There was little chitchat on the radio. We exchanged CB handles and that was about it. My handle is U-Turn because I’m always in residential areas getting bad directions and have to reorient myself, often several times a day. The most common CB handles are Bandit, Lone Ranger, and Coyote. Willie Joyce’s handle is Steamboat, and Tim Wagner’s is Banknote.
I passed a bobtailer—a tractor without a trailer. Bobtailing tractors have a really weird look about them, kind of like a walrus out of the water. They’re dangerous to drive, especially in wet weather, because the brakes are designed for a tractor and a trailer, so when you’re bobtailing and hit the brakes hard, the tendency is for the truck to spin around.
This South Carolina stretch of I-95 is wallpapered with a zillion different billboards. The most common among them are the ones for SOUTH OF THE BORDER, simply the largest, tackiest, tourist trap in the Milky Way.
One thing South Carolina does have is an excellent public radio system. From any point in the state you can pick a station up. The two best public radio networks are in South Carolina and Maine. Virginia is a mess. I understand why that happened in Maine, but South Carolina? Given the rest of its atavistic infrastructure, it’s a mystery. There’s absolutely nothing there. Once in a while I’ll see someone fishing from a bridge but that’s it. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of opportunity for blacks, or whites for that matter, in rural South Carolina. Get a few miles off the highway and it’s hard to believe you’re in the United States. It looks more like South Africa. One of the things I like about the moving business is its equal opportunity attitude. The work is so hard and held in such low esteem that there’s not a lot of room left over for bigotry. Anyone who will do this job is accepted. This did not go unnoticed by a large group of black men who flocked to the industry in the 1960s as long-haul drivers. North American Van Lines was proudly nicknamed North African Van Lines because it had so many black drivers. Just about the time I got on the road these guys were starting to retire, but I did get to know quite a few of them. Every one of them owned his own home and had put money away for retirement. I knew two who had second homes in Florida. They had nothing but good things to say about North American Van Lines and the moving business.
Once I made it through the gauntlet of SOUTH OF THE BORDER signs and reached the North Carolina border, it was fifty miles to Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg—Fayettenam, as it’s known, because it’s the home of the 82nd Airborne and was one of the main clearinghouses for anyone heading over to Southeast Asia in the 1960s and ’70s. I’ve done a lot of work there over the years. Right in the center of town they’ve got the 1832 Market House, where slaves were bought and sold up until 1865. Orbiting the market for miles in all directions you have the typical economic support system for an American military town. That means pawn shops, secondhand car dealers, pawn shops, secondhand furniture dealers, secondhand clothing stores, pawn shops, gun stores, all-you-can-eat cafeterias, and, oh God, how could I forget, mobile homes and prefab home sales. Then you run the gamut of strip clubs and bowling alleys.
It’s the pawnshops that give me pause. I’ve moved a bunch of military folks—nobody moves people around like the military—and they’re no different from their countrymen in wanting the car, the house, the big TV, the guns, and the sound system. Just like their countrymen, they want it all, right now, today if possible. It’s the American way, but military people don’t make enough money to have it all right now, or actually . . . ever. That’s one part of it. The other part of it is they have kids, lots of them, way more kids than families in the civilian world have, so that eats even further into their disposable income. In addition to that you have to factor in young enlisted men; I mean who else goes to strip clubs, right? (OK. Wrong. Lots of middle-aged truckers go to strip clubs.) Many of these these young enlisted folks get married young, aren’t used to a steady income, and are easy prey for salesmen banging on their doors. The signs on the mobile home lots all say that if you come in with a military ID there’s no credit check, no down payment, easy terms. Ergo, all the pawnshops. A pawnshop is a ruthless indicator of flawed financial planning. When you encounter a galaxy of pawnshops, like in Fayetteville, you don’t need to be Lord Keynes to figure out what’s going on.
When you move people and pack their stuff, you see how people really live, not how they want the neighbors to think they live. Louise DeSalvo wrote in a book called On Moving that “packing is a full-scale life inspection.” She’s spot on. I get to see the filthy bathrooms, the dirty dishes, the eight-year-old in diapers, the empty booze bottles, everything. The intimacy is immediate and merciless. I don’t ask for this and I take no voyeuristic pleasure from it. Well, occasionally I do, but not often. It’s just part of the job. As a driver, I get to set my boundaries, but a shipper doesn’t. Shippers sense this, and they react to it with various ineffective defensive strategies. The most common is to make the movers anonymous. This makes the revelation of their life contradictions irrelevant. Basic linguistics supports my view: I’m waiting for the movers, The movers are here, The movers just left . . . We’re not real people. We get tagged and filed away as a nebulous group of anonymous wraiths in order to deemphasize the intimacy. Regardless of psychological gymnastics, we know what we see, and many of us learn from it. It’s a rare mover who becomes a collector of anything. Even rarer is a mover who gets hung up on the “sentimental value” of objects. After more than three thousand moves I know that everyone has almost the exact same stuff and I certainly know where it’s all going to end up. It’s going to end up in a yard sale or in a dumpster. It might take a generation, though usually not, but Aunt Tillie’s sewing machine is getting tossed. So is your high school yearbook and grandma’s needlepoint doily of the Eiffel Tower. Most people save the kids kindergarten drawings and the IKEA bookcases. After the basement and attic are full it’s off to a mini-storage to put aside more useless stuff. A decade or three down the road when the estate is settled and nobody wants to pay the storage fees anymore, off it all will go into the ether. This is not anecdotal. I know because I’m the guy who puts it all into the dumpster.