Homage To Bratfisch

I have now been driving a taxicab in suburban Washington, D.C. for slightly more than nine months. I took it up last summer because I needed money. I still do it for that same reason. Believe me, I don't do it for kicks, although surprises -- good and bad -- do come up. Last October I picked up a fare, an actually quite-attractive 34 year-old woman, extremely drunk, who decided on the way home that she wanted to have sex with me. Right there in the cab. At 4:30 in the afternoon. Well ... that probably would have landed us both in jail, and another alternative, taking her to the Sleazebag Arms Motel, could have landed me in jail by myself when she sobered up later and, embarrassed, decided to file rape charges. So, like the ever-vigilant compromiser and paranoiac that I am, I gave her my business card and said, "If you still feel like doing this after you sober up, give me a call."

She never did.

I have learned a few new things since I took up the trade of hack, such as the fact that, with the possible exception of birds and snakes, there are no two more natural enemies in the world than cab drivers and the police.

This, by the way, has a long and venerable tradition behind it. I just finished re-reading a wonderful book about fin-de-siecle Vienna, Frederic Morton's A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889. Of course the central event of the narrative is the double-suicide at Mayerling of the Habsburg Crown Prince Rudolf and his girlfriend Mary Vetsera. But one of the key players in the drama was Rudolf's personal horse-cab driver, Bratfisch, and Morton describes his activities with a few asides thrown in, not the least factoid of which is that the horse-cabbies of Old Vienna had just as adversarial a relationship with the cops as their modern counterparts, to the point of building insulting "cop-snowmen" during Fasching at which, it being the carnival season, the police had little choice but to smile.

Those Viennese cabbies (bless their hearts) were as contemptuous of the censor as they were of the police. When government censorship clamped firmly down on any account of what really happened at Mayerling, the crackdown including confiscation of foreign newspapers that carried details and rumors the Emperor did not want his subjects talking about over their coffee, Old Vienna's cabbies got busy smuggling foreign papers in, then hiding them under the seats of their cabs and letting the curious read them ... at a price of forty kreuzer for ten minutes.

The city where I drive is served by three cab companies. Between the three of them they have roughly 700 cabs. And since many of us are on the road for twelve to fourteen hours a day, we are highly-visible, highly vulnerable (and highly numerous) targets for cops with quotas to meet.

The police department's hack office has three officers. Two of them are actually not bad fellows; the third is a total jerk.

Someone needs to sit this guy down and tell him that he does not have the most prestigious job in the police department. I mean, he isn't Head of Detectives. In terms of sheer prestige in police work, getting paid to jerk cab drivers around might rank right up there with mopping out the toilets. But this character takes himself very seriously, and he loves nothing more than watching some cabbie either cringe in fear before him or get mad and start cursing, giving him an excuse for further deviltry.

Just the other day this guy followed me into a Metro station. I was about to drop off a fare. He was probably bored, just wanted to yank someone's chain to brighten up his own morning. Anyway, the moment I had dropped off my fare and was pulling out of the Metro station he flashed his lights at me and pulled me over. He demanded to see my manifest. All cab drivers are required to keep a written log known as a manifest. You have to write down where you picked up each fare, what time it was, where you dropped them off, what time you dropped them off and how much the fare was. Some of the guys are very lackadaisical about keeping their manifests. I'm fairly punctilious about mine, if a bit sloppy. I didn't want to sit there in the middle of the Metro parking lot scribbling and blocking traffic, so I decided I would enter the fare I had just dropped off a short time later when I was out of the flow of traffic.

But having just seen me drop off a fare, (and looking for an excuse to yank some cabbie's chain) this clown pulls me over and demands to see my manifest, after first wagging his finger at me over a dented bumper on my cab (which one of his two colleagues had dismissed as no big deal months earlier.)

He jumped in my shit because I had not immediately entered the fare I'd just dropped off into my manifest the second she left the cab. "The law says you gotta enter that fare in your manifest the moment the customer leaves the cab," he harrumphed.

What absolute ballroom-bananas bullshit, as Hemingway might have said. I mean, as chickenshit goes, this crap ranks right up there with the self-important Safeway store clerk who proudly nails a customer for taking one extra packet of saltines with his salad-bar lunch.

