Going to New York

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  I grabbed a crowbar and got out of the car, too. I shouted: "Look, you gotta pay me $7. And really you owe me a lot more for all that driving around, because that wasn't just a regular short round-trip. But at least pay me the $7."

  He wouldn't. I walked up to him, and got in his face, until the tip of my nose was only about two or three inches away from the tip of his nose. We screamed at each other. Neither one of us was willing to back down or give in. I was about to bash this guy's head in with a crowbar for lousy $7. Crazy!

  One of the reasons I usually don't get into these kinds of situations is because I always anticipate what is going to happen next. And what will happen after that and then after that, like a chess player plotting his next five moves.

  When people get into a fight, whatever the reason is, it may seem important at that moment, but in the grand scheme of things, it is utterly meaningless. Nobody will remember or care about the reason for the fight in a week or a month or a year from now, because it's really not that important at all. Usually fights happen because two chest-thumping, knuckle-dragging idiots can't agree on who has the bigger dick. But if you go to jail for battery with a deadly weapon, or you suffer a permanent injury during that fight, those consequences will be with you for the rest of your life.

  Was I really ready to go to jail for bashing this guy's head in over stupid $7? No, of course not. I'm smarter than that. But here I was, nose tip to nose tip with this guy, with no way out, without looking like a total pussy. Luckily that guy wasn't a complete retard either, and the same thoughts were going through his head, and we were both looking for a way to end the stand off without looking like wimps.

  He screamed at me: "Look, I'm gonna go in the house now. I'll call you back later, for a round-trip to McDonald's. And then I'm gonna pay you for that round trip, and for this one. Deal?"

  "Alright then!" I screamed back at him, like I got my way. But really I was just glad that this gave me an excuse to stand down and walk away without getting hurt or going to jail. I walked back in the base and figured I was never going to hear from that guy again.

  But a few hours later Tony really did come back into the base and specifically asked for me to give him a ride to McDonald's on the other side of the neighborhood. I was pretty tense in the car on the way there, because I felt really stupid driving this guy around again, when he was probably just going to try to stiff me again.

  We didn't talk at all at first, until he said in a conciliatory tone: "You remind me of me when I was younger."

  "Uhh, thanks," I said. I didn't really know how to respond to that.

  When we got to McDonald's, he got out of the car and went inside. I waited for him while clutching my crowbar. If that motherfucker was going to play games again, I was gonna bash his damn head in! No, I wasn't. Deep down I knew I would just leave and chalk it up as a learning experience.

  But Tony did come back out after a few minutes. I drove him back to his house, and he really did pay me for both round-trips. Still no tip though. But I was glad I got paid and left it at that.

  A few hours later it was the middle of the night and it was slow again. I was sitting in the room in the back of the base. Suddenly Tony came in and asked to speak to me. Since Tony was a regular customer and Jim had known him for a long time, Jim opened the door and let Tony into the back. Tony sat down on a chair next to me, and pulled out a piece of paper. It was a love poem he had written for me! WTF?! Seriously. What. The. Fuck?!?

  A few hours earlier I was ready to bash this guy's head in. And now I had this 40-year-old black man reading me a love poem about how he was like me when he was younger and we met for a reason and so on and so forth. Bizarre. He was gonna hang out at the base with me, but I told him it was time for me to go home. After that I told Jim never to give me a call with that guy again.

  Another weird guy I still remember was this huge white guy with a big booming voice and a thick Brooklyn accent, who never went anywhere without his large German shepherd. This guy was pretty intimidating. He was the size of a refrigerator. I had to pick him and his dog up from bars a few times. He was always drunk or high when he got in my car, and he was very talkative.

  I hate being around drunk people, because of what happened with my dad, so I was really uncomfortable with this guy in my car, even though he was always very nice. But I always felt that drunk people are totally unpredictable, and at any moment this guy could turn on me and try to pick a fight with me for no reason. And considering his size and the size of his dog, that fight would not have ended well for me.

  He loved talking about drugs. He told me that LSD is a miracle drug and that I have not lived until I have had a vision on LSD. He said it enlightens the mind and broadens your horizon. I just nodded politely and agreed with whatever he was saying.

  He always joked about my shitty old red car and the intense smell of exhaust fumes in it. He knew that even during the winter, I had to drive around with the windows rolled down, if I didn't want to end up with carbon monoxide poisoning. And he was ok with it, even though he was freezing in my car. He was just happy that I didn't mind having his dog in my car.

  One night, when he got out of the car, the leg of his pants got caught on the jagged edge of some rusted metal right by the door frame. It ripped his pants from his ankle all the way to above his knee. Luckily he wasn't bleeding. I thought he was definitely going to lose his temper about it and fight me. But he just laughed and said: "Buddy, you need a new car."

  There was this famous actress in the 60s or 70s. Her name was Karen Black. She was in a bunch of horror and disaster movies. When I was a kid, I watched some of those old movies with her, and for some reason I couldn't stand her from the first time I saw her. I'm sure she was a lovely lady, but there was just something about her face that I couldn't stand.

