The Other Side of Midnight (15 page)
Cocaine used to be called the “rich man's drug.” Most people who used to be doing coke were doctors, lawyers and judges. But I'm not going to get into that very much. People my age beating around couldn't afford coke. You weren't working, and if you were working you were only making three or four bucks an hour. At that time, I think minimum wage was $2.85. You couldn't afford $100 for a gram of cocaine. But now it seems that since the oil came on stream, since they started paying people forty or fifty bucks an hour to make beds in Bull Arm, the drug of choice, even with the kids, is cocaine.
I was down to a house two or three nights ago, and a young guy and his buddy got in the car. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“Livingstone Street.”
I knew what they were going for. They were going for coke. That's how you find out about an awful lot of things. They thought they were being right secretive. Little did they know, I dropped off twenty-five people there last week.
You're hard-pressed to go around this city and find a draw of weed or a draw of hash. But if you took a handful of nickels to George Street tomorrow night and fired them into a crowd at least half a dozen of them nickels would hit off someone selling cocaine. It could be your next-door neighbour, and you wouldn't know. I'm after bringing them up to Road De Luxe, to a $500,000 house, and they're knocking on buddy's door at four o'clock and five o'clock in the morning looking for coke.
Let me tell you something, old buddy. I can get every drug in this city that you want, right now. I can leave here and in twenty minutes we'll probably have a big chunk of hash, we'll have an ounce of weed, or a kilo of coke. That doesn't sit well with me. It's the ruination of a lot of good men and a lot of good women. You go down to the jail right now and do a survey of 100 inmates. Ninety-five per cent of them are in there for drug and alcohol-related problems. Drank too much and got on the pills and got on the coke. You can be sure, drugs and alcohol will be a factor in 95 per cent of your research. There's where your problem is to. The problem isn't the joint buddy smoked on the corner last night and got stoned.
You'll find a lot of your cokeheads at the strip clubs. For whatever reason, strip clubs and cocaine go hand-in-hand. You can't find one without finding the other. If you were an undercover cop and you were looking for cocaine, all you got to do is drive a taxi, or visit a strip joint. You'll get all the information you want. That's been my experience. I don't care what strip club it isâI don't give a monkey's Jesusâif there are girls stripping, they're doing cocaine in that club. The strippers are doing the cocaine, the patrons are doing the cocaine, and the bar staff is doing the cocaine. I don't like to tar everyone with the same brush, but it's in every single establishment.
This job here, a lot of drivers are doing cocaine, and they're doing pills. For the life of me, I can't believe that there's not a drug testing policy in place. Your daughter gets her license and parks her car Friday night and gets a taxi downtown. She does the right thing. On her way home, she gets one of the cokeheads that are driving. He's wired and has an accident and kills your daughter. Your daughter is dead because of some asshole that was driving her home. There has to be a drug testing policy put in place for anybody driving the public. If you're driving a bus or a taxi and you're driving other people's youngsters you should have to be tested for drugs. In order for you to get that Class 4 driver's licence you should have to do a drug test every few months.
It's more rampant than anybody wants to admit. For whatever reason, the night shift seems to be more affected. Ten or fifteen per cent of what's on nights are drug users. I guess it's a factor of a lot of things. You're not checked, for one. It's the only job I know of where you can come to work stoned and go home stoned and nobody ever gives a shit. If you walked into an office tomorrow and you were stoned, your boss, or your supervisor, would say, “Listen, I believe you got a problem. You appear to be stoned.” You can get found out. With this job here, nobody gives a fuck. But, eventually, that is going to cause somebody's death. It's amazing that it hasn't already.
I know a school bus driver, and he has a plastic cigarette pack your father or mother might have used for rolled cigarettes. He's got one full of dope, full of joints. He got thirty or forty of them done up in cigarettes. He'll smoke some of them before his shift that night. The same guy drives a school bus, drives small kids in the daytime. How would you like that, sending your kid out to school tomorrow morning knowing the bus driver is whacked right out of his mind?
