How all Truck Driving stories start:
"You ain't gonna believe this shit, but .... "
It was the spring of 1972. I was between typing jobs, having been laid off from IML Freight during a cutback. I was working part-time as a barmaid, shooting 8-ball for walking-around money, when I decided to drive truck. I had some good friends who drove for a company out of Wichita, Kansas, and between 3 or 4 of them that summer, they turned me into a pretty fair driver. Well. I never killed anything.
Not just any trucks, mind you, but long-nose conventionals pulling 42 foot long, 14 foot high refrigeration trailers. Gross legal weight (in those days) was 73,280 over 5 axles. However, there is no legal load of swinging beef that will fill a trailer more than ¾ full, and since weight = $$$, the idea was to run as heavy as you could … and as fast as your tractor would … and hope for no scales, no DOT, no old gomer on his John Deere, pulling out from a side road with a hay rack … we ran three lanes and blue roads and as much interstate as possible … we ran 15 hours or more a day, never mind the log books… we drove when the birds were walking and prayed to the weather gods … We chugged coffee and popped pills and stayed hardwired in overdrive until we hallucinated from exhaustion and amphetamines, and I weighed a hundred and ten pounds with a brick in each pocket … twenty-two hours non-stop from Wichita, Kansas to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, working that beef down Allegheny Mountain, the trailer becoming this ‘thing’ that was going to eat your ass UP… into Carlisle, PA, a couple of hours sleep in the parking lot of the Bar-B-Q Grill, coffee in Betty’s Diner at 4:00 a.m. with a bunch of coked-up steel haulers and some really strange locals…then into New York, Brooklyn meat packing plants that have made me distrust hamburger completely … get a backhaul out on The Island somewhere, over a hundred and sixty lights out Atlantic Avenue to the LIE to Islip … asparagus to Boston, Quincy Market … nofuckingwayhosay … call dispatch, go out of service, haul your empty ass back over the George Washington Bridge, down the parkway to 80 to 209 to 33 to 78 to 81 to Carlisle … back to the Bar-B-Que, shoot some pool, drink some beer, wait for the stragglers to make it back in … maybe a couple of days at home, but more likely, just getting down the road … fish in Ft. Lauderdale, potatoes in Mars Hill, Maine … peaches in South Carolina and sweet corn in North… yellow onions out of Pharr, Texas (which I lost an hour trying to find on the map under “F”…) … frozen turkeys on the day before Thanksgiving to a V.A. hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee … Styrofoam ice chests out of York, PA for Los Angeles … 5000 pounds and 100% cube in a 40 foot trailer that just bounced and shook and beat me to death the whole way to LA … out old 66, the last year it was open (I think) … made the climb up Seven Mile Mountain outside of Albuquerque at around midnight … pulled that box right up that hill, came over the top and into a big sweeping curve to the right and then … BAM!! … there was Albuquerque, all laid out like a million diamonds and rubies and emeralds on this immense black sky … just glittering and shimmering in the thin air on the mountain … but the new I-40 doesn’t even follow the old 66, so that spot is gone forever … into LA at 7 a.m. on a Monday morning and actually find the warehouse … argue with the dock foreman (who had never had a woman driver at his dock before, and was, therefore, profoundly flummoxed. The dumb fuck.) …dump that styrofoam, then northbound for a zillion miles of melon and tomato fields, over the “Grapevine” and coasting on the flats outside of Fresno before I had to catch tenth and boogie back over to the high side … going for my backhaul in Sacramento, I get there late, realize the next day is the 4h of July, the dock will be closed … the Chicano security guard takes me to his home where I spend an unforgettable 24 hours with his amazing family, his parents, his wife, somebody’s grandpa, the kids, and all the neighbors … an Hispanic 4th of July, the irony of it was perfect, there was one green card in the lot … Stuffed me full of tamale pie and steamed corn and Corona … let me sleep for 10 hours, and took me back to my truck … I never even knew their last name … Hangover regardless, I have to find my 28,000 pounds of wild rice (in 50 pound bags), and when I do, also find that I have to load it. By hand. Four hours later and ten pounds lighter from all the sweating (at least my headache was gone), grab a shower and a cheeseburger at the 76, and then on the road again … …
“How ‘bout’cha, West Bound flatbed, it’s me, GoGo …you’re lookin’ good to Sacto, bud, what’s shakin this way?”
… we were tired, we were hungry, we were sleepy, we were (lots of the time) dirty and wrinkled … but there were thousands of us, so we were never, any one of us, alone … it was a confraternity of pure human endurance which made no one of us a stranger from any other … there was an anonymity to the radio which was very seductive in its cadences of speech and colloquialisms, the ebb and flow of voices in and out, fading out down the miles of asphalt and concrete …
Ain’t seen nuthin, here to state line. Hammer down, girl, keep’er between the fence posts … 3’s and 8’s, darlin’, 44’s to the little ones and a 33 and a third to your old victrola … Catch ya come later, we gone.
Woooooooooooooosh.
Keep on truckin’, GoGo … you were a helluva broad.
