The Other Side of Midnight

by Mike Heffernan

  The indoor sex trade has not been widely investigated. In fact, most studies focus on street prostitution. Because the sex trade industry is largely invisible, existing behind closed doors, the perception remains popular that there are no prostitutes in St. John’s. But the common themes in the following monologues suggest that data collected by the Sex Workers Project reflect systematic phenomena and is not merely anecdotal.

  I picked up this young girl working security on the east end of downtown. “What are you doing down here tonight?” I asked her.

  “Why? What’s wrong with this end of town?” she said.

  “This is where the hookers come to get picked up.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “There are no prostitutes in St. John’s.”

  “There are no prostitutes in St. John’s? I’ll show you something on the way there now, just to prove my point.”

  I went up Duckworth Street right to the corner of Church Hill and Duckworth Street and there was this young one stood up. She was about seventeen years old. “Do you see her right there? If I stop this car she’s getting aboard, and we’re going off and having sex. That’s what she’s waiting there for.” I went to the corner of Gower Street and Church Hill and there was another one. “See that one? She’s pimping herself out for a few bucks.”

  “You’re not serious?” she said.

  “That’s why I asked you what you were doing in this end of town.”

  “I’m not going down there no more,” she said.

  A Common Practice

  Bazil, driving and dispatching for twelve years

  If you come in from out of town and you’re looking for companionship for the night, a cab driver usually knows somebody. The girl might say, “If you know anyone looking for a date, here’s my number.” That’s a common practice between prostitutes and cab drivers. They’ll use a certain taxi on a consistent basis to solicit their business for them.

  Keep It in Your Pants

  Mark, driving for twenty-one years

  I used to drive around a prostitute, Tatiana. When she went out on a call, she never used any other taxi driver but me, unless I wasn’t on the road. One night in particular, we started six or seven o’clock and by eight-thirty the next morning her phone was still going. I did my bit and slept in the car with the seat back waiting by the phone. Every time she would come out from doing a John she’d throw the money in my lap: “Hold onto that for me.” I mean, I had a couple thousand dollars in front of me. She got out of the car that morning and gave me three or four hundred bucks. That’s a nice big pay. If she needed a loan of money during the week, or if she needed a dozen beer or a pack of smokes, I had no problem giving it to her. I knew I’d get it back, plus some.

  Tatiana wasn’t her real name. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know her real name.

  One time, she offered me money to do her. I said, “No. I’ll do you when you win a million.” That was our little joke.

  She used to say, “One of these days, I’m going to win that million, and you’re doing me.”

  It’s like anything else, I suppose. You want what you can’t have.

  The short and long of it is you got to be honest. This is not a racket to be at if you’re going to keep secrets from your wife. The phone can’t ring at one or two o’clock at night and you got to hide around the corner with the phone. If you can’t keep your dick in your pants this is not a job to be at. Your marriage will suffer, trust me on that. If you’re married, you can’t have girlfriends or flings while you’re taxiing. Somebody will see you with her, and that somebody will phone your wife. I was at home one night, and the phone rang. My wife answered. “Do you know where your husband is to tonight? He’s out fucking around on you.” Missus went on and on and on and on.

  Eventually, my wife said, “Listen, honey, I don’t know who you’re supposed to be talking to, but you’re obviously talking to the wrong person. My husband is sat right here along side of me. Would you like to talk to him?”

  My wife’s friends had a problem with it more than my wife did: “I can’t believe you’re letting him drive these women around.”

  “What do you mean, ‘I’m letting him drive these women around?’” she said. “That’s his fucking job. What’s he going to do? I don’t let him do nothing. He still got to pay the bills at the end of the month.”

  What Happened to the Business?

  Ronald, driving for twenty-five years

  Some social scientists say it is environmental influences—where the taxicab drivers were brought up, their “cultural determinism”— which has kept some tied to the underclass. Others point to economic systems and their institutions, in this case, the stand owners and the municipal regulators, a theory known as “structuralism.” Most, however, like famed sociologist Denis Gilbert, would agree that the culture of taxicab drivers, which includes bootlegging, is a “response to social constraints and opportunities of the structural conditions that generated it.”

  It was a good stand with twenty-seven cars and lots of work. And then they started bootlegging. It got so bad that the dispatcher used to have bottles of rum down at the office in the east end. If you phoned for a taxi, they used to say, “That’ll be twenty minutes, or half an hour.” But if you phoned for a bottle of rum, you’d have it right away.

  It all boils down to caring. The dispatcher didn’t care about the customer getting a taxi. He wasn’t making anything off that. But the guy who wanted a bottle of rum would get that bottle of rum right away because the dispatcher was pocketing $20. You’d get your rum right away, but you wouldn’t get your taxi right away.

  What happened to the business? It slowly disintegrated to nothing. Customer service was always good until the dispatcher realized he could make money selling booze. The owner didn’t care. He was half-cracked. They never had a psychiatric assessment done on him, but he wasn’t all there. If there were fifteen complaints against the stand in one night, he owned eleven of them.

