Yellow Rambling

Iva Pekárková

(Translated by Káča Poláčková-Henley)

I’m learning the city like I learned my multiplication tables. The dubious logic of its streets and avenues engraves itself on my brain, permanently altering its furrows, making little traffic lights blink red, green, yellow in the grey of its cortex, as if in a dense fog.

I’m learning the city like the times table: the intersections of numbered streets and numbered avenues, two thousand Manhattan crossings, eight thousand corners with blinking lights; tens of thousands of doorways where homeless people squat in cardboard boxes; I’m learning the city like a diagram of my own memories, of my own head, I colour it like a colouring book... I let the city be born in my eyes and I am born all over again in each and every street... Each time I reawaken to newly familiar sights, views, reflections... Night after night I fondle the city with my eyes and I hear the people who teach me the city recite numbers, 95^th and 2^nd, 45^th and 7^th, 55^th and 5^th, 16^th and 3^rd, 12^th and 4^th, round and round.

I am learning the city like multiplication tables.

At least that’s what it feels like to me, sometimes, as I drive back, say, from Brooklyn to Manhattan towards morning to turn in the cab at the garage. It must be well towards morning, when the mist has had time to disperse, when the orb of the sun has yet to climb up to the horizon but the air is bright already and still invisible down here to me, the sun is already illuminating the tips of the skyscrapers. And sometimes, when I’m really lucky, it has that gentle pinkish-gold glow to it. Maybe I’m on my way back to Manhattan from dropping off my last fare, and there’s a curve I know on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, for a long way there’s nothing below me but endless rows of two-storey houses crammed tight up against each other... that’s all, nothing more, just the bluish roadway, with the earliest commuters just beginning the drive to Manhattan... still nothing... and then suddenly Whoops! there’s a bit of a rise in the road and all of Manhattan pops out in front of you like a jack-in-the-box: on the left the green Statue of Ms. Liberty – and then the whole southern tip of Manhattan rolls out all its skyscrapers before you, strikes you like a fist between the eyes, and without fail, every time, even the thousandth, it floors you with its beauty.

Or is it the power? Towering above you and before you and beside you, the skyline looks like a silhouette cut out of copper plate, and as you roll northwards at your regular fifty, sixty miles an hour, it burns itself into to you, starting with your weary head. You can see all the Battery and Brooklyn Bridge, the blush of sunlight on the towers of the World Trade Centre, the spire of the Empire State Building on 34^th Street... You can see all the bridges... You can see the whole of the metropolis like a bas relief on the palm of your hand... It spread out before you, rosy in the sunlight, you can see it stretching far, far to the north... For a few seconds, and for the thousandth time, you let it etch itself on the inside of your eyes – and so, more and more, you own it: it’s yours, especially at dawn.

It’s yours as you drive your cab back to Manhattan, your eyelids growing heavy already; it’s yours, the harlot city that dons a pinkish halo to rise in the morning as a maiden: content, quiet, rested; rosy and shiny like the unspoiled apple of sin, of sins, of the millions of sins that you observe, night after night, in its streets.

Of a morning, the city is yours, because you know it. At least, some of the times. Mornings like that, your head is an abacus that you use sleepily to multiply the numbers of the avenues by street numbers, and you’ve had something happen for you on every one of those eight thousand street corners. On mornings like that, the map of Manhattan permeates the folds and furrows of your brain; on mornings like that, you can hear the city living deep inside you: the red of the spotlights courses through your veins and you’re connected to the city by the trembling ribbon of the Brooklyn Bridge, you’ve drawn into it by its magnetic force, and the vibration of the bridge beneath your wheels melds with your own trembling into a single rhythmic trance.

Mostly though, it’s much more prosaic.

After a year of driving, if you’ve stuck it out, you ostensibly become a veteran, so I am practically a veteran myself. I know the city. I know my way around. I have learned that if the traffic is not too bad, going some 18 to 20 miles per hour, will carry me uptown on a wave of green lights for dozens of blocks. I also know that if I turn onto Madison Avenue at the 23^rd, I’ll catch a green light at the next corner and with a bit of luck, I can continue to get green lights all the way up to 62^nd, and if that works, then all I need to do at 62^nd is step on it through three yellows to 65^th, and from there, it’s easy going all the way up to 86^th.

