Transportainment

After the weekend, my defensive driving certificate arrived in the mail.  I brought it, together with my completed physical and a $40 money-order, to City Hall.  I made sure to get there very early in the morning.  I got there at 8:15AM.  City Hall opens at 8AM.

There was already a three-hour wait.

At the end of three hours, I walked away with the a permit that boasted my name, the company that I work for (“Need a Ride”), and the most hideous photo of me ever taken.  Satisfied, I left City Hall and made my way down to the Need a Ride garage on the corner of Bienville and Rampart in the French Quarter.

My new pedicab license!

At the Need a Ride garage, the managers shared my excitement and enthusiasm for finally having received my license.  The hellish two-week-long process is something that every New Orleans pedicab driver has to go through.  These people could relate to what I’d been through in a way that my other friends–although they sympathized with me as I sped through the four-hour defensive driving course and struggled to find Room 314–could not.

We scheduled my training for later that week, and I practically skipped out the door.

*

The morning of my training was blustery and gray.  I rode my bike down to the shop where Bob, one of the managers, talked me through the process of starting and ending a shift.  Then we hit the road.

Bob drove me in the pedicab to a nearby parking lot.  It was my first time riding in the back of the pedicab (and honestly, I haven’t been in the back of one since, but)–it’s FUN!  It’s really fun.  Throughout the entire licensing process, I’d been spotting pedicabs every time I ventured down to the French Quarter, and I would think, Driving one of those seems like a great job.  But I would also think, Who would ever pay money to sit in the back of a pedicab and have another human haul you around?

But now I know.  It’s really, really fun!  The wind playfully snaked through my hair, and the sun even peeked out from behind a cloud as we headed up Rampart Street.  We breezed slowly but steadily past people and buildings at a delicious pace.  It felt like riding a bike without exerting any effort.  Perhaps best of all, the back of the pedicab is a wide, soft seat that fits two or even three people.  It felt wonderful to sit on it, especially after straddling my own bike’s hard, narrow seat on the twenty minute ride from my house to the shop.

When we got to the parking lot, we switched places, and I lugged Bob around as he issued instructions on how to steer, how to put the turn signals on, and how to make sure that the back of the cab didn’t hit the sides of the parked cars and damage them.  Then we practiced backing up (which is accomplished by putting your feet on the front wheel and pushing it so that it rolls backwards) and parallel parking (easier than it sounds).

About an hour into the training, Bob had to leave to pick someone up from the airport, so another manager, named Goose, came out to the parking lot to finish instructing me on the golden rules of pedicabbing and, in particular, on strategies for hustling.

“Pedicabbing isn’t just transportation, it’s transportainment,” he talked into my ear as I huffed up one street and down another.  I was starting to sweat through my raincoat, though Goose looked cool as a cucumber in the back of the cab, wrapped in a warm fleece against the cool January morning.  ”People take pedicabs because they’re fun.  You want to be personable–ask people where they’re from, how long they’re in town for.  Tell them your name.  And hold down the front brake when they’re getting in and out of the cab.  Don’t have people sit on top of the cab–they have to stay in the seat.  Otherwise the entire bike will flip over when you get off.  You can ask for tips, you can be explicit.  One of the other guys who pedicabs, he tells people, after they hand him money, he says, Okay, if that’s all you can afford.  You know?  If that’s all you can afford.  But you have to be careful with that.  Because it can come off really bad, you know?  You have to be able to swing it.  You have to be able to say it politely.  So you can use that if you want, if you’re comfortable with it.”

We passed Cafe du Monde, with its green and white striped awning and tourists milling about outside, waiting to cross the street to Jackson Square.  I was exhausted.  Goose just kept talking.  ”If you’re having a bad day, and you’re not getting a lot of rides, it’s really important to stay positive.  People will want to get in your cab if you’re positive, if you’re smiling, and then they’ll want to tip you more when they get out.  If you’re getting grouchy, it’s okay, maybe take a break, stop for something to eat, get a coffee.  Then get back out there with a good attitude.”

I was so out of breath, I could hardly answer.  How was I supposed to keep up conversations with my passengers when I hardly had enough air to keep my lungs satisfied while driving them around?

