Truck

by Michael Perry

  The most distinguishing feature of the Comfo-Vision cab was a one-piece “Sweepsight” windshield, “scientifically curved to minimize eyestrain and reduce glare,” while improving “see-ability.” In truth, the curved one-piece windshield really was a pretty big deal, unheard of in trucks and otherwise available in only a few luxury cars. The Sweepsight was complemented with another distinguished first: twin rear windows to “promote driver efficiency, safety, and peace of mind.”

  The thing that put me over the edge with that E. Thomas Packard letter was him signing off on all those typos. It is bad enough to be at the receiving end of a head-patting lecture, but to endure a misspelled supercilious browbeating on the subject of aesthetics is beyond the pale. During the drive, I polished my speech. I intended to frame my objections in terms of the First Amendment, the Kelley Blue Book, and my paid-up certificate of title. I would furthermore bolster my tirade with citations drawn from city code and zoning regulations, B.J. and the Bear scripts, and recitations from the collected hits of Red Sovine. I would conclude with a snide reference to my having made the drive over in an “abandoned vehicle.” By the time I hit Grant Street, my scientifically curved Sweepsight was spittle-flecked, but I had achieved the clarity of an assassin.

  Then I couldn’t find the address.

  Grant Street is lined with ranch houses and bungalows. I remember thinking it strange that the rental offices were located in a residential neighborhood, and as I cruised up and down the street, looking in vain for 281 Grant amid the basketball hoops and hedges, I felt the righteous umbrage rise again. What kind of ridiculous knothead puts the wrong address on his letterhead? After my third fruitless pass through the 200 block, I crashed the gears and roared home. Someone was going to get a very nasty phone call indeed.

  Despite the emphasis on comfort and esthetics, the 1951 International was designed primarily for work. Or, more specifically, for men who worked. In nearly all the photographs supporting the International truck ads of 1951, the men are lifting something. Feed bags, milk cans, hay bales. If they aren’t lifting, they are at the wheel, driving with their hands at 10 and 2. And if they are not at the wheel, they are under the hood. The men look sturdy and earnest. Like after-shaved farmers at church, or the guy at the hardware store who can help you with your drain trap. These are men who never leave home without a jackknife and miniature tape measure. They can do math in their head and know how many square rods make an acre. These men are fundamentally useful.

  I have come across only one International Harvester whose driver appears to be getting by on his looks. He is on the cover of the twentypage International Light-Duty Series sales brochure. In the picture he is pulling out of a residential driveway at the wheel of an L-120 just like mine, only yellow. He appears to be in California or perhaps Arizona. The property is lined with palm trees, and the house in the background is flat-roofed and architecturally hip. Two women stand on the lawn at a fair remove. They are slim and leggy, and wearing beautifully cut calf-length skirts. From their position and line of sight you can tell they are eyeing the driver. His face is partially in shadow and he is wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses. His white T-shirt is tight across the chest. His cheeks and chin are stubbled. He looks timelessly cool. If James Dean had driven a three-quarter-ton International, he would have made it to Salinas.

  When I returned from my Grant Street goose chase, I had a rare moment of lucidity. Perhaps Grant was one of those streets interrupted by the river, or a railroad. I may have been on West Grant Street when I should have been on East Grant Street, or vice versa. I unfolded the city map bound in the local telephone book. Grant Street ran uninterrupted from end to end. Certain now that the rental company had flubbed their own address, I dialed the phone number on the letterhead. Probably flubbed that, too, I thought. The dial pattern seemed vaguely familiar. I was trying to place it when a woman answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Alpine Management?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Alpine Management?

  “I’m sorry, you have the wrong number.”

  The incompetence!

  “Is this 555-1433?”

  “Yes…”

  And then I placed it. Eric Teanecker, a friend from high school. We lost touch, then wound up working together at a roller-skating rink during our college years. He had gotten married. I hadn’t seen him for over a year. He used to tease me about the truck. This is the number I used to call to see if we could trade shifts.

  “Ahh…is this Renée?” His wife.

  “Yes.”

  “Eric there?”

  “No…”

  “I’ll call back.”