You can tell I’m a veteran from how quickly I register which stoplights don’t work – every night at different corners – and lean on my horn to aggravate the less experienced drivers of passenger cars, reluctant to pull out on a red light. You can tell I’m a veteran from my proficiency behind the wheel, and also from the precision with which newly discovered potholes are registered my sub- or my un-conscience mind, so that I find myself slowing down at just the right moment, or swerving elegantly to avoid them. You can tell I’m a veteran from the ease with which I start conversations: conversations with customers that must always be sincere, in spite of the fact that I will probably never see them again in my life, after I drop them off a few blocks further on. You can tell I’m a veteran from my glances in the rear view mirror, which tells me whether the drunk in the back needs to be left alone, or whether I ought to reach through the plastic partition and pass him a paper bag to throw up in – or whether I’d do better to simply pull over right away and let him relieve himself at the foot of the lamp post, because if he tries to throw up out of the door, he might just fall out on the street. You can tell I’m a veteran how I gauge traffic; I’m a veteran of fender-benders that needn’t have happened, but are a cabby’s nice way of indicating to the insolent Mercedes that it had no fuckin’ business cutting him off like that. Yes indeed, I am a veteran. I know the times when the tides of automobiles ebb and flood. I know them in detail and by heart; I know intersections on two way streets where you can’t turn left before 7p.m.(And I also know exactly how pathetic you have to look to keep the cops from writing you a ticket if you turn left anyway.) I know all the “theatre traffic” on Times Square and Eight Avenue. There is the slower, gradual version between half past seven and eight, when the dressed-up ladies and gentlemen collect at the theatres, climbing out of taxicabs and pushing their way through the crowd to the theatre lobbies. And there so the intense swell around 10:30, when the theatres break: the street opening onto Times Square are all impenetrably jammed with shiny limos and their gloomy chauffeurs in black uniforms, while Eight Avenue is a yellow swarm, dynamic and unpredictable as shifting quicksilver, and the dressed-up ladies and dressed-up gentlemen in patent leather pumps and dress shoes press forward to the curbs, into puddles, out into traffic, dodging the mud spattered up by the tires of the passing cars, waving arms, umbrellas, walking sticks, Broadway playbills, hollering “Tax-e-e-e-e” over the car horns, ghetto-blasters and the squealing of hundreds of brakes.

I am a veteran. Of all the line-ups at both airports, I know which ones to get into, and I’m beginning to learn the arrivals schedule, which makes it possible to estimate how long of a wait we’ll have. At Kennedy, I go straight to International Arrivals, because there, the line of cabs advances the quickest, and I know from experience that I can buy a tuna sandwich from the guy with the van who comes round selling food to us cabbies. At La Guardia, all I dare eat is hotdogs.

I’ve had a proper collision with another cab – with an Egyptian for a driver. On the rim of the wheel with a flat tire, I have driven the last two miles to the airport, in an effort to accommodate a lady who ended up missing her plane anyway; any number of time I’ve had to drive back exasperated from someplace way out in Brooklyn or the Bronx, after passengers had fled my cab instead of paying the fare – and I’ve also felt an oily gun-barrel in belly, and heard a voice give the sinister if anatomically inappropriate injunction, “Give me all your goddamned money, or I’ll blow your brains out!”

If you make it a whole year as a New York cab driver, you are a veteran – and I’m going to be one soon.

Of course, there’s one quality of a veteran that I will never acquire. I’ll never get tired of the city, it won’t ever grow ordinary to me. Those who fall in love with the Big Apple never get bored with it. Besides, I keep meeting you here.

When we are navigating the streets concurrently as competing taxicabs, I don’t actually meet you very often, there are, after all, twelve thousand cabs here, all of us yellow. And when once in a while, late at night, we do catch sight of each other (most likely in a line of taxis in front of some bar), we jump out of cabs and run to grab a hug. That doesn’t happen often though. More often than not, I meet you in a n entirely different way: driving the streets that you’ve driven today too; corners where you’ve turned right today. I meet you on Park Avenue, and on Madison, and on Houston Street; I meet you in the Bronx and in Queens and on the Brooklyn Bridge... I meet you braking in front of potholes, I recognise you in the morse code that the streets are translated into by the tires of my cab. I encounter you at intersections, in the furrows made by the wheels of cars waiting for lights to change; I run into you at the airports and in front of downtown hotels. I scrawl you onto the street map of the city that is beginning to permeate my brain like a built-in atlas... I keep meeting you. And you me. The city files itself away in our memories, so that now neither of us could ever be without the city, or the city without us – or the two of us together else where. We are living our New York love.

