Mean Streets: Confessions of a Nighttime Taxi Driver

By Peter McSherry

Short-listed for the 2003 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction

A world exists on the nighttime streets that the average person cannot envision. Taxi driver Peter McSherry recounts tales of his thirty years of experience driving cabs at night on the hard-bitten streets of Canada’s largest city. Drunks, punks, con artists, hookers, pimps, drug addicts, drug pushers, thugs, nymphomaniacs, snakes, politicians, celebrities . . . he’s experienced them all. McSherry serves up his stories with forthrightness, humour, and the occasional dash of cynicism. In this well-written and street-smart book, the author tells the rest of us about a world we can only imagine - if we dare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Sep 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781459714441

Peter McSherry

Peter McSherry has worked as a high school teacher, a truck driver, a labourer, and a freelance writer, but mostly he's been a taxi driver - and that's how he wants to be known. His first book, The Big Red Fox, about notorious criminal Norman Ryan, was an amazingly detailed work of history.

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Part One

TALES OF THE ROAD

Chapter One

ME AND THE OWNERS

My Beginning as a Taxi Driver

It must have been in July 1971 that I made the fateful mistake of answering a Help Wanted advertisement that read: Taxi drivers wanted. No experience necessary. Apply at … At the top of a dead-end street in Toronto’s west end, I found what I’ll call the 442 Taxi Garage, from which some seventy taxicabs operated, which was the largest fleet garage that I would work out of in my entire thirty-year career as a taxicab driver.

Big Alfie, the garage manager, a fiftyish hard-boiled former professional wrestler, asked me three tough questions, the correct answers to which qualified me as a prospect for employment at the 442 Garage: What is your name?; Do you have a chauffeur’s license?; and How long have you driven in Toronto? Satisfied with my answers, Alf awarded me the vital paper that informed the licensing authority that I would be hired at the 442 Garage after I was duly licensed. At the time, there was no training course for drivers. It took perhaps a month for the Toronto Police Department to issue a letter that assured the Metro Licensing Commission that I had no police record of a sort that would disqualify me, and for me to sit an examination that required a knowledge of the taxicab bylaw and a rudimentary grasp of Metropolitan Toronto, including especially the locations of the major hotels, the hospitals, and a few tourist attractions. Upon passing this laughable test, I paid a $5 licensing fee (in 1998 it was, I believe, $420!), after which I was entitled to go to work at the 442 Garage.

Peter McSherry’s taxi licence photo, circa 1979.

The first night I went out was a Friday, a premium night. Big Alfie, who had told me, You look pretty good to me, didn’t promise me a car, but he said he would do the best he could for me. When I saw the motley crew that worked at the 442 Garage I understood why I looked pretty good to him. With seventy cars to get out, day and night, at a time when jobs of any kind were plentiful in Toronto, the 442 Garage hired almost anybody who walked on the lot claiming to want to be a taxicab driver. There was a core of real taxi drivers, most of them Jews of Russian or East European extraction, some Greeks, Italians, and Anglos, all of whom made up perhaps 30 percent of the total. The bulk of the drivers — maybe 60 percent — were long-haired hippies, many of them American draft dodgers avoiding the Vietnam War, most of whom wore fairly preposterous outfits to work. The rest of the drivers, as I appraised them then and now, were outright chronic unemployables: obvious layabouts, alcoholics, drivers with emotional or mental problems, and sundry other people who couldn’t cope in life.

At the four-thirty afternoon shift change there were dozens of drivers coming, going, and waiting around in the hopes of getting a Friday night car. When he got a chance, Big Alfie sidled up to me and explained that there were more drivers than cars but said, "When the overflow leaves, you wait. I’ve got a car for you out back." He said this like he was doing me a very big favour.

Even as I waited — as dumb and inexperienced as I was — I couldn’t help but notice that some of the cabs that were going out for the night shift were in appalling condition. There were lopsided taxis with defective shocks and springs, cars spewing noxious fumes, cars with auguring engine knocks and rattles, filthy taxis that needed a wash — all heading for the streets. I would soon come to understand that the 442 Garage practical policy was that if a car can drive off the lot, it goes out with anybody who is willing to drive it. Fleet maintenance was not a huge priority in this operation, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, the licensing commission was then not at all vigilant in making such entrepreneurs conform to reasonable standards.