Finally, Goose said the words I’d been waiting to hear.  ”Okay, turn here and go back to the shop.”  Praise God.  I swung back up Bienville and turned the bike sharply to get it through the door of the shop.  Forgetting everything Bob had told me about watching the back of the cab to make sure I had enough room, I smacked the bike into the frame of the door.  Oops.

Goose hopped down and helped me navigate the pedicab.  ”I’ll get there,” I promised him.

We scheduled my first shift for that Friday morning.  New pedicab drivers get their first shift free, so I wouldn’t even have to pay rent for the eight-hour shift.  ”Just come with $25 for your uniform,” said Goose.  ”See you Friday.”

I got on my bike and pedaled home, grateful beyond belief to not be lugging a cab and a human being behind me anymore.

The Licensing Application Process, or: Why New Orleans City Hall is the Worst Ever (Part IV)

I had to hatch a new plan for getting to the airport.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with New Orleans, the surrounding suburbs, and the (dire lack of) public transportation in the area, listen up.  It’s bad.  Real bad.  I don’t have a car down here, and biking around is fine…most of the time.  Well, some of the time.

It’s actually pretty incredible what the humidity and groundwater can do to streets down here.

This picture is actually from a website on "The worst potholes in the world."

Anyway.  Despite the potholes, New Orleans is a semi-decent city for biking because it’s flat and not that big.  But there are some places, like the airport, that are really too far to get to by bike–even though it’s not impossible.

Luckily, I had an in.  My friends Noah and Rachel have started a small kosher challah baking business.  They take orders from members of the Jewish community in New Orleans, and every Friday morning, they head out to Shir Chadash, the local Conservative synagogue (and the only Conservative synagogue in the entire state of Louisiana!) to bake challah in the kosher kitchen there.  The Friday of my appointment in Room 314 at the airport, Rachel had other plans and couldn’t commit to baking all day.  We decided that I would step in as co-challah-baker for the day, and while we waited for the dough to rise, Noah would drive me to the airport for my background check.  Shir Chadash is out in Metairie, a suburb just west of New Orleans and on the way to the airport, so it seemed like the perfect plan for all of us.

One ten-pound sack of flour later, we had two giant batches of dough rising in the kitchen. We left them there and took the ten-minute drive to the airport.

“Where should I drop you off?” asked Noah.

I looked down at the slip of paper that had been given to me at City Hall.  ”Airport Background Check.  Room 314.  Friday, 12pm.”

“Um,” I said.

“Departures?” Noah suggested.

“Okay.”  There was, after all, no color-coded sign for “Room 314″ the way there were signs for “Delta” and “Jet Blue.”  Departures was as good a guess as any.

Noah let me off and drove out to the cell phone lot to make a call.  I entered the automatic doors by Continental, and looked around the concourse.  There was a Popeye’s fast food restaurant, a first class check-in counter for Continental, and an economy check-in counter.  Colorful pieces of luggage looped around on a conveyer belt.  Babies struggled in strollers, haggard-looking travelers lugged bags to and fro.

An airport concourse.  But Room 314?  It was nowhere in sight.

I would have to ask someone.

I felt utterly ridiculous.  I approached a woman working at one of the Continental check-in counters.

“Um.  Hi.”

“Hi,” she said.  ”Ticket and ID, please.”

“No…I’m actually looking for Room 314?”

She stared at me blankly.  ”I’m sorry,” she said.  ”I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Great.

My second attempt to get directions was more successful.  I approached a bored-looking security guard who was calmly patrolling the concourse.

“Hi,” I said.  ”I’m looking for Room 314.”  I showed him my slip of paper.

“Oh, the background check.”  He nodded.  He pointed to a hallway above the concourse that I had never noticed before.  ”It’s right there.  You want to take those elevators–” he pointed to a set of elevators next to the Delta counters–”to the second floor.  Go down the hallway to Room 314.”

Once I was finally walking down the hallway to Room 314, I knew why I had never noticed the hallway before.  It was nothing more than a small, narrow pathway with a series of unmarked doors on either side.  Finally, abruptly, I reached Room 314.  ”Airport Background Check.  Room 314,” read a plaque on the door.

Perfect.  I reached for the doorknob and opened the door.

Somebody on the other side of the door promptly slammed it back in my face.  ”Wait outside!” barked a voice.

I blinked.  There was no waiting room, no other people, not even a single chair in the hallway.  I sat down on the floor.