They’re supposed to give us cars exactly at 5, but it’s first come, first served, and so it’s best to get to the garage around four, and even earlier on Thursdays, Fridays and on Saturdays. That’s how to make sure you get a car that day. Even though I would get one anyway, no matter when I showed up. My garage owns around a hundred yellow cabs and I’m the only woman among a hundred day and a hundred night drivers. So they really look out for me here, to an amazing degree: I don’t drive more than four nights a week, I couldn’t take any more than that (although there are drivers here who are out there six, even seven nights a week), and yet, in the eternal question of WHO GETS WHAT WHEN, there’s always a car for me. And I don’t even have to resort to the usual bribery. Our dispatcher, the one who reigns supreme in our garage and who dispenses joys and disasters (he’s the one who knows every vehicle by heart; the one who recognises cars by their numbers among hundreds of medallions, and who seems to perceive the numbers by smell; the one who can stick his hand through the window and guide his cars around the gas-soaked courtyard as if he were walking mustangs; the one who can take one look at a car – scraped a million times, covered with thousands of dents – and spot every new scrape and dent from two hundred feet away, and yet for the most part he never says a word... in short, the one who knows that if he gives crazy Willy 8P75 at five in the afternoon, the way he drives, the transmission will give out by half past nine, whereas if he gives him 9Y27, it won’t give out until dawn, that is, unless of course Willy cracks it up in the meantime) – anyway, this kingpin, this master of yellow mustangs is Kenny, my protector and buddy, a stocky lad from the West Indies, the prototype of the fellow I’d want to go out with it weren’t for you. Of course, I never let on. I just slip into the trailer, say hi and smile, indicate somehow that I’m there early, and because the few chairs that used to be here once upon a time have been stolen, I hunker down in a corner and read.

Or else I chat with my colleagues bum competitors that flock of curly-headed lambs who in an hour will suddenly be transformed into wolves. They all know what my name is, but because there are so many of them, and I often have problems remembering all the exotic names, I call them all “darling”.

Or else I drift into the repair shop to get used to the colour yellow.

Our entire garage is an ocean of yellow, giving off the fragrance of gasoline. Carcasses of yellow cars with their guts hanging out, victims of the last few days and nights, stand rusting mournfully in one corner of the fenced lot, just as they were dropped off by the tow truck. They are waiting for the mechanics to get round to them all and, under Kenny’s watchful eye, to remove the (sill relatively undamaged) yellow hood; to yank of the headlights, the tires, the windshields and side windows, and in general cannibalise everything that can still be used to repair other yellow cars that haven’t quite died yet. Because day after day, morning after morning, crippled hacks line up at the gate to the workshop, waiting to see what the mechanics will be able to do for them today. Red break fluid trickles out from under rusty bodies, spilling onto the gasoline and tar-soaked dirt of the lot and blending with the green of the antifreeze that spills out of burst radiators in sparkling emerald streams. Sometimes it seems that the wounded yellow carcass is bleeding green.

We have a monopoly on yellow here, and we take full advantage of it. No other car in Manhattan is allowed to be as yellow as we are: mustard yellow, perhaps, or a dark ochre, but never the beautiful lemon yellow that we are. This is so nobody would fail to recognise us. Well, and we enjoy our yellowness, we’re as yellow as we can possibly be, we make our bodies yellow and our roofs and our hubcaps... and, when we’re cruising empty, the light on our roof shines yellow too. I find that our dreams are shining yellow too, and maybe even our souls.

Right next to the mechanics’ shop, in a little separate pen just big enough for one car and one yellow-maker, my pal Tony is spray painting a car yellow, wearing a mask over his nose and mouth. Because a garage and a cabby can get a ticket for a scratched, dented cab that isn’t yellow enough, it’s Tony’s job to colour them yellow. I wander closer, and as soon as he spots me, Tony calls out from his yellow cloud: “How are you, darlin’?”

