American Gangster

by Mark Jacobson

  “To avoid this hazard in the new building, the diesel is stored under the new plaza across from the reopened Greenwich Street,” the brochure said. Another change was the address. Silverstein was promoting the building’s “alternative” address, 250 Greenwich Street, which brokers feel will play better in “the trendy TriBeCa neighborhood.” Call it Real Estate MIHOP.

  When the new building finally opens, sometime at the end of March, the 9/11truth movement is planning a demonstration here, so “no one forgets what used to be here,” says Father Frank, veteran of much street action. He is hoping for a large turnout, even better than the one last summer when three hundred people gathered outside the New York Times office to protest the mainstream media blackout of 9/11Truth. Demonstrators screamed, “Ho, ho, hey, hey … bin Laden was trained by the CIA!” and “Truth! truth!” But few Timesmen looked out the window.

  Now, however, it being late Sunday night, there wasn’t anyone around, so I walked slipped past the construction barriers to get a closer look at the new building. The lights were on in the finished lobby, gleaming card-reading security gates already in place. A giant LCD screen, maybe a hundred feet long, hung across the empty lobby’s back wall. They must have been testing it because it kept playing the full alphabet and numbers from 1 through 9 in various fonts. It just kept scrolling, hypnotically.

  It was about then that a cop car came along. I figured they were checking me out, to see if I was the type who stole things from construction sites. They stopped a moment and stared at me before driving off. Obviously, they wanted me to move on. Cops always want you to “move on.” But I had the right to be there. Larry Silverstein didn’t own the sidewalk. And even if he did, fuck that. This is my city, born and bred. Knew it like the back of my hand. I had as much right to the site of the disaster as anyone.

  But then the cops came around the corner again and I remember more factoid I’d heard tossed around the meetings of NY911truth. David Cohen, head officer of the CIA office at WTC7 on September 11, 2001, was the same guy hired by Ray Kelly as Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence; he instituted the subway bag search, one more of those chimeras of safety we’re supposed to put up with in the forever-changed 9/11 world. Who knew what a guy like that might be up to? So I pushed off, got back in my car and left. It didn’t pay not to be too careful nowadays.

  ALL AROUND THE TOWN

  12

  Night Shifting for the Hip Fleet

  This story served as the basis for the long-running TV show, Taxi. I didn’t get rich, but Danny DeVito once bought me a sandwich while we talked about his character. Plus I didn’t have to go back to cab driving, which is way harder than writing. The Dover garage is long gone now, of course. Also, as predicted, “leasing” did spell the end of the artist/writer cabby. You’ll never find someone like me driving an NY taxi now. They’re all from Lahore. From New York magazine, 1975.

  It has been a year since I last drove a cab, but the old garage still looks the same. The generator is still clanging in the corner. The crashed cars, bent and windshieldless, still lie in the shop like harbingers of a really bad night. The weirdo maintenance guys continue to whistle Tony Bennett songs as they sweep the cigarette butts off the cement floor. The friendly old YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL FRONT-END ACCIDENTS is as comforting as ever. The dispatcher hasn’t lost any weight. And all the working stiffs are still standing around, grimy and gummy, sweating and regretting, waiting for a cab at shape-up.

  Shape-up time at Dover Taxi Garage #2 still happens every afternoon, rain or shine, winter or summer, from two to six. That’s when the nightline drivers stumble into the red-brick garage on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village and wait for the day-liners, old-timers with backsides contoured to the crease in the front seat of a Dodge Coronet, to bring in the taxis. The day guys are supposed to have the cabs in by four, but if the streets are hopping they cheat a little bit, maybe by two hours. That gives the night-liners plenty of time to stand around in the puddles on the floor, inhale the carbon monoxide, and listen to the cab stories.

