by Finn Murphy
A well-built tier is a beautiful thing to see and lots of fun to make. It’s basically a real-life, giant Tetris game with profound physical exertion incorporated into the mix. When I’m loading I go into a sort of trance because I’m totally focused on visualizing everything in the house and mentally building tiers. This is one of the sweet spots where—as anyone who has done repetitive manual labor understands—the single-minded focus, concentration, and hard physical work combine to form a sort of temporary nirvana. Helpers who regularly work with the same driver will anticipate what piece the driver wants next before he even asks for it, and furniture will disappear into a tier the instant it’s brought out. This makes loading go very quickly, and it resembles nothing so much as an elegant, intimate dance between crew and driver. Because I have a picture of everything in the house in my head, I’ll often leave the truck to fetch a particular piece for a particular spot.
It’s hard work. On a standard loading day I’ll spend ten to fourteen hours either carrying something heavy, running laps up and down stairs to grab items, carrying furniture and cartons between the house and the trailer, and hopping up and down a double-sided stepladder building my tiers.
In addition to the mental and physical strain of packing, loading, and keeping my crew motivated, there is also the presence of the shipper. Shippers are frequently not at their best on moving day. They are, after all, leaving their home and consigning all their possessions over to strangers. Shippers can be testy, upset, suspicious, downright hostile, and occasionally pleasant and relaxed. It’s the driver’s job, in addition to loading and carrying, to make sure everything and everybody runs smoothly.
To put it all in a nutshell, the long-haul driver is responsible for legal documents, inventory, packing cartons, loading, claim prevention, unpacking, unloading, diplomacy, human resources, and customer service. The job requires an enormous amount of physical stamina, specialized knowledge, and tact. I am, as John McPhee called it, the undisputed admiral of my fleet of one.
My share of that Vancouver job came to around $30,000 for ten days’ work. I had to pay the labor, of course, and my fuel and food. Still, I netted more than $20,000. A first-year freighthauler for an outfit like Swift or Werner won’t make that in a year.
I guess that’s worth being insulted in the mountains by my brethren.
The long-haul driver portrayed above is the kind of guy you want moving you. That’s me, nowadays. There are lots of guys like me out there and lots of a different kind. I’ve been both. My own baptism into life as a driver for a major van line was not smooth. I was nervous and cocky when I first got on the road. Those might appear to be contradictory characteristics, but they are not for a twenty-one-year-old white American male from the suburbs who’s operating way out of his element. Before I was taken on at North American Van Lines, I’d worked several summers as a local mover. I was known as a hard worker, which made me cocky, but was out on the road all alone, which made me nervous. I was consumed with getting the day’s work done, getting the next load, and making the monthly revenue goals I’d set for myself. I was careless loading and unloading and extremely touchy with both shippers and helpers. I was in over my head. At the ripe old age of twenty-one I shouldn’t have been doing that job, given my emotional maturity. The fact that I was there says a lot about the moving business. The industry will pretty much take anyone willing to do the work. I was willing enough, but lacking the other qualities that make for a good mover or a good truck driver. Almost forty years later, I am a calm, meticulous, and imperturbable driver. I am highly sought after and exorbitantly paid. That didn’t happen overnight.
You’re about to go out on the road with me, a long-haul mover. It’s a road uncongested by myth. You’ll see the work, meet the families I move, and visit with the people who populate this subculture. You’ll smell the sweat, drink in the crummy bars, eat the disgusting food, manage an unruly labor pool, and meet some strange people. But I hope you’ll also experience the exhilaration and the attraction, of the life . . . out there.
You’ll also see what really happens behind the scenes when a family calls in the van line to pursue that all-powerful American imperative: The Next Big Thing. More than forty million Americans move every year. Careful people, who lock their doors, carry umbrellas, and install alarm systems, casually and routinely consign everything they own over to “the movers” without a second thought.
I find that a bit odd, don’t you?
Come on, let’s take a little ride.