Bazil, driving and dispatching for twelve years
Coming into the taxi industry was definitely an eye-opening experience. People who are Monday-to-Friday, regular office-types, have no idea what the world is all about. Think about St. John's. We have all the amenities of a big city, but we have a small community. Everything is more hidden, that's all. You can get anything you want in St. John's. I know how to find most of it, and I don't even fuck around. I even know hookers by their first name. I see Chrissie out there, and I'm after pulling in on a cold night and letting her sit in the car for ten or fifteen minutes. I'll give her a cigarette and let her warm up. What are you going to do? It's not that busy. So what if she's a hooker? She still got to make a living.
My brother died of Lou Gehrig's disease. There were times towards the end of his life when he was in extreme pain. The only way he could get rid of the pain was to roll up some cocaine and a bit of weed and smoke a nice little joint. He would call me on Friday night, and I'd go and pick it up for him. I would never know where to find that stuff if I wasn't taxiing.
Theodore, driving for thirty-eight years
The first time I ever saw cocaine was years before it was big here. That was 1987, or maybe 1988. I picked a guy up at the Village Mall. He was full of tattoos and hung out at the pinball place that used to be there. He got in, and I drove him to Foxtrap. He said, “Do you want cash, or do you want this.” He opened up a tube of aluminum foil and there was white powder sprinkled all through it. “That's $1,000 worth of coke.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I got enough problems without adding to them.”
I was away from the taxiing for about eight years, and I went to the mainland. When I came home, I couldn't believe how much cocaine was in this town. There's pretty much a dealer on every corner. Like that one that got busted down on Casey Street. There's another one across from that, a little further west, and another one up over a store across the way. It's everywhere. I don't know why people do it. I've seen people lose their homes, their wives and their kids and good salaries all over this stupid white powder that does nothing but kill them.
I had a guy get in the back. He picked up his buddy down by George Street, and they went around the corner to a rub-and-tug. He said, “I got something for a bit of leverage with the girls.” He knocked on the door, but they'd already gone to bed.
He got out, and his buddy had me take him to Empire Avenue. On the way back, he scrunched down behind the seat, and I could hear the sniff, sniff. What he was doing was putting the cocaine in the groove of the house key and snorting it before he got home so his wife wouldn't know what he was up to.
Danny, driving for three years
I picked up a young couple on Cabot Street. The girl sat in the front, and the guy sat in the back. It was after four-thirty in the morning. I asked buddy, “Where are we going?”
“Up to Sobeys on Merrymeeting Road.” I made a right on Lemarchant Road, and he said, “No need to be nervous, man.”
I looked at him in the rear-view mirror: “What do you mean, âNo need to be nervous'? Now I am nervous.”
His girlfriend was like, “No, noâwe're fine.”
But he kept saying, “No, man. Chill out, man.”
I stopped the car and said, “You guys got to get out. No offence, but that's enough.”
The two of them were crackheads. I call them “reapers.” After four-thirty in the morning, you run into a lot of reapers. You run into the crowd that are drug addictedâthe crackheads. You know what the grim reaper looks like? Reapers look like that. They wear hoodies, and they're skinned right out. There's no weight on their bodies. That was one of my first experiences with them. I was like,
Hold on now. Is this going to happen every time I pick someone up at
this hour in the morning?
I found that after four-thirty up until about six o'clock you run into a lot of reapers. They go to crack house parties. They're running drugs, and they're running booze.
Reapers are the most dangerous people in the city. They'll feel you out right away; they'll make eye contact with you. At first, they'll usually say something stupid: “I'm just going to my buddy's house to get a few sniffs, a few snorts.” And then they usually ask, “Where are you from, buddy?” They're feeling you out. And they're looking at you, too. They're looking at your sweater, your clothes, your chains and your watch. Then they're looking up in your visor because they know cab drivers put cash up there.
