Sake and a Taxi Story

It took the Duck a while but she finally managed to wheedle out of The Great PD the name of the Japanese Shinto-style restaurant where he was taking The Great FiveHead for her birthday/anniversary dinner. Armed with that information, it was easy to call up Kajitsu Restaurant and have a bottle of sake delivered to the table when 5H and PD sat down.

Here's where they went: http://www.kajitsunyc.com

(The link button is not working today on Blogger)

The restaurant is on Ninth Street near Avenue Ave. A, which is in the East Village, near Plot and Duck's old neighborhood in NYC. Going to Ninth and A, when the Plotniks were younger, wasn't as bad as going to Seventh and B or Fifth and C, but you didn't hang around there any longer than you had to. Now, it's a destination.

All of Manhattan is a destination now. The drunks are gone from Times Square. The hoodlums must have all moved to the Bronx. People use the word 'charming' in the same sentence with neighborhoods Plot's cab company employer did not allow his cabs to drive into.

In the days when Plotnik drove his yellow Dodge cab, you collected your fares in cash. Plotnik put them in an old cigar box and kept it on his front seat so he could make change easily. Everybody did that, but it was really stupid, because by the end of the night the box was really full.

The unspoken rule was that if you got robbed, your employer, who was entitled to more or less half of what you brought in, not including your tips, would forfeit his half of what you lost just like you had to. But if you got robbed in a neighborhood they told you not to go into, you had to pay the owner back his half.

The old time cabbies knew the rules and adhered to them, which is why black people could never get a taxi to take them to Harlem or to Brooklyn or the other outer boroughs -- and since you can't tell where somebody wants to go until they're in your cab, black and white cabbies alike just stopped picking up black people. This is the way it was in New Shmork for several generations.

If you were black, you took the subway or an illegal car service.

But Plottie was young and fresh, so when he got robbed the first time on 132nd and Lenox in Harlem at 2am, and his boss told him he would have to reimburse the company for half of his loss, Plotnik refused. The old guys explained the unwritten rule but Plotnik still refused. Eventually the company let Plotnik slide because he was a new driver and hadn't known how things worked.

The next time he got robbed, at gunpoint under the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, he had just started his shift so he didn't have anything for them to steal, except to run out of the cab without paying the fare.

Pretty soon Plotnik stopped going to Harlem or Brooklyn too, and then the nightmares started where black people would be crowding into his back seat and he would have to just drive without knowing when he would be robbed, but he couldn't look into the back seat either. It was a horrible dream, and the nightmares got worse. Eventually, seeing what was going on with his psyche, and also the heart and soul of prejudice that forms from fear -- he quit the taxi job. It just wasn't worth it any more.

Now, nobody pays cash in cabs anymore, and there are protective windows between the driver and the passenger, and cell phones to call for help, and maybe it's still a dangerous job but if you pick up two young people from a restaurant on Ninth and A in the East Village, you are probably not going to get robbed. You might get a taste from a great bottle of sake, if they haven't finished it all, as you drive them home to Brooklyn.