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Around the latter part of the four months driving the taxi there were certain tendencies developing in me which I feel are worth sharing.There were moments, with passengers in the back, when I could become very serene, very calm and very articulate....

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These occurrences mainly happened when I was either on the West Side Drive with the Hudson River adjacent to me, or the FDR drive with the East River adjacent to me.It would take the form of me calmly explaining to the visitors the history behind lets say, Ellis Island, where the newly arrived emigrants of old were processed through the system as their ships arrived from far away places, or the story behind the Statute of Liberty, which was built in France and shipped off across the Atlantic, and offered as a present to the newly reformed Republic Of America.I also enjoyed adding to this by telling them that you don’t have to get the very expensive tours which are organised around these historic sites, costing from anywhere between $40 and $80, but that all you really have to do is to get on the Staten Island Ferry, which was priced then at 25 cents, and you pass within a very short distance of both these sites with good close up views, albeit without actually disembarking at them.For those people that don’t know, Staten Island which is a borough of New York, is separated from Manhatten, namely west Manhatten, by the Hudson River and the ferry, which is a public form of transport, shuttles people too and from the respective boroughs.

However,as I was getting into my fifth month this calmness was being replaced by something completely different.The driving stock car race part of the job didn’t bother me, because its like everything else, the unusual eventually becomes the norm if you do it long enough, and at this point I probably could have done the job with my eyes closed.But the nagging, lurking feelings of frustration were beginning to take hold again, and they would be displayed in the form of me breaking out into bursts of audible anger whilst driving, not directed at the passengers who were seated in the back, but at the person who was sitting next to me in the front seat, which was always, of course, unfortunately empty, as were the rules
which governed the driving of a yellow cab in the state of New york.I am quite certain that I had many a fucking nutter in the back of my cab who I succeeded in scaring, even a slight bit, with my antics, but I just didn’t give a fuck oneway or the other, because that was how I felt about the whole damn fucked up situation.