by Finn Murphy
For some reason I still can’t fathom, I didn’t leave right then and there. I spent the whole day in the house unpacking cartons. I should have driven away when the cargo bar fell, but I wasn’t in my right mind. I distinctly remember going to pieces in Mr. Bean’s walk-in closet. I had fallen pretty far. Here I was fearing for my life and working as a day laborer for a nutcase who hated my guts and wanted me dead. I had brought myself to this sorry state without anyone’s help through an avalanche of poor decisions. I stayed in that closet for over an hour, carefully hanging up Mr. Bean’s Jack Victor suits and crying like a baby.
After the unpack was finished, I told Mike I was leaving and took off. I drove to the Wild Wild West casino, motel, and truckstop to unwind. I love that place for its easygoing sleaze. I was accosted at the door to the motel office by a young woman who asked if she could borrow my room to take a shower. I told her I didn’t have a room and wished her luck. When I came out with my room key, she was sitting in an idling car with a man in the driver’s seat. It looked to me like a Mickey and Mallory pair waiting to roll another trucker. The best thing to do out here is keep your head down and mind your own business.
After a shower, I went into the casino to grab a beer and play a few rounds of roulette. When I sat down I looked across at my fellow players, and lo and behold, there was driver Mike, lighting a Marlboro and scowling at the croupier. He hadn’t seen me yet. Time to go.
I knew Mike was loading in Salt Lake the day after next, and though I didn’t have an assignment, I knew where I was heading: Since Salt Lake is northeast of Vegas, my direction would be southwest. I packed my bag, quit the motel room, and hit the road toward Los Angeles. I was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the reaction began to take hold. My whole body started shaking, and I had to pull over and let it subside.
My training period was over, and I was still alive. It was time to start reassembling my life. There was no direction to go but up.
Chapter 8
HERE COME THE MOVERS
Veteran movers never wear jeans. Jeans are too heavy and the heavy sweating that comes with the job causes chafing. Also, jeans have rivets on the seams and require a belt. Either one can scratch furniture or walls as goods are muscled from a home and into or out of a moving van. Jumpsuits of light cotton are preferred because there’s nothing to tuck in, nothing to get caught on, and they are loose and comfortable. A veteran mover will also carry his own tool satchel. In it will be his humpstrap, packing tape, a Phillips screwdriver, a flat-head screwdriver, vise grips, pliers, a tube of Elmer’s glue, a crescent wrench, a set of Allen wrenches, a bottle of Old English Scratch Cover, a clamp, and a tube of Tibet Almond Stick. With these simple arrangements, a mover can knock down, put together, repair, or hide damage on practically anything to be found in an American household.
I don’t bring an attitude or any other expectation on moving day except that the day will be long. I do the best job I can with every move, and I treat everyone the same. Since most of my job satisfaction comes from the work, I don’t get too indignant whether I’m treated like a galley slave, a potential threat, an uncomfortable example of the dark side of the labor pool, or a helpmeet and partner. I try to keep things smooth and easygoing. This is partly selfish, partly pride, and partly compassion. It’s selfish because all of my workdays are hard days, usually a minimum of twelve hours doing physical work—and I don’t need mental stress on top of that. It’s pride because I know what I’m doing; managing a large move has a lot of interrelated parts, and all the components need to come together at the right time. And it’s compassion because I understand that people’s identity and security get unhinged by moving.
I’ve worked long and hard to refine my conduct in order to put shippers at their ease, and yet after three thousand or so moves, I’m resigned to the reality that movers are widely viewed as antagonists. I find this exasperating because I can’t figure out why. Our whole industry can’t figure out why. Go to any trade show or meeting of AMSA (the American Moving & Storage Association) and you’ll find seminars and navel-gazing sessions asking the perpetual question of the industry: Why does everyone dislike and distrust movers?