“Fine, honey,” I reply. Tony turns off the compressor, and when the yellow mist settles, I notice that Tony has tiny pointillistic dots decorating shirt, jeans and shoes, but also his cheeks and eyelashes and eyelids too. So that when he smiles at me from ear to ear, his shiny back skin looks like a friendly sky full of stars and, before he retreats back inside his coloured cloud, he turns to me and remarks amiably, “Nice seein’ you again, sweetie!”

And in the meantime, the black king of the canary kingdom strides across the lot like a peacock, here giving a dented fender a pat, there sticking both his massive hands inside an engine which breaks into a grateful purr. Unlike me, he makes no effort to avoid the red and green puddles of taxi blood, and so his sneakers leave behind a trail of rapidly dissipating footprints. I head diagonally across the yard to meet him in the middle. And then I say what I always say: “So, Kenny, is there a car for me tonight?”

“Well of course there is, my dear, you just go sit a while, and I’ll give you the finest car I’ve got today.”

So I go and sit a while, sit in the corner of that filthy trailer that is our dispatch booth. My fellow cabbies are also here already, standing around or squatting on their heels, after a few hours of day-time dozing and before twelve hours of night time driving. They are unshaven, unwashed, they’re wearing day before yesterday’s sweaty t-shirts, yellow grains of sleep forgotten in the corners of their eyes. Still, that’s just the way I like them. They call me “Iva baby”, they ask about what happened to me the past few days and nights, and half seriously try to come on to me. Only half seriously, because they all know that I’m happily married to you.

Pencil stub in hand, I fill out my trip sheet, chatting with them mindlessly. They teach me dirty words – in Spanish, in Greek, in Arabic or Igbo, and my pal Mamalu from Nigeria (the one with the ritual keloids on his temples that look like the three-rayed sun) gives me tips about where I should go today. Mamalu knows these things better than anyone, in spite of the fact that he always gets the dirty end of the stick. Like, for instance, almost every day in the worst traffic, at about five thirty or six, when every cab driver is praying not to have to leave Manhattan, some shithead drags him all the way out to Queens. Mamalu loses maybe an hour and a half, gets maybe a quarter tip and, and on his way back empty, green with rage, gets stuck in a traffic jam on the Queensborough Bridge. Mamalu, an experienced, calm, careful driver, has wound up twice in hospital, both times after getting broadsided on the driver’s side by a truck running a red light. The first time he was in really bad shape, the second time he just got a few bruises. Cruel fate had taught Mamalu prudence, and so when he saw the huge monster bearing down on him, he abandoned steering wheel and brake pedals, and slid over onto the passenger side. Thank heavens he wasn’t buckled up. Afterwards, Mamalu begged and pleaded until the mechanics gave him what was left of the steering wheel, smashed to smithereens in the crash. He stashed it away in a bag at home, and he gets a kick out of taking it out and telling people that that could have been him. By some weird twist of Mamalu’ thinking, that steering wheel has become a charm for him, an amulet that will keep him invulnerable. He wears one of the chips on a leather thong around his neck. It doesn’t even bother him that the chip doesn’t keep him particularly safe. Since then, Mamalu has been hit over the head by a baseball bat, on two separate occasions; he has been robbed any number of times; week after week some women would take advantage of him and get him to drive across to Jersey, lead him on unmercifully and then never give him any, and one time he was ruthlessly booted out of his cab in mid-winter, way the hell out on East Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, the walk back in his shirt sleeves across the Brooklyn Bridge took almost five hours. When he finally lost his patience and bought himself a gun from this swindler, he got stopped for a police spot check investigation three days later, they found it and poor Mamalu went behind bars. His sole salvation was the fact that he had been suckered and the gun wouldn’t fire. All the same, Mamalu, father of four, never complains about his destiny. No, that’s not his style. Mamalu bears his fate with pride, and it would never occur to him to do any differently. The only thing that upsets him, that makes him mad, that pisses him off, is his conviction that the cab, the heap of junk, the damned wreck that Kenny fobs off on him every night has a meter that is at least five percent slow. So that even though he knows the city, and even though he works himself blue in the face, even though he reads the papers every day to find out what’s happening and where people are going to be gathering, Mamalu barely earns any money at all. He works seven days a week, and hasn’t got a fart in hell to show for it. All because of the taxi meter. “And that’s what pisses me off, you know, Iva baby?”

