Angie was smiling at me. She’d seen the exchange between Emily and I and it made her feel good. Angie’s dad had suffered a stroke when she was only ten years old. Her dad was a sweet, loving man, but not physically able to show it much. Angie told her friends that she thought my abilities as a dad were “hot.” whatever that means. I think it helps her when she sees me being loving with the kids, especially with Emmy. It fills the hole her dad’s disability left when she was little. Anyway I sat down next to her and dutifully drew the line down the middle of the paper. Angie set her coffee mug on the rattan table and took the legal pad and pen out of my hands. She smiled mischievously behind the pad as she briefly scrawled away. She turned the pad around and handed it to me. Then she stood up and said “I’m going to get Emily ready for bed, babe. This is my input on the matter.”
I watched her walk out of the room. My wife is amazing, and I know it. I looked down at the legal pad in my hands and read what she wrote. “We’re moving to Lynchburg. You know it and I know it. It’s been in your eyes since we got back this morning. Emmy loved it. The boys loved it. Your problem is figuring out how to tell your family!” She drew a smiley face at the end. She was right. We had already made this decision without talking about it. And she was right about the other thing too...telling my dad would be hard. Telling Nonna would be a dramatic event on the scale of a Broadway play. I set the pad down on the table and leaned back into the thick cushions on the loveseat.
The house was quiet except for the sound of the water in the lines as Angie drew Emmy’s bath. But the silence of the house was broken by the staccato noises from the highway. I-95 was about three miles away but in the evenings, the sound traveled and you could hear the whirring of the tractor-trailers as they rushed by. Depending on the wind direction, the big airplanes from the Philly airport would approach right over our house. You got used to it because it’s all you knew. But the first time you ever really heard silence -like the silence of the Blue Ridge Mountains at evening- you could never be used to it again.
Angie came back downstairs in about a half hour. I looked at her, framed in the doorway with the kitchen light behind her, like an angel. “Do you remember it being this loud back here before?” I asked. She smiled and walked into the porch and sat next to me and laid her head on my chest. “I nailed it, right, about you wanting to move?” she whispered. “Yeah...yeah you did, babe.” I answered. “I know you; like I know Me.” she said, “For the record, I’m on board with this.” I was surprised at that and looked at her directly. “Yeah?” I asked, “Just like that?” “Well we don’t have to rush into it, Joey,” she said. “And you have six more months left at work. Six months, twenty-three days to be exact.” Angie laughed. “I guess we can take our time and pick something nice, huh?” I said wistfully. “How to tell the Old Man, and Nonna. Maddon!”
“I’ll go with you when it’s time. But I ain’t talking.” Angie muttered this into my sweatshirt. She was right. Telling my family that we were going to leave was probably going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done. But we had six months before I could even think about that and so Angie and I just sat there for about thirty minutes, listening to the overwhelming noise of the city where we both were born. Noise that we had never really heard before, and now we couldn’t quiet down.
Joey Trucks’ Last Day
My last day at the office was more emotional than I thought it could possibly be. I didn’t sleep all night the night before. Neither did Angie. My dad was hitting that stage of life where he was a night owl and so sometime around two AM I sent him a text message. “YOU AWAKE, POP?”
He called me back in a few minutes. I had been sitting on the back porch, listening to the sounds of the early summer. The Phillies had been in town and had a game against the Braves earlier that night. At one point I heard the roar of the crowd in the distance out toward the stadium. A minute later Peter, my second oldest boy, came running onto the porch to tell me Ryan Howard had just crushed a massive home run. He asked me if I’d come watch the rest of the game with him so I walked out to the living room and sat in my recliner while my boy sat cross legged on the floor, keeping score in an old notebook like I’d taught him.
I sat in silence, watching my son far more than I did the game. This was what we did every summer. If we didn’t go to the ballpark, we’d watch it on TV. Citizen’s Bank Park is about six blocks from my house. Soon it will be six hours. Am I doing the right thing here? Petey jumped to his feet to watch the final out. The Phillie’s pitcher set him down on three strikes and the game was over. Petey grabbed my arm and dragged me out to the back yard. From our house you can see the fireworks they launch after every home victory. He was jabbering as ten-year-olds will do and I just put my hand on his shoulder and listened. “I have such good kids,” I thought, “I’m a lucky man.”