We’re not so bad. We like to be called by our names and be shown basic respect. Food and tips are also welcome, but not required. That’s about it. The bottom line is, the movers are in possession of all your stuff. If stuff is important to you—and it is disproportionally important to most of the people we move—then the movers are the most important people in your life for those couple of days. If we don’t get a modicum of respect, well, . . . we will preserve our dignity one way or another. Shippers don’t seem to grasp that we know more about them in thirty minutes than their best friends do after thirty years. Movers notice things. Especially the things folks want to keep hidden. We don’t carry any judgment toward mundane bourgeois hypocrisy unless we’re treated like chattel. If we are, we can and often will stir up a shitstorm. “Excuse me, sir, should I pack this nearly empty vodka bottle I found behind the laundry soap?” or “Pardon me, ma’am, would you like me to put these gay porn mags into another carton? They were under the tax returns in your husband’s office.”
Dehumanizing service workers looks to me to be mostly about insecurity. My helpers are almost all Hispanic, and I don’t see any profound cultural chasm between an immigrant from Mexico and a middle-class white American. Your standard-issue Mexican or Brazilian is a hardworking Christian who shares a Western historical experience, speaks a Romance language, uses the same alphabet and numbering system, and has similar aspirations. Just because someone doesn’t have a grasp of English doesn’t mean they don’t have a grasp on disparagement. If you think Juanita doesn’t know when she’s getting slighted, well, she most certainly does know and she most certainly doesn’t like it. Rest assured, there’s plenty of resentment down here in the service trenches. Alas, only the movers and the cooks have retaliatory measures available immediately to hand.
My default introduction to shippers when they answer the doorbell is to start with a jocular “Here come the movers!” I then smile, introduce myself, and hand over my business card. (Nobody ever gets my name right, so I give it to them in print.) Then I introduce the crew. My crews always have name tags attached to their shirts. (People with names get treated better.) After the introduction my crew will disappear to prepare the trailer and I’ll take off my shoes, enter the house, usually into the kitchen, and have a conclave with the shipper. It goes something like this:
“OK. Let’s talk a bit about how the day is going to go. When the men are finished outside, we’ll prepare the house. We’ll cover the floors, walls, carpets, and staircases. That will take about an hour. After that we’ll do a walk-through to see what’s going and what’s staying. Then we’ll start packing cartons. Let’s use the master bathroom for things you don’t want packed, like your clothes, laptops, chargers, modems, cable box, and phones. We’ll be here until about six and start again tomorrow at eight, unless that schedule doesn’t work for you. If it doesn’t, we’ll adjust. How does all that sound?”
Usually that will sound fine to the shipper. Then I’ll add in some more stuff.
“This is a VIP move being paid for by your company. We want you to be happy with your move. I’ve got my handpicked A-team here, and I work all the time with these guys. We’re not in a hurry. We want it done properly, and properly is what you think is proper.”
That’s pretty much my opening gambit. What happens in the first five minutes usually establishes the tone on any move. In fact, I only really know a move is going well when the shipper disappears. They see us work, they gain confidence that we’re professionals, they get bored, and all of a sudden they have to do a few errands, pick up the mail, or meet a friend for lunch. It never ceases to amaze me that these suburban hypersecure control freaks, who have an ADT sign on their lawn, never let a kid out of their sight, and change their garage door code every month, take off after twenty minutes leaving all their
stuff under the care of three Latinos and a gray-haired gringo drifter.
I will grant the point that many of my colleagues, while very possibly great movers, might be lacking in certain social lubrication skills. My friend Bill, a longtime Joyce driver, regularly receives negative reviews from shippers. I don’t understand why. Bill has the finest trailer setup I’ve ever seen, with all the right equipment perfectly stowed, custom-designed uniforms, and a full crew who travel with him everywhere. Bill is a tall, lanky man of some kind of color. I think he’s half black or half white or a quarter Irish or some other kind of perfectly American mix. Bill is well spoken and generally pleasant, though I wouldn’t call him genial. He certainly has that short fuse all road drivers seem to have, but he doesn’t take it out on the shipper. Bill’s the real deal way more than I am. He literally lives in his truck and has done so for over thirty years. He has a Direct TV antenna on the roof of his tractor and a generator to keep the rig warm or cool at night. He’s redone the tractor interior to house his crew. I was asked to talk to him by Joyce management about his shipper problem when I was flown to Pendleton, Oregon, to finish one of his jobs. The shipper had called the office and told them she didn’t want Bill at destination. She said she was afraid of him. I flew into Portland, took a puddle jumper to Pendleton, and met Bill at the Motel 6. We went to dinner at the Waffle House next door, where I buttonholed him.
