The Village Idiot: A cab driver from Bethlehem

Years before Sept. 11, years before we moved to a farm in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, Sue and I lived in Manhattan. It was where young people came from all over the world to make a name for themselves, to make money, to disappear, to become famous, to be anonymous.

Almost no one we knew I was from Manhattan. A few friends were from Brooklyn, but even that was rare. Manhattan is a city full of immigrants from somewhere else. And tourists.

Then, as now, it is a diabolically expensive place to live. An apartment the size of a closet in a bad neighborhood is more than anyone working his first job can afford. So you live with friends in neighborhoods that no one else wants to live in. Places where the rent is cheap and police are scarce.

One apartment we lived in was a large, empty loft a successful painter used as a storage space while he was in Europe conning the art critics. He rented it to a friend ours who promptly rented it to four of his friends. We used the artist’s large paintings to make separate bedrooms.

It took years before Sue and I were able to make enough money that we didn’t need to share an apartment with roommates. A few more years and we could afford an apartment that was within walking distance to a subway. A few more years and we moved into a neighborhood where the police weren’t afraid to go.

Cabs we could never afford when we first moved to Manhattan I took regularly now, especially on those nights when I worked late. For some reason, the nights I had to work the latest were always the holidays. The day before Thanksgiving would always be a deadline ? Christmas, New Year’s, it was always the same.

One Christmas Eve I was working late trying to meet some deadline. I didn’t leave the office till eight or nine, it was raining slush. Sue had a few friends over at the apartment for drinks and to open gifts and I was already way late. I jumped in a cab. I was exhausted, it had been a long day and it wasn’t over.

It probably was faster to take the subway, but I enjoyed the luxury of being alone in the cab. When I was a kid, comedians on Ed Sullivan used to joke about all the cab drivers that came from Brooklyn. Now they came to Brooklyn by way of Beirut and Senegal and Pakistan. I can’t imagine picking up, leaving home and trying to get a job in Pakistan, much less trying to drive in one of the most traffic-clogged cities in the world.

A few blocks from home I looked at the hack license hanging over the glove compartment. It was one of those middle Eastern names that was practically all vowels. The picture showed a dark man with a 5 o’clock shadow and a bushy mustache.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Bedibum,” he answered in his thick accent.

Bedibum? Where is that, I thought. Pakistan. Egypt? Iraq?

“Bedibum,” I said, “Where is that? I never heard of it.”

He turned around and stared at me, his dark handsome face one big question mark. He said unbelievingly, “You never heard of Bethlehem?”

So here’s my philosophical question. How much do you tip?

Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life” and “Baby’s First Tattoo.” You can reach him at [email protected].