Petey gave me a hug and said goodnight. He’d be upstairs listening to the postgame on the radio and checking his score sheet against the official line on the internet. He loved the game and he loved scoring it from home. Petey was my biggest sports junkie of my three boys. They all love to play and they play every sport imaginable. But Petey loves it a little more than his brothers do. He’s a competitive kid but cerebral as heck.
Angie came in from her aerobics class and asked me if I was okay. I said yes I was and I’d be up to bed in a while. I sat on the porch a while longer and eventually went upstairs and tried to go to sleep. Anj was laying there with her hands behind her head, blinking back tears when I walked into the bedroom. “This is really it, Joseph.” she whispered, “Tomorrow morning you clean out your desk and the rest of our lives begins for real.” I lay down next to her and she kissed me softly. Her tears dropped gently on my cheek and I didn’t move to clear them. We talked for a while and she eventually drifted of to sleep. Angie needed to know I was okay. Then she could be. If I was good with this, she was as well and I had reassured her that I was very good with it.
But at two AM, when I couldn’t sleep, it was apparent I was not entirely good with it. Ten minutes later my Old Man shows up at the door with his coffee cup in hand. “Jeez Pop.” I said, “You drink that at this time of night you’ll be awake for the Second Coming.” The old man forced a laugh but I could tell he was edgy. I was worried about him, he was worried about me, and Angie was worried about us both. This was supposed to be the best thing that ever happened to anyone in this neighborhood but instead, it had us all worked up and battling the agita in the middle of the night.
Pop and I sat on the back porch where we could talk without waking the family. We talked about Giuseppe. We talked about “The Crusher” and how we’d held that thing together with baling wire and duct tape for years, while Pop built the business. Every time he thought he could retire the old boy, one of the new trucks would break down or we’d expand to another route and needed to coax another six months out of him. And every time, he’d roar to life and groan his way down the streets, like a steel dinosaur, thundering, and shivering, and looking imposing with that menacing metal scowl of a grille. We talked about Hank Kroyczek, and his wife Helen who was built like a linebacker, and who we’d all joked had played for Joe Paterno at Penn State under an assumed name. We talked about Willie Washington, the guy everyone called “Willie Pickles” because he had a craving for those big deli pickles that they kept in a brine barrel in DiCostanza’s hoagie shop. Willie stopped every morning in the summer to buy a pickle before the heat of the day kicked in. Nobody could figure out why he ate them all the time. Turns out he was building up the salt in his body so he didn’t sweat it all out. Smart guy that Willie Pickles.
He was the first black man that Giuseppe had ever hired. Not because he was prejudiced but because Giuseppe always hired family first, then friends. Willie was the first black man Nonno had hired but he was also the first employee he’d ever hired using a classified ad. Everyone else had come from word of mouth. Willie was one of Giuseppe’s favorite employees. Willie Pickles...we hadn’t thought of him
in ages. He’d retired to Florida in the midseventies and spent his days watching the ponies run at Hialeah. His son Miles had gone to law school and he stayed in touch with us, because he lived in Voorhees. And in return we stayed in touch with Willie through his son. He passed away many years ago but we still exchange Christmas cards with Miles and his family.
So many names and faces. So many memories. You’d think that running a garbage business was just a matter of hauling trash. But these were people. They had families. They were family. Everything that Giuseppe and the Old Man and I achieved in this world had come through the efforts of the people who worked for us. And now, those days were done.
The Old Man and I talked until the sun started to break through the dark of early morning. Angie came downstairs at Six AM and made us some coffee. “You guys have been here all night?” she asked me. “Yeah babe,” I yawned. “It’s a lot to process, and Pop and I were just reminiscing a bit.” Angie smiled softly and set two cups of coffee down on the rattan table in front of my dad and me. “It’s the end of an era, you know,” She said. And she was right. The days of our shiny, unusually clean (thanks to Khalif) trucks running their routes with our name on the side, were coming to the end now. Today I would go to the office, box up my belongings, walk through the shop and say my goodbyes. The guys would pretend not to be emotional. Margie would break down and cry. We’d all promise to remain in touch. We’d mean it too, at first. But eventually the calls will be fewer and farther between, and the family that was Mezilli Trash Hauling and Cartage will be a pleasant, but distant memory.
