by Finn Murphy
We arrived at the job late because Little Al had gotten the address wrong. He had extremely poor eyesight but out of misplaced vanity he refused to wear glasses. At five feet five, with a massive beer belly and weighing over 220, he was strange-looking in an off-balance sort of way, like maybe he’d had glandular problems as a kid. He had long muttonchop sideburns, oiled hair going straight back, and a permanent wad of Copenhagen in his lip. Glasses wouldn’t have made much difference to the overall impression he created, which was that of a genial circus dwarf with more than a touch of malice. Little Al’s standard procedure when driving to a shipper’s house was to hand the bill of lading to the guy in the shotgun seat and ask him to read off the address. This usually worked pretty well, except in this case Joe was sitting shotgun. Joe wasn’t much of a reader, so when he read the street address of International Aviation, 2002 Summer Street, he told Al it was “two hundred two.” Half an hour later, when we were sitting in front of the triple-decker tenement at 202 Summer Street, Little Al insisted on looking at the bill of lading. He fished out the glasses he kept for emergencies, read the number 2002, and said, “Joe, what number did you say the shipper was at?”
“Two hundred two.”
“Is this the number?”
“Yup.”
“You call this number two hundred two?”
“Al, don’t you know nothing? Don’t blame me ’cause you’re blind. Two zero zero is two hundred, right?”
“Right, Joe.”
“So two zero zero two is two hundred and two.”
“OK, Joe. Never mind.”
So we were a little late arriving. It was only eight thirty, but it was going to be a scorching hot day when everything shimmers in the distance and dogs and cats find a shady corner somewhere to wait it out. Al handed out work assignments, and, seeing as how the whole crew had known me for years as one of Dan’s candy-ass gas jockeys, I was assigned to the file room. Such work I never imagined. I carried the first lateral file with Bobby Rich. Bobby was short, thick, and about fifty-five years old, and he’d been a mover his whole life
The file room was in a second-floor office, and the egress was down a winding staircase far too narrow to even consider using a hand truck. Bobby and I handled the first lateral down fairly smoothly, but there was no place to really grab the piece, and our sweaty forearms and hands made the seamless metal slippery. I couldn’t believe two guys were lifting something this heavy, this bulky, this slippery, down and around a flight of stairs. I was on the bottom, of course. Bobby might have taken me under his wing, but he wasn’t going to make things easy for me. Any giving way on the piece going down would have been instant death. We’d only just started, and already my arms were in agony. I was scared, and we had forty-four more laterals to bring down. I dropped the second lateral just before we got to the lip of the stairs, and the metal edge carved a crimson serpent down the inside of my forearm. First blood, I remember thinking, as Bobby whisked me to the men’s room to stanch the bleeding. Little Al grabbed some paper towels and tried to wipe the blood off the carpet. At this, the boys took pity on me, or more likely didn’t want any more blood sprayed over the shipper’s office, so they assigned me to lug banker’s boxes from the top of the stairs out to the truck.
My equally green colleague Gary Rogers was with me, and we commiserated together on how different this was from what we had expected. There were still forty-three more lateral files to be brought down, and my overriding thought was that they would be brought down. Everyone on the crew realized that this job was a bitch, but nobody ever considered not doing it. When you hired movers, they moved it. Execution was the imperative. This unequivocation was very attractive to me then, as it is now.
We finished loading at noon, piled into the truck, and drove over to Billy Graves’s West End Tavern on Fairfield Avenue for lunch. The boys ate at Billy’s whenever they were in Stamford because the beers were cheap, the service fast, and there was a big fenced-in parking lot in the back so John Callahan wouldn’t see the truck if he happened to be driving around. It had recently become a dismissible offense to drink on the job at Callahan’s. This constituted a huge break in tradition. The shift had been caused by the workers’ vote to join the Teamsters Union a few months before; John Callahan felt betrayed, and since there was already language in the Teamster contract about alcohol use on the clock, John decided to enforce it verbatim. From one day to the next, anyone caught drinking would be immediately fired. This didn’t change anything really. Everyone drank just as much and just as often, but now they had to hide their beers and find lunch taverns with enclosed parking lots.
