Resisting the temptation to tap her on the shoulder and suggest she start a blog, perhaps with some affiliate links, I pulled up a Web site for a temp labor company whose slogan was “Work today, get paid today.”
Sounds good. Real good, actually; and I was feeling something tingly but wasn’t quite sure why that was, yet. My instincts were telling me that it was destiny. Only one way for me to find out, and that was to act on this hunch.
Excited, I wrote down the address and contact information, and we quickly drove down to where the company was located. The place was completely empty. I told the lady in sweats behind the desk that I was ready to work and could start today. She told me she was sorry, but that they didn’t have any work. “Haven’t for some time,” she said. For the last five or six months now, every day at five in the morning they had about sixty people show up for work, and on average, they only had about ten jobs available.
I explained to her that I was interested in traveling across the country and working different jobs along the way, asking which cities she recommended. She looked up some information on her computer and told me that my best bet to find work through their agency would be to head north to Billings, Montana, or maybe Cheyenne, Wyoming. “Cheyenne has plenty of work.” Casper, Wyoming; Fargo, North Dakota; and Denver, Colorado, also had work. But no matter what, don’t go to the Midwest or the South—especially the South; there were absolutely no jobs there whatsoever. She had relatives who lived in the South who were in the process of leaving on account of the situation.
I jotted all this down and thanked her.
A few days passed, and while I planned my departure, I received a call from an 801 area code. Turned out to be in regard to a job post I had responded to on Craigslist with my laptop while drinking at a bar that had free Wi-Fi. Good things happen to those who seek them out. We had seen a bar earlier advertising free Wi-Fi, so pulled in and parked. There, after ordering a couple pints, I logged on to my computer and began scanning Web sites for possible employment opportunities. I’ve always been curious as to why bars offer free Wi-Fi, and now I knew. They offer it so that you can look for a job while unemployed.
The lady on the phone asked if I was still interested in the position. Containing my excitement to the best of my ability, I told her yes, I was.
Pete gave me a ride to the interview, explaining on the way that it’s a lower-middle-class part of town. He went on to explain that he doesn’t really go there much, since it’s kind of “ghetto.” While he waited in his car in a nearby church parking lot, listening to Michael Savage on his car stereo, I walked up to the house and knocked on the door. I immediately heard the stomp of little feet running around like there was some kind of day care going on inside. Then the door to opportunity opened up to me, and a kindly housewife welcomed me inside. The smell of stew was in the air, and I saw at least three kids—all running around—as I made my way, as directed, to the table in the middle of the room and took a seat. The lady who owned and operated the business sat across from me with a bunch of miscellaneous folders and paperwork organized into neat stacks set in front of her. To my left, a few steps away from me was the kitchen where a lady, slightly older, stood stirring a pot on the stove, which I suspected was the source of stew I had smelled when I’d first walked in. She asked for my name, and when I gave it, the lady cooking quickly turned around, making it possible for me to view her stellar sweatshirt, which had deer embroidered onto it. With a subtle red-state accent, she asked if I was the guy on the phone who was traveling across the country. I told her I was, and she immediately got excited telling me how cool that was. “You know what that reminded me of? What’s the name of that one guy? You know, that one book where those two guys go hitchhiking across the country? Hmm, what’s the name of that . . .”
I was amazed that this lady knew of it.
“On the Road?”
“Yes! That one! It reminded me of that!”
The interview consisted of only a few questions: how was my driving record, when could I start, and how much or often could I work. I was perplexed that nothing was said about a background check; there was no request to see my birth certificate, nor was I asked to provide my social security number. She explained to me that I would be contracted out, and I would get to use their van lease-free, as long as I returned it at the end of the day with the same amount of gas in it as when I left. They would provide all the ice cream, and I keep 30 percent of each sale. I should have paid more attention in math class back in school; at $1 to $1.50 an ice cream bar, how many ice cream bars would I have to sell during a full nine-hour shift to make it worth my time? Confused, I don’t ask her how much an average day would rake in, nor whether there was a 401(k) plan involved. She told me that weekends were always good, especially when it’s sunny and hot like it had been the past several weeks. After the interview, I walked slowly back to the church parking lot where Pete was waiting, a block away, and got into the car, bummed. Pete asked me what happened and, more importantly, if I had gotten the job.
I smiled.
The next morning when I woke up, it was as if God was telling me not to get a job. I step outside with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and what should it do on my first day as an ice cream truck driver in Salt Lake City, Utah? Rain. It wasn’t a light rain, it was downright pouring. How the fuck did that happen? It had been sunny and hot the entire time I’d been there, and I didn’t know what to do. Is it like a game that gets canceled due to rain? Do I show up to work today? It could be a waste of time for all parties involved to try and sell ice cream on a rainy day, plus I was a bit hung over from going out to the bar last night to celebrate my new employment. I called the lady up to see if she still needed me to come into work, and she said, “Absolutely! Get down here! Some of our best days have been on days where it’s rained!”
