by Finn Murphy
When the bunch of us finished checking out the rig, Tim went into the office to drop off paperwork constituting probably another thirty grand worth of revenue, came back, and climbed up into his Pete. It started with a roar and a whine. He let the air build up, released the brakes, and pulled out of Callahan’s lot with a hiss of the air dryer and a blast of the air horn.
Almost everyone under the tree had stopped drinking for a few minutes to check out Tim’s truck. But not quite everyone. On the far side of the lot stood Little Al, Ralph, and Bobby, clutching their Schaefer cans, facing away from where Tim’s truck had been.
John’s experiment with Tim Wagner proved so successful that he was keen to sign up more drivers. John liked having prime rigs out on the road with his name all over them as much as anyone. He liked dealing with long-haul drivers who were more polished than his regular crew. John also learned that Callahan Bros. was considered a prime agent among road drivers and that he personally was considered one of the straightest guys in the business, which he was. Word got out via Tim Wagner, and soon John signed up another defector from Morse named Willie Joyce.
Willie was twenty-three, not much older than me, when I first met him. He was five feet eight inches tall and weighed about 160 pounds. He had longish brown hair, green eyes, a face pockmarked from acne, and a pointed goatee on his chin. With his quick movements and his jumpsuit, he reminded me of a very intense elf.
I had worked late and it was about 7:30 p.m. The crowd had thinned out under the tree to just Ralph and Bobby and me, but the beer cooler was full. Willie pulled in with the new trailer John had just bought for him, though he didn’t have some fancy new tractor like Tim Wagner. Willie was driving an old faded blue GMC Astro 95 that didn’t even have a sleeper. He called it the Cornflake.
Willie lit over the fence and asked us if anyone wanted to make twenty bucks to help him clean up the trailer. There were no introductions. Ralph and Bobby had no use for road drivers, and Willie had no use for anyone just then except someone to work. He explained that he’d finished unloading 20,000 pounds yesterday in Chicago and had driven straight back to Connecticut last night and today because he needed to load 22,000 pounds tomorrow in Greenwich bound for Florida.
I asked him what he needed, and in reply he hopped the fence again and opened the side door to the trailer. It looked like tornado wreckage. The moving pads were strewn about the floor in unfolded piles. Plywood sheets leaned against the walls in various poses of disorder. Moving equipment lay about everywhere, and on top of this mayhem, like seracs after an avalanche, were several hundred empty moving cartons of various sizes. Willie explained that he needed to get the trailer ship-shape. We started folding pads. Every driver has his way of folding pads, and Willie instructed me on his method. They had to be perfect. He stopped me a few times and quickly and impatiently showed me exactly how he wanted them done. He wasn’t rude, exactly, just focused. He was direct, channeling his solid middle-class Stamford upbringing into this rough world of labor. He spoke in soft mellow tones with incredibly clear diction, and he sure sounded like a Fairfield county boy. Maybe even one who had gone to a fancy boarding school, maybe spent summers sailing on Martha’s Vineyard. But Willie didn’t have a filthy mouth like the preppies I knew.
While I was folding pads, Willie neatly stacked the plywood and strapped it in. Things were looking better. Then we separated by size the big rubber bands used to wrap pads around furniture and hung them on the trailer wall on hooks. Next came burlap pads, called skins, which are used for wrapping tough and dirty items like fireplace grates and garden tools. We stacked the four-wheel dollies and secured them to the wall along with the refrigerator dolly. Next, we collected the small tools lying around and put them in Willie’s toolbox. Finally we swept the whole trailer from front to back. After two solid hours we’d finished and the trailer looked almost as good as Tim Wagner’s.
I told Willie there was a cooler full of Schaefer’s under the tree, but he said he was hungry, so we headed down the street to the Starboard Port to get some dinner. Willie ordered the chateaubriand for two, along with baked potatoes, a side of fries, a side of fried clams, and a pitcher of Heineken. I thought he was buying me dinner, but he wasn’t. The ensuing rampage of consumption took him about ten minutes to finish. It looked like Willie was racing against time to get as much food and drink inside him as he could. After the last dish was taken away, Willie ordered two slices of apple pie and had his beer pitcher refilled. Then he leaned back and asked me what I was doing tomorrow. I told him I’d be working at Callahan’s. He replied that he was loading a full trailer up on Stanwich Road and needed two more helpers in addition to the crew he’d already arranged. He said he’d pay me $8.50 an hour, which was $1.50 more than I made at Callahan’s. If I was game he’d talk to TC in the morning.
