Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  The legendary American trucker isn’t the hero he used to be. Clueless renegades, bad press and an ignorant public have all taken some of the shine from the stacks. Automakers love to tout their air bags and V-6 snap in the looming shadow of Tyrannosauric trucks. A van slides into the oncoming lane, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reads “5 Killed As Tractor-Trailer Hits Van.” Some yobbo in a bitsy four-wheeler sees a ten-foot patch of concrete off the front bumper of a Kenworth and homesteads it in a heartbeat. And last week’s behemoth Mid-America Truck Show in Louisville was salted with the occasional log-book-bending Deliverance extra. But the bottom line is this: Taken as a whole, the best drivers on the road—men and women—are still truckers. Shut ’em down, and the negative buzz will be obliterated by pampered howls of deprivation. On the Road Gang, truckin’ songs are received without irony.

  You’ll hear truckers on the show. They are their own sort of skip, their lo-fi voices ranging the Rand McNally plat. Night Train is on the line. He has his landing gear down and will sleep at home tonight. Bowlegged Snake checks in. Half Breed, T-Trucker, Six Pack, King Korn, Gatekeeper, they all make contact. Cherokee is in Fort Smith, headed to Pennsylvania. The Denver Dreamer is rolling through Denver. Jeff, no handle, no truck, isn’t going anywhere—he’s calling from an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

  The writing life took me to the Mid-America show last week. It was a good gig. Met the guys who haul the Budweiser Clydesdales. Helped Reba McEntire’s truckers load out twelve semi trucks’ worth of stage, rigging and electrical tinsel. Took three days and sifted through about twenty-five acres of trucks and all things big rig. Come Saturday afternoon, I pulled out for home. Glanced at the map, slipped inside the blue vein of I-65, and rolled north out of Louisville. By the time I hit the Wisconsin line, I still had three hours to go. I kept the Road Gang tuned, punching between WWL and WLAC. Kevin Gaskin, Ol’ Spiderbite, was covering for Nemo. He wished it was warmer, so he could go catfishing. Fugitive called from Albuquerque to talk about Hale-Bopp and remind everyone to watch for the eclipse. Pinkard & Bowden filled the “Trucker’s Chuckle” slot. In NASCAR news, as always, the names were the same, but they said Earnhardt was struggling. Chaplain Joe Hunter checked in with Truck Stop Ministries to help Mr. and Mrs. Trucker down Heaven’s Road. And between it all, the music: Johnny Paycheck. Jerry Reed. Roger Miller. Joe Stampley sang “She’s Long-Legged,” with a straight face. I was just home when Ol’ Spiderbite pulled a new one from the recipe cards, something by a guy named Jack Ingram.

  There are other trucking radio shows. The Truckin’ Bozo, out of WLW in Louisiana; Marcia Campbell and Jerry Min-shall, with Interstate Radio Network. Bill Mack has been on the air for years. Wrote “Blue” for Patsy Cline; a girl named LeAnn Rimes recorded it a while later. But I heard Dave Nemo first, at 2 a.m., somewhere in the middle of North Dakota. And so, out of loyalty, when I’m on the road for the overnight, I drive as if my barnacled 1989 Tempo has ten forward gears and a Georgia overdrive, usher in the skip, and collect my mile markers with the Road Gang.

  1997

  P.S. You can still catch overnight trucking shows on the radio (I was listening to the Truckin’ Bozo just the other night), but there have been many changes in the names and programs since this piece was written. Today’s Truckin’ Bozo is actually Son of Bozo. For his part, Dave Nemo now broadcasts exclusively on satellite radio. No more AM skip. I hope it’s working out. He was always nice to me. If I was rolling through Nashville after midnight, I’d buzz the studio door, and he’d let me in to shoot the breeze and talk to the truckers on the air. These days my favorite late-night AM skip comes out of St. Louis—the John Carney show on KMOX. Carney is at 1120 on the dial. As they say, that boy ain’t right.

  Fear This

  My fear is my substance, and probably the

  best part of me.

