Tip for the Death-Defying
Why go to Coney Island when you can purchase a heart attack, right here in the heart of the city?
Fifty-Seventh Street and Fifth and seven avenues to go, and no cab will pull over for me. It might be the all black attire, topped off with a new hoodie, or, possibly that I was screaming the phrase “Come ON!” at each yellow vehicle in a way that Courtney Love might find slightly ill-mannered, but for some reason or another, unattended cab after unattended cab just whizzed past me. It looked like a couple of them tried to run over my foot on the way. And not even my left foot. They went for the good foot. The one I call Alawishes. Then…
“Where you going, man?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Come on, where you going.”
“It’s, like, Twelfth Avenue.”
“I can get you there.”
“I’m in a bit of a hurry, man, and I don’t want you to fucking kill yourself.”
“Tell you what. I’ll get you there, five minutes. All you owe me. Five dollars. How’s that?”
So I climbed in the rickshaw.
I usually regard these as a low level handsome cab. You still have a live animal pulling you around the city, except in a rickshaw you’re less likely to forgive the creature dragging you along if he lets fly a gastronomical gastrointestinal gaffe. Granted, in these vehicles you can still absorb the atmosphere of New York City, but, of course, the atmosphere of New York City has been recently discovered to cause rickets, sterility, and the finger.
Still, a ride is a ride, and the determined look on the peddler
Awesome story, John. Who knew those rickshaw’s could go that fast?!?!
Rickshaw people are CRAZY! But so awesome.
My favorite rickshaw metaphor is in a New Yorker talk piece:
Riding in a bicycle taxi, one feels nostalgia for the bicycle messenger of the Reagan era. The bicycle messenger, with his whistle and his disdain, was the embodiment of underclass resentment and underclass style, and of a booming economy, which demanded that documents be here now. As oblivious of stoplights as he was of pedestrians, he owned the streets. Everyone yielded to him, or learned to. Are the pedicab drivers of today happy? Well, they are on their way somewhere. And they will tell you flatly that it is the best job they can find. The pedicab may merely suggest rather than entirely embody the new America of puller and pulled, but it is a sharp symbol of a new reality. It even evokes new metaphors. For instance, the thing about George W. Bush is not that he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. It is that he has been in a bicycle taxi all his life but has not yet bothered to notice that someone else is pedalling.