We have day shift drivers who handle them differently. They're stern. They don't tolerate any bullshit. They want the money up front. One time, I asked a guy if he had the money, and there was a bit of an altercation. Since then, I try not to ask.
Here in Newfoundland the reapers kind of shocked me. I was in Toronto for five years, and I knew there was a subculture of drug addicts and crackheads. But I didn't think it was as serious as it is here. Reapers are pretty creepy and sneaky people. You won't see them out in the daytimeâno way. They're vampirish. They're reapers.
Bazil, driving and dispatching for twelve years
Two guys from down around Pasadena Crescent were going around talking about selling some meat they had stolen from Sobeys. They asked if they could pay me with it. “No thanks. I don't buy anything hot,” I said. “Besides, even if I did, how do I know you never found that in the dumpster? That could've been there all day.”
“Oh, noâthat's fresh.”
“I don't take goods. I only take cash,” I said.
I brought them to a house up on New Pennywell Road. I can't remember the number. But they went in and sold the meat, came back and had me take them down to Shopper's Drug Mart on Empire Avenue. He was going to get his methadone. On the way, he called his drug dealer to bring him his weed. They got beer somewhere, too, and paid me out of the money they got for the meat.
Sandra, driving for four years
There are nights when I get completely wigged out, like incidents that I can't shake off. You might get a pillhead, for instance, or you might get somebody who is on the rob. If you get some dude who you think might be up to no good, you know you could get accidently wrapped up in it, you might get unintentionally involved. Two or three days later, I'm like the post-traumatic stress case. You start to wonder about every customer. You start to question your own judgement. I'm wondering why I don't want to go to work. I'm wondering why I want to go home and call it quits.
I picked up this young guy on Kelsey Drive, and he had a cart at a store that didn't have carts. I knew right away something sketchy was going on. He told me he'd load up the trunk himself. Typically, to be polite, you would do it, or at least help him do it. When he was loading up, I could feel the weight of what he was putting in the trunk push down the coiled wire springs. I knew I had a load of hot gear in the back of the car. When he got in, he was all out of breath, and he told me where we were going. I knew when he gave me the address where I was going. I knew how bad that could end up. Within a three week period, people there have been arrested with weapons, and this same guy had been in a chase with the cops.
As we were going down Kenmount Road, he said, “Do you mind if I take my medicine?”
He hauled out a pill bottle and a metal car charger, crushed up a pill on a credit card and snorted it back without even trying not to be seen, without even trying to hide down behind the seat.
Frank, driving for twenty-nine years
I had a call to go up to Barachois Street behind the Village Mall. It was about two o'clock in the morning. I went there and tooted the horn, and this guy came out. “Put the meter on, man,” he said. “Myself and the old lady had a big fight, and she's gone to her mother's place. She told me to get out, so I got to move all my stuff out. I got it all packed up by the door ready to go.”
He started lugging up a few things, a VCR, a TV, a dresser.
“Let me give you a hand,” I said. “It won't cost you as much.”
I went down and he filled up the car and I brought him down to Forbes Street. He paid me, and I went on my way.
The next day I get a call from the dispatcher: “You got to call constable so-and-so down at the RNC.” Lo and behold, buddy was robbing that apartment where I picked him up, and I was helping him. But I had no idea. I told the cop where I dropped him off and everything was hunky dory. The cop believed me. He said he would call me back if he needed anything else. But he never did.
A Backyard Tour of Duckworth Street
Gordon, driving for eighteen years
A buddy of mine was driving past Kentucky Fried Chicken on Duckworth Street when a guy came running out with a ski mask on. He had a butcher knife in one hand and a bag of money in the other. Paddy's not really a fighter, but he has a good sense of what's right and what's wrong. When the guy came out of the store, Paddy chased after him. Buddy took him on a backyard tour around Duckworth Street. He climbed up over a bunch of fences, and Paddy ripped him down and sat on him until the police came. The next day in the paper: “Police apprehended a man.” There was no mention of Paddy chasing him down all over hell's half-acre and risking his life.