  —Franz Kafka

  I don’t get to town much, so being cut off in traffic should have been a novelty. A stream of bumper-to-bumper day-jobbers droning homeward, doing sixty in a forty-five, light turning red 200 yards ahead, and this non-signaling knothead shoots in front of me like he’s going for the pole at Daytona. Pinches himself between me and some four-door, and then stomps the brakes like he’s smashing a rat. And so I sat behind him, wondering if I had time to rip out his valve stems before the light changed. His baseball cap was on backward, of course, his stereo—as I am confident he would have put it—was “cranked,” and he was driving one of those yappy little four-wheel drive pickups that have become the toy poodles of the truck world. But while all of these things triggered my pique, it was the “No Fear” sticker in his rear window that sustains my rant.

  The “No Fear” logo represents a line of clothing and sports gear. Irksomely ubiquitous on windshields, t-shirts, caps, billboards and bumper stickers, this bellicose bit of marketing has caused me to ponder what I know of fear. Very little, I suspect. Not because I am immune, or brave, or drive a hot little truck, but because of good fortune, and because what fear I have experienced—in the face of a well-armed Hungarian border guard, in the back of a fire engine, down a Belize City back street—has been, in the scope of things, fairly superficial. But in today’s society, where rebellion amounts to a nipple ring, a Kool-Aid rinse, or an exquisite tattoo, superficial covers it. Image—be it ephemeral as a cathode ray and thin as ink on a two-syllable bumper sticker—while it is so obviously nothing, is, in the age of identity purchased at retail, everything indeed. And every marketer believes—that is not to say they understand—the words of French playwright Jean Anouilh: “An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.” Fear is ugly, and ugly doesn’t sell sunglasses.

  But what sort of vacuous buffoonery allows us to adopt such slogans? Consider the case of the lump of gristle with a pulse who cut me off in traffic. Cossetted in a society where rebellion has been co-opted by commerce, where individuality is glorified in fashion campaigns that put youth in world wide lockstep with an efficiency despots only dream of (assuming, of course, that the people who own athletic shoe companies are not despots), raging youth finds itself sitting at a red light, steeped in the same hormonal invincibility that fuels ravaging armies, with nothing to do but wait to tromp the accelerator of a trendy little pickup. Who knows fear?

  I once hitchhiked a ride with a Belizian cane hauler. I couldn’t speak Spanish; he couldn’t speak English. It didn’t matter: The bellowing engine precluded conversation. We simply grinned at each other as he hurled the truck through the twists in the road, the scorched sugar cane swaying high above our heads. The truck was of indeterminate vintage. The play in the steering was such that an entire half spin of the wheel was required before the truck’s vector was affected. The previous evening, on a blind corner, a pickup had veered over the center line, crashing head-on with a tractor hauling cane. Two men had been killed. As we shot the same curve that morning, the wreckage still remained; grieving clusters of family stood along the roadside. We hit that curve full tilt, blowing a backwash of cane leaves over the upended tractor. I sneaked a peek at the speedometer. It was completely obscured by a circular decal of the Virgin Mary. We grinned at each other again.

  Two men, both driving dangerously in trucks, both expressing themselves through adhesive symbology. And yet there is a difference; an instructive distinction.

  Is the cane hauler wiser because he knows fear? Poverty, dangerous labor, the hungry faces of a brood at home—surely these cultivate acquaintance with fear. The Virgin Mary decal seems evidence of theistic fear. But these are presumptive conclusions, and, I think, just miss the point. That point being, if the cane hauler drives without fear it is because he has acknowledged fear, and then turned it over to the Blessed Virgin. The fellow in the four-wheel poodle, on the other hand, is fearless because he has never been forced through circumstance to acknowledge fear’s existence. He has made the quintessentially American mistake of thinking his life is special, his bumper sticker is bold, his truck is shiny…because he is special. His fearles
sness is an inane statement construed through an accident of birth. In contrast, the cane hauler may dispense with fear, but he knows better than to scoff at it.

