Alligators, Lizards, French Fries & Watermelons

by GEORGE YANOK

The Passenger and the Driver hook up in Nashville at a truck stop across from the new stadium.

"We'll have breakfast before we get on the road. You have to see this place. It's like the bar in "STAR WARS."

The Nashville stop is mid-trip for the Driver who started over a week ago with a run from Chicago to Miami and back to Chicago. He's on his second circuit now over the same ground and has invited an old friend along for the ride.

The Passenger avoids the tubs of gravy, biscuits and suspicious looking eggs and sausages on the steam table buffet and orders a short stack from the menu. The Driver asks for a cheese omelet with no potatoes, no bread. He's trying to maintain a high protein, low carbohydrate diet which, on truck stop food, is like attempting to keep Kosher at a Baghdad falafel stand.

"Just give me some sliced tomatoes and put extra cheese on top."

The Passenger will soon learn that everything at a truck stop comes with French fries and that even if he ordered green jello and specified he did not want French fries, he'd still have to scrape them off the plate. Or, given the Passenger's criminal lack of willpower, gobble up every last one of them.

They eat in the area reserved for truckers. The Driver is a little disappointed at the scarcity of weird and crazy patrons here this morning but promises greater weirdness further down the line.

There are telephones at most of the tables and booths and even along the counter. In addition to calling home from time to time, truckers stay in communication with people at each end of their journey -- those who sent them and those who wait for them.

Signs caution, "No incoming calls". Phone company calling cards have effectively eliminated operator placed long distance and drivers save pockets full of coins for the somehow legal electronic slot machine games found in most truck stops.

After breakfast the Passenger climbs in the right side of a Freightliner tractor attached to about 50 feet of trailer and settles into a surprisingly comfortable, pneumatically cushioned seat. Within a few moments the Driver has negotiated the big rig out of the truck stop lot and onto I-24 East, outward bound for Miami. "We're carrying 43,000 pounds of some sort of assorted shit," the Driver tells the Passenger.

This is the Passenger's first nugget of trucking lore. 'Freelance' drivers often don't know nor do they much care what they're hauling. Independent owner/operators contract to carry a wide variety of cargo from many different sources. As long as the load is legal, the weight is right and the trip will pay, they concentrate on getting it to its destination in the most efficient manner possible. Because only then can they load up something else and be on their way home.

The Driver points out other trucks on the road, identifying them for the Passenger. A tanker is a tanker, easy enough. An open topped trailer secured with a tarp is called a 'covered wagon.' A truck with a car carrier is a 'parking lot.' Cabs pulling TWO trailers are called 'wiggle-waggles.'

"Ever drive one of those?" the Passenger asks.

"I've never done it and I never will. The damn things sway and slide all over."

*

Truck stops distribute a wide variety of free literature -- magazines, guide books, newsletters -- tailored to drivers and their professional concerns. An article in one lists tips for avoiding hijack: "Don't talk about your load." That assumes a driver knows what's back there in the first place. The giant logo of an electronics company emblazoned on a trailer obviously precludes secrecy, but the admonitions make simple common sense: "Don't reveal your schedule to inquisitive strangers." "Don't pick up passengers."

The Driver and the Passenger are by no means strangers, having met during their Army days in Texas. In fact, they've been "on the road" together before in a chartered Greyhound bus touring an Army show to military bases. Later, as civilians, they trekked up and down the California coast in vehicles ranging from a British Triumph TR-4 sports car (the Passenger's) to a '53 Chevy the Driver ultimately traded for a motorcycle.

Intervening years saw the Passenger and the Driver follow separate roads spaced with life's mile markers including a marriage or three and various career moves both lateral and dizzyingly vertical.

The Driver started out to be an actor but gave it up when he took upon himself the task of single-handedly raising his infant daughter, a choice requiring that he pursue more dependable employment. He learned to drive a truck and did it well, spending several years driving his own rig. Now single again, his daughter grown, he hires himself out to drive a couple of weeks a month, earns enough to live on, and preserves the balance of his time to write and indulge a variety of creative outlets.

The Passenger is a writer who for many years wrote scripts for television shows. A long résumé is not tolerated in youth worshipping Hollywood which is how he happens to be in Nashville, gone there from California for a job that did not last. And there he has remained for a couple of years, effectively stranded, hoping to get to New York.