In the preunion days, lunch would always be at a bar. On particularly tough jobs, John Callahan himself was known to show up late in the day with a case of beer for the crew. On road trips, it was the job of the guy in the shotgun seat to prepare a thermos of cocktails for the driver. At the end of a move, the shipper always offered us beer. Often our work would take us into New York City, which required a 7 a.m. start. At 7:20 we’d get off I-95 in Pelham and stop at Arthur’s Bar and drink a couple or three screwdrivers before heading into Manhattan. As far as I could tell, the moving business floated on an ocean of alcohol.
Lunch at Billy Graves’s was a frenetic affair. I had a bag of chips and kept drinking the beers that appeared in front of me. I was pretty shell-shocked by the morning’s work, so I didn’t really register the orgy of engorgement some of my colleagues were engaged in. It was as if someone had set a stopwatch and said, “OK, guys, you have thirty minutes, so get her done!” Jimmy ate nothing but drank at least seven beers. Richie ordered three calzones and drank four beers while waiting for them, drank two more beers while wolfing them down, and then drank two beers for dessert. Everyone else dined in a similar manner.
Someone had evidently told TC that maybe I’d better take it easy in the afternoon, because after lunch I was sent with Billy Belcher, Gary, and Ralph to work a small local job. Billy knew it was my first day and that the temperature was above ninety, so he sent me up to the attic to clean out chowder.
Now I grew up in an old Victorian house. It didn’t have an attic. I’d never even seen an attic, certainly never been in one, and definitely never been in one in the middle of a hot day, after a morning of killing work, after drinking four beers at lunch on an empty stomach, and after being gently hazed by a bunch of work-worn movers, most of whom knew me as one of the skinny, hollow-chested, wiseasses from Dan’s. So I didn’t know there was only Sheetrock between the rafters in an attic.
I grabbed one of those plastic clothes storage hanger things to bring downstairs, stepped between the rafters, heard a crash, and opened my eyes to find myself lying on the king-size master bed one floor below clutching the clothes hanger in a tight embrace. Looking up I could see in the sheetrock the jagged outline of a human form in free fall. Billy Belcher heard the crash and came running upstairs to the attic. He couldn’t find me and came down and saw me lying on the bed, fully involved with the clothes hanger, and observed: “Good thing these people are moving out and not in.” Gary Rogers went up to finish the attic. Billy went to call the office.
We finished loading and stopped at the warehouse, where I cowered in the truck trying to make myself invisible. Billy Belcher came back from a brief conclave with management and told me everything was going to be OK, but I needed to relax and slow down. We then drove over to the shipper’s destination house to unload. Billy told me to open the truck’s side doors to get a little air into the hot truck. I went around to the side and studied the door latch for a long time. Slow down. Relax. I figured out the door latch and opened the side door an inch or two. I had the matter well in hand. It was only a matter of applied main force to get some air to my sweating comrades. I pulled the door a little harder and it gave a little more. That’s the ticket, I thought, and I yanked hard. The door had given way another eight inches or so when someone yelled, “Stop!” I stopped. As is standard procedure, Billy Belcher had secured all
the paintings and mirrors tightly together against the truck wall, using the strap and clip that fits into grooves along the sides. One of the clips was attached to the side door. By pulling on the door I had tightened the strap against all of the glass. By yanking on the door I had broken three mirrors, four picture frames, and the top of an antique vanity.
Billy told me to take it easy, smoke a cigarette, and fold some moving pads. Gary Rogers cleaned up the broken glass while Ralph scowled at me. Taking it easy, folding pads, and smoking cigarettes was evidently his job. Billy went to make another phone call.
John Callahan came out in his car to survey the damage and then drove me back to the warehouse. It was a long, quiet ride, though comfortable because John had the AC cranked up high. In fact it was the coolest I’d been all day. John was pensive and silent. We drove into the warehouse yard, and he told me to park his car and then collapse the empty moving cartons on the loading dock and put them in the dumpster. This I accomplished without incident, and frankly, I was rather proud of myself.
When four thirty rolled around and the boys began to return from their various jobs, we saw a plume of smoke rising at the far end of the yard. John Callahan’s car, idling in the sun since two thirty, with the AC turned up full in the heat of a ninety-degree day, was peacefully melting down in the sunlit corner where I’d parked it two hours before. I had neglected to shut off the engine.
