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Blind Drivers !!

Can a blind men drive a New York City taxi? I'm asking questions here, but not funny like: "Should a blind man be a base ball umpire?"

This is serious. First understand that blindness is defined as the condition in which visual acuity is less than 20/400, and not correctable with lenses.

Before talking about driving a New York City Medallion Taxi as a blind person, sharing a subjective familiarity with the innuendoes of the state of being blind is in order.

Someone with less than 20/400 sees something 20 feet away the same way a person with normal vision would perceive the same object at 400ft.

This working, legal definition does establish criteria. At the West Haven Blind Rehabilitation Center when I was there, some patients were having trouble bringing a match to the tip of their unlit cigarette.

Others were able to show off, using magnifiers or color shape and size context clues in order to discern the difference in the candy machine between a Clark Bar and a pack of peanut butter and cheese crackers.

All of us there fit the definition of blindness. A person may easily fall below the legal standard for blindness and still be quite mobile, without the use of a cane or a seeing eye dog.

Still, walking down a city street for me is very difficult because I can not pick up on all the signals we unconsciously send each other as we go about our lives.

No one is in danger of having me stumble into them, but that critical social interaction transmitted via body language is muted to the point of not being there at all.

You might see me waving to a neighbor when his or her back is turned, for example.

Things like: "I'm staying on the right, you pass on the left," or, "I think I know you," or "you look scary," are all signals I can not transmit or receive with accuracy.

Try this: Walk along a street until you are about to pass a stranger. Then keep walking, but do not give in to the impulse to look down as you are about to physically walk by each other.

Odds are high your stranger will halt.

You may have to explain or make an excuse. It's a variation of the "Are you talking to (looking at) me?"

At the West Haven Blind Rehabilitation Center, I learned how to use and was issued the red tipped cane. The times I tried it on the streets gave me wonderful clearance and pass, but it was more than I needed. It is a beautiful cane, custom made for one who is 6'4". The top of the cane comes to just below my clavicle.

The importance of body language, particularly those messages transmitted via eye contact, can not be over emphasized.

Sunglasses do more for me than enhance contrast ... by hiding my own eyes, I level the playing field. The uncertainty when passing becomes mutual and therefore acceptable.

Long ago, to the few astonished friends who knew I was blind, and driving a cab I would say, "You don't have to read a license plate to avoid hitting the car."

I could certainly see objects as large as a car, and given the movement and physical context, I'd know a car from say ... a tree.

Tunnel vision, the absence of peripheral vision, is much harder to deal with than the circumstances of yours truly. I had excellent peripheral vision. It is what I look at directly that seems to disappear.

Once at about 3 AM on the Major Deegan, just where it curves around Yankee Stadium, I thought I saw a brick wall in the middle of the road in front of me.

The highway was mostly empty, so I slowed and crept up to the perceived obstacle. Of course there was no such obstruction, but that is how it was: More often I'd see things that were not there as opposed to missing things that were truly present.

It's easy. There are no trees on the road in the middle of New York City. The road itself was clear enough too. In Manhattan, where I was born, the layout is all logical.

Even numbered cross streets that weren't the big two way thoroughfares, like 57th, 14th, and 23rd, went east.

Odd numbers went west. I grew up in Queens and knew my way around that borough very well. For Brooklyn and the Bronx, I'd ask "What's the best way to get there?" until I got the hang of each borough.

In Queens, it is Queens Blvd. In the Bronx, it is the Grand Concourse. Manhattan? Broadway. If you were in Brooklyn, the big street to relate everything else to was Flatbush Avenue to Grand Army Plaza, and then, Eastern Parkway.

If you could relate your position to the appropriate major artery, you had an important tool. In those days, there was no GPS!

Driving a New York City Medallion cab for a large garage also meant my fares' addresses were not called into me by radio. I picked up in the street. I wrote on my trip card using a common magnifier.

Having been born and raised in New York, I knew my way around! Additionally, back then, although I was legally blind, I could see better than I do now ... by far. Over the years, your correspondent's eye sight has been declining in spurts. In the late sixties my vision fell below the legal minimum blindness threshold. At that time I could get around and even read a little ... with magnifiers.

Today it is daunting just to walk down an unfamiliar hallway. Tomorrow I'll be in a place where a particular room number is required. I know I'm going to need help.

