It was never easy, taxi-ing about the Big Apple. Ten years ago when I lived in New York, I was constantly astonished by the fact that those huge taxis (by my own puny Australian standards), devoted most of the living space, so to speak, to the driver, who sat alone in armored splendor in the front. If he got two thirds of the space, the three passengers in the back got a third, and the floor space even then would have been comfortable only for a Chinese woman with bound feet wearing size 2 shoes. The rest of us twisted our feet sideways and sat there, splay footed as frogs.
But since then, as I discovered this winter, the torture has been refined. Now some genius has installed miniature heater/air conditioners at ankle height, mid-cab, which more or less fill the generous three inches allowed for feet. To get out on the far side from where you sit (and the driver will always arrange to stop on that side), you wrench your feet across the steel projections of the heaters. In my experience this action produces one result …“you could hear the bones breaking 100 yards away, and the screams, etc., etc….”
It always astonished me that argumentative, combative, litigious, ever complaining New Yorkers have put up with these torture boxes for so long. Maybe they’re so grateful to get a cab they don’t notice they’ve lost two toes when exiting, or left strips of their Manolos on the heaters. Maybe it’s just that they’re numb from the pounding they get as they traverse streets so shattered and potholed they would cause riots in Calcutta if the rickshaw pullers there had to traverse them. This is the richest city in the world? It has streets in worse shape than Baghdad-after the bombing! I’m an old war correspondent, and when my taxi hit a pothole, or crater, rather, at the intersection of 57th Street and Lexington Ave. in January, I calculated that the hole could only have been made by a direct hit from a 155-millimeter, high-explosive howitzer shell.
AUSTRALIA’S DEMOCRATIC TAXIS
I spend my professional life getting in and out of cabs. In Australia, where I live now, etiquette is strict. To show how democratic you are, whether man or woman, you must-repeat, must-sit in front next to the driver. You don’t sit in the back like some bloody colonial governor. And there’s enough space up front for Michael Jordan to stretch his legs. In France, you sit in the back, because the driver always has a reeking dog on the front seat beside him (or often her)-but there’s room for feet as well as hound. In Lebanon in the old days, when taxis were like buses, you rode with about ten others as the driver picked up anyone who hailed him-but even then there was room for your feet.
In Delhi, the cabs travel at eight miles an hour, but apart from space for the tootsies, they have both heating and air conditioning. For heat, you wind the window up, and for cool (it’s 120 degrees for weeks on end in the summer), you wind the window down. It might take half an hour to travel 600 yards-but you could still walk when you got out of the cab. In the old Saigon, you rode motorcyclos, which were effectively seats on top of lawn-mower engines, but if there was incoming fire, you could leap out in a trice.
Comes the war to New York, and you’ll all die in the backs of taxis, feet clamped between the heaters. Now I think of it, maybe it was Saddam Hussein who designed New York cabs. Or Osama bin Laden perhaps?
