The Cab Ride

After my sophomore year of college, I decided to stay in New York City. Like most summers, I had little to no idea what I was going to be doing until the very last minute when I acquired a pretty cool, albeit incredibly depressing internship writing informational materials on urban sprawl for community governments at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).

It was the summer of 2000, and the United States was experiencing one of the longest economic booms in the country’s history, and there I was a 20 year old kid trying to explain why this was no good. I went to work everyday and learned a little bit more about how the newest housing developments and SUVs and roads were bringing forth Armageddon. I’m not much for melodrama, but somehow spending your whole summer staring at research reports and books that point to the inevitable environmental doom which human beings are bringing upon themselves made me understand folks who take refuge in rural bunker-type abodes a little bit better.

Anyhow, before any of this had even happened, I visited my parents in Illinois for a couple of weeks. Then, one day, I packed up all my stuff and my dad drove me out to O’Hare International Airport (airport code: ORD) where with a hug he handed me $70 and told me to take a cab. I preceded to catch a plane back to New York City. Along the way I chuckled at my father’s continued insistence on giving me money for cabs. He was well aware that I usually just took the bus and put the money towards a better purpose like groceries or a couple of drinks.

I landed at La Guardia (airport code: LGA) and came to the disappointing realization that I had too much luggage to take the bus. Now, New York City public transportation is freakin’ amazing! For $1.50 you can get everywhere in Manhattan and a whole bunch of places throughout the five boroughs. It’s relatively cheap, pretty damn efficient, and as an added perk, an excellent place to people watch. And when the people cease to amuse in the subway tunnels, there is always the giant rats that are oddly compelling in their Apocalypse-resistant dirtiness.

One of the joys of living in Morningside Heights is that the M60 bus runs right from LaGuardia to my doorstep. Thus, the realization that I was going to have to dip a little further into my Dad-granted $70 for cab fare was none too pleasing when the other option was so convenient and cheap.

However, I found a cab and loaded my luggage into the trunk before giving the young, Indian cab driver the instructions to take me to 113th St. and Broadway. For the summer, I was living in a beautiful, pre-war building where the fire alarm seemed to go off every Tuesday morning at 6:15 a.m. and the elevator was out of commission half the time.

I don’t know what it is about me and cab drivers, but they always want to chat with me. And it seems that within three minutes of sitting in the back seat, I have been asked whether I have a boyfriend or not. I don’t take cabs too often (usually only to an airport when I have more than one bag), but even I had learned early on that no matter what, I had a boyfriend if a cab driver was asking.

So, I told this guy that I had a boyfriend. The young cab driver inquired about him and I had a bit of fun constructing the ideal fictional boyfriend from a composite sketch of boys that I had recently been crushing on. As we started across the Triborough Bridge, the wind whipping through the half open windows, the plexiglass divider between front and back seat, the cabbie’s quiet voice, and my disinterest all combined and I stopped listening to anything he was saying and opted to just politely nod my ascent.

This was a mistake. As we disembarked from the bridge into the heavily trafficked crosstown drive on 125th Street, I came to the horrific (though certainly amusing if it wasn’t actually me) realization about what the cab driver had been saying. It seems that he had some sexual designs on me and was trying to convince me to engage in some meaningless sex by describing, in accented English, all of the things he would like to do to me.

I was confused and shocked and praying that there was in fact a God and he/she/it would have mercy and make the crosstown commute a quick and painless one so I could get out of that cab and grab my luggage and begin moving into the beautiful, pre-war building where the fire alarm would go off virtually every Tuesday morning at 6:15 a.m. and the elevator would be out of commission for half of the summer.

But, apparently there is no God, or he/she/it likes to have the fun with me and made the traffic endless. We sat there forever, waiting for lights to change, buses to move, people to walk and he talked on. Now he was in between my legs, now he was in my mouth, now he was between my breasts. My knuckles grew whiter, my teeth clenched a little harder and finally, we were at 113th and Broadway. I sprung from the cab with the speed of a super hero. I paid him the fare, grabbed my stuff and he handed me a slip of paper with his phone number, “You will call tonight, yes?” he asked. I looked at him as I hobbled away under the weight of all the luggage and said, “Oh, yeah, if my phone is set up, definitely...” and moved just a little bit faster. He smiled slyly at me and climbed back into the front seat of his cab and drove away. I shuddered, hoping that the movement somehow gravitationally washed me free of the whole experience. Checking to make sure he was gone, I then threw the slip of paper into a trash can on the corner.