A Working Stiff's Manifesto (9 page)

“We have to keep to the schedule.”

“Then call the customer and tell them we'll be late.”

“The schedule says to be there at seven. We'll be there at seven.”

Damn if we're not there at seven.

“You can achieve it if you put your mind to it,” Jim tells me, guru-like, as we pull up at the house. He thinks I lack desire, that burning in the gut that makes you want to accomplish goals. I do. I think the goals are meaningless.

I get out of the truck, go inside the house, and look around. It is a beautiful house, spotless white carpet, cathedral ceilings, maple wood lining every windowsill and door frame. The furniture is quality stuff too, all mahogany or cherry wood. The kitchen is the size of a restaurant's. But I notice something else.

People prepare for moves differently. In a good scenario, boxes are taped up and labeled, drawers emptied, televisions unplugged, beds stripped. In a bad scenario, which is what this is, it looks like it was your idea to show up and move them, that the truck in the driveway caught them by surprise. Televisions are still on, items like plants and ornaments are still everywhere, books are still in the bookcases, and the beds are made.

Nothing has been done.

I open the fridge. It is full. I open the pantry door. It is full.

A pretty woman, about forty, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, comes inside and looks around sheepishly. “
I
got a lot done last night,” she says.

I nod. A lot of what, I wonder? I had a mental picture of her packing a few things, then throwing the packing tape down when it started to occur to her how long this ordeal was going to go on, and mumbling to herself, “Let the movers do it.” Let us pack, strip her beds, take down her pictures, unplug her TVs. Some people just don't have a taste for manual labor of any kind, especially not if there's the money to pay someone else to do it.

Packing is easy work, compared to moving, and there is so much extra stuff in the house that it will take us all day just to get organized enough to start loading the truck. Jim calls the company and gets her estimate adjusted, essentially charging this woman a thousand or so extra dollars for the inconvenience she has caused. She shrugs. It's just money to her, and the less she has to bother with the better.

I start wrapping her trinkets in paper, three or four sheets of thick moving paper around each figurine, an environmentalist's nightmare. Each 4.5-cubic-foot box can hold only a handful of the tiny, glass artifacts with which she has lined her whole house. This is the way it has to be done because as we are now charging her for packing, we are responsible for the breakage of anything that was packed. Even more time consuming is the inventory list. Every remote control, box of fish food, aquarium rock, and egg timer that we drop in a box has to be accounted for, to protect the lady from us stealing her stuff. Of course, as I am in charge of both inventory and packing, all I have to do if I want to steal something is just not inventory it, but this doesn't matter. Like most services that corporations offer, it's just a marketing trick, designed to make the customer feel good.

While Jim and I are working, the woman starts telling us the story of her life. She is moving out the day before her husband comes home from a business trip because she has recently discovered that he molested their daughter when she was a child. The daughter shared this with the woman after a particularly emotional therapy session, and the woman decided to schedule a move when he was away. So this man will be coming home from a business trip to an empty house, and later in the week he'll get served with all kinds of legal papers.

This seems like personal stuff to be telling a mover, but Jim and I just nod and continue about our business. She tells us more gory details about her life and dysfunctional marriage. She mentions that she was a farmer's daughter from one of the poorest areas in Kansas, and that she had met her husband while they were in college, where she had received a scholarship for winning a beauty contest. But, like a guilty party in a murder interrogation, she doesn't stop talking in time, and bits of information start to emerge to tell a different story.

It seems that her husband only recently brokered a deal to make him one of the richest men in town. This coincided nicely with the divorce proceedings, and the “sudden” realization of the molestation. Now that this man has something worth suing for half of, all the skeletons are suddenly coming out of the closet. This woman is clever, astute. She's been biding her time since she met this man in college for just this day, just this carefully planned opportunity. Now, thanks to Jim and myself, and this fine moving company, she can make herself the well-to-do matron she always must have wanted to be, ever since she looked at the rich women in town from the back of her daddy's pickup.