After about five minutes, the door opened, a disgruntled-looking man hurried out, and an even-more-disgruntled-looking woman called me in.  I showed her my ID and my slip of paper, and she took my fingerprints.

And that’s all.  I climbed back into Noah’s car a mere twenty minutes after he’d let me off.  The adventure of Room 314 was over.  Once my fingerprints got back to City Hall and my background check came back, I’d be cleared to get my license and start driving a pedicab!

Here's a picture of all the challah we baked that day!

The Licensing Application Process, or: Why New Orleans City Hall is the Worst Ever (Part III)

The two weeks after this initial victory at City Hall were a blur of missed background checks, tracking down affordable primary care physicians, and slogging through a four-hour defensive driving course.

Ben Springgate, a physician and public health practitioner who founded REACH NOLA (the community health organization I worked for in 2009 – 2010) recommend St. Thomas Community Health Center as a good place to get my physical completed.  Ben now works at St. Thomas, which accepts many forms of health insurance and has a sliding scale for folks without insurance.  The Clinic was able to give me a same-day appointment, and after I filled out some basic paperwork, I sat with a doctor who asked me a string of questions, to which I replied with a string of “no’s.”

“Have you ever stopped exercising because of dizziness?”

“No.”

“Have you ever passed out during exercise?”

“No.”

“Have you ever had a heat-related illness?”

“No.”

Until we got to these: “Have you ever had a broken bone?”  ”Have you ever been hospitalized for any reason?”  ”Have you ever had surgery?”

I explained about my accident, but that I was fully healed and my orthopedist had explicitly given me permission to pedicab.  She signed my form.

The drug test was a similarly straightforward process–that is, once I was confident enough that I would pass.

The defensive driving course was a colossal waste of time.  It is, predictably, geared toward drivers of motor vehicles and not drivers of pedicabs.

The background check was another story altogether.  One of the things I was clutching in my sweaty hand when I left City Hall the first time was a half-sheet of paper with some xeroxed writing on it.  It looked like the kind of thing I used to have to carry in fifth grade, when I was walking through the halls of school during class time.

“Airport Background Check,” it said.  ”Room 314.  Monday.  10:30AM.”

(“Pass to Nurse.  Mrs. Warter.  Monday.  10:30AM.”)

After a slight mishap in which I underestimated the distance I would have to drive (borrowing a friend’s car) to get there, I had to return to City Hall to get a new appointment.  Josh let me drive his car down to City Hall from his uptown apartment.  I parked nearby, fed the meter, marched through the too-familiar metal detector, and made my way to the Transportation Bureau.

I counted the number of people waiting.  Fourteen.  No way in hell was I waiting for three hours–again–just to reschedule my airport background check.

Remember what I said about opportunities to sweet-talk your way into what you want in New Orleans?  Zing.

I left the building a mere twenty minutes later holding a new piece of paper.  It said: “Airport Background Check.  Room 314.  Friday, 12PM.”

I was so close to being licensed, I could practically taste the bike grease.

The Licensing Application Process, or: Why New Orleans City Hall is the Worst Ever (Part II)

On Tuesday, I got up, went for a run, ate breakfast, and biked down to City Hall again.  I checked my watch as I strolled through the metal detector: 12 noon.  I should have plenty of time to register at City Hall and make my way to Common Ground Health Clinic, a clinic I used to work with in 2009-2010.  I wanted to get there by 3pm to pitch in with a volunteer day they were having, and see some folks I used to work with.

I took the back elevator up to the second floor, where the Transportation Bureau is located.  The Transportation Bureau includes both taxi cab drivers and pedicab drivers.  The hallway was filled with taxi cab drivers waiting to renew their licenses and submit paperwork.  Every single chair was filled up, and some folks were sitting on the floor.

“About how long is the wait?” I asked a woman, an employee of City Hall, who kept rushing in and out of the same door with a different stack of papers in her hands.  It was unclear what she was accomplishing by doing this.

“Three hours,” she said brusquely.  ”Sign in.”  She pointed to a clipboard that sat on a low table next to the chairs.  There were at least ten people ahead of me, and the line wasn’t moving quickly.

Ten minutes into the wait, I realized that I didn’t have my passport, one of the essential documents necessary to begin the licensing application process.  The morning I left New York for New Orleans, I’d found it under some old magazines on my desk.  ”Do you think I need this?” I’d asked my father.  ”No,” he’d scoffed.  ”Leave it here.  Do you want me to put it in the safe for you?”

