My hilarious ride with the younger Mayor Koch CHAPTER NINETEEN

MY HILARIOUS RUN IN WITH YOUNG mayor KOCH

"There's no question it was a giant municipal sin and the worst municipal scandal of modern times. I think he paid a price for it; Koch never admitted that it contributed to his defeat in '89 but I believe it did. I think he transcended it in many ways. He had such a successful post-mayoral life and he had many successes as mayor. But this was such a dark side that he said himself he seriously contemplated suicide after Donald [Manes] killed himself.* So there was a moment in time when he came to grips with the shame of it."

- Jack Newfield on 

Ed Koch

I once had a run-in with Mayor Koch before he became Mayor. He was a Congressman from Greenwich Village. Koch made a name for himself by taking down the last old fashioned  Tammany Hall boss named Carmine Desapio. (I have a story about DeSapio too which I might tell you later.)

So, when he was in Congress Slim came and went between New York and Washington all the time, usually on the Eastern Shuttle that flies in and out of LaGuardia. One time there was a late flight from Washington that had been delayed by snow.

I was on the taxi line at the Eastern Shuttle and I happened to get Congressman Koch for a passenger. (I have met a few celebrities driving a taxi. The celebrities weren't driving a taxi - I was.) So I put Koch's luggage into the trunk at La Guardia  and headed out to Greenwich Street.

The only problem with my plan was that Koch said he was going home and his home was on Greenwich Place, not Greenwich Street which was around a mile away.

Anyone mightta made the same mistake I did. In fact when we got over the bridge I asked him to repeat the destination just to make sure that I remembered it right but he was too busy reading some paper or other and he did not answer me.

I asked Koch to repeat the destination again when we got closer and again he didn't answer me.

Some passengers seem to think that when a taxi driver talks to them it's just an animal making noises.

In those times Greenwich Street was deserted at night except for men who dressed as women and did blow jobs for money, plus also their customers, their pimps, and people who were watching the show.

There were and still are brownstone town houses on the side streets off Greenwich Street and I guessed he must live in one of them.

Koch rolled down a window and saw where he was and so he bellowed like a stuck llama. Thinking back on it if I was him I probably also would have been pissed but this guy was making all too much of a big deal of it. I would have gladly taken him to his apartment off the meter just to end this disaster but I couldn't get a word in edgewise.

Greenwich Place was around a mile and a world away from this place. It's quiet at night, near Washington Square Park. There are stores, restaurants. Even back then there was an all night we deliver cheap Chinese restaurant right there.

So Koch was not in the center of the world, which is where he thought he belonged.

Because he wouldn't calm down and be reasonable I had to out of the cab, open the trunk and put his shit out on the street.

At that time I did not know what a big shot he was.

He was knee deep in snow, freezing cold and probably scared shitless.

And it had been snowing like it's Buffalo.

Since he just wouldn't cam down and be reasonable Congressman Slim ended up standing in the snow with his belongings on the street. (I'm telling you this - keep it to yourself.)

That morning the day dispatcher Mamadou asked me about it. He said the cops had come by asking him about it because this congressman had been dumped out in the snow on a very bad street in the middle of the night with all his belongings in the middle of the street. It seems \Koch could not describe the guilty driver and he didn't know the medallion number either only that it was a white guy that was the driving a Checker. (Our garage happened to be one of the last one's to put Checkers out on the street.) That's all he remembered so of course I said I don't know anything about it but that's how come I knew it was Congressman Slim.

When he became Mayor, Koch did everything in his power to make life miserable for taxi drivers for all his twelve years in office.

The story goes that later he decided to be our friend, and so we have the Edward I Koch Taxi Academy.

The area where Koch was dropped was also (and still is) the Meatpacking District which these days is a trendy neighborhood of bars and restaurants. Back then it was where trucks came loaded with dead animals that would get cut up in the abattoirs around there, packaged and sent out to be sold as meat. There were other activities in the area. The famous triangular shaped building that stands where Fourteenth Street meets Hudson Street and Ninth Avenue is where Mickey Cezar had his "Church of The Realized Fantasy"

That part of the neighborhood mainly that building and a couple of joints on the side streets was wild at night.

I was going down Hudson one time around 4 in the morning (and this was before I was partners with Louie) and there was a club, an S&M Club right next to Mickey's Church in the same building. That night it was snowing and as I'm passing that building this guy comes running out the door and all he's got on is just athletic shorts and I see holy Hannah! I didn't know if that was shit or blood or both and the guy's running barefoot yelling "Arrrrgh!" over and over He was just about naked in the freezing cold and snow.

So that's the wild and crazy West Village that is no more.

You might not know that New York taxi drivers have had to graduate a two week class and pass a pretty tough test. It's been like this for a couple of decades now. It wasn't always like that but today one of these schools is the Edward I Koch Taxi Academy.

I teach a class called Taxi English on Saturdays and Sundays in the afternoon before I go driving.

The Ed Koch Academy is a two story old type "taxpayer" floor through that once was a big ninety-nine cent store and is now partitioned with sheet rock into classrooms and  office rooms .

The full time instructors at the Koch Academy are mainly part time cabbies and the part time instructors- like me - clock 50 to 70 hours a week behind the wheel.

Back in Koch's days as mayor the taxi driver license test was a simple multiple-choice-open-book-take-it-as-many-times- over-as-you-have-to sort of test. This meant that Slim was just selling licenses to drive yellow taxis to anyone who had a driver's license from anywhere on earth and could hold a pen and open a book.

Needless to say the repute of taxi drivers crashed (get it? Drivers crashed) and this high reputation from when mainly white guys like me were taxi drivers has never returned to the old respect cabbies used to get.

These days it's a pretty tough exam a candidate must pass. Anyone who passes that test on the up-and-up deserves respect especially if he comes from someplace where they don't speak English like Africa.

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