The Other Side of Midnight (11 page)
Donald, driving and dispatching for seventeen years
Some of the brokers are pretty tight. On average, if you drove 100 kilometres you should have about $35 for them. But see I'm a cruiser. I cruise. So if you expect $35 out of me and I'm cruising around and I'm not getting no work and I put on twenty or twenty-five kilometres before I get a job for only a run up over the hill and you expects $35 then you're cracked. I give them half of what's on the meter. My tips are my own.
For me, if you expect that $35 for every 100 kilometres, I'll give him back the keys. You can drive me back home. I'm at it long enough, and they all know me. I'll work my twelve hours. I know that at the tail end of my shift, at the ninth and tenth hour, when these weekend warriors are gone home, there's that three hour window when there's only a few cars on the streets. You're flat out then. You can make sixty, seventy, eighty or ninety bucks just cruising. All you got to do is take one from downtown and head out over the overpass with them, and that's $40 there.
But I can see where the owners are coming from. The price of everything has gone up. If you go 100 kilometres, you should have $100 on your meter. But then you take twenty for gas, and that leaves you with eighty. Then you split that, and that's forty. You're coming into an average of $35 each. Let's say, for argument's sake, a broker has got fifteen cars available for Friday and Saturday night. For fifteen cars, he got seventeen drivers for Friday night. Two of them got to do without a car. The bottom two, to my knowledge, that made the least amount of money on Friday night won't get a car on Saturday.
The real difficulty is starting off in the early part of the night. Since the bars changed their hours from two o'clock until three o'clock they shot themselves in the foot. Most people, students, used to rush home, get cleaned up and rush downtown. Now they party until twelve o'clock, and then they get the taxi downtown. They got that extra hour. You got three hours of drinking; they're priming up at home. What is it, $6 a beer down there now? Look at the George Street Festival. That's gone retarded. Thirty bucks to get in on the street. When I first started out, I used to drive my brother's car from six or seven o'clock until six or seven in the morning. There used to be seven of us out there, seven drivers. We used to be that busy that we had enough work to keep us going the whole night. Now you're sitting around waiting until around midnight before you really get going.
Allen, driving for twenty-two years
Before the bars close, downtown is not phone work. I cruise Water Street and Duckworth Street, and I'll shoot up Adelaide and look for a job. We used to tell the regular customers to go up by Mile One if they're heading west or to go up by Club One if they're heading east. You drive up and lock your doors, and people start swarming your car. Then the customer you're there to pick up might only be going up to Gear Street. But that person is a regular customer, and that's what they called us for, a run up the hill for $5.
Then you get others: “Thanks for picking me up. Take me to Mount Pearl for fifteen?”
“No way. How'd you get downtown?”
“Valley Cabs.”
“You can pay what's on the meter, or you can get out in the cold and wait for Valley Cabs.”
Out-of-town taxis aren't supposed to be down there. That's the regulation. But still and all taxis from CBS are down there taking work. Taxis from Paradise are down there taking work. What's a taxi from CBS doing down in Logy Bay Road? We're not allowed to pick up and drop off in Mount Pearl or Paradise. We're not allowed to pick up in Mount Pearl and drop off in St. John's. But we're allowed to pick up downtown and drop them off in Mount Pearl.
If those cabs are going to be at it, I got no problem doing the same. It's like a vicious cycle. When I do pick up someone in Mount Pearl, I'll haul into somewhere like Tol's Time Out Lounge. Buddy might get in the car, and I'll take him wherever he wants to go. If I see a cop around, I shut off the meter and just say, just like everyone else does, “You're related to me.”
Leonard, driving for four years
People can't afford to go out and buy new taxis. You got to make the most of what you got. You're not making enough money, and what you got is worked to death. If you see an old car that used to be a taxi stay away from it because that car is worn out and isn't fit to be on the road. If someone reports it the city got to do something about it. But other than that, there's only so many random inspections that they can get around to. That's another problem you can't fix with the number of people they got down there. I'll tell you this. If there are 100 taxis out there I'd say eighty of them shouldn't be on the road.
