This trip had me in a daze. Normally I’ll run with three, maybe four shipments. This time I had seven; two of them entailed extra pickups and deliveries going to six different cities, ending in Key West. Most of the shipments were small, and I’d gotten them all mixed in with each other. They wouldn’t be unloading in the sequence they went on, either, so I’d be digging some of them out. I knew I had to be empty on the Sunday of the last week of the month. Hardly anyone moves out of Florida except in a coffin. I’ve heard there’s a mortician in New York who’s cornered the market on snowbird cadavers. That’s a shame. I could probably get two hundred coffins in the truck and get them up there before they started to stink too bad if the price was right. No damage claims, no crazy shippers.
I had three more to pick up after Bangor, so I headed south. I stopped at Hal’s Truck Stop in Kittery to grab a shower. I fell asleep in the truckstop parking lot listening to All Things Considered on Maine Public Radio. Every driver I’ve ever encountered listens to public radio. The great thing about NPR is that when you lose one signal you can pick up another that continues the broadcast. Some may not like the slant, if there is one, though it would be incorrect to think that truckers constitute some harmonized bloc of redneck atavism. I’ve heard All Things Considered called Small Things Considered and One Side Considered, and even heard a Klan member from Georgia call it US Jews and Girls Report. (He might have been a bigot, but he was a listener.) If I can, I’ll schedule my driving to catch Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She’s got that omniscient NPR tone they all have, but she always has someone interesting on. I’ve got a little crush on Terry, actually. It’s probably because I’ve spent more time with her than anyone else in my life.
At the fuel desk they gave me a towel for the shower. Most truckstops now have private showers, but this was Hal’s in Kittery, not a gleaming Bosselman’s out on I-80 west of the big ditch. Hal’s had one large shower room with six spigots, like in high school, and there was a coin slot next to each spigot. You put in a quarter and that bought you five minutes’ worth of hot water. If you wanted more, you put in more money. Where was I supposed to put my quarters? I ended up thumbing them into my bar of soap. Though communal, the shower and bathroom stalls were spotless. There weren’t any glory holes drilled between the stall walls like you see down south.
I was about to jump into the shower when another guy came in. It didn’t bother me unduly, but I would have preferred to shower alone. This fellow had his clothes in a clear plastic bag: new jeans, new briefs, and a three-pack of pocket T-shirts. He saw me looking at the bag.
“Now don’t get all edgy there, driver. I’m no hobo. I drive for Pottle’s out of Bangor. I got fired yesterday, supposedly for too many fender-benders. I went in there today to pick up my CB and fuzzbuster and damn if they didn’t rehire me. Guess they wanted to teach me a lesson . . . more likely they had a hot load they couldn’t cover. They’re good folks, actually, and I can be a pain in the ass. I hadn’t brought any extra clothes, seeing as I was fired, so when they dispatched me to Tucson an hour ago I had to bobtail to the Kmart and pick up some fresh threads. Shit. I just remembered I took a chicken breast out of my freezer to eat tonight. Left it in the sink at home. Oh well.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Lone Ranger, who are you?”
“U-Turn.”
“Glad to know you. I forgot about this gumball-machine shower setup. How about you float me a couple quarters out of that bar of soap? I’ll pay you back outside. The real reason they fired me was because I took off the month of August to go fishing. I sure do love trucking. A man can quit whenever he wants and always find another job.”
He went on like that throughout the shower. Lone Ranger gave me his entire job history, all the while jacking my quarters. He was the real deal trucker/drifter type. I liked him because he was intelligent and good-natured. He just had this streak of independence that kept his life flirting with the breadline. When that line got crossed, like today, he went happily to the Kmart and rolled with it.
After my shower, I bought thirty gallons of go-go juice for the fifty-mile hop over to Manchester, New Hampshire, and went to sleep. I love sleeping in my sleeper, and I sleep better there than anywhere else. Getting up wasn’t nearly as pleasant; the cab was chilly, even with the heat on, and it’s always a struggle to wriggle into clean clothes in the cramped space. I had to piss real bad too. I took care of that with an empty Gatorade bottle stowed for the purpose. (Truckstop parking lots are littered with flattened Gatorade bottles, and a hot summer afternoon will provide a memorable olfactory experience.) I climbed out of the rig and was in Ray the Mover’s office at seven thirty ready to pick up paperwork and my two lumpers. The plan was to load 4,000 pounds out of Milford, New Hampshire, for Beverly Hills. I got my paperwork at five minutes to nine, the pricks, and the dispatcher told me to follow the two packers out there because the packing hadn’t been done yet. I wasn’t getting a good feeling.
We arrived at the residence a little before ten. Not good. The packers I was following got lost, of course.
The shipper was an elderly woman named Mrs. Fowler. When we got inside the house, we saw that she hadn’t done a thing to prepare for her move. Mrs. Fowler had told the agent she was going to do all the packing except for a bedroom mirror, her mattresses, and some dishes in the kitchen. We had to force open the front door of the house because there was so much crap in the way. She’d lived there for twenty years and apparently had thrown nothing away. We couldn’t get any of the interior doors open either, because every single tabletop, chair, and floor area was piled high with newspapers, files, magazines . . . It was the most full house that I had ever seen in my life, and I’ve been a lot of years in this game.
“OK, Mrs. Fowler,” I said, surveying this residential scree field, “why don’t we go through the house and see what’s going with us to Florida?” She took us into the first room and said that the only thing going was the lamp on the table.
“Good. What about the kerosene lamps on the wall?”
“Oh yes, they go too.”
“How about the pictures on the wall?”
“Oh, the pictures? Yes, yes. The pictures go too.”
“What about the stuff on the mantelpiece?”
“Oh, yes, yes. That’s got to go.”
“How about the bookcase? Is the bookcase going?”
“Yes, the bookcase is going.”
“What about the books in it?”
“Oh, yes, yes. The books are going. Well, some of them are going.”
“OK. Is there anything else in this room?”
“No, no. That’s everything.”
“What about the stuff inside the china cabinet?”