On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

  He lapsed into silence again.

  A few miles later he asked me suddenly, “Ever hear of the Bessemer process?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We ‘did’ it in chemistry at school.”

  “Ever hear of John Henry, the steel-driving nigger? Well, he lived right here. When they made a machine to drive a steel pick into a riverbed, they said that human labor could never compete. The niggers made a wager, and brought up their strongest man: John Henry. They say his arms was bigger ’n twenty inches. He held a mallet in each hand, and he drove in a hundred picks quicker than their machine. Then he lay down and died. Yessir! This is steel country.”

  We were surrounded by scrap yards, auto wreckers, railway sidings, and smelting works. The air resounded with the clangor of steel, as if the whole of Bessemer was some gigantic forge or armory. Torches of flame topped the high chimneys, roaring as they swept up from the furnaces below.

  I had only once before seen a city illuminated by flames, and that was as a child of seven, when I saw London in the Blitz of 1940.

  After we had negotiated Bessemer and Birmingham, Mac started to speak freely of himself.

  He had bought his truck for $500 down, and the balance—$20,000—over a year. He could take up to 30,000 pounds of cargo, and traveled anywhere and everywhere: Canada, the States, Mexico, so long as there were decent roads and money to be made. He averaged four hundred miles in a ten-hour working day; it was illegal to work longer at a stretch, though frequently done. He had trucked, on and off, for twelve years now, and had been “riding double” with Howard for just six months. He was thirty-two and lived in Florida, he had a wife and two children, and he made $35,000 a year, he said.

  He ran away from school when he was twelve years old, and, looking older, got himself a traveling salesman’s job. At seventeen, he joined the police force, and at twenty was a considerable firearms expert. That year he’d been involved in a gun fight and narrowly escaped being shot in the face at point-blank range. He lost his nerve after that and changed to trucking, though he was still an honorary member of the Florida police force, and received one dollar a year in token of this.

  Had I ever been in a gun fight? he enquired. No. Well, he’d been in more than he could remember, both as a policeman and a trucker. I’d find his “trucker’s friend” right under the seat, if I cared to look; they all carried guns on the road. Though the best weapon in an unarmed fight was a piece of piano wire. Once you had it round your opponent’s neck there was nothing he could do. You gave a little tug—and the head fell off: easy—like cutting cheese! There was no mistaking the relish in his voice.

  He had carried everything in trucks, from dynamite to prickly pears, but had now settled down to trucking furniture, although this included anything which a man might keep in his house. He had the contents of seventeen homes on board, including seven hundred pounds of weights (the property of a muscleman moving out of Florida); a grand piano made in Germany, said to be the best there was; ten television sets (they had one out at the truck stop last night and plugged it in); and an antique four-poster on its way to Philadelphia. If I wished to, I might sleep in this at any time.

  The four-poster brought a nostalgic smile to his face, and he started talking of his sexual exploits. He seemed to have had an incredible success at all times and places, though four women held pre-eminence in his affections: a girl in L.A. who once eloped with him as a stowaway in this truck; two maiden ladies in Virginia he slept double with, who had showered him for years with clothes and money; and a nymphomaniac in Mexico City, who could take twenty men in a night and still cry for more.

  As he warmed up, the last traces of diffidence disappeared, and he emerged as the full-blown Sexual Athlete and Storyteller. He was God’s gift to lonely women.

  It was during this recital that Howard, who had been lying in a sort of stupor, pricked up his ears and showed his first signs of animation. Mac, seeing this, first humored him, then started to goad him with a teasing banter: tonight, he said, he was going to get a girl in the cab and lock Howard in the trailer, though one night, if the boy looked sharp, he might procure a real whore (he pronounced it “hooorrh”) for him. Howard grew hot and wild, and started panting with excitement; finally he lunged angrily at Mac.

  As they struggled in the cab, half in fury, half in play, the steering wheel was jolted violently, and the huge truck rocked dangerously along the road.

  But between his taunts Mac was also educating Howard, informally:

  “What’s the capital of Alabama, Howard?”

  “Montgomery, you filthy sonofabitch!”

