When cocktail conversation turns to epically bad and/or strange taxicab experiences, and it frequently does, all of my show-stopping stories seem to come from outside New York City. An x-ray taken of my thoracic cavity will reveal an X-Files-esque jumble dating from 1994, when Slim and I stepped into a cab at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, blasted off into traffic like a faulty Roman candle, described a parabola on two wheels through a gravity-inverted French Connection remake while fruit-cart vendors got right with God and dived out of the way, and screeched up on the sidewalk in front of the Troc with our internal organs tossed like a salad. “Nice hat.” “Thanks — it’s my liver. Two Yuenglings, please.”

I’ve also traveled through an actual wormhole on the outskirts of Chicago, in the company of Wing Chun, Maggie, and an aspiring Bartleby who answered every question put to him with a fearful “yes please.” Could he get us to the Holiday Inn in Evanston? “Yes please.” Hmm. Hey, did he know that Wrigley Field is actually the opposite direction from Evanston? “Yes please.” Ah, very good — so he also knew that he’d just passed Wrigley Field, then, right? “Yes please.” Okay. Any theories about why your passengers might have started yelling “HELLOOOO CLEVELAND” at one another? “Yes please.” Could he stop the car and let us out now? “Yes please.” Spotting a “Gary, Indiana city limits” sign in the middle distance, we extricated ourselves, flagged down another cab, and got in, but not before subjecting the new driver to a rigorous geography test first.

San Francisco taxi drivers know where to go and how to get there, but due to some sort of actuarial blip that I cannot begin to explain, every single one that picks me up is either still recovering from a brief marriage to an emotionally inert Raymond Carver heroine back in the eighties, or he’s engaged in a battle royale with his brother-in-law involving borrowed home-improvement paraphernalia. Seriously. It’s the weirdest thing. I get in the car, I give the guy an address, we make idle chitchat about the weather, and the next thing I know he’s expounding on the nature of infidelity or how Jimmy’s never going to paint that goddamn garage anyway so what the fuck does he need the sprayer for then, and I spend the next fifteen minutes all “bottom line, you can’t change people” and “well, what does your sister say?” Not that I mind, really — in exchange for the free therapy, these guys will usually let me smoke in the car — and besides, if I don’t get Issues Cab, I inevitably wind up with You From Out Of Town Oh Really Well Dig The Air I Get Cresting A Hill In Chinatown At Forty-Five Miles An Hour I Bet You Don’t See This Back Home Cab. “Excuse me, sir? I know this isn’t actually a scene from a movie, but I could swear we — did we just go to slo-mo?” “Yes please.”

All the out-there cab rides happen when I go out of town. Do I ever get an offer to ghost-write a memoir about a naturalized citizen’s eighteen-year journey from Vietnam to the U.S. when I take a cab in Manhattan? No. I had to hit the Syracuse train station for that one. Where did my taxi fill with smoke? Tulsa. Who offered me, on various occasions, a bite of fruit cocktail, a surefire strategy for winning fistfights with hookers, and a sweet deal on Santa Fe real estate? The friendly drivers of Las Vegas. Okay, so that’s not out of the ordinary for Vegas, but still — it would kill the Manhattanites to pass the pineapple once in a while?

No, Big Apple cabbies generally avoid the spectacularly incompetent and bizarre in favor of the vaguely disturbing and/or annoying, but even that’s kind of a relative thing. Nine times out of ten, you get in, you tell him the destination, you get there, you pay, you get out, and you don’t think anything more of it. Maybe the seatbelt doesn’t work or the guy’s snacking loudly out of a baggie of bacon bits, but you got where you needed to go, so you don’t really care. But because the majority of New York cab rides come and go without incident, the ones that don’t truly work your nerves, and you glare sullenly at the Taxicab Rider’s Bill Of Rights posted in the back seat and wish you’d thought to bring a magic marker.

And frankly, the document could use a bit of revising for accuracy’s sake. Currently, it reads as follows:

As a taxi rider, you have the right to:

Direct the destination and route used;
Travel to any destination in the five boroughs of the City of New York;
A courteous, English-speaking driver who knows the streets in Manhattan and the way to major destinations in other boroughs;
A driver who knows and obeys all traffic laws;
Air-conditioning on demand;
A radio-free (silent) trip;
Smoke and incense-free air;
A clean passenger seat area;
A clean trunk
A driver who uses the horn only when necessary to warn of danger; and
Refuse to tip, if the above are not complied with.

It’s a nice idea, but it’s a little naïve, really. The interpretation of these rights varies widely from driver to driver, and it’s no use pretending otherwise. Take the first item on the list: “You have the right to direct the destination and the route used.” Well, yes and no. You have the right to do so, but you do not necessarily have the right to do so successfully. You can direct the driver, but he is under no obligation to hear you correctly (or at all), and may decide that you want to go to “Avenue Eighth” instead of Avenue A, infer from an address on West 58th that it’s on the east side, or hear “Houston and Ludlow” as “Newark Airport.” The driver may also construe explicit, spittily enunciated instructions not to take Broadway going downtown on a Friday night as permission to hop onto Broadway and sit in gridlock for twenty minutes while the meter ticks up and the back of the cab fills with carbon monoxide. Nowhere does the item state that the driver cannot ignore or openly defy you.

“You have the right to travel to any destination in the five boroughs of the City of New York.” Yes — as long as the destination is in the borough of Manhattan and on the grid, or as long as you can find the destination on the wadded-up street map jammed into the front-seat headrest and direct the driver yourself. Note: Brooklyn is not a borough. Brooklyn is particularly not a borough when it’s pissing down rain and the F train isn’t running, and Brooklyn is never, ever a borough if you live in Park Slope. Ever.

