by Finn Murphy
Willie was in the forty-eight-state fleet for North American. Long-haul moving in the winter is more difficult. There’s less coast-to-coast work and many more smaller, short-haul moves. It’s a challenge because short-haul point-to-point moving can keep a driver away from home even longer than usual. And, there’s more actual work; the more short-hauls you do, the more loading and unloading, which means more labor to hire. This exacerbates the most intractable problem a driver encounters on the road, which is finding good help. It’s expensive to keep a helper with you all the time and can also become annoying. You’re with this person constantly, and if the chemistry’s wrong, things can get ugly fast. My call to Willie answered his own dilemma perfectly. We had worked together previously so we knew each other’s habits, and Willie wanted someone he could work with through the worst part of the winter, but he didn’t want a permanent person on his payroll.
We went everywhere in those six weeks. I had my first huevos rancheros in Laredo, Texas; stepped on the ice of a frozen Lake Superior in Duluth; bailed Willie out of jail in Davenport, Iowa; drove through Holcomb, Kansas—the scene of the murders that Truman Capote had memorialized in In Cold Blood—on a spooky, snowy night; drank my first Coors in Durango and ate a buffalo steak at the Buckhorn Exchange in Denver. We drove across the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico (we were moving the commanding officer), played the slots in Vegas, descended Grapevine into Los Angeles, ate jambalaya in Baton Rouge, and nearly jackknifed the truck on black ice outside of Flagstaff; I dipped my toes in the Pacific Ocean underneath the Santa Monica Pier. I learned firsthand about life in the truckstops and how movers were treated as pariahs. I learned about the van line/agent system and listened to other movers talk about loads, revenue, and tricks of the trade. It was a deep immersion into the intricacies of long-haul moving, and I loved every minute of it.
I returned to Colby in mid-February 1980 with $1,500 in my pocket and the conviction that, however silly it sounded to other people, I liked meeting and getting to know the people we moved and I liked the physical labor. Driving a lot of miles wasn’t so great, nor was truckstop living, but the rewards of the work, and the money, made up for a lot. The last thing I brought home with me was the certain knowledge that a long-haul mover made a minimum of $2,000 a week and sometimes much more. I couldn’t put that thought away. I went back to college, studied reasonably hard, but more or less continued my idiotic life there. Something had to change, and the form of that change was beginning to coalesce into a plan. Certain people were not going to like my plan.
My stint with Willie had cleaned up my financial difficulties, and my Jan Plan on the economics of long-haul truckers received a passing grade. Whatever else it said, that report contained a nugget of truth: A young man with no prospects, no connections, and no money could launch himself by becoming a driver for a van line. For Willie, work was an enforced savings plan, which would finance his future acquisition of the entire moving industry. Willie was a renegade with a hot temper, and he knew he’d never make it in the traditional workforce. I too had decided, for similar reasons, that I’d be self-employed for life and I’d need a nest egg. Most important of all, becoming a long-haul driver would free me from the callow existence I had fashioned at Colby College.
My parents came up to Maine that May to bring some of my stuff down to Connecticut for the summer vacation. I hosted a cocktail party and invited a group of friends and professors to meet them. My father, who had never attended college and therefore had rigid ideas as to what college life should be like, heartily approved. I can see him standing next to the little bar setup I’d made (I even hired a bartender for the occasion, thanks to my flush bank account), chatting amiably with our East German exchange professor. My father stood there smoking his pipe and sipping his scotch, no doubt thinking that an informal exchange of ideas with a real Communist over Johnnie Walker fit perfectly within his fixed ideal of a liberal arts college social. He and my mother schmoozed the profs and my friends. I wanted them to have a particularly good time because very soon we were going to have the big talk.
The next morning, after croquet and mimosas on the quad, I suggested to my parents we take a stroll. The three of us walked around the campus and I finally introduced the topic that had been on my mind since returning to Maine from my road trip with Willie.
“I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”
“What’s that?” asked my father.
“Well, the good news is I’ve got a high-paying job working for myself where I can put some money away for whatever future I might have. The bad news is that I’m not planning to come back here and finish my degree.”
“Surely this job, whatever it is,” said my father, “will be available a year from now. We’ve seen what you’ve done here; you have nice friends and seem to have established some friendships with your professors. Your grades have really improved, and, well, you seem to have built quite a comfortable life here.”
“Well, that’s right. In a way it’s too comfortable.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m ready to get on with things. You’re seeing the best of what goes on here. You’re not seeing, and I don’t want you to see, the other side. I’m wasting a lot of time and a lot of your money, and I think I’ve taken everything this place can offer me.”
“Well, one thing this place can offer you is a college degree, if you finish.”
“Yes, that’s true. If I finish. The thing is. . . another year here might finish me first.”
“In what way?”
“Well, you saw the bar setup, you saw my long-haired friends. I didn’t want to get into this, but I’m smoking a lot of pot. In addition to that, my professors are leaving, my friends are all graduating . . . If I stay here, it’s going to be miserable.”
“It’s only another year. It will go by so fast,” my mother chimed in.
“To you maybe it will. To me it won’t.”