PART I
THE TRUCK
Chapter 1
PUNCHING IN
I’ve lived a good part of my life in an odd netherworld. Working people are suspicious of my diction and demeanor, and white-collar people wonder what a guy like me, who looks and sounds like them, is doing driving a truck and moving furniture for a living. The truth is, I wasn’t brought up to be a long-haul mover. I was raised by conscientious parents, educated by the Catholic Church, and fine-tuned by the sensibilities of a prestigious New England liberal arts college. None of it stuck because Dan Bartoli, the proprietor of Dan’s Service Station in Cos Cob, Connecticut, where I got my first job, nailed me at an impressionable time and introduced me to low company and hard work.
Working at Dan’s blasted me out of the sheltered, church-oriented life I had known. My baptism began the first instant of my first day at the gas station when Dan trotted out his employee orientation speech:
“The middle word of this enterprise is ‘Service,’ and that’s what we give here. The first word of this enterprise is ‘Dan’s,’ that’s me. You give service and remember that this business belongs to me, we’ll get along fine. You got that, you dim fuckin’ peckerwood?”
Before that day I can’t remember ever being sworn at. Before that day I had never heard an adult say the word “fuck.” I was fifteen years old. Dan wasn’t kidding about service. You had to wash all the windows, check the oil, the power steering fluid, the brake fluid, and the transmission fluid, wipe off any spilled gas, and chat up the customer about the latest Yankee game or town gossip, all in a fluid motion so as not to waste anyone’s time but still give full value to each customer. Dan was a master. He knew every customer’s name, their kids’ names, and the latest news from the church, firehouse, Rotary meeting, or school. In public, Dan always had the perfectly appropriate response for any social situation. It was an elaborate ritual, and regular customers would stop and get two bucks’ worth of gas just for the experience.
I don’t know why, but I felt right at home. I liked being around machines and being taught how to use them properly. (My father couldn’t distinguish the business end of a screwdriver from the handle.) I liked the responsibility too. It was a huge adolescent passage to be selected to work the night shift, from 6 to 9 p.m., because it meant I was a trusted member of the team. In my family, where the term “school night” had a religious ring and all social activities were proscribed, work was the one exception. Since I lived only a few minutes’ walk away and was eager to find some solace from my seven brothers and sisters sequestered in a too-small house ruled by the iron fist of an Irish matriarch, I was a ready candidate for the night shift.
The idea now seems incredible that a lone fifteen-year-old boy would be placed in a gas station on US Route 1 at night, collecting cash, but it was a more innocent time. Dan’s cash-management protocol was that whenever we had fifty dollars in the till we were to slip thirty into the safe and keep twenty for the bank. His instructions about what to do if we were robbed were unequivocal: “Give the Bluegum all the money, fill up his stolen car, get the license plate, and call the cops. Even your measly life isn’t worth twenty bucks to me.” I was surprised that in Dan’s world all thieves and drug users were black and from the Bronx. In my admittedly limited experience, theft and drug use were exclusive to Dan’s own employees and the kids from the even more affluent Backcountry, who were all white, privileged denizens of Greenwich, Connecticut.
The ot
her plum shift at Dan’s was any weekday after four thirty. That’s when the movers from Callahan Bros. Moving & Storage, located next door, would walk past the gas island and settle themselves along the steel median fence under the big tree at the far end of Dan’s lot to drink beer after they’d punched out for the day.
All of Dan’s gas jockeys were well acquainted with the Callahan men because we’d see them every day adding to the chain of beer can tops they’d been assembling for years between the trees. Building the chain of beer can tops was a sea change from the more ancient practice of simply throwing the empty cans up onto Dan’s roof, which had been flat with a big lip all around. That tradition ceased when it was time for Dan to replace his roof, and rather than move several thousand beer cans, the roofers just laid new plywood over the cans and made the roof flush with what had been the lip. After this improvement, the cans simply rolled off, so it was time for a new game. That’s when they started building the chain of beer can tops. At the time of my ascension from gas jockey to mover, the chain wound back and forth about six times along a distance of about sixty feet. I’ve no idea how many beers that represented, but I do know it wasn’t a true sampling of consumption, because every once in a while Dan would get pissed off at the movers for pulling some stupid antic and he’d rip down the chain and ban them forever from beer drinking on his property. That meant things would resume their normal tempo the following Monday.
