A night in the life of a cab driver

By Melanie Jackson
msjacksonpei@gmail.com

It’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday night in Charlottetown. The streets are wet with freshly fallen rain, and the pavement shimmers under the streetlights. The tires of the taxi splash through puddles, as the driver makes his way to the next pick-up location.
Brice MacLean has been driving a cab for Good Taxi for 18 months. He works nights mostly, because that’s when the fun is.
A female’s voice comes over the two-way radio, “Where are you, 44?” That’s Brice’s driver number. Brice picks up the receiver, “44 here.”
“21 Elena, Brice,” Shelly, the dispatcher, advises him.
“21 Elena. Over,” he acknowledges, picking up his clipboard and writing the address in a column where he keeps his pick-up destinations. Another column lists the payment amount he received for the fare.
We head up St. Peters Rd., into East Royalty. We arrive at 21 Elena Court. It’s a large apartment building with at least 20 units. Outside, a man and a woman stand at the front door. She’s holding a leash and there’s a small dog sniffing around the wet grass, scouting out a location to do his deed. These obviously aren’t the people we’ve come to collect. There’s no sign of anyone coming to the door, looking for a cab.
We’re parked and the engine has been running for about five minutes when I ask, “How long do you usually wait for people?”
“It depends how busy we are, but usually five or 10 minutes, or till Shelly sends us some place else.”
A few minutes later, eight young people come noisily staggering out the building’s door – five guys, three girls. As they make their way over to the cab, they quickly realize not everyone is going to be able to fit in the mini-van Brice is driving tonight. We hear them begin to argue about who is taking the taxi and who will be paying the fare. They’ve all been drinking. That’s quite obvious.
Four of the five guys get in the cab. The lone leftover male escorts the three ladies away on foot as we drive off.
One of the young men asks Brice if he can stop to buy a pack of cigarettes on the way. They’re headed for St. James Gate tonight. He tells Brice he’ll give him two cigarettes from his pack if he stops at the store and lets him smoke a “dart” in the cab. Brice accepts the deal.
We stop at the Petro-Canada gas station on the corner of Prince and Grafton Streets, and the young fella returns to the cab and lights up a cigarette, as Brice said he could. He explains that he’s out to have a good time tonight because he’s headed back to Alberta on Monday.
“And how are YOU doing tonight?” he asks, looking at me with bloodshot eyes.
I explain I am riding along with my cabdriver friend as part of an assignment I’m doing for my Journalism class, and I ask the young men if I can take their picture.
The group of them all chime in with 1.) their approval at my endeavour (a choir of “right on!”s), 2.) how “awesome” it would be to drive around in a cab all night, 3.) how great Holland College is, and 4.) how they had better see their picture in The Guardian.
I snap their picture and take their names. I make no promises about their picture showing up anywhere other than my instructor’s desk.
We arrive at St. James Gate. The chap bound for Alberta pays Brice, and tells the other three they all owe him a drink for doing so. The door opens and we set them free to roam among the cougars. We drive away, certain those boys will have a good time tonight. Brice never got his two cigarettes.
Our next call takes us to 75 Northridge Parkway, where five girls come stumbling out of a house, dressed in sparkly tops and high heels. They’re headed for what locals know as The Dirty, or Jack Cameron’s – formerly The Velvet Underground.
Immediately they ask how much it will cost them.
“$11.50,” Brice tells them.
They all rummage through their purses for their share and one girl begins counting out their offerings. She hands Brice $11.50 in toonies, loonies and quarters.
They all begin talking about the price of cabs in the various cities they’ve visited. One girl has been to New York City, another girl has been to Dubai. They tell us they’re from Summerside, and that they hate Summerside.
“Don’t go to Summerside,” the girl who paid advises, “unless you want to get knocked up, f—–d up, or cracked up.”
We drop them off and the cab is silent again.
I ask Brice if people ever complain about the price of cab fare.
“Not really,” he says, “but I have gotten some interesting methods of payment.”
“Oh, like what?” I’m curious to hear this!
“One time I got $3.87 in change, three granola bars, half of a Ziploc container – it had no top – 3D glasses, and a Pizza Hut menu.”
We both laugh. At humans in general, basically.
We head to our next pick-up: The Canton Café. It’s almost 1 a.m. when we pull up to find a lone middle-aged woman, obviously intoxicated, stumbling towards the cab.
