Lady, You Can Drive My Car

Taxicab Confessions From Providence's Female Cabdrivers

BY ALISON NGUYEN

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Illustration by Jim Jarmusch
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As Janice, a driver for Walsh Cab, made a right onto Angell Street, I asked her how she got into the cab business. She looked at me in the rear-view mirror with unusually large blue eyes semi-covered by thin red bangs and smiled, "My friend, Paula, said 'Hey let's go drive cabs'." She shrugged and paused, "And so we did."

There are approximately 1,000 licensed cabdrivers in the state of Rhode Island and of those, according to the Division of Public Utilities, 10 percent are women. While there is constant turnover in the cab-driving industry and numbers are, at their very best, approximations, Janice is among what cab companies estimate to be the15 female cabbies that maneuver through the winding streets of Providence, bringing cell-phone clad businesspeople to the financial district, tourists to the busy Italian eateries on Federal Hill, and sweatshirted college students to and from the train station and bars.

Janice described herself as a "hermit." She lives in the 1.2-mile-wide town of Central Falls, RI, alone, above her "kid-sister" and nieces and nephews. After her shift, she was on her way to pick a birthday present for one of her nephews at the Providence Place Mall. "I'm thinking like a track for little cars or something," Janice said. "He has so many of those little cars that he could fill up an entire cab."

In the background, the staccato static of her dispatcher's voice surfaced in and out of the radio. I could catch phrases of a joke he was telling to another cabbie. "It's a hard job," Janice told me. "You're stuck in your cab for 12 hours listening for your little bell."

Who Gets To Be The Star?

Analogous to male nurses, female construction workers, and dude airplane stewards, the role of a woman cabdriver breaks cultural norms. There is an inevitable—albeit usually benign—"huh?" moment when a passenger eases into the backseat of a cab driven by a woman.

From the early formation of American automobile culture, the automobile industry has fashioned its self-image—through the evolving and overlapping narratives of advertisements, social conventions, movies, car races, and road trips—to be one of rugged masculinity. The sport of driving is, in its most basic element, a venue for independence and exploration and, hand-in-hand with that, a supposed venue for the expression of manliness.

Women, from the outset of the industry, were and are still used in automobile advertisements as sex objects that are drawn to the car or are used almost as extensions of the car—the attractive accessory in the passenger seat. At the end of the game show, when the lucky, eagerly grinning winner is shown his prize, the red curtain unfolds and the iconic image is the convertible complemented by the bikini-clad beauty.

Likewise, the job of taxi driving is deeply linked to masculinity and independence. Despite the rise in women cabdrivers during and after World War II, the cab driving industry is still a male-dominated culture, largely due to timeless safety issues, but also, to a certain extent, due to societal constraints.

The six or seven women cabdrivers that I spoke to said that they, as females, are often well-received by most passengers, but only as a sort of novelty. Flash back to 1907, when women first started driving cabs in Paris, and the New York Times featured a headline which read, "Women Cabbies A Big Hit: So Popular In Paris That Cabmen Masquerade As Women." The article read, "The Parisians love nothing so much as an amusing innovation"—the "amusing innovation" being, of course, women cabdrivers motoring about the streets. The headline of the article was no gross exaggeration. The Times noted that jokes in newspapers about women cabdrivers "attracted the sympathy of the public, and the 'cochéres' were never without a fare and their tips were both numerous and generous"—so much so that male cabdrivers began shaving off their moustaches, even dressing like women in a half-farcical, half-serious effort to increase profits. Female cabbies were part of a spectacle, a trend, coming into vogue like a certain parasol style.

Working For Peanuts Is All Very Fine

Almost 100 years later, women are still ubiquitously the minority in the taxicab profession.

"Most people are excited that they have a woman cabdriver," Marilyn, a cabdriver for Corporate Taxi, explained while she drove me down George Street to East Side Marketplace.

Marilyn came into the supermarket with me, and as we ate pizza that we won from a giveaway wheel, I asked her what her favorite job to do in Providence is.

She answered immediately, "Foxy Ladies," referring to the strip joint in downtown Providence. The store manager laughed, overhearing our conversation. She explained that the owner of the strip club gives the women cabdrivers $10 for every guy that she brings there. Much like concierges of hotels who are paid by certain restaurants to drop their name when making recommendations, Marilyn gets paid by the strip club to bring potentially bored, party-going men there.

Her least favorite job: Saturdays, Waterfire. Enough said.

Marilyn spoke about the culture of cabdrivers, the idle waiting and chatting that occurs as they wait for fares down at Amtrak and Kennedy Plaza. A certain folklore evolves as stories reach the extremities of the city via radios and cabstand conversation. She referred to some of the other taxi drivers as "crazy," most notably two women drivers from Walsh Cab that are rumored to make out in the front seat of the taxi down in front of Amtrak.

