I was only about four months into the job with North American and still pretty green when I moved a guy named Mel King from Greenwich to Richmond, Virginia. Mr. King was some kind of big executive and conceived an instant dislike for me. The loading part in Greenwich went smoothly, mostly because I had hired Callahan’s local crew for helpers.
It was at destination where things began to unravel. I had arrived at Mr. King’s on schedule with two helpers from the local agent and a full truck loaded with his stuff. Mr. King’s dream house had one of those long, curving driveways that the Richmond exurbs sprout like anthrax spores. I haven’t any good reason to explain it but I cannot stand Richmond. I call the whole area a hotbed of social rest. The term is not original with me but it works. It probably has something to do with a string of problem shippers but I don’t know. I surveyed the driveway and decided that even if I could get the truck down to the house, which I didn’t think I could, I’d never get it out. Strictly speaking, basic physics dictates that any object in one place can extricate itself by exactly reversing the movements it took to get there. While this is theoretically true, try explaining that to a lobster caught in a trap or to a trucker pulling a trailer through a half-mile curving driveway. First rule for the lobster and the trucker ought to be: Back in.
I told Mr. King I didn’t think I could get the truck to the house and we’d have to do a shuttle. (A shuttle is when you transfer the goods from the big truck to a smaller one.) Mr. King didn’t like this idea at all, so when I called Callahan’s to tell them about the shuttle, Mr. King grabbed the phone from me and complained to TC that he wasn’t going to pay any shuttle charges because it was Callahan’s fault for sending a driver who wasn’t competent enough to operate the vehicle through a few twists and turns. Mr. King didn’t care about the shuttle charges; it was a company move, after all. He was just using it as an angle to humiliate me.
Naturally, that pissed me off. Partly because he was right, in the sense that I wasn’t totally competent in the job, and partly because Mr. King had taken every opportunity to belittle me from the moment we’d met. He was annoyed, I think, because as a corporate big shot he thought he should have gotten the best, most experienced driver in the North American fleet. Instead he got me. In consequence of all this, I got back on the phone and told TC I’d do my best and told Mr. King I’d try to get the truck down the driveway. One of my helpers that day was an elderly black man who called himself Frog. (Movers who work for road drivers always have their own handles to keep the tax man at a distance.) He was an old moving pro who carried his own tool pouch and lunch pail. Frog took one languid look at the driveway and drawled under his breath, “Don’t do it, Junior. They’ll be using that trailer to plant geraniums, ’cause that trailer ain’t coming out if it ever goes in.”
Frog was going way out of his way to help me. He knew, as a black man from Richmond, that you let white people do what white people are going to do. At the same time, he saw my inexperience and the weird dynamic between Mr. King and me and probably figured that my being a young fool trumped my color, so he piped up with his sage counsel.
Casting aside all advice, I started up the rig and drove down the slope toward the first bend. That one I negotiated fine, though I had to get really close to the trees on the right so that the back left wheels of the trailer would clear the trees on the other side. Now there would be no going back. The next turn was a dogleg right, and my tractor wheels started spinning because of the sharp angle, the grade, and the red clay soil I was digging up. I made that just fine too. The third turn was another dogleg right, and I took all the room to the left that I had as early as possible, but there just wasn’t enough room. There was a tree in front of me and a tree within the angle of the trailer wheels. The tree within the angle was small so I shifted into my lowest gear and gunned it, figuring I’d just knock it over. Instead, the steel side of the trailer buckled against it and I was firmly wedged. Stuck. Really stuck. There was no chance of a shuttle now. In fact, emptying the truck and moving in Mr. King’s family became a consideration secondary to extricating Mr. Callahan’s $100,000 rig from the surrounding flora.
I turned off the engine. Silence. Calm. I got down from the truck, lit a cigarette, surveyed the situation, and started pondering options. Just then Mr. King ran up to me, his face purple with rage.
“You stupid little fuck! What are you gonna do now? My family’s in there waiting to move in!” His spittle was spraying in my face.
I looked at Mr. King. I knew now how his rants and insults had magnified my insecurity and self-doubt, plunging us both into an inexorable cataract of bad judgment and ill-conceived actions. I grew up a lot in the next minute or so. I realized that his need to bully and my need to prove myself had mixed this incendiary cocktail. I wasn’t ever going to play that game again. I was cured. I looked down at Mr. King, flicked my cigarette into the woods, and said, “I’ve got to see about getting this rig back onto some pavement. Where’s your phone?”
We trudged down to his new house, past the pale, wriggling shadows of his wife and daughters, into the empty study. I combed the Yellow Pages for the biggest, baddest tow truck in Richmond. I found one, and it arrived about an hour later. The driver, John Amos, was a muscled African American about thirty years old, highly skilled in his job, and so inured to the ways of truckers that he conveyed nothing when he saw my truck corkscrewed into the woods between two trees. I respected his degree of self-control, since he couldn’t have seen anything like it in all of his years towing big trucks. It must have taken all he had not to burst out laughing. I can see him back at the garage at the end of the day regaling his fellows about the Yankee truck with the child driver who had poured his rig down a drain and pulled the cork in after him.