“Bill, Pete asked me to talk to you about what’s going on. Your shipper ratings are uniformly negative, and having to fly me out to drive your truck to residence to complete the move naturally has them concerned.”
“I knew this was coming,” he said. “Why’d they ask you to talk to me? Can’t Pete ask me himself? I’ve been out here my whole life, and it’s nothing personal to you, Finn, but having someone fly in to finish my job is completely humiliating. You and I have always got along fine, but I’m not glad to see you. You’re not a better mover than me.”
“I know I’m not, Bill. This isn’t about you and me or about you and Joyce. It’s about you and the shipper. She’s terrified of you. She feels threatened. This is a VIP move and we’re going to get rated on it. You know the game. We can’t have a terrified shipper. As regards Pete, I suppose he figured a driver-to-driver conversation would be better. You and I go back a long time. I’m not a spy for management and I know how things can go wrong with shippers, but this happens all the time with you. Why do you think that is?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I used to think it was a race thing. Maybe the shippers didn’t like black guys, though I’m not really a black guy. I don’t know what they’d call me. Besides, Perry and Richard are black, and they get great ratings. So it’s not that, though I’d like it to be. Before I got my teeth fixed, I thought that was the problem. But it wasn’t.” (Bill had been missing his two top front teeth for years. Willie paid to have them fixed up, thinking his menacing mouth was putting off shippers. Whatever people might say about Willie, he’s loyal to his longtime drivers.)
“What happened here with this shipper? Any words exchanged? How about your crew?”
“Not a thing. I hardly even talked to the shipper. I did the inventory and loaded the truck. My guys were in and out of the house. To be honest, I’m getting gun-shy about interactions with shippers.”
All of a sudden tears sprang into Bill’s eyes.
“My whole life’s been like this. People just don’t take to me. It’s like there’s this hostility they grab onto when they meet me. Sure, I have a temper when things don’t go right, but I’m under control. I’ve spent my life out here alone on the road mostly because nobody wants to be around me. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong with me?”
“My impression is that you do a good job, you’re always prepared, always on time, and you want to be liked. I don’t get a hostile vibe from you at all.”
“So what’s wrong with you that you don’t get my bad vibe?”
“I’ve wondered about that. So has Willie, so has Pete. We’re all on your side on this. We want to try and figure it out.”
“Maybe. They’ll probably just fire me and I’ll have to go work for Atlas or Mayflower. I like working for a small van line, and I like corporate pack and loads.”
“Nobody wants to fire you, Bill. They want to figure out a way to keep you. They know the way you operate, they see you have no damage claims, they see you’re totally organized and on the job every day. There’s just this thing with the customers. You scare the shit out of them.”
The tears sprang up again. “It’s not fair. I’m not a horrible person. I overcompensate by keeping my truck perfect, my paperwork pristine, my jobs go smooth, but none of it matters because people don’t want me around. I’m a human being. I take up space. I have to be somewhere and I have to work. Now it’s looking like I can’t even have that because I’m so toxic people have to fly around the country to finish my jobs.”
I had no answer to any of that. I just looked at him across the counter.
“You know what else, Finn? I’m not the only guy out here like that. I can’t see it in myself, but I can see it out there at the truckstops. I see the guys with the empty eyes. The sociopaths. The crazy drivers holding on to reality with Twinkies, coffee, and Marlboro Blacks that don’t have a single thought from one mile to another. They scare me! I never thought I was one of them.”
“You’re not, Bill. This conversation proves you’re not.”
“What are you going to tell Pete?”
“I don’t know, Bill. I really don’t.”
“Tell them I’m doing my best.”
“They know you are.”
“Maybe I should just be a freighthauler and never see anyone from one month to another except forklift drivers and robots. Then I wouldn’t scare anybody, but shit, it’s such a dumb job. I’m a skilled mover. I can do anything out there that needs to be done.”
