So Many Things

I’ve written quite a few posts here about some of the wonderful people we met who work nights in New York City but whom we ultimately couldn’t include in the book.

One of my favorites was a taxi driver from Guinea, in West Africa, our fourth night out. He was the first to educate us about the intricacies of driving a taxi in New York. Soon enough we learned his story was a familiar one. He only worked nights and he drove a taxi owned by a broker who owned both his taxi and his medallion.

The medallions are private property, and can be bought and sold like any other commodity. There are over 13,000 of them these days, and each one is worth more than $300,000. Most of the city’s 24,000 active yellow cab drivers cannot afford to own a medallion. Instead, they lease one, through brokers, who often own as many as fifty at a time.

That West African driver we met early in our research was like so many of the taxi drivers we met preparing for the book - trolling the city streets after dark, hoping to make at least enough to cover the lease to the broker.

Yet his story was also unique in ways I’ll never forget. First, he hated working nights.

“The reason I do it,” he said, “is because my wife passed away and I don’t want to be in the house at night.”

We let that hang in the silence for a while. Second, he told us one of the first stories in what we’d come to know as New York As A Small Town. We’d asked him the best thing that had happened to him in his cab at night.

“Well, I don’t know, because, it’s hard, depends, there’s so many things. Sometimes, at Christmastime, you have some very nice people. They come and give you Christmas gifts, they don’t even know you. That’s number one. So many things.”

He was quiet a moment, then said again, “So many things.”

The Body's Clock

Cliff the Cabbie turns north on Third Avenue. Like most nightshift cab drivers in New York City, his shift runs 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. Tonight he wears his favorite leather jacket, a loose-fitting shirt and jeans. With a lilting Jamaican accent and full-throated laugh, he talks about working nights. "It's not normal, because your body is not made to work at night. You’re supposed to be sleeping at night and working in the daytime. It’s not normal.”

Cliff doesn't refer to circadian rhythms by name, but that's what he's describing. The word circadian, from the Latin, translates roughly as "about a day." Circadian rhythms control almost everything that happens in our bodies in about a day. They control body temperature. They control digestion. They control the release of hormones, such as melatonin, which is released at night and regulates sleep. It works like this. The eyes receive information about what time it is from the amount of light absorbed by the retina. The retina sends this information to the group of cells in the hypothalamus known as the SCN. The SCN passes on that information to the teeny tiny pineal gland in the epithalamus. If it's night time (or there isn't enough light for the retina to think it's daytime), that little gland secretes melatonin, which makes Cliff tired. Whenever we feel tired, or hungry, or thirsty, it's because our circadian rhythms think it's time to be tired, hungry, or thirsty.

For those who work regular overnights, or alternating shifts, all this messing around with the body's circadian rhythms can quickly cause health problems. Digestion problems are especially probable because the G.I. system is so sensitive in general but all the more so at night when the body thinks you're asleep. It only took us a few weeks on the nightshift to crave pancakes at 3 a.m. instead of salad, and to convince ourselves that pain in our guts from the salad meant we shouldn't order it next time. Needing to sleep during the day, we, and millions of others, skipped exercise in favor of sleep. Thus for those who work nights there are correlated increases in diabetes, obesity, heart problems, and depression. Then there are decreases in memory, cognitive functioning, immune functioning, and coordination. In December, 2007, the cancer wing of the World Health Organization weighed in on a long-debated issue by adding the nightshift to its list of possible causes of cancer.

Add to that sitting in a taxi 12 hours a night, and Cliff the Cabbie found himself rather overweight. "You have to plan some time to go out and exercise when you’re off," he says. "If you don’t do that, you’ll gain a lot of weight. That’s what happened to me." Cliff the Cabbie started taking brisk walks two or three mornings a week after work. At first, his legs hurt so badly he could barely walk. He kept at it. "After about two or three months," he says, "I went out to walk and there was no pain." Within four months, he realized he'd lost weight. "I dropped off a good 15 or 20 pounds. Just walking at a brisk pace." Once it grew cold again, he stopped his walks -- and put back on some of the weight. But he's committed to getting in shape. And he's committed to the nightshift. Don't even talk to him about the dayshift. “It’s too much stress," he says. "You eat a lot of pollution, too. I can’t do it anymore. I’ll take my chances on the nightshift.”