Then out from behind the 442 Garage came Alfie in the taxi I was to drive. It was nothing less than a derelict car. It was listing at about a ten degree angle and the engine sounded like an underpowered sewing machine. It was so filthy inside that a garden could have been grown in it, but Alfie, who awarded me this disaster-on-wheels as if it were gold dust, fixed that by wiping the interior seats with a dirty blanket. There you go, buddy, he said. Have a good night.

I was foolish enough to drive away in this incredible wreck.

These were the days of the split sheet — a fifty-fifty share of fares between the driver and the fleet operator, with the driver to pay the gas from his end. This arrangement greatly favoured the fleet operator and was predicated on the unspoken understanding that the driver would steal what he could — but never, at the 442 Garage, so much that the operator didn’t get half of a twenty-eight-dollar sheet. Within days, I learned how to steal parcels and food orders by not turning on my meter and thus not recording trips and units. I learned how to high flag fares — agreeing on a price with the fare so that income would not be recorded on the meter. Soon I understood that many drivers knew how to wiggle the plastic Chinese meters to turn back recorded trips and units and how to chop into the cables on metal meters for the same purpose — devious arts that I never bothered to master. Every 442 driver doctored his nightly trip sheet to make it conform to the unreality recorded on his meter. It was just the way business was done at this preposterous taxi company.

That first night — after doing about three fares — I was towed in by the 442 Garage’s own oft-used tow truck. This would happen perhaps six more times in the month I worked there. The tow truck driver wanted a little payoff in the form of a round of coffees for himself, his helper, and the garage guy. The gas guy expected a nightly tip; so did the guy who did the cash-in. The dispatchers got lots of tips, too — but not from me. I doubt I was dispatched a fare worth as much as five dollars in all the time I drove at the 442 Garage — and those were the days when a competent driver could get twenty or twenty-five orders a night from the dispatch.

From a service point of view, the garage was a nightmare. Drivers would give each other advice on how to steal, not only from the garage, but from the customers. Virtually everybody was high flagging, booking off, and/or scooping.¹ Many of the drivers were working stoned on grass. There were two guys — known as the Rat and the Pig — whose specialty was to take travellers to the airport, then, after being paid, charge them an additional fee to release their luggage from their trunks. Dispatched to the Women’s College Hospital, I got there in time to see a driver named Tex, who always wore a leather cowboy hat, do a complete revolution of the circular driveway, then pitch an elderly lady fare out of his cab and announce to me, "This lady’s your fare," after which he quickly made off with the much more lucrative fare that really was mine.

There was a perhaps apocryphal garage story about a scooper and a driver who had booked off — both rushing to the same fare — smashing their cabs into each other on a blind bend. One night that month, a speeding 442 Garage driver — likely in a mad dash to get rich behind the wheel of a cab — ran over two people at Winona and St. Clair. I drove past the scene and saw the bodies lying on the road.

Big Alf manipulated this circus with an odd mixture of kindness, bluster, and toughness. He was a strange man — at once warm-hearted and threatening. I remember the extraordinary patience he showed with a hopeless fellow who was trying to learn the business but just didn’t have it. Alfie was genuinely trying to help this pathetic guy develop a way to earn a living. I remember, too, how he humiliated an old rummy who came in from a day shift — reeking of booze — with a sheet that had only three or four trips on it. He shouted the guy off the lot forever in front of two dozen drivers — a cruelty that he no doubt intended as an object lesson for all. It was the short sheet, not the alcohol, that Alfie seemed most upset about.

On the last night I worked there, I was again towed in, and something I saw gave me an understanding of how and why things could be quite as awful as they seemed to be at the 442 Garage. It was about eight o’clock on a Friday night, the mechanic was still at work on a blue private car, which was up on a hoist, and two fellows I had never seen before were hanging around drinking from an open bottle of whiskey. In a few minutes the mechanic finished and the two guys drove away in the private car. Before leaving, the driver of the car said to the mechanic, Thanks a lot. I guess that will hold me till I get back from Ottawa. I’ve got to be back at work Monday morning. The mechanic made some jocular reply about damned Commission inspectors who expected people to stay and work late on a Friday night.

