Richard Burkhart

 

“Put-up or shut-up!

It’s not hard to think that one can never really understand what people are about until one has lived in New York City for awhile . Like jazz, especially free jazz, you learn from what floats up from the boiling streets of the city – the passion, the terror, the simultaneous hardening and softening one goes through just trying to survive. I once drove a taxi in Manhattan. I only lasted about three months. I quit not only because I couldn’t make enough money, but because of the numbness it was causing in me. New drivers were forced to drive the worst nights and sometimes, after driving all night, more than ten hours, and after paying for the car and the gas, I had less than twenty dollars left in my pocket. In New York it isn’t so uncommon for someone with a Masters Degree to be driving a cab – actually, there is no better way to feel you are in the blood of the city. My first night out I thought things were going pretty well when a man I picked up coming out of a chic restaurant on West Broadway with two friends asked me to drop his friends off and then be taken to Amsterdam Avenue, a good fare, and to my bewilderment he gave me a twenty-dollar tip. I could tell he was drunk by the smell, but he was long gone by the time I realized he had vomited in the back seat of the car. I can’t tell you how many times I was sure I was going to die or how many Angels I met or how difficult it sometimes was to sleep even after nearly twelve hours of driving.  I lived in New York for eighteen years but it was in those three months I felt I became a New Yorker. I still consider myself a New Yorker even though I haven’t lived there for more many years. Somehow though, after the experience of driving a cab, things seemed to make sense to me, about people, about the city, and ultimately, about why we make art.

 

 

 

 

New York – night. 1988. All photos: Ray Burkhardt

“Put up or shut up!” was Jackson Pollack’s response to Hans Hoffman when Hoffman, on visiting Pollack’s apartment-studio, suggested Pollack should take classes with him at the Art Students League.

 

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