“You have the right to a courteous, English-speaking driver who knows the streets in Manhattan and the way to major destinations in other boroughs.” The driver does not have to employ either his courtesy or his language skills on you, and you should view “not hostile,” “fairly hostile, but not brandishing a weapon,” “brandishing a weapon, but not in the direction of the back seat,” and “knows the phrase ‘yes please'” as acceptable substitutes. The driver may speak English in the service of muttering angrily to himself, complaining at length about the previous passenger, generalizing in a bigoted fashion about the driving skills of Asian-Americans, proposing marriage to you on account of your “beautiful strong legs,” or beseeching you to check out his website. During the endless series of phone calls which the driver conducts during the ride, he may speak the language of his choosing, and although you will not know if he’s addressing himself to you or to the caller, the driver does not have to clarify the difference if he does not wish to. The driver is under no compulsion to refrain from arguing — loudly, through an open window, in the middle of February — with other cab drivers, drivers of passenger cars, police officers, pedestrians, street vendors, poodles, fire hydrants, or blowing trash he feels have wronged him; the driver need not pronounce the word “jackass” correctly during these arguments, avoid involving you in them, or stay in the car instead of stomping over to his enemies and screeching at them with the meter still running while you contemplate an unpaid dash for freedom. Furthermore, “knows” and “knows how to get to” do not mean the same thing. Note: The item does not compel the driver to admit that he has no clue where he’s going; nor does it prohibit him from driving purposefully in circles to the tune of eighteen dollars while you unfold a paper clip you found in your bag and prepare to hammer it into his ear with your shoe, or from forcing you to participate in a “short” “cut” that takes five minutes longer than the “long” “way.” Note also: Brooklyn is still not a borough.

“You have the right to a driver who knows and obeys all traffic laws.” What you actually have is the right to a driver who knows a few of the more obvious traffic laws, but flouts those to get you there faster. You will appreciate that right until the cab gets pulled over or crunches fenders with another cab during the execution of an illegal left, at which time you will exit the car fuming, “You could have gotten us killed, you know — where’d you learn to drive, Boston?” Your right to proceed from Point A to Point B without participating in a Chevy Caprice speed trial is not guaranteed. Because it is not against the law, your driver may engage in compulsively fussy braking that turns you into a bobble-head doll and nauseates you beyond the telling of it, and your right not to feel very close to barfing is also not guaranteed. It is also not against the law to put an automatic transmission vehicle in second gear and leave it there for no good reason, and therefore you do not automatically have the right to go faster than 17 miles an hour. You do, however, retain the right to ask the driver very sweetly if there’s something, like, wrong with the car or something, and to tell him when you hand him the fare to think about buying a third gear with the money.

“You have the right to air-conditioning on demand.” It is my sad duty to report that rolling down a window meets the narrow definition of “conditioning the air.”

“You have the right to a radio-free (silent) trip.” Apparently, according to an obscure by-law, Hot 97 does not qualify as “radio.” Also, “silent” does not automatically preclude the driver from shouting into the phone or asking you for stock tips.

“You have the right to smoke[-] and incense-free air.” You also have the right to long miserably for a stick of sandalwood in order to dispel the fug of armpit that pervades the entire car. You do not, however, have the right to light it. You may wonder aloud about the origins of “that fishy smell,” but the driver does not have to answer you.

“You have the right to a clean passenger seat area.” The article does not stipulate that the driver must provide the clean passenger seat area, only that you have a right to it. The best place to avail yourself of that right is in the garden of your imagination. Rather than verifying with the driver that the miracle of childbirth recently took place in one of the foot wells, go to a happy place in your mind, a place in which you didn’t just plunk a two-hundred-dollar calfskin boot into a six-inch puddle of puke, and visualize a brand-new unsticky car seat and a tree-shaped air deodorizer. Breathe in; breathe out. No, through your mouth. There you go.

“You have the right to a clean trunk.” Note: “clean” is not synonymous with “doesn’t have six spare tires, a busted baby carriage, sixteen books on electrical engineering, and the body of Jimmy Hoffa back there.” If Hoffa is properly trussed up in plastic sheeting, the trunk is technically considered clean, and you will have to find a way to stuff that bookshelf into the back seat somehow.

“You have the right to a driver who uses the horn only when necessary to warn of danger.” Your driver will see danger lurking everywhere. Quibbling with him over the dictionary definition of “danger” will do nothing to ease his paranoia.

“You have the right to refuse to tip, if the above are not complied with.” Implicit in the right to refuse a tip: the right to shiver in a gale of Russian curses involving your mother and an unspecified number of goats; the right to take off at a dead run down Little West 12th, fearing for your very life; the right to meet the driver’s steely gaze with your own when you only round up ten cents on the fare; and the right to enjoy the sensation of a steel-belted radial proceeding slllloooowwwwlllly over the top of your right foot.

You’ll notice that the Commission doesn’t mention certain other “rights” of which I have unfortunately availed myself in the past, like standing on a corner for twenty minutes while cabs drive by with their duty lights on but don’t stop, or listening to that goddamn seatbelt PSA for the umpteenth time. Mind your own business, Radio City Rockettes. It’s my party, and I’ll not buckle up if I want to. God.

Anyway. I just want all of it in writing. I want the Bill Of Rights amended, and I want those amendments posted in the back of the cab. Then, on the blessedly few occasions when an NYC cab ride does suck, I’ll know if I’ve got grounds to register a complaint, or if I should just shut up and thank God the guy’s not starting in about his alimony payments. “Let’s see here — do I have the right to a vehicle without a suspension system of any kind? Why, yes. Yes, I do. All righty then. Oh, dear — are those cobblestones?” “Yes please.”

November 11, 2002

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