The Passenger hopes a big rig ride from Nashville to Miami and back can be something to write about. The trick will be to avoid "Knights Of The Highway" clichés or torturously wrought "modern day cowboy" images. The romance of the road makes a piss poor love story and humping 80,000 pounds of diesel powered steel up and down the nation in service of interstate commerce is a tough damn way to make a living.

*

"We bare it all." "Adult toys." "Couples Welcome."

What the hell are these billboards...?

Amazingly, a several mile stretch of I-75 through Georgia (near the home of former President Jimmy Carter) is solid titty bars. Clap-trappy roadhouses with space to park everything from a Geo Metro to an 18 wheeler pop up at regular intervals on both sides of the highway. Garish color schemes of day-glo and neon promise a panoply of prurient delight to accompany barbecue and beer.

"Ever stop?"

The Driver shakes his head. "Naw. But plenty of guys do. It's lonely sitting behind a wheel all day. So they park, have a beer, stare at some naked chicks and go back to the truck and jerk off. Or they get on CB radio and send out a call for 'lot lizards'.

"'Lot lizards'?"

"That's what truckers call prostitutes who specialize in servicing truck drivers." He does a perfect redneck accent: "'Hey, breaker, innybuddy ott thar wanna suck ma dee-yick?'' Wait'll you see one and you'll realize how damn hard up you'd have to be."

Thereafter the Passenger keeps an eye peeled at every stop hoping for a look at a lot lizard. He's not sure he could positively identify one, remembering a summer in New York before the Disneyfication of Times Square when he'd walked several blocks down 9th Avenue before it dawned on him that the spectacularly bewigged and mini-skirted pedestrians sharing the sidewalk with him were plying the oldest profession.

*

The truck is home as well as conveyance. Sleeper cab design has improved over time, refining the early crypt-like cubicles that were once tucked as afterthoughts behind the seats. Most sleepers, as in this Freightliner, feature two full sized bunk beds and are far more spacious than the largest camper van with Pop n' Marie Retiree rattling around inside. The Passenger, six feet tall, can stand in the sleeper with arms raised over his head and not touch the ceiling. There are reading lights, bookshelves and closet space for extra clothing (although both Driver and Passenger made do the entire trip with shorts and a few tee shirts). The Driver brings along an ice chest for drinking water and perishables although there is space in the cab designed specifically to fit a small refrigerator. There is even a TV which they never switch on. About all the sleeper cab lacks is a toilet...an 'official' one, at least. Tucked away in a compartment behind the Driver is what the trucking magazines delicately refer to as a 'personal jug.' The Passenger has not been assigned a jug . The Driver assures him that if he needs a roadside stop he will be accommodated.

"Riding in a truck can be tough on the kidneys when you're not used to the bouncing around. If you have to go, just say so and I'll pull over." At that moment the Passenger silently vows NEVER to be the cause of an unscheduled stop. He also determines he will not use a jug, having no confidence in his aim or balance at 70 miles an hour. It is a point of some pride that the Passenger is able to conform throughout the trip to the Driver's schedule of stops with no discomfort.

Added to the nuggets of trucking lore is the 'third axle trick', or: 'how to relieve a full bladder with the least chance of outraging public sensibilities.' This is accomplished, with the truck stopped parallel to the roadside, by assuming a position at the third set of wheels from the front bumper, right at the coupler. From here it is possible to whiz with abandon, invisible to passing traffic. Naturally, this does not work as well in heavily populated areas.

*

Truck stop overnight parking areas provide hookups for electricity and water but the Passenger is surprised to learn that most truck engines run on idle all night to utilize their air conditioning or heat, depending upon the weather. The Passenger wonders why they don't suffocate in the night which would be the fate of anyone who went to sleep in the family sedan with the motor running. The Driver's explanation has something to do with the truck's unique exhaust routing system. The Passenger isn't sure he buys this but faced with a choice of shutting down the engine and having no air conditioning or leaving the vents open to mosquitoes, he chooses the former and stops worrying about how it works as long as it does.

On their first overnight stop the Passenger gains a clear understanding of the importance of avoiding parking next to a 'reefer', a refrigerated trailer, easily identified by a huge refrigeration apparatus attached goiter-like to the outside of the front wall.

"They're noisy as hell and run all damn night," the Driver tells the Passenger. In spite of the Driver's best efforts, the spot next to them is vacated sometime after midnight and a reefer noisily takes up residence. The Passenger likens the experience to sleeping with his ear next to a running vacuum cleaner.