I am suddenly aware of my womanhood, as the smell of gasoline mixed with the odour of dozens of man’s sweat intoxicates and excites me. The smell of gasoline has always aroused me, and now creates something like a philosophical platform from which I want to consider myself as a cabby. I never want to fear the city, I have no intention of confronting it night after night. I would like to trust the city. So I never intended to carry a weapon, even though Kenny gave me a switchblade (after the time I got mugged), and Willy has repeatedly suggested that there’s a certain building on 145^th Street in Harlem where I can get a repeater for a hundred and seventy bucks. One that really shoots. No, I never want to carry a weapon. I want to let the city lull me to sleep, and only once in a while, late at night, to become aware of my mortality.

So I’m sitting on my haunches in the corner of the trailer, sort of thinking of you, getting ready for tonight and letting myself get aroused by the fragrance of gasoline and wild adventure.

And in the meantime, under a sign that lists how a taxi driver should act towards his customers (Never call them “lady” or “mister”, but rather “sir” or “madam”, never use vulgar language, always help customers with baggage), beneath that sign my fellow cabbies are working on transforming themselves from lambs into wolves. They buckle steel-striped bracelets onto their wrists. In the palms of their hands, they bounce the saps and sledge-hammers they carry for busting heads when customers refuse to pay. They wipe the blades of their shivs on their t-shirts. They boast of how they’ve sharpened their screwdrivers, for slipping between a guy’s ribs quicker than a wink. They tell me real-life horror stories – and several seasoned four-wheel cowboys vie for who has done in more than the rest. Willy and Denver take the safeties off and aim their loaded guns at each other, testing which one is quicker on the draw. The Kenny, the local kingpin, who had been watching us amiably, if with a touch of boredom, now hurries to the dispatcher booth because the day guys are beginning to drift in. The sweaty spots on the back of their t-shirts smell, the seats of their jeans are wearing through. The outside edge of everyone’s right sneaker is worn down from using the gas and the break pedals. The day drivers talk to us, wish us a good shift, lots of fares, and, lighting up a Camel, they tell us today’s latest outrage. They line up, their taxi meters and keys in their hands, and as they wait for their turn at the wicket, they unlace their sneakers and pull crumpled damp banknotes out of their socks. “I haven’t made shit,” you hear them grumbling in all kinds of languages as smooth their dollar bills into little moist stacks.

And so we get their yellow cars. We argue over who wants which car, which one accelerates the best, which one the worst... which car we don’t trust the brakes on... which one has a transmission that’s about to go, and leave us stranded in some godforsaken place. Until the finally, when Kenny decides it all for us, we climb inside the yellow cars, already annoyed, weary, irritated; already intoxicated, happy, aroused.

And after that, I forgot about you for a few hours after all, because between five and seven, business is usually pretty snappy. We ferry the rather brusque, rather uptight business people through heavy traffic from midtown to the residential areas, we work hard at finding the quickest routes, honking madly at one another, avoid the stretches that we know are the busiest, and if we find ourselves stuck in the wrong street where traffic is down to a slow crawl, we swear impressively under our breath in hope of getting another fifty cents tip. Business people are usually pretty touchy about their time. They ask us perfunctory questions, on their laps they spread out the stock reports from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, choke down their irritation into elegant cellular telephones. Very rarely will one of them amuse us, tip us, but there are a lot of them, and nowadays they are everywhere. So while a career woman fishes for a quarter to tip me with before she slams the door without a word, tow other ones are waiting to grab the door out of her hand and have me shunt them a few blocks further on. So you don’t even enter my mind, in spite of the fact that I know that you’re around right now. I drive up and down through the city, respond mindlessly to mindless questions; when nobody happens to be looking I unobtrusively stuff twenties in my sock, looking forward to when all the hustle and bustle is over.

