Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  Today’s trucks are wired. In addition to his steering wheel, Dave Sweetman overlooks an array of nineteen knobs and twenty-five gauges. He can summon up screen after screen of performance data. As we course over the ruts and grooves, the easy lurch of the road reaches the seat through the air-ride shocks, and I am reminded of a trucker in Alaska who once told me his cluster of computerized doodads gave him good information, “but ninety percent of it you feel in your ass.”

  Speaking of which, trucking is not good for your hemorrhoids. Or your back. Or your knees. Or your anatomy in general. If your back doesn’t go out after years of jostling by the road, it’ll go one day when you’re busting your hump to unload eighty pallets of meat before someone poaches your next load, or you’ll do your knee jumping off a flatbed, or dropping from the cab. The endless miles set up a craving for coffee and nicotine, and the fats and carbohydrates waiting at every diner set your heart and arteries on twin trajectories eventually intersecting at a stroke.

  So much for the body. What about the soul? Truckers will tell you trucking is frequently twinned with loneliness, that if you’ve got trouble at home, the road gives you time and space to turn it over and over, roll it like a worry wheel, and sometimes you run it down, get it corralled, but more often than not it just wears a deeper groove. Loneliness and distance create their own little market for companionship. At the Nevada line, a warm-voiced woman offers a brief, polite invite over CB channel 19: free hot coffee and free hot showers, available at a place just off the road; additional services, available for a fee. Many trucks sport decals in the image of a reptile stamped with a red circle and slash, meaning the driver is not interested in the services of freelance hookers truckers call “lot lizards.”

  I switch trucks, riding out of Iowa and into Nebraska with Bandit and his wife, Lady Frog. They’re pulling two backhoes on a flatbed. Bandit has been assigned to handle public relations for Share America on CB channel 19, the traditional trucker’s virtual hangout. Some good ol’ boy calls in, apparently unimpressed: “That convoy stuff, that’s a crock a shit.” Bandit keys up the mic. “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, sir,” he says, his voice like a wood rasp drawn through steel wool. “We’re just trying to improve the image of trucking and encourage everyone to make that little extra effort to make our highways and byways safe—if that ain’t for you, well, have a safe trip, driver. This is the Bandit, and we’re outta sight.”

  Bandit lights a cigarette. “I smoke too much.” He’s small but stocky. Ex-military. Loaded with turquoise jewelry. He does smoke too much. His laugh sounds like melted cheese. But he maintains that measured military bearing, a stance that suggests sudden moves are ill-advised. I’m perched in the bunk, and he looks at me in the mirror. “You want something to drink? The fridge is right there. Please—you are at home. Anything.” This is a new Freightliner Century. Capacious. You can stand up in the sleeper and still not reach the skylight. The refrigerator is studded with novelty magnets: a Snoopy, a pineapple, a banana, a watermelon, strawberries, grapes, one in the shape of a tooth, several shaped like states. A counter-top holds an array of scented candles—one placed atop a doily—a stock of vitamins, and a flowered box of Scotties tissues. A tapestry of a semi superimposed on the American flag hangs over the bunk, which is loaded with embroidered pillows and stuffed animals. The Trucker’s Prayer is clipped to Bandit’s sun visor. A solid crucifix is centered over the windshield. This is not a truck. This is a home, a business, a shrine.

  I ride with as many truckers as I can: Jim, originally from Frog Jump, Tennessee, who bounced my kidneys across Nevada in a Wal-Mart truck filled with giant orange jack-o’-lantern leaf bags. He has a part-time gig as an Otis impersonator for Mayberry R.F.D. conventions. Lee, sixty-seven, running freight with his wife of forty-six years, listening to twenty-five hundred watts of Pink Floyd and Ravel, stopping at schools to give truck-safety seminars. George, his gorgeous canary-yellow Freightliner Classic grossing eighty thousand pounds, loaded with Hidden Valley dressing and Armor All. He loves the road, but misses his two babies and wife back in New Jersey; and, with another baby on the way, he thinks he’ll trade the Classic in for a wrecker so he can work close to home. George is training a rookie, Marques, and as we roll under the sun in Wyoming, he tells Marques it takes twice the woman to be a truck driver’s wife than it takes a man to be a trucker. The Connecticut Yankee, an ex-policeman loaded with cardboard. He used to drive local, in Long Island. Hated the bumper-to-bumper madness. He waves at the big western sky. “This is like vacation every day.” He blames trucking’s image troubles on “Billy Big Rigger; the guy who trashes around the truck stop playing video games for two hours, then hammers down the highway trying to make up for lost time.” And then there was Thurley, the woman who trucked me in a smaller rig across a numbing stretch of Nebraska. Thurley simply bustles with goodness. “Look at that, look at that!” she kept saying, pointing at yet another wearying flat-line vista. “Praise the Lord. Thank you, Jesus.” She thanked the Lord every quarter mile. Look, I wanted to say, this really isn’t His best work. But that’s my problem, not hers.

