Friday June 04, 2004

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

maritime.jpgDear Cabbies En Route to the Maritime,

It’s Friday, and I know you are excited. I am excited, too. You are no doubt looking forward to picking up fares late into the evening — addled fares with substance abuse problems and some remaining stitch of discretionary income — some of whom might ask you to take them to the Maritime Hotel, the enormous three-sided pleasure palace on 9th Avenue, right next to my home. That is all great. Everybody wins.

However, I am afraid you might also be looking forward to your other favorite weekend activity, which is why I am writing to you today. True, the traffic sometimes gets a little congested on 17th Street as your taxi-driving brethren wait for loud-talking account executives to coax orange, nasally bobbleheads off their cellphones and into the backseat, or as they stop to eject vomiting schoolchildren, in from Bayside and Bayonne, from their cabs. But this is no reason to lay on your horn for hours at a time, creating the impression inside my first floor studio apartment that my head is stuck up somewhere under the hood of your Crown Victoria, wedged between the carburetor and the horn. So, starting tonight, I would like to invite you to please shut the fuck up.

Before the Maritime Hotel opened, life over here on West 17th Street was idyllic. It was like Walden or Big Sur or Park Slope — a blissful setting for quiet contemplation and, yes, even sleep. I know you are not entirely to blame — believe me, if one more bond-trading Notre Dame alum pisses on my air conditioner, the management at the Maritime will be receiving a strongly worded letter — but I know you can help with the honking. Because that is you honking, right? With the heel of your hand and your elbow — honking as though you have fainted across the steering wheel? Honking like this should be reserved for alerting people to mudslides or to sheets of fireballs falling from the sky.

If you do not accept my invitation to shut the fuck up, I guess I have a couple of options:

  • I might join the neighborhood movement that is already underway to call 311 testily and incessantly, registering complaints about your behavior.
  • I could stay up one night and record each and every one of your medallion numbers, then share these with Mayor Bloomberg the next time I see him at my monthly book group. (We’re just now getting around to The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, if you can believe that.) The man killed smoking. Honking should be easy.
  • Or I might build a device that will emit a powerful electromagnetic pulse — like that associated with nuclear winter — that will disable your Crown Vic’s electrical system, its horn and hopefully that cellphone you are talking on all the time to God knows who.

Naturally, I hope these measures will not be necessary.

Sincerely,
Jim Hanas

Posted by jim at 08:15 AM ||

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