A Trucker's Tale

by Ed Miller

  I had to get out of the bunk when Frank arrived, because those were the days that the entire tractor cab had to be jacked up and tilted over in order to access the motor. I was so damned cold that I sat in Frank’s pickup truck most of the time, but Frank braved the cold and masterfully installed a new radiator hose and filled it with antifreeze, even while his hands were frozen stiff. When he was finished, he started my tractor, left it running so it would warm up before I headed north again, and then got into his pickup truck. He sat there and shivered for a long time, never saying a word about how cold it was outside. Watching him was a lesson in perseverance.

  Shortly after I began working in the Baltimore terminal, we had an extremely busy day that kept us at work until after eight o’clock that night. When we finished, Frank and I decided to grab a beer and a pizza before heading home in opposite directions. We rendezvoused at a country music bar, which Frank referred to as his “shit-kicker hangout,” and several beers loosened our tongues as we talked about our personal lives.

  When I learned Frank was on his second marriage, I asked what had caused his divorce. He gave a sigh and a half-smile and said it was because he had contracted the “seenus disease.”

  “You mean sinus disease?” I asked.

  “No, I was in the back seat of my car with this ’ol gal, and my wife SEEN US. I don’t know how she found me, way off down a dirt road, but let me tell you, it scared the hell out of me when she banged on the rear window. I got my pants on, stepped out of the car, and asked her what she wanted.”

  Frank’s wife asked him who the woman in the back seat of his car was and he responded that he didn’t see a woman in the back seat of his car.

  Not long after, at Frank’s divorce hearing, he again claimed there hadn’t been a woman in the back seat of his car—but the judge didn’t buy it. He left the marriage with little more than the pants he’d pulled up when he exited the back seat. I’m sure he’s not the only man who’s suffered from the seenus disease.

  Frank was a master of words and there was no filter, particularly when it came to women. I was riding with him one day when he saw a gorgeous, well-proportioned woman crossing the street at an intersection. He shook his head several times and said, “My, my, my. That gal could put something on you that Ajax wouldn’t take off—and that Ajax is good stuff!” He loved this Ajax proclamation, and applied it to anything that he had a strong appreciation for, from well-proportioned women to Gojo hand cleaner, a great sledgehammer, WD-40, and even a bottle of Jack Daniels. But he also had words for women whose bodies weren’t perfect. About one extremely, and I do mean extremely, overweight woman, he said, “If someone told her to haul ass, she’d have to make two trips!” About another overweight lady, he said, “If someone told her to haul ass, she’d have to use a wheelbarrow!”

  He truly had words for everything. When he heard snow was in the forecast, he’d say, “I hope it snows so damned deep that when you shit, you’ll have to put it in a shotgun and shoot it out the chimley [sic]!” Frank’s comment sure suggested a unique solution for what to do if the snow was so deep that you couldn’t open the door and get to the outhouse. Snow elicits comments from us all, but everyone at the terminal learned to keep the word “snow” out of conversations, otherwise, you knew what you were about to hear. I think I heard the shit-and-shotgun saying at least a thousand times. Other people tried to use it and bombed, and although we tried to avoid prompting it from Frank, he definitely had a knack for making us chuckle every time he said it.

  Frank never used old, worn-out clichés—he made up his own. If easy-to-fix problems turned complicated, or if someone changed something midstream, most people would say something like, “Now things are becoming more interesting.” Frank would say, “And the cheese gets more binding-er.” When folks heard this saying for the first time, they were at first baffled, but after thinking about his words, it didn’t take them long to grasp his real meaning. Given an experience I had one night out with Frank, when I took a bite of fresh out of the oven, 450-degree pizza too quickly and it got stuck to the roof of my mouth, I certainly understood, in this incident, that “binding-er cheese” was about as interesting—or dangerous—as it gets.

