Willie leased me an old Freightliner nobody else wanted to drive. To me, after my Astro 95, it looked like a palace. It had a double walk-in sleeper, refrigerator, TV set, and slideout desk. The cockpit had cruise control, an air ride seat, and GPS. I installed a CD player and a CB radio and bought an AT&T AirCard that gave me internet access anywhere there was a cell signal. I was almost ready for twenty-first-century moving. To reengage my truck-driving chops, I spent a week at a truck-driving school in Denver doing a refresher course. To help me learn the new ropes for high-end executive moving, Willie planned to put me on for a couple of weeks with one of his drivers. That would get me back into the groove.
At the truck-driving school, I picked up right where I left off and deftly performed the parallel parking maneuvers, the backing maneuvers, and the paperwork. Apparently, backing up a truck is like ice-skating and riding a bike. I was doing the one-week course, but there were about fifty guys there doing the month-long CDL course. I could see immediately that trucking hadn’t changed at all. Everyone at the school was overweight, undereducated, and looking forward to the big money and free pussy they thought were waiting for them out on the road. When they saw me on the lot doing my turns, they asked me where I’d learned it, and I told them I’d been a bedbugger. That was that. How those guys, without a single paid mile behind the wheel, already knew to ignore the movers was a mystery to me, but I became an immediate pariah. They were all going to the big freighthauling outfits, which seemed to have some sort of hazy relationship with the trucking school that I decided not to be curious about. A couple of guys did ask me about moving work, but when I told them they’d need to load their own trucks and deal with shippers, they lost interest. When I told them a top driver can clear $4,000 a week and more as a bedbugger, they said they were already going to make that once they hooked up with a company. I didn’t argue.
The school did a whole morning’s lecture on the Interstate Highway System. Here’s a kind of fun primer for you four-wheeler drivers out there: On the US Interstate Highway System there’s always a mile marker represented by a small green sign on the right shoulder. Truckers call them lollipops or yardsticks. Within each state, mile markers run south to north, so in South Carolina mile marker 1 is one mile from the Georgia border, and mile marker 199 is at the North Carolina border. On a horizontal plane, mile markers run west to east, so on I-80 in Pennsylvania mile marker 311 is at the New Jersey border, and mile marker 1 is near the Ohio border. When truckers communicate with each other, they use lollipops to give a location such as “Kojak with a Kodak 201 sunset,” meaning a state trooper has a radar gun at mile marker 201 on the westbound side.
Interstate highways have even numbers for east-west routes and odd numbers for north-south routes. The larger the odd number, the further east it is, and the larger the even number the further north it is. I-5 goes up the West Coast, and I-95 goes up the East Coast. In between, the major routes are I-15, 25, 35, 55, 75, and 85. East-west I-10 (the Dime) goes from Jacksonville, Florida, to Los Angeles (Jayville to Shakeytown). I-90 goes from Boston to Seattle (Beantown to Needle City). In between are I-20, 40, 70, and 80. Three-digit numbers indicate spur routes to the system. Odd-numbered three-digit routes do not reconnect to the main highway; even-numbered routes are circular and are usually beltways around cities. Using Washington, DC (Bullshit City), as an example, I-495 goes around the city, and I-395 ends in the city. It’s a simple system that works extremely well except in massive, older urban areas like Chicago (Windy City), where the route numbers coalesce into a Rubik’s Cube of confusion.
Every driver should own and use the Rand McNally Motor Carriers’ Road Atlas. Get the one with the laminated pages so when you spill your coffee you can wipe it off. It’s the best fifty-nine dollars you’ll ever spend. Forget about online systems, and don’t rely on the voice. It can be useful as a backup, but your primary guide needs to be a map. You need to visualize the route in your mind. Willie Joyce told me that since they started using GPS, drivers get lost or confused three times more than when they used road maps.
I was scheduled to meet the Joyce driver who was to train me in new procedures the day after Christmas at the Joyce warehouse in Oxford, Connecticut. The driver showed up late, looked drunk or drugged, and immediately got into an argument with Willie in the office. The discussion heated up, and when the driver came over Willie’s desk to make a particularly poignant point, Willie grabbed one of the Bantu spears off his wall (a gift from his sister, a UN aid specialist) and pinned him against a file cabinet with the tip of the spear at his throat. “Call nine-one-one!” Willie shouted. He held him there at spearpoint until the cops came and took the driver away.
Mike, another driver, showed up an hour or so later to load material for a big pack and load in Williamsburg, Virginia, to Las Vegas that would take two trailers. The driver for the second trailer didn’t show up (lots of drivers disappear after Christmas), so Willie reassigned me to Mike’s load. Willie told me that Mike was a good mover but had anger issues so I should be careful.
Mike was annoyed at being saddled with “a friend of the boss.” He made that clear from the moment he refused to shake my hand when we met. Mike’s one of those guys who lives out on the road because he can’t fit in anywhere else. He was wearing a T-shirt that said MY TWO BEST FRIENDS ARE CHARLIE AND JACK DANIEL’S, which told me just about everything I needed to know. Also traveling south with Mike were two Joyce movers, Nate and Carl. They were to spend the week in Williamsburg packing and loading, and then take the Greyhound back to Connecticut. Neither Nate nor Carl would ride with me in the Freightliner after I told them this would be my first road trip in years. They were sure I’d hit something or slide off the road.
My job was to follow Mike down with the second trailer, help him pack and load, then follow him to Las Vegas to unload. We headed out west on I-84 for the nine-hour slog to Williamsburg. Ironically, at the toll plaza near Newburgh, New York, a four-wheeler changing lanes banged into Mike’s trailer. The trailer wasn’t hurt, but the four-wheeler was. It took a couple of hours to get all the paperwork done. Mike was sure I had brought black magic to this whole trip. He told Nat and Carl to call me Jonah.
Mike had decided to take the western route to Harrisburg and then south on US 15 to the DC Beltway and down to Williamsburg from I-64 at Richmond. It’s not the route I would have picked. It was as if he wanted to test me, a seemingly green driver, to see if I could negotiate the Pennsylvania mountains in the ice and then drive the two-lane US 15 in the dark. But I drove carefully and slowly and arrived in Williamsburg about 5 a.m. I found Mike’s truck at the Kmart outside of town, parked next to it, and slept there in my sleeper.