I knew John Callahan, owner of Callahan Bros., because every morning he would park his car at Dan’s gas pump for one of us to fill the tank and check the oil. John would leave a quarter on the dashboard as a tip to whoever got to the car first. This would be, to my certain knowledge, the only Callahan Bros. vehicle whose oil level was ever regularly checked. The quarter was always an incentive for someone to stub out his smoke and service John’s car. John’s quarter wasn’t nearly as big an incentive as the crisp new dollar bill that Griff Harris, the insurance man and former mayor, left on the steering wheel, though. Griff Harris always had the newest-model Cadillac Eldorado, and the gas jockeys would often fight to get to it more for the privilege of driving his car the fifty feet to his parking space than for the dollar. Griff’s office was around the corner, and he and John Callahan constituted the summit of local royalty by being the only two people in Cos Cob who could drive up to the gas pumps and leave their car unattended without provoking a cataclysmic conniption from Dan.
Dan’s gas jockeys were ardent observers of the Callahan men and their habits. As I got a little older and saw the movers crossing the gas island over to the tree, their green T-shirts soaking wet with sweat or brine-encrusted with dried sweat, pounding beers in the late-summer sun, telling their stories of hard work done well, hard work done poorly, road trips, good moves, horrendous moves, my interest intensified. The gas jockeys were part of their scene in a distant kind of way, but it was abundantly clear we were not part of their world. Like the Post Road in front, and Dan’s next door, the gas jockeys were background music for the movers. We were younger, for one thing, and we didn’t do the same kind of work, for another. Especially that kind of work which was a source of pride for them and awe for us. Lots of people simply can’t do that kind of work, and we all wondered, if the day ever came, whether we would measure up and be dubbed “a good worker” or fail and be permanently dismissed as “candy-ass office muck.” We could see the scars, smell the sweat, and translate the banter. This was tough work for tough men. Because of that, no gas jockey would have dreamed of approaching the movers, initiating a conversation, or commenting on anything said, still less to helping himself to one of those frosty Schaefer cans peeking suggestively through the ice cubes in the coolers under the tree. On the other hand, the Callahan men could call a gas jockey over at any time and grill him for the entertainment of the other movers—on his sex life (nonexistent, if you don’t count masturbation), on how much pubic hair he had (also nonexistent for a late-blooming Celt), or on why he’s working for such a maniac (Dan) in such a chickenshit job (pumping gas).
For me, these periodic grillings were just another lesson in hierarchy similar to countless others I’d been subjected to at school, church, and home. It started to creep over me that maybe pumping gas wasn’t the right career for me. I’d had enough of dirty magazines, cheap talk, cigarettes, and Dan’s mercurial moods. Dan was bored, and like a caged tiger pacing all day in a circle, he exhausted his active mind with irrational acts of willfulness and racist screeds to pass the time. Dan had ended up on the wrong treadmill, and he hated that. By the time I was seventeen I knew I had to get out of there. Lucky for me, for the first and only time in my life I knew exactly where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.
I wanted, in the worst way, to exchange my light blue polyester Mobil shirt with the red Pegasus on it for the green cotton sweat-stained T-shirt festooned with the white Callahan Bros. Moving & Storage logo and the little North American Van Lines tractor-trailer. Sweat was manhood. Sitting and drinking with the boys after work and sharing the secrets of their underworld looked like a brotherhood. My American Dream was to earn one of those shirts. I wanted the right to walk up to the tree, open a beer, casually hook the top onto the unbroken chain, and be at home and relaxed; to be in the cradle, so to speak. I wanted to be in some hierarchy where I wasn’t at the bottom. Looking back on it now, I must have started out pretty low to think that being accepted as an equal by a small group of working-class drunks was a move up, but there you are. It’s the truth no matter how pathetic it sounds.
