by Finn Murphy
“Can’t do it. The tenants’ll cut my nuts off, then have me fired, then have me shot, then dumped in the ocean. I’ll be shark bait. I’ve got a wife . . .”
I slid out Mr. Taylor’s fifty-dollar bill and laid it gently on the desk.
“Tell you what . . . you let me unload after United over there gets done and Mr. Warren will be happy, and you and your wife and General Grant here will have a nice romantic little threesome at a beach bistro tonight. Your only downside is a couple people bitching about the elevator, but they’ll do that regardless of whether Mr. Warren gets his stuff or whether General Grant goes to his final resting place in your Dickies. Whaddyasay?”
“I say I’ve met the first goddam mover who knows how to motivate people.”
“Thanks. I’ve got to run down to Miami and drop this other little shipment. I’ll be back around five.”
“I’ll be here.” I left him rooting through the phone book’s restaurant section. I picked up the fifty on my way out. This ain’t my first rodeo. An advance payment would have guaranteed me returning to find the whole place locked up with Shark Bait already on the beach slurping his second daiquiri.
We got in the truck and headed south. This delivery was in Kendall southwest of Miami. It was killing me having to drive fifty miles south to Kendall and then fifty miles back to Galt Ocean Drive when I had to drive right past Kendall to get to Key West. But at least my immediate problem of getting empty was solved.
We got back to the Galt Ocean Mile at four thirty, and I went over to check with the United driver.
“How’s it going, bedbugger?” I asked him.
“Oh, North American. I didn’t expect to see you again. What’s up?”
“We thought we’d give you a hand. You know, cooperate. Speed things up a bit.”
“You’re not unloading here tonight, driver, whatever you do. You’re wasting your time.”
I was going to enjoy this. “I believe the fix is in for delivery tonight. You have a contrary opinion. It is of no importance. Notwithstanding, Tommy and I are simply waiting around, so I humbly repeat my offer of assistance. We may as well be useful, what? How about I send Tommy upstairs and he can start assembling beds. I’ll stay down here and fold some pads.”
“Well, I suppose that’d be OK. Thanks. Where you from anyway, England?”
“Indeed not, my friend. I hail from southern Connecticut. Fairfield County, in fact. The Gold Coast it’s called, according to some. Others call it Wall Street’s bedroom. I call it my heretofore domicile, as my home of late is the humble GMC tractor yonder . . . Enough of this playful banter, sir. So, how do you like your pads folded? Every driver’s got a different method . . .”
True to his estimate, United finished at five thirty, and Tommy and I started in on our load. Tommy was wheeling the first batch of cartons into the elevator when the United guy showed up with his four guys. “One good turn deserves another,” he said. “C’mon fellas, we can get this done in three trips.” We finished Mr. Warren at six thirty.
The next morning, Sunday, I missed the eight o’clock breakfast call with Tommy. He came into my motel room at nine thirty looking for me. His bed was still made. We headed south for Key West. I-95 ends in Coral Gables; then it’s US 1 from there to the end of the road, literally. Route 1 ends at the Key West Naval Air Station, where we’d be loading. For once, I could not possibly get lost.
The first time I was in Key West I got bad directions and ended up driving my massive rig down the main drag, Duval Street, just before sunset. I had no idea where I was going and was driving slowly and tentatively. There were a bunch of streamers over the road advertising FANTASY FESTIVAL, and I thought I was going to rip them all down with my trailer. A group of young men were sitting on the rail of a streetside bar saw my plight, and one of them shouted to me, “Hey, driver, do you know where the fuck you’re going?”
“No, no idea at all,” I replied.
The guy and his friends vaulted the rail and before I knew it six or seven fabulously handsome men in body paint had grabbed the handholds and were standing on my fuel tanks as they rode me through downtown Key West hooting and hollering like they’d commandeered the vessel. Gays, like bikers, have a kinship with truckers. It’s probably due to all of us being outside the mainstream. At the turnaround at the bottom of Duval Street the guys told me where to stay, where to eat, and where to go if I wanted company, male or female. It was one of those rarities in my world: an accurate set of directions given by people who actually just wanted to help me out.