  All those marvelous pictures advertising the L-Line, and not one woman at the wheel. When they do appear, it is in the background, where they elbow-tote their purses and chatter with each other, or look on admiringly as the men lift things. Chauvinism aside, when it came to women and trucks, International really missed the boat.

  I know exactly how they feel. In 1992, I was traveling to Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in my reliable-if-not-zippy four-door ’78 Impala when the radiator blew. It could have been worse, as I was rolling up the exit ramp at the time, and had sufficient momentum to reach the Wal-Mart parking lot. (As quick as we are with the why me, why NOW? rap, it seems a matter of karmic responsibility to acknowledge those instances when bad luck has good timing.) I was en route to research a magazine piece on canoeing, and had agreed to meet a local guide at a downtown hardware store, so I left the car astride its expanding green puddle and walked the rest of the way.

  The guide—a petite young woman named Cindy who kept her blond hair pulled into a ponytail with a pink scrunchie but carried herself with a trace of jock swagger—determined immediately that I wasn’t the kind of guy who could fix his own radiator, and arranged to have the Impala towed to a local shop. Then she loaded me into her pickup truck. The exterior was bashed and scuffed, and the cab was awash in good working-class trash—spark plug boxes and empty gasket packs, shell casings, that sort of thing. We accelerated manfully from the curb. She handled the stick shift with authority, which gave me certain twinges. And I admit I noticed how her quadriceps arched against her shorts when she worked the clutch. She told me about her motorcycle. When we reached the landing, she jumped out and didn’t wait around for me to help lug the canoe. Once launched, we floated the tannin-stained Black River for a long while. Cindy paddled smoothly and pointed out key fishing spots. “I do a lot of bass fishing,” she said. All this, and a pickup truck, I kept thinking. When she drew my attention to a specific cluster of brush and identified it as the spot where she shot her biggest buck ever, I decided it was time to get married.

  It’s tough to make a marriage proposal in a canoe. I’m not saying it can’t be done, it’s just that canoes are notoriously tippy, and because I have never mastered the j-stroke required to successfully captain a canoe without switching the paddle side to side every two strokes like an indecisive milkmaid assigned one dasher and two churns, I had been quite rightly placed in the position of emasculation: up front facing forward, where I could paddle away mindlessly without yawing us madly into the tagalders. As I recall, I got Cindy to sit in the front of the canoe only long enough for me to get a photograph of her gazing downstream. I found it difficult to focus on anything other than her exposed shoulders.

  What I had in mind was a sandbar. With a deft variation of her stroke, Cindy would put us ashore. Kneeling shoulder to shoulder on the beach, we would coax up a fire with moss and flint, then roast frog-legs-and-cattail-root shish kebabs over driftwood coals. Later, while loitering in a muskrat-pelt loincloth and waiting for the tin-can coffee to boil, I would pop the question. The evening would culminate with a postprandial arm-wrestling match, loser wears the engagement ring. In the morning I would take her in my arms and bear her to the canoe. Or vice versa. We would emerge from the wilderness to notify our friends and reserve the Legion Hall.

  The fantasy bro
ke when a well-muscled and wholly corporeal local boy hailed Cindy from shore. There followed a good-natured exchange of insults that implied familiarity. He looked woodsy and capable. A real back-of-the-canoe fellow. I was building him up in my own mind. Then, out of the corner of her mouth, Cindy said, “He’s a weak-tit.” One feels the gonads shrink. I hope it is a sign of progress when a man subverts machismo to allow room for frank self-assessment. Unable to construct a scenario—beyond faking a seizure and flipping the canoe—in which I would leave Cindy breathless, I resumed my brute-force paddling. Shortly we debarked. Cindy dropped me at the shop with my Impala and I have not seen her since. I recall her shoulders in the sun and the flex of her calf when she hit the gas.

