Here's the mid-week forecast for New York: chaos, with intermittent eruptions of hand-to-hand combat in the streets. That's because this Wednesday and Thursday may see the first strike by the city's taxi drivers in almost 10 years. Cabbies are mad as hell over - well, over everything, really: low wages, industry corruption, back-breaking 12-hour shifts, random muggings, and the lack of ability to control many aspects of their jobs, not to mention the racial discrimination and verbal and physical assaults they regularly have to endure while cops turn a blind eye to their troubles.
But the issue this week is high-tech global-positioning systems that the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission has required to be in cars by the end of the year. Cabbies say the GPS won't enhance the passenger experience, and will simply be another burden whose $7,000 (U.S.) costs will fall on their overworked shoulders. They say the city is merely trying to intrude on their privacy by tracking their driving, to make sure they're not taking people, as they say, for a ride. Still, as with most taxi issues, there's not much that drivers can do except stage a token protest, grumble meekly about their fate, and take their place behind the wheel for another shift.
The job can be cruel, and yet it continues to attract thousands of new drivers every year. Most are there because they have few economic alternatives. But a few do it because they're attracted by the mythology. There are dozens of books about driving a New York taxi, from sociological studies to kids books. (One of my recent favourites was the photo book Drive By Shootings, which came out in 2000.) And who wouldn't want to join a fraternity that includes Travis Bickle and Louie De Palma?
Melissa Plaut wasn't even walking yet when Taxi Driver hit theatres in early 1976; she inherited the film's cultural legacy and its depiction of the city. A petite, black-clad 32-year-old raised in the suburbs, she has the vocal rasp of Joan Rivers and a deferential nature that you'd think would make it tough to compete for fares.
Three years ago, Plaut was just another aimless twentysomething, bouncing from one dispiriting job to another (advertising, tech industry, etc.), when she decided she'd had enough. She yearned for adventure, or at least something offbeat. So, just before her 29th birthday - Sept. 1, 2004 - she took her taxi test and joined the 44,000 men (and roughly 200 women) licensed to pilot the iconic yellow cruisers around New York.
"There were aspects that I thought would be cool - like having those all-night cafeterias where cabbies hang out," she says, referring to a location in Taxi Driver. "The fact is, that's just not the city we live in any more. Those don't exist."
Last week, I met Plaut at a family-owned Greek diner in Williamsburg, a few blocks from her apartment, on the day after her first book hit the shelves. The full, self-explanatory title is Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab. The book grew out of a blog she began writing (at newyorkhack.blogspot.com) a year after she took her place behind the wheel.
Hack unfolds as a series of brief tales about good tippers and bad tippers, mentally unstable personalities, traffic troubles, frisky couples who don't seem to comprehend that their cabbie is an actual human being in front of whom they might not want to perform intimate acts, cops with aggression issues, and fare beaters.
"You become so insulated in your own reality, that's what cab driving has done for me, it's broken down all those barriers, you see all those people you'd never come into contact with any other way," she says. "But with a cab there's the poor, there's the rich, the down on their luck, the people who just won the lottery, they're all coming in."
Still, Plaut admits that most driving shifts failed to yield any interesting material.
"So many of the passengers are just going home from work," she said last week. "There's so much money in New York right now. There's so many people working white collar jobs, taking cabs, and it's not so much the freaks and the geeks and the hookers and the pimps - that happens, but not as much any more. You sort of wish for that New York feeling. I guess I wanted that fantasy that I was too young to really be a part of."
In fact, Plaut's co-workers are probably the most colourful characters in the book: the pre-transgender sixtysomething man named Harvey; the diabetic old-timer plagued by a persistent odour of urine; the crazed but sympathetic Romanian dispatcher. "I feel like the weirdest New Yorkers in the city right now are the cab drivers," says Plaut. "They're all whack-jobs, all the old-timers, they're all weirdos. They have a lot of stories."
Which is partly why driving a taxi in New York is as much about something in The Godfather as it is something out of Taxi Driver: Just when you think you're out, they pull you back in. Last year, after a disturbing incident with a driver who exposed himself, Plaut swore she was done forever. But her manager promised her a free shift as compensation, which was all the convincing she needed to get behind the wheel again one week later.
"I don't know if I'll ever fully quit," she sighs. "Even if I become an investment banker, which is an unlikelihood, or a millionaire, there might be this little itch of: you know what? I still have my hack licence. I've been keeping it current - which I always will - maybe I'll just drive a cab for a shift and see what's happening in the world."
Simon Houpt