“Los Angeles, California,” the girl at the desk said. “Jerzy Mulvaney, you’re a long way from home.”
I could never have told my parents that I was a writer. Such a thing would have been unthinkable. If I’d kept the summer job I’d had when I was sixteen, a laborer for the Otsego County Highway Department, that would have been perfectly acceptable. If I’d become a clerk at Augur’s Bookstore or Withey’s Drugstore, why, that would have been even better, because I would have been working “inside.” Or if I’d stayed in the Army… I know they talked about me behind my back—all of them except Aunt Mizpah. What was the explanation for my vagrant, edge-city lifestyle, and the succession of jobs, the many changes of address, and the brushes with the law? Maybe I was unbalanced.
Certain members of the family, especially on the German side, were unquestionably a little funny in the head, going back to Maddalyn Isolde Shimmersalz, my maternal grandmother, who committed suicide by drinking Paris Green, an insect poison. Then there was Uncle Augustus, who played with paper dolls and spent a summer living in a tree. And my mother, of course, who did a couple of stretches in the nuthouse at Binghamton. In any case, crazy or sane, I was the black sheep, a complete failure and an embarrassment to the family.
Aunt Mizpah, my mother’s maiden sister, was the only member of the clan who had the slightest inkling of what I was about. We exchanged long literary letters over the years. Aunt Mizpah had been engaged, as a girl, to a poet, Ashley Van Deerlin, who drowned in Lake Dunmore the day before their wedding. That was when she started on the sauce.
Aunt Mizpah shared some of Ashley Van Deerlin’s letters and poems with me. She kept his faded photograph on her dresser as well as his collected poems and love letters, tied with a crinkly lavender bow, as a sort of shrine. She even wrote a poem herself, dedicated to Ashley Van Deerlin, “To a Poet who Died Young.” It wasn’t very good, as I recall.
“Will you be needing a wakeup call?”
“Yes. No. Yes… What city is this, anyway?”
“Passaic. Passaic, New Jersey.”
“Passaic… Yeah, sure, Passaic.”
“Are you okay, sir?”
I slept that night in a king-size bed on pink sheets. In the morning, or to be more accurate, in the afternoon, after a sumptuous meal at an Italian restaurant, I again hired a taxi and ordered the driver to cruise around town, looking for a Mercury Movers trailer hooked up to a red and white International cabover with a winged foot logo on the door. At last we found it, parked in back of a Motel 6.
Armando and I had been on the road for two months. All across America the other truck drivers treated us like poor relations because we were bedbug haulers—furniture movers. The truckload company drivers—Schneider, England, Covenant, even JB Hunt—don’t touch their freight. For them, it’s strictly drop and hook. You drop your trailer at your destination, you pick up another one and you haul ass, nice and clean. You don’t unload your trailer. But we poor saps, the bedbug haulers, we have to wrestle with grand pianos, steamer trunks and vintage chrome dinette sets, and that makes us, in their eyes, the lowest of the low.
On top of that, I had cabin fever. I was sick of Armando and I was sick of talking Spanish. He didn’t speak a word of English and he refused to try. I had to interpret everything for him, even to the extent of translating the menus in the truck stops, and of course I had to order for him too. Since my Spanish was far from perfect it sometimes happened that I didn’t know the correct word and had to express myself in a roundabout way. For instance, I didn’t know how to say “speedometer,” so I called the speedometer, in Spanish, “the wristwatch of the miles.” Toll booths I called “the little houses of paying,” a junkyard, “the cemetery of cars,” and so on. Instead of supplying the correct word, Armando made fun of me. He constantly remarked that I was “muy burro,” very stupid, and that my mind was “basura,” trash.
Like a lot of short men, Armando was a little tyrant. Always we had to do everything his way. Although he was domineering, moody, verbally abusive and sometimes even shoved me, I never thought of retaliating physically since I was five inches taller and outweighed him by twenty-five pounds. Instead, I stupidly allowed this lout, this mouth-breather from Oaxaca, to dominate and bully me from one coast to the other.
Now, as I confronted Armando in the motel room, he characteristically assumed the stance of an inquisitioner and began interrogating me. Had I considered that what I’d done might cost both of us our jobs? Yes, I’d thought about it some. And the running money? Yeah, I did spend some of it. And so, what will El Jefe say? El Jefe can say what he pleases. He can charge the money against my salary or he can fire me right now.
As I gazed at Armando sitting on the edge of the bed with a 40-ounce King Cobra balanced on his knee, I realized that my spree at the Sheraton had done little to dissipate the anger and resentment that had been building up in me over the thousands and thousands of miles. I was trembling and I thought to myself: I’m actually going to take a swing at this motherfucker.
