A cabbie tried to rob me Wednesday afternoon. At the cab stand outside Navy Pier. An inversion of the usual dynamic. Typically, it is the cabbie being robbed, by the customer.
The trip started out so normally. Having spent a productive half day at the Sun-Times newsroom — there was a Christmas lunch — I strode through the tourist commotion of the Pier, burst out the doors, tossed a glance to my right at the CTA bus corral, didn't see a waiting 124 bus, so veered left. The first cabbie's door was locked — he gave a brisk shake of the head, and I figured he was waiting for an arranged ride or perhaps just didn't like the look of me. The second cabbie's door opened.
"Where to?" he asked.
"Union Station," I said, starting to climb in the back. "Madison Street entrance."
"It's a $15 flat fee," the cabbie ventured.
I froze, halfway in the cab.
"No it's not," I replied, automatically, beginning to withdraw. "I'll take the bus." I began to close the door.
"Okay, get in," he said.
And here is the surprising part. I got in.
"Run the meter," I said.
As we pulled away from the curb, I asked myself: why patronize the guy who just tried to rip you off? The short answer: expediency. There was no other cab. If I went back to the bus, I would miss the train. This driver wasn't a hardened felon, just another hard-working jamoke, trolling the bait to see if I was ignorant enough to snap at it. I was at Navy Pier at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday, after all. How on the ball could I be? Fleecing the rubes is as hallowed a Chicago tradition as there is. I'm lucky he didn't also try to steal my land.
As we drove past Lake Point Tower, he started murmuring on the phone, in Yoruba — or Hausa, or Igbo or Fulfulde or one of the other 520 languages of Nigeria, one of the most linguistically diverse nations on earth. Thanks to WhatApp, cabbies hold continual conversations while they drive, I assume with relatives back home, or wives or girlfriends here. It's annoying, but what can you do? Me, a chatterbox, began talking to him anyway, breaking in on his conversation.
"Here I try to do the right thing, and patronize cabs, insead of Uber, because there aren't any Ubers just sitting there. I'd have had to wait five or 10 minutes for an Uber to arrive, and I'd miss my train. And my reward is, you try to rip me off."
Okay, not a Mamet monologue, but I was improvising.
He replied that Uber is the true ripoff.
"With their surge pricing," he said. "How am I supposed to make it?"
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Been quite a while since I saw the term "jamoke" in print. Derivative of "mook," I think. So disparagingly descriptive.
ReplyDeleteMy father used to use it. I use it all the time, especially online. Comes from something to do with coffee...Like mocha coffee. A jamoke may have been a dock worker in the islands of the Carribbean. Not sure of that. I would have to look it up again. I thought it was a slightly racist word...like the Yiddish word "shvartse" was when I was a kid. But it isn't.
DeleteCleveland, where I live now, is not a cab city. Big tourist places, like Manhattan and New Orleans, have a lot of them. Chicago's lakefront is a major cab city. One of my Wrigley scalper buddies drove a cab at night...in the days before lights at the ballpark. Heard a lot of taxi stories, many of them unprintable. He bragged about how he and his cabbie pals ripped people off, stiffed them, and broke the law with impunity.
He was a Chicago native who had lived in places like New York, Paris, and San Francisco, and the Big Easy, too. He was a con man and a hustler and a smooth operator, which made him an excellent cab driver. You don't have to be from a foreign country to be a crook. Plenty of Yankee cab drivers are sleazebags, too.
Can count the number of cab rides I ever had in Chicago on one hand...maybe both hands, tops. I guess that says something about me, and my economic status. I was a yuffie...and then a muffie...a middle-aged urban failure...in the 70s and 80s and early 90s. Too poor for cab rides, and the CTA was my limo,. even though I had a car, and a garage to house it. I hated looking for parking spaces. And the car was an old beater.
Bought a monthly pass and would try to see how many CTA rides I could get out of it, on the buses and the trains. Made a sort of game out of it. At one point, I was using it almost a hundred times a month, and was paying about forty or fifty cents a ride. Was a clerical drone in the Loop, and I lived in Evanston and Wrigleyville, so I didn't need to take cabs. And I couldn't really afford to use them. Cabs were either for richer people, or visitors, or when you were late and desperate. Didn't fall into any of those hoppers..
Grizz, you're right that it comes from coffee! I looked it up:
Delete"The term "jamoke" originated in the early 1900s as a blend of "Java" and "Mocha", two regions known for their coffee production. Initially, it was used as slang for coffee. Over time, the term evolved to also mean an ordinary, unimpressive, or inept person, often used as a mild or joking insult.
The transition from coffee to a term for a foolish person likely happened during World War I, when soldiers used it to describe fellow soldiers they considered unintelligent."
From a website for coffee lovers, called Convergent Coffee:
Delete"Mocha is an intensely flavorful coffee blend that originated in Ethiopia and was brought over to Europe by traders from Yemen in the late 1700s. It is made up of espresso and hot chocolate milk. Together, these create a rich flavor with notes of chocolate, caramel, earthy spices like cinnamon or nutmeg, and fruity flavors such as raspberry or orange blossom, which can come from their addition. Mocha is not just any old cup of o' joe, though; this beverage contains caffeine and sugar, so be careful if you are sensitive to sugar or currently on a diet! Mocha can be served either hot or cold."
