“What do you miss?” I ask, imagining he’ll say speed, going it alone, adrenaline, danger—everything I remember from the classic movie They Drive by Night.
“I miss the community,” he says. Since this isn’t at all what I expected, I ask him to explain. He says civilians just don’t understand, and asks if I want to see for myself.
We turn off the turnpike onto a service road. Near three gas pumps, I see several parked trucks, their huge shapes outlined by multicolored safety lights that shine through the black rain like Christmas. Behind them is a windowless shack that’s dark except for a couple of neon beer signs.
Opening the door is like throwing a switch. We’re plunged into bright lights, laughter, music, the smell of fresh bread, and an energy level more like noon than two a.m. At the counter, we are served coffee in mugs as heavy as dumbbells plus slabs of a pie that must have been big enough for ten-and-twenty blackbirds. My driver and the waitress exchange news about who’s still working, who’s still married, who jackknifed a semi on black ice, and who was driving a rig that got blown over in a tornado. At least, I think that’s what they’re saying. Words like anteater, which is a kind of rig, and bear, which means a law enforcement officer, need translation.
A bearded driver in cowboy boots sits down next to me. He orders lemon meringue pie, a side of chocolate ice cream, a pot of tea, and a can of motor oil. The waitress slides each item down the Formica counter to exactly the right spot in front of him, all with the skill of a great pool player. I compliment her. From there we get to talking about women truck drivers. She says there are a few more these days. Fleet owners have begun to hire them because they listen to their trainers and have better safety records. Still, women get ribbed and talked dirty to on CB radio. She respects them for hanging in there, and even driving eighteen-wheelers. What started as husband-and-wife teams, the pioneers of job sharing—one sleeping in the back of the cab while the other drove—has now become a crack in the glass ceiling of jobs with good pay.
Over by the booths, one older white guy and two young black men are feeding coins into an old-fashioned jukebox and arguing about the relative merits of rappers versus classics like Stevie Wonder and Sam Cooke. They seem to agree that Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia” is the truckers’ anthem, and play it three times straight.
“Just wait,” my driver says. “The next place has real truckers’ music.”
Back on the shining highway, he explains that truck stops aren’t chains of sameness like McDonald’s; they’re more like idiosyncratic relatives. Each one offers down-home food, talk, music, and timelessness, plus trucker necessities, from motor oil to mosquito spray, all sold over the counter.
When we turn off again and head into another warm, tacky, welcoming world, the jukebox features such songs as “Girl on the Billboard,” “A Tombstone Every Mile,” and “18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses,” the last being the ode of a trucker coming home to his wife. Truckers are such constant listeners that they dictate pop music hits. Also, Nashville produces specialty truckers’ songs as a profitable category. Who knew?
At our third stop, I sit next to a truck-driving wife. She started teaming up with her husband as a defensive measure. “Pimps work the truck stops,” she explains. “They drop off girls to work the cabs as they pull up, then take them to the next stop. I know because I had a niece who got caught up with drugs, and her pimp beat her to death for trying to get out. I used to hate the girls. Now I hate the pimps.” She says truckers tend to be family men—executives are probably more likely to be johns—and she’s proud that husband-and-wife teams have a better safety record than men driving alone.
At a fourth stop, there is a twenty-four-hour poker game. At a fifth, there is what seems to be a permanent floating argument about cross-country trucking and whether it can flex enough political muscle to make better safety laws.1 In this way, we hit every major truck stop between Boston and New York.
I’ve spent most of my life on the road, yet I’d never seen this world that wakes when others sleep. My driver tells me it’s global. He’s met immigrant truckers looking for work who have driven English lorries, and everywhere from Eritrea’s mountainous roads to the crowded streets of India, where trucks are painted with flowers and gods and goddesses, an art form that drivers carried photos of, right along with photos of their families.
Back in our shared cocoon in the rain, we’re quiet. The rhythm of our windshield wipers merges in my head with Brook Benton’s sensuous baritone:
It’s a rainy night in Georgia
and it looks like
it’s rainin’
all over the world.
I see Manhattan lights reflecting into the night sky, but I’ve lost all sense of time. This could go on forever. I realize I’ve been swimming in the shallows, and am only now discovering the deeps where the great whales meet.
III.
· I’m having lunch at West Hollywood’s Café Figaro with Florynce Kennedy. She is explaining to me that she quit being a lawyer because “the law is a one-ass-at-a-time proposition, and what you have to do is stop the wringer.” This is inspired by the sight of seven waitresses and no waiters, an index of suspicion. Flo says tips are probably being used as a legal excuse to pay less than the minimum wage.2 We quiz the manager. He assures us the pay is terrific, all seven waitresses adore their jobs, and more women are waiting in line.
Back home in New York a week later, I find a letter waiting from those waitresses: “We don’t think any other occupational group can appreciate what you do for women as much as we. It’s not enough that we work hard for ridiculously low wages, we’re expected to softly come on to male customers so that they’ll spend more and return again. Our wonderful male manager advances the theory that it’s really to our benefit—we’ll get bigger tips. God, what an intellectual cripple. Don’t ever let up! The Subversive Seven.”