Armando jumped to his feet and faced me. I thought we were going to tangle ass, but no—instead, he evinced one of his mercurial changes of mood. He grabbed my hand and shook it; he laughed and slapped his thigh. I was a buen trocero, he said; he was overjoyed to be running with me; he couldn’t wait to get back on the road, and let’s spend some more of the boss’s money and fuck El Jefe anyway. He was a hard guy to figure, Armando, but one thing I was starting to realize: he liked it when I stood up to him.
El Jefe—Reggie Ray, our boss—was a shuck-and-jive artist, a smooth talker, always a toothpick dancing over his lips. Reggie Ray had a criminal mind. It’s possible that he may have done some time. I never asked him, of course. After all, he was my boss, and besides, a guy like Reggie Ray would never give you a straight answer anyway.
Reggie Ray knew the trucking business inside and out. Before becoming an owner-operator and an entrepreneur he’d pulled for Zero Refrigerated out of San Antonio, the reefer-haul. El Jefe was an excellent driver and he knew America—the roads, the towns, the Interstates—as few men do. To Reggie Ray the United States was just one small town.
El Jefe was also an expert packer and loader. Not particularly strong, he had a fine sense of leverage and balance. He knew how to use a dolly and he made innovative use of a hump strap. He showed me, in fact, how to use a hump strap on a king mattress for an easy one-man carry, something I’d never seen or done before.
Reggie Ray was nice looking and enormously personable. He bowled you over at first. But anyone who’d been over the road could see through him in a minute. He spoke with a thick North Jersey accent, which, along with the catchy phrases and the ever-present toothpick, added immeasurably to the sleaziness of his image, the Broadway Sam who promises you a rainbow and leaves you standing on 42nd Street in your skivvies. Still, he was good company on the road; he was a truck driver in his heart. The truth is that even though he was thoroughly dishonest, a manipulator, a flimflam man, a facile and crooked scammer who relentlessly exploited his clients and his employees, I liked Reggie Ray a lot.
The freight-haul drivers and sleeper teams run pretty much on the Interstates, but a bedbug hauler is all over the map. We were constantly on the horn with Reggie Ray all along the way.
“What’s your twenty?”
“Billings.”
“Okay, I want yez to run over to Rapid City on 90 and load four thousand pounds for Minneapolis and Saint Paul.”
There’s a logistics to it. For example, if you’re running to the east coast and your last stop is New York, but you’re also dropping off loads in Denver, KC, Cincinnati, Columbus and Pittsburgh on the way out, naturally you’ll load New York in the nose of the trailer, then Pittsburgh, then Columbus, and so on. But it becomes more complicated because you’re also picking up new loads en route. Because of this we often had to zigzag or even backtrack. Let’s say we were running from LA up to Washington and we had to load six thousand pounds in Portland for Jacksonville, and Tacoma was in the nose, then we’d have to go to Tacoma and unload then double back and pick up Portland.
All this and much more Reggie Ray coordinated in the “Map Room,” his office on Santa Monica Boulevard. Mercury Movers was a wildcat trucking operation. Reggie Ray himself was in fact the only man in the company who had a current Class A license. His drivers were illegal aliens like Armando, ex-convicts, men running from the law, and desperadoes like me who would take any sort of work.
At the start of each haul you got your running money. Thus you were assured of eating. On the road it seemed like you were flush, but it was an illusory sort of wealth. That horse-choking bankroll was company money. You had to pay out for diesel, permits, repairs, scales, tolls and the rest of it. When you got back in to LA, after being on the road for a month, sometimes two or three, and Reggie Ray did his arithmetic in the Map Room with the calculator, you could easily come out in the hole. So, he’d set you up with another load, hand you your running money, and off you went, running balls out for the other coast. Vassalage is what it was, with Reggie Ray, the Master Scammer, as lord of the manor and his frazzled and sleep-starved drivers as the serfs.
Reggie Ray had six units constantly in operation, the International, three ancient Freightliners, a Kenworth, and a Mack, all of them cabovers, the latter assigned to a special pal of Reggie Ray’s, Shawn, the only driver privileged to run solo. There was also a 1973 Diamond Reo conventional, a classic tractor in mint condition, the Rolls Royce of the fleet. This legendary truck was Reggie Ray’s personal rig. No one else was allowed to drive it. Although Reggie Ray spent most of his time in the Map Room, every now and then, just to keep his hand in the mix, the Master Scammer would climb up into the cab of this magnificent fire breathing dragon of a tractor, the great and glorious Diamond Reo, and take a load out, sometimes to the east coast, or more often, so as not to absent himself too long from the Map Room, the short haul or “local” run up to Portland or Seattle.
