CITY DESK: Urban Crunch - middle class life in New York City - Brief Article

THE taxi is a Manhattan vehicle. In other cities, cabs nest at the airports and hotels, and in a few they go through the motions of cruising. But it is hard to flag them, while in the cities of the Sun Belt, where driver's licenses are among the rights of man, they hardly exist.

In a century, the language of internal- combustion-engine cabs will be as foreign as the language of horse-drawn vehicles now is. In classic 19th- century fiction, Mr. Darcy is always helping Becky Sharpe into his hansom, when who should pass in a spanking new cabriolet but Archdeacon Grantly. I only recently realized that "brougham" is a one-syllable word. In a new anthology of fiction from The New Yorker, Ann Beattie refers in a 1977 story to a "Checker." Soon that will require a footnote.

The Checker company, headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan, went out of business in the early '80s. It made the most commodious taxis in history. The sturdy London Morrises were small by comparison. Even stretch limos, with trashy cut-glass decanters on the wet bar and blinking window lights, have less headroom. I am 6'4"; in a Checker I could wear a fedora and stretch my legs without touching the back of the driver's seat. With two people on the passenger seat, and two more on the pill-shaped jump seats, you could have a cozy game of bridge. Once the plant shut down, the Checkers began disappearing through attrition. The papers ran eulogies when the last one went out of service. In the standard taxi of today, a mid-sized Ford, a person of any size has to sit with knees wrenched to one side, a la Sharon Stone. When I emerge from a long ride, I feel like my 20-year-old wedding corsage, pressed between the pages of the OED.

It was long a staple of lazy reporters-or of lazy humorists mocking reporters-to present colloquies with taxi drivers, in which the cabbie vouchsafed some pearl of populist wisdom. You don't get many such answers from cabbies these days, because most of them come from some other populace, usually from Lahore. They can ask unexpected questions, though. One cabbie wondered if my wife, decked out in odd finery, belonged to a religious order. Only the order of Iskander. Another asked us, "Where does love come from? From the head, from the heart, or from the god?" I forget what we said.

Cabdrivers are an artifact of urban pseudoaristocracy. Most Americans own their own cars. Especially poor Americans: They typically own nine, all parked in the yard; only the newest works. But owning a car in Manhattan is as expensive as renting another apartment. The subways are efficient, but there are times when you just don't want to be a rush-hour Orpheus. Hence, the temporary car and driver. You sit, they work; for 20 blocks, they are your servants.

Middle-class city life is filled with stop/start feudalism of this kind. The butler in his cutaway is almost extinct; the liveried servant totally so. But every middling rental-apartment building in Manhattan has a helpful man at the door, wearing a jacket he would never buy for his own use; in older co-ops, he wears a hat. Maids used to be found wherever the ambitious middle class flourished: Mr. and Mrs. Bridge had one. But maids have disappeared- except from the homes of New York professionals, where once a week a woman from the Caribbean comes to clean. When Zoe Baird, Bill Clinton's first choice for attorney general, was going down because of unmade Social Security payments to the help, Upper East and West Sides united in sympathy. What was the lady supposed to do, eat dust bunnies? All across the broad bosom of the republic, amateur Sunday handymen apply their own coats of base paint, install their own brackets, and unblock their own drains. In the city, these tasks are performed by Hispanic porters, directed by Balkan supers. And when it comes time to eat dinner, and wives have been too busy to cook and bachelors open their refrigerators and find only beer, they all go out to restaurants, where actors and novelists assume the temporary roles of waiters and waitresses.

Then, if the professional urbanite has children to be educated, comes the true pseudoaristocratic splurge-private school, the midtown Etons and Harrows, the side-street An dovers and Exeters. Mayor Giuliani, who cut the murder rate and drove porn out of Times Square, cannot im prove the Board of Edu cation. So private schools flourish by providing a guarantee that your child will not be slashed with a box cutter and will learn who Colum bus was. Given curriculums these days, your child will learn that he was a genocidal maniac, but that is another problem.

We could do most of it for ourselves. 'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free. We could even order McGuffey readers and homeschool. We don't, because we're too busy working. But part of the reason we work so hard is to pay for amenities that elsewhere would be less expensive. Hence the treadmill of expense, and anxiety. And what, Lady Bracknell, could be more 19th century than hard-up aristocrats?

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