  The Constabulary knew it was going on. Yes, Jesus, I’d say the cops bought booze off them. It’s like anything else. The cops know everything. They know who is selling drugs, to who and where and how and when. But do you bother with it? Do you gather up a task force to do it? I don’t think so.

  Hacked to Death

  Work-Related Violence

  “If someone comes up to my cab and I don’t like their looks, I’m not going to take them. I don’t care if the police tell me, and I go to jail.

  I’d rather get a hacking violation than wind up in the city hospital.”

  – Boston taxi driver, PBS: Forum 38

  “Each night when I return the cab to the garage, I have to clean the cum off the back seat. Some nights, I clean off the blood.”

  – Travis Bickle (Robert de Niro), Taxi Driver

  Each week, thousands of people frequent George Street and the dozens of bars and restaurants in the downtown core. In fact, the George Street Association boasts it has more bars per square-foot than anywhere else in North America. On any given Friday or Saturday night, thousands of people could be on the street. During the George Street Festival, a six-day event in late July, an estimated 120,000 people pass through the gates. By three o’clock in the morning, the bars have emptied and the drunken patrons spill out in search of taxicabs. Many linger around until the early hours of the morning. Assaults and vandalism are not uncommon. In recent years, the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary has increased their presence by putting more boots on the ground and stationing patrol cars at the main entrance. Closed-circuit cameras have also been installed. George Street is big business for both the city and the province. They’re simply protecting their investment.

  When other forms of public transportation are reduced, the taxi industry becomes an integral part of the nighttime economy. Unlike downtown business owners who are afforded a number of safeguards, little has been done at either the civic or provincial levels to help ensure a safe working environment for taxicab drive
rs. Yet, according to a 2010 report by Statistics Canada, taxiing is among the most dangerous occupations in Canada. Taxi drivers and police have the highest on-the-job risk of murder.

  The Newfoundland and Labrador Occupational Health and Safety Act requires that employers “ensure the health, safety and welfare of his or her workers.” Whereas in Nova Scotia the taxi licence holder is responsible for the safety of the driver, in the Newfoundland and Labrador legislation there is very little mention of taxi safety. Although the legislation requires that an employer with ten or more employees establish and maintain an occupational health and safety program, fleet owners and brokers provide little or no safety training. Within recent years, taxi companies have designated secure drop-off locations, namely gas stations, where drivers deposit cash. But safety measures are often arbitrarily implemented by the taxicab drivers themselves.

  There are important lessons to be learned from other jurisdictions. Until 1986, Winnipeg was seen as a safe and friendly working environment for taxi drivers. But the fatal beating of taxi driver Gurnam Singh Dhaliwal prompted the provincial government to create a task force aimed at improving driver safety. In fact, many cities in North America and the United Kingdom now require taxicabs to be equipped with partitions. In New York, partitions are left down during the day and raised during the night. Winnipeg’s response to the task force’s findings, including mandatory use of cameras, partitions and the introduction of a crime-reduction program, has created arguably the safest working environment for taxicab drivers in North America. They found that protective shields were “essentially valid.”

  The St. John’s taxicab industry has frowned on the idea of implementing partitions because it is felt they will intrude on the relationship between the driver and the customer. There is also the question of cost. Manufacturers are now keenly aware of the financial obstacles to small operators. Protective partitions are no longer modified police shields but specific to the needs of the taxi industry. Self-install shield kits are available at low cost and can be mounted in twenty minutes.

  Other practical initiatives have been successful at bringing some sense of security to the occupation. Taxi marshals, municipally regulated uniformed authorities or taxi company officers, add an element of policing at stands. Closed-circuit cameras have aided in apprehending perpetrators. In Winnipeg, since the introduction of closed-circuit cameras, arrest rates for perpetrators of assaults against taxicab drivers rose by 30 per cent. In Nova Scotia, the Department of Environment and Labour has initiated a practical violence-prevention plan.

  Frustrated by Newfoundland and Labrador’s lack of safety measures, one young St. John’s taxicab driver, the victim of a weapons-related assault, went before news cameras in March 2011. “There’s no barricade, and we don’t have eyes in the back of our head. It’s going to take something serious to happen before anything gets done.”

  A Hard Case

  Frank, driving for twenty-nine years

  Although St. John’s remains one of the safest cities in Canada, taxi drivers are frequently both the witnesses to and the victims of violent crime. A number of factors put them at risk, including carrying cash and working alone late at night in high-crime areas. Jacob Leibovitch, executive director of the iTaxiworkers’ Association, an Ontario-based organization, said, “Economic pressures force cab drivers into dangerous situations.” One of the key factors is that the income for drivers is so low that in many cases they’re taking additional risks on the road to make the money they need to feed their families. The pattern of assault is disquietingly familiar: some presumed minor insult results in an often severe beating by a group of heavily intoxicated males; a drug- addicted twenty-something hauls out a knife or a needle and demands cash; called to an address to pick up a fare, a taxi driver is assaulted with a weapon and robbed by two men in dark clothes; a juvenile female is charged with assault and property damage after a dispute over the fare.

