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http://chronicle.com/article/Confessions-of-a-Former-New/65274/ May 2, 2010 Confessions of a Former New York Cabby By Mark Edmundson Getting a mild gasp from a classroom full of college students isn't easy. But the other day I got the 20 or so students in my class on the Romantics to register a small jolt of surprise. I did it simply by telling them that for a year or two after graduating from college, I'd been a cab driver in New York City. At first, I thought that they'd somehow gleaned something about my sense of direction (nonexistent) and imagined what I'd be like trying to transport a fare through the maze of the West Village. But no: It was the idea that someone would actually get a job like cab driving after college. Most of them hope to go immediately on to grad school or professional school, maybe a corporate job, maybe a prestigious internship. A menial gig like driving a cab? No thanks. That's not on the menu. Though I went to cab driving to make a badly needed buck, I eventually came to think of it as a part of my education, more valuable in some ways than the schooling I'd acquired at my little college in Vermont. It turned out I had a few ideas that needed modifying, and my evil-smelling, cartoon-yellow cab was a good place for doing just that. I hated rich people at the time—no doubt about it. (It was 1974: I wasn't alone in the sentiment.) I thought of them as parasites, exploiters. But the problem was that the rich—or at least the adult rich—were an abstraction to me. I really hadn't encountered many of them until I started driving the cab. Often, my well-heeled Upper East Side passengers gave me yet more reasons to dislike the wealthy. They bellowed orders; they addressed me as "driver"; they postured and declaimed. One night I picked up a party of four on Fifth Avenue and began to ferry them south. They were well dressed, slightly lit, and ready for a night on the town—their town. The host and main man sat beside me up front and commenced an oration: "Everyone says that London cabbies are the best in the world," he began. "They know the city like the backs of their hands, and all that. But for my money, New York cabbies are the best. They're by far the most interesting. And that's because a lot of them aren't professional cabbies at all. They're on the way to being something else. They're actors and writers and musicians. They aren't just hack drivers." His companions took this in, duly impressed. The orator saw a visual aid ready to hand. "And look at this!" he trumpeted. "A book! New York cabbies read." He picked up my volume and turned it over so he could get a look at the cover. Selected Writings of Karl Marx, he said, his voice dropping with each syllable. Then he fell into a silence that I found satisfying in the extreme. But sometimes things turned out rather differently. Sometimes, in fact, my class enemies gave at least as good as they got. One Sunday night, I picked up an old woman, brittle and spindly as an autumn spider. She was standing under the awning of a mammoth building, a great gray elephant, on Park and 83rd or so. She gave her liveried doorman a tip (it looked to be a dime), then groaned her way into my back seat, shut the door, and said, in a voice I took to be somehow both snooty and vulgar, "Park and 52nd, driver, and step on it." Step on it! Were we in a 1950s movie? Did she think she was Lauren Bacall? I banged the gas pedal of the stinking old Chevy so hard that my 200 or so pounds flew backward on the broken-springed seat. I felt like I'd been hit with a karate chop to the chest. I could only guess what was happening to the matron in the back seat. I reveled in guessing. We made maybe 10 blocks—a good run—before the light changed. From the back, I heard her self-infatuated voice. "Driver, I must insist. I am in a hurry. Are you unable to go faster?" When the light turned green, I stomped my foot down as though I was trying to burst through the floor, and we launched. I went weaving through the other cars, skimming and dodging like a bug on a lake, going full tilt. I was driving so fast I was terrifying myself. I ran two red lights, slinging my car around and through the others, pushing east to west and west to east. They barked like outraged sea lions at me. When finally I saw the destination—it was a church, as I remember—I cut for it so hard that I rolled the cab up and onto the curb, with a great thudding of the steel frame and flapping of the tires. From the back seat, silence. I looked into my rearview mirror and saw a dark, unmoving shape, upright as a pole. Had I caused a heart attack? Put her in shock? I waited, waited—and finally: "Thank you, driver," my matron said. "We had a poor start, but then you made very good time." The fare was $2, and she gave me a 10 percent tip, 20 cents. Sitting around in my apartment up on 187th Street that night, I thought the event over. My matron must have been terrified by the ride, of course. But she hung in. She played her part, acted her role. She did what a rich, appearance-conscious person has got to do under such circumstances: She showed a little grace. And I—22 years old and looking to figure out the world—had to do some revision. I had to redraw a small segment of my mental map. Maybe the rich weren't to be hated so fiercely after all. Cab driving was a good place for making such discoveries. People such as cab drivers often seem invisible to others. But that's an advantage in a way: You see and hear many things when you become invisible; you're like a low-rung spirit sojourning unseen on the earth. My students often feel that they don't have time for that kind of sojourning. They've got to get on with their careers, their lives. They're too stressed about the future to let go a little bit. They know how to relax—but mostly only as a reward for some arduous work and a prelude to more. They feel that they can't take the time to kick back and cruise. Sometimes driving my cab I'd find myself still on the street at four o'clock in the morning, when the traffic was in its hour or two of remission. I'd make my way over to Sixth Avenue, ride as far downtown as I could, then turn north and sit waiting for the first light to go green, then the light ahead of it, and the next and the next. I'd pop the gas and begin moving north, driving almost as fast as the Chevy would go but not fast enough to outrace the lights as they flicked green, one after another. It was like being a surfer, riding the edge of a green wave, cruising fast, never easing on the pedal, never stopping, until I came face up to Central Park. At which point, I often drove back downtown and did it again. If you happened to hail my cab during a Sixth Ave Surf, I'm sorry, there was no way I was going to stop for you. Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. This essay is adapted from his most recent book, The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll: A Memoir, published this month by Harper. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