Sandra, driving for four years
You can make a decent living at this. It's just a matter of how you handle your money. This job changes how you prioritize. When I was getting paid once every two weeks, the day after I got paid I'd probably go get a case of beer and a little draw. That'd do me for however long. It's different now. Pot becomes a priority. I pack a lunch and make sure I got change for a coffee. I'll smoke a draw before I go, and I'll roll one for later on when I have to pull over because I'm ready to snap.
I can't say I speak for all of them, but about 80 per cent of the drivers I know smoke pot. They all got the same kind of mindset. It's one o'clock in the morning. All the customers are getting on my nerves. I'll go have a break and smoke a joint. Then the rest of the night is way easier to deal with.
You smoke more cigarettes, you drink more coffee and you eat take-out. So if you weren't doing that and you worked five days a week you could easily take in about $600 cash. But if you're taking in $600, that's not what you're giving the boss.
With the guy I drive for, he wants half of what's on my meter, and he wants me to turn on the meter as much as possible. But he expects that at the end of the night he'll see a few more kilometres than I have money. With some brokers they want you to pay a dollar and a quarter a kilometre. If I got $400, I should have about 330 kilometres. That's why when somebody asks if you can take them to Mount Pearl for $20 you take the $20. What the boss doesn't know won't hurt him. It's called “cribbing,” working off the meter.
One time, I didn't have the right kilometres. The boss said, “You're cribbing me!”
I said, “What?”
“You don't know what cribbing is?”
He assumed I didn't and went into great detail about how it's robbing and how you go about doing it. He gave me about twenty ideas on how to do it. “Now that you know that I know,” he said, “you better not be at it.”
But you do it according to the broker you drive for. There are some brokers that I won't drive for because I'd make less money. I just got too much respect for them. I wouldn't be able to do what I can do with another broker who might've pissed me off.
Allen, driving for twenty-two years
For years, while the taxi inspector was there, nobody shagged around. If you had to go see the taxi inspector, if somebody made a complaint about you, he'd sit you down, and it made you pretty nervous. People had a lot of respect for himâa little bit of fear and a lot of respectâbecause he kept you on your toes.
The last time the city had a full-time taxi inspector down there was probably in the early â90s. He was doing a good job, too. He'd be down there on a Friday night looking for cars with defects, cars that didn't have working lights and proper stickers. Stuff like that. Sometimes these big stand owners have cars floating around without proper stickers on them. The stand owner might have an extra car and an extra driver. They just stick a radio in a car and send them out. It's not legal, but the stand owner might say, “Go on and take it. Make an extra couple bucks for the weekend.” The taxi inspector had the power to stop that sort of stuff. He'd stand up on the corner of Adelaide Street and George Street and haul people off the road. If you got too many people in your car, he'd go over and issue a citation. A lot of that is on the go. There might be six or seven students heading home from downtown that'll pile up in the car: “We'll give you two bucks each to take us to the university.” But you're not supposed to take any more than four or five passengers. If you have an accident, you're not insured. The insurance won't cover you because you got too many people in the car.
There are a lot of junkers out there, too. They're only inspected by City Hall once a year. That inspection is pretty perfunctory. All they do is check the signal lights, headlights, and backup lights. They check to see if your doors open. They don't take it off the road and lift it up on the ramp.
The taxi inspector was there to prevent things like that from happening. These days, if the city needs someone to do something like an inspection someone comes over from Housing.
It seemed like we had a little bit more legitimacy when there was a taxi inspector. You had somebody to answer to. Now it's like any fool can drive a taxi. We got guys coming from Ontario and British Columbia thinking there's this big job market here and then they can't find anything. What do they do? They go drive a taxi. They're out there driving and they don't know where they're going. It's costing us regular business. The funniest one I ever heard was when I was working at Gulliver's. The taxi stand is on Adelaide Street, right in front of City Hall. The dispatcher called out, “Car such and such head over to the front of City Hall.”