I guess that's one way to get out of a life of poverty. It makes us the getaway drivers in a heist.

We've been packing for ten hours before we can even start loading. It is pitch black before we can get to the heavy stuff, and we have to spend forty minutes rigging flashlights in the truck so we can see. By two in the morning we've stopped caring about any of her possessions, and so has she. We slam a lawn mower up against a TV set, balance a mirror on top of a big pile of garden rakes. We are running out of room in the truck, and we still have a pile of boxes and assorted junk from the garage to go. A few of the boxes get crammed in so tightly they lose their shape, and I hear the occasional tinkling of broken glass from inside. We stuff what we can into the belly box, the metal bin on the underside of the trailer designed to carry the moving ramps. The last few boxes go into the sleeper, along with a pile of rope and some small lamps and garden tools.

At three thirty in the morning we finish. She signs the paperwork, waves good-bye, and shuts the door. No tip.

We've just worked a twenty-hour day on five hours' sleep. According to our schedule, we should be in Colorado by now, on our way to Spokane. Even Jim is beginning to admit that the war is unwinnable.

“I don't think I can keep on like this without any real rest,” he tells me, his eyes red-rimmed, like my own. Unlike me, he has an hour of paperwork to take care of before he can drift off to sleep in the first motel we find that takes trucks. “Let's just spend a day in Boulder, relax.”

“Sounds good.”

“Fuck 'em, I don't care what they say,” he tells me anxiously, meaning the people in the office.

“It's not a do-able schedule.”

“They're killing me.”

“I know.”

We blow another tire.

Fortunately, there is a rest stop about a mile ahead, and we limp into it.

We are both too tired to curse or complain, and all we want is sleep. This is impossible because the sleeper is crammed full of boxes, lamps, and rakes. I try to make enough room in the sleeper to lie down by shoving everything into the passenger seat, and the bottom falls out of one of the boxes, dumping this lady's memorabilia all over the cab. We look at each other, an unspoken agreement to worry about it tomorrow. I push and kick a few more boxes out of the way, and have enough room for a halfway comfortable lying position.

Jim, who is considerably shorter than me, manages to rig up a board across the cab and lie down there. A rake, which has been jammed into place by the boxes I have just kicked, is pointing straight into his back. Irritated, he rolls under the rake and kicks it up with his foot, splintering into a dozen pieces.

Then he grabs the pieces, opens the door, and throws them into the rest area parking lot.

When he slams the door shut, I am convulsing with laughter.

“What's so funny.”

I am laughing so hard I can hardly breathe or speak. “You … just … broke … that lady's rake.” After spending fifteen hours trying so hard to treat her stuff carefully and professionally, after double and triple wrapping every trinket and figurine she owned, we are kicking and slamming and destroying anything that inconveniences us.

Jim starts giggling too.

“Let's just hope she doesn't pull into this rest stop.”

I sleep very well, and in the morning I get up and realize that the things I spilled all over the cab are modeling photographs. We have ten- and fifteen-year-old shots of her in a bikini, in ski wear, modeling lingerie, even a few nudes. We ooh and ahh over them while we drink coffee from a rest stop vending machine and wait for the repair truck.

“She was a good looking woman,” Jim says, admiring the photos from several different angles.

“Still is.”

“Fucked her way into some serious money.”

“God bless her. I would if I could.”

“Would you?”

I give this some thought. It's a purely theoretical question.

I've never met a rich woman who I've gotten along with well enough to get such an offer. Probably not, I decide. “I reckon if I would, I'd have probably done it by now.”

“Yeah,” Jim says, putting the photos down. “I could live off a rich girl for a few weeks, but I'd need some freedom. Like this.” He looks around at the rest area parking lot like it is nirvana. “Nobody bothers me here,” he says.