  “Yeah, that’s right. ’Tain’t always the biggest cities that’s the state capital. And those are pecan trees, look—over there!”

  “Fuck you, I don’t care!” grumbled Howard, but craned his head to see them, nonetheless.

  An hour later we pulled in at a truck stop somewhere in the wilds of Alabama, for Mac had decided we should stay here overnight: it was called “Travel Happy.”

  We went inside for coffee. Mac settled down, with polite determination, to entertain me with “funny stories,” of which he had an endless, execrable store, much inferior to his own first-hand experiences. Having discharged this friendly duty, he wandered off to join the crowd around the jukebox.

  Truckers always gather round a jukebox on Saturday evenings, and try desperately to make it to the truck stop on this one night. The jukebox at Travel Happy, in particular, enjoys a certain fame, for it has a magnificent collection of trucking songs and ballads, epics of the road: savage, bawdy, melancholy, or wistful, but all with an insistent energy and rhythm, a special excitement which spells the very poetry of motion and endless roads.

  Truckers are generally solitary men. Yet occasionally—as in a hot and crowded truckers’ café, listening to some infinitely familiar record blaring on the jukebox—they are stirred, transfigured suddenly, without words or actions, from an inert crowd to a proud community: each man still anonymous and transient, yet knowing his identity with those around him, all those who came before him, and all who are figured in the songs and ballads.

  Tonight Mac and Howard had become, like all the others, rapt and proud, in unwitting transcendence of themselves. They were sinking into a timeless reverie.

  Around midnight Mac gave a violent start and then tugged Howard by the collar. “Okeydoke, kiddo,” he said, “let’s find ourselves a place to sleep. Wanna say the trucker’s prayer before you turn in?”

  He took a creased card from his pocket-book, and handed it to me. I flattened it out and read aloud:

  Oh Lord give me strength to make this run

  For U.S. currency and not for fun.

  Please help me not to have a flat

  No engine trouble or likes of that.

  Help me pass the scale and the ICC

  Or make the JP make me go free.

  Keep the Sunday drivers out of my way

  And the woman drivers too, I pray.

  And when I wake in the stinking cab

  Let me wake where there’s ham and eggs to grab.

  Make the coffee strong and the women weak

  And the waitress cute, and not some freak.

  Make the highway better and the gasoline cheaper

  And on my return, Lord, get me a sleeper.

  If you’ll do this, Lord, with a little luck

  I’ll keep right on driving a darned old truck.

  Mac took his blanket and pillow into the cab, Howard crept into a nook among the furniture, and I bedded down in a heap of sacks beside the bike (the promised four-poster was at the front, inaccessible).

  I closed my eyes and sharpened my ears. Mac and Howard were whispering to one another, using the truck’s solid walls as a conductor. Putting my ear to part of the latticed framework I now heard other noises too—the sounds of joking and drinking and making love—coming from all the other trucks all around us, impinging on the antenna of my ear.

  I lay, contented, in the d
arkness, feeling myself in a very aquarium of sound; and very soon I feel asleep.

  —

  Sunday was a day of rest, at Travel Happy as all over America. A pane of lighted glass above me, smell of straw and sacking, smell of the leather jacket which serves me as a pillow. For a moment of confusion I fancied myself in a great barn somewhere, and then I instantly remembered.

  I heard a gentle sound of running water, which started suddenly and ended gradually, lingeringly, with two small after-spurts. Someone was pissing against the side of the truck; of our truck, I thought, with a new possessiveness. I scrambled out from under the sacks and tiptoed to the door. A steaming trail from wheel to ground bore testament to the crime, but the offender had crept away.

  It was seven o’clock in the morning. I seated myself on the high step of the cab and started to scribble in my journal. A shadow fell across the page; I looked up and recognized a trucker seen dimly in the smoke-filled café the night before. It was John, the blond Lothario from the “Mayflower Transit Co.,” perhaps the very man who had pissed against our wheel. We chatted for a while, and he told me he had left Indianapolis—our immediate destination—the night before: it had been snowing there.