“What’s this job you mentioned?” My father changed the subject.
“Well, I talked to John Callahan, and he told me he had a truck available. He said when I come home later this month he’ll have one of the guys teach me how to drive it. After some practice I’ll take the tractor-trailer test and get my commercial driver’s license. John told me that North American is desperate for drivers, so he’ll lease me the truck and contract me to North American into their long-haul fleet. I’ll be making almost a hundred grand a year.”
There was a long pause while we all pretended to take in the vista of the forest blanketing the hills of Central Maine.
“You want to become a truck driver?”
“Well, yes. For now.”
“And you want to quit college after you’ve completed three years . . . to become a truck driver?”
“That’s right.”
“I think you should finish your degree,” my father snapped. “After that you can do whatever you want.”
“Actually,” I said evenly, “I can do whatever I want right now.”
“Not under my roof you can’t.”
“Jack,” cut in my mother, “Jack, let’s talk about this later.” My mother had come in as peacemaker, and my father wanted to escalate. This was opposite their traditional roles.
They went off back to the motel in town. I was relatively sanguine. Things might have gone much worse.
They put my stuff in their car and returned to Connecticut.
We never did talk about it in any real way ever again.
I finished my junior year with the best grades I’d ever gotten and moved into the basement at the family house in Cos Cob. I spent the early summer working local for Callahan’s. After work, instead of drinking beer under the tree, I’d hook up the old International Harvester tractor to a 35-foot trailer and head up to St. Catherine’s parking lot. There I’d set out traffic cones and practice backing up the trailer, parking, and shifting gears. I got my CDL in late June of 1980, and on July 2, I called up my
first dispatcher and got my first move: 22,000 pounds, a full load, from Mount Holly, New Jersey, to Asheville, North Carolina. I went home and told my parents I’d be hitting the road the next morning. That night my father came down to the basement. In his hand he had some papers.
“Since you appear to be set on this course of action, an action which you are aware I strongly disagree with, I thought we might finalize some financial arrangements.”
“Sure,” I said.
“This first page is the tuition we’ve paid to Colby for the past three years, which we’d like you to pay back. The next page is the rent you owe us for the past three summers. The third page is the rent you’ll pay if you want to continue occupying these premises.”
I stared at him in disbelief. Then my incredulity turned to anger. I shouted at him, “You fucking asshole!”
“Don’t use that language in my house.”
“I won’t use anything in your goddamn house.”
I packed up my clothes and went down to Callahan’s. At least I’d have free storage.
That night I slept in the sleeper of the gleaming new Astro 95 that John Callahan had just bought for me. I was up early and crossed the George Washington Bridge in the dawn’s early light. I could just make out the profile of the Tappan Zee Bridge upriver. Bridges, ha! It’d been a rough few months of bridges, crossing some and burning some, but everything had been reduced to simplicity. I was free.
My parents and I didn’t speak for two years.
I was a long-haul trucker now.
Chapter 3
TENDERFOOT
The first rule of truck driving is: Don’t let anyone ever tell you what to do with your truck. I failed my first test of this precept early on and never failed again.
I was only about four months into the job with North American and still pretty green when I moved a guy named Mel King from Greenwich to Richmond, Virginia. Mr. King was some kind of big executive and conceived an instant dislike for me. The loading part in Greenwich went smoothly, mostly because I had hired Callahan’s local crew for helpers.
It was at destination where things began to unravel. I had arrived at Mr. King’s on schedule with two helpers from the local agent and a full truck loaded with his stuff. Mr. King’s dream house had one of those long, curving driveways that the Richmond exurbs sprout like anthrax spores. I haven’t any good reason to explain it but I cannot stand Richmond. I call the whole area a hotbed of social rest. The term is not original with me but it works. It probably has something to do with a string of problem shippers but I don’t know. I surveyed the driveway and decided that even if I could get the truck down to the house, which I didn’t think I could, I’d never get it out. Strictly speaking, basic physics dictates that any object in one place can extricate itself by exactly reversing the movements it took to get there. While this is theoretically true, try explaining that to a lobster caught in a trap or to a trucker pulling a trailer through a half-mile curving driveway. First rule for the lobster and the trucker ought to be: Back in.
I told Mr. King I didn’t think I could get the truck to the house and we’d have to do a shuttle. (A shuttle is when you transfer the goods from the big truck to a smaller one.) Mr. King didn’t like this idea at all, so when I called Callahan’s to tell them about the shuttle, Mr. King grabbed the phone from me and complained to TC that he wasn’t going to pay any shuttle charges because it was Callahan’s fault for sending a driver who wasn’t competent enough to operate the vehicle through a few twists and turns. Mr. King didn’t care about the shuttle charges; it was a company move, after all. He was just using it as an angle to humiliate me.
