Reading In Cabs With...

"We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab, and you had no warning. It was the last time you were going to have Lake Tung Ting shrimp in that entirely suspect Chinese restaurant, and you had no idea. If you had known, perhaps you would have stepped behind the counter and shaken everyone's hand, pulled out the disposable camera and issued posing instructions. But you had no idea."

Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York,also, New York Times Magazine.

(I'm not sure I know how to write about this essay without being corny. It's super-sentimental, and perhaps overwrought, and I hadn't read it in years — although I'd read it about a million times since I first saw it in the NYT Magazine — when I saw the book, Colussus of New York, in a store recently, and turned right to it, and it definitely made me cry. And so, because it made me cry in the middle of Bookcourt, and because it's still one of my favorite pieces of writing about New York, and because it meets the key criteria of "Reading In Cabs With," i.e. it mentions a taxi, that's why it's here.)

Reading In Cabs With...

I sort of love most of this page. (#441, from Pynchon's V.)
But the appropriate bit:

Its landscape is one of inanimate monuments and buildings; near-inanimate barmen, taxi-drivers, bellhops, guides: there to do any bidding, to various degrees of efficiency, on receipt of the recommended baksheesh, pourboire, mancia, tip.

Reading in Cabs With Girls (Again)*

"The–-the–-damn it, are you deaf too? Who said undertaker? I said taxi; can't you hear what I say?"

"You want me to call a taxi, sir?"

"No; I don't. I already told you so. I'm going to walk."

Edith Wharton, from "After Holbein"




*A sometimes series

Reading in Cabs With Girls

"He handed her into the taxi as though she were a package marked glass – something, she thought, not merely troublesomely womanly, but ladylike. 'Put your legs up on the seat,' he said. 'I don’t want to, Miles.' Goodbye Missis Butter Put your legs up on the seat. I don’t want to – better luck next time Missis Butter Put your legs I can’t make out our window, Missis Butter Put your 'All right, it will be nice and uncomfortable.' (She put her legs up on the seat.) Goodbye Missis But . . . 'Nothing I say is right,' he said. 'It’s good with the legs up,' she said brightly.

Then he was up the steps agile and sure after the fruit. And down again, the basket swinging with affected carelessness, arming him, till he relinquished it modestly to her outstretched hands. Then he seated himself on the little seat, the better to watch his woman and his woman’s fruit; and screwing his head round on his neck said irritably to the man who had been all his life on the wrong side of the glass pane: 'Charles Street!'"

Tess Slesinger: from The Unpossessed (1934) (reissued in 2002 by New York Review Books)

Reading in Cabs With Boys*

"A bus's circular steering wheel is not only larger but is set at an angle of incidence more horizontal than any taxi, private car or police cruiser's wheel I have seen and the driver turns the wheel with a broad all-body motion which is resemblant of someone's arm sweeping all the material off a table or surface in a sudden fit of emotion."

David Foster Wallace, from "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," page 184 in Oblivion.




*A new segment in which I read things, find the word "taxi," and then reprint bits here.