  Ernest Hemingway wrote about people living “essential, dangerous lives.” Those three words say so much about what we are or aren’t, and explain why, in a world filled with fear, we would choose to disguise the sheltered nature of our existence through mindless sloganizing. Perhaps the pickup driver could back up his bravado; swagger through a Rwandan refugee camp, exhort those pitiful laggards to get a set of decent basketball shoes, hoist a microbrew, and shake off this unattractive predilection to fear. Tell ’em this is Planet Reebok, and on Planet Reebok, we have no room for the fearful. Better yet, he could earn his No Fear decal by strapping on his favorite Nikes and sprinting down Sniper Alley beside a twelve-year-old Sarajevan on a water run. Somehow, after that, I think he’d prefer to keep his rear window clear, the better to see what fearful thing might be creeping up on him.

  1997

  End of the Line for a Depot Man

  Everybody’s got a Greyhound story. You haven’t really yanked the slack out of the Great American Road Trip until you’ve gone Greyhound. And you will wind up with a story. The Grey Dog is every country music song ever written, on wheels. It’s a rolling Coen Brothers film with casting by John Waters.

  Ray Grams has a Greyhound story. It stretches over thirty-six years. Funny thing is, Ray never left town.

  “March 22, 1965.” Ray will tell you to the day when the story began. He came to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a young man in his twenties, and took over the old bus station. He learned the ropes, selling tickets and checking bags, and one year later—“March 22, 1966,” says Ray, exactly—he moved into a new depot a block away on South Farwell, the main drag through downtown Eau Claire. The depot was built to Greyhound specs, a squat box of tan bricks and blue trim, with a steel lean-to foyer.

  For the next thirty-five years, Ray was as much a fixture as the bricks. He worked behind the counter, swept the floor, cleaned the restrooms, and hauled luggage, presiding over other people’s journeys. At the end of each month, he tallied the numbers for the home office in Dallas and geared up to do it all again.

  All those pilgrims—runaways and returners, comers and goers, inbound and outbound, with Ray a part of their journey, but Ray never moving. “I was there for thirty-six years, and I don’t believe I ever left town on a holiday,” says Ray. “Relatives would want to visit, and my wife would welcome them, but she’d say, ‘Ray will probably be working—not all day every day, but he’ll be down there at least a few hours.’” Ray is in his living room, watching Notre Dame football. He turns the sound down to tell the story. On July 31, 2000, the bus station closed for good. Ray puts it this way: “I pulled the pin.”

  Greyhound has had some good years lately. Total revenues are up, earnings are up, and ridership is up. Greyhound’s parent company, Laidlaw, is struggling and has stopped supplying working capital, but Greyhound still puts three thousand buses on the road, making twenty-two thousand North American departures daily. Greyhound says 19.4 million passengers took the bus last year, up 6.6 million from 1994.

  But for Ray Grams, things have been getting tight, and he reckons his depot won’t be the last to close. Nationwide, there are roughly 1,800 places to catch a Greyhound. Of these, approximately 1,650 are run by commissioned agents. “If I didn’t sell a ticket, I didn’t make any money,” says Grams. “You can now buy tickets on the Internet. And before, they never had a 1-800 number. Now, if you’re not going to travel for at least ten days they’ll take your credit card and mail your ticket, and then you’ll come into the station and say here’s my ticket, please check all my baggage—well, we do all that for nothing.

  “You’ve got the lights on, and the heat on, and the air conditioning when it’s needed, and if you’re not making any money, you can’t afford to pay the bills. I think that is going to be the demise of the small-town bus depots.” He speaks matter-of-factly, without bitterness. “The only way to change that is if they start paying a percentage based on the number of people boarding at the station.”

  The local newspaper quoted Ray in a brief piece marking his retirement. “I will definitely miss it,” he told the reporter. “When you deal with the public for that long a time, you miss it.”

  Have you done much time in Greyhound stations? Can Ray really mean it? “Oh yes,” he says. “I ran across just about any kind of people that you might ever imagine. We ran the gamut, from the most downtrodden to wealthy people who never cared to fly. I’ve had some where you’d have to finally call the police department, but generally, when you’d have some people there with a layover, you’d have the opportunity to visit, say, with a bunch of grandmothers talking about the grandchildren they’re on the way to see, or their daughters or sons. Or the college student on the way to school, frettin’ about the test they’re gonna have. And also the type of people who’d say, ‘Well, I’m on my way to interview for a new job.’”