She gets in the back seat and instructs Brice she’s going to Oak Tree Crescent in East Royalty. Brice puts the van in drive and starts off.
“Where are you going?” she asks not a minute later.
“Oak Tree Crescent, right?” Brice responds. She mumbles in approval.
The drive is silent til we get to St. Peters Road when Brice looks at me and says, “I’m not liking these new shoes I got.”
“Huh?” says the lady from the back. “Longworth Avenue?!”
“No,” clarifies Brice, “I’m breaking in new shoes.”
We look at each other and snicker a bit at her drunken state.
We pull onto her street and she warns Brice to avoid the potholes in her apartment driveway. She thanks him for getting her home.
“Once a month, my husband leaves me stranded like this. Once a month,” she says, exiting the cab.
Our next pick-up isn’t far away, at 10 Genoa Crescent.
The dispatcher comes over the radio, “Sorry, 44. Make that 98 Scarlett.”
Brice turns the van around and drives down a dead end street. He parks on the shoulder of the road and I wonder what he’s doing. He gets out of the cab, walks to the edge of the pavement and urinates. The cab’s headlights serve as a spotlight on his performance. I never thought about where cabbies had to do their business, till now.
We get to Scarlett and two girls come out of a house. Brice knows them because they refer to him by name. It’s after 1 a.m. when we drop them off at The Globe, where they will pay $8 to get in the door and hang out for a half an hour. I don’t get it.
No other calls come in on our way downtown, so we head to Tim Horton’s for a coffee and park the cab. Brice reaches beside his seat and pulls out the cold pizza he calls lunch. It’s 1:30 now.
“It’s about to get nuts,” he warns me.
The bars let out and 2 a.m. and that’s when cabs are in-demand.
“What’s the biggest tip you’ve ever received?” I ask while we’re parked and I can jot a few things down in my notepad.
“$60,” he proudly responds. “I drove a guy to Hunter River. It’s about a $30 fare and he gave me $90.”
“Holy s—! Sweet!” I say. “What the longest drive you’ve ever done?”
“Moncton Airport. $240.”
Tonight I’m learning that people spend way more money on cabs than I ever imagined.
Our next couple of pick ups are quiet and uneventful. I assume these night prowlers came up empty-handed and decided to head home a little early in defeat.
Then, it’s 2 a.m. Brice receives a text on his personal cellphone from a girl he calls a regular. She and her friend are going to meet him in front of Dooly’s pool hall on Kent Street, because it’s impossible to get near the bars farther down the street.
We arrive at Dooly’s and the girls scurry to the car, almost as if they’re scared for their lives. And rightly so. There are cop cars and drunken people EVERYWHERE.
There are so many people loitering around that they’ve poured over the sidewalks and onto to the streets. Two cop cars block the Hillsborough to Prince Street portion of Kent Street. Lights are flashing, drunk people are staggering around; it’s chaos. It looks like a riot scene.
The girls sigh in relief as they enter the safety of Brice’s van.
“Get me out of here!” one of them says. ” It’s f——g nuts down here!”
“What’s going on out there?” I ask, curious if there’s any potential news stories to report.
“It’s f——-g crazy!” she explains. “Three fights broke out! Some guy was trying to kick in the window of a cop car! Bouncers were kicking people in the head! People were pushing and hitting! The cops have the street closed off! F— this s—! Take me home!”
On our way taking her home to Winsloe, Brice gets a call for another pick up at the Zellers mall. He tells me it’s not uncommon for the dispatcher to double-up on fares at this time of night. Passengers don’t care, he says, they just want to get home.
We pull in to Zellers parking lot to find a lone figure standing by the bus stop. It’s a young boy, maybe 15 or 16. He gets in the van, behind the two girls who are still riled up from the chaos they had just escaped.
Driving down Lower Malpeque Road, the most vocal of the two girls has calmed down a little because, as she requested, Brice switched his iPod over to play her favourite song. She’s singing along and throwing her hair around, immersed in the music.
We arrive at the girls’ destination and Brice waits in the driveway til the two girls are safely inside the house.
The young boy moves up to the seat directly behind us and says, “Well, that was certainly entertaining.”
