All I can say is a deep into the night in New York City, in Manhattan, especially on the Friday nights for a Saturday night, the city changes in a mysterious way. The roads become free of traffic, people are intoxicated, lightheaded with sleepiness, and a kind of nocturnal army of nighttime workers, the cleaning maids, the garbage men, night cops, and all manner of people on the margins of society inhabit the city. It’s also significant that there is little traffic at this hour so it’s very easy to get around the city, and as I mentioned before, the police are fairly lenient about things like speeding.
For instance, in Manhattan the avenues have a staggered system of stoplights. So that makes for a wave of cars coming down the avenue and just ahead of them the light is turning green one at a time. Usually at the head of this way if you have a bunch of yellow cabs each jockeying for position to catch any fares as they come.
I remember once, somehow I offended another taxi driver, and he threw his coffee at me. The coffee landed on my windshield. I rolled down my window to shout at him, and he rolled down his window to shout at me. I then threw some beverage I had, I think it was an iced tea, through my window through his window into his taxi.
He took offense at this, and chased me for about 10 minutes at high speeds around Park Avenue. I finally got away from him by going the wrong way down a one-way street. Unintentionally, I’ll add, but nobody was on the street. He missed my turn, but then he starts going backwards the wrong way up Park Avenue, which is a lot harder to do without causing destruction. He wasn’t a very good driver and after almost crashing a few times, gave up the effort and was forced to go with the traffic, hang a U-turn, and then try and pursue me as I went back onto the avenue, with traffic, away from him. Of course, since I was in a taxi, and he was in a taxi, and there were dozens of taxis, it was not rocket science for me to blend in with the traffic and he lost me.
The 24 hour shift is not technically legal. You’re only allowed to drive for 12 hours at a time. But the rules have a loophole. So long as you take a break between 12 hour shifts, you can resume driving. So I take a break for about an hour, and then get back into the car. In point of fact I would only drive for about 20 hours and then call it a day.
The advantage was driving that long, and I would only do it from Sunday morning 5 a.m. to Monday morning 5 a.m., is that if you find a dispatcher shady enough to let you do it, he’ll give you his best car and a very good price for both shifts. The best 20 hour shift I had, I think I made about $450 after expenses. Not bad for one day’s work, and not something you can do continually, but if you’re in a bind, and need money, there it is. I emphasize that new drivers wouldn’t be allowed to do this, as you have to have a dispatcher who likes you, and who is confident that you’ll return his car in one piece.
I never crashed, but I remember that after about 15 hours of driving, it was night time in New York, Sunday night, and reality would become a kind of haze for me. It was almost like one moment I’m in Chinatown, 10 seconds later I would be in LaGuardia, then suddenly on the upper East side, with no real memory of how I got there or who my passengers were. It’s almost like my reptilian brain would take over, and take the passengers, and drive them, safely, to their destination.