(Although it might not sound like it, and although my father doesn’t mean it in this way, this is a trick question.  He likes to take important documents from me–like social security cards and passports–and “put them in the safe” so that I won’t lose them.  Then, he loses them, and I need to go through the bureaucracy of ordering new documents.)

“No!” I’d said quickly.  ”I’ll just leave it in my desk drawer.”

And now, here I was, passport-less, facing a three-hour wait at City Hall with the very real possibility of it ending by being sent home and told to come back once I had my passport.

Damn.

Suddenly, I remembered that I’d emailed a PDF of the front page of my passport to an employer recently.  If I could get to a printer, I could print out the PDF and cross my fingers that it was good enough for New Orleans City Hall.

The library is down the street from City Hall.  I looked around.  Folks were leaning back in the chairs, closing their eyes, talking on cell phones, catching up with other taxi cab drivers. One yuppie-looking guy who had to be applying for a pedicab license was reading something on his iPad.

Three-hour wait.

I took the elevator down, walked out the front doors of City Hall, and booked it to the library.

At the library, I had to register for a library card, which was actually easier than I’d anticipated, because I’d had a library card in 2010, when I was last in New Orleans.  Then, in order to use a computer, I had to sign into the computer registration station and book a computer.  The next available computer would be free in one hour.

One hour?  I mean, there was a three-hour wait at City Hall, but still.  This seemed to be pushing it.

The upside to nothing working like it should in New Orleans, and everything being dysfunctional and corrupt, is that sometimes you can sweet-talk (or bribe) your way into bypassing a line or paying a fee.  (Sometimes this is acceptable, like sweet-talking your way into using the printer at the library.  And sometimes the corruption in this city is totally inacceptable and despicable, like this or this or this.)

I approached a friendly-looking man sitting behind a desk and explained the situation.  ”I literally need to print one thing,” I said, trying to look as cute and sweet as possible as I said this.  He looked doubtful…but I must be pretty persuasive, because ten minutes later, I was logged onto my gmail account on his computer at the library desk, printing a PDF of my passport.

“Thanks!” I said, logging off and turning around to head back to City Hall.  I almost bumped into an older woman who was in line waiting for some computer help herself.

“Here,” she said, pulling a bracelet off her wrist and handing it to me.  ”God bless,” she said.  ”They’ve been real helpful to me here at the library.  Real helpful.”

“Oh!” I said.  ”Thanks, but I can’t take your bracelet.”

“Oh, yes, you can,” she said.  ”That’s what I do.  I buy costume jewelry and I give it away.  The Good Lord blessed me, and they’ve been real helpful to me here at the library.  This is just what I do.  Bless Jesus.  Jesus been real good to me.  You know?  Jesus is real good.”

“Um…thanks.”

“You bet.  This is just what I do–I buy costume jewelry, and I give it away.”

“Right.  Thanks.”

“You have a blessed day.”

I did have a blessed day.  I got back to City Hall, waited two more hours, handed in my paperwork, and was given less-than-detailed instructions on how to proceed.  By the time I left City Hall, it was 4pm and I’d clearly missed my friends over at the health clinic, but I had some bright costume jewelry on my wrist and forms for a background check and drug test in my shoulder bag.

The Licensing Application Process, or: Why New Orleans City Hall is the Worst Ever (Part I)

The day after I arrived in New Orleans, I borrowed a friend’s bike and made my way down to the French Quarter.  There’s a garage on Bienville Street where two of the three pedicab companies down here keep their bikes.

The managers informed me that pedicab drivers are independent contractors who are first licensed by the city of New Orleans.  In order to receive a license, you must:

• be eighteen years old or older
• have a valid driver’s license
• complete a background check in room 314 at the airport ($50 money order)
• complete (and pass) a drug test ($20)
• complete a defensive driving course ($40)
• complete a physical affirming that you are healthy and it is safe for you to operate a pedicab (I paid $20 at St. Thomas Community Health Center)
• pay a $40 licensing fee to the city of New Orleans (money order only).