I had gone online the night before to do some research on the profession. I was curious to find out how much ice cream trucks made, how many units I could hope to push on the good children of SLC, so I Googled “ice cream truck,” checking out various recent articles; I was shocked to see that there were dozens. As I read, I seriously wondered how many ice cream truck drivers get killed each year in the line of duty. The statistics must be staggering. There had to be a monument for them somewhere, because these articles were brutal. “Ice Cream Truck Driver Says Arson Was Attempted Murder,” “Three Charged with Hate Crime in Ice Cream Truck Attack,” “Two Marin County Men Face Charges in What Police Say Was an Attempted Highway Heist of an Ice Cream Truck,” “Mister Softee Driver Busted for Stopping Ice Cream Truck to Buy Drugs.” All recent.
Pete waited again in his car down the street as I went to sign in and pick up the truck. When I showed up at the house, one of the kids I had seen the day before was seated at the dinner table playing a game of blocks with two packs of cigarettes while Grandma took me out to the ice cream truck to show me how it works. She went over the entire inventory and told me which ice creams sell, which don’t, how to drive the vehicle, operate the Slow Children sign, and turn on the sound system, which has a couple dozen ice cream chimes to choose from. After that, I was all ready to enter the world of the employed again. She gave me directions to a town called Magna and suggested I start there and make my way back: “Yes, it’s a poor neighborhood, but you’ll make a killing there. For some reason kids there love ice cream.”
She helped back the ice cream truck out of their garage, waving me off. I drove over to pick Pete up in front of a house down the block with gang graffiti spray-painted on the outside. After I picked him up, the rain cleared up, and the sun was starting to come out. We were locked and loaded on our way to Magna. Pete’s wife called, wished us luck. “Try not to get shot,” she said.
I was starting to wonder what in the hell we were doing wrong when all of a sudden at 11:15 a.m. a girl popped out of a building to our vehicle’s ten o’clock, guided by her mother. The two of them walked over,
and I asked the little girl what she wanted. She told me she wanted a Rainbow Pop. Easy enough; we had two grown males in charge.
I looked, but didn’t see any Rainbow Pops, so asked her to pick something else. She frowned and pointed at a sticker on the side of the truck. I leaned out the ice cream truck window to see what she was pointing at, and dove into the back of the truck on the hunt for a Fudgsicle.
A few moments later I poked my head back outside the truck to tell her that we didn’t have that either and asked her to again pick something else. The frown on the little girl’s face turned to borderline anger. I couldn’t tell if she wanted to kick me or start crying, she could go either way, so I grabbed a King Cone, thanked her for her patience, and told her that it was free. Her mother asked, “Did you guys just steal the truck?”
I didn’t know how to answer. Just then Pete, who like me was breaking a sweat, exclaimed, “I found it!”
We made our sale, and after that we both needed a drink. So we parked the truck outside the neighborhood VFW bar and walked in. An old dusty American flag hung above the bar, and about a half dozen day drinkers were silently inside looming at the bar. One guy, sitting at a table in the corner, had his head down, sleeping, while The Gilmore Girls played on the television. After ordering a pint, I got to talking with one of the old-timers, telling him how much of a pain in the ass it was trying to sell ice cream. He told me to follow him after we were done with the beer, and that he’d drive us over to a trailer park community that always has dozens of kids running around. After we polished off our beers, we did as he asked, following his white pickup truck to the Promised Land, the trailer park community. We didn’t sell shit.
As I drove the truck through other residential neighborhoods in search of little kids, I wondered if this is what a child molester on the hunt might also find himself doing. We came across several other ice cream trucks also driving through our area of operation, one of which we tailed for a bit, and another I pulled up alongside to ask, “Hey how much do you make?” He didn’t seem to speak English, and I had no idea what in the world he was saying; I’m not even really sure he understood the question. It made me wonder if this was his first job here in America.
The only rush we had that day was a Mexican family who came over once we pulled into a small park. Afterward we drove around another neighborhood, several houses again covered in gang graffiti. Pete and I felt bad for not selling any ice cream, and we felt even worse for having eaten some of the profits when we got hungry. Our last sale of the day went to a little black girl who pushed her wheelchair to the curb and sat there patiently waiting for us to pull up. She was wearing a T-shirt with the American flag on it. She only had a dollar in loose change on her, and she asked, “Can I have that one, please?” as she pointed to an ice cream bar that cost $1.50. I really did not want to take her money, and I felt bad doing so, but I sold her the ice cream bar for her dollar. She said thank you, and we called it a day.
At the gas station I estimated that for a full nine hours of driving around way below the legal residential speed limit, about fifteen miles per hour, the amount I would have to put into the vehicle would be $7. That didn’t move the gas gauge one bit. So I put $5 more in. It barely moved. I put another $7 in low-octane fuel in, and it moved the meter a bit closer to where I needed it to be. Fuck it. Close enough. The amount that I spent on gas that day was $19.
When I checked the truck back in, I sat around and chatted with the grandma while her daughter went through all the ice cream in the truck to see how much we had sold. We talked about where I’d been so far, and where I was thinking about heading. She gave me some advice on places I should check out along the way, like the town in Montana where the Unabomber lived. When her daughter came back inside the house, she pulled up an Excel spreadsheet on her computer and started listing off what I had sold, handing me cash. I assumed I would be scheduled to work the following day since I had agreed to work the entire weekend, but she told me that wasn’t necessary and wished me luck on my travels. I thanked them all and left.
