Famous Fat Dave: The Hungry Cabbie

If you take cabs, I’m sure this has happened to you at least a couple of times.  Your cabbie gets you where you are going, but the conversation is still going somewhere.  So you idle at the curb, maybe talking a little faster, maybe even passing the money up front, but you don’t make a move for the door handle.

That has happened to me a few times as the customer, and many times, from the other point of view, as the cabbie.  The other day, in South Williamsburg, I idled in front of a brownstone on Wythe Street for a good fifteen minutes while my fare poured her heart out.  She had been living a lie.

I had first spotted her not too far away in North Williamsburg staggering out of a bar on Union Street and Richardson.  I didn’t expect much from her.  She looked like every other girl in Williamsburg right down to the mullet, the Duran Duran tee shirt she had obviously not bought before Simon got fat, the torn leg warmers, the oversized pink plastic belt, and the can of PBR in her hand.  She was a classic hipster chick.

(The Williamsburg Bridge from the hipster side)

But she clearly had to get something off her chest.  She danced around it for a while, and I wasn’t in the mood to fish for it.  So after the bit of back and forth during which she repeatedly hinted at some secret dominating her life, we fell silent.  I assumed it was the same old story I’d heard a million times from girls like that:  she’d gotten hooked on oxycontin and couldn’t kick so it was ruining the one good relationship she’d ever been in OR she had slept with her gay friend’s boyfriend who actually isn’t gay and neither of them know how to tell the real gay one.  I hear stuff like that all the time, so I wasn’t worried when she clammed up.  But I could tell she was bursting at the seams.

“I’M A REPUBLICAN!!!” she blurted out.  “I’m from Utah.  I’m from Utah, and we’re all Republicans.  ALL OF US.  I mean . . . I love being Republican.  I love George W. Bush.”  She was talking very fast now.  “I hate Ralf Nader, I hate the Democrats . . . I even hate other Republicans who don’t stand behind Bush.  I’m a Republican. . . a Republican.”  We were at a light, and I had been looking at her in my rearview.  As I turned my gaze back to the street in front of me, I noticed in the mirror that my mouth had been hanging open.  The light had been green for some time.

Usually, I’ve got something to tell people.  Something to at least start to put things in perspective.  Maybe even something to make people feel a little better.  But I was speechless.  I actually considered that she might be on some crazy drug, and I could be in physical danger. 

She kept talking as we crossed into the south side of Williamsburg.  I managed to ask, “Do your friends know?”  This only served to agitate her to the point where I could barely understand her.  And, no, her friends did not know.

She’d voted for Bush twice.  She’d actually worked for the Bush campaign in 2000 and, like Alex P. Keaton, worshipped Richard Nixon.  Her hobby was collecting Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich memorabilia.  She was against abortion, against gay marriage, against immigration, against Arabs in general.  Yet she was living in possibly the most liberal neighborhood on the planet. 

As we sat in front of her building with the meter running, she began acting more and more like she was on the couch in her therapist’s office.  She was on the verge of tears now.  All I could say was, “Well . . . there’s always something,” quoting my hero Tepper from Calvin Trillin’s Tepper Isn’t Going Out.  It seemed to work though.  She calmed down and worked her problems down to their core:  “Why should I be afraid of becoming an outcast just because I support our president?  Why should I live in fear of letting all these liberal freaks around here ‘find me out’ for the Republican I am?”

She seemed empowered.  Her facial expression relaxed, and she grabbed her purse to pay me.  Even though the meter had been on, I still could have made way more money out there picking up and dropping off fares in the time I sat in front of her house.  I expected a nice tip.  I hadn’t considered that, as a Republican, she did not identify with the working man one bit.  She gave the change plus a dollar.

Now I was the one who felt deflated.  I asked her, “Is there any place in Williamsburg you go to get away from the other hipsters, I mean the real ones.”  I didn’t care that I might have sounded offensive.

“Marlow and Sons is only a couple blocks away.  I love their oysters.”  She said it reminded her of her drunk mother’s summer house on Puget Sound.  If I wasn’t going to get a monetary tip out of her, at least I got a tip on the food in the neighborhood.

I returned to Marlow and Sons today with a couple of my hipster friends.  We had a feast.  The oysters, some from Puget Sound, some from Blue Point Long Island, were delightfully briny.  The west coasters were huge.  (I visited the Hudson River Project and read that oysters from what is now New York Harbor used to grow to be gigantic, and the people of the Manhattan tribe would filet them and roast them like steak.  So I should say these oysters were huge by today’s standards.  They definitely required more chewing than the oysters I’m used to.)

(Left: the Puget Sound monsters, Right: the local Blue Point)

We also devoured a handsome plate of assorted meats (soppressata, coppa, saucisson, chorizo, and prosciutto), assorted cheeses (pleasant ridge reserve, majic mountain, taylor farms gouda, sprout creek, and the stinkiest hooligan I’ve ever smelled), and pate with cornichons.  It all went together so well. 

I was in heaven.  Basic foods served without garnish or overpreparation.  That’s good eating.  And, tonight at least, aside from my friends, there wasn’t a hipster in sight.

Marlow and Sons, Broadway and Berry St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Read an article I wrote about a floating oyster bar off Cape Cod’s elbow in the “Published Food Writing” section of the Famous Fat Dave’s Five Borough Eating Tour website.