It’s the Cabbie’s World, We Just Live In It

Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few. This one has been lightly edited to bring it up to date in some areas.

Like a lot of people who live in the Northeastern United States, I’m obsessed with public transportation. IT dominates my existence in a way that few other places can equal. Sure, there are cars and highways here, but most of us end up taking alternative transportation some time, if only out of simple necessity. And sometimes that transportation comes in the form of a car service or taxi cab. And that’s when it usually hits me: I live my life at the mercy of madmen.

Cabbies and car drivers of all sorts work hard and are, for the most part, honest and sincere people who want nothing more than to do their job well enough and get paid fairly for it, which sets them immediately above me, a man who wants to do as little as possible and get startlingly overpaid for it. But I cannot be the only one who feels like he’s being inspected by a superior officer when I’m standing in line for a cab at the Hoboken bus depot. I step off the train and I’m a (possibly slightly inebriated) man of means, happy in his work and contributing to society. Get on the end of that cab line, and I’m a supplicant. The cabbies roll forward slowly, inspecting the line of people, and demand to know where you are going. If they don’t like the answer, they keep moving. I’ve seen people launch into complex negotiations involving the cabbie, themselves, strangers around them, and compromise intersections so elaborate I’m amazed anyone gets home at all.

Once you do actually convince one of the cabbies to accept you as temporary freight, you slide into the seat and you’re in their little spot in the world. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course; if I had to spend hours and hours driving strangers around—strangers who can probably be often rude and inconsiderate—I’d want the cab to be pretty much an extension of my home as well. But it’s a little unsettling, after spending five minutes negotiating the ten-minute cab ride, to find yourself sitting in the back seat of what feels like the cabbie’s living room, listening to their music or talk-radio choices and staring at their decorations. The worst is when they have to move and rearrange sixty pounds of personal possessions in order to surrender the front seat to you, as if the front seat were a customer demand so unexpected it stuns them momentarily with its originality.

Once on the move, most cabbies will then treat you as if you temporarily ceased to exist, as if riding in their cab was an experiment in teleportation or astral projection. They’ll talk on the phone, talk to themselves, hum tunelessly or drive in grim, frightening silence that makes me keep one hand on the door release in case I have to ditch at high speed. The message seems to be that they would much prefer their job as cabdriver not include any actual passengers, that the only real impediment to them really enjoying their job is you, so rudely taking up space in their car.

That’s preferable, of course, to friendly, chatty cabdrivers. There’s nothing wrong with some friendly human interaction with the person driving you home or to the airport, but sometimes you wonder if you’re on some sort of reality show. There are certain subjects I hesitate to discuss with my own family that have been raised, seconds into the ride, by cheerfully loud cabdrivers. Once in Seattle a genial cabby tried to pick up my three female friends and ended a fascinating ride by suggesting that they ditch me and stay in the cab with him, and just the other day while riding to the airport I learned more than I wanted to know about one cabdriver’s finances as he raged against the ridiculous prices of a Condo in Hoboken. Harmless, for the most part, and yet disturbing: After all, for the time you’re in the car, you’re pretty much in the cabby’s hands. He can drive you where he wishes and release you from the car when he chooses, and I can’t possibly be the only one who occasionally imagines I’m about to be sold into slavery to a fat South American crime lord who will force me to wear a thong swimsuit while I serve him drinks by the pool and who will call me Tuco. Or perhaps I am, but I’m used to it.

The thing is, if a bus driver goes nuts and decides it’s his time to ruin your afternoon, you’ve at least got a busload of people ready to assist you in mutiny. On a train, there’s at least a bunch of people who will share your horror when the train grinds to a halt and the lights go out. If your cab driver turns out to be taking a holiday from his meds, it’s just you and them, mano a driver. This wouldn’t bother me if I didn’t end up feeling like I was intruding on the free time of a crazy person half the time I’m in a cab.

Of course, sometimes you get to the bus station and not only are there no buses, but the cab line wraps around the block as everyone presents themselves and their destinations for inspection, and your only option for getting home in a timely fashion is to walk. But walking in Hoboken is a whole other essay.