Settling Up

We were about halfway home from the airport when I decided that I would not only tip him well but also say something vaguely encouraging when I got out of the taxi. He was driving with extreme caution; I couldn’t tell if this was just his style, or if he was concerned about something specific, like hitting a pothole and somehow losing a wheel, careening across the BQE, our lives (and his hoped-for gratuity) flashing before all six of our collective eyes. If this was a possibility he was preoccupied with then I could sympathize, as by this time I had noticed that more or less every conceivable warning light on his dashboard had been flashing continuously since we got into the taxi: low tire pressure; headlight system failure; all wheel drive system failure; etc. His driver-side rearview mirror was also smashed, and even if it hadn’t been, its angle of incidence would have given him a better view of his own steering wheel than it did of anyone driving behind us. Now that I’m thinking about it, I suppose it might have been easier to list the features of this automobile that I believe were working as intended: namely the steering wheel, the windshield, and with the notable exception of the all wheel drive system, at least some aspects of the powertrain.

In retrospect perhaps he wasn’t a taxi driver at all; maybe he was just someone who woke up feeling conflicted about the life he had lived thus far. Maybe he walked by an empty taxi and recognized it as an opportunity to live someone else’s life for the morning, pick up a few fares, see what it was like to drive a cab in New York City. If this was the case, I’d missed the warning signs as we walked up to the taxi line and got nonchalantly aboard. I was, admittedly, a bit distracted. We were leaving my favorite airport in the world, the old Marine Air terminal at LaGuardia. Maybe I was thinking about the mural in the terminal’s rotunda, which depicts, among other things, a youthful-looking Daedalus, the sun tucked benevolently over his shoulder as if its only purpose was to warm his back as he attempted to liberate his son from lifelong imprisonment. Or maybe I was puzzling over the orthodox mother on our flight, who prayed to her child ostentatiously as we experienced what the flight crew described as “significant turbulence” on our relatively tame approach to LGA. Or maybe I was just miffed at my ride share app for suggesting that we walk over to terminal C, in the rain, to get a car home — a proposal which led us to take our chances in the taxi line instead. Either way, it wasn’t until we had ignored the cabbie two cars back (who was urgently waving us towards his car), and got into this one, and noticed a not at all subtle odor of cigarette smoke, that we were struck with the possibility that something might be off here.

“This is, like, a legit NYC taco,” I typed out on my lowered phone, which Ada saw before I could change “taco” to “taxi.” She didn’t really suppress her laugh, but I got the sense that even if the driver had noticed it, he wouldn’t have been bothered. His appearance was, you might say, seasoned: maybe mid-seventies, thick black-framed eyeglasses, untrimmed gray hair on both his skull and his earlobes, baby blue surgical mask protecting his Adam’s apple from infection and injury. He mumbled to himself quietly, gesturing in a way that I interpreted as a critique of LaGuardia’s suboptimal mass transit options. Ada had casually enumerated our destination as we settled into the back seat, and I was reassured when, a minute later, he proposed a route there, calling out landmark arterials in a way that suggested a familiarity with not only the neighborhoods we’d be going through but the practice of, you know, picking up and driving passengers to their destinations. I was given another dose of confidence when he seemed to understand and be open to the slightly more efficient route I offered in return. But by this time he was checking his comically large blind spot and pulling gingerly onto what I think of as the most high-stakes section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. So I reconfirmed that my own seatbelt was buckled, then leaned over and made a show of checking Ada’s as well.

All weekend long I had been struggling with how much to tip people. A couple weeks earlier I had read the article about the history of tipping in the New Yorker, and had lamented the anecdote about how one prominent New York City restaurant group eventually backtracked, under pressure due to COVID, from their “no tipping” policy. It really is a horrible institution (why would we decide how much our bartender deserves to be paid after our judgment has been dulled by multiple rounds of fuzzy navels?), but the way in which tipping is woven into everyday life makes it awkward to separate myself from it. In Miami Beach, where Ada and I had been for the weekend, it’s apparently common practice for restaurants (or at least those restaurants which are located inside of or adjacent to hotel lobbies) to include an automatic eighteen percent gratuity charge. They don’t stop there, though, presenting “additional tip” options on their point-of-sale terminals. When I see these I typically panic, then retrace my feelings about my own socio-economic status, my stance on the value of service labor, and the degree to which I think it’s justifiable to reward or punish the waitstaff for any reason, let alone for reasons which were determined not so much by the waitstaff’s actions but by the breakfast rush we happened to coincide with, or by the way Miami’s atmospheric humidity made the salt clog in the shaker, or by the fact that my potatoes had shifted as our breakfast was carried out to the patio where we were sitting, causing a haphazard smear of Hollandaise sauce to form across my plate. The breakfast in question was, in spite of these annoyances, something I remember fondly now, if only for the fact that it was the first time in years that Ada and I had brunch together as a couple. She ordered the huevos rancheros, and I got a crab cake Benedict and a coffee which took about fifteen minutes to prepare and turned out, in the end, to be an Americano. Our waters — tap water, mind you — took even longer; we received them only after I saw how aesthetically displeasing, and bland, the crab cakes were. So by the time our server swung back by to ask us about our first bites, I had decided that I was not going to tip them particularly well. And yet when the check, with automatic eighteen percent gratuity, was presented, and I registered the trio of buttons suggesting optional-but-presumably-expected “additional tip” amounts, I again panicked and hit the middle button.