I haven't been able to drive a cab since the early seventies, and I was pushing it even then.

My blindness has been progressive and thankfully slow. Treatments have been sometimes extremely painful and invasive, but more importantly have had no lasting effect.

How my brain interprets the signals from these mixed up eyes is another miracle. We all agree on what is red and what is square or round ... but how? The rods and cones of our retinas do not themselves perceive what is before us. The images are assembled in our brains.

Most of the time I do not consider that I am blind. I just do the best I can. Over the course of time, physically, this has meant progressively less and less.

At one time, like Ray Charles, I even had a motorcycle, and I rode it for a while. On a bike though, even a small deviation can put your face on the pavement without the protection from a cockpit like when you ride a car. For me, perceived deviation is the rule rather than the exception.

I had to give up the bike just as I gave up the cab at night. I don't have to be told or killed! I can see where there is a need not to do something I can not handle. I attribute this discretion facility to the West Haven Blind Rehabilitation Center.

At times, like the adventure I see for myself in foreign halls tomorrow, it helps to look more blind than I do. Sometimes, I ask strangers for help in finding a location right behind me.

"Here!" they say. And they must sometimes wonder about the condition of an apparently unimpaired person, standing on a street clearly labeled in thousands of ways, asking for directions to that self same street.

"Almost bit me," I reply. Then the red tipped cane would obviously facilitate, but as earlier indicated generally, I don't need the cane ... I'm highly mobile, even if I don't always perceive the environment via "normal" means.

To me, the Westhaven legacy is"You can do whatever you want to do." This is apparently true, but it helps to have been doing whatever it is before the onset of your blindness.

It was a panic to see that same veteran who'd struggled with matches and cigarettes when they took us bowling. There was a special rail set along the side which we could use to align ourselves with the alley.

Barnes, his name was. He was tall, thin, and he kept his misery to himself. There were exceptions. The time with the cigarette. It was at a table in the chow hall. We'd finished eating and we sat around, talking and smoking. Barnes was up at the head of the table, near the center aisle. His mobility came strictly through his mind and soul. Plenty of counting, remembering and metering. It was said he had lightness perception. Everything there about blindness was expressed positively.

To stupidly fumble and bumble was labeled "UN-insightful" by our instructors. To be called such, by a sighted coach was quite the mash. Insight is, after all, one of the few strong suits a blind person can muster.

Now, in the middle of things, Barnes sought to light a cigarette. Like us.

One by one we fell silent and watched. By touch, he got the match lit. This was good. We all watched now, it seemed even the clattering in the kitchen subsided for this moment. The flame went up ... the running water they kept for rinsing by the clipper shut down.

Higher; higher the match slowly moved. There was a precision to it. Barnes must have been counting. Up slowly went the light. When the match passed the cigarette hapless, he began to bring it back down. It didn't seem right to try to help.

In that atmosphere, we were encouraged to do for ourselves. Had he succeeded in getting his cigarette lit, we would have gone back to talking.

As it was, he did not come close to success, and we went back to talking.

On the way back down, Barnes had the match wide to one side or the other. It isn't that I don't remember ... "which side" wasn't on my list of capabilities then or now. I knew Barnes missed though.

He went to strike another match and this time burned his fingers. This was the only instance I ever saw Barnes emote.

He threw the matches, pushed back from the table and stood rocking for a moment. Even in the heat of anger, he could not just run.

Everything for a blind man is based on calculating.

Learning what when and how to reach ... is one of the most difficult things to understand.

They taught us Braille, like Braille 101 ... and if there was an interest, one could take subsequent courses in that science. They used muffin tins and tennis balls to tactically impart the Braille Cell concept.

I wasn't much for Braille ... what I liked ... what I reached for ... was touch typing.

Everyone's circumstance is different and changing, but knowing what you can do and doing it sometimes means knowing what you can't do ... and faking it!

Barnes stood ... weaving and upright. He cried an inarticulate yell of frustration. Then he did turn and run from the room. His unconscious grace was startling. There was dignity in his upright, planned haste.

You would think he would collide with a chair table or some other obstacle. Like the rest of us, Barnes was more advanced than he knew. He was like a gazelle.

One image the VA has is that of a stodgy, over managed bureaucracyThe business of learning at the West Haven Blind Rehabilitation Center was a 24/7 life style operation.

