ONE QUESTION TOO MANY - taxi to joe's shanghai (12/19/06)

i generally hate making small talk with cabbies, or really anyone, but out of sheer texas-girl politeness i usually let conversations go on much longer than i'd like.

Q1: how long have you lived in new york?
Q2: do you have a good job?
Q3: do you save money?
Q4: do you have kids?
Q5: but miss, what are you gonna do in the afterlife without no money and without no kids??

JFK to NYC

last night we came home from JFK in a larger slide-open door taxi with no partition. The driver was a woman. We think she asked us which route we'd like to go, but she spoke in such a low, sweet, dulcet tone reminiscent of Austrian Operetta
Sopranos or Mountain Warbler Ladies we couldn't make out a word she was saying. She then turned on 1010 WINS so loud it blasted out, but then surreptitiously turned it down as a trick so she could eavesdrop on every word we said.

last night i went to a party in astoria. i justified taking a cab there and back because i wasn't going to spend any money on drinks. $48 lighter, and after having to deal with a car-sick fellow passenger, i think i would've rather bought drinks. another reminder of why i moved away from astoria...

the cabbies were really nice, though. and didn't give me any beef about having to go to astoria.

last night, aaron alden and i caught a cab from the bowery and bleecker, up to black and white on third and tenth avenue. it cost $3.60 before tip, and took about 37 seconds. i told him, wow, we were closer than we thought, that cab ride only cost like eighty cents on top of the initial fare we shoulda walked. black and white was closed for some reason. so we decided to go down to the annex. we thought, we'll just walk, but it was cold, and we wanted a drink, so after a few blocks aaron said that he'd pay the eighty cents. so we took another cab back downtown. then i took another cab home at like 2:30 alone. it was more than eighty cents. more like ten dollars. but i was drunk, and didn't mind so much. definitely better than the train.

Karma Cab II

How to put a price on Brooklyn rides.

via dailyscope.com

Times Square to West Village

My cab driver repeatedly shouted at other cars, "Get your thumb outta your ass!" and "Stop picking your goddamned nose!"

in the spring of 2004, after tom's birthday party, dinner, and the BAM screening of "Nothing Lasts Forever", i hopped a cab back to astoria, where i was living at the time. even though i instructed the cabbie the best i could, i wasn't really sure how to get there by car, he ended up getting lost. so the fare was an insane amount, and i told him i wasn't paying that full amount, it was his fault for getting lost. and i had just enough money to pay the usual fare. it usually cost about 15 dollars from the city to my place, so i figured it shouldn't be much more than that from brooklyn, where we just took the BQE. after about 5 minutes of arguing which increased in intensity, i threw him a 20, leapt from the cab, and ran to the stoop of my house where he followed/ran after me, only stopping at the foot of the stairs, yelling at me as i slammed my front door. i didn't sleep that well that night, and half expected him to still be there the next morning when i awoke for work.

just took a ride with Johnnie Smallwood (why do they always have the most unfortunate names?), the low-talker. He kept mumbling things, and I would say What I can't hear you? and then he started yelling at me for not hearing him correctly. finally got to my destination after a screaming match with a low-talker...