“Well, nobody likes me.”
Bill was right about a lot of things. There is a subset of truckers who really are off the mark and choose the job so they can go through life on an anonymous surface paying their bills, keeping on the down low, and thinking or feeling nothing. I had a pretty good idea of what bothered people about Bill. He was an angry man. He was angry about being half white or half black; he was angry that his family had lost the moving company they once owned; and he was angry that he was fifty-nine years old and still a road driver. An angry man, I knew now, since I wasn’t one anymore, was a frightened man. I also knew that combining a frightened man with a shipper was a bad combination.
I didn’t know how to talk to Bill about this. In our culture, fathers don’t even talk to sons about fear so you can be goddam sure truckers don’t talk to truckers about it. Bill felt too much and covered up too much. If he could reconcile those to a measured middle, he’d be all right.
I had gotten off a long stint of up-and-down West Coast work, which was horrible. I got stuck in some kind of a dispatch vortex where it was San Diego to Seattle, Redlands to Portland, Tacoma to Oakland. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who wants California can have it. The charm is completely lost on me. I finally broke out of the vortex with a load to Fort Collins, Colorado, which is a short jump to my home in Boulder. I was looking forward to some well-deserved time off. At least I thought it was deserved. The Joyce honchos in Connecticut didn’t think so, and we had a few words about it. I’m not on the road anywhere near fifty-two weeks a year anymore, and I pick and choose my loads. Part of this is because I get very high customer satisfaction ratings, and part of this is because Willie Joyce is my best friend. Some people in the main office think I’m a prima donna, which is somewhat true, but it’s also true that to maintain a high-quality standard you can’t burn yourself out on the road.
Willie wanted me to deliver a Mr. Vaughan, who had had to leave his goods in storage near Denver while he found a house. Joyce stored the loaded trailer inside one of their warehouses to avoid double-handling. Our shipper was an electrical engineer for a large aerospace firm. Apparently the company was centralizing its rocket design division and had been moving engineers to Colorado from all over the United States.
I have two Denver-based helpers, Julio and Carlos, both Latinos, with whom I’ve been working for years. Like Tommy Mahoney in Florida, they only work for road drivers. Unlike Tommy, they hire themselves out as a pair. It’s both or none. Julio is in his late thirties and is a single dad. He’s tall, muscular, and covered in tattoos. Julio is very polite and well spoken, and he works like a mule. Carlos is short and slim. He’s in his early forties but looks twenty-five. He was born in Colorado but has a touch of the sing-song accent you sometimes hear from a native Spanish speaker. This is odd because Carlos speaks no Spanish whatsoever. His grandparents and most of the rest of his sprawling family speak no English, though they’ve all lived in Colorado for decades. I once asked him how he communicates with his relatives. “It’s not easy,” he answered. Carlos is a happy-go-lucky guy who always has a smile on his face and a joke on his lips. That’s a major asset on a moving van because there can be a lot of tension on the job. Between the shipper, the other laborers, things going wrong, and the difficulty of the work itself, it doesn’t take much for things to deteriorate into conflict. Having a class clown like Carlos around keeps things loose.
Carlos and Julio met me at the Sapp Bros. truckstop in Denver to deliver Mr. Vaughan. The trailer came in from the East Coast via a freighthauler. Occasionally, a crew will pack and load a van, and a freighthauler will pick it up and deliver it to one of the Joyce yards for a local crew to deliver. I met the guy early one morning at the yard in Erie, Colorado. His name was Terry. He’s not a mover. In fact, he doesn’t touch furniture or even open the trailer doors. Terry hauled for a company that moves a lot of our trailers around. Terry was dropping Vaughan and picking up an empty for Los Angeles. I handed him the 20-ounce black coffee I’d picked up on the way over.
“Here you go, Terry. It’s a shitty brew, and I didn’t know how you liked it, so I played the odds and got it black.”
“Thanks. You got it right. Here I am again. Drinking bad coffee before dawn in a dusty truckyard in nowhere, USA.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Since 1980.”
“Me too. I had a good long hiatus in the middle, but now I’m back in the harness.”
“I’m so fucking sick of it.”
“Did you ever do anything else?”
“I started out hauling green beans in a dry box. Quick turns to grocery warehouses. Then I moved to hauling hay. Now there’s a place to exercise some judgement. Do I tarp the load or not? Clear skies and two hundred miles to run. No problem, unless it rains. If it rains, my 80,000-pound load turns into 150,000 pounds, ’cause that hay just sucks up the water. Ever pull into a weigh station weighing 150,000 pounds? They throw you in fuckin’ jail. Tarping sucks, but I was in my twenties, right? Jump up and down off the trailer a couple hundred times. Spend a few hours getting it all perfect and it’s dry all the way. Decide not to tarp and the fuckin’ skies open up. Too much stress.”
“What did you do next?”
“Went up to Canada and drove a Terex in a pit mine. That rig was 150,000 pounds empty, for crissakes. Tires twelve feet high. Biggest goddam thing you ever seen. Scared the shit out of me, driving little mining roads with a thousand-foot drop. I did well there, so they sent me to Chile for six months running a Terex at a copper mine. I finally quit. Maintenance? In a Chilean copper mine? You can say one thing about that job. No logbooks, no pre-trips, no regulations. I just couldn’t handle being so scared all the time. The workers hated us, the roads made the Canadian mine look like an interstate, and I was living in a trailer on-site. Nothing to do in the off-time except watch TV in Spanish.”
“This is incredible. What else?”
“Eighteen months in Iraq. I made $225,000. That made Chile look like kindergarten. The trucks were locked up every night in cages. Security inspections every couple hours. Pull into a dock with a pit and soldiers crawling up and down and under looking for bombs. I was carrying potable water for the locals. Who’d want to bomb a water truck? Guess what? Every nutcase out there wanted to bomb a water truck.”