Modesto (Flako) Jimenez stood near an intersection in Brooklyn one Saturday, not far from the L train, telling the story of a sidewalk grease stain. “This is Yolanda’s grease,” he said. “She’s been selling food here since I was a little kid. It’s amazing to watch her cleaning it every morning. Like, ‘You know you’re not getting that grease out.’ ”
Earlier this year, Jimenez, a Dominican-born poet and theatre-maker, spent a couple of months driving pods of up to three passengers around Bushwick in a cab, for a site-specific performance piece called “Taxilandia.” Jimenez wasn’t interested in making a show for Zoom. “How do you show a neighborhood?” he asked. “Except by taking people through the neighborhood.”
The first stop in“Taxilandia” is Jimenez’s childhood home, which is his current home, too. He climbed into the driver’s seat of a burgundy Lincoln Town Car with a Little Trees Black Ice air freshener dangling from the mirror. Jimenez, wearing brown glasses and a Yankees cap, held a coffee in his non-steering hand. “Now you locked in, boy,” he said, eying his back-seat passenger through a protective sheet of plexiglass. “You ready?”
Jimenez drove a cab for nine years, typically working from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. “I saw the real world,” he said. If a conversation was stimulating, he would sometimes give the passenger what he called a two-dollar “keeping humanity alive” discount. He had riders sign a kind of guestbook, and some of his favorite interactions are preserved on social media, under the hashtag #bgtflow (for Brooklyn Gypsy Taxi). “People wrote everything in that guestbook,” he said. “Their life stories. Or just ‘This driver is crazy.’ ” He tended to feel safer inside the cab: “All the chaos of the city is closed out.”
Seven years ago, Jimenez was a performer and a designated driver in a show called “Take Me Home,” which whisked tightly packed mini-audiences through the streets of the financial district. “We did that show on Wall Street in crazy Manhattan traffic. Through a blizzard,” he said. “No crashing.”
“Taxilandia” is easier because the turf is more familiar. “See that furniture store?” Jimenez said. “It’s always been a furniture store. Even when the Germans were here. The land demands it to be a furniture store. Every time I come by here, it looks like there’s a new owner. But it’s still the same furniture.”
Jimenez’s conversation, unlike his driving, careers crazily: Father Knickerbocker, nineteenth-century breweries, Robert Moses, redlining, white flight, gang life, the war on drugs, the pandemic. (More stoplights during the show mean more stories.) “I’m trying to get the word ‘tour’ out of my mouth, because it disconnects,” he said. “It never holds you accountable. We gotta respect the land and its people.” He forbids his passengers to take photographs: “I ain’t no museum. I ain’t no exhibition.”
The principal subject of “Taxilandia” is gentrification, and Jimenez is happy to start difficult conversations with his riders. “After being uncomfortable, we can have a blast,” he said. He also gets to celebrate the things that have stayed the same, such as Tony’s, a pizza joint that opened in 1969: “It’s, like, ‘Watch me not change.’ The neighborhood is gonna keep changing, but you’re gonna be one of those constants. I love that friction.”
The show includes a bodega pit stop, although snacking in the car is not permitted. It also includes murals. “That’s what people think they came to see,” Jimenez said. Pulling over near a depiction of the Notorious B.I.G. by Danielle Mastrion, he briefly relaxed his no-photos policy: “I don’t mind that one. I know the artist. She’s respecting the community.”
Jimenez enjoys having a captive audience. “I’m a performer, and I have an ego,” he said. “And I love this. I love that I’m in a car right now, at nine in the fucking morning on a Saturday, to talk. And to talk about changes.”
The show does not involve finding a parking space, which is just as well. “That’s Brooklyn,” Jimenez said, as his rightful length of curb was claimed by another vehicle. He exhaled slowly. Then he drove on: “I’m, like, ‘Well, if I go to jail, there’s no show.’ ” ♦
