Over the next year or two I worked with Willie once in a while, but since he was running the coasts he was gone for months at a time. In any case, moving had become a secondary consideration. In the fall of 1977 I entered Colby College.
This isn’t the appropriate forum for a disquisition on how I squandered my college opportunities. The CliffsNotes version is that I spent three years in Waterville, Maine, smoking as much dope and expending as little effort on my studies as I could. The reason for this, I know now, was that I had already been seduced. Dan Bartoli and Callahan Bros. had begun the fraying of my umbilical cord of blue blazers, church, junior golf, and suburban upward mobility. Encountering Willie Joyce severed it completely. I’d begun my working career at the very bottom of the employment heap at Dan’s. Having started there, I decided I’d pull myself up the economic ladder by determination and work. I’d show the boys under the tree it wasn’t the system that kept them down, and I’d show my teachers and my parents that college wasn’t necessary to achieve success. To put it another way: Screw you, everybody. The American Dream is alive and well. From now on I’ll be the captain of my ship and the master of my soul.
Colby had an independent study scheme they called the January Plan. The concept of the Jan Plan, as it was known, was to provide an opportunity for students to pursue independent study projects off-site during the long break between Christmas and mid-February. (Cynics remarked that the Jan Plan also allowed the school to save lots of money by not heating dorms through the shank of a Central Maine winter.) Any project would do so long as you could find a faculty member to sign off on it. My first Jan Plan consisted of a month at a Virginia commune modeled on the book Walden Two by B. F. Skinner. The brief time I spent there permanently cured my nascent penchant for collectivism. I skipped the Jan Plan during my sophomore year like I skipped a lot of things. My junior year Jan Plan was decidedly less idealistic. Since I was flat broke, I figured I could work for Willie and write up the economics of long-haul movers as my Jan Plan. All I had to do was find a professor to sign off on the idea. I found a professor in the Economics Department who thought it was an OK idea; he wasn’t thrilled about it, but he was packing his office in preparation for his own Jan Plan in Baja, so he signed it off.
I called TC at Callahan Bros. and asked him to have Willie Joyce call me when he next checked in. Willie called a few days later and said he’d pick me up at the Indianapolis airport. He’d pay me $250 a week and cover my food and lodging.
My sister Byrne drove me to Kennedy Airport on Christmas night 1979. I had a duffle bag stuffed with North American shirts, my fleece lined North American jacket, and some notebooks. I exited the terminal in Indianapolis at midnight and just about bumped into Willie’s rig. He’d gotten rid of the Cornflake and purchased a brand-new Astro 95 complete with blue North American trim, oversize fuel tanks, a Cummins 290 diesel engine, and, best of all, a sleeper. Finally, he had a tractor to match his gleaming trailer.
Willie was in the forty-eight-state fleet for North American. Long-haul moving in the winter is more difficult. There’s less coast-to-coast work and many more smaller, short-haul moves. It’s a challenge because short-haul point-to-point moving can keep a driver away from home even longer than usual. And, there’s more actual work; the more short-hauls you do, the more loading and unloading, which means more labor to hire. This exacerbates the most intractable problem a driver encounters on the road, which is finding good help. It’s expensive to keep a helper with you all the time and can also become annoying. You’re with this person constantly, and if the chemistry’s wrong, things can get ugly fast. My call to Willie answered his own dilemma perfectly. We had worked together previously so we knew each other’s habits, and Willie wanted someone he could work with through the worst part of the winter, but he didn’t want a permanent person on his payroll.
We went everywhere in those six weeks. I had my first huevos rancheros in Laredo, Texas; stepped on the ice of a frozen Lake Superior in Duluth; bailed Willie out of jail in Davenport, Iowa; drove through Holcomb, Kansas—the scene of the murders that Truman Capote had memorialized in In Cold Blood—on a spooky, snowy night; drank my first Coors in Durango and ate a buffalo steak at the Buckhorn Exchange in Denver. We drove across the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico (we were moving the commanding officer), played the slots in Vegas, descended Grapevine into Los Angeles, ate jambalaya in Baton Rouge, and nearly jackknifed the truck on black ice outside of Flagstaff; I dipped my toes in the Pacific Ocean underneath the Santa Monica Pier. I learned firsthand about life in the truckstops and how movers were treated as pariahs. I learned about the van line/agent system and listened to other movers talk about loads, revenue, and tricks of the trade. It was a deep immersion into the intricacies of long-haul moving, and I loved every minute of it.
I returned to Colby in mid-February 1980 with $1,500 in my pocket and the conviction that, however silly it sounded to other people, I liked meeting and getting to know the people we moved and I liked the physical labor. Driving a lot of miles wasn’t so great, nor was truckstop living, but the rewards of the work, and the money, made up for a lot. The last thing I brought home with me was the certain knowledge that a long-haul mover made a minimum of $2,000 a week and sometimes much more. I couldn’t put that thought away. I went back to college, studied reasonably hard, but more or less continued my idiotic life there. Something had to change, and the form of that change was beginning to coalesce into a plan. Certain people were not going to like my plan.