by Finn Murphy
“OK, Mrs. Fowler,” I said, surveying this residential scree field, “why don’t we go through the house and see what’s going with us to Florida?” She took us into the first room and said that the only thing going was the lamp on the table.
“Good. What about the kerosene lamps on the wall?”
“Oh yes, they go too.”
“How about the pictures on the wall?”
“Oh, the pictures? Yes, yes. The pictures go too.”
“What about the stuff on the mantelpiece?”
“Oh, yes, yes. That’s got to go.”
“How about the bookcase? Is the bookcase going?”
“Yes, the bookcase is going.”
“What about the books in it?”
“Oh, yes, yes. The books are going. Well, some of them are going.”
“OK. Is there anything else in this room?”
“No, no. That’s everything.”
“What about the stuff inside the china cabinet?”
“Oh, of course, that has to go. I showed that to the other man.”
I was still trying to be nice. This was our first room, and it was a big house, and I already knew what kind of day it was going to be.
“Ma’am, it’s very important that we know exactly what goes and what doesn’t, down to every little brass ring.”
“Oh, well, I can get this stuff together as you people are working.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, it can’t be done that way. I have to write up an inventory. We have to know what’s going before we start.”
She acquiesced to that and began bobbing her head happily. “OK. Let’s go into the next room.”
“Before we do that, what about the pitchforks on the wall? Do they go?”
“Oh, yes, yes. They go.”
“Look, ma’am, would you look around, just in this room, and tell me exactly what’s left that you haven’t mentioned that’s supposed to go?”
“That’s everything.”
“What about the television?”
“Oh, yes, that goes.”
This went on all day from ten in the morning until nine that evening. I never did get a clear idea about what she was shipping. My inventory was a work of fiction. It was the most screwed-up, messy, filthy, disgusting move I’d had. The packers were slow, of course. They were milking it. Lucky for me I had picked up a bunch of packing material at Callahan’s. I loaded the entire truck myself: dressers, desks, boxes, chairs, tables, end tables, night stands, appliances, everything. By eight thirty that night I had completely filled my trailer. Mrs. Fowler was still rummaging through closets when I went upstairs.
“Look, ma’am, you’ve got to stop now.”
“What do you mean?”
“The truck is full. I can’t take anything else.”
“What about the rest of my things?”
“They’ll send another truck and bring the rest down to Florida later.”
She brightened at this. “Oh, good, then I can get the rest of my things ready then.”
“Absolutely,” I replied. “Ma’am, I hope you understand that every one of these boxes we’re packing is costing an average of twenty dollars apiece for the box and thirty dollars for the labor to pack it.”
“Really? I thought the other man put the packing on the estimate.”
“He did. He put three mattress cartons, one mirror carton, and three dishpack cartons on the estimate. We packed that in the first twenty minutes. You’re looking at another two thousand dollars in packing and another six thousand in extra weight.”
“I didn’t know it worked that way.”
“It does work that way. Do you think all this extra work is free?”
The irony here was that this whole fiasco was going to work out extremely well for me, if not for anyone else. She didn’t have a binding estimate, so all the packing and extra weight would be added to her bill. My truck was full, and I’d picked up an extra couple of grand on packing and material. I wouldn’t be able to load in Newburgh or make the extra stop in Rhode Island either. All told, my schedule had been reduced by one full day with more revenue than anticipated.
I pulled into the Secondi Bros. truckstop in Connecticut to get my gross weight at 1 a.m. I filled up with fuel first to bump the weight of her shipment. A gallon of diesel weighs slightly over 7 pounds, and I put in 140 gallons. Fowler’s load came in at 12,260 pounds. It had been estimated at 4,000 pounds. That’s over six tons of stuff manually carried and loaded by me, though to be perfectly accurate, I probably shouldn’t count the 1,000 pounds of diesel she’ll be billed for. Serves her right.
I mixed a large Dr Cola at Secondi’s and headed south. It’s only sixty miles to the George Washington Bridge, and I wanted to get across to beat the morning traffic. I did a little math on the Cross Bronx Expressway. I’d worked seventy-three hours in five days. That’s just the way I liked it. As the Grateful Dead sang somewhere, “Too much of everything is just enough.”