Willie and I walked back to Callahan’s yard. He opened the trailer doors, laid down some pads for a bed, and told me to be at Callahan’s at 7 a.m. This guy had just worked forty-eight hours straight with an eighteen-hour day in front of him tomorrow. He’d eaten a meal no three people could have finished, drunk twelve beers, and, according to him, made over $3,000 in four days. He’d had no shower for who knows how long and was sleeping in his trailer.
I was intrigued. Tim and Willie were young guys making big money. Tim was a nobody from the wrong side of the tracks and had qualified for an $85,000 loan to buy his Peterbilt. Willie had just ordered his own new truck. In addition to that, they both had the respect and trust of a man like John Callahan, not to mention that they were willing and ready to go anywhere anytime to achieve their goals. It wasn’t hard to see why guys like Ralph and Bobby chose to ignore them. The local boys were trapped, while Tim and Willie looked like revolutionaries with their flat bellies, swollen bank accounts, and attitude of complete indifference to anything but work.
The next morning, Willie was waiting for me in the Cornflake. I’d never ridden in a tractor-trailer before. All the Callahan trucks were straight trucks. I was up so high. The engine felt so powerful. This whole rig was going to be loaded today, and three days from now it would be empty in Florida. I was in.
The shipper’s name was Lester Tabb. He had a big house in Backcountry Greenwich, where the big-money lived. We drove up and found the two pillars on the right side of the road standing guard over a long twisting driveway. Willie’s helper Jeff Wilson and Jeff’s sister Punky were already there. Willie tossed Jeff the trailer keys and pulled ahead. Jeff opened the side doors and pulled himself into the trailer. Willie told me to get out and block traffic. As Willie backed blind-side into the Tabb driveway, Jeff lifted the power lines with a long-handled broom. About a hundred yards down the truck stopped, and Jeff tossed out a few sheets of plywood. He jumped down and placed them over a flower bed, and Willie cut the wheel hard guiding the trailer through the twists while Jeff moved the plywood, anticipating the next move, protecting the landscaping, and keeping the drive wheels out of the mud. The two of them were doing a dance they’d clearly done before.
After half an hour of this, the mansion hove into view. It was an ivy-covered faux Tudor pile from the 1920s, three stories with steep gables and a slate roof. I expected to see gargoyles leering over the gutters. Willie backed right to the front door, and we dropped the walkboard into the foyer.
Looking around, I realized we had a twenty-five-room mansion to empty. I figured we’d be here several days. The first item to be loaded was a Persian carpet forty feet wide and sixty feet long. All rolled up it was about four feet high, and the five of us tried to lift it. Not a chance. We could barely pick up one end. Jeff ran back into the truck—he always ran when he worked—and returned with four four-wheel dollies. As we lifted up each section of the rug, Punky slid a dolly underneath. In no time the rug was atop the four dollies, and it looked like a mutated python from a 1950s horror movie. With Punky steering, we rolled the rug through the drawing room and up the walkboard into the trailer. Jeff had set up ropes at intervals, an
d we pushed the rug to the front of the trailer. We put the ropes around the rug and lifted it in sections, with Punky pulling the rope tight as it went toward the trailer’s roof. It was now well past 9 a.m. Willie told me to go down to the cellar and clean out chowder.
By noon I had carried everything from the basement and set it outside the truck. All the truck doors were open, and Willie could see everything, so he worked my chowder into holes in his tiers as he loaded. He was in his loading trance. He had a picture in his mind of every item in the house and was visualizing the location of the next piece in the tier. He and Jeff had been working together for years, and Jeff was prescient about what Willie would want next.
