All too plausible...

Rating: 10/10 (1 July 2013)

Take it from someone who drove a cab for years: the TAXI DRIVER scenario is all-too-plausible. DeNiro's performance is dead on: I saw more than one "Travis Bickle" out there on the streets at night, men who carried guns (though it's illegal for a cabbie to carry one in this town), who drove drunk (or worse), who robbed passengers (often by running what's known as "a hot meter," where the meter is switched from a mileage counter to a timer, usually at long stoplights, thereby allowing the driver to make more money off of the unwitting passenger) and who talked incessantly of "cleaning up the city" (a common refrain, especially among former cops). Of course, some of this behavior is understandable: cabbies themselves must pay for their own gas at the end of every shift (which means that, more often than one would wish, one ends up owing The Company money at the end of the night); the driver eats it when a customer bails out on him and doesn't pay (a common occurrence with college kids, who think it's funny); if a cab goes down (usually because of a slack mechanic- and the term "reliable mechanic" is as much an oxymoron as "honest lawyer" or "trustworthy politician"), it's the Driver (as most of them like to be called, "hack" or "cabbie" being each in their own way demeaning) who's s*** out of luck: bills to pay or not, if there's no cab for you to drive, you don't go out; and robbery (you're on your own if you get robbed- and, if you don't have the money to pay The Company their 50% of each fare for the night, you OWE The Company). Because I wasn't part of the Inner Circle where I worked, I usually got the s***-end of the stick every night- what were known as "the crack runs." I wasn't allowed to refuse a fare and, because the dispatcher had it in for me, I eventually came to be known as Crack Man. More than once, I came THIS close to dying out there: I once had a crack dealer literally hanging from the passenger window of my cab grappling with my passenger over a piece of "rock" (crack cocaine). A crowd of dealers charged my cab. I proceeded to pull a manuver that I remembered, quite literally, from Richard Matheson's I AM LEGEND (see chapter five). It saved my life. Anyone who can't buy the premise of TAXI DRIVER has never driven a cab.