EVERYONE IN NEW YORK has a cab story. The best I’ve heard involves a wallet full of cash and six Australian tourists at the Ritz-Carlton, while the worst involves projectile vomit and a girl walking home on the side of the highway. I’ve been taking taxis in New York for more than a decade and have yet to find so much as an earring, but if a crazy story counts as a treasure then I’ve uncovered at least one gem.

I was on the Upper East Side drinking dollar margaritas with a coworker.We’d spent six bucks and had gotten completely wasted, which was good because we worked in a bookstore and didn't have many dollars to spare. With or without disposable income, I was thrilled to be in the city—so different from rural Pennsylvania, where I'd grown up, and rural Ohio, where I´d gone to school. I was 23 and had nothing to lose except my short-term memory and a growing suspicion that life was blazing by without me.

I left the bar and decided to see Bill, a lawyer and not-so-recovering alcoholic I’d met on Second Avenue after attempting (and failing) to enter an amateur striptease contest at Webster Hall. Bill was bad news, but he had a nice apartment.Also, it was interesting to date a guy I barely liked. I felt strangely detached from my actions, as if I were a cool-headed scientist trying to discover the point where curiosity turned into fear.

I hailed a taxi on 67th Street and fielded a call from Bill, whose anxious, repetitive questions made me suspect he’d entered the cokesnorting portion of the evening. When I ended the call the cab driver said I was pretty, and I thanked him. “You look young. How old you are?” He wasn’t a native English speaker, but I was too drunk and too American to guess where he was from. I told him my age and he exclaimed in horror.

“What? 23? This is crazy.You look 14 or 15. That is what I think. I like young girls, you know?”

I considered thanking him—even in her early twenties, a girl likes to look younger than her age—but 14 was ridiculously young. Illegally young.

“Nope,” I said. “23.”

“Well,” he said. “Still very pretty.”

If I had been in a different mood, I might have fretted for my safety. But Bill put everything in perspective—terrible, coke-addled Bill, who had smashed his guitar and kept the remains, who went into AA at the insistence of his law firm, who received a restraining order from an ex who lived across the park. I figured Bill was more dangerous than some random cabbie, so I laughed and let it go.

We pulled up to a red light, and the driver turned to face me.“So,” he said. “You want to sleep with me?”

“Oh,” I said. “Not really.”

“No? I take you anywhere you want. No charge.”

No charge! My mind raced through potential destinations.Was Long Island too far? How about Connecticut? Or San Francisco? I was pretty good in bed, but was a single romp in my sack worth 3,000 miles?

The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror. He was 60 or so and had a long, white Santa Claus beard. He seemed jolly, too: He had a big belly, and I didn’t find him threatening at all. That didn’t mean I wanted to sleep with him, but his proposition had been relatively polite, and I wanted to reject him with an equal amount of politeness so we could continue toward our destination in a civil, organized manner.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m meeting my boyfriend.”

We pulled onto Stuyvesant Square, where Bill was waiting. He came over to pay, and the cabbie feigned confusion.

“How much,” he asked. “I don’t remember.”

I’m not sure why he didn’t charge the full fare. Perhaps it was a last-ditch effort to win my favor, or maybe he was afraid that I’d rat him out to the tall, nervous attorney tapping on his window. Bill gave him a 10, and the cabbie pulled away, never to be seen again—not by me, and hopefully, not by any 14-year-old girls.

As for Bill, I broke things off a few weeks later, when I agreed to give up alcohol for a month in order to help him quit. I was seven days sober when Bill told me he’d been drinking the entire time. In response, I told him I wanted to be friends. Both of us were liars.

When I tell people this story, someone inevitably asks why I didn’t write down the driver’s license number and file a complaint. But the truth is, I liked my lascivious cabbie.He was emblematic of New York itself—a place where danger lurks around every corner and behind every wheel, yet rarely shows its face if you don’t take it seriously. Catching a ride Downtown turned out to be more of a double entendre than I bargained for,but when my cabbie drove off, I smiled and waved eagerly in my best impression of a schoolgirl. I hope my driver eventually found what he was looking for: a young-looking lady in need of a ride, who doesn´t have much cash but who always thought Santa Claus was kind of hot. If such a woman exists, I’m sure she lives in New York.

Jessie Marshall is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at NYU. Her fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review. She is currently researching a book about her family’s immigration from Japan to Hawaii, and is completing a collection of short stories.