40 Minutes.

I arrived, startlingly enough, in Manhattan yesterday afternoon ten minutes early. That's right, the Amtrak pulled in early to Penn Station, slightly ahead of the urine smell which was running fetid. I beat the throng to the escalator and made it out onto Eighth Avenue, just before the drizzle started getting serious.

About nine men hiding behind mustaches got me as I ran to the cab line. 

"Oooooober? Ooooooober?"

The cab line was as still as an oil painting. I scanned down the avenue and saw no cabs coming. They disappear the minute the rain comes.

A guy turned to me.

"The woman at the front of the line said she's been there 30 minutes and it hasn't moved."

I turned to one of the mustasches.

"How much to 83rd and York?"

He typed some numbers into his handheld and turned it around for me to see. It was close to $100 for the four mile trip.

I turned from him.

"I give you twenty-percent discount."

I walked away. 

"How much you want to pay?"

I kept walking, figuring I could grab something dropping a Long Islander off at the Garden, or a Knicks fan since there was a playoff game in just an hour or so. But Seventh Avenue was as jammed as a lower intestine in Boca, so I kept going east. 

"It'll thin out," I assured myself. Not sure, really, if my extraordinarily good kab-karma had been hexed since I was sentenced to the littoral life on Connecticut's Gingham Coast. 

I made it up to 35th and was still heading east toward Fifth Avenue. An empty cab steamed by and I gave him my best Yankee Stadium hotdog vendor, a deep diaphragm bellow, but he missed me. He must have been listening to some over-produced auto-tuned shit of someone screaming hotdog, because he missed me like I had hit 110 decibels.

I cursed myself like Job. "That's probably the last cab between here and Yonkers," I Chandlered. "I might wind up walking home."

But seconds later, I summoned Luciano Pavarotti again selling hotdogs during a twin bill and a Ford Transit van stopped mid-block.

The cabbie had dreadlocks but rather than Ska on the radio, some Coltrane was playing. I gave him my address, repeating it three times so he'd get it once, and he meandered his way against traffic like a disoriented salmon looking to spawn against all odds. After three blocks heading east we hit Park Avenue, and against my better judgment he took it up town.

"Is this WBGO?" I asked him. Not realizing mentioning a terrestrial radio station's call letters put me closer in age to Napoleon than to Taylor Swift. 

Now Ella was singing "Birds Do It," as we inched into the 40s. The streets, not the decade.

"It's Spoootifiii," he said with a lilt. "You pooot on Jazz, you get beautiful."

Sinatra came on next, "My Way," if I remember right. Then something by Chet Baker with a lot of falsetto and even more trumpet. Before too many blocks passed, Dionne Warwick was ironyizing me. She was singing "Just Walk On By," as we moved at about four-miles-per.

These days, the meter drop in a New York City cab, laden with about 17 different covid and gasoline and green-related and congestion-pricing surcharges is close to ten dollars. They try to hide the fare from you. You can't really see the driver's meter anymore. The screen in the passenger section displays the price but not in a logical place, and in about six point type. The old mechanical meters probably used 90-point type and you heard a loud mechanical click every time the enamel numbers spun a turn.

I spent the first 58-years of my life never hearing the words "user interface." Now, at least in advertising, it's all you hear, and as far as I can tell, every such user interface is about 97.6-percent illegible.

We finally made it to my neighborhood. I got out, as I almost always do, a block away from my house. An old hoodlum trick, lest someone know when you live. The fare, with a nine-dollar tip came to a ludicrous fifty-dollars. Pre-pandemic, it would have been half that. Pre-21st Century, it would have been seven-bucks.

"Thanks for the Jazz," I quicklied, as I got out of the car mid- block.

"Spoootifiii," he answered and laughed a laugh.

The rain was coming harder now, and I walked into my building. One of the tiny doormen was there, asleep on his stool, even though it was only seven pm, ostensibly a busy time for doormen. 

I made it to the door before he made it to his 38th-wink. I picked up the Chinese I had ordered as my Amtrak creeped through Long Island City, Queens. It was still hot when I got upstairs to my apartment, and it was almost time for the Knicks, who won last night going away, in something of a rout.

In a minute, when I'm done writing this post, I'll microwave the leftovers for lunch.

Thanks for reading.

And not just walking on by.