My eighteenth birthday was May 22, 1976, and that afternoon, after school, I walked into the Callahan Bros. office, filled out an application, and was hired. When I told Dan I was going to work for Callahan, he shrugged and wished me luck. I wasn’t the first or the last guy to leave Dan to go over to the movers.
On the appointed day I left my house at 7:30 a.m. for the ten-minute walk to Callahan Bros. It was humid and hot; one of those June days when the early morning temperature is hovering around eighty-five, giving you a slapping reminder of the brutal summer weather on the way. I hadn’t slept much the night before because I didn’t want to be late for my first day as a mover.
I arrived at Callahan’s at twenty to eight, and though I was early, Bobby Rich, one of the regular guys, was already there. He said, “Hi, Murph,” and looked me over as I tentatively hovered near the time clock. He asked me if I was there to service John’s car, and I swelled with pride and said no, I was coming to work for Callahan’s. Bobby nodded, showed me how to punch in, including how to hit the punch button before the ten-minute click so I’d be paid from 7:50 instead of 8:00, and led me downstairs to the employee room. It was a humble place permeated with the smell of cardboard boxes, which I’ll take to my dying day. There was a ten-seat poker table in the corner with a Masonite cover topped with porn magazines and ashtrays. Everybody smoked. Bobby sat at the table, and when I went to sit down next to him he directed me to the sprung sofa against the wall. I may have been wearing a Callahan shirt, but I hadn’t earned a place at the big table.
The guys began to trickle in, and I could hear the thump of work boots and the click of the time clock as each worker came through the door upstairs. Down they came: Little Al, the resident Mephistopheles; Ralph, the laziest drunk in southeastern Connecticut; Cuzzie, a teetotal cousin of John’s from Stamford; Billy Belcher, called Bull; Richie, a huge taciturn kid they called the Gentle Giant; Jimmy, the policeman, who could drink more beer than any three men; Howard and Joe, the two black men; David, the overweight son of the boss, christened by Little Al as The Incredible Bulk; and a couple of other part-timers. All the regulars, including Howard and Joe, sat at the poker table.
In addition to me there was another new guy that day: a seven-foot two-inch colossus named Gary Rogers. I knew Gary vaguely from Little League, where he had been the home run king. When I looked at Gary I realized how little I was bringing to this moving game. I was small for my age, chicken-chested, and scared. Gary was massi
ve and confident. He was from a posh family in Old Greenwich, and everything he’d ever done in life had been a rousing success.
TC Almy, the Callahan dispatcher, came down promptly at eight to hand out work assignments. Each assignment was on a clipboard attached to a vinyl case containing basic tools. On top was the bill of lading, which contained the vital information for the job: the address of the shipper, a listing of who was on the crew, the hourly billing rate, the destination address, and an estimate of how much time the move should take.
Moving companies like Callahan’s perform four categories of moving work: local, commercial, long-distance, and international. Callahan’s work was mostly local moving, which entails loading up someone’s house in the morning and then unloading in the afternoon at the new house. It takes the greatest toll on the body because you are handling stuff every working day. Long-haul drivers get plenty of days when they’re just sitting and driving; international moves are almost never time-sensitive, so the pace is easier; and commercial jobs—moving offices around—are mostly done with dollies and elevators. It’s the local stuff that eventually kills you or drives you to drink; more commonly, both.
I was assigned that first morning to work in Little Al’s crew and take part in a big commercial job moving a company from the second floor of a house in Stamford to an office building in Greenwich. The company was called International Aviation, and whatever they did required a lot of paperwork, because they had forty-five lateral file cabinets, all of them full. At a guess I’d say each one weighed 400 pounds.