The Passenger awakens early and stumbles through the maze of truck rows to the truck stop restroom carrying his tooth brush. The urine redolence hanging in the morning air is vivid evidence that many drivers neither employ a 'personal jug' during the night nor expend the energy required to walk inside to the urinals.

Truckers have their own restrooms at most truck stop facilities, separate and apart from those available to ordinary 'amateur' motorists. The Driver and Passenger take advantage of one chain which offers coupons with fuel fill up which may be exchanged at another stop for private cubicles with sink, toilet and shower. Towels and soap are provided; rubber shower shoes are strongly advised. The Passenger idly wonders how long someone would have to hole up in one of these hygiene refuges before bringing knocks on the door and passkeys. But their schedule is too tight to experiment.

*

Perhaps the most prevalent trucking myth is the one that says the best roadside food is at restaurants where the truck drivers eat. The fact is, truckers eat where they can PARK. You don't whip 60 or 70 feet of iron monster into a diagonal parking slot and if you even THOUGHT about trying to taking a big rig through a fast food drive up window, you'd probably drive off dangling a few of the Golden Arches.

Unfortunately the vast urban sprawl that has filled in most of the spaces between cities in America has resulted in a 'dumbing down' of local flavor in all senses of the word. Blindfold someone and plop them down in any one of a thousand commercial strips that cling like mold to every off ramp along the Interstate system and it would take that person a good long time to identify their location. Everything looks exactly the same -- gas stations, sub shops, pizza parlors, fast-food outlets, motel chains -- each with its towering signage of familiar and interchangeable corporate logos. It is a commercial landscape mathematically determined to merchandise sameness, familiarity and, one supposes, what passes today for security. Evidently an entire society has tacitly agreed that surprises are bad, serendipity is to be avoided and we'll all have vanilla, thanks.

*

While every trucker has favorite places along the road to get a meal or grab a nap or even park close enough to some multi-plex to catch a movie during down time, the Driver is most likely unique in knowing where to find a good bookstore along a given route; meaning one with good books AND a good place to park.

A mall just off the bypass south of Atlanta is a favorite of the Driver. He parks the truck on a service road behind a large furniture outlet next to a Barnes & Noble, and he and the Passenger pass a pleasant half hour amongst the stacks, able to forget for the while the frenzy of the road.

Perhaps the Driver's penchant for bookstore pit stops is not surprising given his demonstrated ability to keep National Public Radio tuned in on his truck radio. The trick is to hopscotch frequencies according to strength in the direction traveled. And in those pockets where an NPR signal is just NOT obtainable, the Driver seeks out 'fire and brimstone' radio preachers for entertainment. Even these are becoming a vanishing breed in the homogenization of American culture. Nowadays radio preachers read Scripture as if they were lawyers parsing a particularly dense legal brief. Their message remains the same, though: "Give me the money and I'll get you to heaven."

*

The Everglades Parkway, popularly known as "Alligator Alley" cuts a horizontal line straight as a draftsman's rule across the lower quarter of the Florida peninsula. Chain link fence separates canals on either side of the highway and this is where the alligators are. But the Driver and the Passenger hit the "Alley" late Sunday afternoon of a rainy day and no 'gators are visible.

That night they sleep in the parking lot of a freight terminal near the Miami Airport while a night crew off loads a variety of cartons and crates and boxes.

The next morning, 'deadheading' an empty trailer, they start back across the Everglades. This time the alligators are there, almost every mile, floating in the canals and lurking in the dense undergrowth.

At one point they spot several alligators in one of the little inlets close to the fence. The Driver parks the rig at the side of the road and he and the Passenger pick their way down a grassy embankment, hoping for a closer look. One beast, at least ten feet long, flicks it's tail and disappears with the sudden speed and agility of a surprised garter snake. Another reveals just a flash of front legs and snout as it knifes into the water and is gone, leaving hardly a ripple on the surface.

As the Driver and the Passenger start back to the truck they become aware of a man calling to them as he approaches on foot from further down the grassy frontage. They'd noticed him earlier while approaching the alligators and assumed he was a tourist also viewing the wildlife. But there appears to be no car or truck but their own parked along the road. The man wears Wrangler jeans and a black tee shirt advertising a bar and grill in the Keys and a cap bearing the same logo. His arms and neck are covered in tattoos; the ones on his arms are very elaborate and intricately done but those on his neck appear to be crude prison decoration. He holds up an empty one liter plastic bottle.