  At the Baltimore terminal, we had a forty thousand-pound capacity Pettibone forklift, which we primarily used for repositioning steel when axle weights needed adjusting. Another use was when one of the steel mills thought its plants would be hit with a work stoppage—for a technical reason or an employee strike—and would ship ahead of time, and ask our company to stack the steel in our warehouse and on our yard until it was ready for delivery. During these times, the forklift was very busy unloading pipe, plates, tinplate, and coils into our storage spaces. One winter, Frank fabricated a workable snowplow that fit into the long blades of the Pettibone, and after that our yard was always plowed clean.

  Sometimes moving a heavy single steel coil proved too heavy for the forklift’s counterweights, and the rear wheels, which steered the forklift, would come off the ground. This made coil movement pretty tough and when this happened, Frank would search the driver’s lounge for four or five of the largest drivers to help. The group of guys acted as a counterweight, and they’d stand on the rear of the forklift, which usually added enough weight to get the job done. I am certain that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration wouldn’t have approved of the human counterweight method, but it worked for us. Frank described this action as “putting something on the forklift that Ajax couldn’t take off.”

  All his pithy pronouncements were intended to make people laugh. Even if he dropped a few offensive lines here and there, he wasn’t a mean person. He was extremely careful that none of the folks who inspired his comments ever heard the words he uttered. On the outside, he was a tough-sounding, gregarious, happy-go-lucky, fun-loving guy. Inwardly, he was one of the most compassionate men I have ever known.

  Slick Jack

  On the opposite end of the human spectrum sat a worthless little weasel named Jack. Jack was our evening dispatcher, and one of his duties was to reimburse company drivers for their road and truck expenses. Each driver was given one hundred dollars at the beginning of their workweek to use for such things as tolls, tire repairs, and motor oil, and could replenish their funds by “cashing in” receipts for the expenses. Jack was employed by WMTS and working at the Baltimore terminal before I was transferred there, and after I settled in it didn’t take me long to notice how he operated. He slinked around and always looked like he was scheming to be one step ahead of everyone else. You know the feeling when you meet a person who makes you think that something about them is just not right? I had that feeling often when it came to Jack.

  Anyone who has ever been responsible for a petty cash box knows that it’s not a fun task, and try as you may, you cannot always get the son of a bitch to balance. Well, Jack’s petty cash box always balanced. Maybe this was one of the reasons I started noticing that the amounts of toll reimbursements were higher than usual, especially the first day of each week. This was odd because most of the company drivers began each week with all of their one hundred dollars of expense money, so they would not have had the need to use much of it.

  I was responsible for the petty cash duties during the day, prior to Jack coming on duty at four o’clock in the afternoon, and one day a driver came into the office and asked if I could give him change for a twenty-dollar bill. I opened the box, counted out twenty dollars using various denominations, and then handed it to him, noticing a grin on his face. As he stood in front of my desk after handing me the twenty-dollar bill, I started to place it in the box when I noticed something peculiar. Further inspection showed this to be a humorously counterfeited twenty-dollar bill. I can’t remember what the image was, whether it was the classic fake dollar bill with Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman where Andrew Jackson is supposed to be, or something else, but it was certainly something of that nature. Laughing, the driver h
anded back the change and told me to keep the fake bill, as he had plenty more.

  Jack went about his routine when he got to work that afternoon. He always began his shift by going into the driver’s lounge to see which drivers were available for dispatch, and note who was laying over for the night. As he walked out of the office, I had an idea. I folded the twenty and placed it under a bathroom door, leaving visible only one corner of the fake bill. I told the other office folks what I was doing, and we watched “Slick Jack”—as we not-so-affectionately referred to him—smoothly pretend to drop some documents and then pick up and palm the fake bill, none the wiser that we’d all seen what he’d done.

  I think the majority of people are honest, and I hope that most folks, when faced with a similar situation, might say, “Damn! Look what I just found!” or “Wonder who dropped this twenty-dollar bill?” Not Jack. He pocketed it without a word. I wish I could have seen his face when he got a good look at it. All the better if he got caught trying to spend it.

