Even after I quit working for North American, I never considered letting my CDL lapse. I remember joking about it to friends who knew my history, and I’d say, “You never know . . . things might unravel and I might need it again.” Well, as it happened, things did unravel and I did need it again. Just like Frodo Baggins, when things got too hot, I slipped on the ring of my CDL and disappeared. Long-haul moving is a convenient industry—where else can a man get paid big money for being essentially on the lam?
It was a long time though before the unraveling. I made several U-turns after I left North American, none of them involving truck driving. In 2008 I found myself washed ashore in a city out west where I knew nobody; I was fifty-one years old, single, with no job, no plans, no nothing. I was unmoored. It was the most difficult period of my life. I didn’t want to think about how I’d lit the fuse to my previous life and watched it explode. All I wanted to do was to go back on the road. I wanted to climb into a truck, hit that start button, watch the air pressure build up, and go. In that respect I knew I’d have plenty of company among other drivers. That’s what we do.
Fifty-one years old is not a propitious age to go back to building tiers in a moving van. I was in decent shape, but moving furniture is young man’s work. I wasn’t at all sure I could make the grade. What I did know was that I could certainly perform other tasks much better than before. I was no longer a young man in a hurry. I wasn’t a young man at all. I was another piece of flotsam hitting the road because I thought I’d run out of options.
Another thing I knew now was that moving, for the shipper, was to experience an emotional nosedive. Maybe I couldn’t lift like I used to, but maybe, just maybe, I could use my own failures and hard-earned understanding to grease the wheels of my work and make the experience easier for the people who were moving. Maybe I could breach the wall of suspicion and enmity people have about movers. That felt attractive. I wanted to do it the right way, the way I had never had done it before. I wanted to interact with my shipper and helpers applying compassion and professionalism. I wanted to approach the work itself with serious intellectual intention toward performing even the smallest tasks properly.
With all that in mind, I had the big chat with my old pal Willie Joyce.
Willie had come off the road in 1982 and opened his own moving company, Joyce Van Lines, in Stamford, Connecticut, right after deregulation. Prior to deregulation, interstate moving companies had enjoyed an oligopoly thanks to the Motor Carrier Act of 1935. That act made it nearly impossible for new carriers to enter the industry. Deregulation of the moving industry was started by Jimmy Carter and completed by Ronald Reagan. Any company could now obtain what was called “operating authority” to provide interstate moving services. Moving rates fell by more than half almost overnight. For me personally it was a big financial hit, but it was a far bigger hit for the fat, lazy moving companies with their sweetheart union contracts and bloated management. Those overfed sows were drawn and quartered by nimble, lean, and hungry weasels like Willie. He obtained his operating authority and started taking out the weak zebras in the herd by discounting moves with a fleet of straight trucks. Before long, Willie’s workaholism and focus had created a mini van line pulling in $20 million a year. Willie had seven terminals scattered across the United States, a hundred or so trucks, and about thirty long-haul drivers under his broad thumb. The quick-moving, elfin mover with the long hair and goatee I’d known had ballooned into a 350-pound, shaven-headed hydra. He had a fearsome reputation for brooking no bullshit back when he was a driver, and that reputation ballooned like his weight and the size of his enterprise. Picture Marlon Brando as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now and you’ll have an idea of Willie’s appearance and demeanor. Willie ran his company with an iron fist, and had been in the business for so long and was so focused on it that he had a quantum connection with everything. He knew if trailer 169 was missing a stack of pads, and he knew if there was a hedge fund in New Jersey looking for yield that would finance $1.5 million for ten new Peterbilts at 7 percent. And he knew every detail in between. We’d remained friends mostly due to the fact that I’d never worked for him.
That was about to change.
Our chat was about me going on the road for Joyce Van Lines as a driver. Willie was skeptical due to my age and long hiatus. I told him I was going to do it whether he put me on or not. I already knew that I could walk into any of the high-end boutique van lines and get hired on the spot on the basis of my skin color and diction. Guys like me were disappearing because the money was not as good as it once was, while demand for the Great White Mover was getting ever more acute. (High rollers are increasingly impatient with service people they can’t communicate with. Industries like moving, landscaping, and housecleaning in today’s America are almost entirely non-English-speaking, so I was a highly desirable outlier.) Willie, of course, knew this, so he half-reluctantly leased me a truck.
A few things had changed in the moving business since I was last out there. One was that moving and drinking, and driving and drinking, had disappeared. Another was quality, especially for corporate long-haul operations like Joyce. Now they were rated under a microscope by relocation consolidators like Cartus and Brookfield. If your customer satisfaction metrics didn’t measure up, you’d find yourself cut off from corporate moving altogether and back trying to make a living doing local moves. Most of Willie’s contretemps with drivers and staff had to do with maintaining the quality standard. If you didn’t measure up you were out.
I was pretty sure I’d be up to the job on the quality angle. The way I was looking at moving jobs now compared to before was totally different. I would not be in a hurry, and I would not be obsessed with revenue. The challenge would be to produce satisfied shippers.