Tommy and I got to Key West Sunday evening after cleaning up the trailer at a rest area in Islamorada overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. We parked the truck at the navy base and headed over to the Half Shell Raw Bar for fish sandwiches. We arrived at Helmut’s warehouse Monday morning a little before 8. There was an Allied truck there too. I knew Helmut from previous jobs, and there he was in the office, bleary-eyed from the weekend, staring into the distance.
“Hi, Helmut. I’m Driver Murphy from North American. I’m here to load Admiral Clark.”
“North American? Clark? That’s Allied’s shipper.”
“Can’t be, Helmut. They gave it to me Friday afternoon. Call Fort Wayne.”
“I never heard back from Fort Wayne, so when I saw this Allied guy, I gave it to him.”
“Where’s the phone, Helmut. You’re fucking me over here.”
I called Gary in Indiana. “Gary? Finn. Helmut here says the job went to Allied, that nobody confirmed my assignment from Friday and he had to reassign it to save his ass.”
“Lemme check this, Finn. I’ll call you right back.”
In the meantime the Allied guy was at the dock loading his trailer with packing material and cartons. My goddam shipment.
The phone rang. Helmut picked it up. I could hear one side of the conversation.
“Aw, c’mon, Gary, you know me. I’d never, ever do that. North American are my number one guys out here. Nobody called me back . . . Yes, I was here . . . No, I didn’t leave early . . . The guy’s a fucking admiral, he’d have sent a SEAL team to kill me . . . I’m sorry, but I had to do what I had to do . . . OK. You want to talk to your driver?” Helmut handed me the phone.
“Finn. It’s Gary. We’re fucked. Charlie booked this verbally with Helmut Friday afternoon. Charlie’s the boss, and I know he’s not lying, but he’s out today and we can’t confirm it. It doesn’t matter anyway. Helmut’s really the boss, and he gave it to Allied. The truth is he probably booked it with both of us just to make sure he had a driver. We’re on the losing end.”
“We’re on the losing end, Gary? It looks like I’m on the losing end. What are you going to do? First thing I’d say is to delist this fucker from our agency roster.”
“That’s not going to happen, Finn. He’s the only game in town.”
“What about me? I just drove two hundred miles to Key West to load a phantom shipment.”
“I talked to the planners about that already. We feel really bad about this. I’ve got seven thousand pounds loading out of Tampa tomorrow for Caribou, Maine, on a GBL paying three grand. There’s nothing else on the board, but you’re priority one.”
“Tampa is four hundred fucking miles from here. Three thousand pays me thirteen hundred to the fucking North Pole. That’s a money-losing job.”
“That’s what I’ve got. Something else might come in.”
My head started pounding and my vision got all blurry. I was thinking about the past eight minutes, eight days, eight months, eight years; the injustice, the slights, the effect on my psyche. I thought about what was happening to me. I thought about the vitriol and cynicism and the bad thoughts coming out of me like bile just on this one trip. I thought again about Lone Ranger up in Kittery. What would he do? What was I going to do? Deadhead up north again to load another snowbird fulfilling his American Dream? What about my American Dream? I had a couple hundred grand in the bank.
Every fiber of my being told me it was
time to cash in and work on what Lone Ranger already knew. Maybe he had been born that way, or maybe he had gone down his own grueling road of disappointment and failure and figured his way out. The shower at Hal’s didn’t last long enough for me to uncover the truth. We might have gotten there if I’d put more quarters into my soap. Stephen King once wrote, “Life can change on a dime.” In my case, it was a quarter.
“Gary, we’ve been together for eight years. I want to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“How do you look at yourself in the morning? How do you teach your kids ethics? How can you watch me get screwed and spout the company line when you know it’s wrong?”
“Between you and me Finn, it’s not easy. I’ve got a mortgage, I’ve got a family, I’ve got a job. They’ve got me by the short hairs. You’re a good driver, an upstanding man, but I’ve no choice except to stand by and watch you get screwed.”