  It isn’t just the idea of a woman in a truck. At this point, they’re everywhere. The statisticians tell us today’s woman is as likely to buy a truck as a minivan. One cheers the suffrage, but the effect is dilutive. My head doesn’t snap around the way it used to. Ignoring for the moment that my head (or the gray hairs upon it) may be the problem, I think it’s not about women in trucks, it’s about certain women in certain trucks. Not so long ago I was fueling my lame tan sedan at the Gas-N-Go when a woman roared across the lot in a dusty pickup and pulled up to park by the yellow cage in which they lock up the LP bottles. She dismounted wearing scuffed boots and dirty jeans and a T-shirt that was overwashed and faded, and at the very sight of her I made an involuntary noise that went, approximately, ohf…! I suppose ohf…! reflects as poorly on my character as a wolf whistle, but I swear it escaped without premeditation. Strictly a spinal reflex. (My friend Frank once walked around a street corner and came face-to-face with a woman so stunning he yelped, “Jesus Christ!” This from a poet and charter member of the local Student Feminist Alliance.) The woman plucking her eyebrows in the vanity mirror of her waxed F-150 Lariat does not elicit the reflex. Even less so if her payload includes soccer gear or nothing at all. That woman at the Gas-N-Go? I checked the back of her truck.

  Hay bales and a coon dog crate.

  Ohf…!

  Here lately I have been pondering the commodification of higher consciousness as evidenced by the fact that you can get a yoga mat at Wal-Mart. The world needs all the Sun Salutations it can get, but when I leaf through the glossy yoga magazines, I want to know where all the stiff and lumpy people are. (And a gentle pox on yogis who insist on taking out ads in which they pose as human origami. Gratuitous convolutions are to inner peace as home run contests are to baseball. I keep thinking of the little kid who flips his eyelids inside out and does a little monkey dance hoping you’ll notice.) Spiritual discipline, shined up and streamlined for that dream focus group where census and disposable income intersect. If you were there in the beginning—if you did yoga prior to the advent of monogrammed zippered mat bags—you feel a little peevish.

  Different crowd, but do you remember when they did it to cigars? My buddy Al is a connoisseur of small-town taverns, smoked carp, and cigars. He’ll burn a cigar on his own, but he most of all enjoys smoking in the company of old-timers of the sort who wear stained T-shirts and go bobber fishing down by the bridge. Guys who chomp as much as smoke their cigars. I met Al in the early 1990s, right about the time cigars boomed. Bill Cosby and Jack Nicholson were on the covers of Cigar Aficionado, as were Demi Moore and supermodel Linda Evangelista. Rush Limbaugh and Bill Clinton were popularizing the cigar across lines of politics and propriety. But perhaps most irritating to Al and his old-school pals, cigars became popular with droves of lean women, high-fiving frat boys, and young sharks in suits. The anachronistic recalcitrance of their habit was suddenly happening. To be seen smoking was to be seen as to be trying to keep pace with the It Girls and Boys. Al defined the problem as “Goddamn yuppies.”

  The world of American culture and commerce functions like a combination of sponge and sandpaper, absorbing everything and smoothing it down so it slides easily into a designer shopping bag. It’s the American free enterprise system at work, and while in general I am a fan, I admit to some grumping while I try to work out exactly where it is that egalitarianism gets tromped by commodification. At what point does the genuine article become frothy? I’m pretty much a live-and-let-live agnostic, but whenever I see churches luring people to their services with puppets and guitars, or these mall churches where they park your car and serve you lattes and let you watch the pastor on your choice of five JumboTrons, I want to say, No, No, No. Church should not be easy. Church should be hard. I have read that in his last days, Jesus Christ fell on his face and sweated blood. The least you can do is sit on a hard pew and squirm some.

  Harleys, tattoos, party platforms, the Wild West, we distill the concept to its iconic essence, slap a price tag on it, and get down to the business of overexposure. Politicians pontificate on the concept of the big tent, but pop commerce actually pitches it, finding a way to make square things hip and alternative things mainstream, selling work boots to hipsters and body piercings to insurance agents. You pays your money, you takes your titanium stud through the frenulum. In 1951, a man bought a pickup truck because he needed to load things up and move them. Things like bricks and bags of feed. Somewhere along the line trendsetters and marketers got involved, and now we buy pickups—big, horse-powered, overbuilt, wide-assed, comfortable pickups—so that we may stick our key in the ignition of an icon, fire up an image, and drive off in a cloud of connotations. I have no room to talk. I long to get my International running in part so I can drive down roads that no longer exist.