  And she looked annoying enough even when she wasn't doing anything. But when she cried in the movie (and she always did, hysterical bitch) I just wanted to punch her in her stupid face all day long. I couldn't even concentrate on the damn movie, because she was that annoying to look at.

  I never felt this annoyed about a complete stranger again, until I moved to the States and started to drive a cab. Every once in a while I had to pick up this woman who was so unbelievably obnoxious, it made my skin crawl. Literally. She gave me goose bumps. She was a skinny white girl, and ugly as fuck, with warts all over her face, and a hook nose. She had these stupid ghetto cornrows in her hair. It just looked so retarded.

  And she had these 3 mixed kids. They were from 3 different black guys. And she constantly, constantly screamed at these kids at the top of her lungs, threatening them with beatings and cursing them out: "What the fuck did I just tell you, you stupid motherfucker? If you fucking piece of shit don't shut the fuck up I WILL BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU!"

  That's the kind of stuff she screamed at her little kids nonstop. And they were so used to it, they weren't intimidated by it at all. Having her and her kids in the cab was so stressful, it just made my skin crawl. I think if that woman had lived a few hundred years ago, she would have been burned at the stake as a witch, because she just had this horrible, evil, negative vibe about her that made you want to run away from her.

  This whole ghetto cab service I worked for was totally illegal and all the drivers were unlicensed. We always had to be careful not to get caught driving around as illegal taxis, because the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission had cops that were hunting people like us.

  Whenever possible, we asked our passengers to sit on the front passenger seat instead of the backseat, because when people pick up a friend, the friend usually gets in the front. When someone gets in the back, that's usually a sign that the driver is a cabbie. And undercover TLC cops were staking out malls and supermarkets and looking for people getting into the back of cars that looked like they were illegal cabs.

  One day I left the base to go pick up some lady at a nearby supermarket. She got in the back with a bunch of grocery bags. Suddenly a
n uncover cop car pulled up right in front of me, blocking my way. They had followed me from the base, but I didn't know that at the time.

  Two TLC cops, wearing bulletproof vests under their plain clothes, jumped out of the car and pointed their guns at me and yelled: "GET OUT OF THE CAR! GET OUT OF THE CAR!!!"

  The woman on the backseat and I were shocked. We got out of the car, and the cops asked the woman a couple of questions about me, wrote up my license, and then impounded my car on the spot.

  Now the lady and I stood in front of the supermarket without a car, and I had to try to explain to her what just happened. It was so embarrassing. Then she called another cab and one of my buddies came to pick us up.

  Without my Flintstone mobile I couldn't work for that car service anymore, so I applied at a different taxi company. They were a little bit more legit. They actually had a fleet of their own cars. They were old, crappy retired police cruisers. The first night I started working there, the dispatcher put me in the oldest, shittiest car that none of the other drivers wanted.

  This was a bigger company, with more long distance trips. The dispatcher sent me to a neighborhood on the other end of Brooklyn that I had never been to. I had to take the highway to get there. As the highway was bending into a curve, my driver side door suddenly swung wide open. The lock was broken, and whenever the car was leaning into a curve, the door just opened up all the way. I felt like I was gonna fall out onto the highway. I had two or three more calls that night, until the car broke down, and I spent the rest of my shift waiting for a tow truck.

  Canarsie, the Brooklyn neighborhood Donna and I lived in, had been all Italian and Jewish before I moved there. But right around the time that I moved there, the neighborhood began to change. More and more black people from Haiti and Jamaica moved in, and over the course of just a few years, the whole neighborhood had turned from almost all white to almost all black. We were the only white people left on our block.

  I'm not racist. After World War 2, the German school system was set up to never allow another Holocaust to happen. German children are being taught to be tolerant of all people and to never judge a person by the color of their skin or their religion.

  But of course there are some right-wing extremist racists in Germany, just like anywhere else. Like those skinheads that started using computers to spread their message of hate online for example. Even one of the members in my hacking crew had been a skinhead. At first I thought it was just a poor fashion choice, but later I found out he really was a hardcore racist. He ended up in prison for arson. He had set fire to an immigrant shelter full of Turkish families seeking asylum in Germany. Psycho.

  Anyway, when you live in Europe and watch American movies or sitcoms, you get the impression that racial tensions in America are a thing of the past. So when I moved to Brooklyn, and all the white people seemed to hate blacks, and all the black people seemed to hate whites, it caught me by surprise. This was not the tolerant melting pot America I had seen in movies.

  At first I thought the white people I met in Brooklyn were just a bunch of racist halfwits, when they talked about how much they hated niggers. But then I even heard some black people complain about niggers.

  Have you ever seen Chris Rock's stand-up routine about the difference between black people and niggers? It's so true. Most black people are nice, decent folks, but the ones who act like trash make all the other black people in their neighborhood look bad.