When we stopped for lunch, we all sat down inside the trailer in the shade. (Movers never eat in the shipper’s house.) I had brought a peanut butter sandwich, two Oreos, and a bottle of Gatorade. Jeff brought his cooler into the truck and undid the clasp. The thing popped open like a jack-in-the-box. Jeff pulled out two loaves of Wonder Bread and what appeared to be the entire contents of an Italian deli: ham, salami, roast beef, tuna, egg salad, macaroni salad, four kinds of cheese, French’s mustard, Dijon mustard, horseradish, mayonnaise, potato salad, napkins, cutlery, a couple of 64-ounce bottles of Coke, a couple of bottles of Gatorade, and an entire cherry pie. In a bag next to the cooler were the dry goods: a jumbo bag of Doritos, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of Bonne Maman jelly, two boxes of Fig Newtons, and a banana. While I morosely munched my sandwich and eyed Jeff’s larder, Willie, still in his loading trance, stared remotely into the distance, no doubt building the after-lunch tier in his head. Willie also knew there was no way we were going to get everything into this trailer and we’d have to leave some things behind. It’s called an overflow. Mr. Tabb would not like that, and John Callahan wouldn’t either, so Willie was trying to figure out when to break the bad news. Finally, he was figuring how to maximize the weight of the load, because he’s paid by weight. Whoever was going to take the overflow might as well take the thin metal shelving, the clothing cartons, and all the other light, bulky stuff. Willie would take the file cabinets, book cartons, refrigerators, dressers, gun safe, and dumbbells. On the other hand, Mr. Tabb would go crazy if the overflow took a week or so to get there, leaving him with no clothes. It was a tricky problem, and Willie wandered around during the fifteen minutes he allowed for lunch, idly nibbling a Fig Newton. Jeff, meanwhile, had built himself a four-decker Dagwood using half the first loaf of Wonder Bread. It was disgusting. Jeff was gorging himself like Jabba the Hutt, shoving whatever he could get into his mouth and spilling the Coke down his front. This was the second time in less than eighteen hours I’d seen someone eat like that.
When lunch was over, Willie informed us that since we’d had such an easy morning there would be no breaks the rest of the day. He told Jeff to empty the library, so Jeff brought out his prized humpstrap. (A humpstrap is a hemp mesh strap about three inches wide and ten feet long, which can be used to efficiently move large items. It is particularly useful for negotiating a bureau or dresser down a twisted set of stairs and for carrying multiple cartons.) In the library, Jeff laid his humpstrap on the floor, stacked five book cartons on it, and then laid a second row of five. He picked up the strap, twisted it tight against his chest, leaned over, transferring the weight onto his back, and carried ten book cartons (about 500 pounds) down two flights of stairs into the truck. Jeff is an animal. Willie had the gleam in his eye once he’d seen Jeff bring down over 7,000 pounds of books. If Willie could smile while he was working, he’d have smiled then.
All of us were in that sweet spot now that we’d established the rhythm. Willie built his tiers: dresser, piano, nightstands, end tables, dining room chairs, chowder. Next tier: washer, dryer, overstuffed furniture, chowder. Next tier: tool bench, cartons, chowder. We worked nine hours after lunch nonstop. By 9 p.m. the pile of chowder in the driveway was gone, and there was room for one more tier. Jeff brought out a row of six fireproof file cabinets. At 9:45 Willie closed the trailer doors; we were full. I was fried to a crisp and sat on the grass to light up a smoke. Jeff was on a ladder attaching straps to the slots on the outside of the trailer. Willie looked at me like I’d gone crazy and told me to get the rest of the file cabinets from the office.
“What for?” I asked. “There’s no more room.”
“Get them.”
Willie pulled out the tailgate, a steel platform hidden under the rear bumper, while I went inside and wheeled out the six file cabinets. He set them up on the tailgate and stacked a lawn mower, a picnic table, and the ladder on top. Another 1,500 pounds. Jeff covered the load with a tarp and strapped it all in using the side clips. It was 10:15.