I couldn’t get Lone Ranger out of my mind. He was a happy man, though he had little in the way of material wealth except his modest new wardrobe. I kept thinking about the thawing chicken breast he’d left in his sink. It might be six months before he got home again. For him, that was a problem for another time. Lone Ranger didn’t attack life every day with judgment, resistance, and a perpetual chip on his shoulder. (They say a well-balanced Irishman is a man with a chip on both shoulders.) He was the perfect Zen truck driver, taking it all in and enjoying every moment. I was the opposite. I envied him. A lot. What he didn’t have, and what I had in abundance, was anger. I had it when I started out as a mover and I had it when I became a driver. I had brilliantly managed to select a career where frustration was the norm. That allowed me to to justify remaining angry all the time. The truck broke down, the traffic sucked, my helpers were lazy, the shippers were paranoid, and my van line exploited me. In my rare leisure moments, which mostly took place in pool halls and truckstops, everyone around me was angry too. Something didn’t feel right about that but as long as I had loads I didn’t have to think about it. I’d been angry so long I didn’t know how to feel any other way.
Chapter 6
THE POT OF GOLD
For a long time I used to have a helper in Florida named Tommy Mahoney. Since he didn’t haunt truckstops or moving-company loading docks, he wasn’t strictly a lot helper. In fact, he’d have taken enormous Irish umbrage at that term. He’d probably have called himself an on-call professional. He didn’t have a regular job, but the stable of road drivers who knew him kept him pretty busy. He’d make between $150 and $250 a day, so in a good week he’d make well over $1,500, plus tips. All cash and tax-free. Then again, on a bad week he’d make nothing.
Tommy loved Irish music, bluegrass, and primitive country, and he’d go out every night to coffeehouses to keep up to date. One of the things that made him so odd is that he never slept. Ever. He once told me that when he lived in New York he worked night shifts at the A&P and stopped sleeping one day. It sounds incredible, but I traveled with him for days, sometimes a week, and he really never slept. Because of that I called him the Vampire, but he was known all over the country among road drivers as Brooklyn Tom. I once asked him why, seeing as he was from Queens. He told me that as soon as people heard him talk his New York street accent they just assumed he was from Brooklyn. “These monkeys around here don’t know Brooklyn from Queens, so I let it ride.”
I’d arranged for Tommy to meet me at the first delivery drop in Florida. My schedule was to unload Fowler, Howell, and Gross on Friday and Taylor, Warren, and Murray on Saturday. This would give me Sunday to rest, clean up the trailer, and be ready to load Monday. It was perfect, the first workday of the last week of the month. If there was a pot of gold to be taken out of the sandpit, I’d be properly positioned for it.
I crossed the George late Wednesday night and pulled into the Vince Lombardi rest area to sleep. The Vince is a notorious pickle park, and that night the place was swarming with s
leeper leapers, so I rolled down to Bordentown Junction and slept there. That was Wednesday. I drove all day and night Thursday and hit Beverly Hills at 3 a.m. Friday.
The first delivery was Mrs. Fowler, the hoarding artiste from New Hampshire, who was supposed to have 4,000 pounds and ended up with 12,000. Her estimated cost of services had been $4,000 for her move. Ray the Mover told me that Mrs. Fowler had prepaid her full bill of $11,967. How about that? Almost triple the estimate. The extra charges will no doubt spawn another “Tale of Horror from the Moving World,” but it was entirely her own fault. She was not truthful about how much stuff she was moving. Moving stories, like losing virginity stories, have a universal one-upmanship quality about them. Bring up the subject anywhere, anytime, and a randomly selected heretofore reasonable human being will launch into a rabid tale of premeditated malfeasance, only to be outdone by an adjacent interlocutor retailing even more heinous crimes.