  But niggers really come in every color. The only thing I hate more than black kids acting like thugs and niggers, are white kids acting like thugs and niggers. Is there anything more pathetic and ridiculous than some white kid from the suburbs trying to act like he's a gangsta from the hood? Pull your pants up, dipshit. You're embarrassing yourself.

  Although most of the black families from Haiti and Jamaica who moved to Canarsie were nice, hard-working people, there were also a bunch of thugs and niggers who turned the neighborhood to trash.

  There was this little convenience store right down the block from where Donna and I lived. I went there all the time, to get a bottle of Pepsi or a loaf of Wonderbread. One day I was just about to walk into the store, when I heard a popping sound behind me.

  I turned around and saw a minivan drive by. At first I could only see the right side of the van, but as it was slowly rolling further down the road, I could now see the back of the minivan, and a foot sticking out of the left side of the vehicle. Suddenly the whole body was being shoved out of the door and fell into the street. Then the minivan sped off. The popping sound I heard right behind me a few seconds earlier was a gun shot. This guy had been shot and killed in the minivan, just as it was passing me.

  There was a phone booth right outside the store, so I called 911 and reported that I had just seen a person being shot and that his dead body had been thrown out into the street just a few feet away from me. The 911 operator told me a cruiser was on the way to my location and asked if I was willing to testify. I said no. I didn't want to end up getting shot just because I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  But this was now the new reality of our neighborhood. The crime rate had gone up dramatically. Local stores and banks were getting robbed on a daily basis, and suddenly there was graffiti and broken glass on the sidewalk everywhere. Canarsie was turning from a quiet suburban neighborhood into the hood.

  I picked up some guy who had to get a ride to the projects nearby. When we got there, we saw two guys running across the parking lot right in front of the car. The second guy had a gun and was shooting at the first guy, while chasing him. My passenger was afraid to get out of the car and asked me to take him back home.

  It was getting scary to drive a cab in New York at night. You never knew what was gonna happen. Then a cabbie murderer made the headline news. This guy kept robbing cabbies for the few bucks that they had in their pockets and then shot them, to leave no witnesses. I was not going to get myself killed for minimum wage, so I decided to quit my little adventure as NY cab driver and look for a safer job.

  BEING A PRODUCTION MANAGER SUCKS

  “You are part of the rat race because you are letting them treat you like a rat. This is the modern definition of a slave.”

  Saurabh Sharma

  I landed a job in the graphic department of a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn. At first I had to create the ads for local advertisers. The old lady who owned the newspaper liked my work, and after just a few weeks I was promoted to production manager.

  I was now in charge of the entire newspaper. I was the one who determined how many pages each issue had, how many copies to print, what the newspaper looked like, and where each article and advertisement went on each page. It was another job I had gotten by pretending to know their software, even though I didn't. I had to learn everything on the fly, without letting anyone know that I had no idea what I was doing.

  After a few weeks, I was pretty good at my job and had made several improvements to the paper. Before I took over, the previous production manager still had cut and paste boards, where each page was literally being glued together with snippets of text on paper strips. And photos still had to be developed in a dark room. Like we were a bunch of savages or something.

  I upgraded their computer systems, installed a network, optimized the work flow and went fully digital. The layout of each page was now being created on networked computers and all photos were digital images.

  The old lady who owned the paper passed away just a few weeks after promoting me to production manager. A lawyer bought the paper and moved his law office into the back of the newspaper building. Every time one of his clients came to see him, I saw how his little law firm operated: If someone came to have a will or a deed prepared, the lawyer charged him $1000 and then told his minimum-wage secretary to take care of it. She had an archive of legal document templates, and all she had to do was fill in the client's name and a few details. That's it. Pretty easy money.

  For legal reasons, the newspaper was not in t
he lawyer's name, but in his wife's name. I guess he figured if anyone was going to sue the newspaper, his wife would be the one to take the fall, not him, and they wouldn't be able to get to the assets that are in his name.

  In order to make the story believable, we were instructed to treat his wife like the boss whenever she happened to stop by the office. It reminded me a lot of the precautions I took as a teenager, to create a believable story of how not I but my non-existent friend Lucifer was supposedly the one running my hacking crew.

  Being the production manager was an incredibly stressful job. I was close to having a nervous breakdown once or twice, because it was up to me to make sure the newspaper came together in time for the deadline. Otherwise there would be no newspaper at the newsstands the next morning. If anything went wrong, it was my fault, because I had forced the old folks who had worked at that paper for decades, to welcome the 21st Century into their office. Change is never easy. And some of the old folks fought me every step of the way.

  And on some days, it just didn't seem like the paper was going to come together in time, because everything went wrong. But somehow it always worked out in the end, even if I had to stay in the office until 11 pm, while everyone else went home at 5 pm. I was not on the clock. I was getting the same salary each week, no matter how long I stayed. So when I was in the office until 11 pm, I wasn't even getting paid for it. It was just my German sense of duty that made me want to do the right thing and get the job done, no matter how.