Taxicab Confessions

At a party recently, someone who I'd never met said he recognized me. I told him maybe he'd seen my picture run with my column sometime. After a few seconds he seemed to remember and remarked, "Oh yeah, you're that girl who takes cabs."

Yeah, that's me. And there it was, my Secret New York Guilty Pleasure. He had just, indirectly, revealed it to whoever was around us. At first, I hoped no one had heard him. As amazed as I was that he happened to remember that I had once written about taking a cab to East Harlem, I was equally embarrassed.

Judging from his unsympathetic tone, I assumed he didn't see this as a favorable thing, and then came the next stab.

"Who the fuck takes cabs?" he asked.

Well, I take cabs. Gasp. I do it for the rides, and I don't do it often, but often for me is more than usual. I tell no one. My mom knows, and she thinks it's a character flaw. I'm the only person I have ever seen hail a cab at the corner of 114th Street and Broadway, and the only one out of all my friends who ever has ridiculous cab stories to tell. Sometimes I even walk to 110th Street to avoid getting caught. It's a habit that began with my faulty sense of direction, but quickly became an activity that gave me a sense of tranquility-of breezing past street after street in a rare instance of calm among chaos.

In a not-so-slick move, I apologized to the boy who recognized me. "I'm sorry, I'm lazy," I said. Which is only partly true-I just couldn't think of anything better to say to justify myself, and I doubt my "calm among chaos" tirade would have gone over better.

"And by lazy, you mean rich," he rebutted.

And there it was again, the Columbia student's response for anything that slightly implies wasting money. But no, it has nothing to do with that. Let's just say that my budget would love it if I didn't enjoy so many rides. For some reason these activities, like this habit of mine, don't fit anywhere into the idyllic middle ground of the pseudo-humble snobs that Columbia students are-which is why I keep it hushed. But I'm sure we all have that Secret New York Guilty Pleasure, that isolated pastime in the city that we don't talk about. That one thing the city helps us keep secret, lest we be found out and deemed unfit to belong to this strange culture of not-quite-highbrow-but-not-quite-lowbrow expectations we all hold of each other. If we like to read the New York Post, our level of education is taken into question. Yet if we partake in any activity that's attributed only to businessmen trying to get home at 5 p.m., our supposed college student humility is doubted.

At times I take cabs if only so that I can have experiences like the one on my last ride, about two weeks ago. I told my driver the address, and after he repeated it in a thick Romanian accent and wrote it down, he blew a kiss into the air. I smiled politely and continued looking out the window as I always do. He asked me the usual: if I was a student, what I was studying, if I was Brazilian, and then, in a seemingly meaningless sidetrack, dove right into telling me his life story. He had come from Romania when he was young with no papers and lived in a building with mostly Spanish speakers. One day, a Brazilian woman knocked on his door and asked for a cup of sugar. "I want, she want," he said, telling me about the beginning of their life-long romance.

"You same size as her," he told me, "I thought she was too small to make love. I thought I was gonna break her."

"She drive me crazy because everything so little," he continued, drawing parallels to our mutual petiteness.

It turns out she moved back to Brazil and he couldn't go with her because he had no papers. She continued to visit even as they were both married and grew older. As we drove down the West Side Highway, this man I'd never met before and who I will never see again recounted his life to me insofar as I reminded him of it and the only woman he ever cheated on his wife with. I'm still not sure whether this is entirely creepy or just fascinating, but it could not have happened anywhere else. Only on a twenty-minute ride from Morningside Heights to Chelsea, on the right side of a yellow car, seated diagonally behind a Romanian immigrant who passed me by and remembered the tiny woman who will always be the love of his life.

"I hope to see you again, you beautiful, you remind of me of crazy things," he said, as I got out on 24th Street and told him it'd been a great ride. A great cab ride, that is.