Now it’s decades later, in 2014. I’m reading about beloved comedian and actor Bill Cosby, who has been accused by no fewer than thirty-nine women of drugging and sexually assaulting them at some time in the past. Each one feared she would not be believed, but when one came forward, they all began to. One is Linda Joy Traitz, who at nineteen was a waitress at Café Figaro, where Cosby dropped in occasionally because he was its part owner. He offered her a ride home, then, in his car, she says that she was confronted by a briefcase full of drugs and booze, plus his sexual assault.
I wish Flo were here to learn her instincts were right. Eighteen years older than I, with a life that stretched from seeing her parents threatened by the Ku Klux Klan to becoming a civil rights and show business lawyer, she was nearly always right. Traveling with her was better than any college education.
I once saw her buy a purple pantsuit for a young white salesgirl in a small-town dress shop, something the salesgirl wanted but could never have afforded. When I went back after Flo’s death, that now middle-aged woman told me Flo’s generosity had opened up a new view of life.
· In 1980 I board a crowded plane for Detroit and find myself seated among a group of Hasidic Jews. The men are wearing wide-brimmed black fedoras over their yarmulkes, the women are in dark-haired wigs and long-sleeved dresses, and the children are as neat and well behaved as miniature grown-ups. I notice some hurried rearranging of seats. The goal seems to be that no woman sits next to a man not her husband—or next to me. My seatmate turns out to be the oldest man, stooped and gentle, reading his prayer book. Knowing that no Hasidic man is allowed to touch a woman outside his family, not even to shake hands, I do my best to be respectful and keep my arm off our shared armrest. Still, I’m surprised that separating me from the women seemed to be a higher priority than isolating me from the men. I hear the word feminist in English amid the Yiddish from two young men sitting in front of us, and they peer back at me between the seats.
When we arrive at the Detroit airport, I go into a ladies’ room—and there are the wives and daughters. The youngest wife checks the stalls i
nto which the older ones have disappeared, looks me straight in the eye, and smiles. “Hello, Gloria,” she says firmly. “My name is Miriam.” That smile is worth the whole trip.
· It’s 1996, and I’m in Kansas, home state of U.S. senator Robert Dole, who has just run for president of the United States. I turn on the television in my motel. Dole is on camera, smiling, talking about his ED—erectile dysfunction—in a paid commercial for Viagra. As Liz Smith, the smart and funny Manhattan gossip columnist, always says, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
· Just as the millennium is about to end, I’m in a car with two women students on our way to a political meeting in Arizona. We’ve stopped at a construction roadblock in the searing desert heat, and a big man is walking toward us carrying a pickax. Suddenly, we’re hyperaware that no other car is in sight. Leaning into my window, he says he noticed our Ms. T-shirts—he’s a Ms. reader. This seems so improbable that I’m sure it’s a joke or a con. Then he cites an article of a year ago about los feminicidios, the hundreds of young women whose raped, tortured, and mutilated bodies have been found in the Mexican desert across from El Paso. Speculation about the motive has ranged from sex trafficking to the sale of organs, from raping and murdering young women as part of a gang initiation to a twisted taking of revenge against women for being wage earners. These murders have been going on for decades, but since they are sexualized and the victims are “only” workers in the maquiladoras—factories just across the Mexican border where products are assembled cheaply for sale in the United States—news coverage has been sensational and arrests have been zero.
I notice tears in this man’s eyes. He is saying that ten years ago his sixteen-year-old sister became one of las feminicidios and today is the anniversary of her death. He wants to thank us for paying attention, for remembering. He is grateful to anyone who makes these deaths visible. He himself will remain in mourning until her murderer is caught.
We shake his callused hands. He says there is something mystical about our appearance on this day. We are feeling it, too. As he walks back to his roadwork, we sit silent for a long time. Over the years, I will forget the larger purpose of this trip, but I will never forget this man and his sister.
· In 2000 I’m driving with a friend from Texas into rural Oklahoma. I can tell where the first state ends and the second begins because roads get better, cattle roam freely instead of being tethered in the boiling sun, and roadside businesses are more likely to be gas stations with convenience stores than topless bars and entertainment arcades. This seems like a good thing—until the Bible Belt gets tighter, and I see paired billboards along the road. One promises everlasting life through Jesus Christ. The other promises to reverse vasectomies.
· During a discussion after a university lecture in the early fall of 2003, a student stands up in the audience and says that President George W. Bush will board a plane carrying a large plastic turkey and fly to Iraq for a Thanksgiving photo op with our troops. Since we’ve been discussing the phony pretext of weapons of mass destruction with which Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in the first place, the phony turkey gets a big laugh.
After Thanksgiving the press breaks a top secret: Bush boarded Air Force One carrying a big hand-painted plastic turkey, flew to Iraq in the middle of the war, posed for photos with our troops and the turkey, and flew back to Washington—all at taxpayers’ expense.
Who was that student? How did he know?
· While traveling in Georgia, I see lawn signs for the reelection campaign of Max Cleland, a much-admired U.S. senator and a war hero who lost both legs and one arm to a grenade in Vietnam.