Then, after eight, when the theatre rush is over, I get to rest a bit – and I’m thinking about you again. What you’re doing, where you are... who your passenger might be. I try to reach out to you by means of waves of anticipation and particles of memories. I think of your black, black hair, reflecting the blue undertones when the light shines on it from behind. I imagine burying my fingers in it, and my hand responds to the touch as if the steering wheel were actually fuzzy. I shiver with an abundance for you, because you are everywhere here, because all of Manhattan is now our living room. The streets embrace me with the sweetness of your slender brown arms. And I can imagine it, slowly, deeply. The longer we know we each other, the more molecules of skin have come off on mine, and every day your life line fits better into mine. You learn my body by heart, you cruise it the way you cruise Manhattan island, and every day you know it better. So I exhibit myself: my cruel streets, my cosy corners, my sweet spots and my weak spots. I draw you a map of myself on the palms of your hands, I carve myself into your brain, I place myself neatly inside you and there is where I want to live forever.

Sort of anything lull develops between eight and ten, when there are still a lot of taxis on the streets, and the traffic hasn’t quite died down yet, but customers seem to have evaporated, and you always have the irritating feeling of not knowing where to go. You and your buddies have driven all the business people home, you’ve picked up all the young men headed out on the town from the Upper West Side and dropped them off in front of the Greenwich Village bars. You’ve delivered the dressed-up ladies and gentlemen to the theatres around Broadway and you’ve cleared Fifth Avenue of shoppers and tourists. You fiddle around somewhere around 86^th Street, glance West and East, and then diffidently drift down the diagonal which is Broadway. You take it down to Greenwich Village (lots of people but lots of taxicabs, too) and then turn east on Houston Street to Alphabet City, Avenues A, B, C and D. Cab drivers like to say that on Avenue A, you’ll get robbed, on Avenue B, you’ll get beaten, you’ll get stabbed on Avenue C, but on Avenue D, you’ll get killed, but that isn’t quite the way it is. Just the other day, I heard they killed a cabby at 13^th and Avenue A, where he was supposed to get robbed – and on the other hand, my fellow driver Willy from the garage brags about going all the way out to Avenue D to pick up customers in front of a Puerto Rican bar there, where he seldom has any competition, and he’s still among the living. Me, I go to Alphabet City and drive up Avenue A, check a tavern I know called Sidewalk, where I know some musicians who like to drop in for a drink on their way down to play at one of the bars at the Village. When I stop at the corner of 11^th and Avenue B, by a brightly painted wall that says CRACK KILLS, and wait for the light to change, and elderly Haitian shuffles up to my cab. I know him by sight, and he comes up to my open window and says in a low voice, “You want some smoke, girlie?” and I shake my head, no, I don’t, and wish him good luck. Then I turn down past Tomkins Square Park (which has been home for the homeless for the past couple of years, in tents and crates and plastic lean-tos, so the whole ratty park looks like a crowded campsite on the Bulgarian coast), and when I can’t even find anyone in Alphabet City, then there is nothing left to do but to drive even further south, all the way down to the World Trade Centre, where, especially Mondays and Wednesdays, you always stand a chance of picking up a lone businessman who’s been standing there on a corner, waving his umbrella in frustration. Then I’ve hit pay dirt. If he’s going all the way to the Upper East Side, where his kind usually lives, it means at least ten dollars. And if you can’t drum up any business down on the southern tip of Manhattan, if there’s nobody waiting around the exit from the Staten Island Ferry, if all the tourists have left the South Street Seaport, there’s nothing to do but to cruise. Around ten, you drift back up towards Broadway, and if you’re lucky you’ll pick up someone who slipped out early from a Broadway theatre (and you’ll avoid getting caught up in too much of a traffic jam). You’ll drop him off quickly someplace on the West Side, so that before the theatre-leaving hour is past, you may be able to turn it round two or three times.

