What do a transsexual, a 12-year-old prostitute and a teenage kugel from Johannesburg’s well-off northern suburbs have in common?
They are all customers of Tony Marks*, a taxi driver who has been crawling the streets of Sandton for a decade, 40 to 50 hours a week.
Marks works the night shift because competition is less, and no traffic means he can travel faster. He says drivers who work the night shift meet some of the city’s strangest characters. ”If you’re on the road for long enough, you get to see everything.”
He has driven 12-year-old prostitutes going to visit ”their uncles at 11 at night for only two hours in Bryanston”, a she-male with a penchant for plastic surgery and wealthy men, as well as the many young and beautiful club-goers who puke up their good nights out all over Marks’s leather seats or out the windows ”twice or three times a week”.
The 35-year-old cabbie has even driven into the middle of a peculiar ceremony. It was about midnight and he was called to Orange Grove, a north-eastern suburb in Johannesburg. He drove in to find a garden littered with burning candles. ”I thought it was early Christmas celebrations,” says Marks. ”Then I see a completely naked chick running around the house in circles and two guys dressed in all white cloaks like the Ku Klux Klan running after her.
”Another guy dressed the same, but without the mask, comes out of the house. His head was completely shaved but he had a long piece of white hair at the back. So he got into the cab and I asked him while we were driving what they were doing.
”He said: ‘This is our regular church meeting. This is part of our ritual.’ So I asked him what exactly do they do with the chick, and he said I wouldn’t understand. When I asked him how I could join in on such a cool ritual, he got weird and I decided it was best to end the conversation.”
However, Marks now refuses to enter people’s driveways after a man locked him in and threatened to kill him. The man’s hand was tucked underneath his jersey, and Marks was convinced he was about to be shot.
His favourite clients are the drunken teenagers he collects from clubs around Johannesburg. He says the things they talk about are enough to leave you ”motionless”.
”Last week I picked up these four 14-year-old girls from a party in Balfour Park. They get in the car and straight away the one says to the other: ‘I hate her; she’s such a bitch. She knew that I liked him. And she still gave him head. I was supposed to give him head tonight.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and they were talking like I wasn’t even there.”
Marks has ”hundreds” of reliable customers, mostly from the city’s northern suburbs, and can get up to 100 calls on a busy Saturday night.
When asked how he has maintained such a reliable clientele, Marks says: ”You must make them feel at home. Taxis don’t have a good name when it comes to safety, and if you make [clients] feel safe in your car, they will always use you again.”
His years in the industry have also taught him how to spot ”dodgy” customers — those who do not pay.
”If a guy gets into the car and says, ‘I’m just going to visit my friend in Hillbrow for one hour,’ you know he’s going to score drugs and when he’s finished, he won’t have money to pay you, so you demand for the money upfront.
”Or if a girl gets into the car and says, ‘I’m just going to visit my uncle in Sandton for two hours,’ and it’s 11pm in the night, you know she’s a prostitute and you should ask her for money upfront too.”
* Not his real name