I took a slightly different route to work that final morning. I drove down a few side streets where our trucks had been running for over fifty years. I know…a sentimental journey in a garbage truck, right? It’s funny, it doesn’t matter what it is you do, if you love it and you love the people you do it with, it becomes something more than a job.
I was driving the streets slowly, listening to my old friend Angelo Cataldi on the radio. Now, you’ll need some background here. Angelo is the morning host on the local sports radio station here in town. In fact, it was the first allsports radio station in the country, and Anj was one of the first hosts. He’s been at it a long time, and he is far more than just a radio jock. He is an icon in this city. I’ve been listening to him since he first came on the air. First I listened in those smelly trucks, and then in the office. About twenty years ago, he and I became friends. The former owner of the Eagles – Norman Braman- had just sold the team to the current regime. Now, I’ll be kind and say that nobody really liked Braman, and when he finally sold, we all felt like our beloved Iggles had been brought back from exile. So Angelo, never one to hold back his feelings, throws a party. It was a going away party for Braman. I think if I remember correctly, that he called it a “Good Riddance Party.”
So anyway, I used to call in from the trucks when I was young and learning the business. My grandfather hated it, when he found out, but my dad always told him it was good advertising. I was still “Joey Trucks” back then and Anj just loves local nicknames.
He gets very excited and animated on-air and he would boom into his microphone: “Joey Trucks is on the line! Our favorite garbage man! What’s up Joey T?” And I would go into a rant about the Phillies or the Eagles or the Flyers or the Mummers parade. One time Angelo and I somehow got off course and he asked me what the strangest thing I ever picked up on the routes was. That was a funny discussion, because people will throw away some very odd things and you could make up any kind of story you wanted to about the stuff you found in your crusher.
So anyway, the day of the big “Goodbye Braman” party, I surprised Anj by firing up “The Crusher”, my grandfather’s first truck, and driving it to the Adam’s Mark hotel, downtown. Thankfully I know the cops around here pretty well and they didn’t hassle me about bringing that thing to Center City. I pulled up to the hotel and laid on the old air horn. Angelo and his cohort Al Morganti were doing the show from tables set up near the big picture windows. I managed to get his attention after a few horn blasts and Angelo nearly fell over, when he saw the truck. I went inside and told him I was there to crush Braman in effigy. There was no shortage of Norman Braman figures in the live audience and one of the regulars offered his up as the honorary sacrifice to the frustrations of the long-suffering Eagles fans.
About six guys formed up, three on each side, and solemnly carried the bizzaro-Braman to the back of The Crusher. We threw the stuffed aberration into the compactor and pulled the handle. Somehow the crowd felt like we were exorcising demons and the place went nuts. Now, this was a very visual thing, but Angelo is an amazing radio guy and he did such a great job describing it that it was one of the all-time great bits of his show.
So after the celebration, I parked The Crusher, and went inside and watched the rest of the broadcast. Angelo had never met me face to face and so we grabbed lunch afterward and wound up becoming friends. We have dinner sometimes, with our wives, and I even got him out on my boat once when we had it in Avalon. Away from the radio, Anj is a pretty private guy and that made me treasure our friendship even more.