I’m in Atlanta again in 2002 and see TV ads that call him unpatriotic, and compare him to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The excuse is only his vote against two of many antiterrorism measures. This is a Joe McCarthy–type Big Lie. Veterans in both parties protest the ad, and eventually it is removed. Still, its very extremity has created doubt in a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire way. Cleland is defeated.
A year later, I see this successful tactic rolled out nationally against U.S. senator John Kerry, also a Vietnam War hero, who is running for president. Television ads feature veterans who deny his heroism as a Swift boat captain. Though the charges are later disproved, they contribute to Kerry’s defeat. Swiftboating enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called trashing, attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all.3 Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.
· In the presidential election of 2008, a banner year for Surrealism in Everyday Life, right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh opposes the Democratic candidacy of Hillary Clinton. He accuses her of wearing pantsuits to conceal “bad” legs. Instead, he supports Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate because she wears skirts to reveal “good” legs. Actually, Republicans have nominated Palin at the last minute to pick up some votes from disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters. This makes no sense. Palin opposes reproductive freedom and most other majority needs of women, enjoys shooting animals from helicopters, and has always earned more support from white male voters than from diverse female voters. Her selection is the biggest political mistake since the first President Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, expecting to get more votes from African Americans. Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.
· For serial surrealism, nothing beats right-wing and religious efforts to confer legal personhood on fertilized eggs. This would nationalize women’s bodies throughout their childbearing years. Not surprisingly, the Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has failed, but many state and local tactics are succeeding, from bombing clinics and murdering doctors in the name of “pro-life,” to denying birth control as a part of health insurance, and closing clinics with impossible building regulations imposed by antichoice state legislatures. Over time, I’ve also noticed that local pickets of clinics often personify this surrealism.
To enter the Blue Mountain Clinic in Missoula, Montana, I have to pass picketers who are crowded at the edge of the legal buffer zone. They are shouting, “Abortion is murder!” and “Baby killer!” Inside, staff members show me around the clinic, which has been providing a full range of health services since the early 1970s. In 1993 its building was firebombed and completely destroyed by anti-abortion terrorists, even though, as with most such clinics, providing safe abortions is a tiny fraction of its health care mission. I understand that repairing the damage has taken two years and a lot of work. Now Blue Mountain is operating behind a slender buffer zone and a tall protective fence.
A staff member tells me that one of the female picketers has come in when the men were not around, had an abortion, and gone back to picket the next day. This sounds surrealistic to me—but not to the staff member. She explains that women in such anti-abortion groups are more likely to be deprived of birth control and so to need an abortion. They then feel guilty—and picket even more. This restriction on birth control may also explain why studies have long shown that Catholic women in general are more likely to have an abortion than are their Protestant counterparts.4
When I visit clinics, I’ve learned to ask the staff if they have ever seen a picketer come in, have an abortion, and go back to picketing again. From Atlanta to Wichita, the answer is yes. Yet because staff members see the woman’s suffering and guard her right to privacy, they don’t blow the whistle.
Meanwhile in Wichita, Kansas, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors who performs late-term abortions—only about 1 percent of all procedures but crucial when, for instance, a fetus develops without a brain—is shot in both arms by a female picketer. He recovers and continues serving women who come to him from many states.
I finally meet Dr. Tiller in 2008 at a New York gathering of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. I ask him if he has ever helped a woman who was protesting at his cli
nic. He says: “Of course, I’m there to help them, not to add to their troubles. They probably already feel guilty.”
In 2009 Dr. Tiller is shot in the head at close range by a male activist hiding inside the Lutheran church where the Tiller family worships each Sunday. This is done in the name of being “pro-life.”
· I’m sitting next to a very old and elegant woman on a plane from Dallas to New York. Assuming that she needs company, I start a conversation. She turns out to be a ninety-eight-year-old former Ziegfeld girl who is on her way to dance in an AIDS benefit on Broadway with her hundred-and-one-year-old friend from chorus girl days—something they’ve been doing since the tragedy of AIDS first appeared. Humbled by this response and looking for advice on my own future now that I’m past seventy, I ask her how she has remained herself all these years. She looks at me as if at a slow pupil. “You’re always the person you were when you were born,” she says impatiently. “You just keep finding new ways to express it.”
IV.
An organizer’s job is surrealistic by definition. I often find myself in front of an expensive painting or amid a sea of designer clothes or in an elegantly furnished room that could pay for dozens of the projects I’m raising money for. This is a crucial part of the job of an organizer. You leave a dark basement and try to explain to people in the sunshine what it’s like to live down there. I’ve learned this is best done by bringing these different groups of people together. Those with extra money discover how much more satisfying it is to see talent and fairness grow than to see objects accumulate. Those without money learn the valuable lesson that money doesn’t cure all woes. Instead, it may actually insulate and isolate.
I think this contrast between excess and need is the source of anger and joy for most organizers: anger that it exists in the first place, and joy that the contrast can be diminished. Raising money is the price of our greatest gift: we love what we do.
My Life on the Road Page 20