Overview

"""I was a young woman, 20-something, and new to New York City, a small town girl from Ohio, living in a two-room apartment on the Lower East Side (the rent was $100 a month) and attending Brooklyn College, which was tuition free in those days. A classmate always had money in his pocket because he was driving a yellow taxi cab. A lot of college guys were driving cabs in those days, but very few women. He persuaded me to try it. This was in 1971. At the same time, my best friend from Brooklyn College had moved to Missoula, Montana (she wanted to leave her childhood home, as I had done). During my cab driving days, I wrote her long letters on my IBM selectric typewriter describing my adventures. Turns out she saved my letters! Many years later, she visited me in New York and presented me with the letters. By then I was teaching at The City College of New York, having earned an M.Ed. from Baruch College and an M.F.A. in poetry from City. After retirement, I pulled out those letters and confronted my young self-and New York City in the early 1970s. ""Cabbie"" tells the story of those days, and how I became more savvy about making money driving a cab, about dealing with difficult customers, my boss (the dispatcher), and unwanted, but sometimes tempting, male suitors, and about planning for a future."" N.G. Haiduck"

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Reviews

"""N. G. Haiduck's collection of stories, Cabbie, is like riding shotgun in a yellow cab up and down New York City streets, in the 1970s. Our gutsy driver introduces herself by saying, 'I'm a big hit at the garage. It's not just that I'm a woman, but that I'm so little.' Haiduck depicts both the supportive and the frustrating aspects of driving a cab in the city. The other cabbies help out. When the car seat doesn't pull up: 'Hey, Izzy, give the girl another car; her feet don't reach the pedals and the seat won't pull up.' Jake takes her under his wing and shows her where and at what times to pick up fares. Police officers help too: 'Today, I got stuck behind another truck. A policeman made the truck pull over. Let the young lady make some money.' But there are those gas fumes on the day shift, drunks thrown in the back seat on the night shift. The week she got a second parking ticket, she says: 'I am pleading guilty with an explanation since I absolutely HAD to stop and take a piss. I just could not wait one second longer, not one more second.' When she catches her boss Sammy stealing from her, she gets even, without saying a word. Haiduck's writing is hilarious and heartbreaking. The quick city-like pacing of her writing makes this book impossible to put down. In the 1970s, Shirley Chisholm's run for President inspired many women, including Haiduck, so Cabbie closes with her succeeding in a male dominated workplace-and making plans for the future. 'A woman can be anything. I can be anything, Just wait.'""-Melinda Thomsen, author of Armature"

Author Information

N.G. Haiduck is the recipient of the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing from The City College of New York, the BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and the Janice Farrell Poetry Prize from the National League of American Pen Women. She was a finalist for the Ed and Fay Phillips Prize in Poetry, Hannah Kahn Poetry Foundation. Publications include Aeolian Harp Anthology, BigCityLit, Flying South, Hanging Loose, Interpoezia Intercultural Magazine, Main Street Rag, The Naugatuck Literary Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, and The Prairie Home Companion. She is married to clarinetist Neal Haiduck. They live in Burlington, Vermont.

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