  Cab stories are tales of survived disasters. They are the major source of conversation during shape-up. The flat-tire-with-no-spare-on-Eighth-Avenue-and-135th-Street is a good cab story. The no-brakes-on-the-park-transverse-at-fifty-miles-an-hour is a good cab story. The stopped-for-a-red-light-with-teenagers-crawling-on-the-windshield is not bad. They’re all good cab stories if you live to tell about them. A year later the cab stories at Dover sound a little bit more foreboding, not so funny. Sometimes they don’t even have happy endings. A year later the mood at shape-up is just a little bit more desperate. The gray faces and burnt-out eyes look just a little bit more worried. And the most popular cab story at Dover these days is the what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here story.

  Dover has been called the “hippie garage” ever since the New York freaks who couldn’t get it together to split for the Coast decided that barreling through the boogie-woogie on the East River Drive was the closest thing to riding the range. The word got around that the people at Dover weren’t as mean or as stodgy as at Ann Service, so Dover became “the place” to drive. Now, most of the hippies have either ridden into the sunset or gotten hepatitis, but Dover still attracts a specialized personnel. Hanging around at shape-up today are a college professor, a couple of Ph.D. candidates, a former priest, a calligrapher, a guy who drives to pay his family’s land taxes in Vermont, a Romanian discotheque DJ, plenty of M.A.s, a slew of social workers, trombone players, a guy who makes three-hundred-pound sculptures out of solid rock, the inventor of the electric harp, professional photographers, and the usual gang of starving artists, actors, and writers.

  It’s Hooverville, honey, and there isn’t much money around for elephant-sized sculptures, so anyone outside the military-industrial complex is likely to turn up on Dover’s night line. Especially those who believed their mother when she said to get a good education so you won’t have to shlep around in a taxicab all your life like your uncle Moe. A college education is not required to drive for Dover—all you have to do is pass a multiple choice test on which the hardest question is “Yankee Stadium is in A) Brooklyn B) New Jersey C) The Bronx—but almost everyone on the night line has at least a B.A.

  Shape-up lasts forever. The day-liners trickle in, hand over their crumpled dollars, and talk about the great U-turns they made on Fifty-seventh Street. There are about fifty people waiting to go out. Everyone is hoping for good car karma. It can be a real drag to wait three hours (cabs are first-come, first-served) and get stuck with #99 or some other dog in the Dover fleet. Over by the generator, a guy with long hair who used to be the lead singer in a band called Leon and the Buicks is hollering about the state the city’s in.

  “The National Guard,” he says, “that’s what’s gonna happen. The National Guard is gonna be in the streets, then the screws will come down.” No one even looks up. The guy who says that his family owns half of Vermont is diagnosing the world situation. “Food and oil,” he says, “they’re the two trump cards in global economics today … we have the food, they have the oil, but Iran’s money is useless without food; you can’t eat money.” He is running his finger down the columns of the Wall Street Journal, explaining to a couple of chess-playing method actors what to buy and what to sell. A lot of Dover drivers read the Wall Street Journal. The rest read the Times. Only the mechanics, who make considerably more money, read the Daily News.

  Leaning up against the pay telephone, a guy wearing a baseball hat and an American-flag pin is talking about the Pelagian Heresies and complaining about Saint Thomas Aquinas’s bad press. His cronies are laughing as if they know what the Pelagian Heresies are. A skinny guy with glasses who has driven the past fourteen nights in a row is interviewing a chubby day- liner for Think Slim, a dieters’ magazine he tries to publish in his spare time. The Romanian discotheque DJ is telling people how he plans to import movies of soccer games and sell them for a thousand dollars apiece. He had already counted a half million in profits and go
tten himself set up in a Swiss villa by the time the dispatcher calls his number and he piles into #99 to hit the streets for twelve hours.

  Some of the old favorites are missing. I don’t see the guy with the ski tours. He was an actor who couldn’t pay his Lee Strasberg bills and was always trying to sign up the drivers for fun-filled weekends in Stowe. Someone says he hasn’t seen the guy for a few months. Maybe he “liberated” himself and finally got to the mountains after all. Maybe he’s in a chalet by a brook right now waiting for the first snowfall instead of sweating and regretting at shape-up. Dover won’t miss him. Plenty of people have come to take his place.