“You can. Except you don’t seem to be able to square away the shippers.”
“Yes, except for that. Isn’t the rest of it enough?”
“Not when I need to fly to Oregon to finish your job. Perry’s not half the mover you are, but you have to admit, he’s got charm. Perry has damage on his loads all the time, but shippers don’t complain about Perry. You know why? Because they like him.”
“Well, nobody likes me.”
Bill was right about a lot of things. There is a subset of truckers who really are off the mark and choose the job so they can go through life on an anonymous surface paying their bills, keeping on the down low, and thinking or feeling nothing. I had a pretty good idea of what bothered people about Bill. He was an angry man. He was angry about being half white or half black; he was angry that his family had lost the moving company they once owned; and he was angry that he was fifty-nine years old and still a road driver. An angry man, I knew now, since I wasn’t one anymore, was a frightened man. I also knew that combining a frightened man with a shipper was a bad combination.
I didn’t know how to talk to Bill about this. In our culture, fathers don’t even talk to sons about fear so you can be goddam sure truckers don’t talk to truckers about it. Bill felt too much and covered up too much. If he could reconcile those to a measured middle, he’d be all right.
I had gotten off a long stint of up-and-down West Coast work, which was horrible. I got stuck in some kind of a dispatch vortex where it was San Diego to Seattle, Redlands to Portland, Tacoma to Oakland. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who wants California can have it. The charm is completely lost on me. I finally broke out of the vortex with a load to Fort Collins, Colorado, which is a short jump to my home in Boulder. I was looking forward to some well-deserved time off. At least I thought it was deserved. The Joyce honchos in Connecticut didn’t think so, and we had a few words about it. I’m not on the road anywhere near fifty-two weeks a year anymore, and I pick and choose my loads. Part of this is because I get very high customer satisfaction ratings, and part of this is because Willie Joyce is my best friend. Some
people in the main office think I’m a prima donna, which is somewhat true, but it’s also true that to maintain a high-quality standard you can’t burn yourself out on the road.
Willie wanted me to deliver a Mr. Vaughan, who had had to leave his goods in storage near Denver while he found a house. Joyce stored the loaded trailer inside one of their warehouses to avoid double-handling. Our shipper was an electrical engineer for a large aerospace firm. Apparently the company was centralizing its rocket design division and had been moving engineers to Colorado from all over the United States.
I have two Denver-based helpers, Julio and Carlos, both Latinos, with whom I’ve been working for years. Like Tommy Mahoney in Florida, they only work for road drivers. Unlike Tommy, they hire themselves out as a pair. It’s both or none. Julio is in his late thirties and is a single dad. He’s tall, muscular, and covered in tattoos. Julio is very polite and well spoken, and he works like a mule. Carlos is short and slim. He’s in his early forties but looks twenty-five. He was born in Colorado but has a touch of the sing-song accent you sometimes hear from a native Spanish speaker. This is odd because Carlos speaks no Spanish whatsoever. His grandparents and most of the rest of his sprawling family speak no English, though they’ve all lived in Colorado for decades. I once asked him how he communicates with his relatives. “It’s not easy,” he answered. Carlos is a happy-go-lucky guy who always has a smile on his face and a joke on his lips. That’s a major asset on a moving van because there can be a lot of tension on the job. Between the shipper, the other laborers, things going wrong, and the difficulty of the work itself, it doesn’t take much for things to deteriorate into conflict. Having a class clown like Carlos around keeps things loose.
Carlos and Julio met me at the Sapp Bros. truckstop in Denver to deliver Mr. Vaughan. The trailer came in from the East Coast via a freighthauler. Occasionally, a crew will pack and load a van, and a freighthauler will pick it up and deliver it to one of the Joyce yards for a local crew to deliver. I met the guy early one morning at the yard in Erie, Colorado. His name was Terry. He’s not a mover. In fact, he doesn’t touch furniture or even open the trailer doors. Terry hauled for a company that moves a lot of our trailers around. Terry was dropping Vaughan and picking up an empty for Los Angeles. I handed him the 20-ounce black coffee I’d picked up on the way over.