  A few minutes later, another trucker shambled up, a short fat man wearing the floral shirt of the “Tropicana Orange Juice Co. Fla.,” half-unbuttoned to expose a hairy pudding belly.

  “Christ, it’s cold here,” he muttered. “It was ninety in Miami yesterday!”

  Others gathered round me, talking of their routes and journeys, of mountains, oceans, plains; of forest and desert; of snow and hail and thunder and cyclone—all encountered within the span of a single day. A world of traveling and strange experience was gathered at Travel Happy on this, and every, night.

  I walked round to the back of the truck and saw through its half-open doors Howard asleep in his niche. His mouth hung open, and his eyes too—I noticed with a qualm—were not fully closed. I thought for a moment he had died in the night, until I saw him breathe and twist a little in his sleep.

  An hour later Mac awoke, tousled and disheveled, and staggered from the cab; he vanished in the direction of the truckstop “bunkhouse,” carrying with him a massive Gladstone bag. When he came back a few minutes later, he was perfectly groomed and shaven, coolly and cleanly dressed for the Lord’s day.

  I joined him and we walked towards the cafeteria.

  “What about Howard?” I asked. “Shall I wake him now?”

  “No. The kid’ll wake up later.”

  Mac obviously felt the need to talk to me without his being around.

  “He’d sleep all day if I let him,” he grumbled over breakfast. “He’s a good kid, you know, but not too bright.”

  He had met Howard six months before—a bum of twenty-three—and taken pity on him. The boy had run away from home ten years before, and his father—a well-known banker in Detroit—made little effort to retrieve him. He had taken to the roads and wandered round at large, doing a little casual work from time to time; occasionally begging, occasionally stealing, and managing to avoid churches and prisons. He was briefly in the army, but soon discharged as feeble-minded.

  Mac picked him up in the truck one day and “adopted” him: he took him along now on every trip, showing him the country, teaching him how to pack and crate (and also how to talk and act), and paying him a regular salary. When they returned to Florida, after a journey’s end, Howard would stay with Mac’s wife and family, where he had the status of a younger brother.

  As we drank our second cup of coffee, Mac’s handsome face grew clouded:

  “He won’t be with me much longer, I imagine. Maybe I won’t even be driving myself for too much longer.”

  He explained that he had a curious “accident” some weeks ago, when he blacked out without warning and his truck had run into a field. The insurance paid, but insisted that he would have to have a medical examination; they further objected to his having a trucking partner, whatever the outcome of the examination.

  Clearly Mac fears, as his insurance company must suspect, that his “blackout” was due to epilepsy, and that the medical will see the end of his driving days. He has had the foresight to line up a good job, in insurance, in New Orleans.

  Howard walked in at this point, and Mac rapidly changed the subject.

  —

  After breakfast Mac and Howard sat on a discarded tire, shying stones at a wooden post. We talked vaguely and incoherently of many things, spelling away the gentle Sunday indolence of a trucker’s lot. After a couple of hours they got bored, and climbed back into the truck to sleep again.

  I grabbed a couple of burlaps from the trailer and settled down to sunbathe, surrounded by broken bottles, sausage skins, food, beer cans, decaying contraceptives and an incredible litter of torn and screwed-up paper: here and there a stalk of wild onion or lucerne was poking through the rubble.

  As I lay and dozed or wrote, my thoughts turned often to food. Behind me were a score of beggarly chickens scrabbling in the dust, which I gazed at from time to time with a wistful sigh, for Mac had waved his “trucker’s friend” (an efficient-looking automatic) at them earlier, saying:

  “Poultry for dinner tonight!” with a pleasant chuckle.

  Every hour or so I would get up to stretch my legs, and consume four coffees and a black-walnut ice cream in the café, leading to my present total of twenty-eight and seven, respectively.

  I have also paid many visits to the bunkhouse washroom, having had an incandescent diarrhea since tasting Mac’s hot peppers last night.