  On the convoy’s last night together, we gather in a casino parking lot just inside the Nevada state line. It’s a jolly little carnival. Joey Holiday, a singer who does a truck stop tour and bills himself as “The Nation’s #1 Trucker Entertainer,” unfolds his tiny portable stage, and sings “She ain’t just a truck, Lord, she’s my best friend.” In between songs he emcees a coin toss to raise money for a child’s wheelchair. Above us, the casino marquee—an exploding neon rainbow—grows brighter as the night grows darker. Jim comes out in his Otis clothes, does a ten-minute improv around the fact that he’s been driving for two days with a splinter in his butt. The truckers eat it up, guffawing and shaking their heads. I recall these faces a few weeks later when I come across a Salon.com piece in which the writer takes a sarcastic jab at “—those American Trucking Association propaganda films they used to show to high school civics classes. ‘Did you know that the clothes in your closet and the food on your table were delivered by truck? That’s right. Think about that the next time you see a trucker—and give him a friendly wave!’”

  The ATA is hardly impartial, and the road has its share of dangerous, unfriendly truckers. While industry representatives are quick to point out that the number of deadly accidents per mile are down (and have been decreasing steadily since 1982), there are still enough large trucks (4,871 in 1997) involved in fatal crashes to keep groups like Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH) actively lobbying for further restrictions. But: Did you know that the clothes in your closet and the food on your table were delivered by truck? The Without Trucks, America Stops slogan is unsophisticated, but we’re all complicit in that premise, every single shopping one of us. It is simply not feasible to run train tracks to every grocery store and Wal-Mart in America. Air drops are imprecise and messy, and canals are out of the question. Dave and Bandit and Thurley are on the road to feed our collective habit. We voted them there with our wants and charge cards. Little wonder, then, that they are troubled by our casting them as the heavies.

  Tomorrow I will roll into Reno with Dave Sweetman, and his odometer will kick over two thousand miles on the nose, just like he said, and we’ll all gather up at the Knights of the Road Truckerfest before embarking on an air horn–blasting parade through downtown Reno. But tonight we’re all just hanging out in a parking lot, happy to be truckers. And one hundred yards to the north, out on I-80, the economy rolls on.

  1999

  Rolling Thunder

  In 1988, a small group of Vietnam veterans rode their motorcycles through Washington, D.C., to protest the U.S. government’s abandonment of prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action. Since then, the protest—known as Rolling Thunder, in reference to the sound of the bikes and the massive bombing campaign carried out during the Vietnam War—has grown to include over 270,000 participants.

  Midnight at the the Wall. We enter on an i
n cline, descend past the first thin sliver of names, then edge silently downward to the darkened vertex, the incline running deeper and the sliver widening until the names stretch beyond the reach of a tall man. A smattering of candles flutter along the footpath and set the polished Bangalore marble to gleaming like sheets of black ice. But if you lean in close and turn your head, as if listening for the names, you’ll see the candlelight caught in a film of fingerprints. The satin marble face—cool and smooth as lacquer—invites touch. Few people are drawn to the Wall without being drawn to touch it, and the prints are trace elements of this instinctive ritual.