  For the most part, customers are pretty good. Ninety-five per cent of them that get in my car respect me, respect my job, respect my cab. But then there are about 5 per cent that think the world owes them something and that they’re doing you a favour for getting in your cab and you’re supposed to put up with their antics and their bullshit. That’s not necessarily the way it goes. Me, personally, if you get in my car and you show me respect you’ll only get respect back. But if you show me contempt, it won’t be very long before you’re back out on the street. Let the doorknob hit you where the good lord split you. Over the last twenty-eight years, having that type of attitude is how I’ve survived in this industry. I know of a lot of guys who have been punched out and robbed. You know—different things. Thankfully, I’ve avoided most of that.

  I have to say, in the last eight or ten years, the younger crowd are much harder to deal with. It’s the drugs. When we were knocking around, the drug of choice was a bit of marijuana. Now, it’s Oxycontin, it’s cocaine, it’s ecstasy. You got Red Bull out there that’ll set them out of their minds. A couple pills, a bit of Red Bull, and they don’t know what they’re at. If you’re going to get into trouble, they’re the ones you’re going to get the trouble from. Them and the university students.

  When the university students first come to St. John’s, there are always incidents with cab drivers. No doubt. That’s the first weekend back. They don’t want to pay, or they get on with their macho tough guy attitude because they come from some little outport and they’ve been into a fight or two in their life and all of a sudden they come to St. John’s to take over. Ask any cab driver who gives them the most trouble, and they’ll tell you: university students. I don’t even bother to pick them up.

  If I can help it, I’ll pick up a guy and a girl. If I’m driving downtown at three o’clock in the morning, just as the clubs are letting out, there are maybe hundreds of people walking up the streets looking for taxis. If there’s a guy and a girl, I’m picking them up. I’ll drive right through the centre of downtown, and I’ll wait until I see a guy and a girl, or two girls, or something like that. I like to get a guy and a girl for one simple reason. He got one thing on his mind: he wants to get her home and get her drawers off. That’s all he’s interested in. He’s not interested in causing me trouble.

  You always got to be on your toes. It’s not always about getting the face beat off you, either. Drivers leave here and go to Carbonear, and when they get there buddy in the back seat jumps out—he’s gone. That driver is out $200, his time, his money and his gas, and he still never got paid. You’re also talking about the money he didn’t make on another job. If you’re going to Carbonear, that’s an hour and a half out and an hour and a half back. He’s burned three hours’ worth of gas, and he hasn’t got nothing to show for it.

  The first fare I ever lost was for $3.50. I went back to his girlfriend’s house, knocked on the door and said, “Tell that dummy, if he’s going to take off on a cab driver not to be coming out of a residential address where I can go back and find out exactly who he is.”

  It’s becoming more frequent. In the past three or four years, I’d say I’ve lost eight or ten fares. About a month or two months ago, I got a call to pick someone up on Heffernan’s Line in the Goulds. I pulled up in front the house, and a young woman came out. “Where you going, my love?” I asked her.

  “Tim Horton’s on Thorburn Road,” she said.

  “That’s a fine old haul for a coffee.”

  “I’m meeting someone.”

  When we got there, twenty-nine bucks was on the meter. She looked in Tim Horton’s, but it was empty. “He’s not here yet,” she said.

  “Who’s not there yet?” I asked.

  “The guy I’m supposed to meet. He’s paying for the taxi.”

  As soon as she said that the red flags went up. I knew something was on the go. I waited and waited and waited. Finally, I said, “I can’t wait here all day, my love. You’re going to have to pay me and get the money off of him.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I le
ft my money on the counter at home.”

  “Have you got a credit card?”

  She had every card under the sun, but she didn’t have a credit card. “It doesn’t look like he’s going to show,” I said. “Do you know this person?”

  “I don’t know him. I just met him on the Internet.”

  Mary, Mother of Jesus. I knew then that I was in trouble.

  “If you bring me back home, I’ll give you the $58.”

  I said, “Missus, I got to ask you a question. Do I look like a total idiot to you? Do me a favour and get the hell out of my car. You haven’t got the money here, and you haven’t got the money home. Get out!”

  I heaved her out, phoned the police and waited an hour for them to show up. The police do their calls in priority, and a taxi driver is not high on their priority list. I’ve sat in parking lots on a Friday night at two o’clock, waiting. You wait an hour, and then you spend the better part of another hour giving your statement. That’s your Friday night gone, your gravy—two to four in the morning.

  Later that night, Co-Op Taxi phoned our stand and asked the dispatcher, “Did one of your drivers pick up somebody on Heffernan’s Line?”

  “Yes,” he said, “She owes him twenty-nine bucks.”

  “That’s queer,” he said, “because one of our cars took her home. She went into the house, and she never came out. She owes him twenty-nine bucks now, too.”

  There you go. That’s what you’re dealing with.

  If someone is getting shot or stabbed, the guy getting shot or stabbed deserves more priority than me who is only out a bit of money. But when the police do show up, they’re real good: “Pay the man, or you’re coming with us. I’m not here for a debate. Pay the man right now, or you’re coming with us.” If you charge the person who refuses to pay, which you will, two or three months later, you’ll get a check in the mail for what they owe you.