In the mid-Fifties, there was a Chicago radio DJ named Josh Brady, on WBBM. He sounded just like Arthur Godfrey. I thought he was a real snoozer, but my parents used to listen to him on lazy Sunday mornings, while we ate lox and bagels and smoked fish. Oy, vey...they were to die for!
One of his sponsors was Monarch Coffee, and he would play a recorded jingle for it. A Hispanic-sounding woman, who sounded a lot like Carmen Miranda, would tell listeners that their brand was "mocha-mocha-mocha...mocha-rich." Had no idea what mocha was, until I had mocha-flavored ice cream, 20 or 30 years later. Mocha-flavored ice cream is delicious...
I was ripped off by a cabbie in Dallas, TX about 25 years ago. I was staying at a hotel downtown and wanted to see a football game at the Cotton Bowl (when in Rome...). The cab ride there took about 40 minutes, down one expressway and over to another. I'd never been to Dallas, knew nothing of its geography, and didn't think twice about the trip. I left the game at halftime and the cab ride back took about 10 minutes, no expressways involved. What an out-of-town rube I was. Oh well, live and learn. Like NS says, you need to be on your guard all the goddamn time.
ReplyDeleteI drove a cab in Chicago for over 10 years and rode cabs in Milwaukee and New York. I can attest that taking an expressway versus city streets USUALLY costs a little more but is considerably faster. Nonetheless, to preclude beefs, I eventually made it a habit to ask customers how they wanted to go. The only problem with that habit was that the turn rights, turn lefts didn't register in my mind and I'd have to ask the customer how to get back to civilization or rely on a dime-store compass to tell me which way I was headed.
Deletejohn
In order to know a $15 flat fee from Navy Pier to Ogilvy is both not a real thing and a ripoff, you would need to have ridden in cabs in Chicago often enough to know.
ReplyDeleteI am willing to bet the cheapest Uber on the same route would be more than $15. But if you always take an uber, the $15 flat fee sounds like a steal.
I'm glad I don't have Uber, proud i've never had it on my phone, and will do everything i can to avoid using it (or lyft) until no longer in control of my faculties.
This story does remind me of how we all seem so very lost in a sea of endless capitalism. To be is no longer possible, you must have excess. Minimum wage is no longer livable (and it hasn't been since the 90s). A job where you can grow and have a career will die with our parents. The oligarchs and their Kleptocracies and Kakistocracies will continue to rinse the masses. Life seems terrifyingly reminiscent of the late 1920s. I used to laugh at the idea of a 222,818 Dobra taxi ride... but I think we may be looking a lot more like that in the coming years.
Mr. B
Our Great grandchildren will look back on those upcoming days as “the Good Old Days”
DeleteMore like the 1890s. It will be...and maybe already is...another Gilded Age. That's when things were a lot worse, with far more inequality, than in the 1920s--by which time a lot of people were beginning to prosper At least until 1929 blew them away.
DeleteMaybe we won't see actual enslavement again, but there will be some form of servitude. The alarm will go off, and folks will groan and say: "Serf's up!".
Can't remember where I saw this, though it was only a couple days ago. Poorly paraphrasing somebody on Twitter or somewhere:
Delete"Rich Republicans like to think that we're going back to the good old days of the 1890s. They're gonna be surprised when they find out we're actually headed back to the what the 1790s were like in France."
Don’t Chicago cabs run their meters anymore? The last few times I have taken a cab at Union Station I got the flat rate nonsense.
ReplyDeleteThis all reminds me of a funny cab scene from a Clint Eastwood movie called Coogan’s Bluff, in which Clint portrays a cowboy hat wearing sheriff’s deputy from Arizona transplanted to the Big Apple.
ReplyDeleteCabbie: “That’ll be $2.95, including luggage”
Clint: “It’s just a briefcase.”
Cabbie: “It counts as luggage”
Clint: “Tell me, how many stores are there in this town named Bloomingdale’s?”
Cabbie: “Just one.”
Clint: “Well we drove past it twice.”
Cabbie: “Uh well, that’s still $2.95 including luggage.”
Clint: “Well here’s three dollars, including tip.”
I don’t live in the city and I am unfamiliar with taxi rates so I would be a rube who got the flat rate. I would be ok with that. $15 for a short trip sounds reasonable and I wouldn’t mind paying a few extra bucks to not be at the mercy of a spinning meter that I have no idea to where it’s going to end up at.
ReplyDeleteI have driven Uber as a side gig for several years. Usually on weekend mornings for beer and golf money. That’s about all it’s good for. Some of the people who try to do it as a full time job resort to some shady practices. In many markets Uber takes as much as 80 percent of the fare. The driver will offer to cancel the trip on the app and do a cash ride at a discount. Dont agree to this. You will be riding with a driver who has no insurance coverage. No uber insurance and their personal insurance will deny the claim when they find out it was an off app Uber ride.
Cabs were some weird economy in Chicago. The worthless medallions and the banks that financed them. Once Uber came in it crashed that market. I remember getting hustled when I wanted to use a credit card. Cabbies played dumb or the device was in the trunk. It was amusing theater.
ReplyDelete