I wanted to run away. I never wanted to look at any of these people again, and I knew what I was going to do. I’d quit before I was fired. Bobby Rich came over, looked at me, and quietly said, “Let’s go punch out, Murph.” I went into the foyer where the time clock was, grabbed my virgin time card, slunk into the office, and laid it on John’s desk. “I won’t need this anymore. Please don’t pay me for today either. I must have cost you more money today than any ten guys.”
John looked up from his pile of claim forms, eyed me narrowly, paused a moment, and handed the time card back to me. “Go punch out. You’ll need this card tomorrow. Don’t be late, we’ve got a busy day.”
I heard the next day that my exploits were subject number one under the tree at Dan’s that afternoon. I didn’t attend, needless to say, but I received the distinct impression that the general view was that I had demonstrated a lot of pluck carrying the lateral files in the morning, which showed promise, and that I was such a fuckup the boys couldn’t wait to see what I’d do next and was therefore welcome.
The next morning I punched in seconds before the clock ticked ten to eight. I waited and looked for Gary Rogers, but I found out later he had called in sick.
The job was obviously too much for him.
Chapter 2
ROAD WARRIORS
After that eventful first day at Callahan’s, I settled down into the rhythm of daily manual labor. I discovered that moving suited me perfectly because I could lose myself inside the work. Many young male neurotics find out early that hard labor is salve for an overactive mind. When the old guys marveled at my intensity, they were impressed. Little did they know that running up and down staircases for hours on end, carrying dressers and refrigerators and pianos, was to me a relief from stress. Hard work temporarily shut down the constant movie running in my brain that looped around in an endless cacophony of other people’s expectations, obligation, guilt, anger, and rebellion.
My status was solid as a good worker and a good shipmate. I could be relied upon to pull my weight on the trucks, and after work, my yearning for distraction translated into an epic thirst under the tree that matched or surpassed any of the older congregants’. Work hard, drink hard. I was right there. Each day I’d punch out in my brine-streaked green T-shirt and walk over to the fence, pointedly ignoring Dan’s candy-ass gas jockeys, and dig deep into the cooler for one of those frosty Schaefer cans. The truth of it was, the club wasn’t all that exclusive.
Callahan Bros.’ arch competitor in Fairfield County was Morse Moving, based in Stamford. Both companies were agents for North American Van Lines so there was occasionally some conflict as to who got credited for booking a move. Morse operated more like a bucket shop out of Glengarry Glen Ross than a trucking company. They had an army of aggressive salesmen and access to North American’s enormous fleet. At Morse the salesmen were procuring multiple listing books, haunting mortuaries, cold-calling corporations, monitoring divorce courts, you name it. Whenever a change in personal circumstances occurred in someone’s life that might conceivably trigger a relocation, there lurking in a corner would be a Morse salesman waving a binding estimate and wearing an understanding smile. Callahan Bros., on the other hand, was so well established that they sat around in the office and waited for the phone to ring, which it did, often. The cultures of Morse and Callahan were as far apart as two entities could possibly be.
Morse had a long-haul driver named Tim Wagner, a handsome white guy in his late twenties. Tim was leasing a tractor from Morse and running forty-eight states for North American when he was dispatched to load 12,000 pounds booked by Callahan’s to Dallas. Tim showed up at 8 a.m. and took the trudge down the stairs to pick up his helpers. He was immediately struck by the conviviality of the crew and the relaxed authority of management. The air of entitled prosperity that permeated Callahan Bros. was a stark contrast to the hornet’s nest over at Morse. At the end of the workday, having experienced Callahan’s high-quality help, and further impressed with other information gleaned from the workers, Tim approached John Callahan with the idea of switching from Morse to Callahan’s. Tim’s proposal was to buy his own tractor and lease it to North American through Callahan Bros., who would provide the trailer and equipment. John would make less money by not owning the tractor, but he would have another truck on the road (North American was always hounding him to put on more trucks) and a great driver available when he needed one. They shook on the deal, and it wasn’t more than a week later when Tim drove up in his brand-new $85,000 Peterbilt tractor looking for a trailer. All John had available was a 35-foot single-axle piece of junk from the 1950s, which clearly wasn’t going to work, so John sent Tim bobtailing—driving a tractor without a trailer attached—down to Kentucky Trailer Corp., outside of Louis-ville, to go shopping.