  But then your fingertips come to rest on a sandpapery row of etched letters. The letters form a name. You think of the mother then, cradling the baby, speaking that name. Then you conjure a young man’s face to match. The image is necessarily incomplete, necessarily ghostly. And then you find yourself wondering what you might have been doing that day in ’59, or ’68, or ’75 when—still young—he fell. The power of the Wall is in those names—a silent roll call grit-blasted into the stone to remind us that we are not honoring an abstraction, we are honoring 58,214 comrades; each with a life, each with a death. Each with a name.

  But there are names missing. And so early the next morning, after four hours of sleep, here I am on the tail of an Eighty-fifth Anniversary Edition Harley-Davidson driven by a sharpshooting ex-marine everyone calls Murdoch, wind slapping at my ears, rolling up Interstate 66 toward Washington, D.C. The sun is risen and the land is green, but it’s early, and the cold air stiffens my knuckles. A staggered double line of dancing headlights trails us in the mirror. And running right behind them, looming like the mother ship, is a big black Class 8 Volvo semi tractor. Most of the guys in this motorcade had a hand in building that Volvo as part of UAW Local 2069, and they’ve brought it with them to help honor the names you don’t see on the Wall, the prisoners of war and missing-in-action soldiers who never came home.

  By 7:45 a.m. we pull into a fifty-eight-acre parking lot outside the Pentagon. There are already several thousand bikes in line. It’ll be a noisy day. Then I think of the names on the Wall, and the names not on the Wall, and I think, well, it oughta be noisy.

  The bikes—Harleys, mostly—roll in for hours, in fits and starts at first, but then in a steady, rumbling stream. By 11 a.m., the overpass leading to the parking lot is swarmed with spectators; like a gaggle of flightless birds, they perch chockablock on the railing, flock the sidewalks and spill down the grassy slope overlooking the swelling sea of cycles below. The bikes are packed cheek by jowl, clicking and cooling, canted on their kickstands in ranks roughly ten abreast. Riders milling around on foot lend the scene a sort of constant motion. They check out each other’s bikes, snap pictures, reunite with friends. There are a lot of bare arms, a lot of tattoos. A group of eight riders who look like a bad stretch of highway are holding hands and leading each other in prayer. Artie Muller, Rolling Thunder’s founder, stands alone in the center of a clear spot, surrounded by lights, cameras and satellite gear, all rigged up in a C-SPAN headset, answering questions none of us can hear. It’s overcast now, but warmer. The bikes keep coming.

  At high noon a cluster of red, white and blue balloons rises into the air and the parking lot begins to rumble. Beneath me, the seat shudders as Murdoch fires up the Harley. One row over, a long, tall biker with skin to match his leathers pogos up and down on the kick starter of his chopper, a rough hunk of work that looks more like a plumbing project than a motorcycle. He runs out of breath and a buddy strides over to help him. The buddy is heavier, and when he brings his full weight down on the kick bar, the bike backfires, then chugs to life. For a while, while we wait to get moving, the exhaust becomes a little overpowering, but everyone is too keyed up to care.

  When we finally swing out toward Arlington Memorial Bridge, and I catch my first glimpse of the spectators, I feel a thrill. And when Murdoch snaps off a salute to a solitary middle-aged Ranger standing at ramrod attention, the thrill turns to tightness in my throat. I get that feeling all along the route.

  We swing right at the Lincoln Memorial, rumble up Independence Avenue, hang a left around the Capitol and cruise the home stretch down Constitution Avenue. I remember the trip in glimpses: the family, curbside, holding a homemade sign: Where is Private Jack Smith? Clenched fists, raised alongside peace signs. Murdoch exchanging “Hooah!s” with grinning marines. Kids with flags. A man in fatigues, with a quiet face, just watching. Murdoch rapping the engine, and the echoes splattering back from the government buildings. The smell of overheating engines, hot clutches.

  And then it’s over. National Park Service police on horses direct us onto the grass of the Mall. Murdoch and I leave the bike, double back and catch a ride on the back of the Volvo. Then we end up sitting in the grass beneath a tree. I remark on the irony of so many Vietnam vets being here, on the very ground where their actions were so vehemently opposed. The protested have become the protesters. He agrees, but points out that many of the original protesters show up to support Rolling Thunder. “They realize the soldiers did what they were told,” he says. “They were called, and they went.”

