HACK: HOW I STOPPED WORRYING ABOUT WHAT TO DO WITH MY LIFE AND STARTED DRIVING A YELLOW CAB, by Melissa Plaut, Villard, 240 pages, $21.95

Even though 99 percent of taxi drivers in New York are men, 20-something Melissa Plaut went to a three-day taxi school, got her hack license and hit the streets of Manhattan and the outlying boroughs.

She's been doing it for three years and describes some of her most interesting experiences in "Hack," a delightful but graphic book.

The language she uses is often a bit strong, owing to the fact that she is talking about driving all over New York with strangers — and quoting them. But it never ceases to be interesting.

She describes a cross-dressing cabbie, a dispatcher known as "Paul the crazy Romanian," and Lenny, the garage owner thought to be the prototype for Danny DeVito's character Louie De Palma on the TV sitcom "Taxi."

Plaut also believes that driving a cab — especially for a woman — is not easy.

For two years she "alternated between an almost Zen-like mind-set and hair-trigger anger." She was surprised that many immigrant cab drivers had been lawyers, engineers or architects, but because their advanced degrees weren't accepted in the United States, they had to drive a cab.

The author was "stupidly thrilled at the thought of danger," so initially she didn't worry about being robbed or threatened. She knew her New York geography and was not afraid of getting lost — and she got a 98 on her final test.

Once she started, however, she found that whenever someone new got into the cab, she had the screaming fear that she would get lost. Which actually didn't happen often, but sometimes she found the maps she had didn't match the "reality of the streets," so she would have difficulties that made people impatient.

Whereas many cabbies discriminated against blacks, Plaut found that it was "old, scraggly white guys" she had to suspect would not pay. After it happened twice, she swore off picking up such a man.

Over time she has found cab-driving to be both interesting and scary, due to "the randomness" of it — you never know whom you will pick up or where you will end up.

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"Driving a cab provides a rare view into people's lives," writes Plaut. "So many passengers are on the phone or carrying on a conversation with a companion in the backseat that they forget half the time that you're even there. Or, if they are remotely aware of you, they just don't care"

As a result, people are usually more open with a cab driver than they would be with someone else, knowing the chances of seeing the driver again are remote. Plaut is often asked if she is an actor or a student. In the book, she reverses the conversation whenever she can, variously discovering that someone in her cab is a narcotics cop, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, a singer from the Metropolitan Opera, a musician from Lincoln Center, a federal judge, a massage therapist, a jewelry designer, a bartender, a private eye, a filmmaker, a struggling actor, a member of a rock band, a psychic, an animal oncology nurse, a makeup artist, a composer, etc.

Once, Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" got into her cab: "I was so starstruck, I forgot to turn the meter on for nearly ten blocks, but he turned out to be a very modest, nice guy and left me with a very decent tip."


E-mail: dennis@desnews.com

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