of finding girlfriends in the sky.

  I not
iced that stewardesses were all young—and all female—but I assumed they wanted a few years of travel before doing something else, or this was an entry-level job and a pipeline for airline executives. I only began to pay attention when I was shuttling constantly between the start-up of Ms. magazine in New York and the organizing of the National Women’s Political Caucus in Washington. Once when exhaustion caused me to fall asleep with my credit card in my hand, a kindhearted stewardess removed the card, ran it through the onboard ticket machine—the way one paid for the shuttle in those days—and put it back in my hand without waking me. Neither she nor others knew who I was or why I was such a frequent-flying oddity among the mostly male passengers going to our nation’s capital, but we seemed to share a sense of being outsiders.

  On longer trips with various airlines, I began to hang out in the galley, where I could ask questions and listen. I learned that the first stewardesses had been registered nurses hired to make passengers feel safe at a time when flying was new, airsickness was frequent, and passengers were fearful. Some pilots resented this female invasion of their macho air space so much that they quit. Like the first American astronauts who compared sending a Soviet woman into space with sending up a monkey, the presence of any woman devalued a masculine domain.

  Once male business travelers became the airlines’ bread and butter, everything changed. Stewardesses were hired as decorative waitresses with geishalike instructions. There were even “executive flights” for men only, complete with steaks, brandy, and cigars lit by stewardesses. Though they still had to know first aid, evacuation procedures for as many as seventy-five kinds of planes, underwater rescue, emergency signaling, hijacking precautions, and other skills that took six weeks of schooling—not to mention how to handle passengers and fend off some—their appearance was prescribed down to age, height, weight (which was governed by regular weigh-ins), hairstyle, makeup (including a single shade of lipstick), skirt length, and other physical requirements that excluded such things as “a broad nose”—only one of many racist reasons why stewardesses were overwhelmingly white. They had to be single as well as young, and were fired if they married or aged out at over thirty or so. Altogether the goal of airline executives seemed to be to hire smart and ornamental young women, to use them as advertising come-ons, to work them hard, and to age them out soon. Flight schedules were so merciless that on some airlines, the average stewardess lasted only eighteen months. As one United executive famously said, “If a flight attendant was still on the job after three years…I’d know we were getting the wrong kind of girl. She’s not getting married.”2