My cab driver this morning was another Italian-American guy.  This one's name was Joe.  He was about sixty-five.  His face, and particularly his nose, implied a life of heavy drinking.  He seemed like a sad man, in a tears-of-a-semi-happy-clown way.  He told me that he'd lived in New York all his life and never thought he'd retire, but that he was going to sell his medallion in a few months and move to Knoxville, which is where his daughter lives.  I asked him if he minded telling me how much he'd be able to sell his medallion for (a medallion is what you need to operate a car as a yellow taxicab in New York: the driver needs a hack license, and the car needs a medallion).  He said that he'd paid $60,000 for his in the 1970s and would sell it for about $600,000 if he were to sell it today, which sounds about right based on what I've read about the cost of medallions.  They're sold through brokers on some sort of medallion exchange, and people take out mortgages to pay for them.

He said that he'd grown up on the Lower East Side, on Orchard Street.  He said that he'd belonged to a gang back then.  What they'd usually do, he said, was put on their gang clothes and go up to Hell's Kitchen and beat up Irish guys.  "That's how it was then," he said, laughing, his laugh giving me the sense that he didn't have a problem with Irish-Americans anymore.  "That's how it was."

He talked about what it was like driving a cab here during the 1980s.  "Once a rock band got in my cab, and they couldn't pay the full fare, so they paid me in marijuana.  That's how it used to be!"  I told him that my dad, a retired lawyer in Blue Hill, Maine, was paid in scallops once.  "There you go!  People used to do that.  When I was growing up on Orchard Street, my mother used to cook Italian food for the Jews and they'd wash our linens for us.  That's how it used to be."

In Chinatown, he told me that his father used to say that the food down in Chinatown was pretty good, but that "you didn't see any cats or dogs in the alleys!", and then explained the joke, which didn't really need explaining, but I didn't mind.

I asked him how he liked the Lower East Side now.  It doesn't bother me that the Lower East Side has been gentrified, but I don't know how I'd feel about it if I'd grown up there when it was a very different place.

"It's alright," he said.  "I drop kids off there sometimes.  I see things and I remember things.  Oh!"  We were stopped at a light on Centre Street where it runs into Kenmare Street in what is now called SoHo, not too far from the Lower East Side.  He was pointing at the far right-hand corner of the intersection and said that that's where he used to go with his father on Thanksgiving morning to buy a turkey.  There'd be live turkeys there on the corner, and you'd choose one and they'd kill it for you, right there on the street.  "Or chicken," he said, when they couldn't afford a turkey at Thanksgiving.

A beautiful black woman tried to flag him down, not realizing that he wasn't for hire because he already had a passenger.  "That I'll miss: beautiful women waving at me in my cab!  Smiling...  You don't think about that, passengers don't, but I'm inside, I see things from in here, beautiful women waving at me.  That I'll miss," and he laughed.

"All this New York," he said.  "I need to take it all down to Tennessee with me, down to Knoxville.  All these stories.  I think they'd like them down there.  I have to do that."