The demise of the rogue taxi stand
Taxi stand. Credit: Ian J. Stark
I’d just finished changing my second flat tire, and the replacement provided by the taxi company was as worn out as the first. The cab I was driving was a sickly lime green and required no keys. At the start of each shift at the Stony Brook train station, I simply turned a key-less ignition switch and took off. The old four-door sedan had neither heat nor air-conditioning, and the day-shift driver would leave the tank on empty with a big, toothless grin. Everyone was addressed by a number. Mine was 19, which was also my age.
“Would you mine dropping me off at the corner?” my young passenger said once we got back on the road. “My parents would kill me if they knew I used this company.”
Understood.
As a student at Stony Brook University in the late 1980s, I drove a cab part time for the infamous Tootsie Taxi, operating from an ancient depot at the station. The hours were flexible, the driving liberating, and best of all, no rules. Ask any longtime resident of the Three Village area about the cabs that prowled the streets of Setauket and Old Field 30 years ago, and their eyes might go wide. “Yes,” they’d say with a shudder, “I remember Tootsie.”
Oddly, the company had no competition. The 19th century historian Lord Acton must’ve had Tootsie in mind when he said, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Customers were crammed into cabs like circus clowns, prices were set on a whim, and one of the dispatchers refused to give out calls unless we called him Louie, the name of the shift boss on his favorite TV show, “Taxi.”
I was not immune to Tootsie’s mad ways, skidding into my share of garbage cans and mailboxes in the snow. I’d fall asleep in parking lots during the dead hours before sunrise, and the dispatcher would send out a search party, a firing squad of headlights surrounding me until my door was yanked open. “Hey, 19, stay awake or go home!”
To prove my worth, I’d drive down a shallow flight of stairs between campus roads to make the next train. Ugly, mean and dangerous, we were a company composed of pirates and ne’er-do-wells.
One evening, a smartly dressed woman came off the train and entered the shack, the taxi nerve center. Louie and the boys were sipping coffee and watching dirty movies.
“My God!” she said. “This is supposed to be a business!” and headquarters exploded with laughter. This was the only game in town. Until it wasn’t.
Competition arrived one day, another taxi company, and the Stony Brook station became our Alamo. Their numbers were strong, their vehicles immaculate. They announced their presence by working the campus side of the station. In an unprecedented move that left us stunned, our new rivals drove customers home for free during their first month. Louie said the company was run by the mob. Louie, of course, was the first to jump ship to the other service.
As the competition lured drivers away, we shunned them — unless we were tailgating and cutting them off. One evening, a dispatcher told us to go home. The owner had sold the company. The Battle for Three Village was over, and Tootsie’s reign had ended.
Sometimes I stare at the spot where the shack once stood, recalling the cackles of a ghostly convoy barreling its way down Quaker Path, hurtling through stop signs and coughing up exhaust, a toxic green mist of Stony Brook yesteryear.
J.B. McGeever grew up in Port Jefferson Station and lives in Brooklyn.