Buddy radios back: “Where's that to?”
They Got to Get These Cars Moving
Gordon, driving for eighteen years
Over the past thirty years, the city has slowly deregulated the
process of monitoring who could operate a taxicab. Starting in 1976,
under Section 16 of the Taxicab Bylaw, part-time drivers were permitted.
Soon after, City Council amended the bylaw by removing the “sole
occupation” restriction which permitted part-time taxi drivers, but
only if it was their sole occupation. In a memorandum to the city, the
taxicab inspector raised his concerns that, because of the change, full-time
drivers might suffer a loss of income. But many of the part-time
drivers who entered the industry worked shifts the career drivers were
unwilling to accept, mainly those at night.
To get a taxicab driver's licence, drivers were once required to
present a letter of conduct from the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary.
But, starting in 2000, the city dropped the regulation in favour of
self-regulation, or owner operators, brokers and stand owners monitoring
the quality of their drivers. In an editorial to
The Telegram
entitled “Know Who's Driving Your Cab? Neither Does the City,” one
concerned driver stated, “The stand owners are under no onus to ensure
a review of the driver's past performance, or that it excludes criminal
behaviours that may put passengers at risk.”
I didn't like it from the first day I started, right up until now. But this province has got fuck all to offer you. I tried to get out of it a couple of times, but you know what they say about taxiing, that you'll always come back to it. No hard labour, or nothing. The industry isn't fit for human consumption. There's nothing straight about the owners. The drivers are dirtbags, people on welfare. Some of the lowest forms of life are driving taxis. There's no money at it, but combined with what they make on their welfare check, by the time they give buddy who owns the car half they're probably making $500 a week. There are a few well-to-do people out there. There are retired people at it. But when a taxi hauls up to your door you don't know what you're going to get. The driver could be the lowest form of criminal in this city, or he could be the most respectable man you've ever met. You just don't know.
The owners got to get these cars moving. They got to get people in them. If it comes down to hiring mental patients, they don't care. There's even talk that they used to go down to the penitentiary and wait for drivers to get out from doing weekends and put them to work. You can't get a good man at it no more, a good respectable man, because there's not enough money to be made for a good respectable man to go out there. What good respectable man is going to go out and put in eleven hours to come home with fifty bucks? What happens is you get the shady people driving taxis: welfare recipients, drug dealers, people who never worked a day in their goddamn life. There are a lot of investors in at it now, too, guys who own other businesses. We call them “fleeters.” They don't drive the taxis. They just sit home while another bunch is out paying for the gas to keep them on the road. The cars are complete junk. They don't care what happens to nothing.
The government doesn't know they're out taxiing. The drivers don't say they're working, and it's all cash money. I guess unemployment doesn't give a damn, and the same goes for welfare. I phoned down, and they said, “Buddy, there's nothing we can do about that. We don't have the manpower. You're only wasting your time calling us.”
Let's face it. We're in St. John's, man. What's out there? There's nothing hereânothing. There's lots of welfare. They say that for every dollar we give Ottawa, Ottawa gives us four back, and that's in welfare and unemployment checks. When you're out driving a taxi, on the fifteenth of the month and the thirtieth of the month the city comes alive. Your phone rings off the hook because the welfare people are out getting their groceries.
The tourists who come down from Toronto say, “I heard so much about your city.” The next thing, they get in the back of a cab and they're doing 130 kilometres. Buddy is probably after smoking three joints, he's on welfare, and he's probably after drinking a flask before he even came to work. It's going on. It's going on because that's the only people they can get to drive the taxis. If there was money out there to be made and the city could properly regulate the taxi business, the nice sensible man might want to hand his business on down to his son. Then you might not have these nutbars flying around. But that's all that's out thereâretards.