  Close to a week later, this petty cash thing was bothering the hell out of me, so I began comparing toll ticket time stamps with tractor numbers. I realized that each driver was required to write his tractor’s number on the top of all his receipts and, eureka! That solved it! Jack was a cheater, and I had proof. The time and place of some of the ticket claims did not correspond to the indicated trucks. For instance, one toll ticket showed a certain tractor going through one of Richmond’s toll facilities early one morning, but when I went through company dispatch records, they showed that the tractor had been making a delivery south of Atlanta that day.

  When other office employees and I investigated, it didn’t take us long to figure out how Jack was sneaking cash. He had arrangements with several of our owner-operators and would buy the O/Os’ receipts for half the face value of each. WMTS’s policy was to only reimburse employees’ expenses, not those of O/Os, so they would normally have had to pay the full cost of each themselves. But Jack’s scheme was to buy the O/Os’ receipts for half the face value of each, so they made half their money back. Then he reimbursed himself from the petty cash box for the full receipt amount. Today, some trucking companies reimburse their O/Os for toll fees, but this was not the case in the 1970s.

  When Jack arrived for work the afternoon after we figured out how he was playing the system, I told him to sit down. He said to let him first get a cup of coffee, but I informed him that there was no sense in pouring a cupful since he was not going to have time to drink it. I don’t remember my exact words, but they had something to do with him being a lying, stealing, sneaking piece of shit. He began protesting and swearing his innocence, but I told him to shut up and keep quiet until I finished what I had to say. I made him aware that he was fired and would soon be arrested and charged with theft of company petty cash funds. Jack said it was bullshit and began babbling about suing WMTS for unlawful termination, blah, blah, blah. We didn’t want the scumbag to receive unemployment benefits upon his termination, so I informed him that the company would act graciously by allowing him to voluntarily resign, although this offer was only good if he accepted the offer immediately by hand-writing his resignation letter. Jack yelled that he couldn’t be railroaded into quitting, but changed his mind and decided to write the letter after I picked up the phone and told him I was calling 911.

  When Slick Jack wrote his resignation letter, he was probably thinking he would receive unemployment compensation due to the fact that Maryland, where we lived and worked, had the reputation of awarding compensation to damned nearly everyone who applied for it, without much inquiry into the reason for termination. And true to form, he proved us right. We learned that Jack left the terminal and marched right into the local unemployment office. We were, however, delightfully surprised by the fact-finding phone call from the office several weeks later. Jack told the unemployment folks that he had been fired without cause. We supported our version of the story by faxing the unemployment compensation office a copy of Jack’s signed resignation letter.

  There is a happy ending to the Slick, Sneaky, Stealing Jack story because the unemployment office denied his request for benefits. We never heard another word from the son of a bitch.

  Edward

  Every morning, Joe, the terminal manager, and I would go out onto our lot to wake the drivers. A food wagon came by each morning, and most of the drivers wanted to be woken up so they could get breakfast. One day Joe knocked several times on the driver’s side door of Edward’s truck, but Edward didn’t respond. Finally, he pounded loudly, and hollered, “Goddamn, Edward, if you can’t hear me, you must be dead!”

  After waking the last driver on the back of the lot, I headed back up front and saw Joe frantically waving at me. He was gesturing wildly and pointing to the truck, but couldn’t get a word out even when I reached him, so I climbed up into the tractor to see the problem. Behind the privacy curtain, I found Edward. He was dead. His autopsy revealed that he had died in his sleep from a heart attack. Poor Joe was terribly ashamed for saying Edward must have been dead if he couldn’t hear him. It took him quite a while to get over Edward’s passing.