  In this age of declining postmodern irony, it is fashionable to dismiss such loyalty as gullible foolishness or blind jingoism. But to do so is to deny a cold truth: Vietnam may have been a mistake, but the loyalty of the troops misused there still underpins our very existence. The time will come when it is required again, and if you have grown used to freedom, you better pray someone is still willing to risk theirs for yours. Like it or not, deny it or dismiss it, eventually you need someone willing to do a little dirty work in defense of the ivory tower and the well-groomed suburb. Murdoch and I talk a long time, then walk to the Wall. The bikes are still rolling across the Memorial Bridge.

  On Monday, a few of us returned to the Wall for a memorial service. The speakers on the dais were joined by an empty chair draped with a pair of fatigues, a helmet, and a set of boots. It was a reverent coda to the previous day’s thunderous remembrance.

  When I got back home, I tried to describe the thunder of 270,000 motorcycles, the passion in the peace signs and fists and salutes, and the desolate power of the names, and the empty boots. Mostly people were polite, but their eyes took on that wary glaze we reserve for street preachers and proselytizing relatives, and I had just the faintest taste of what it must have been like to return from the jungle in ’68 and search for a sympathetic ear.

  When you face the Wall at midnight, the Washington Monument is all lit up at your back, standing clean as a butcher’s bone and solid as a compass pointing the way to Glory. It is a monument to look up to, a monument to remind you of all this country ever hoped to be. The Wall, on the other hand, is cut darkly into the earth. To see the Wall, you have to hunker down and peer into the marble until you find your own face looking out, strung with names.

  1998

  P.S. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Kropp proposed that wars be resolved by having the leaders dress in swimming trunks and beat each other with clubs. It does not happen, and we find ourselves back on the overpass, waving at our neighbors as they depart on our behalf.

  The Road Gang

  Note to non-truckers: The line “Ten forward gears and a Georgia overdrive” comes from the classic Dave Dudley song “Six Days on the Road.” To save fuel and gain speed coming down hills, old-school truckers used to shift their trucks to neutral, otherwise referred to as “Georgia overdrive.”

  The road, at night. Thirty miles up in the rare cold black, the ionosphere bounces madness back upon the earth. Waves of amplitude modulation yo-yo from the sky, hopscotching squares of latitude and longitude. Roll the AM tuner and the dial winds through a nether-world; a pulsing, electrostatic ebb and swell of fuzz and flash. The ephemeral spirits in the machine spout prophecy and damnation, provide news without context, dawdle through the late innings of a White Sox game. Dante trips out with Marconi, and their nocturnal spawn dance the dash, dive through your head, chas
e you down no matter which way you travel.

  The phrase “nocturnal spawn” would likely put Dave Nemo off his biscuits. He’s an unassuming man, with a light, friendly tone. Put himself through college in New Orleans, on the barges and in the bars, pulling tow and playing country music. Got a part-time job at WWL in New Orleans, but it was 1969, his lottery number was 17, and Uncle Sam was still taking. Wound up in Korea, on the overnight with Armed Forces Radio. A year and a half passed, and he was back at WWL, broadcasting country music for truckers on a new all-night radio show they were calling the Road Gang. Twenty-five years later, he’s still sending out skip, now from a tiny bunker of a studio a rock toss from the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. And the members of the hall would approve. In the gold-plated era of radio consultants and computerized playlists, Nemo works with a box of recipe cards and has gone toe-to-toe with guys in ties. Radio is no business for a purist, and yes, Shania Twain commands a card. But the bulk of the names penciled in the mix run to the likes of Cash and Cline, Haggard and Jones, Williams and Wynette. You can still hear Lacy J. Dalton on the Road Gang, or a teen-aged Tanya Tucker, or Tommy Collins—the man Merle Haggard called Leonard. Dale Watson is big with the truckers, and up until they caught the wave, BR5-49 used to drop by and pick a few on their way home from Robert’s Western Wear. If you drive all night, you’ll hear a pair of fifteen-minute Road Gang Hammer Down Bluegrass Breakdowns. Nemo keeps a banjo under his bed; sometimes he grins and says if he had his way, the Road Gang would be all bluegrass, all the time.