When I asked her if she feels that she is at all treated differently as a woman cabdriver, she at first said no, paused, and said that often times dispatchers will give "the good jobs"—such as runs to the Providence Airport—"to the guys." As we drove down George Street she alluded to the strange power relationship that exists between driver and dispatchers. "There's a problem with dispatchers acting like they're better," Marilyn said. An East Side Taxi driver, Dorothy, noted that she didn't feel that the dispatchers favor men or women—"they treat everyone like shit."

While there is little direct evidence of conflict between the sexes in the cab driving industry, there is strong competition between cabbies. The "every man for himself" side of the business can often result in a sort of circularity: Dispatchers attempting to intimidate cabdrivers and cabdrivers attempting to intimidate other cabdrivers. "The rule was up until about 10 years ago that no women cabdrivers could be here after dark," said Dick Sanford, a cabdriver for Walsh Cab who has been in and out of the business for thirty-five years, dividing his time between cab driving and painting houses. "But they have them working nights here for some reason—because of women's liberation, I guess. They shouldn't even be here. It's a dangerous job."

In Providence, as opposed to cities like New York or Boston, cages that separate the cabdriver from the passenger are not required in cabs. Patty Nichols, a mounted patrol officer for the Providence Police Department, said that the issue of safety transcends gender in cab driving—it's a dangerous job, statistically more hazardous than that of a police officer, and all people are exposed to the same risks.

Despite the occasional catastrophe, Dorothy, the East Side Taxi cabdriver, said that she likes her job much more than her previous jobs as a security guard and a Wal-Mart cashier. She has much more freedom as a cabbie. To pass the time waiting, she played her music low and flipped through an old book that featured pictures of Providence downcity in the 70s, pointing out different buildings to me.

The Warwick resident got started in the business several years ago; she has been driving at night for a year and a half. Though she does not feel that she is placing herself in a dangerous position on a daily basis, she remembers being only a few car lengths away when there was a shooting on Washington Place last year.

Dorothy explained that surviving as a cabbie involves avoiding or refusing certain fares in order to protect yourself. Even still, sketchiness has no limits. Often times, trouble arises when she is unaware that a passenger is going somewhere to take part in a drug deal and she ends up driving them. "I don't care for doing drug runs. If I don't know it, I end up doing it," Dorothy said.

Maybe I'll Love You

Outside of the Amtrak station on Exchange Street, I asked Martino, the owner and driver of an independent cab service called Gemini Taxi, about direct danger to women cab drivers on the job. He said, "Direct danger? You haven't met enough female cabdrivers to know—there would probably be nothing like a sexual assault or a rape or anything because most of the female cabdrivers out here belong in a leper colony. You have to see them to understand it; it's absolutely hideous, these people don't take care of themselves."

Martino was caught in mid-afternoon limbo between fares as he sat in his cab and stared out the window through his aviator sunglasses. He wore a T-Shirt that read 'Try and cheer me up, I dare you!' I did not, in fact, make any attempt to cheer him up. "The taxi business is the definition of a prison mentality," he said. "Most people that come into the taxi business—after a while, maybe after a few weeks or a month.they say, "I don't need this, I don't need this." The translation is, it's a prison mentality; "I'm innocent, I don't belong here." After a couple months they all start talking about how they can do what they want."

"After about six months every one of them says I'm getting out of the business soon, I'm going to go sell poker chips in Vegas, water in the Pacific, straw hats in Alaska.Most cab drivers are what I call end-of-the-roaders."

Down at cabstands at Amtrak, Kennedy Plaza, and the Westin, there is a daily tableau of cab drivers standing outside their cabs smoking, talking, and gesturing or waiting languidly inside their cab, one arm hanging out the window in the sun. Most cabbies believe that there is a deep tedium inherent to the job, but that there is also a seductive, addicting side. In and out of conversation, cab drivers make plans to pull themselves away from cab driving, but find it impossible to actually leave. As Janice, the Walsh cabdriver said, "I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up."

After she pulled up on Thayer Street to drop me off at my dorm, she turned around in the driver's seat and turned off the meter. We talked for a while as Brown students crossed the street and waved to each other outside. Janice fixed her eyes steadily on me as she told me about her plans for buying a Winnebago and traveling around the country.

She repeatedly emphasized the importance of seeing the world as a means of discovery. Even though her home, Central Falls, where she has lived all her life, is a "little one-mile town", Janice said it was only until she recently took a wrong turn that she noticed a candy store that had been there for years. "Say you never went around that block, then you would have never seen that candy store."

Alison Nguyen B'08 shared a fare with Judith Butler.

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