Mr. Tabb was unhappy about the overflow, but he was too exhausted to care very much. Willie had waited until the end to tell him for that very reason. I was exhausted too. I climbed into the cab and tried to arrange a place to sit. The seat area was taken up with Willie’s toolbox, moving pads, and a four-wheel dolly that wouldn’t fit in the trailer. I perched there for the twenty-minute ride back to Callahan’s. I found out later that the shipment weighed 25,750 pounds. Willie netted almost five grand on the Tabb move, bringing his eight-day net to a shade less than $8,000. Callahan Bros. made way more than that. I made $140 on a day when I would have normally made $56. Walking home after Willie dropped me off, I was in an endorphin-induced euphoria. Yes, I was completely exhausted, but I was exultant too. I had been a key member of a professional team with a fixed and difficult objective. Nobody had wasted a word or a motion through sixteen hours of totally focused execution. Give me more of that! I collapsed into bed happier than I’d been for as long as I could remember.
From then on I was Willie’s lumper whenever he came to Connecticut. I even got a road trip out of it when he had to do a quick turn to Virginia Beach. He was traveling at that point with Diana, a preppie chick with a perfect figure, fine features, and a bubbly personality. For an ugly guy, Willie had a way with women. I never did understand it and still don’t. Diana had been trained for voice. She had a playful “come to bed with me” singing voice like Joey Heatherton. I’ll always remember traveling Route 17 south toward Virginia Beach crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel for the first time, at sunset, with Diana sitting cross-legged in the sleeper singing sixteenth-century madrigals. Willie told me that Diana had suggested early on that every time they crossed a new state line they should pull over and screw and see how many states they could cover. Diana rode the road with Willie for almost a year before they called it off. By the time she left they had notched off forty-six states.
Over the next year or two I worked with Willie once in a while, but since he was running the coasts he was gone for months at a time. In any case, moving had become a secondary consideration. In the fall of 1977 I entered Colby College.
This isn’t the appropriate forum for a disquisition on how I squandered my college opportunities. The CliffsNotes version is that I spent three years in Waterville, Maine, smoking as much dope and expending as little effort on my studies as I could. The reason for this, I know now, was that I had already been seduced. Dan Bartoli and Callahan Bros. had begun the fraying of my umbilical cord of blue blazers, church, junior golf, and suburban upward mobility. Encountering Willie Joyce severed it completely. I’d begun my working career at the very bottom of the employment heap at Dan’s. Having started there, I decided I’d pull myself up the economic ladder by determination and work. I’d show the boys under the tree it wasn’t the system that kept them down, and I’d show my teachers and my parents that college wasn’t necessary to achieve success. To put it another way: Screw you, everybody. The American Dream is alive and well. From now on I’ll be the captain of my ship and the master of my soul.
Colby had an independent study scheme they called the January Plan. The concept of the Jan Plan, as it was known, was to provide an opportunity for students to pursue independent study projects off-site during the long break between Christmas and mid-February. (Cyn
ics remarked that the Jan Plan also allowed the school to save lots of money by not heating dorms through the shank of a Central Maine winter.) Any project would do so long as you could find a faculty member to sign off on it. My first Jan Plan consisted of a month at a Virginia commune modeled on the book Walden Two by B. F. Skinner. The brief time I spent there permanently cured my nascent penchant for collectivism. I skipped the Jan Plan during my sophomore year like I skipped a lot of things. My junior year Jan Plan was decidedly less idealistic. Since I was flat broke, I figured I could work for Willie and write up the economics of long-haul movers as my Jan Plan. All I had to do was find a professor to sign off on the idea. I found a professor in the Economics Department who thought it was an OK idea; he wasn’t thrilled about it, but he was packing his office in preparation for his own Jan Plan in Baja, so he signed it off.
I called TC at Callahan Bros. and asked him to have Willie Joyce call me when he next checked in. Willie called a few days later and said he’d pick me up at the Indianapolis airport. He’d pay me $250 a week and cover my food and lodging.
My sister Byrne drove me to Kennedy Airport on Christmas night 1979. I had a duffle bag stuffed with North American shirts, my fleece lined North American jacket, and some notebooks. I exited the terminal in Indianapolis at midnight and just about bumped into Willie’s rig. He’d gotten rid of the Cornflake and purchased a brand-new Astro 95 complete with blue North American trim, oversize fuel tanks, a Cummins 290 diesel engine, and, best of all, a sleeper. Finally, he had a tractor to match his gleaming trailer.