Famous Fat Dave: The Hungry Cabbie

The Bronx can be a scary place.  I have to admit that, even after more than four years of driving a cab, I don’t really know my way around it.  Hunt’s Point, the desolate peninsula bulging out of the borough east of the Bruckner Expressway, might be the scariest part of the Bronx.  Warehouses and auto glass stores seem to be all that there is along the neigborhood’s two wide avenues.  Countless eighteen-wheelers rumble up and down the streets day and night, outnumbered only in the wee hours by the chunky, sassy hookers that made Hunt’s Point Avenue famous as “Ho Avenue.” 

Last night, sometime during the smallest of those wee hours, I picked up a fare in Harlem who was on his way to his job as a truck driver for the Hunt’s Point Terminal Market.  He was late, in such a hurry that he was willing to take a cab to work, something he told me he very rarely does.  But he still had time for breakfast.  At the end of Hunt’s Point Avenue, just before the left turn for the Terminal Market, my fare asked me to wait and jumped out of the cab for a meatball hero and a side of broccoli rabe. 

It’s that kind of blue collar breakfast that keeps the proletariat down, but for me, it was dinner time.  With a knowing look in his eye as he devoured his hero, he told me to go back and get anything with broccoli rabe.  I trusted him not just because he worked in the area, but he had the kind of thick Italian accent you get when you are born in Napoli, not New York.  With time to kill, I pulled up amongst the ample parking and walked into Fratelli Pizza Cafe.  A couple cold pizzas sat on the counter, so I asked Joe, the counterman, what to order with broccoli rabe.