Transcript for the Piece Audio version of From Yale to Hack [Two Versions]

Transcript of Essay:

Now that I?m over the initial thrill of driving a taxi, I don?t force conversation with my passengers. The ones that want to talk inevitably break the ice in the same way: ?You know, you?re the first white cab driver I?ve ever had.?

I have a practiced reply: ?Actually, we make up about 10% of drivers? ? a fact I picked up from an official Taxi and Limousine Commission study.

Usually, the passenger will ask me how I got into the industry. ?Well, I dropped out of school last year, and I needed a job to make ends meet. I had always wanted to drive a cab, so here I am.?

?Where were you in school?? some of them will press.

Here, I pause, and then rattle off: ?I did undergraduate at the University of Chicago, got a Master?s Degree at Oxford, and I left a Ph.D. program at Yale. I studied medieval monks.?

At this point, my fare in the backseat is no doubt terrified that I am about to set off on a rant about society?s ills, different from the norm only because mine is made more tiresome by its opaque references to 11th century theologians.

But mostly, they?re curious about one thing: ?Why did you leave??

Why would someone leave great institutions of higher learning for the life of a hack? I don?t explicitly quote Travis Bickle, the disenchanted anti-hero from the movie Taxi Driver, because people would jump out of the cab. But, his words have made an impression on me: ?All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.?

As a graduate student, my life was entirely dedicated to studying a group of monks called the Carthusians. They were some of the most secluded, strict monks of the Middle Ages. For a year or two, I think I was the world?s expert on their early history. I even considered spending a few weeks at a lay retreat they run in France. Putting myself in seclusion, studying people who kept themselves so apart from the world, I felt like I was drifting away. I was a million miles away from my girlfriend, from the city, from the things that I thought would matter in my life. I needed to leave and reconnect.

Most people walk out of a midnight showing of Taxi Driver in a deep depression. But I bounded out beaming, inspired. I remembered that I had always wanted to drive a cab. To be a part of the city?s secret underbelly. I needed that direction now. So I decided to do it.

?It?s not even so different from the monks,? I?d tell people unconvincingly. My dad was predictably furious. A close friend refused to believe it, thinking I had been pulling his leg during my months of preparation. Most surprising, my girlfriend?s grandfather was envious, coming out of the closet to reveal his own hidden desire to become a hack.

A few weeks after I walked off of Yale?s gothic campus, I was back in the classroom. This time, a windowless basement room at Laguardia Community College in Long Island City. I could never work up much enthusiasm for classes on medieval law, but I had trouble sleeping before taxi school. I arrived 15 minutes early, and I watched my fellow aspirants filter into the room. I was clearly the only American, and everyone glanced at me nervously, wondering what the hell I was doing there.

After ten minutes of waiting, our instructor strode in. He was every inch the crusty New York hack ? immense, round belly; big shock of white hair; thick Russian accent.

?I have driven cab twenty years,? he started. ?I love it.? I was hooked from the first words. Here was the mystical connection with the heart of the city I desperately craved. The low door in the wall that had eluded me in graduate school.

The first day of taxi school covered passenger interactions. Some of this stuff was self-explanatory ? helping old people in and out of the cab, smiling, dealing with luggage. But he also covered the touchier subjects ? such as dealing with women (?Don?t yell at them for being without a husband late at night,? he advised. But do wait for them to get into their building.) He also instructed us on dealing with whom he termed ?the gays.? He went through the entire taxonomy of the gays ? their habitat (West Village and Chelsea), their mating habits (sometimes they ask you to come up, other times they will stroke your hand when they give you the fare), and their garb (some dress like girls, some don?t. You can?t tell). At the end of these words of wisdom, our instructor summed up the lessons of the morning: ?In America, everyone is equal. Is much better this way.?

We broke for lunch and I went across the street to buy myself a sandwich. One of my classmates, a Pakistani, was there too. Eager to fit in with my new peers, I went up to him to talk about how great and inspiring the class was, but he beat me to the punch. ?Wasn?t that crap. He went the whole morning and didn?t teach us anything. I just want to get the license and start making money.?

I didn?t know how to respond. If I wanted to, I could pluck up the courage to ask my parents to support me while I looked for a real job. For this guy and everyone else in the class, the taxi was the real job. As the day went on, I learned more about my classmates. One worked at a kebab cart on 6th Avenue. One was a mechanic at a taxi garage and starting to drive was a big step up. Some other students couldn?t have been more than 16; they had clearly lied about their age to get the license. I was thrilled to be in this new environment, filled with an energy that graduate school lacked entirely. But I wondered if they all saw me as an interloper. If they saw my ease with maps or the English language as a constant indictment of them. Part of me was shamed by their unspoken remonstrance. I was determined to be the best hack I could be.

Taxi school came and went, and I passed my exam and got into a yellow Ford Crown Vic ? mine for the twelve hours of my shift. The 3AM wakeup calls quickly became the high points of my week. I loved biking to my garage in the dark, cruising the city streets in my cab. Driving was real ? when I made mistakes in my early days, my fare?s irritation was an exercise in immediate reward and punishment. My first time going into Williamsburg, it took me fifteen minutes to find the entrance to the westbound BQE while my fare nagged me to ask for directions. These disasters were entirely different from the relative safety of academia. But slowly I began to learn the city. To think less and drive more.

As I grew more confident in the front seat, I continued my attempts to befriend my fellow drivers. The airport holding lots serve as on-the-job lounges for drivers where you can see the whole spectrum of New York hacks. The Sikhs march purposefully up and down the lanes in little knots. Pakistanis play cricket with a beat-up bat and tennis ball wrapped in electrical tape. West Indians sit inside and slam dominoes down on unsteady tables. Russians quietly smoke and play backgammon outside. But I stand and watch them, not a part of any of their circles. One day, I did start up a conversation with the cabbie next to me in line. He turned out to be a KGB astrophysicist ? an exile from the former USSR. I was so chastened to meet an actual Ph.D. that I slunk away and buried my nose back in my book of medieval history.

I always felt more comfortable with my passengers. Sometimes, I will start up the long, invested conversations with them that I can?t with other drivers. A few weeks ago, I picked up a young woman from Laguardia going to Boerum Hill, near my neighborhood of Carroll Gardens. We were talking about Brooklyn when she mentioned that she had an ill child waiting for her at home.

?Is he going to get better?? I asked.

?No, this is kind of a lifelong condition. He was born without a diaphragm, so he can?t breathe on his own. The doctors put in a Gore-Tex replacement, but he still needs lots of attention.?

I was stunned. ?Did you know about this before he was born??

She said that they found out halfway through the pregnancy. But they had decided to carry the baby to term.

?I hope you don?t mind my saying so,? I hesitatingly offered, ?but I think you made the right choice. I mean, this is going to change your life, and I really think you?re going to emerge a better person. Devoting yourself to a calling that sometimes seems impossible can only strengthen you.? I was thinking of my Carthusians.

We talked for a bit longer, but soon enough we had pulled up in front of her home. The fare was 26 dollars and she put some folded bills in my hand. ?It was really nice to meet you.? I said to her. ?Good luck.? She smiled, turned, and walked away ? back to her life and her sick son.

It was near the end of my shift and this trip had taken me near my garage. I was trying to decide if I should find one more fare or just call it a day. I opened up my hand to count the bills and put them away. She had given me fifty dollars.

Some people think I drive on a lark ? that I come to hacking with the same detachment I brought to my monks. But my life needed a sense of someplace to go and someone to go with. And every time a new fare gets into the backseat, I have one.

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