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They are prejudiced, the cabbies in town. Because the sun has risen every morning in memory, they expect it to dawn during this shift too, and to dawn again one minute earlier each day until the solstice, then later again each morning like the year before. They predict low wages. They anticipate dents and rattles and non-lethal automotive malfunctions and for their tips to be insufficient to ditch the business altogether to the younger hacks and spend their days fishing for trophy. And they don’t take dark-skinned fares uptown. They explain it this way:

Seven times I’ve seen a knife in this cab and two guns. Usually I just see it; it’s shown to me, or it’s deployed by someone to threaten someone else. But twice it’s used to injure or persuade me physically. Once I’m stabbed. Once a shot is fired through the windshield. Of the nine times, each time I’m the only native Caucasian in the car. So I have a policy. No dark fares after sundown, none uptown any time of day. It’s common sense. You judge from what you’ve seen, you act on what you know, you live to serve your sentence.

To confound this logic, a group of us, a very small but steadfast group, have been systematically stabbing cabbies. We dress well, carry umbrellas, and stand outside expensive hotels with a finger in the air. We kiss our dates goodbye and get inside. We introduce ourselves invariably as Mr. White, which most of them later recall. We entertain our driver with the same rap every time. We’ve been injured, we say, sometimes grievously, in multiple, near-fatal automobile accidents, but we can’t remember what color the cars were. Then we cut them, carefully, therapeutically, to alter the odds the only way we know how.

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