I arrived at Mrs. Fowler’s at 8 a.m. The property manager was waiting for me. Good old Mrs. Fowler. The lovely woman had bought a ground-floor condo. I discovered I’d given Tommy bad directions, so he was going to show up late and pissed off. He’s pretty smart, but when you are dealing with directions the key is to stop, figure it out, and don’t go anywhere until you know exactly where you’re going. Here’s a useful tip about directions: Never ask a convenience store clerk, never ask someone loitering on the street, and never ask anyone over sixty-five years of age.
Tommy wasn’t there yet, but I set up the walkboard. It went right inside the front door. No stairs, no long carries, no elevator, and, best of all, no Mrs. Fowler. Tommy showed up at eight thirty with steam coming out of his hairy Irish ears.
“Hello, Tommy. I’m sorry about the directions, but your luck just changed. I’ve got the walkboard inside the house, it’s all on one floor, and all we have to do is wheel everything in. No stairs, no climbing, no lifting, no crazy shipper. If this got any easier I’d ask you to pay me.”
“Fuck you” was his greeting. “I’ll never meet a driver again at residence. If you want to use me you can goddam well pick me up.”
“I wasn’t going to drive two hundred miles out of my way to pick you up, Tommy. I don’t care how good you are.”
“It’s a hundred miles. Don’t exaggerate.”
“It’s a hundred down to get you and a hundred back. That’s two hundred, Einstein. Besides, if I’d known how pissy you’d be and how easy this delivery would be, I’d have done it myself. You could still be home bitching at your wife instead of at me.”
The property manager took off, saying to call him if we needed anything. Mrs. Fowler’s delivery took two and a half hours, which is really fast for 12,000 pounds. It took me almost twelve hours to load it. We sort of guessed which room stuff would go into, and we didn’t worry too much about getting it wrong. Mrs. Fowler probably wouldn’t notice if her beds were set up in the kitchen. We did the best job we could and took off after the property manager signed off that everything had been delivered. He had no idea, but the papers were signed, the van line was paid, and there would be no damage claim. In my world, that’s a successful move.
I’d gotten one load off out of the six I had on board, and it was the biggest one. The only thing on my mind was my scheduled call to Gary in dispatch at the end of the day. I was still crossing my fingers for the pot of gold.
Largo came off smoothly. This was Mr. and Mrs. Howell’s stuff from Marshfield. The Howells weren’t in Florida yet, so the trailer park manager let us in. The Howells had one of those ancient, dark wooden bedroom sets with a bureau, double dresser, vanity with mirror, and bed with a big headboard and footboard. It looked funereal stuffed into the trailer’s master bedroom. Mrs. Howell’s church organ looked like a giant cockroach in the living room. We finished in about ten minutes, and the manager signed off on the inventory. Papers signed, van line paid, no damage claim.
Sarasota was our next stop. Route 19 south to St. Pete and then over Tampa Bay via the dual spans of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. I’ve been on the road so long I remember driving the Sunshine Skyway right after a freighter hit it in 1980 and knocked half the southbound span into the water, taking with it six cars, a truck, and a Greyhound bus. Thirteen people were killed. They used the remaining span for both northbound and southbound traffic until 1987. It was narrow, congested as hell, and the northbound traffic was right next to you with no median. That was scary enough, but it got really hairy at the top—it’s a high bridge because all the tankers and military ships need clearance into Tampa, and at the top was the dangling steel of the other span as it opened into the abyss. Freaky.
As we crested the bridge, Tommy, in the shotgun seat, started cutting a lime for the first of his many daily vodka and cranberry cocktails. He kept his supply in a big thermos at the bottom of his duffle bag. I was annoyed at Tommy because we still had work to do. The unwritten rule was No drinking until the workday is over. I’d have to write the unwritten rule. The unfortunate truth was that to get the quality help I need, I have to make allowances or I’ll have nobody at all.
We came off I-75 just south of Sarasota to deliver Mr. Gross. We headed west off the ramp and had driven maybe a mile when the road simply ended. But wait; there was the billboard, there was the security shed, there was the golf course, and there was the right turn into Whispering Pines, Palmetto Groves, Majestic Manor, Golden Gables, Century Village, Martin Downs, Sunburn Acres, Twin Beavers, or Sunset Farts. Who gives a shit? It’s the same old Florida crap. However these places get named, rest assured, the more lyrical the moniker, the more of a sunblasted, cookie-cutter nightmare the place will be.
