The Other Side of Midnight by Mike Heffernan

and all of a sudden they answer the radio at four in the morning when downtown is cleaned up and they’re looking for phone work. It’s like they appear out of nowhere. But you know they’ve been on the go the whole night. You’ve watched them out the window as they blow by. You’ll radio into the dispatcher to let them know what they’re at, cruising around and not taking jobs off the phone. Then you’ll hear: “Forty-two? I hope you’re listening, because you’re not getting anything from me after four o’clock.”
    I prefer to work with the dispatcher. If I’m in the area and he wants a car, I’ll call out. I’ll tell you now, I was in on Brookfield Road and the dispatcher whacked me to the Fairview Inn. You mean to tell me there were no other cars between me and the east end? You let out your dirty digs—your complaints. The dispatcher knows you’re frustrated, but what can he really do about it?
    When I dispatched, with that many drivers out there, when I came in at eleven-thirty, I put my foot down: “If you don’t work with me now, come four o’clock in the morning you’re not getting anything off the phone.” I’d say that in order to get the drivers to work with me because the company got regular customers waiting. Those same regulars are going to be there Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday when there’s nothing doing. You got to try to keep them happy.
    The Downtown Rush
    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,