Day in the Life:Right Cab,Wrong Shoes

Act I: The Day Begins Well The day begins well. I wait only a half an hour at Penn Station for cab. This is not bad. And when the cab arrives, I notice two good things about it: There is no homeless person asleep in the back seat. And the cab driver speaks English. Or at least he nods when I speak English.

So I am in the cab and I tell the driver I want to go to Madison and 77th, a trip of 50 or so blocks. He nods, we pull from the curb and he doesn’t turn the meter on.

So for 50 or so blocks, I watch the blank meter and have a furious argument with myself.

“Tell him he hasn’t turned the meter on.”

“Are you kidding? This is New York. He may have a knife.”

“But who knows what he’s going to charge you? He could charge you $50.”

“I’m not going to pay $50!”

“What if he has a knife?”

“OK, so I’ll pay $50, but then I’ll get a cop.”

“Why don’t you just tell him to turn the meter on?”

“He may have a gun.”

So I sit in the back seat, my stomach churning with acid. We get to the destination, the cab driver looks at the meter, shakes his head, sighs and tells me he forgot to turn the meter on.

I wait for him to try and charge me $50 or pull some scam, but he says nothing.

“Here’s $10,” I finally say. “That ought to be about right.”

He shakes his head. “Make it $5. Ten’s too much.”

I am stunned. Five dollars for 50 blocks? In traffic? And after I have offered him $10?

I thank him and note his name: Kenneth Rose. Cab License 5N39.

I do not know it, but this will be the high point of my day.

Act II: Things Get Worse Things got worse on the subway. I am on the Lexington Avenue subway going from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side. The subway is clean and free of graffiti and I am pleasantly surprised.

So I get on the subway at Astor Place and the next stop is supposed to be 14th Street. Except the doors close and we don’t move and a voice comes over the loudspeaker saying: “There is a police action at 14th Street. We must wait here until the police action is over.”

The guy next to me, who had been talking to the guy next to him, taps me on the shoulder. “What did he say?” he asks. “I missed the announcement.”

“Nothing to worry about,” I say. “A police action at 14th Street. No big deal. Just a police action.”

He falls silent and looks at his feet for a while. Then he looks back up at me. “You know,” he says, “the Korean War was a police action.”

Act III: Tragedy Strikes Tragedy strikes in the bar at the Stanhope Hotel. The Stanhope Hotel is a very snooty hotel on Fifth Avenue, the kind of hotel I do not stay in no matter how many different kinds of shampoo they give me.

But I am meeting the associate publisher of one of the hottest book publishers in New York in the bar of the Stanhope Hotel. This publishing house has recently published both Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and Scott Turow’s “Presumed Innocent,” each of which sold 100 kazillion copies. And the associate publisher has picked the Stanhope bar in which to meet.

So I am on my best behavior. And also in my usual shoes. My usual shoes are very important to this tragedy, so listen up:

One of the things I learned on the presidential campaign trail is that it pays to wear comfortable shoes. There is nobody to impress by wearing nice shoes anyway--except the candidates, who think all reporters are insects, so why bother?

So I always wear a pair of black, leather Reebok shoes. They are not running shoes with stripes on them. They are not purple and green. They are black. They are leather. They lace up. This is very important.

OK, so I am in the bar of the Stanhope Hotel waiting for the associate publisher. It is semi-dark in the bar, which is decorated to look like an English gentleman’s club. I am seated at a table.

After about 10 minutes, a waiter comes up to me. “Are those Reeboks?” he asks.

I am pretty impressed with his powers of observation. To determine my shoes’ manufacturer, he probably had to fall to the ground to peer under the table.

“Yes, they are Reeboks,” I say, fool that I am.

“I cannot serve you,” he says in a tone last used on this planet by Queen Victoria. “We do not serve people who wear sneakers.”

At this moment, the associate publisher shows up and I have to explain to her how we can’t have a drink here because I have the wrong shoes.

And as she says sympathetic and comforting things, it occurs to me that it is highly likely that neither Tom Wolfe nor Scott Turow has ever had to apologize for his footwear.

Epilogue: I want Mayor Ed Koch to do three things and I want him to do them immediately. I want him to erect a statue to Cab Driver Kenneth Rose.

I want him to use United Nations troops to fight all further police actions in the subways.

I want him to buy the Stanhope Hotel, turn it into a shelter for the homeless, but keep that waiter on the staff. Because I’d like to buy every homeless person at the Stanhope Hotel a pair of sneakers.

And I want to have somebody around to shine them.