Whew!  I feel exhausted just typing all that out again.  This is what the application process looked like for me:

I had been to the pedicab garages on a Thursday.  On Friday, I returned, talked with another company, and made my decision about which one I wanted to work for.  By the time I left the garages on Friday, it was too late to go to City Hall to begin the licensing application process, so I went home, had a nice weekend, and decided to go back on Monday.

On Monday, LSU (Louisiana State University) was playing Alabama in college football.  So, naturally, City Hall was closed.  I found this out after riding my friend’s bike downtown, pulling up to an eerily silent City Hall, and encountering a disgruntled man who was in town for just one day and needed to fill out some paperwork in City Hall before he left the next day.  Our conversation went something like this:

“City Hall is closed,” he said.  He was walking down the stairs away from the doors, and I was walking toward them.  Evidently, he had just attempted to enter the building.

“What?” I said.  I checked my watch, as though to make sure it was really Monday.  ”Why?”

“LSU game,” he said.

“Are you kidding???  City Hall is closed for a football game?”

He shared my disbelief and disgust.

Later, when I got home and related these frustrations to my friend Laura, she helped me put my problems into perspective.  Laura works at the Juvenile Public Defenders Office.

“I know,” she said.  ”The courts are closed, too.  It’s ridiculous, because some of my kids had hearings scheduled for today.  We didn’t even know the courts were closed until we showed up.  Now the kids will have to sit in jail or another week or so until their hearings can be rescheduled.”

At least I had free reign of the outside world while I waited for City Hall to re-open.

The Backstory, or: How I Broke My Collarbone

The backstory: I love biking (cycling, that is.  On bicycles.  Motorcycles terrify me).  So when I was coming home from Israel in June of last year, I hatched a brilliant plan: I’d work at an environmental Jewish farm camp all summer (“kindness is cool!”) and then I’d take a bike tour up the West Coast.

Well, camp was awesome, but my plan was thwarted: about a week before I was supposed to fly out to LA (Los Angeles, not Louisiana), I was training near my parents’ home in Rockland County, north of New York City.  I was minding my own business, riding on the shoulder of a road that is very popular with cyclists in the New York area.  I was being safe, and doing everything I was supposed to do: I had applied sunscreen before I left the house; I was drinking plenty of water; and my helmet was strapped tightly under my chin.

But sometimes, you do everything right, and everything goes wrong anyway.  A ladder had been poorly secured to the back of a truck.  As the truck attempted to pass me, the ladder slipped and whacked me in the back–at 60 miles per hour.  A bad concussion and retrograde amnesia obscure my memory of the accident itself, but my brain kicks back in around the time I was in the ER of the local hospital.  A brace hugged my neck, and my lungs kept pulling in knives rather than air.  I dully took note of people–nurses and doctors, presumably–bustling about my gurney.  At some point, my mother was there.

I was so confused.  ”Did I do something wrong?” I kept asking.  ”Was I breaking the rules?”

“No, no,” my mother kept assuring me.  ”You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I spent a few days in the hospital, until the doctors were confident that I was stable and they released me right before the crazy snowstorm we East Coasters were hit with before Halloween.  I had broken my left collarbone and left ninth rib, and the broken rib had punctured my lung.  I was released into my mother’s care and blue Subaru in a state of codeine-induced semi-consciousness.  My left arm was in a sling, the collarbone protruding into a rude bump like some kid sticking his tongue out.  My knees, back, arms, and face were scraped raw and bloody from extended contact with the pavement.  A sharp pain persisted on my left side, either from the broken rib or the punctured lung, or both.

The next week, at a visit with the orthopedist, he showed me the x-ray of my broken collarbone.  The two disjointed pieces of my bone were at a sharp angle, and would not heal without surgery.  Four days later, I had a metal plate and six screws holding my bone in place.  (It looks AWESOME on the x-ray, the scar is sexy, and the metal detector doesn’t go off when I pass through.)

Fast forward four months: I’ve had a few solid months of physical therapy; I’ve undergone several breathing tests to monitor the progress of my lung; and the scrapes, for the most part, have scabbed and healed.  With all my spare time (and believe me, it was plentiful), I’ve studied for the GRE and applied to graduate school for a Master of Public Health.

The next step was clearly to move to New Orleans, where I had lived for a year in 2009-2010.  There was no other place on earth I’d rather wait out the verdicts of the graduate school applications.

And there was no job that I would rather have than drive tourists through the French Quarter on a pedicab.