Riding the Green Wave

With my girlfriend and her parents packed on the backseat, a confident cab driver became my personal New York savior.

Illustration by Andra Emilia Fenton

The double-decker tour bus for the night loop doesn’t leave until it’s full up with paying customers. Usually it’s not much of a problem to get people on a nice evening, but for whatever reason when my bus got to be about two-thirds full, the tickets just stopped selling. So we kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting, until the last few sales finally trickled in. I had been counting on being done with this tour at 9:30, but because of the delay I wasn’t back in Times Square until 10:15. I met my girlfriend, Sara, and her parents at 49th and Seventh at 10:20.

It was Sara’s parents’ first time in New York so of course I, an actual professional tour guide, was also playing amateur tour guide for them. After all, this was about the only card I had to play to impress them–I had no money, lived in a walk-up with a roommate in Crown Heights, and my current career consisted of waiting for work on a Times Square street corner. Earlier I had suggested my go-to, …