This period, just short of two hours, will determine how good a night it will have been for you. The streets are fairly empty already, and if you know you’re way round just a little, you drive people uptown from the theatres, but then on the West Side, on Columbus Avenue, or on second Avenue on the East Side, you pick up the ones who are just staggering out of the bars, and they want to go east if they’re west or maybe back downtown... and so, the whole time you swing back and forth across Manhattan, nice and full, and the dollar bills just keep piling up. And then comes the moment when your mettle is tested, and you prove what kind of taxi driver you are. Because everyone knows that nobody wants to drive to the back streets of Brooklyn at eleven o’clock at night, across the bridges, along the highways, and let yourself be yelled at for being so stupid you don’t know just where the particular tiny street is that your customer is going to. Nobody wants to drive back empty to the deserted city that you just drove out of just when things were beginning to get busy... and instead of the thirty-five, forty, maybe even fifty dollars that tickle the inside of your socks on other, better nights, tonight you’ve barely got fifteen. So, you have to know how to pick your customers, and cabbies are masters at that. No reporter, no matter how hard he tries, has been able to describe that quintessential Manhattan appearance (shortish, straight ‘plane Jane’ hair, an elegant two-piece suit dress... narrower neckties than you’ll see on people from Brooklyn, not a lot of jewellery) no reporter has ever succeeded in describing the real Manhattan look, and yet, any cab driver worth his salt can classify a fare in a single glance.

Sometimes after midnight or one in the morning, the city begins to look like a field of blossoming dandelions. Tens, hundreds, thousands of desperate yellow cabs zip through the streets, five of them at every stop light, all of us cringing every time a full taxi stops at the curb to let somebody out, and the yellow light on top clicks on to indicate one more adversary. Sure, it annoys me, but now I’m an experienced veteran, I know very well which lane I need to be in to make sure that somebody doesn’t pick up a fare I want, and also to see to it that I get somewhere. I’m a master at cutting off the startled drivers of passenger cars, zipping across four, five lanes of heavy traffic and using ordinary cars, their drivers none the wiser, to block other cabs from going anywhere... In short, I know the city, I know its every breath and I breathe along with it. No, late at night the city is not just the multiplication table of streets and avenues that I have burned in my brain. Late a night, the city is a living being, I travel its body, I caress its fur with my tires... the city is a magical, furry creature falling asleep beneath my wheels.

We chase up and down the avenues and the wheezing garbage trucks pull in and out of our way like long-nosed beetles. We watch the city falling asleep, we watch its windows going dark, its eyes closing: first uptown, with its apartment buildings, and down on the tip of the island; we watch all of Alphabet City gradually drifting off, one bar after another closing, until finally all that is left are the night clubs on the West Side and Greenwich Village. And those of us who haven’t gone to sleep yet line up meekly in front of the bars to wait in turn for our fares. Things are just the opposite now from what they were earlier: now a fare to Brooklyn is a lucky break, of you get paid, that is. And so we know that Mondays and Thursdays, reggae nights at the Wetlands Club, it’s worth our while to wait as long as half an hour for a fare: it’s almost a sure thing that we’ll be going to Brooklyn. On the other hand, the line of taxicabs at the newly opened club called the Building at Sixth Avenue and 26^th, moves quickly, but it’s uncertain. Without fail, passengers are headed to the Bronx, and unless you can get the fare out of them in advance, you can almost bet on it that you’ll get stiffed. Of course, there are lots of other clubs, like say, the Limelight, where you’ll find a fare every night, but you may have to wait a long time for him. There are the gay bars, the last ones to close, and they are usually swamped with cabbies, because homosexuals are supposed to be great tippers. Or we can drive down to Nell’s (and that’s where I often meet you) but most of the time, the cops show up and scatter the cabs just as you’re getting up there close to the head of the line. So I generally try to find places that are less well-known. I look for newly-opened clubs. I stand in the short line in front of the “Save the Robots!” discotheque on Avenue B, where most cabbies don’t want to go, because the word is that you’ll get beaten up there. Three hours before closing time, we line up in our cabs and glance repeatedly and tiredly at our wrist-watches, pull the bills out of our socks and estimate how much we’ve made. We pull up and yawn and now and then we doze off... or else we get out and stretch our bones, and talk. These line-ups aren’t all bad. Better than sitting the wheel and going nuts, running red lights out of sheer distraction. And while it used get to me that everyone used to stare at me, the only female driver among all those guys, it quit bothering me a long time ago. Now I stare at the other drivers myself, I take it all as if it were perfectly natural, and sometimes, in order to fortify my femininity, I pull out my mascara and do my eyelashes in the rear view mirror.

