A Fare to Remember

David Woodward carries two things with him every night when he leaves work and heads home. One is his hotel night manager’s uniform, crumpled up in a ball and ready for laundering. The other is his skateboard.

“It’s for when a cab doesn’t come,” explains Woodward, 25, who had his driver’s license suspended last year for drunk driving. “I just get on it and start riding home.”

He doesn’t have to do that often because the taxi usually arrives. “It’s great,” says Woodward, who lives in Newport Beach and works at the Doreyman’s Inn. “You don’t have to worry about all that stress, and it’s better than riding a skateboard. If I’d taken a cab in the first place, I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Like Boy Scouts of the wee hours, Orange County’s night cabbies fan out in fleets across the darkened landscape, getting people out of jams and doing good deeds for hire. A growing portion of their business involves ferrying those too inebriated to drive--or as in Woodward’s case, living with the consequences of past indiscretions.

Like night workers everywhere, however, they also see their share of travelers, insomniacs, eccentrics and, occasionally, people involved in un-Scout-like activities. “You see a different kind of people at night,” says Mark Rubarth, 43, who drives the night shift for a company called A Taxi Cab. The largest cab company in Orange County, A Taxi operates about 60 cars nightly out of its Santa Ana headquarters, each carrying an average of 12 to 15 passengers between midnight and 5 a.m.

“You end up with a different view,” Rubarth says of his 12-hour shift, which begins at 8 p.m. “You see the city in a way nobody else does. You get a different perspective on life.”

He recalls the time he picked up the woman in a bathrobe who spent $50 for a long ride through deserted streets with no destination in mind. “She just wanted to drive around,” he says. And the man with the duffel and sleeping bag who muttered incoherently about the FBI, CIA, God and his dead father--all the way from Orange County to Hollywood. “He was just whacked,” Rubarth says.

Other times he feels like a knight in shining armor. One morning he came across a young woman sobbing in the darkened street. Her boyfriend, it turned out, had just beaten and evicted her. So Rubarth drove the distressed woman to her sister’s house, free of charge.

Another time, he got a call from the home of a pregnant woman who needed a fast ride to the hospital at 3 a.m. “When I picked her up, the contractions were three minutes apart,” he says. “It was the one time I broke all the speed laws. We drove down the freeway at 120 miles an hour. I got her there in time, but I was starting to sweat.”

Driving all night, Rubarth hears lots of stories. “You’re like a bartender,” he says. “Sometimes people spill their guts about relationships. Other times they talk about their ailments--I find that kind of depressing.”

Occasionally passengers get rowdy, swinging at each other in the back seat until he pulls over and orders them out. And sometimes he picks up would-be criminals who want him to help them break the law.

Whenever a fare requests a round-trip ride to a certain corner in Costa Mesa, for instance, Rubarth knows that it’s a drug-buying mission. “I’ll drop them there,” the driver says, “but I’m not going to hang out.” To avoid having to do so, he always requests payment from such passengers up front.

His policy is only slightly different when the quest is for female companionship. “We cruise up and down certain streets,” he says, “and every time we see a girl, we slow down. They can’t make a deal in the car. They get out, make their deal, then she gets in, and I’ll take them wherever they want.”

A determined search--involving several passes up and down the street--can cost $60. “I tell them I don’t guarantee results,” Rubarth says.

On this particular night he encounters no lawbreakers. There are several late-night revelers, though, in need of rides home. One of them is Duncan McEwan, a retiree who calls a cab from the same Costa Mesa bar almost every night and is on a first-name basis with most of the county’s cab drivers.

“Anybody want to go get Duncan?” says the radio voice of Rubarth’s dispatcher at 1:07 a.m. Rubarth doesn’t have to ask for directions.

On the way home, the white-haired passenger explains his liberal use of taxis.

“The Costa Mesa Police Department,” says McEwan, 64, “has established that you can drink or you can drive, but you can’t do both. So about 12 years ago, I decided that if I were going to drink I wouldn’t drive.”

Having delivered McEwan safely home, Rubarth encounters a similar situation half an hour later in Newport Beach, where two friends out for an evening on the town have made the prudent decision to let their cars spend the night in the bar parking lot.

An hour after that he meets Scotty Arvin, 35, who has avoided the problem altogether by leaving his car at home. “I went to the club and had a couple of beers,” Arvin says. “Better to spend $10 each way on a cab than $6,000 on a DUI.”

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As the hours stretch closer to dawn, however, the clientele begins to change. First come the late arrivals from out of town--people whose planes were rerouted to Los Angeles and who were forced to get to Orange County by bus. Next are the early risers: a salesman off to the airport for a business trip to Portland, a real estate investor on the way to Aspen, Colo.

At 4:15 a.m., Rubarth makes an embarrassing mistake. He has taken a call to pick up someone at a house in Costa Mesa, but something isn’t right. After he knocks repeatedly on the door, a young couple emerge looking sleepy and puzzled. No cab ordered, they say, you must have the wrong address. “They got awakened for nothing,” Rubarth says sheepishly as he returns to his cab.

A few minutes later at the right address, all is well again. Richard Wright, a pipe cleaner for a plumbing company, is going to the parking lot of a nearby restaurant to catch his ride to San Diego.

“This is early for me,” he says, “but it’s nice. You get an edge on the world somehow.”

Rubarth can’t help but agree. “Morning is a pretty important part of the shift,” he says. “Even if you had a bad night, you can usually save it in the morning.”

He keeps his eyes on the road as he speaks, glancing vigilantly to the left and the right. Somewhere there’s another fare out there, and Rubarth is determined to find it.

“I like working nights,” he says, massaging the wheel as if it were a genie’s lamp. “Things are different at night.”