It’s worth this cabbie’s while to talk a good game

SHORTLY after clocking in for his Saturday night shift, Ernest Ganem begins scanning the sky above Las Vegas for planes. Soon he sees one, and yes, it’s performing a landing pattern. So Ganem, 55, whose shift runs from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., heads to the airport to get a crack at the newly arrived passengers. He’s been driving a taxi in Vegas for 17 years, and his job has changed with the town.

“When I first started, it was the Frank Sinatra crowd: The ladies wore evening dresses and gloves, and the men wore jackets. You can’t believe how many times you got paid in chips then. By around 1995 there was the family atmosphere, because the Frank Sinatra crowd was getting older and not coming anymore,” says Ganem, a gregarious former Texan. “Those were hard years to drive a taxi. That was tough. Now, we are away from the family and we get the young club crowd. I call it the Britney Spears crowd. They tip well. The conventions changed things too. We are making more money now than ever before.”

For example, landing pattern or not, Ganem used to avoid the airport on Saturday nights. “On a slow night you can get stuck there,” he says. Taxis wait for passengers lined up in segregated lanes, each containing nine to 10 cabs, which are released one row at time to go to the pickup stand near the airport baggage door. Once your cab is in one of the lines, there is no leaving until your row is released. The area where the cabs wait at the airport is called the pits, and it has become a sort of social hub for the drivers of the 16 cab companies that serve Vegas, with time to get out of the cab, stretch and buy snacks.

Slow nights are rarer these days, thanks to the convention business. He predicts he will be picking up someone flying into Vegas for the National Assn. of Broadcasters convention that starts Monday. Ganem notes the convention schedule, and this gathering is expecting 110,000 attendees. After less than five minutes in the pit his row is released. He’s right too: His fare is a man heading to the Wynn resort for the convention. Before his shift ends, he will return to the airport three more times, and every passenger he picks up will be attending the convention.

Ganem, who has also worked in restaurant management and used to collect coins from slot machines, gets no base salary. He divides the fares he collects with the cab company, Yellow Checker Star, and, of course, he gets tips. He estimates he makes $80 to $100 a night for his share of the fares and about $140 in tips. So Ganem works his customers hard, starting with, “Where are you from?” He has a line for every hometown.

A couple of young men who hop in at the Wynn on their way to the Venetian are from Montreal. “I love Montreal. You love to eat and drink and party!” The men laugh and agree. Ganem then offers wife jokes, though he isn’t married. He concludes with “At least you aren’t from Winnipeg!” The men are still laughing as he pulls into the Venetian and they give him a good tip.

“You got to remember,” Ganem later explains, “people from Winnipeg are not French Canadians.” When customers get in the cab who do hail from Winnipeg, he offers: “Phoenix is never going to win a hockey game since they stole your team.”

Since the cab company Ganem works for charges him a flat fee for each trip, the worst are the many customers who simply want a short lift across the street. That happens a lot when the street is Las Vegas Boulevard, and you want to go from, say, the Mirage to the Venetian. In fact, except for the occasional trip to and from the airport, all of Ganem’s fares travel between casinos on or around the Strip. “This job is very repetitive. The slow nights are the worst.” Since shift assignments go by seniority, Ganem says it is hard for new drivers to get the good money shifts, like a weekend on the Strip, and so there is a lot of turnover among drivers during their first year.

There was a time when Ganem knew every cab driver in Vegas. Obviously, those days are gone. “When any of us old-timers run into each other we celebrate the occasion,” he says. On this night there are 1,189 other cabs also working the resort corridor, and each casino has a hefty cab line too. The Venetian, Ganem and other cab drivers think, has the worst driveway, because its circle creates nightmares when the arriving and departing cab lines press against each other on a busy night. On Saturday nights, the Strip is a perpetual bumper-to-bumper rush hour, added to an obstacle course’s worth of accidents, construction and closures to drive around.

Even the back roads are packed roads these days, and most passengers urge Ganem to perform acts of what he calls the “creative driving” Vegas cabbies are famous for. Example: Ganem has a nifty way into the Bellagio (which works even when the cars in the turn lane are backed up, with their drivers staring at the fountains) that I am assured is safer than it looks.

The Bellagio, like all the hotels built by Steve Wynn, is beloved by taxi drivers for offering a cab lane (at the Bellagio it runs under the lake in front of the resort) that provides a stop off for cab drivers, with a restroom and vending machines. Pulling out of the Bellagio with a couple of young women heading to a nightclub at the Wynn, Ganem reaches into his bag and gives them VIP passes. All the nightclubs give the drivers passes to spread about.

Over the course of one Saturday shift, nearly every passenger on the 28 rides he gives around the Strip solicit his opinions on restaurants, nightclubs, hotels -- even on which Grand Canyon tour to take. Yet Ganem sheepishly admits that like many locals, he doesn’t actually spend much of his free time on the Strip, preferring to work out, bike and golf. There are exceptions, of course; on his next night off he planned to take a date to “Spamalot” -- which, as a taxi driver, he was easily able to arrange. Sometimes it’s good to be a Vegas cabbie.

For more of what’s happening on and off the Strip, see

latimes.com/movablebuffet.