“Oh, of course, that has to go. I showed that to the other man.”
I was still trying to be nice. This was our first room, and it was a big house, and I already knew what kind of day it was going to be.
“Ma’am, it’s very important that we know exactly what goes and what doesn’t, down to every little brass ring.”
“Oh, well, I can get this stuff together as you people are working.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, it can’t be done that way. I have to write up an inventory. We have to know what’s going before we start.”
She acquiesced to that and began bobbing her head happily. “OK. Let’s go into the next room.”
“Before we do that, what about the pitchforks on the wall? Do they go?”
“Oh, yes, yes. They go.”
“Look, ma’am, would you look around, just in this room, and tell me exactly what’s left that you haven’t mentioned that’s supposed to go?”
“That’s everything.”
“What about the television?”
“Oh, yes, that goes.”
This went on all day from ten in the morning until nine that evening. I never did get a clear idea about what she was shipping. My inventory was a work of fiction. It was the most screwed-up, messy, filthy, disgusting move I’d had. The packers were slow, of course. They were milking it. Lucky for me I had picked up a bunch of packing material at Callahan’s. I loaded the entire truck myself: dressers, desks, boxes, chairs, tables, end tables, night stands, appliances, everything. By eight thirty that night I had completely filled my trailer. Mrs. Fowler was still rummaging through closets when I went upstairs.
“Look, ma’am, you’ve got to stop now.”
“What do you mean?”
“The truck is full. I can’t take anything else.”
“What about the rest of my things?”
“They’ll send another truck and bring the rest down to Florida later.”
She brightened at this. “Oh, good, then I can get the rest of my things ready then.”
“Absolutely,” I replied. “Ma’am, I hope you understand that every one of these boxes we’re packing is costing an average of twenty dollars apiece for the box and thirty dollars for the labor to pack it.”
“Really? I thought the other man put the packing on the estimate.”
“He did. He put three mattress cartons, one mirror carton, and three dishpack cartons on the estimate. We packed that in the first twenty minutes. You’re looking at another two thousand dollars in packing and another six thousand in extra weight.”
“I didn’t know it worked that way.”
“It does work that way. Do you think all this extra work is free?”
The irony here was that this whole fiasco was going to work out extremely well for me, if not for anyone else. She didn’t have a binding estimate, so all the packing and extra weight would be added to her bill. My truck was full, and I’d picked up an extra couple of grand on packing and material. I wouldn’t be able to load in Newburgh or make the extra stop in Rhode Island either. All told, my schedule had been reduced by one full day with more revenue than anticipated.
I pulled into the Secondi Bros. truckstop in Connecticut to get my gross weight at 1 a.m. I filled up with fuel first to bump the weight of her shipment. A gallon of diesel weighs slightly over 7 pounds, and I put in 140 gallons. Fowler’s load came in at 12,260 pounds. It had been estimated at 4,000 pounds. That’s over six tons of stuff manually carried and loaded by me, though to be perfectly accurate, I probably shouldn’t count the 1,000 pounds of diesel she’ll be billed for. Serves her right.
I mixed a large Dr Cola at Secondi’s and headed south. It’s only sixty miles to the George Washington Bridge, and I wanted to get across to beat the morning traffic. I did a little math on the Cross Bronx Expressway. I’d worked seventy-three hours in five days. That’s just the way I liked it. As the Grateful Dead sang somewhere, “Too much of everything is just enough.”
I couldn’t get Lone Ranger out of my mind. He was a happy man, though he had little in the way of material wealth except his modest new wardrobe. I kept thinking about the thawing chicken breast he’d left in his sink. It might be six months before he got home again. For him, that was a problem for another time. Lone Ranger didn’t attack life every day with judgment, resistance, and a perpetual chip on his shoulder. (They say a well-balanced Irishman is a man with a chip on both shoulders.) He was the perfect Zen truck driver, taking it all in and enjoying every moment. I was the opposite. I envied him. A lot. What he didn’t have, and what I had in abundance, was anger. I had it when I started out as a mover and I had it when I became a driver. I had brilliantly managed to select a career where frustration was the norm. That allowed me to to justify remaining angry all the time. The truck broke down, the traffic sucked, my helpers were lazy, the shippers were paranoid, and my van line exploited me. In my rare leisure moments, which mostly took place in pool halls and truckstops, everyone around me was angry too. Something didn’t feel right about that but as long as I had loads I didn’t have to think about it. I’d been angry so long I didn’t know how to feel any other way.
Chapter 6
THE POT OF GOLD
For a long time I used to have a helper in Florida named Tommy Mahoney. Since he didn’t haunt truckstops or moving-company loading docks, he wasn’t strictly a lot helper. In fact, he’d have taken enormous Irish umbrage at that term. He’d probably have called himself an on-call professional. He didn’t have a regular job, but the stable of road drivers who knew him kept him pretty busy. He’d make between $150 and $250 a day, so in a good week he’d make well over $1,500, plus tips. All cash and tax-free. Then again, on a bad week he’d make nothing.
Tommy loved Irish music, bluegrass, and primitive country, and he’d go out every night to coffeehouses to keep up to date. One of the things that made him so odd is that he never slept. Ever. He once told me that when he lived in New York he worked night shifts at the A&P and stopped sleeping one day. It sounds incredible, but I traveled with him for days, sometimes a week, and he really never slept. Because of that I called him the Vampire, but he was known all over the country among road drivers as Brooklyn Tom. I once asked him why, seeing as he was from Queens. He told me that as soon as people heard him talk his New York street accent they just assumed he was from Brooklyn. “These monkeys around here don’t know Brooklyn from Queens, so I let it ride.”
I’d arranged for Tommy to meet me at the first delivery drop in Florida. My schedule was to unload Fowler, Howell, and Gross on Friday and Taylor, Warren, and Murray on Saturday. This would give me Sunday to rest, clean up the trailer, and be ready to load Monday. It was perfect, the first workday of the last week of the month. If there was a pot of gold to be taken out of the sandpit, I’d be properly positioned for it.