  The night before his death, Edward had joined several drivers in our terminal’s driver lounge for a low-stakes poker game. These frequent gatherings provided entertainment for the fellows who didn’t want to go out on the town. The drivers who had played cards with Edward said that he had kept his usual $150 to $200 in his pocket, so, hoping to give this money to Edward’s family, I contacted the coroner’s office to inquire when I could retrieve his belongings. According to the two coroner’s office employees, the ones who removed Edward’s body from his truck, the driver’s wallet had various items in it, but no cash. This seemed mighty fishy to me, begging the question of whether the coroner’s office had its own Slick Jack.

  I never received a reply to the nasty letter I sent the coroner’s office, and I never learned the names of the two worthless scoundrels who picked up Edward’s body. I suppose it was Edward’s bad luck to have died within the Baltimore City limits.

  Davonne

  A week after Edward’s death, we asked one of the guys to drive Edward’s truck back to our home office in Eastern North Carolina, some three hundred miles away. Davonne said, “Oh, hell no! Edward done died in that truck and his ghost might still be in there!” It took an awful lot of negotiating, including what could have been best described as hazardous duty pay, before he finally agreed to the assignment. As he left the terminal, his parting words were, “Now I’m gonna do this for y’all, but I ain’t stopping for nothing after I leave here!”

  He kept his word, and I’m sure Davonne must have broken every speed limit along the route, because he made the trip in record time. We later heard that after dropping the truck at the home office, Davonne literally jumped out and ran away from it. He later told someone he had pulled the privacy curtain closed and didn’t once look into the bunk.

  JB and William

  Many of WMTS’s drivers from its Eastern North Carolina headquarters spent at least one night each week in Baltimore, while waiting to load early the next morning. It sometimes happened that a few drivers would have to layover twice in one week. When they laid over, most drivers played cards or watched television, but some drivers enjoyed Baltimore’s nightlife.

  JB was a driver who didn’t mind staying in Baltimore, which was mostly due to his fondness for a couple of ladies at one of the clubs close to the terminal. Truth be known, JB probably planned out his schedule to include twice-per-week layovers. Although I never observed him in his element, I heard that he had a way with the ladies. Evidently, they loved his muscular build at 6´3˝ and 220 pounds. And I know he was a smooth talker, since he always tried to sweet-talk the dispatchers into giving him better loads than what he’d been assigned. After he spent a night out, it wasn’t uncommon to see JB brought to work early the next morning in a car driven by one of his lady friends.

  JB
was accompanied to the club one evening by a newly hired driver named William. William was young, and the complete opposite of JB. He clocked in at around 5´5˝ and 125 pounds, soaking wet, and was so naive that it seemed to drip from him. Poor William also had a speech impediment you heard each time he began a sentence. It was something between tsk-tsk and t-t-t. I’ll just call it tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk.

  William evidently liked what he found during his first visit to the club with JB, because he couldn’t wait to return the following week. The morning after his second visit, he had a big grin on his face when he came into the office to get his pick-up slip for his load at the steel mill. I don’t know why none of us asked about his “big night” the evening prior—maybe we were too polite. At any rate, William picked up his load of steel and headed south without sharing.

  Well, one of the company officers was known to enjoy the occasional practical joke and the next afternoon, the officer told the home office dispatchers that he needed to speak with William when he unloaded his steel and made his “empty” call. Those were the days before cell phones or in-cab communication, which meant every driver, after unloading, would either use a consignee’s telephone or have to seek out a pay telephone, in order to inform their dispatcher that their truck was empty because they’d made their delivery, and were ready to receive their next loading assignment. When William called later that day, his call was transferred to the company officer who acted very serious on the phone, saying: “William, some woman called here around lunch today, and she said that she would have called you directly, but she didn’t know how to get in touch with you. She said she was really sorry, but she had gone to the doctor that morning because she hadn’t been feeling very good. The doctor told her she has a fatal disease and that she doesn’t have but about six months to live. William, she said she was afraid that she had passed it on to you. She said there isn’t a cure at this time, but she wanted you to know about it because you are such a nice boy. She said she wanted you to know while you still had some time left.”