Naturally, that pissed me off. Partly because he was right, in the sense that I wasn’t totally competent in the job, and partly because Mr. King had taken every opportunity to belittle me from the moment we’d met. He was annoyed, I think, because as a corporate big shot he thought he should have gotten the best, most experienced driver in the North American fleet. Instead he got me. In consequence of all this, I got back on the phone and told TC I’d do my best and told Mr. King I’d try to get the truck down the driveway. One of my helpers that day was an elderly black man who called himself Frog. (Movers who work for road drivers always have their own handles to keep the tax man at a distance.) He was an old moving pro who carried his own tool pouch and lunch pail. Frog took one languid look at the driveway and drawled under his breath, “Don’t do it, Junior. They’ll be using that trailer to plant geraniums, ’cause that trailer ain’t coming out if it ever goes in.”
Frog was going way out of his way to help me. He knew, as a black man from Richmond, that you let white people do what white people are going to do. At the same time, he saw my inexperience and the weird dynamic between Mr. King and me and probably figured that my being a young fool trumped my color, so he piped up with his sage counsel.
Casting aside all advice, I started up the rig and drove down the slope toward the first bend. That one I negotiated fine, though I had to get really close to the trees on the right so that the back left wheels of the trailer would clear the trees on the other side. Now there would be no going back. The next turn was a dogleg right, and my tractor wheels started spinning because of the sharp angle, the grade, and the red clay soil I was digging up. I made that just fine too. The third turn was another dogleg right, and I took all the room to the left that I had as early as possible, but there just wasn’t enough room. There was a tree in front of me and a tree within the angle of the trailer wheels. The tree within the angle was small so I shifted into my lowest gear and gunned it, figuring I’d just knock it over. Instead, the steel side of the trailer buckled against it and I was firmly wedged. Stuck. Really stuck. There was no chance of a shuttle now. In fact, emptying the truck and moving in Mr. King’s family became a consideration secondary to extricating Mr. Callahan’s $100,000 rig from the surrounding flora.
I turned off the engine. Silence. Calm. I got down from the truck, lit a cigarette, surveyed the situation, and started pondering options. Just then Mr. King ran up to me, his face purple with rage.
“You stupid little fuck! What are you gonna do now? My family’s in there waiting to move in!” His spittle was spraying in my face.
I looked at Mr. King. I knew now how his rants and insults had magnified my insecurity and self-doubt, plunging us both into an inexorable cataract of bad judgment and ill-conceived actions. I grew up a lot in the next minute or so. I realized that his need to bully and my need to prove myself had mixed this incendiary cocktail. I wasn’t ever going to play that game again. I was cured. I looked down at Mr. King, flicked my cigarette into the woods, and said, “I’ve got to see about getting this rig back onto some pavement. Where’s your phone?”
We trudged down to his new house, past the pale, wriggling shadows of his wife and daughters, into the empty study. I combed the Yellow Pages for the biggest, baddest tow truck in Richmond. I found one, and it arrived about an hour later. The driver, John Amos, was a muscled African American about thirty years old, highly skilled in his job, and so inured to the ways of truckers that he conveyed nothing when he saw my truck corkscrewed into the woods between two trees. I respected his degree of self-control, since he couldn’t have seen anything like it in all of his years towing big trucks. It must have taken all he had not to burst out laughing. I can see him back at the garage at the end of the day regaling his fellows about the Yankee truck with the child driver who had poured his rig down a drain and pulled the cork in after him.
John Amos set up the tow truck on a level spot at the top of the driveway and unleashed a fat cable with a hook on one end and a very large winch on the other. He hooked the cable to my trailer axle and started the winch to pull the trailer out. We couldn’t get a straight pull, so we snaked the cable around a small tree to get the proper angle. Turning on the winch, the cable sliced through the tree with a puff of smoke and a sharp twang. The tree came down, further blocking our way.
Plan B was to positi
on the tow truck closer to the trailer with a straighter shot and remove a couple of smaller trees. John Amos, of course, had a chainsaw in the bed of his tow truck. At the sound of the saw, Mr. King reappeared to demand what the fuck I was doing cutting down his forest, pontificating that he’d bought this house because of the woods, that I would pay for every goddamn tree I cut down, and that he was going to go back to the house this instant and call the local agent to send the insurance adjuster because he was going to file the biggest claim ever filed against the damn van line for fucking up his forest. I noticed he directed all of this at me, ignoring the towering John Amos. Had Mr. King confronted him directly, the situation might have become more complicated. John Amos could have cut the bastard in half with or without the chainsaw, but he knew the odds to the decimal point how that would pan out in Richmond.
“I’m gonna own this fuckin’ van line when we’re done, you little bastard” was Mr. King’s parting shot.
John Amos’s plan worked, and between me putting the tractor in reverse, easing the load on the winch, and John Amos constantly repositioning the tow truck to correct for the proper angle, we eased out of the woods a few inches at a time. Six hours later we had the truck on safe pavement, and we only had to cut down nine more trees. John Amos took off, having collected a cool $1,600, and it was 4 p.m. The insurance adjuster had arrived and was waiting inside Mr. King’s house to interview me. I had to be in Fredericksburg the next morning at 8 with an empty truck to load a new shipment to Missouri.
The interview went quickly. The insurance guy was sitting on the floor of an empty bedroom with a notebook and pocket tape recorder. Mr. King was standing, looking out the window. I entered the room. The adjuster turned on the tape recorder.