To put it all in a nutshell, the long-haul driver is responsible for legal documents, inventory, packing cartons, loading, claim prevention, unpacking, unloading, diplomacy, human resources, and customer service. The job requires an enormous amount of physical stamina, specialized knowledge, and tact. I am, as John McPhee called it, the undisputed admiral of my fleet of one.
My share of that Vancouver job came to around $30,000 for ten days’ work. I had to pay the labor, of course, and my fuel and food. Still, I netted more than $20,000. A first-year freighthauler for an outfit like Swift or Werner won’t make that in a year.
I guess that’s worth being insulted in the mountains by my brethren.
The long-haul driver portrayed above is the kind of guy you want moving you. That’s me, nowadays. There are lots of guys like me out there and lots of a different kind. I’ve been both. My own baptism into life as a driver for a major van line was not smooth. I was nervous and cocky when I first got on the road. Those might appear to be contradictory characteristics, but they are not for a twenty-one-year-old white American male from the suburbs who’s operating way out of his element. Before I was taken on at North American Van Lines, I’d worked several summers as a local mover. I was known as a hard worker, which made me cocky, but was out on the road all alone, which made me nervous. I was consumed with getting the day’s work done, getting the next load, and making the monthly revenue goals I’d set for myself. I was careless loading and unloading and extremely touchy with both shippers and helpers. I was in over my head. At the ripe old age of twenty-one I shouldn’t have been doing that job, given my emotional maturity. The fact that I was there says a lot about the moving business. The industry will pretty much take anyone willing to do the work. I was willing enough, but lacking the other qualities that make for a good mover or a good truck driver. Almost forty years later, I am a calm, meticulous, and imperturbable driver. I am highly sought after and exorbitantly paid. That didn’t happen overnight.
You’re about to go out on the road with me, a long-haul mover. It’s a road uncongested by myth. You’ll see the work, meet the families I move, and visit with the people who populate this subculture. You’ll smell the sweat, drink in the crummy bars, eat the disgusting food, manage an unruly labor pool, and meet some strange people. But I hope you’ll also experience the exhilaration and the attraction, of the life . . . out there.
You’ll also see what really happens behind the scenes when a family calls in the van line to pursue that all-powerful American imperative: The Next Big Thing. More than forty million Americans move every year. Careful people, who lock their doors, carry umbrellas, and install alarm systems, casually and routinely consign everything they own over to “the movers” without a second thought.
I find that a bit odd, don’t you?
Come on, let’s take a little ride.
PART I
THE TRUCK
Chapter 1
PUNCHING IN
I’ve lived a good part of my life in an odd netherworld. Working people are suspicious of my diction and demeanor, and white-collar people wonder what a guy like me, who looks and sounds like them, is doing driving a truck and moving furniture for a living. The truth is, I wasn’t brought up to be a long-haul mover. I was raised by conscientious parents, educated by the Catholic Church, and fine-tuned by the sensibilities of a prestigious New England liberal arts college. None of it stuck because Dan Bartoli, the proprietor of Dan’s Service Station in Cos Cob, Connecticut, where I got my first job, nailed me at an impressionable time and introduced me to low company and hard work.
Working at Dan’s blasted me out of the sheltered, church-oriented life I had known. My baptism began the first instant of my first day at the gas station when Dan trotted out his employee orientation speech:
“The middle word of this enterprise is ‘Service,’ and that’s what we give here. The first word of this enterprise is ‘Dan’s,’ that’s me. You give service and remember that this business belongs to me, we’ll get along fine. You got that, you dim fuckin’ peckerwood?”
Before that day I can’t remember ever being sworn at. Before that day I had never heard an adult say the word “fuck.” I was fifteen years old. Dan wasn’t kidding about service. You had to wash all the windows, check the oil, the power steering fluid, the brake fluid, and the transmission fluid, wipe off any spilled gas, and chat up the customer about the latest Yankee game or town gossip, all in a fluid motion so as not to waste anyone’s time but still give full value to each customer. Dan was a master. He knew every customer’s name, their kids’ names, and the latest news from the church, firehouse, Rotary meeting, or school. In public, Dan always had the perfectly appropriate response for any social situation. It was an elaborate ritual, and regular customers would stop and get two bucks’ worth of gas just for the experience.
I don’t know why, but I felt right at home. I liked being around machines and being taught how to use them properly. (My father couldn’t distinguish the business end of a screwdriver from the handle.) I liked the responsibility too. It was a huge adolescent passage to be selected to work the night shift, from 6 to 9 p.m., because it meant I was a trusted member of the team. In my family, where the term “school night” had a religious ring and all social activities were proscribed, work was the one exception. Since I lived only a few minutes’ walk away and was eager to find some solace from my seven brothers and sisters sequestered in a too-small house ruled by the iron fist of an Irish matriarch, I was a ready candidate for the night shift.
The idea now seems incredible that a lone fifteen-year-old boy would be placed in a gas station on US Route 1 at night, collecting cash, but it was a more innocent time. Dan’s cash-management protocol was that whenever we had fifty dollars in the till we were to slip thirty into the safe and keep twenty for the bank. His instructions about what to do if we were robbed were unequivocal: “Give the Bluegum all the money, fill up his stolen car, get the license plate, and call the cops. Even your measly life isn’t worth twenty bucks to me.” I was surprised that in Dan’s world all thieves and drug users were black and from the Bronx. In my admittedly limited experience, theft and drug use were exclusive to Dan’s own employees and the kids from the even more affluent Backcountry, who were all white, privileged denizens of Greenwich, Connecticut.