A talkative cabby is balm for the urban soul

For this reporter, anyway, the best thing about covering the Oscars was the cab ride home. As fabulous as it might seem to an outsider, working the Academy Awards -- sans date, avec notebook -- is more grind than glamour.

I spent much of the actual ceremony crouched in a corner of the ladies’ room -- the only place quiet enough to make a cell phone call -- shouting to my editor the story I had scribbled in the darkened theater. Our conversation was punctuated by the sound of flushing toilets. Nice.

Determined to skip the limo gridlock of last year, I called a cab as the ceremony began its windup and said I’d meet it at the southern corner of Franklin and Highland in 20 minutes or so. I left the theater with little confidence that this would actually work out -- in my glitz- and applause-rattled state, I had given no more specific address than “across from the church with the big AIDS ribbon.”

But there it was, my lovely green United Independent Taxi cab, waiting patiently in the night right where I’d asked it to be. I fell onto the loose-springed backseat and began issuing possible routes to my home like Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News.” The cabby listened very politely and then said, “Oh, I know how to get there,” flooring it for emphasis.

As we rocketed along Sunset, catching glimpses of protesters lingering on corners and taking breaks in coffeehouses, we talked about the impact the awards season has on cab drivers in L.A.

“I know people want to be safe,” said my driver, Imtiaz Solaiman, “and, believe me, I think this is a good thing, but they are overdoing it with so many street closures. I lost five calls just in the last two hours because of the Oscars.”

It is not the best time in the world to be a cab driver, as it turns out. “L.A. is not a taxi town,” said Solaiman. “And now tourism is down, the foreigners are not coming to L.A. The economy is down and no one wants to go anywhere.”

Onward we sped, along surface streets and three freeways, my driver discussing in long non sequitur spurts the pros and cons of his profession. He meets many nice and interesting people and, always, he tries to talk to them, to make connections because that is what makes this an interesting job. But he is not pleased with the fact that there is no set minimum fare for trips to and from the airport.

“You can sit there two hours and then you get someone who is going to Marina del Rey,” he said. “You lose money doing this.”

After the hype of the Oscars, his conversation was soothing even in its mild discontent.

These are the issues most people take with them into the night -- jobs that don’t pay quite enough, don’t offer quite enough self-respect, rules that are always made by others, a world outside of their control.

The cab rattled along and I could not remember the last time I had had a ride such as this. L.A. is not a taxi town and that is unfortunate, not only for those who drive for a living but also for the rest of us.

Cab drivers are historically a United Nations of relatively new Americans -- the man I was speaking with came from Bangladesh -- and what they have to say to the windshield, or you, is inevitably interesting. If only because they see so much more actual living than most members of the work-cube, pod and corner-office set.

Lulled by the road and the close confines of their occupation, cabbies are often a chatty and opinionated lot -- in other cities, cab drivers are often used as bellwethers for public opinion and behind-the-scenes sources. In Washington, in Paris, in New York, in London, the cab drivers know who’s in town, where they’re going, when and with whom; the whys are just a matter of common sense and street savvy.

But in L.A., we miss a lot of that. Angelenos may take a cab to and from the airport, but that’s a different thing entirely than burrowing through a metropolis inches away from a New York cabby alternately offering a concise and spirited history of American-Saudi relations over his shoulder and hurling invective at pedestrians and garbage trucks. It is one of the great urban experiences and, really, when you think about it, quite miraculous.

You call a number out of the phone book and ask for a complete stranger to pick you up and drive you for miles and miles, often in the dead of night. And they do. Even without the added value of insightful political or cultural commentary, a cab ride through L.A. is proof that, current events notwithstanding, civilization may be working out after all.