The amount that I made, on 30 percent commission, for a full nine hours of work was a whopping $10.50. Since I had paid $19 for gas, what I really made was a negative $8.50. I wondered how the other ice cream truck drivers made a living.
At the end of the workday I was mentally, physically, and psychologically exhausted. Back at the house, Pete’s wife had a steak dinner prepared for us. We stopped by the liquor store to pick up a couple bottles of wine with the money we had made that day, all negative $8.50 of it. We picked up four bottles of their cheapest. The four bottles of wine put us at a negative $36.
The steak was delicious.
Chapter Five
Changing Atmospheric Conditions
“Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.”
PAUL THEROUX
Shortly after crossing the Utah-Wyoming state border, I pulled off the freeway. I hung out a few hours, wandering aimlessly. I got back onto the freeway, then off again. Hung out. Back onto the freeway, off again. Gas station, diner, a motel or two, a couple chain fast food joints, maybe a Walmart, and residential houses with locked front doors, their inhabitants suspiciously closing their blinds as you walk past. That’s it. Then back onto the freeway, drive for a bit. Repeat. This went on and on, each time feeling more uncomfortable than the last.
It then hit me: I was totally fucked. This path that I was now on scared the hell out of me. It was just me and I-80, but I feared this might be the climax of my trip. I felt like I was stuck in some unreasonably long, drawn-out indie film, no plot whatsoever, and nobody could find the remote to change the channel. I was the main character, stuck living in this film.
So far the rising action, leading up to this potential climax, had been quite dull. That’s my conflict. Nickel-and-Dimed in Salt Lake City? Let’s see, since then, I’d played a game of bingo at a VFW hall, driven a lot, and witnessed the groundbreaking of a new library in Lyman, Wyoming, “A Great Place to Grow.” Three feet of gas station hot dog and dozens of energy drink containers later, I stopped in for some shitty Chinese. My fortune cookie read:
One of the first things you should look for in a problem is its positive side.
I angrily left no tip. Basically, what I needed to figure out was a way for me to hurry the fuck up and get to the climax, wherever and whatever the hell that is, then hurry up and get to the falling action part, “during which the tension is palpably eased; and then finally the resolution, or ending.”
You have to keep all this in mind while driving across the country working on a book for a big-name publisher out in New York City with in-house lawyers who would love to do their job and come after you for that book advance money that they kindly gave you in good faith . . . which you’ve now pretty much blown on booze. The thought of all this was making me want to drink, a lot. It also made me want to disappear, permanently. All this to say I felt like a man on the run, which maybe I’d pretend was the case, for now.
I was noticing a new sound coming from my engine, much like air being funneled through a plastic straw. I tried to not think too hard about that as I made my way to Green River, Wyoming.
Slowly rolling into the gravel parking lot of a motel, I noticed that all the other vehicles were pickups, nearly all with blue-and-white Michigan plates.
The lady working the front desk looked straight out of a David Lynch movie. I requested to stay one night, and she told me that most of the folks who stayed there do so for a lot longer, a week, several weeks, sometimes months. She mentioned she had several who had been living there for nearly six months: “They come here from out of state to work.” With my wheels now spinning, I thanked her for the information. Dropping my shit off in my room, I made my way over to the bar I’d noticed by the train depot.
Discovering that I was a war veteran, a guy my age wearing a cowboy hat, Wranglers, and a huge belt buckle the size of a dinner plate
kindly introduced himself as a “redneck from the sticks,” and thanked me for my service. He bought me a beer and started, “I don’t want to offend you, or anything like that, but can I ask you a question?” He hemmed and hawed, and given past experience, I thought I knew exactly what he was going to ask. Why in the world did you join the military? Shortly followed by his personal opinions on the war, all along the lines of how we should have never invaded Iraq, the war was wrong, I support the troops but not the war, etc. Especially by those who say, “Well, I’m glad you’re back,” which is always said with a subtle implication of being against the war, as if the gas-powered vehicles that they’re driving all have a “Bring the troops home now!” bumper sticker placed on the back of them, which they’re not telling you about. I’ve heard it all a million times over. Instead, the complete opposite happened. He asked me, “Why’d you come back?”
I just stared at him blankly, not knowing how to answer that one.
“I’m serious, why’d you come back?”
While I struggled to think how to answer, an intoxicated female stumbled over, eyeballing his cowboy hat. She took his hat off, exposing his bald head, and jovially told him that she liked his hat, a lot, and wanted to wear it. Irritated by the interruption, he politely agreed, getting up from his bar stool, telling me he’d be right back. A couple minutes later, he returned, wearing a mesh camouflage hunting cap, and picked up where we left off.
He explained to me that there are no jobs anymore in this country, and at least over there, I had the opportunity to make some pretty good money. He said he had looked into driving a truck in Iraq, and had been serious about it, but at the last minute he chose not to, as he felt it’d be too dangerous. He said he didn’t want to go over there unless he could bring his firearm with him; as a contractor, he could not do so legally.
Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey Page 5