Tim picked out the longest legal trailer he could, which was a beautiful 45-foot flat-floor moving van complete with belly boxes, pull-out tailgate, extra side doors, and a deck door. For the inside he bought forty steel cargo bars, six furniture dollies, four rubber dollies, two piano boards, two refrigerator dollies, two Mag-liner dollies, 250 large rubber bands, assorted straps and winches, fifteen sheets of plywood, a first-rate toolbox, and twenty dozen brand-new moving pads. Tim signed John’s name to everything, called dispatch in Fort Wayne, and got loaded out of Madisonville, Kentucky, the next day with a full load to Seattle. John Callahan waited almost two years to see his new trailer because Tim’s furious pace kept it out on the road. When Tim finally showed up in Callahan’s yard, the trailer had 125,000 miles on it and was completely paid for.
One midsummer Friday afternoon about five thirty, we heard the sound of air brakes behind us in Callahan’s driveway. The crew was all there under the tree, drinking beer and feeling easy and mellow. We knew that John had road drivers, but these guys weren’t a part of our work life. The whole point of having road drivers was to keep them on the road. I think John liked to keep it separate for another reason, which was the equipment. An owner-operator like Tim Wagner, who was expected by the van line to go anywhere anytime, needed to be properly equipped. The road drivers had the best and latest stuff; we, the poor local movers, got the junk.
The trucks we drove were a disgrace, and the equipment was often substandard. The equipment issue was always pretty high up there in the discussion ranks under the tree, and I was a vocal critic of Callahan management about it, as was everyone else. It wasn’t until much later, when I stopped to drop off something at Little Al’s house, that Al took me into his garage to drink a couple of beers and showed me all the equipment he had stolen f
rom Callahan’s to outfit his moonlight moving business. Everything was stenciled PROPERTY OF CALLAHAN BROS. Al told me several other employees had similar setups, and then I became aware that the reason John wouldn’t invest in equipment was that he knew it would all get stolen.
It was considered perfectly acceptable to steal from John, whether it was overtime or equipment or boozing on the clock, but I never once saw anyone steal anything from a shipper. This is not to say that we didn’t open drawers or boxes, particularly if the shipper was good-looking. Then she could reasonably expect her dresser drawers to be ransacked for a look at the lingerie and sex toys. (When I started in the 1970s, it was always surprising to find a nightstand drawer with some kind of sex toy or lingerie. Nowadays it’s surprising to find nothing. My advice to shippers is to either to pack your erotica yourself or salt the lingerie drawer with plastic snakes or a loaded mousetrap. This will scare and impress the movers; always a sound option.)
Anyway, it was five thirty under the tree, and there, right out of the truck wash in Milford, parked behind us in all its glory, was Tim Wagner’s navy blue, chrome-hulled Peterbilt hooked to the almost-new Kentucky trailer. It was very possibly the nicest rig in the North American fleet. Tim saw us there under the tree and came over. We tried to come off as cordial but unimpressed. He turned down our offer of a beer, and someone tentatively asked if he could maybe take a look at the truck. Tim said sure, and he went around and opened the trailer and popped the lock on the passenger side of the Peterbilt. We checked out the trailer first. It was a mover’s Sistine Chapel. There were rows and rows of perfectly folded, clean pads. All the equipment had a place and was stowed perfectly. The hardwood floor was polished. The trailer resembled nothing so much as an operating room scrubbed for the next surgery. Then we checked out the cab. It had a maroon velour interior with lots of gauges and lights, a large padded steering wheel, two gearshifts, and an adjustable air ride seat. The sleeper had a full-size orthopedic mattress, a seat belt, a climate control console, and a quad stereo sytem. The bed had a white goose-feather duvet, and Tim had tucked in the sheets using hospital corners. Tim’s meticulous attention to order and system stood in stark relief to our own slapdash attitude toward machines and equipment. Aha! I said to myself. This was how it’s supposed to be done.