Read Online The Other Side of Midnight by Mike Heffernan - Free Book Online Page B

the ground. So I had to take out a second mortgage to pay off the car and to pay off some other bills that allow me to go taxiing so I don’t have too many bills racked up to the point where I can’t make enough to live on. I had to get a meter and a sign installed: $700. My first insurance policy: $2,500. That had to be paid up front.
    Then you’re working all night and you get this asshole that jumps out of your car at two o’clock in the morning that owes you $50. If you’re driving for someone else, you got to gas up. Now instead of making $250 for that busy night you’re only making $200. Do you know what a “water haul” is? Ever see a fisherman haul up his net and there’s fuck all in it? It’s the same thing as going to somebody’s house and nobody comes out. That’s a water haul. If they send me to Mount Pearl, that’s five bucks in gas and an hour out of my time wasted. You wait fifteen minutes because you want to make sure you’re going to get your job. So you lost an hour on a busy Friday night, and you got $5 in gas burned. You get two or three of them in a night, and it’ll ruin you. A typical Friday or Saturday night, you got $60 worth of gas gone, you bought a pack of smokes and something to eat because you’ve been working twelve hours. You got $70 left: $35 for the guy who owns the car, and $35 for yourself. You go home and say to the wife, “This is what I made.”
    She says, “Why are you doing this?”
    â€œBecause no one else will have me.”
    The other day, this lady got in the car. I got a rattle in the back. I know what it is. It’s the sway-bar bushing. It can make an awful racket if you hit the right bump. Later that day, missus phoned in and complained down to the stand. The manager told me, “You’re probably going to have to take your car off the road.”
    I called back. “Listen here, you get that lady who called. Tell her to pick the mechanic of her choice, and I’ll get a full inspection done.”
    I don’t drive a Cadillac, but I look after what I got. The thing about it is, if I lose a motor tomorrow I’m out of business. I can’t afford to put a motor in the car. So then I got to go to work for somebody else. If that happens, I got to get another job because that isn’t going to cut it. That person probably got two drivers on the car: a day driver and a night driver. The day driver wants to work certain hours, and the night driver wants to work certain hours.
    A few months back, a guy in a truck ran up the side of my car. That was $4,000 worth of damage. Buddy struck me in an F-150 pickup truck just down the road here on O’Leary Avenue. He hit me—it was clearly his fault. He told me it was his fault: “Sorry about that. I wasn’t looking.” The passenger in the back heard what he said. I was stopped, he was going, and he hit me. My insurance company contacted his insurance company. You know what they said? I’m 100 per cent at fault. I’m taking him to small claims court. [ He points to a camera mounted on the dash. ] If I’d had that in my car at the time, I wouldn’t have to prove a thing. Everything would have been on tape. It was the best $78 I’ve ever spent.
    I put this car on the road the day after the Cameron Inquiry. That’s two and a half years ago. Co-Op Taxi was the only stand that had an available licence. When I had the car on in 1997 or 1998 it was with Co-Op. If I wanted, I could leave here now and in a half an hour I’d have a taxi on at any of the stands in St. John’s. Because I got the experience. But they’re all alike. What’s better, the devil you know or the devil you don’t know? That’s exactly the way it is.
    Look, a lot of guys in the taxi industry, they’re at it because they can’t catch a break—for whatever reason. They’re not necessarily illiterate;