Hack (book review)
Hack: (How I Stopped Worrying About What To Do With My Life & Started Driving a Yellow Cab)
Melissa Plaut
Villard Press
Paperback
June 2008
$14.00
240 pages
In her late 20s, Melissa Plaut got her hack license and became a New York City cab driver. Her memoir details the strange characters she worked with, the even stranger characters she took as passengers, and her near-chronic bafflement about what to do with her life in any grander sense.
“How does it feel to be a woman and a cab driver?” or “How does a woman get to be a cab driver” are the questions she got asked the most. This book is an answer- or a compendium of the many answers. Plaut’s explorations of gender are glancing, at best- whether her own gender role behind the cab’s wheel, or the role gender may play for her passengers, or for Harvey-turned-Helen, her cross-dressing coworker at the company that leases her cab.
If there’s any overarching issue this book tackles, it is economics- the economics of a cabbie leasing the car, and starting the night over a hundred dollars in the hole, or the strange economics of a woman dabbling in cab driving as a part-timer, by choice. Plaut doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, in any overarching way, and the cab driving starts as “an adventure” which lingers on until it becomes a weird obsession. She confesses the many nights and many ways she hates the work, but hangs in there, buoyed by odd moments of kindness or cameraderie with passengers. Ultimately, it may be because I’ve seen too many movies, or read too many novels and memoirs that resolve on notes of pat uplift, that I’m looking for a more definite resolution, for Plaut’s life to take a defined direction and new pathway as a result of her time in a cab.
This book is predominantly a collection of New York stories- told with the same breezy, conversationally pithy style of a cabbie coming off shift and swapping tales with her fellows, griping about traffic, tips, and the strange moments that unfold in the backseat. It’s a fast read, told in candid snapshot vignettes of New York, from bridge to tunnel to borough. (For example- Mom got it for Christmas earlier today, and I absconded with it, and read it in one long, lazy post-Christmas afternoon.)