I think of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway — the BQE — as the quintessential piece of New York City highway infrastructure. It both lacerated neighborhoods and spawned new ones, either way installing itself as their ominous, elevated feeding tube. In the years before I moved to the city, when I was living in eastern Long Island and would drive in on Friday afternoons to spend the weekend with Ada, I developed a heightened awareness of the BQE’s traits: its comically pitted road surfaces, its claustrophobic terraced sections, its pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey exits, which seem to point you in random directions in an attempt to shake you up just one last time before you switch to surface streets. The more you drive the BQE, the more you notice in yourself the sinister behavior that emerges from even the most mild-mannered person while driving on elevated highways in intensely urban settings. The highway tempts you: You should be going faster, it says. Why aren’t you going faster, driving more aggressively? Why aren’t you flying into a sublime rage, ripping your brake pedal off, painting over the whole city with burnt rubber?

To his credit, our driver seemed to register these taunts about as much as he registered the warning lights on his dashboard. It was a late Sunday morning in January, the sky quilted and grey, a mist of tiny raindrops making everything feel damp and drowsy. We were doing, maybe, forty miles an hour, which when you think about it is a perfectly appropriate speed for urban driving, especially if your passengers are a pair of parents who are savoring the final moments of a kid-free weekend, and the car you’re driving them home in happens to be held together with twist ties. But forty miles an hour is decidedly Not Fast Enough for the BQE, regardless of the road conditions, or your passengers’ moods, or the status of your anti-lock braking system. Cars sped by as we listed through Sunnyside, their horns Dopplering as they swerved to avoid us. Our driver changed lanes a few times too; I’m not certain whether his horn worked, and he didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to the traffic around him. But the route we had planned together seemed to have stuck in his memory, and in the end he managed to stay on the highway until our previously agreed-upon exit.

It is at this point in my story that I am unsure how to describe the way our driver drove on surface streets. But these events must be noted somehow, if only to underscore my own sense of complicity and defeat towards the end of our ride: At multiple times during the trip, parts of his car intruded into the bike lane in ways that strike me as both offensive and utterly unnecessary. This — the fact that cars sometimes avail themselves of infrastructure that’s nominally reserved for bikes — is my hangup, and I did my best then to manage my reaction to it. Our driver seemed to be hanging on by mere threads, and it would have been unreasonable and ineffective to speak up, guiding or pleading or demanding that he Get out of the Fucking Bike Lane, I’m not so anxious to get home that you need to violate this particular part of the traffic code. To say this would have been superfluous, counterproductive, gibberish. He eventually merged back into the stream of motor vehicles, at which point I spoke up to remind him of the final couple of turns required to get to our destination. He promptly made motions to miss these turns completely, which led both Ada and I to speak up before he blew through the intersection, which led him to swerve hard to the right, crossing blindly through both the bike lane and the crosswalk. I took a breath, and attempted to relax myself again, and we moved on.

One thing I love about yellow New York City taxis is the design language of the clear acrylic barriers that separate the front seats from the rear. I cannot imagine that they’re effective at preventing the spread of infectious disease (a purpose they can’t have been designed for), and neither can I see them doing that much to prevent driver assault (although I assume that this is their true intent). To me they serve mostly to remind you of things you might have had to do to get around the city in the twentieth century: deciding which corner would be ideal for flagging down a cab, leaning forward to enunciate your destination through the barrier’s little sliding window, then spending most of the ride looking at the see-sawing money holder and wondering if the driver would actually put your change into it when the time came. The way the partition’s edges are coped to fit the taxi’s interior not too closely; the litany of notices and placards riveted to the partition window; the little partially-covered air holes reminding you that despite the lack of conversation, both you and the driver continue to breathe the same air... These details are fossil relics, pleading that we not go into the future too quickly.

On this day the fossil relics prevailed. Our driver pulled over, having successfully transported us to our destination. He leaned forward, inspecting his meter as if he had just discovered its presence, and tentatively pushed a few buttons. The point-of-sale display on our side of the partition stared at us unchangingly. It isn’t working, we told him, and the mood changed quickly, our driver displaying heightened emotions for the first time in our trip together, Ada trying to explain what we saw on the taxi’s passenger-facing display. He had no solution for us, no proposed action steps, and neither of us had any cash, and in the end Ada got out of the car, and I directed the driver down a few blocks to find an ATM. He failed to yield to a stroller being pushed across the street towards Prospect Park, its parents-cum-chauffeurs rolling their eyes, me feeling distinctly guilty at this point. On the corner of Seventh and Union a bank presented itself pridefully, and the driver steered lazily to his right, coming to a stop at what struck me as the worst possible location, completely obstructing the crosswalk while also remaining a short stroll from the curb. At this point I began to think of him — and his entire conveyance, perhaps — as exhausted, debilitated, incapable of rolling another inch. I opened the car door, walked into the bank’s lobby, and inserted my card into the ATM. The ATM was incapable of dispensing anything other than twenty-dollar bills, and the cab fare was fifty-five bucks; I could either tip him nine percent of the total, or forty-five percent. I sighed, considering again the implications of my own generosity. Then I pressed a few buttons, took my cash, and walked back outside to settle up.