  There are five contraceptive machines in the little room, an interesting example of how commercial pressures will follow a man into his most intimate activities. The cost of these beautiful articles (“electronically rolled, cellophane-sealed, supple, sensitive, and transparent,” as they were rapturously described) was three for half a dollar, though this had been modified, clumsily, to read: THREE FOR A DOLL. There was also a machine called Prolong, which dispensed an anesthetic ointment designed, it was stated, “to aid in the prevention of premature climax.” But John, the blond Lothario, who is turning out to be a veritable compendium of sexual information, says that piles ointment is much better. Prolong is too strong—you never know whether you have come or not.

  In the middle of the afternoon Mac suddenly announced that we would be staying at Travel Happy for another night. He wore a pleased, deliberately mysterious smile—no doubt he has lined up Sue or Nell for an assignation in the cab tonight. Howard has been behaving like an excited dog in this atmosphere of intrigue. Despite his brave show I suspect (and Mac has confirmed) that he has never yet made out with a girl. Indeed, Mac has procured him girls from time to time, but Howard—so vociferous in imaginary achievement—becomes timid and boorish when confronted with the reality, and things always “fall through” at the very last moment.

  I returned to my writing and my cups of coffee. Occasionally, I walked outside to stretch my legs, and to peer curiously at all the truckers round me, snoring in their cabs, comparing their faces and their postures in repose.

  —

  At 4:20 the dawn appeared, dim and indecisive in the east. One trucker woke up and walked towards the bunkhouse to take a leak. Returning to his truck he checked over his cargo, pulled himself into the cab, and slammed the door. He started his engine with a roar, and slowly lumbered out. The other trucks remained silent and sleeping.

  By five o’clock the stillborn dawn had been replaced by a fine and drizzling rain. One of the ragged cockerels was kicking up a din, and the twitter of insects had started in the grass.

  Six o’clock, the café is filled with the smell of hotcakes and butter, bacon and eggs. The night waitresses take their leave, wishing me good luck in my travels around America. The day staff troop in, and smile to see me seated at the table I occupied all yesterday.

  I can come and go now as I please in the little café. They no longer charge me for anything. I have drunk more than seventy c
ups of coffee in the past thirty hours, and this achievement deserves some small concession.

  Eight o’clock, and Mac and Howard have just hurried off to downtown Coleman, to help the Mayflower men unpack their cargo. The pace is suddenly different, for today they have said nothing, they have skipped breakfast, and they haven’t washed. Mac’s Gladstone bag has been put away for another week.

  I crawled into the cab which Mac had just vacated—it was still warm from his humid sleep—covered myself with his old worn blanket, and in a moment fell asleep myself. I was awoken briefly, at ten, by a heavy fusillade of rain upon the roof, but there was no sign yet of Mac or Howard.

  They finally turned up at half past twelve, heavy-footed and bedraggled from shifting the heavy cargo in a rainstorm.

  “Christ!” said Mac. “I’m shot. Let’s eat—and we’ll be on our way in an hour.”

  This was three hours ago, and still we have not moved! They have been smoking and boasting and fiddling and flirting, as if an unhurried thousand years lay before them. Mad with impatience, I withdrew to the cab with my notebooks. Lothario John tried to mollify me:

  “Take it easy, kiddo! If Mac says he’ll make New York by Wednesday, he’ll do it, even if he stays at Travel Happy till Tuesday evening.”

  After forty hours here, this truck stop has become infinitely familiar. I know a score of men—their likes and dislikes, their jokes and idiosyncrasies. And they know mine, or think they do, and call me “Doc” or “Professor” indulgently.

  I know all the trucks—their tonnage and cargoes, their performances and quirks, and their insignia.

  I know all the waitresses at Travel Happy—Carol, the boss, has taken a Polaroid snap of me standing between Sue and Nell, my face unshaven and dazzled in the flash-light. She has stuck it up along with her other photos, so that now I have my place in her thousand-brothered family, her “boyfriends” who come and go on the long cross country trucking routes.

  “Yeah!” she will say to some future, puzzled customer who scrutinizes the print. “That’s ‘Doc.’ Great guy he was, bit strange maybe. He rode with Mac and Howard, those two over there. I often wonder what became of him.”