But the Map Room... To see Reggie Ray ensconced in the Map Room, leaning back in his padded swivel chair and glancing up at the maps and schedules and rosters plastered on the walls—his toothpick dancing in his mouth, cradling a phone to his ear, another telephone blinking on hold, reaching with his free hand for yet another jangling phone—this was to see a man who had found his supreme niche in life. Reggie Ray, in the Map Room, was planted in the absolute live center of the world he knew as well as most people know their own names and addresses: that is, America, the United States, the world of the American road, the towns, the turnpikes, the hubs, the truck stops, the freeways, the crooked and little-known access roads that lead to this or that on-ramp. The great cross-country routes, mostly the Interstates, were highlighted on the wall maps with magic markers of various coded colors. Reggie Ray tracked his desperado drivers, his cross-continental madmen, with color-coded pins and tacks which he moved, on the maps, as his hirelings called in with their “twenties”. He was forever on the phone, or two or three at once, hooking us up, Armando and me, and his other drivers as well, with new loads, new destinations. He leaped from the phones to the fax machine to the computer terminal, then to the map, shuffling his chessmen this way and that, with the theatrical aplomb of a great general making momentous battlefield decisions which were certain—at least in his mind—to rewrite the history books.
It was all fluid, mutable, all vacillation and teeter tottering; it was all timing, windows, juggling, fluctuations, synchronicity, an interlocking grid of fleeting opportunities, incredibly intricate and involved. Reggie Ray’s genius manifested in his uncanny ability to get everything to coalesce, to balance this exigency against that, adroitly shifting funds from one account to another, making a phantom deposit, buying stocks on margin, floating a loan here, doing a little double-entry bookkeeping there, and deftly covering his tracks with all the dexterity and savvy and seat-of-the-pants sagacity of an old-time thimble-rigger. He had the ability to anticipate, to negotiate, to neutralize, to offset, to stage a diversionary movement on one front only to pop up unexpectedly on another with a new shell game, a new subterfuge, an explosive and audacious display of hocus-pocus and gimcrackery, or a dazzling exhibition of broken-field running. Slippery, gimmicky, endlessly resourceful, classically cool under fire, he’d run up a flag of truce and confront his accusers with a perfect poker face; then, just when it seemed that they had him dead to rights, he’d put his pursuers on a cross-town bus with the shoddiest of his carpetbagger’s tricks.
Wherever there was a deal to be made, a wager to be staked, or a hundred-to-one shot to be risked, Reggie Ray was there with his deck of marked cards and his loaded dice and his pirate’s instinct for survival. Above all, the quality that put Reggie Ray in the catbird seat was his almost magical ability to outmaneuver, to circumvent, to propitiate, to bamboozle—to cool the moment—then, to use the breathing space thus gained to regroup, to steal a march, and finally, marshalling all of his grifter’s cunning and Gypsy horse-trader’s skill, to run his opponents into a duck blind.
Disasters did happen. Frequently Reggie Ray’s drivers, those who were on the run from the law, were pinched and sent back to the slam; those who were illegal aliens were nabbed and deported. Sometimes a driver would simply up and quit, leaving the rig and the customer’s shipment stranded mid-continent. In such a pickle Reggie Ray would often hire a joker off the street or on the basis of a long-distance phone conversation. Thus it was quite possible for a desperate and out-of-work man to bluff his way into the job without having the slightest idea how to handle an eighteen-wheeler. One such driver missed a gear coming down the Grapevine and died along with his co-driver in a flaming wreck that totaled the rig and the shipper’s goods. In a similar incident, a novice driver burned up his brakes on Donner Pass and subsequently plunged to his doom. One desperado stole a rig and ran for Tierra del Fuego. Another man, a refugee from Guatemala who was wanted for rape in Kansas, pulled a heist in Rahway, then dropped his trailer and ran bobtail to Miami, where he was charged with armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and impairing the morals of a minor. A fellow named Roy, who was quite a gentleman and seemed very knowledgeable about the trucking business, sold one of Reggie Ray’s tractors to a chop shop in New Orleans and hit for the Big Apple. He was arrested at Kennedy International Airport when he tried to board a flight for Paris with a bomb in his suitcase. It was later discovered that he was an escapee from the Atascadero facility for the criminally insane.
These disasters and losses Reggie Ray took perfectly in stride. Strange to say, it wasn’t the money that motivated him. The money was necessary to keep the wheels turning, to enable, to lubricate, to facilitate. The money was a means, not an end. It wasn’t the money that Reggie Ray loved: it was control—control over people’s lives, control of the criss-crossing continental movement of his rigs, control of the loads. He didn’t care at all if he ran in the red—just as long as he ran.
For Armando and me, at this juncture, the next destination was Coraopolis, outside of Pittsburgh, where we had to drop off a load. When we hit Coraopolis, with me at the wheel and Armando in the sleeper, we couldn’t get under the Coraopolis Bridge. There was an eleven-foot something clearance. I woke Armando, he got up cursing, jumped down from the cab in his socks and stopped traffic—a hell of a mess—while I backed up the rig and got us turned around. I parked in front of a 7-11 and went inside. The clerk was busy drawing a map. He didn’t look up as I approached the counter.
