A Cab Ride to Remember

I had a small adventure on my way to NY a couple weeks ago.  The plan was to fly from SJC to JFK, take a cab from JFK to Grand Central, and take a train from Grand Central to Orange so I could help with the porch construction.  After my aptly-named redeye flight, I hailed a taxi at JFK.  We were cruising down the highway when I started to hear a click-click-click sound.  About a minute later there was a loud bang, which sounded like a small explosion had taken place to my right (I was sitting in the right rear seat).  The cabbie waved his hand vaguely at a truck in front of us, seemingly to indicate that they had kicked up a rock, but otherwise he kept on driving.  Over the next five minutes or so there was a steadily growing griding noise coming from the back right.   The driver did a great job ignoring this until people started to honk at us, and by the time he pulled over there was a plume of smoke trailing behind us. 

He stopped the car in an on-ramp median to take a cursory look, then got back in to drive another half mile to reach an exit.  The exit merged with another lane to the right.  The driver decided to stop in the middle of the exit and back up to the beginning of this other lane so he could reach a side street.  I was rapidly losing my confidence in his sense of judgement.  By this point, in addition to the grinding, the car was lurching about like a drunken horse, and every revolution of the tire was producing this really loud WHUMP-WHUMP noise.  It sounded like he was doing a pretty good job of bashing up his wheel wells.  He finally pulled over to try to fix the flat, only to discover that his jack didn't work (or he couldn't get it to work).  Here's a picture:

After failing at this, we got back in the car and he started driving again, this time looking for an auto shop that could help.  Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly), not many car places are open at 7am on a Saturday.  After passing the third such closed shop (WHUMP-WHUMP), he finally gave up and pulled into a gas station.  He said he'd hail me a cab, but we were pretty off the beaten path at this point, so it took a while.  Even after this, he had to argue with the guy for several minutes to take me.  Fortunately, the second taxi was in good enough shape to get me to Grand Central...just about 45 minutes later than I originally expected to be there.