Like many aspects of the Veterans Administration, the Blind Rehabilitation Program is flexible and surprisingly effective.

After Barnes left, we were quiet for a moment. Then Willy Speights, with his perpetual frozen smile, scooted over and with quick, seeing fingers, sized up the location of Barnes' abandoned tray by assessing its perimeter. His fingers moved like ant's antennae. He cocked his head and looked at his hands as if the dancing fingers were not his own, but they were talking to him. It was funny ... the different tricks we had.

Speights always looked like he was apologizing. It was in that awkward smile, and the way he tilted his head. He put Barnes' Pall Malls and matches in his shirt pocket.

Smiling vaguely in our direction, Speights patted his pocket. "I'll give these to him later," he said. His eyes rolled independently in their wide open virtually sightless sockets. Speights took Barnes' tray on top of his own and walked slowly towards the sound of the "turn in your tray" window.

At West Haven, they really had us going. On more than one occasion, they took us skiing.

On the very next day it was bowling. Barnes walked rapidly along the rail for blind people. One hand trailed the rail, the other held the ball at his side.

Near the end of the rail, he halted, and let his momentum transfer to his ball arm. The ball lifted as if it was on a huge pendulum. Barnes released at apogee; the ball's trajectory took it up and away. Barnes pivoted sideways ostensibly the better to hear. He waited. It was clear he was listening.

The first bounce came at least two full seconds later. I thought I saw the manager wince. Barnes frowned and smiled at the same time. It was a look of pure mischief.

The ball had landed in an adjacent alley. Barnes' shoulders moved as if he was laughing. Eventually the ball he'd thrown moved slowly, like a plow, through a gaggle of standing pins, several lanes to the right.

The rest of the afternoon, when it was Barnes' turn to bowl, everyone watched and cheered. It was the fact that he was "out" (certainly not his bowling skills) which led us to cheer so. Oh yes, they took us skiing, biking, even bar hopping. "Hey, I just wanted a sandwich!"

But they never did take us to the rifle range.

I knew there was something wrong with my eyes when I got discharged from the Air Force, but several doctors and specialists had examined me and there was a suggestion that I was malingering. "Your eyes are fine," they kept telling me. "We find nothing physically wrong."

My eyes were not fine, but I was no doctor, and I came to embrace the idea that since according to Air Force Doctors, there was nothing physically wrong with my eyes ... I must have been just crazy.

You know ... if my acuity was declining, and there was nothing physically wrong, the problem had to be psychosomatic. This was disturbing and scary. I did not feel crazy! Was I that far out of touch with who I was?

At Queens College, in class, I found myself sitting closer and closer to the board. In the library, even with my nose physically touching the pages I tried to read, and even with glasses, prescribed by an optometrist, I could barely manage; slowly and painfully.

Whatever problem I had was coming from my insane head, I'd concluded. When I finally stumbled into the VA regional office on 7th Avenue, I fully expected to be confined to the psyche ward, if they had one.

Instead, there I was told not only that I was physically blind, but that it was going to get worse. I was told it wouldn't be long before I could not see at all. That's how I ended up at West Haven. The VA arranged it.

To be told I was blind and it was going to get worse was a hard shock, but at the same time, it was reassuring to realize this condition was not a result of some twisted sickness I'd brought upon myself.

Driving the Taxi

Ironically, driving a cab was one of the few paying jobs I could do. Someone asked me how I'd know the different speed limits. On the highways, the speed limits were set and known. Generally, I just drove a little slower than the fastest cars around me.

Terminal Taxi was known as about the largest cab company in the city. As far as I could tell, no more than five cabs had the same company name, for tax reasons, I was told when I asked, but there was also the matter of having the bucks to take over the businesses of smaller, failed companies.

Generally, you could tell a Terminal Cab no matter what was stenciled in green on the side of the taxi. The names all had a similar ring: "Terminal," of course, but also "City," "Gotham" ... I once even saw one labeled "New."

"New" cab company. The stenciled name was always the same size and place. It was always green and somehow terse. We were not men, we were numbers!

You could drive for Terminal from any one of five garages throughout the city. I liked Terminal because there was a certain anonymity in the numbers.