“I pity you, Gary. You know what I just figured out about truck drivers? For all their pitiful myths, most of them do this stupid job for one reason: They can look themselves in the eye and honestly say they’ve held to their own standards without caving in to pressure by society or somebody else’s expectations. They might fuck up, and they do, but they own their fuckups and keep to those standards regardless of the personal cost. I’m a truck driver too.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying fuck you, Gary. Keep your split-level in Fort Wayne. Raise your kids to become cogs in the machine. I live by a different standard that I just figured out. All these cowboys I’ve looked down upon—they’re better than you, for all their faults.”
“Nice speech. Do you want the Tampa load or not?”
“You’re not listening, Gary, but I suppose you can’t. No. I’m not going to Tampa. I’d leave this fucking rig right here, but I need to do right by Mr. Callahan, so I’ll throw away a thousand dollars and park this rig in his yard and hand him the keys.”
“You’re quitting?”
“I’m just done with this.”
“OK then. I’ve got to reassign this Tampa load.”
“Gary, did I ever tell you about the summer I washed dishes at the Howard Johnson’s on I-95? The dishes were never done. There was always another rack to load no matter how fast I worked. I was a hamster on a treadmill. Never again.”
“Finn, we’ve had a nice run. I wish you the best, but I’ve got stuff on my board and my phone is redlining.”
“I thought your board was empty, Gary.”
“Good-bye, Finn. You were the smartest guy I ever dispatched, but you’re not the smartest truck driver. You still don’t understand the system. You’re not the only guy in the world, you know.”
“Oh, I understand the system, Gary, I really do. That’s why I’m leaving. I’m the only guy in my world.”
“Good luck.”
“You too, Gary. You’re going to need it more than me.”
So that was that. I deadheaded up to Connecticut, dropped the truck in Callahan’s yard, and walked away. I had no idea what I was going to do next.
No idea at all.
I quit driving for a long time.
PART III
THE BIG SLAB
Chapter 7
BACK ON THE ROAD
I have a card in my wallet that says I’m qualified to drive any vehicle of any size. It’s called a Class A commercial driver’s license. Having a Class A CDL is a quasi-mystical benediction, sort of like being a Tolkien Ring-bearer. Like a Ring of Power, it can open up a world of possibility closed to others. It can also bring good or ill upon you depending upon your motivation and luck. A CDL is a lot harder to get nowadays, but once you have one, unless you lose it through some piece of errant stupidity, you get to keep it. Forever.
Even after I quit working for North American, I never considered letting my CDL lapse. I remember joking about it to friends who knew my history, and I’d say, “You never know . . . things might unravel and I might need it again.” Well, as it happened, things did unravel and I did need it again. Just like Frodo Baggins, when things got too hot, I slipped on the ring of my CDL and disappeared. Long-haul moving is a convenient industry—where else can a man get paid big money for being essentially on the lam?
It was a long time though before the unraveling. I made several U-turns after I left North American, none of them involving truck driving. In 2008 I found myself washed ashore in a city out west where I knew nobody; I was fifty-one years old, single, with no job, no plans, no nothing. I was unmoored. It was the most difficult period of my life. I didn’t want to think about how I’d lit the fuse to my previous life and watched it explode. All I wanted to do was to go back on the road. I wanted to climb into a truck, hit that start button, watch the air pressure build up, and go. In that respect I knew I’d have plenty of company among other drivers. That’s what we do.
Fifty-one years old is not a propitious age to go back to building tiers in a moving van. I was in decent shape, but moving furniture is young man’s work. I wasn’t at all sure I could make the grade. What I did know was that I could certainly perform other tasks much better than before. I was no longer a young man in a hurry. I wasn’t a young man at all. I was another piece of flotsam hitting the road because I thought I’d run out of options.
Another thing I knew now was that moving, for the shipper, was to experience an emotional nosedive. Maybe I couldn’t lift like I used to, but maybe, just maybe, I could use my own failures and hard-earned understanding to grease the wheels of my work and make the experience easier for the people who were moving. Maybe I could breach the wall of suspicion and enmity people have about movers. That felt attractive. I wanted to do it the right way, the way I had never had done it before. I wanted to interact with my shipper and helpers applying compassion and professionalism. I wanted to approach the work itself with serious intellectual intention toward performing even the smallest tasks properly.