So I’m driving the streets, that final morning, listening to his opening monologue and it hits me…this is the last time I’ll ever hear him on my way to work. Anj has kept me company my entire time. He first came on the air the year I graduated High School, so he’s always been a part of my work routine. Every day on those trucks, or in the office. After today, I might not even have a reason to be in my car at this hour. Angelo must have known I was thinking of him because not a few minutes later, he says, on air: “By the way, I want to say a very special congratulations to our old friend Joey Trucks.” I smiled to myself; Anj was the last guy to still be calling me that on a regular basis. He always loved that nickname. “Joey is retiring today, Al,” Angelo continued, “He sold the business and he’s livin’ the life!” “Oh yeah?” Morganti responded, “He sold the trash business? To who, Tony Soprano?” Al Morganti is the absolute perfect foil to Angelo and he knows the value of a great line better than most guys. “No Al, you fajoot.” Anj feigned his exasperation at his longtime on-air partner, “He took a big buyout. I’m tellin’ you, he’s got the life. He’s young, he’s rich now, and his wife…Maddon, Al, have you ever seen his wife?” Angelo was on a roll now. Without waiting for Al to respond, he redirected the question to his other co-host Rhea Hughes. “Rhea, you know beauty. Is Joey Trucks’ wife not smokin’?” Rhea was very gracious in her assessment of my bride. Then he sent out the word over the airwaves for me to call in and talk about my last day. “Joey Trucks, give us a call and tell us what it’s like to be you, my friend!”
To be honest, this broke me. It’s funny, you don’t appreciate your routine until it changes, and mine was about to change immensely. I found myself very emotional and had to pull over for a minute. I’d grown to love these guys and even this -something as seemingly innocuous as a radio show- was changing now. I sent Anj a text instead. “Can’t call today, Paisan. Too many memories. Too much emotion. But thanks…thanks for everything.” Anj understood.
I got to the office at 7:30AM Richard Green’s car was there when I pulled up. I pulled into my spot, unfolded my silver dashboard cover and put it in place. I laughed out loud. Written inside the reflector, in red lipstick, visible only from the inside and only after I had unfolded it and placed it on the dash was “Congratulations Joey...you sexy man. Hurry home to me. The kids are at your parents all night! –A” Angie always knew when I needed a good laugh and this was exactly that moment. She must have written that last night while she claimed to be upstairs giving Emmy her bath.
Richard Green was still sitting in his Volvo when I got out of my truck. I walked over to his window. “Your key isn’t working?” I asked. He smiled. “No my key works fine. But It’s your last day here Joe, and I wanted to give you the moment to yourself. It would be tacky for you to walk in and find me in your office, like a vulture. I just came by to wish you well
and follow up on a few things.” He stepped out of his car and we walked inside together. I noticed that all the trucks were still in the yard. “What the...nobody has left yet? What’s going on?” Green spoke up. “I emailed the GPS’s last night Joe. I told the guys to wait before rolling this morning. If you don’t want to stay all day today I understand and I wanted them to have the chance to say goodbye.” I looked at him a little startled. That was a remarkably class move on his part and I appreciated it. “Thank you Richard,” I said to him. “That was very nice.” Green looked serious for a moment. “You know, I’ve observed you this entire year, Joe. Your management style is amazing. You know these people like they were your brothers and your sister and they know you as well. Yet you can define the boundaries easily. I have to admit I have implemented some of your policies in other locations since we did this deal. Are you sure I can’t bring you on board at the corporate level?” I didn’t have to ask him if he was serious because he was. I could tell. But I simply smiled and said “No, I’m finished here. I’m young. I am rich now. And I have a young family that I will get to invest a lot of time in. Corporate life isn’t for me.”
I walked through those double glass doors for the last time. The guys were all waiting inside the big conference area we’d built. It seemed like just last week I’d called them all together to tell them about this deal. Now here it was, my last day. The guys erupted into a loud, raucous cheer when I walked in. It caught me off guard and I played it off by doing my best “Rocky” impersonation. I shuffled my feet like Muhammad Ali and held my hands over my head in victory. But I felt the tears already starting.
I stood there as one by one the guys all came over to shake my hand, slap me on the back, and even hug me. Khalif was there with his dad, Big Sam. He had a huge grin and he hugged me for a long time. Sam was crying like a baby. Richard Green handed me a microphone and he whispered into my ear, “If you don’t say something, they’ll stay here all day.” he said with a laugh. He was right. This was it. This was the final moment and nobody really wanted it to happen. I stood on a chair, took a breath and said my goodbyes.
The Legend of Joey Trucks: The Accidental Mobster Page 8
