This is a Christmas Story, I promise…

So why am I, a quasi-Naval Aviator and Intel professional writing about trucking? The writer’s muse is a horny bitch without mercy, and she strikes without warning. I am at her bidding, so here goes…
Driving big trucks is a lot of fun. I got my start when I was a grounds keeper at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear at age 16, after I had done my tour as a bus boy in the restaurant. This was like going to Middle School before I graduated to my dream job of Life Guard.

I worked for a fellow Finn, Archie Halonen. I recounted my earlier time there when I invented photo-bombing in a piece for Vic called Roundup.This is just part and parcel and ancillary to that, but I find it amusing, nonetheless. I trust you will do the same.

We Finns have a stoic side which is to never yield; we call it Sisu:
“Sisuis a Finnish concept described as stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness and is held by Finns themselves to express their national character. It is generally considered not to have a literal equivalent in English.”[1]

Archie had that quality – quiet but determined. We groundskeepers were always on the clock, since there was a never-ending list of little shit to do, including rolling out and grooming the putting green in front of the Bird Cage Bar which overlooked Mobile Bay. And when the task list got short, Archie always had a mantra – “If you’ve got nothing to do, then you can always rake leaves.”

We had a motor-propelled leaf sucker golf cart to scoop up the vile little critters that dared encroach themselves on our sanctimonious grounds. It felt good. By that time, Archie had forgiven me for killing all of the sidewalk side grass with an over-exuberant application of Roundup and since I was one of the few guys who reliably showed up on time, he promoted me to dump-truck duty – awarding me with the well-worn keys to the beast.

We had several leaf-suckers to scavenge the expansive grounds, but all roads led to the dump truck. At the end of the day, the duty dump truck operator at that time was me. Everyone else had clocked out so after sun-down, I had to drive out to the dumping place (which is now the locale for $1M homes, so go figure), and relieve the load. Of course, I would stop off at Gary’s on the way and grab a few beers as a reward. Usually, the dumper switch worked, but one night it didn’t – fuck. Here I was stuck in the dwindling twilight and with the dumper in a half-raised erection and not sure what to do to escape.

I cycled the switch a couple of times – no joy. I got up into the bed, cleared the herbal detritus, and then did my best by jumping up and down to get the dumper to level on the truck bed. Fuck it – I cracked another beer and started to think my way out. I did have a flashlight so went into the

Of course, the battery on the dump truck was weak, so I had only a few cracks left on the motor. Resolved, I fired it up, performed a series of violent jerks both forward and back and voila! I got the bed to go down. With dim headlights I made the hazy way back to the hotel, and parked in the appointed spot. I think that was the last time I drove that truck.

My step-dad Henry was many things – and a hobbyist who mastered whatever tantalization there was out there for him to grasp. At that time, he had just retired from being President of his company in Mobile, so his next obsession became Ham Radio. He put up a 120 foot tall retractable antenna in our backyard on the bay, powered by a 1000 watt transceiver. He would carry on nightly conversations with people around the world – he even installed a base station in his pick-up truck. His father was a Baptist minister in Mississippi and the running commentary on his radio obsession was that he was talking with God every night – and maybe he was. That man taught me how to cuss among other things, and also to get down on your knees to pray for forgiveness like a schoolboy – I worshipped him. That was sort of the internet social media meeting place of the day, so my parents would go to Ham Radio Fests around the country, and we also had some visitors on occasion – fast forward a few years. It was just before Christmas in 1978, more than 40 years ago? Why did I dream this up? You never know where the muse takes you – that bitch. This time it was back down to New Orleans.

One of his closest radio head friends was Mike, who was a wildcat trucker based out of McAllen, Texas, who drove a big refrigerated rig, with a sleeping compartment above the cab. Mike was a funny Italian guy – sort of like Danny DeVito. He was a frequent visitor even though he had to swing 20 miles south either way from I-10 to come see us. He genuinely loved my step-father, and the fresh seafood he would harvest out of Mobile Bay. You knew when Mike was in town when you saw his 18-wheeler pulled up on the side of the road in front of our house off scenic route US-98 in Point Clear.

It was late-December; the pool was closed, so I was otherwise unemployed that Friday afternoon when I drove down to our house on the bay. I saw the large truck parked on the wayside, and knew that Mike was there – stand by for fun. Mike grabbed me in his characteristic bear hug when I entered our house, and asked what I was doing. Not having much to do, basically nothing and I said so.