  “I don’t look like a cabdriver, do I?” Suzanne Gagne says with a hopeful smile. Not yet. Her eyes still gleam—they aren’t fried from too many confrontations with the oncoming brights on the Queensboro Bridge. Suzanne, a tall woman of twenty-nine with patched blue jeans, is a country girl from the rural part of Connecticut. Her father gave her a car every time she graduated from somewhere, so she has three different art degrees. When school got tiresome, she came to New York to sell her “assemblages” (“I don’t care for the word collage”) in the SoHo galleries. There weren’t many immediate takers, rent was high, Dad and his bank-book had split for Europe with his mistress, so now Suzanne drives for Dover several nights a week.

  A year ago or so, any woman hanging out at shape-up was either waiting to report a driver for stealing her pocketbook, a Dover stiff’s girlfriend, or some sort of crazy cabdriver groupie. In those days the two or three women who were driving were banned from the night line, which is notably unfair because you can make a lot more money with a lot less traffic driving at night. Claire, a longtime Dover driver, challenged the rule and won; now fifteen women drive for Dover, most on the night line. There are a lot of reasons why. “I’m not pushing papers anymore,” says Sharon, a calligrapher and former social worker who drove for Dover until recently. “I can’t hack advertising.”

  Sharon says many more women will be driving soon because women artists need the same kind of loose schedule that has always attracted their male counterparts to cabdriving. At Dover you can show up whenever you want and work as many days as you can stand. Besides, she says, receptionist and typist positions, the traditional women’s subsistence jobs, are drying up along with the rest of the economy. The women at Dover try not to think about the horrors of the New York night. “You just have to be as tough as everyone else,” Sharon says. But since Suzanne started driving, the artwork she used to do in two or three days is taking weeks.

  “I’m tired a lot,” she says, “but I guess I’m driving a cab because I just can’t think of anything else to do.”

  Neither can Don Goodwin. Until a while ago he was president of the Mattachine Society, one of the oldest and most respected of the gayliberationist groups. He went around the country making speeches at places like Rikers Island. But now he twirls the ends of his handlebar mustache and says, “There’s not too much money for movements, movements are ga-stunk.”

  Don sometimes daydreams in his cab. He thinks about how he used to dress windows for Ohrbach’s and how he loved that job. But his salary got too high so they fired him. Don offered to take a cut in pay but “in the window-dressing business they don’t like you to get paid less than you got paid before, even if you ask for it. Isn’t that odd?” Now Don’s driving seven days a week because “after window-dressing and movements, I’m really not skilled to do anything else.”

  A driver I know named David is worried. David and I used to moan cab stories to each other when I was on the night line. Now he keeps asking me when I’m coming to work. After four years of driving a cab, he can’t believe interviewing people is work. David is only a dissertation away from a Ph.D. in philosophy, which makes him intelligent enough to figure out that job openings for philosophers are zilch this year. The only position his prodigious education has been able to land him was a twenty-five-dollar-a-night, one-night-a-week gig teaching ethics to rookie cops. David worked his way through college driving a cab. It was a good job for that, easy to arrange around things that were important. Now he has quit school in disgust and arranges the rest of his life around cabdriving. He has been offered a job in a warehouse for which he’d make $225 a week and never have to pick up another person who has a crowbar stuffed into his pants, but he’s not going to take it. When you’re zooming around the city, there’s an illusion of mobility.

  The turnover at the garage (Dover has over five hundred employees for the 105 taxis; it hires between five and ten new people a week) makes it easy to convince yourself this is only temporary. Working in a factory is like surrender, like defeat, like death; drudging nine to five doesn’t fit in with a self-conception molded on marches to Washington. Now David’s been at Dover for the past two years and he’s beginning to think cab freedom is just another myth.

  “I’ll tell you when I really started to get scared,” David says. “I’m driving down Flatbush and I see a lady hailing, so I did what I normally do, cut across three lanes of traffic and slam on the brakes right in front of her. I wait for her to get in, and she looks at me like I’m crazy. It was only then I realized I was driving my own car, not the cab.”