All the cabbies in town utterly loathe this guy. This week when I went into the cab company to pay my weekly stand dues, (we're all independent contractors; we pay the cab company for using its infrastructure and the cab stands around town) another driver who had seen this cop pull me over, watched the whole thing, gave me a twenty-minute lecture about how much he detests this particular cop. I told him that I personally never argue with the guy; I just smile, take his bullshit and walk away. It's the best policy, really. In the early Mel Brooks movie The Twelve Chairs, which takes place in Russia right after the Bolshevik revolution, a fracas breaks out in which Ron Moody clobbers a cop. Raffish Frank Langella admonishes him firmly: "Don't EVER hit a policeman!" Well, "don't argue with a policeman" is also a good idea, because they like it when you do. Especially if you're a cab driver. Because cops really do have a special hard-on for us Gypsy Hacks who serve The Insomniacs, to paraphrase Tom Waits. I've come to believe it.

By the way, this particular cop, in addition to having a case of elephantiasis of the ego, is also apparently not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. (Well, yeah, he hassles cab drivers for a living. If he were playing with a full deck he might indeed be head of detectives.) Last spring when we, the latest batch of cabbies to pass the test, were being processed in, he demanded to see my immigration papers. This guy is so accustomed to dealing with cabbies from places like Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Iraq that he just assumed that all cab drivers must come from somewhere else.

"Immigration papers?" I scratched my head. "I was born in Vermont."

I think he got the message. And probably made a mental note to nail me for something, anything, at the first opportunity, to get even with me for making him look stupid for a moment.

Oh, well. Every situation has its ups and its downs, right? Being in business for yourself, for example. The downside:no guaranteed money; you have to go out there and hustle every day. And no benefits: you have to provide your own health insurance, and a vacation is just a week of making no money. But there's an upside as well: you can make your own hours and you can't be laid off. As one who has been laid off more than once, (and fired a couple of times) I can tell you that this last is indeed a plus.

As I'm sure Bratfisch would have agreed. Makes you wonder, though. After he lost the plum assignment of a Vienna cabbie's life, driving the Crown Prince Rudolf around, where he did he go from there?

Somehow I have a feeling he managed. A thick skin and a bounce-back ethos are essential to survival in the cab business.

Hail to Bratfisch. May he be in heaven, outsmarting the local flatfoot, even as we speak.

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010

J.D. Salinger's obituary was in the Washington Post yesterday. He was 91, the same age my father was when he died.

What a strange dude. (I mean Salinger this time, although my father was also an exceedingly strange dude.)

It seems to me that Salinger was Truman Capote's opposite number. They shared the distinction of publishing one smash-hit book, in Capote's case In Cold Blood, in Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye, then drying up creatively, or at least publishing next to nothing. But whereas Capote lusted after fame, glamor, exotic locales, celebrity gossip, television interviews and a big rolodex of famous names, all of whom he described as his "dear friends," Salinger published one successful book in 1951, then went out and hid in the woods for the rest of life, talking to practically no one. At the time of his death, he hadn't even published a short story since 1965, although the obit did mention that he stayed busy out there in the woods, writing stuff that he intended for publication only after his death. I guess we'll find out about that.

I read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and disliked it, most likely because it was de rigeur for adolescents to admire that book, and I had a contrarian streak in me. Re-reading it many years later, I found Holden's diction rather quaint, and certainly his jaded cynicism, a shocking novelty in 1951, was something of a yawn in the post-Watergate era. But because all adolescents like to think of themselves as alienated and "different" from everyone else, Holden Caufield immediately became an American folk hero. The obit did answer a question for me, which was why my contemporary, Joyce Maynard, who was going to Yale at the same time I was starting college, managed to publish a teenage memoir, Looking Back, when she and I were both all of 19 or so, gaining instant literary fame. Seems she was sleeping with Salinger at the time. Yeah, that would do it all right. Listen to me. I sound like Holden Caufield. Only one man knows why J.D. Salinger withdrew into the New Hampshire woods at age 33 and seldom came out again, refusing interviews, shunning publicity, publishing nothing. Well, that man is dead now, but I'm sure he had his reasons. R.I.P.