Cab driver tells all about life behind the wheel — from celeb encounters to a holdup at gunpoint
Jack Trunz was exhausted the night Khakendra Pun picked him up in his yellow cab at LaGuardia Airport. Trunz’s flight from Nashville had been delayed three hours, causing him to miss a buddy’s 30th birthday party.
The last thing he wanted was to jabber with his taxi driver.
But Trunz, 30, an investment analyst in Manhattan, didn’t have much choice. Because schmoozing with customers is what Pun does, regaling them with stories of growing up in Nepal, the 77 jobs he’s had since coming to the United States in 1991, his exploits as a New York City cabbie for the last decade, and the 493-page book about his passengers, “From the Top of Mount Everest to the Winding Streets of New York City,” which he self-published.
He sells the tome from his cab for $39.99 as well as on his website, and half of each sale goes to the Ulleri Foundation, a non-profit he started to open a medical clinic in a village in Nepal.
Trunz was fascinated.
“It was honestly the highlight of my day,” he told The Post. “I said, ‘Tell me more.’ It was one of those situations where I was, like, ‘I wanna root for this guy.’ He seems like a good human being, and we need more of those.”
It turns out Pun’s faced some wild encounters on the road.
He claimed he once had a tryst with a female customer — and was held up at gunpoint another time.
In 2020, he picked up two guys from Midtown Manhattan to bring to the Bronx. One got out in Harlem and said his friend guy would pay.
“At the end of the trip, I said, ‘How are you goin’ to pay? He said, ‘I’ll pay cash.’ He came out from the backseat to give me the money, and he said to roll down the window, and I did. The next thing I know he takes his gun out and says, ‘Give me whatever you got.’ I thought my life was over,” he recalled to The Post.
“I gave him my wallet with 60-something dollars, and he also took my phone so I couldn’t call the police. He just took off and I had to figure out my way to get back to Manhattan,” he continued.
“I had no phone and no GPS, but I felt great to be alive.”
Ask Pun, 49, for a list of people he’s driven over the last decade, and he’ll provide handwritten notebooks filled with names, occupations, emails and phone numbers of folks happy to talk about him. Famous riders include musicians Patti Smith and Glenn Frey, late talk-show host Regis Philbin and actress Lili Taylor, whose picture appears in the book, along with photos of numerous other passengers who consented to be featured.
He picked punk royalty Smith one day in Midtown and took her to her apartment downtown. He told her about his book and asked, “What do you do?”
He had no idea who she was.
“She said she used to do music and was also a writer,” he said. “It was raining, and she said, ‘Wait right here and I’ll bring you my books.’ She goes to her apartment in the rain and hands me three of her books.”
What he found inside stunned him.
“I’m looking through the pages and I see she had taken a picture of Yoko Ono. I called a friend and he said, ‘You don’t know who Patti Smith was? She’s famous!’ I didn’t know that.
“The worst thing is I was waiting for the printout of my book, and so I didn’t have any copies to give her,” said Pun, who has sold about 2,000 copies of the thick read.
He said that his favorite customers have been one of President Carter’s bodyguards, as well as Terry King, the nephew of legendary “Stand By Me” singer Ben E. King.
“We were going from Queens to Manhattan to his doctor’s appointment,” he said of his 2019 encounter with Terry. “I said, ‘What do you do? He said he was a musician in the Drifters. He said he played with Ben E. King, and I started singing ‘Stand By Me.’
That’s when Terry revealed: “That’s my uncle.”
Pun — who’s divorced with two children, one of whom lives in New York and the other in Nepal, where his family still is — eventually rented a room from him in Jamaica, Queens. The two men are still in touch.
As for his worst customers? Too many to count.
“There are so many who were verbally abusive and threatening and saying that I was an illegal immigrant,” said Pun, who’s been a U.S. citizen since 2010.
“So many people are negative and terrible. But that’s part of life.”
Pun was born in Ulleri, a tiny village in western Nepal, about 6,700 feet above sea level. There was no running water or electricity; his job was to look after a herd of buffalo. He dreamed of coming to America and becoming a writer like Jack Kerouac, but he had no money.
When tourists visited, Pun always requested pencils and notebooks. “I knew that to make my future, I needed an education,” he said.
One afternoon in the late 1980s, he met an American backpacker named Steve Wright. They hit it off, and Wright’s mother, Judith, sponsored Pun at her home in the San Francisco Bay area. He attended high school in Los Gatos, near San Jose, living with the Wrights for three years. (Steve Wright died in a car accident 25 years ago.)
“I feel like his aunt,” Steve’s mom, Judith Wright, a retired teacher now living in Harrisonburg, Virginia, told The Post. “Khakendra wrote every single day, so he has real good records of everything that happened.”
After graduating, Pun traversed the United States, taking odd jobs in factories, fast-food joints, laundromats and gas stations, plus sleeping inside his car. After being rejected by agents and publishers, he self-published a memoir, “Inevitable Dreams,” in early 1998.
Lorraine Williams met Pun at a café she owns in Washington, Iowa, called Café Dodici.
“He was alone. There weren’t any other Nepalese in the area,” said Williams, who sells Pun’s books at her café. “He’s a hard worker. He’s one of those characters — people knew him and liked him. I buy his books to support him because I know he needs the money.”
Pun says he pays $1,050 weekly to rent his cab, but Uber and Lyft have eaten into his profits.
“Sometimes I make $200, sometimes $300, sometimes minus,” he said. “Sometimes I only get three riders hours into a 12-hour shift. The only way I survive is by selling my books.”
He lives in an apartment with friends in Sunnyside, Queens, paying $500 a month to sleep on their living room floor.
Pun takes a philosophical approach.
“Millions of other people are struggling to make their futures far away from home like myself,” he said. “You can cry and live in misery or keep moving.”
Jack Trunz also tried to help. He bought two books and donated $400 to Pun’s foundation.
“I wish I could have given him more,” he said. “Think about the things we complain about. I feel so incredibly fortunate to have grown up the way I did, to get the education I did, to have the job I have.
“He helped put things in perspective.”
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