Guys like me came and went ... we'd come in, turn in our license and wait around until our name was called in the shape up. Then you'd go to the dispatcher's window, get your license back with a trip card. You'd find your cab out in the lot, probably. One of many hundreds. It was not unusual therefore to ask someone "Where's 410?"

Asking the same question while tapping about with the red tipped cane would have been been more acceptable as a stunt for Candid Camera, but would certainly have precluded adventures which I and I daresay many passengers (fares) subsequently came to enjoy ... and / or endure.

Read on!

Once you found your cab, you'd be on your own. At the end of your day, from the readings on the meter, the company deducted their share: 52 or 51 percent. On a good quick night, I'd get between 20 and 30 paying fares, and I'd have about fifty to one hundred 1968 dollars to take home.

There I was: A blind man driving a taxi in New York at night ... really, I was a very good driver ... defensive by necessity and aware of my limitations. My workaround tricks were without limit, but the main thing was in knowing those limits.

As my vision continued to decline, cab driving adventures dwindled. Because my left and right eye tend to work independently, depth perception was one of the fist skills to go.

For example, when turning left across lanes of oncoming traffic, it is true that you don't have to know if what is coming is a Ford or a Chevy, but you do certainly have to be able to quickly and automatically figure out how long it will take the oncoming vehicle to reach a given position, and you have to render action timely and accordingly.

I found I could not do this. When empty, I'd cross over with a series of right turns. With fares, I'd wait, go across with the light change, either to red or green, or I'd get inside another cab ... on the down or away from traffic protected side, and go when he (or she) went.

I could have perhaps driven longer on the day line, but summer rain on muggy day in those little Dodges meant you were going to have to turn on the hot defroster. The daytime traffic was different too! Sitting in the middle of a block with your clock ticking and a fare fuming was not fun.

Better to swoop in like an eagle ... pick up a fare who was going far ... and ticking up or down the avenues, counting the blocks, or driving through the park ... easy and free.

But the vision kept getting worse. When I first got out of the service, I'd been able to fake an eye test at the motor vehicle bureau. All one had to do to pass that test was listen.

"Read the lowest line you can see," the bored clerk would intone. I couldn't even make out the big E on top, but I rationalized that driving a cab did not require seeing an E.

"ASDFG," I said.

Ka-choomp! "Step over to line six," the clerk would not even look at me as she handed over the stamped form. "Next!" She called while looking at her fingernails and then her watch.

On two occasions I was told I should not be driving a cab ... that I should be doing something else. Both instances had more to do with the blindness of the passenger, than me!

Howard Thompson, a schoolmate of mine since kindergarten once found himself in the back of a cab I was driving. We recognized each other. Howard was wearing a pin stripe suit, and he was on his way to the 169th Street subway station, on Hillside Avenue.

I picked him up where the street he lived on met Linden Blvd. ... a little north of what used to be the main entrance to the St. Albans Naval Hospital.

He told me where he wanted to go, sat back and snapped the latch on his attaché case. Then he recognized me. Howard Thompson and Charles Singletary ... They used to hang out.

Howard, Charles and I had known each other throughout school. We'd given each other respect, but it wasn't like we rode bikes together or anything.

Anyway, Howard took it upon himself to instruct me on why I shouldn't be driving a cab. He opened with "Do you actually like this?"

Some people didn't. I had a friend I talked into getting a Hack license and giving it a try, and he hated the job. "The people treat me like an elevator operator," he complained. "They just tell me where they want to go and that is it!"

Personally, I loved it. I loved the driving, and I liked the chance to observe people and things even as I was being observed. I interacted when I felt like it ... (more on that in subsequent installments) ... but when there was only the destination given ... I was happy with that.

"56th and 7th," a passenger might call out while dropping into his seat. Sounded like a mixed drink. Did I like it? Hell yes! It wasn't just the driving that made me so happy.

A big part of my joy came in the knowing that this driving was a precious thing I would not be able to go on doing indefinitely. A variation of "You never miss your water until the well runs dry."

The well spring of even normal vision was drying before and in my eyes.

I'd be on a mission. How did the fare want to go? Did it matter? Routinely, I'd say, "How do you want to get there?"

So as a secretly blind person driving a taxi in New York, I had a wonderful time.