"You guys got any water?"

"You mean drinking water?" the Driver asks.

"Yeah."

"We got water. You need some?"

The man nods gratefully and walks along with them. He is very talkative and begins explaining how the canals containing the wildlife are man made and called 'pushes' -- meaning they are a combination of fresh water and salt water. He tells them that alligators which turn up too close to populated areas are transported here and put in the canals for the safety of both sides of nature's equation.

"They put one in here that was 20 feet long."

The Passenger is thinking of the hijack warnings in the trucking magazine, particularly the instances recounted of drivers approached by strangers at the roadside suddenly finding themselves at gun point. The Passenger drops behind the stranger and the Driver as they walk up the bank toward the truck. From this vantage he decides that, barring an ankle holster, there seems no possibility the man is carrying a concealed weapon.

The Driver and the Passenger both assume the man will ask for a ride but he does not. He fills his water bottle from a supply in the Driver's cooler and explains that his car had broken down back on the road.

"I called my partner and he's supposed to come get me but I just started walking. Only got a little ways when I realized I was running out of water."

The Driver and the Passenger exchange a look. Too many questions occur: Where is his car? They'd seen nothing parked at the side of the road. How did he call his partner? If by cell phone, why did he leave it in the disabled vehicle instead of carrying it? Was he casing the truck and either knew somehow that it was empty or did not want to go against two men instead of a single driver? As they climb back into the cab the stranger waves his thanks and lays one more bit of arcanity on them.

"You walk along here at night, you never know what the hell you're gonna meet. 'Gators get under that fence all the time."

*

I-75 cuts through verdant forest and rolling agricultural plain from northern Florida to southern Georgia. This time of year the mother lode crop is melons and this is what they have come for.

At each stop on the way from Miami the Driver makes a series of phone calls to a fruit broker trying to nail down a time and a place to take on a trailer full of watermelons. At one point it seems he might contract a load that will change his ultimate destination from Chicago to Memphis, but it develops that this alternative trip will not pay enough to make rerouting worthwhile. After stopping for the night in Adel, Georgia he is finally directed on a northeasterly track to a farm not far from the little hamlet of Rochelle.

The Passenger can't help it. Rural southern Georgia reminds him of night riders and burning crosses and fat cops with corrupt grins dipping into pouches of Red Man as they terrorize anyone suspected of being Godless-Communist-Jew-homosexual-Democrat-liberal-northerners. Not an enlightened view nor even a fair one in the "New South" of glass skyscrapers, industrial parks, upscale malls and hideous suburbs, but there it sits at the front of the Passenger's consciousness and won't go away. Part of this is American history and, just as vividly, a great part is the movies: he can't help but populate this fecund red dirt countryside with recalled cinematic images of men in flat brimmed hats and mirrored sunglasses holding shotguns on prison road gangs.

"Takin' it off, boss...".

"Takin' it off..."

"What we got here is a FAILURE to COMMUNICATE..."

The Passenger wrote a television movie a few years ago which was partially filmed in Columbus, Georgia. He remembers spending the better part of an evening with a woman network executive trying unsuccessfully to buy a bottle of wine that was neither sugared nor carbonated.

No onslaught of yuppies has yet arrived in Rochelle to tart up the 19th century storefronts along the downtown strip and transform them into Starbucks and frou-frou antique shops. Farm houses and shotgun shacks and graceful Victorian cottages scattered on the side streets are nearly all inhabited, though many need paint and shingle work. People "live" here; they would never think of it as "pursuing a lifestyle."

Two chicken stands across the street from each other serve as Rochelle's 'restaurant row'; one is run by blacks, the other by whites. Neither lacks for customers of any color. A beautiful old brick train station with slate roof and rococo wood trim sits disused and crumbling at the edge of the railroad tracks that bisect the town. But this is no ghost town. Big rigs lumber through all day long, some of them flatbeds stacked with fresh cut timber. When the Driver pulls into the watermelon farm there are already three or four trucks backed up to a loading shed, taking on melons.

The melon harvesting and loading operation is a model of ingenuity. The fruit is harvested in vast fields beyond this pecan grove at the edge of a pond and transported to the loading dock in what were once school busses. The roofs and seats have been removed and the undercarriages reinforced to bear the loads of melons.

