A victim of overly-ambitious scheduling, I dashed out of class a few weeks ago, late for a concert. I hailed a cab on 6th Avenue and 12th Street, and proceeded north ten blocks, where we were halted by a stoplight. A 50-something Asian woman approached the passenger window, and the cab driver lowered it. The woman shouted something unintelligible and motioned with her hands as if she were expecting something. I thought nothing of it, until my driver responded.

“No! I know you! You do this to me before! Remember me?!”, he shouted in an accent I can only describe as "Island", adding, “Get the fuck out of here!”

“Go to the curb, go to the curb,” she muttered, retreating.

The light changed and we lurched onward, our quiet ride violated by the episode seconds before.

“She do this to me before! Same woman!” He looked out the window to check the street. 22nd. “It was the same street! She ask me to take her to West 4th, and she get out of the cab, and she start PRAYING! ‘Oh god oh god help me!’, she say. She kneel in the street! She pay me nothing!”

“How often does that happen, someone stiffing you like that?”, I asked. “Like, once a day? A few times a week?”

“Oh, no, maybe a few times a year,” he said. “Another time! Another time I have a woman try to give me,” he turned around and stuck his hand towards me, indicating he was holding something very small. “She give me a little thing, a little, she say, DIAMOND, and I say, ‘I cannot take THIS! I need seven dollars!’. And she say, ‘But this is worth MORE than seven dollars!’. And I say, ‘I don’t CARE, you pay me seven dollars!’”

“Did you get the money?”

“No, I did not get the money! They never give the money!”

As we approached Madison Square Garden, he spoke again. “You know who it always is? It’s always the women. The women who – not nice women like you,” he looked over his shoulder at me. “The women who don’t have the boyfriend. They don’t have the sex anymore. I can see it in their eyes. Always these women!”

I wondered where he got off assuming I had the boyfriend. I also wondered where he got off thinking that being single could make you crazy (or cheap). But by sheer statistics, I figured he could be right. He had seen it and I hadn’t – he apparently knew the type. The vision of undersexed women stiffing cabdrivers all over town amused and depressed me at the same time.

We pulled in front of the ballroom, and the fare was five and a teeny. I gave him seven, not to compensate for the fares lost, but to give a little extra tip for the story. Despite the fact that I missed the opening act, my night was off to an entertaining start.