Pandemic taxi driver

RHINEBECK, New York, USA — Driving a taxi during the pandemic enables you to feel like The Humungus from Mad Max 2 because you have a wheel in your hands and you are wearing a masque and so many people are on edge and in a lot of ways rules have been suspended and upgraded simultaneously. It is a muffled world of loneliness and you fall in love with the DJ on the new radio station in Kingston because she plays The Minutemen as well as the Debbie Harryesque home-care worker who is 64 and wears Chuck Taylors and you are 56 and just spent $149 on a pair of Kelham Overlord Dr Marten’s boots for the winter months. You know, for survival.

Somehow it all makes sense. You have slightly more hair than The Humungus who had a baseball doppelgänger in the form of Ohio native and former roided-up Yankees catcher Jim Leyritz. He was one of the first catchers to opt for the hockey-goalie style mask that gave him Humungus verisimilitude big time. After Leyritz went for the skinhead look, his jaw-muscles ballooned just like Barry Bonds when he was on the needle or the cream or whatever cheating substances many baseballers were taking back in the late 1990s.

In the vehicle, ventilation remains the key. I keep the moon-roof open slightly, and at least two windows cracked despite the cold. The heater is up and sent low, over the new DMs and under the seats past the dropped packets of Splenda from the other drivers and the 11 cents in loose change and some dead willow leaves from the lakeside pick-up in rural Elizaville. That was a surprising fare – a transplanted New York City native living amid the most virulent rednecks in her new neighbourhood. She also did time in Sarasota, Florida, and when I brought up Bradenton Spring Training bliss, she flatly stated she disliked baseball. The remainder of our trip was therefore sullen silence until I turned up the oldies radio station and forced her to endure “Candida” by Tony Orlando & Dawn as we glided into the abandoned Rhinecliff Amtrak station. 

The train experience here in upstate NY has been pared down by fewer available routes, diminished numbers of commuters, and a general sense that travel is not really a good idea right now. Most of the interactions involving the masqued customers and the station personnel remind me of childhood TV viewings of the sitcom MASH, when Alan Alda and his somehow zany blood-spattered cohorts would have entire conversations from behind the surgical face-coverings. We have returned to that, apparently, only without the clever one-liners about the new nurses.

There is (of course) an urgency to the well-documented hordes moving to the Hudson Valley from New York City, as if they are Charlton Heston’s Dr Neville from the film The Omega Man. They are leasing cars from far-flung dealers and signing up for 1-year Airbnb rentals in remote wooded areas with sketchy cell phone service. We go through a sort of existential Yellow Pages phone directory conversation. They ask about schools. Grocery store locales. The availability of handymen. Amazingly innocent non-tech questions from people who got into my cab only because their beloved Uber was a 45-minute wait for service at Rhinecliff and they committed Generation Z suicide by surrendering to the old way of doing things vis-à-vis an actual dialled phone number. 

So, you have an app that will supposedly corral you a ride, but you have no idea where the grocery store is or if the car rental place is open or what time the liquor stores close. Selective smart phone efficiency is the order of the day, then. I possess the knowledge they request without the aid of electronics, though I rarely boast about it. I have been tech-shamed so many times (mostly by freshly-arrived viragos from Park Slope, Brooklyn) because I do not take Venmo and all the other silly-named online payment services. “Welcome to the ‘80s,” I say to the disbelieving Karens who are one-handed because their phone permanently occupies an appendage, and they will never put it down. Ever. Because it is their efficiency and more importantly their control. Their magic wand that can, in fact, promptly summon the manager to whom they need to speak with great urgency. “Why aren’t you using GPS?” they ask with a timbre of medium panic. “Because I know where you are going,” is my reply without a measure of sarcasm or snark and hiding behind my own sky-blue masque. It is as if they believe we will fail to reach their destination unless a cell phone is telling us where to go or there is some device guiding the experience and plotting coordinates, even ones that are painfully obvious.

And as we wait at the Rhinebeck traffic light, they come at me with muffled real estate questions involving numbers. I shrug them off as I do not practice the dark arts of landlording and do not speak Estate Agent language. I offer baseball banter, or soccer. Any sport, really. They pass on that, and silence prevails in the cab in a thankful informational truce. The radio volume knob is turned a few clicks to the right and Jon Bon Jovi takes over.

I have a teenage daughter at home doing mostly remote learning. One assignment involved reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. As she overheard my friend grilling me about the safety of pandemic taxi driving, she reminded me of the novel’s ending. In a taxi, in Madrid. Talk of the great times that could have been between a couple who never really hooked up, as they say. The final line: “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

With that in mind, I will end this missive not with boundless and serene nature imagery, like the television program CBS Sunday Morning, but with passenger utterances of late — because the sun does, in fact, continue to rise and set despite it all. What follows is one end of a transport-oriented lingua franca, if you will. The artless minutiae emerge quickly, sometimes in baffling non-sequiturs. The ears were strained to hear these statements over the howling wind of the cracked windows, the cranked-up Dodge Caliber taxi heater and, of course, the muffling effect of the Covid-19 era masque:

“So Belushi leaned over the desk, grabbed my shoulders and lifted me off my feet. He said ‘I’m taking this one with me’”
“I made that dentist’s sign 30 years ago. I cut out that tooth pattern.”
“The Old World ham at Tops is great. Your other driver told me about it.”
“She has kind of a speakeasy on Mill Road.”
“I’m in a show called Billions. On Showtime.”
“The county really should redo this road.”
“Bring your window down to my level, so we match.”
“Can you take me to Manhattan? Okay then, how about the CVS [pharmacy] in Rhinebeck?”
“What happened to the Rhinebeck village pandemic food court?”
“We haven’t really left this house since March.”
“I just sold a cow, so let’s hit the beer store AND the liquor store if you don’t mind.”
“You really do need a car around here, don’t you?”
“I’ll never go into that store again.”
“Tiger Beat?? I own Tiger Beat magazine.”
“My landlord is crazy. She goes around telling people I am her fiancé.”
“I think Soho House has the right idea with a Rhinebeck property.”
“Drop me off at the smoker’s wall near the hospital.”
“I don’t need a mask, I know the owner and he’s cool with it.”
“Dude, that kid from Ozark was at the Beekman Arms with his girlfriend.”
“I like to have my own set of knives.”
“You did that very well, backing in.”
“Living the dream. I got mandated.”
“This guy told me he really liked my set. It turned out to be Darryl Hall.”
“They are going to mail me my plates.”
“If we’d came here yesterday, we would have saved 100 bucks.”
“Who played centre field for the 1971 Pirates?”
“And I need to make a quick stop at Adam’s.”
“That’s my wife’s car. It’s disabled.”
“Can we stop at the wine store so I can get a bottle?”
“I was paintin’ the door at that place and it was so cold it was like spreading peanut butter.” [Whiskey laugh with masque down.]
“I just need to get some beer for the house.”
“Nobody’s really doing any work at Bard [College].”
“Is that a Public Image Limited badge? I saw them in New Haven in 1983.”
“I’ve got lots of baseball cards. I should show them to you some time.”
“This is a cute town.”
“These buses are bullshit, they need more public transportation up here.”
“After I pick up my Volvo, I will hopefully never see you again.”

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