  Even when the stories weren’t so happy, Ray felt privy to the drama. “We’d get prepaid ticket orders, say where a trucking company would call and issue a ticket for somebody to go to Albert Lea, Minnesota, or Salt Lake City, or Seattle…whether they didn’t make the grade as a driver, I don’t know—I never got too involved. Sometimes Mom or Dad would come in and pay for a ticket at our office, and we’d notify a depot in whatever city to issue a ticket to a child somewhere that went out on their own and couldn’t make it.”

  He had a few regulars, like the respected businessman from Iowa who’d get to hitting the bottle and wind up afoot in Wisconsin. “He must have known someone here, because they’d come down and buy him a ticket,” says Ray. His waiting room was about the size of a living room, and Ray treated it that way.

  Most people who get off the bus in Eau Claire smoke a cigarette and leave. They debark and loaf to the curb and back, trying to shake the feeling that the road has turned their blood to wash water. “We originated an awful lot of riders out of that station,” says Ray, “but most of the people are passing through.”

  The abandoned depot abuts the Eau Claire River, right across from the public library and a stone’s throw from the post office. The library is well kept and busy, and a vibrant farmers’ market springs up in the parking lot across the street twice a week all summer and fall, but much of downtown is a collection of dated buildings searching for identity and life while everyone is away at the mall sprawl three miles across town.

  In part because of the decline, downtown is home to a number of charitable organizations, including the Chippewa Valley Free Clinic, the Interfaith Hospitality Network, the Hope Gospel Mission, the Salvation Army, and the Community Table. Each of these, as well as the Eau Claire County Human Services building, are all a short walk from the old station.

  Blunt economics dictate that Greyhound is the transport of choice for a population always near the end of the line regardless of their destination, and now and then Ray would find someone in need, and he could literally point them to help. The new station is located in an out-of-the-way charter bus building up the hill and well removed from the downtown area, with no city bus connection.

  The director of the Hope Gospel Mission has claimed that up to 25 percent of the people they helped came from Ray’s depot, and Ray recalls giving riders directions to the Salvation Army or Human Services. Ray is a little concerned about what those people will do now. Helping was part of the job. So was tough love. “Churches would call up and say we’ve got John Doe, and we want to issue them a ticket, will you accept our check? Well yes, I would do that. And mark the ticket nonrefundable, of course. Surprising how many people would get a ticket called in and then wonder if they could get the cash for it. Well, no. That was a complete no-no.”

  Ray remembers when Greyhound’s Ameripass would let you travel ninety-nine days for ninety-nine dollars. These days, a sixty-day pass runs you six hundred dollars. But ninety-nine days on a Greyhound? Rid
ing the bus to a ranch job one summer, I struck up a conversation with two young Israeli men. They were traveling from New York City to Los Angeles. To have sex on the beach with California girls, they said. They were anxious, and felt the bus was overdue. In Hanna, Wyoming, I gathered my stuff and took their leave. One of them reached out and took my arm. “We are almost there, no?” I told him he was just over halfway, and he fell to his seat in despair. Greyhound grinds the size of this country into your skull.

  Ray says he’d like to see some of it now. He doesn’t care to drive and thinks he’ll take the bus. “I’d like to go up into Canada,” he says. “And then Alaska. And then fly home after I’ve seen it all.”

  For now, he’s a little bit at loose ends. “I’m just starting to get used to this,” he says. “I stayed an extra month down at the depot after it moved, cleaning out. Filled I don’t know how many Dumpsters. I was looking through records back to sixty-five.” Now the place is stripped and locked, and in the hands of a developer.

  But put that Ameripass on hold. Ray says the people at the new depot have called. “It looks like I might go back and work three to four hours a day,” he says. “Maybe two days a week. To help those people out.”

  2000