With all that in mind, I had the big chat with my old pal Willie Joyce.
Willie had come off the road in 1982 and opened his own moving company, Joyce Van Lines, in Stamford, Connecticut, right after deregulation. Prior to deregulation, interstate moving companies had enjoyed an oligopoly thanks to the Motor Carrier Act of 1935. That act made it nearly impossible for new carriers to enter the industry. Deregulation of the moving industry was started by Jimmy Carter and completed by Ronald Reagan. Any company could now obtain what was called “operating authority” to provide interstate moving services. Moving rates fell by more than half almost overnight. For me personally it was a big financial hit, but it was a far bigger hit for the fat, lazy moving companies with their sweetheart union contracts and bloated management. Those overfed sows were drawn and quartered by nimble, lean, and hungry weasels like Willie. He obtained his operating authority and started taking out the weak zebras in the herd by discounting moves with a fleet of straight trucks. Before long, Willie’s workaholism and focus had created a mini van line pulling in $20 million a year. Willie had seven terminals scattered across the United States, a hundred or so trucks, and about thirty long-haul drivers under his broad thumb. The quick-moving, elfin mover with the long hair and goatee I’d known had ballooned into a 350-pound, shaven-headed hydra. He had a fearsome reputation for brooking no bullshit back when he was a driver, and that reputation ballooned like his weight and the size of his enterprise. Picture Marlon Brando as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now and you’ll have an idea of Willie’s appearance and demeanor. Willie ran his company with an iron fist, and had been in the business for so long and was so focused on it that he had a quantum connection with everything. He knew if trailer 169 was missing a stack of pads, and he knew if there was a hedge fund in New Jersey looking for yield that would finance $1.5 million for ten new Peterbilts at 7 percent. And he knew every detail in between. We’d remained friends mostly due to the fact that I’d never worked for him.
That was about to change.
Our chat was about me
going on the road for Joyce Van Lines as a driver. Willie was skeptical due to my age and long hiatus. I told him I was going to do it whether he put me on or not. I already knew that I could walk into any of the high-end boutique van lines and get hired on the spot on the basis of my skin color and diction. Guys like me were disappearing because the money was not as good as it once was, while demand for the Great White Mover was getting ever more acute. (High rollers are increasingly impatient with service people they can’t communicate with. Industries like moving, landscaping, and housecleaning in today’s America are almost entirely non-English-speaking, so I was a highly desirable outlier.) Willie, of course, knew this, so he half-reluctantly leased me a truck.
A few things had changed in the moving business since I was last out there. One was that moving and drinking, and driving and drinking, had disappeared. Another was quality, especially for corporate long-haul operations like Joyce. Now they were rated under a microscope by relocation consolidators like Cartus and Brookfield. If your customer satisfaction metrics didn’t measure up, you’d find yourself cut off from corporate moving altogether and back trying to make a living doing local moves. Most of Willie’s contretemps with drivers and staff had to do with maintaining the quality standard. If you didn’t measure up you were out.
I was pretty sure I’d be up to the job on the quality angle. The way I was looking at moving jobs now compared to before was totally different. I would not be in a hurry, and I would not be obsessed with revenue. The challenge would be to produce satisfied shippers.
Willie leased me an old Freightliner nobody else wanted to drive. To me, after my Astro 95, it looked like a palace. It had a double walk-in sleeper, refrigerator, TV set, and slide-out desk. The cockpit had cruise control, an air ride seat, and GPS. I installed a CD player and a CB radio and bought an AT&T AirCard that gave me internet access anywhere there was a cell signal. I was almost ready for twenty-first-century moving. To reengage my truck-driving chops, I spent a week at a truck-driving school in Denver doing a refresher course. To help me learn the new ropes for high-end executive moving, Willie planned to put me on for a couple of weeks with one of his drivers. That would get me back into the groove.