This one looked solidly middle-class because the security shed was unmanned and the gate was open. At least it wasn’t a high-rise. I took a right into the development, and a tipsy Tommy Mahoney started languorously reading off street signs.
“Wren . . . Robin . . . Blue Jay . . . Cardinal . . . Oriole . . . Yankees . . . Red Sox . . .”
“Stop screwing around, Tommy, what street are we looking for?”
“Ostrich.”
“Bullshit.”
“Penguin.”
“Tommy, I’m gonna throw your drunk ass out of this truck. What’s the fuckin’ street?”
“Kiwi.”
“You asshole. Gimme the directions.”
“You know something, Finn? You’re really uptight sometimes. You should learn to relax.”
“I’ll relax when I find this guy’s street. What’s it called?”
“We passed it already. It was Oriole.”
“We passed it! You slack fucker. Where am I gonna turn this thing around in this fuckin’ rat’s nest?”
“You’re the guy who calls himself U-Turn. You’re the guy who says he can turn a tractor-trailer around inside a car wash. Let’s see you do your stuff.”
“Tommy, why are you fucking with me right now?”
“Don’t worry about it. This road goes all the way around. Oriole’s just up on the right. The guy’s house is on the left, we’re unloading from the left. We’re perfect. I’ve been in this stupid place before. It’s hard to keep them separated. I didn’t remember until I saw all the birds’ names.”
“You’re fucked up. Are you in shape to work?”
“I ain’t fucked up, just a little buzzed. You’re the one who’s fucked up.”
“That’s it. No booze until the working day is done, you got that?”
“Yes, massa, I got that. Here’s Oriole. Turn right.”
Mr. Gross was an obese man of about sixty. He was standing in front of the house waiting for us. Tommy jumped out. I put on the air brakes, shut off the engine, and hopped down.
“Mr. Gross, I presume? Hi. My name is Finn Murphy. How’s it going?”
“Hi, Ken,” he said. “Everything’s going into the garage. Can’t think why I shipped it. I got all new stuff when I moved down here.”
“Yes. Everybody does that. We have to do a little paperwork before we unload.�
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“You mean you want the check.”
“Yes, sir. A certified check for eighteen hundred dollars.”
“That stuff isn’t worth eighteen hundred dollars. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. How ’bout you keep it and I keep the dough? What am I going to do with an Ethan Allen living room set in Sarasota?”
“I dunno, Mr. Gross. Can we go inside and do the paperwork?”
“Sure.”
Tommy started wheeling boxes into the garage while we went inside. Mr. Gross waddled over to the sideboard and poured himself a scotch.
“Want a drink, Ken?”
“No thanks, Mr. Gross. About that check . . .”
“I don’t know what I’m doing down here, Ken.” Mr. Gross topped off his drink with some water, “I had the largest commercial window-washing business in New England three months ago. We did all the big buildings in Portland, Burlington, Manchester, hospitals, schools—we had ‘em all. Then one day this guy offered me a fortune to sell up if we did the deal fast. All cash. Before I could shake myself awake it was over. I was up there in Vermont freezing my ass off with nothing to do, so hell, buy a place in Florida, right?”
“Congratulations, sir. About that check . . .”
“Oh yeah, here.” He handed me the certified check.
“Thanks. Say, Mr. Gross, could I use your phone?
“Sure, Ken.”
This was the key call I’d been anticipating all week. I had waited to give Gary the most time to try to scrounge something out of Florida for Monday. To a dispatcher, success is defined by clearing freight off his board and doing it on schedule. He’s not overly concerned with driver revenue. I’m not required to take loads dispatched to me, but if I get a reputation for refusing loads they’ll all dry up, so everything revolves around a balance between Gary and me. He’ll give me as much garbage as he thinks I’ll haul, but he has to make it up sometimes and give me some gold. Gary’s had some rotten shit I’ve hauled for him—overflows, cut-rate military, and short hauls nobody wanted. In my view, he was way overdue for a big payload. I called him at four forty-five Indiana time.