“How would you like to be a truck driver?”

I thought for a moment, and asked:
“What do you have in mind?”
He was ripe for adventure, and wanted some company.
“I’ve got a load of cabbage that I have to deliver to New Orleans, and then I have got to get back up to Georgia to get another load. I can come back here, if you want to go. But we need to get moving in about an hour.”

Well hell yeah? Not really thinking about what was to come but caught by the idea of a new experience, I was all in. I packed a small go-bag, and then we mounted the beast.

“You’re driving, I’m talking – just do what I say.”

So shit, there I was. I had graduated from a glorified golf cart to a dump truck, and now an 18-wheeler. Yikes! Be careful of what you want, because you will surely get it.

Mike handed me the key, and I fitted it into the ignition switch, disengaged the clutch with my left foot, and fired that sucker up.

I got her going without dumping the clutch which was a good omen, and we were off to see the Wizard.

Roll on highway, roll on along
Roll on daddy ’till you get back home
Roll on family, roll on crew
Roll on momma like I asked you to do
And roll on eighteen-wheeler roll on”

It was around sundown, so we had a long night to deal with to get to NOLA. Mike never touched the wheel on the way there, but coached me through how to drive. An 18-wheeler is a curious work of automotive art – there are three transmission modes to choose from, and six forward gears; there is only one in reverse. It is diabolically hard to remember what gear you are in, much less what transmission you chose. You bikers out there know about this since you have the same challenges with riding an 18-speed model – it is a little different with three buttons on a single gear shift lever with 750 pounds of turbo-charged horse power and a 40,000 pound load swinging back and forth on your ass.

After navigating a series of country roads, we regained I-10 and turned west to bore into the long sunset. Under Mike’s tutelage, I turned into a double clutchin’ mother-fuckin’ road warrior. He taught me all of the trucker’s etiquette, or at least all that he wound reveal, like turning your lights off for a brief instant when getting passed by another truck to let them know that they had cleared your bow, tooting the horn at good-looking women, and how to communicate with hand gestures and not the bird – the latter is too easy. For long-haul truckers, it’s all about respect.

We made Slidell in a couple of hours, and then had to pull off the road at a truck stop for a break, since there was a moratorium window for allowing trucks to go downtown deep into the Vieux Carré, which was the destination to deliver our cabbage cargo.

Mike crawled up into his overhead to sleep, and I had to make do between the two front seats – hell, I was young so contorting myself into impossible positions of slumber was not the issue that it is today. After about six hours, we continued our journey, taking the skinny old two-lane Lake Ponchartrain Bridge into the city, which was and still is the direct route. In a curious turn of events, I had driven down that bridge just the weekend before with my South college bud Michael Mark. His parents were out of town so we had quickly decamped Mobile to take advantage of staying at their house in the Garden District to party – fate is strange, and visits itself upon you in most unexpected ways.

True to his word, Mike let me wind our behemoth down to the Quarter, where we awaited our turn to drop off the produce at the central market, a place where tourists don’t normally go, but the living, beating culinary heart of the city. While I sat idling in line, Mike went out to find the small coffee shop that catered to early-morning deliverers, and bought back a steaming hot white Styrofoam cup of coffee with chicory, and some scrumptious powder sugar-coated beignets ensconced in wax-paper cones – it was messy but delicious. It was sort of incredible to believe that I had been there a few days earlier enjoying the same at the Café du Monde off Jackson Square.

When our turn came for off-loading, it was a brisk and efficient process. The land-stevedores sporting their hand-trucks quickly unloaded us, and we were out of there, since we had to clear downtown before 0800 by law.

I drove back to Slidell but yielded the helm then to Mike for the ride back to LA. He dropped me off at home, and I headed straight to the rack while he went to Georgia to pick up a load of cucumbers to haul back to Houston, and then home to the Rio Grande for Christmas.

That was one weird 18 hours, but I learned a hell-of-a lot about long-haul trucking in a short amount of time. When next you get cross-wise with an 18-wheeler, get out of the way with no hurt feelings. They are on a mission, much like an attack pilot – trying to deliver a payload on target on time – and they also are consumed with your safety on the Interstate of life.

Merry Christmas and Roll On.
I remain your faithful servant

Copyright 2019 Point Loma
www.vicsocotra.com

[1]Source: wikipeida.com