Now Howard Thompson was asking me if I really liked what I was doing. I took the right turn at Linden and Merrick. Now we were headed North, towards Hillside Avenue. Did I like it?

"Yeah, " I spoke to the place in the rear view mirror where the image of Howard did the things images do for me when I try to look at them: They come and they go. They undulate.

Howard sucked his teeth and said, "You can't do this."

Knowing what I do now, I might have said something like, "If people didn't do this, you'd be walking." You know ... the old ... "someone has to do it." After all, when Howard saw it was me, he didn't get out of the taxi.

All I could think of then, besides how inappropriate Howard's observation felt ... was "Why not?"

"You can do better." Howard responded. "You should make something of yourself." I never did ask Howard what he was doing ... it didn't seem to me that lawyering or banking or whatever he was doing was any better or more unique than being a blind man driving a taxi in the City of New York.

Besides, back then, facility for someone with low vision was not as powerful or available as today. In other words, office work was out of the question for me.

I kept a magnifier for writing on the trip sheet ... and reading the meter settings ... mileage at start, trip number and counter ... little readouts about the size of your odometer reading on the family sedan. In other words ... small.

When Howard got out at 169th and Hillside, he was still shaking his head at me. I didn't get it. He was implying what I was doing wasn't good. Hey, I quit school to drive a cab. It was great!

There were guys in my garage who got robbed an average of once a month. The city was putting plain clothes cops in the driver's seat in order to arrest all the heisters and robbers who were ripping off cab drivers. After a while they installed the Plexiglas petitions, and even a floor safe.

I kept the money on a rubber band on the back side of the visor. It was my plan if I ever got robbed ... to reach for the visor with my hands in plain sight. I wasn't afraid to be robbed. I often wore my Air Force Field Jacket ... maybe I looked like a cop. I certainly didn't look blind!

At any rate (no pun intended) in the maybe four years of driving a medallion cab in the city at night, I was never robbed.

Another time, I picked up a fare on Columbus Avenue ... a well dressed African American woman ... we were going to work our way downtown. The fare apparently read my Hack license and said to me, "Jesse Miller," that's my doctor's name."

"He's my father," I responded.

The NAACP horror evinced by this bourgeois matron was fairly palpable. "That can't be," she said.

"Sure," I told her ... and I rattled off some of my father's addresses.

The lady was actually upset. "You can't be doing this," she said.

"Yes I can," I told the mirror. She didn't know the half of it!

"But why? Why are you doing ... this?" She was talking back at the mirror.

It felt to me like this woman was from some other planet ... a place where such things were a concern to others.

"Well," I said, guiding the cab into a rhythm that would have us snag all the green lights as we glided on down ... after Columbus Circle, on Broadway. "Well, I do this because I like it."

The woman was horrified. It was early evening. The sun was going down on our right, over the Hudson River, each cross street blazed like a rouge laser light show.

She was going to 17th street. I'd start counting after crossing 23rd. That was my main trick for locating streets: I'd recognize the big two way ones ... 57th, 14th, 42nd, of course, 23rd, etc. etc. "You can't be doing this," she said.

I was a little annoyed. "Yes I can!" I said.

"We'll just see about that," she told me as she got out. I loved to pull into the curb just right and make it easy for my passenger to get out ... and subsequent passengers to get in of course.

I was no good at picking up fares. Someone shyly wagging a finger wasn't sufficient to get my attention!

But anyway, the lady gave me a perfect tip ... not too big, not too little ... and I thought it was just nuts that she would tell me, a total stranger, "We'll see about that."

I'd been living off and on, in fact, in the apartment in the back of one of my father's offices, the one on Sugar Hill, at 935 St. Nicholas Avenue. His mother, my grandmother, had lived there until her death.

A few days after discharging Ms. NAACP, my father called and told me I had to move out. I felt OK about that. It never felt like this nice apartment was my place. I'd had no illusion that I was there permanently.

The unsolicited and unexpected explanation my father gave me didn't start to make sense (or hurt) until years later. Until now.

He said, "You were free to stay there as long as you were not a threat to me. Now that it is a question of my survival or yours ... there is no question: you have to go."

As I said, I was fine with all this, but now, looking back, it strikes me that my father was overly concerned with surface appearance. It hurts particularly to be beamed with the club of stupidity by your own father.

So who is our Father? What is Right to do?