But people do bother us. There is a device in the truck called an Omnitrax, which is hooked up to the company headquarters by satellite, and there is a satellite receiver in the roof of the truck. The company can triangulate our exact location at any time. Ostensibly, this is for emergencies, in case we ever break down in a snowbank somewhere, but it is primarily used to stop the drivers from lying about their exact location in an effort to procure time off. Thus, a driver who wants a rest can't say, “Hi, I'm three hundred miles outside Seattle, be there tomorrow,” when he is actually parked in a Seattle parking lot, having driven over the speed limit the whole night before. They'll just flick a switch and see his blinking light come up on a screen right where Seattle is, and fire him as soon as his truck is empty.

You can also type and receive messages on the Omnitrax, meaning that headquarters can communicate with us anytime they want. We periodically get notifications that items we have just dropped off have been nicked or scratched, and deductions are made from Jim's paychecks accordingly. Jim is responsible for everything. He is an independent contractor, but “independent” these days just means that nobody is paying for your health insurance.

Jim is suddenly worried that, when we see the lady again to drop off her stuff in Denver, I will smirk or look at her knowingly, now that I've seen naked pictures of her. I tell him not to worry about it, but I know he will.

We hit Denver, unload all her things into a storage space before the woman even shows up, have the warehouseman sign for it, and Jim calls the company and we take a day off. It is that easy. “You've been running pretty hard,” they tell him. Somebody out there is a human being, a rare find these days. We spend the day milling around a picturesque college town, looking at girls and trying to find a place classy enough for us to get shitfaced.

The next day, I wake up and wander around some more, and I come upon a man with one hand trying to put a starter motor in his car. He asks me to help, and I spend a good amount of time slithering around in oil under the car, trying to bolt the motor into place. After about an hour of this we get it done, and he starts it up. He's got a car that works now, and I have a new appreciation of how good life is when you have two hands. I head back to the truck in a good mood.

Jim is awake and hungover, and my positive, easy-going attitude is infectious. “Let's just stay here another day,” he says. We had a good time in the bars last night, and the mountains look peaceful. “I'll rent a suite in the nicest hotel in town. On me.”

It's an enticing offer. Who am I to argue? “Can you afford it?”

“I've got a credit card.”

“I don't want you to waste your money.”

“I want to do this. I think we should have a good time out here, at least when we can. I appreciate you coming out here.”

“Thanks.” I am flattered.

So he rents a room in the finest hotel in Boulder, Colorado, that has a parking lot big enough to accommodate a tractor trailer. We get a suite, which gives us each a room, with our own TV and microwave and toilet. I like Jim, but living together without any personal space for two weeks is a strain on any relationship. I get to use a remote control for an hour or two without having it snatched out of my hands. I watch
Law and Order
with sound. It is bliss.

And that's all we do with our day off—sleep, rest up, flip channels, go to the bathroom. There's a lousy restaurant fifty feet away that we limp over to when we get hungry. Then it's nightfall. We fall asleep. Then it's daylight. We get back on the road.

We're on our way to Seattle, and Jim lets me drive through Wyoming because it's a wasteland. Wyoming has no trees or people, great advantages for a novice tractor trailer driver. There's nothing to hit if you run off the road. Other cars and trucks are only visible every twenty minutes or so. As he calls out instructions to me, I realize that Jim has a gift for teaching.

“Did you ever want to be a teacher?” I ask him.

“Yeah. After I got out the army, I looked into it.”

“What happened?”

“I had a roommate who was a teacher. He made about eight dollars an hour. I was waiting tables at the time and I always had to lend him money. This guy had been to school for four years so he could borrow money from a waiter.”

“Where is he now?”

“He's still teaching. He loves it. But he had to move back in with his folks. I'd like to teach too, but I don't think my folks would let me move back with 'em. Downshift.”

“What?”

“We're coming to a hill here. You need to downshift.” I manage to do it without grinding the gears. I'm getting the hang of this thing. An hour or two later we pull into Sheridan, but I don't feel confident enough to back the truck into a space.