  David has the Big Fear. It doesn’t take a cabdriver too long to realize that once you leave the joy of shape-up and start uptown on Hudson Street, you’re fair game. You’re at the mercy of the Fear Variables, which are (not necessarily in order): the traffic, which will be in your way; the other cabdrivers, who want to take your business; the police, who want to give you tickets; the people in your cab, lunatics who will peck you with nudges and dent you with knives; and your car, which is capable of killing you at any time. Throw in your bosses and the hack inspectors and you begin to realize that a good night is not when you make a living wage. That’s a great night. A good night is when you survive to tell your stories at tomorrow’s shape-up.

  But all the Fear Variables pall before the Big Fear.

  The Big Fear is that times will get so hard that you’ll have to drive five or six nights a week instead of three. The Big Fear is that your play, the one that’s only one draft away from a possible showcase, will stay in your drawer. The Big Fear is thinking about all the poor stiff civil servants who have been sorting letters at the post office ever since the last Depression and all the great plays they could have produced. The Big Fear is that, after twenty years of schooling, they’ll put you on the day shift. The Big Fear is, you’re becoming a cabdriver.

  The typical Big Fear cabdriver is not to be confused with the archetypal Cabby. At least in the movies, the Cabby is a genuine New York City romantic hero. He’s what every out-of-towner who’s never been to New York thinks every Big Apple driver is like. The Cabby “owns his own,” which means the car he drives is his, not owned by some garage boss (58 percent of New York’s 11,787 taxis are owned by “fleets” like Dover, which employ the stiffs and the slobs of the industry; the rest are operated by “owner-drivers”). The Cabby hated Lindsay even before the snowfalls, has dreams about blowing up gypsy cabs, knows where all the hookers are (even in Brooklyn), slurps coffee and downs Danish at the Bellmore Cafeteria, tells his life story to everyone who gets into the cab, and makes a ferocious amount of money. Sometimes he might even, accidentally on purpose, take an unsuspecting passenger to the Bronx by way of Staten Island (leading one such driver to say, “One day they’ll put my picture on TV and every little old lady in New York will shout: That’s him!) But for the most part, the Cabby is the genuine article, a Big City staple. As much as he complains, he really loves his work.

  The Dover driver doesn’t fit this mold. He probably would have voted for Lindsay twice if he had had the chance. He doesn’t care about gypsy cabs; if they want the Bronx, let them have it. He knows only about the hookers on Lexington Avenue. He has been to the Bellmore maybe once and had a stomachache the rest of the night. He speaks as little as possible and barely makes enough to get by. He also hates his work.

  Th
e first fare I ever had was an old bum who threw up in the backseat. I had to drive around for hours in miserable weather with the windows open trying to get the smell out. That started my career of cabbing and crabbing. In the beginning, before I became acquainted with the Big Fear and all its attendant anxieties, the idea was to drive three days a week, write three, and party one. That began to change when I realized I was only clearing about twenty-seven dollars a ten-hour shift.

  There are remedies. The nine-hour shift stretches to twelve and fourteen hours. You start ignoring red lights and stop signs to get fares, risking collisions. You jump into cab lines when you think the other cabbies aren’t looking, risking a punch in the nose. You’re amazed at what you’ll do for a dollar. But mostly you steal.

  If you don’t look like H. R. Haldeman and take taxis often, you’ve probably been asked by a cabdriver if it’s “okay to make it for myself.” The passenger says yes, the driver sets a fee, doesn’t turn on the meter, gets the whole fare for himself, and that’s stealing. Stealing ups your Fear Variables immeasurably. You imagine hack inspectors and company-hired “rats” all around you. Every Chevy with blackwall tires becomes terror on wheels. The fine for being caught is $25, but that’s nothing—most likely you will be fired from your garage and no one will hire you except those places in Brooklyn with cars that have fenders held on with hangers and brake pedals that flap. But you know that if you can steal, say $12 a night, you’ll have to drive only three nights this week instead of four and maybe you’ll be able to finish that play, which some producer will love to death and this will lead to that, and you’ll be hobnobbing at the Public Theatre in no time.