Trash Collectors

During the late 1970s, I got my start driving cab for Beck Taxi in Toronto. Their business at the time was disproportionately located in the east end, above and below the Danforth. We got calls from the projects in Regent Park and the low-income housing at Main and Gerrard, but most business came from working-class people.

It was maybe a month into the job. Business was slow; not many radio calls, street pickups had died down. A bunch of cabbies were parked in front of a bar on Queen East, hoping to take someone home who was calling it quits for the night.

I decided to join them.

Around midnight, when I was at the front of the queue, the bar door swung open and out stumbled a guy. He was about my height but maybe weighed 35 pounds more. Visibly drunk. Thick arms. Ruddy complexion. Missing a few teeth. His nose looked like it had been broken at least twice and hadn’t set right either time.

I could tell he was a brawler. The kind who didn’t give a fuck who he picked a fight with or whether he got knocked out cold at the end of it. He’d just get up and do it again the next night.

He might have been from Down East. Probably a Newfie.

He looked at me, swaying slightly, then stumbled toward my cab. I hadn’t yet learned to keep the doors locked until I was sure I wanted the passenger. He climbed into the back seat, closed the door, and slumped against it.

“Where to?”

He mumbled an address I couldn’t quite make out. I asked him to repeat it. He said something that might have been a street name or might have been him telling me to fuck off. Hard to say.

“Look, I need an address or I can’t take you.”

He said nothing. Just sat there, eyes half-closed.

“Hey. You need to give me an address or get out.”

I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He had that flat, mean stare drunks get when they’ve decided you’re the problem.

“Fuck you,” he said clearly.

I turned around in my seat.

“Yo. Get out of the car.”

There was a solitary police cruiser parked maybe twenty feet away, right in front of the bar. I could see the officers inside, drinking coffee, bullshitting with each other.

I got out of the cab and walked over to them. Tapped on the window. One of them rolled it down.

“I got a guy in my back seat who won’t get out. He’s drunk, won’t give me an address, and he’s refusing to leave. Can you help me?”

The cop looked at me.

Then looked past me at my cab. Then looked back at me.

The window rolled back up.

I stood there for a moment, watching them go back to their coffee and chit-chat. Then I walked back to my cab, opened the back door, and stood outside the car with some distance from the would-be passenger. The kind of guy who’d done this a hundred times before and didn’t care how it ended. I figured I’d wait him out. I stood there. Cars passed. Nobody looked twice.

Eventually, he growled something incoherent, crawled out of the cab, and predictably left the door open. When he was a good six feet from the taxi, I rushed into the cab, turned on the ignition, and drove a few car lengths ahead, stopped long enough to close the rear door, and then booked.

I drove. I replayed the cops’ faces. The dismissiveness. The indifference.

The Toronto police viewed cab drivers the same way they viewed the fares we transported. We were part of the ecosystem they patrolled, not separate from it. We weren’t people they felt obliged to help. We were the trash collectors.

Photo By Little Gamma Ray