“You’re out there in the cabover?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you want to go to Coraopolis...” With a grin he handed me the map.
After we dropped off three thousand pounds in Coraopolis and picked up a cash payment we showered for five dollars each at the Eat and Park Truck Stop on Route #23. I put away a stupendous meal and slept like a baby in the sleeper while Armando was out helling around (it was his turn now). The next day we bought sixty-five cases of Rolling Rock beer with company money after agreeing that we’d put the money back in the kitty once we offed the beer on the shaky side.
Good to go! Loaded with cases of beer and furniture, we hit for Buffalo on I-90. Now that we’d become entrepreneurs the future seemed unexpectedly bright. We were both wearing our Mercury Movers hats with the winged foot logo, and it seemed to me in that moment, as Armando began to talk expansively about what we were going to do after we’d made our mint, that the great god Mercury’s winged feet would take me wherever I wanted to go in life, now and forever. Our first destination, according to Armando, would be Oaxaca, Armando’s hometown, where I would find a novia. The best place for me, he maintained, would be the Santo Domingo Hotel, near downtown Oaxaca, the market and the cantinas, where, Armando assured me, there were girls, and they would go for ten bucks American a night, a bit of news that I found endlessly enthralling.
Yes, I loved this scenario, and for the first time since we’d begun the trip I found myself enjoying Armando’s company. It was as if the beer we were hauling in the trailer—the sixty-five cases of Rolling Rock—had watered a garden in the brain of this surly oaf. The shriveled-up pea that normally rattled around inside his cranium had germinated and sprouted and was rapidly becoming a leafy green vegetable with vines shooting this way and that, and everywhere new tendrils and new directions, new horizons. Armando had discovered the world of ideas.
“We will go to Cabo San Lucas,” he said in Spanish, perched on the jump seat beside me as I hissed briefly on the brakes to avoid a mower that had veered onto the Interstate. “I have an uncle there who will give us a discount. He works at the Hotel Melia de Cabo San Lucas. The hotel is very big and very beautiful. Good food, plenty of beer and plenty of girls—good girls, and cheap too! Qué te parece? We need a vacation, cuñado, is it not so? From Cabo San Lucas we can go to Ixtapa, across the Sea of Cortez. It costs very little by boat, my friend. Y entonces, South America—Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Brasil, quien sabe? Oh, there are some very beautiful women, amigo, in Costa Rica. And very cheap, ademas. You can go to the room there for five or six dollars de oro. And so you might wish to leave your novia in Cabo San Lucas—just for a little while—poco tiempo, tu sabes. We are troceros! We have to be on the road, my friend. El camino es la vida. Your novia could return to Oaxaca to wait for you. No te preocupes. She will give you a promise that she will not go back to the cantinas while you are away. You may be sure of this, cuñado. The girls from Oaxaca are very—how does one say?—very sincere. She will not betray you, amigo. And when we leave Costa Rica we will go to Barbados. Si, mi amigo, Barbados. Barbados, the Land of Beautiful Women. Hijole! The girls there are very hot, my friend. Very hot! And we are men. Women of Barbados: calzones abajo!”
1
That upright piano in Passaic, I thought, by Christ, it was going to kill me. We had a piano board, but a piano board won’t help you much on a stairway, and besides, one of the wheels was locked. We chipped some corners off the slate steps going up. The young-old lady in her see-through blouse hovered over us. I thought at first she was coming on to me. But no, she just wanted to make sure we did everything right. And that we didn’t step on her stinking little Pekingese that kept nipping at my ankles. We inched that piano up those stairs—three flights in all—stopping after only two or three steps. The stupendous weight of the thing was terrifying. Each time, before we hoisted the son of a bitch once again, as Armando’s mocking black eyes met mine—“Can’t you take it, guero?”—I felt tears starting at the back of my throat. I was afraid of that piano.
When it was over, Armando suggested going to a “cantina” for a beer. I told him, in Spanish, to kiss my ass. I just wanted to get away from him. I had three thousand dollars—our running money—in my pocket. I didn’t give a rat’s balls what this wetback from Oaxaca wanted me to do, or what Reggie Ray, our boss, “El Jefe,” wanted me to do: I wanted to do what I wanted to do. And I held the purse strings.
I shucked a few hundred-dollar bills off my Philadelphia bankroll and stuffed them at Armando. I called a cab; I went to a bar and got grandly drunk; I talked with the barmaid for three hours—in my own language, not Spanish. After my night of drunkenness I took a taxi to the Sheraton Hotel.
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