Anyway, on the following Monday I went in early for the purpose of giving Big Alf and the 442 Garage the golden handshake. By accident, I had stumbled on a driver from the 478 Garage — another west-end taxi concern but a business that was properly run by people who gave a damn beyond the mere fact that they were making money. The best features of the 478 Garage from a driver’s point of view were that the cars were all well-maintained (the fleet manager once got quite upset with me when I failed to mention that a taxi’s interior light was burned out), and, instead of a split sheet, the garage rented out cars on deals — charging a flat fee for the nightly use of a car. I greatly preferred this to the fifty-fifty setup — and, in fact, greatly resented the 442 Garage for putting me in the position of stealing money that I felt I was actually earning.

The two businesses were like the difference between night and day. I worked at the 478 Garage for about three months before landing work as a high school teacher — the career for which I’d trained.² My career lasted only eighteen months before I realized it was not for me and I returned to taxi driving and the 478 Garage. I was to be disappointed; the 478 Garage had just been bought by the 442 Garage and I had no doubt at all that it would soon be operated in accordance with the 442 Garage’s business principles. I worked there one shift, then went looking for another situation.

I Become a Journeyman Taxi Driver

My real career in the taxi business began in the summer of 1973, after I saw a sign on a passing taxicab that read Taxi drivers wanted, and said to see Mr. Dilby at such-and-such an address. In presenting myself at Mr. Dilby’s loft office, I started down a trail that has stretched out over thirty years — and will continue until the end of my working life, though I will likely not work in the future on a full-time basis. At this juncture, I am, irretrievably, a cabby.

Dilby was the first of several small fleet operators whom I would work for during the next twelve or thirteen years. All had between five and eight cars operating out of what I’ll call the Foobler Taxi Company, a large city-wide brokerage. None kept a regular full-time mechanic, as the 442 Garage and the 478 Garage had done, but instead sent their equipment out to be fixed. This often meant that real maintenance happened only in a crisis — after something had gone really wrong. Though some of these small fleets were better than others, in retrospect it seems to me that the general pattern was that their taxicabs tended to be less well maintained than in the ideal fleet situation, which, in my experience, is where the fleet operator actually employs his own competent mechanic. At one of these less-than-ideal concerns, maintenance was a very low priority, to the extent that the cars seemed virtually held together with string and sealing wax. What I was doing working for this fellow I can’t now fathom at all.³

According to the later comment of a relative-by-marriage, Dilby was a tough man in business, which I’d estimate to be putting it mildly. For a twenty-eight-year-old boy from the Avenue Road hill district, who had read a lot of books but who wasn’t too smart in terms of the School of Hard Knocks, Dilby was nothing less than an education. If there were any loose nickels around, Dilby wanted them. The weak and defenceless, Dilby sheared like sheep. It was a full-time job just keeping his hand out of your pocket. He had skimming his inexperienced drivers down to an art form.

I remember, in an early business dispute with Dilby, making some stupid preposterous argument designed to appeal to his non-existent sense of liberal morality. You’re such a nice boy, Peter, Dilby spat at me with considerable bitterness — and, even then, I knew why. Dilby had a number tattooed on his arm and deep welts across his back where, in childhood, he had been the victim of an abomination of a kind that, having been well-born in this soft, rich country, I could never really know or comprehend. He was a Holocaust camp survivor. He wasn’t giving any free rides in life to the likes of me, and, even as it happened, I knew in my mind that I had to cut him some slack. After I learned to neutralize the worst of his antics, I came to regard him as not such a bad guy at all. It was just that he had set up this little toll gate on life’s highway — for people like me who had been dealt a better set of life’s cards and who weren’t quite smart enough to know that it was so.

That Christmas — Christmas 1973 — Dilby and I had an argument over the rental cost of my shift on Christmas Day. All of his other drivers were paying more than the regular shift rate (many years later, I can hardly believe this), but I was prepared to quit over the issue and, because of this, I won, whereas the other drivers lost. Afterwards Dilby did something — it would take too much space to describe — that I have come to know meant that he was trying to help me learn a little lesson in life, and, in my memory, I am almost touched by it. In a sense, I think that he imagined that he was educating me, and, if it was so, he was right. It must have been that he actually liked me, for the lesson involved Dilby parting with a few bucks that he didn’t have to part with, and, in the normal run, that would have been excruciating pain for him.

Much later, in the early nineties, Mr. Dilby was ruthlessly murdered by a twisted young man whose motive was to steal a thirty-thousand-dollar ring that Dilby wore on one of his fingers. I was saddened to hear of this. In a fair world, which this one isn’t, Dilby deserved much