But even the very last bars and clubs finally shuts down, the last gate crashes shut, the last empty yellow cabs pull out of the last futile line-up – and it’s still not time to go back. All that’s left for me is to ferry whores. There are plenty of them, but of course they are not everywhere. I can forget about the “better” ones right off, the ones form Sixth Avenue and 58^th: they’ve gone home a long time ago in limos. I check 30^th and Lexington, once in a while you can pick up a girl who needs to get back uptown. Occasionally, I get flagged by transvestites on Ninth Avenue around 14^th Street, although they still evoke in me a kind of foolish, subconscious fear, especially since the time I saw this gorgeous black girl swinging her hips down the street, and dangling out from beneath her miniskirt there was a well-developed pair of balls. I could try East Side, where here and there I might find a little prostitute who is tired of plying her trade, but for the most part, those girls work close to home. And so, instead of going on some grand search, I turn around and pretend to myself that I’m heading back to the garage. Right there, on 45^th and Eleventh Avenue, that’s where most of them are. And for some reason, maybe all of them live in cheap hotels over in Jersey.

Slowly, I drive the few blocks ruled by the prostitutes. Now, towards dawn, the traffic jams caused by the presence of these girls are long gone, that’s when you can’t even get through on the West side of 44^th, 45^th or 46^th Streets, because the horny guys in their flashy cars don’t hesitate to park right in the middle of the street, haggling over the price of a blow-job. Or they pull over to the curb, the motor running and grab a little ecstasy. So that often on their good days, generally Saturday and Sunday mornings, we shuffle our way home from work through piles of lip-stick stained condoms.

But this morning business is slow. The girls change clothes in the doorways, hook their nursing bras and pull on brightly coloured t-shirts over them, change from a mini skirt with a cut out at the back into cords, and, bushed, grab a cab home. Their names are Daisy and Queen of the Night and Sunshine. They hail a cab with a friendly wave, no danger of not getting your twenty bucks from them. They are career women. Some of them seem to function on two planes. One of them is money: debit, credit. The other plane is sorry. How she like to froze her tushy off tonight, and hardly made a dime. And the johns, what jerks they are, promise you twenty, sure they do, and then, when you’re done, they discover that all they’ve got in their pocket is eight bucks, will you take a credit card, girlie? Turning tricks is rough in this weather. Except there’s always more business when it’s rainy and freezing. Oh, God, her boyfriend’s gonna kill her when she gets home. Not even seven hundred and he wants a thou. Sunshine has a giant scar along her cheek, heavy and deep, from her temple almost down to her red lips. “He did this to me for holding out on him, but all I did, I just got myself a little fix, just a little bitty one, you know?”

They only have two levels, but the second one, the sorry one, can be expansive enough to embrace you as well. So some of them are even kind. Those are the ones that ask me, of a morning, how much I made last night, and whether, like, I’m not scared, driving around the streets at night this way. “Me, I just turn tricks for a living, but even I’ve got a boyfriend, even I’ve got, like, protection... You say you’ve made a hundred and twenty bucks, and you’ve got to pay your gas out of that? Wait let me give you another buck, I really feel for you honey, I do... Look here, I’ve got, like seven hundred bucks and I’m scared shitless my old man is gonna beat me up... driving a cab doesn’t pay at all, does it? Look at you, you’ve got the body for it, I’ll, like, get you a pimp too, you want me to? I’ll show you the ropes, okay? But not now, just let me get home now, God, my mouth is sore, that’s from those dorks, you gotta pull the rubbers on for them, like. I mean, I’ve got it pretty much down pat, like, seven minutes and you got your twenty bucks. But it’s hard on your mouth, let me tell ya... I gotta shut up now, okay?”

And then even the hour of whores passes, and all I can do is gas up and drift back to the garage. Half dead I roll onto the lot – and there you are, waiting for me.

When we finally embrace, you smell so good to me, you smell of the night, of adventure, of everything... of the Manhattan that we’ve been driving tonight. The sun is slowly getting to rise over the horizon, even though we still can’t see it. But when you take me by the hand and tell me about last night’s adventures, your brown skin contrasts with mine, I smell your fragrance and I feel as we’d been living together all night long, as if you had been holding me in your arms, all night long.

At home in my apartment, I check to make sure my roommate is fast asleep. It’s about half past five. And because my window faces south-east, dawn always paints a bright orange stripe of sunlight high up on the wall. My roommate sleeps soundly – and we make love until daylight. The stripe of sunlight narrows and turns golden, until it as yellow, yellow, yellow as my dreams.