  No pickup should endure the humiliation of being passed through a car wash. I was raised on working pickups. One pickup in particular—my father’s 1971 Ford F-100—dominated my life from the time Dad purchased it when I was four years old until the day I left the farm for college. Saturdays, I shoveled it full with corn and oats. Dad took them to town to be ground, and when he returned from the mill, the bed was stuffed with feed bags twice the circumference of a tackling dummy. We lugged them one by one into the barn. Other times Dad returned with bags of barn lime, or a pallet of salt blocks, or bundles of baler twine. Once when we repoured the barn floor he came home loaded down with so many bags of cement that the frame was on the axles and the truck looked like a half-sprung lowrider. In the winter we loaded the truck with hay and drove through the sheep pasture, parceling alfalfa off the tailgate flake by flake. The following autumn, Dad mounted the side racks and set up a ramp, and we’d shoo the lambs aboard for their journey to the stockyards in St. Paul. My brothers and sisters and I used to spend hours slinging the truck bed full of firewood from the slab pile by the sawmill. Back at the house we’d reverse the process, unloading and stacking the whole works. I am prejudiced to the idea that you must work a truck to deserve a truck. I am prone to sneer at any truck with comfortable seats or, for that matter, a comfortable driver. I want to say, No, No, No. Pickup trucks should not be easy. Pickup trucks should be hard. This tendency is self-centered, unattractive, and, more to the point, irrelevant. I am beginning to think that once you hit forty, you spend the bulk of your time suppressing the urge to harangue everyone who comes within forty feet of your porch.

  In an effort to help me arrive at the age of eighteen alive and financially solvent, my parents quite wisely forbade me to buy my own car while I was in high school. Which meant I did a lot of dating in the F-100. By the time I got my license, the truck was entering its second decade of hard labor. The side panels were ragged with rust and flapped like buzzard wings. When you gained speed, they flared. The truck pulled drastically to the right. I’d hang off the left side of the steering wheel to keep it moving on a straight line. The transmission, originally three-on-the-tree, had been replaced at some point and converted to a stick shift accessed through a hole cut in the floor. No one is clear on why, but the mechanic put the new transmission in backward so that the gear selection pattern was reversed. You had to go far right and back for first gear and shift against your intuition. There was a gap in the floorboards beside the clutch th
rough which you could gauge your speed based on the road blur. When it rained, my pant legs were mud-spittled. On the sharper turns, sheep ear tags and fencing staples shot across the dash. The brakes were inconsistent. Sometimes the pedal was as soft as squishing a plum. Other times the brakes caught so abruptly that empty vaccine bottles rocketed from beneath the seat and smacked you in the ankle bone.

  Naturally, the windshield was cracked.

  The heater was passable, but in the summer you’d rely on what a laughing bus driver once described to me as a “2–80” air conditioner: “Roll down two windows and go eighty miles an hour!” There were vents on either side of the cab at shin level, but to open them was to unleash a cyclone of alfalfa chaff and dehydrated horseflies. Picture your date perched beside you on a summer’s day, her lips glistening with Bubble Gum Lip Smackers and the cab charged with the scent of Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific! shampoo. You’re running fifty miles an hour down a gravel road when she grows overwarm and bends down to crack a vent. When she rares back, she appears to have emerged from a polluted wind tunnel. Her hair is frosted with feed dust and she’s got pine needles stuck in her banana clip. Her lips are dotted like twin strips of flypaper, and there is a June bug in her braces.

  You’re young. You kiss her anyway.

  I spent so much time dating in that old truck, I didn’t know how to act in anything nicer. Once my grandfather lent me his Ford LTD. It was a beauty. Bloodred paint job with a white vinyl top and air-conditioning. Power steering, power brakes, and a fully automatic transmission. I was dating a farmer’s daughter with the cutest button nose. I had coupons, so we got dressed up and went to Pizza Hut. After dinner I pulled out of the parking lot, merged into traffic, leaned back expansively, and draped my right arm across the back of the seat. The girl smiled up at me sweetly. She had grown to tolerate the farm truck, but as we picked up speed, I could see her luxuriating in the smoothness of the LTD. At which point, out of reflex and forgetting I was driving an automatic, I went for second gear, instinctively mashing what should have been the clutch but in the event was the power brake. I had my seat belt on. She did not. The image that endures is of her flailing elbows as she fought to unwedge her button nose from that pinch point where the windshield and dashboard meet.