We explain the madness they had just left downtown. It’s an usually warm night tonight and I speculate that people might want to have one last rip-roarin’ drunk before winter sets in, hence the riot-like scene outside the downtown bars.
After a brief discussion about what he’s doing out at this hour (he just got off work at Boston Pizza) and a short debate on the effects of LSD (his friends are all into it now, but he’s not), we drop the young boy off at Hillsborough Development’s Community Centre, where, he says, his “intoxicated friends” should be waiting for him. Sure enough, we pull into the centre’s parking lot and another young boy emerges, greeting his buddy with a drunken hug.
Brice and I look at each other reminiscently and drive away. Kids.
It’s 2:30 a.m. and special requests for Brice are polluting his cellphone and the radio. He seems to be popular with the ladies.
We pick up four girls at Dooly’s: the same two girls we had picked up at Scarlett earlier, plus two others. They, too, are escaping the downtown madness.
They beg Brice to stop at McDonald’s or Burger King so they can get something to eat. I chime in and beg him to do so, too. It’s almost 3 a.m. and I haven’t eaten since 8 p.m. the night before. I didn’t pack any cold pizza for my late night snack.
McDonald’s drive-thru is wrapped around the building and almost onto the street. We head to Burger King where only one car is ahead of us.
One of the girls designates herself as reciter and roars out all of our orders to the poor guy on the other end of the drive-thru speaker. We get to the window to pay him; he is very patient and kind.
The girl who did the ordering gives him a tip and tells him it’s for “putting up with us.” He accepts it but says he will be donating it to the Children’s Wish Fund.
We coo in admiration as we drive away; but then quickly discuss how if that were us, we’d just put it in our pockets.
French fries are being chewed and burgers eaten as Brice drops the girls off at their respective destinations – one as far as Cornwall.
He gets another text on his cell. It’s from the same girl we dropped off in Winsloe earlier – the one we rescued from downtown. We pick her up at the same place we had dropped her off. It’s almost 4 a.m. now, and she’s heading home to Stratford.
Brice once again plays her favourite song for her and she once again rocks out to it. He waits again in her driveway till she is safely inside. I am beginning to understand why so many women entrust him as their regular driver.
We head back over the bridge to pick up a young fella in East Royalty. He’s headed for the Esso in Stratford. When he gets out of the cab, Brice tells me he’s a regular who works the morning shift at McDonald’s there. What horrible hours for a young man to have to work, I think.
We both use the washroom while there and Brice buys his second pack of cigarettes for the night. He smokes – A LOT – always with his hand near the window, though, and squirts Febreeze periodically so as not to stink-up the cab.
Two young boys are propped against the outside wall of the store. They don’t appear to be feeling very well. They meander off into the street and disappear around the corner of the building. Brice pulls out of the parking lot and I catch a glimpse of the boys again, one is bent over, puking his guts out. Kids.
His cellphone and the radio have quieted down. All the drunk people are home by now and the early-morning shift workers will be waking up soon. We get one last call to head to the China Garden restaurant on Queen Street.
We pick up a middle-aged woman with an extremely thick accent. I’m guessing Russian. I assume she’s a waitress and she just got off work. It’s 4:30 a.m. and I think to myself, “This is why education is important. I never want to be getting off a minimum wage job at 4:30 a.m.”
She is chatty with Brice, another obvious regular, and surprisingly pleasant at such an ungodly hour of the day, especially after having dealt with drunken idiots all night. She comments how she’s happy she made it through another Saturday night and that no fights broke out.
We drop her off at a beautiful home in East Royalty. It looks brand new, with a well-manicured lawn and nice flowerbeds. Maybe China Garden pays better than I thought.
I’m tired now. My eyes are heavy, my back is sore and my butt is numb from sitting all night. I ask Brice to return me to my car, speculating that I’ve gathered enough material to effectively portray a night in the life of a cab driver.
“How much longer will you work?” I ask him.
“Hopefully I can check out soon,” he says.
The clock in my car reads 4:55 a.m. when I get inside and watch Brice drive off. I’m stiff and exhausted, and I didn’t even have to do anything but observe the night’s happenings.
I get a Facebook message from Brice the next day. He drove until 9:30 that morning. He had to, because he hadn’t made enough pay and no other drivers checked in to work until then.
Later that same day, he will wake up and do it all over again.


First appeared on The Surveyor Online - October 29, 2012