A white clapboard farm house sits surrounded by a neatly trimmed lawn, in the center of which is a swing set. Behind the house is the loading dock canopied by a long, tin-roofed shed. Melons proceed in stately fashion along an intersecting series of electric conveyor belts as workers manually stack them into the trailers. In accordance with principles of load distribution, the tallest layers are at the forward end, tapering toward the back. The workers and the pickers are mostly Mexican, some blacks. The 'straw boss' of the conveyor belt line is a black woman who watches each melon as it arrives and grades it as to type and weight and rejects any defects. At her feet are piles of ruptured or misshapen fruit. Cardboard cartons unfolded Origami fashion into six sided bins are filled with melons and placed at the tailgate end to secure the load. Otherwise, an avalanche of watermelons would greet whoever opened the trailer doors.

The truck was weighed, empty, at a scale across from the train station in Rochelle. Once loaded, the Driver must go back and weigh again to determine cargo weight. On first try the Driver proclaims them much too heavy and returns to the farm to off load dozens of melons, each one of which weighing an average of 20 pounds. Then back to town to weigh again. Ultimately, they do it three times. Complicating this process are 1) the seeming inability of the melon loaders to accurately judge weight (the last off load happens after the migrant workers have been bussed away to the chicken shack of their choice and must be done by straw bosses who, in khaki's and plantation hats, look to the Passenger for all the world like 'overseers' out of "ROOTS") and 2) all of this goes on while the skies pour down a virtual deluge.

The hope this morning had been to load quickly and be on the road by noontime. The Driver even had assurance that this would be the case when he spoke on the phone to the broker. But given the protracted period of waiting and weighing and loading and offloading, they do not get underway until nearly nightfall and must make it all the way to Nashville.

*

"Big word or little word?"

"Little word."

"Shit. We gotta stop."

A part of the truckers oddly self-deprecating sense of humor plays into their cliché image as illiterate rednecks. Official roadside signs indicate whether a truck weigh station is closed ('big word') and can be passed by or open ('little word') and require truckers to pull off and pass over scales at slow speed to establish legal weight. 'Big word' or 'little word' has been a running joke ever since the Driver told the Passenger about it.

Since leaving Rochelle, the Driver has periodically punched numbers into his hand calculator, all the while mumbling in frustration.

"We're still about a couple of hundred pounds overweight. I need to take on fuel and I can't fill up because at 5 pounds per gallon we'd end up way over. They let us slide at the last scale but when we cross over into Tennessee, they are really chickenshit. I have to get rid of some watermelons."

"How? Sell some at a rest stop?"

"Maybe. Or I'll just open the door and dump some if I have to. I KNEW those loaders didn't know what the hell they were doing."

They pull into the first truck stop along the line in Tennessee for an evening meal. As they finish, the Driver has an inspiration. He asks the waitress if there is a manager around. She frowns, worriedly. The Driver reassures her.

"There's nothing wrong with the food or service."

When the manager arrives, the Driver levels with him. "Here's my situation...I'm heading north with watermelons and I'm overweight. Can you use a dozen or so?"

The manager is immediately interested. "What would you want for them?"

The Driver holds up the two food checks for himself and the Passenger. "Take care of these and you get the melons."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

The deal is struck; the manager signs the bills and the Driver pulls the truck around to the kitchen door. In 'bucket brigade' fashion the Driver, Passenger, manager and three busboys divest the truck of about 20 melons. As the Driver jumps down from the trailer bed and closes the door he is approached by a man offering to buy more melons. The Driver politely declines. A few minutes later as they are once more rolling up I-75 the Driver laughs as he tells the Passenger, "If he'd asked me while I was still in the trailer I would have given him some. I just didn't want to climb back up there again."

*

Sometime after three AM, approaching Murfreesboro from the south, the Driver is able to tune in a 24 hour jazz station broadcasting from the campus of Middle Tennessee State University. The sublime sound of Dexter Gordon's tenor saxophone fills the Freightliner cab, invigorating their flagging spirits and turning the inky black and humid night into a comforting velvet cocoon. Soon the skyline of Nashville looms and, a short time later, the Driver lumbers the Freightliner into the same truck stop where he picked up the Passenger nearly five days ago. The Passenger retrieves his automobile from the 'civilian' parking lot and when he drives back to the truck to pick up his duffel bag he sees the Driver standing over an enormous watermelon.

"I picked you out a good one."

The Passenger completes his own journey by driving the deserted roads to his home feeling strangely diminished in what now seems to him this ridiculously puny 4-door sedan. A mile from his turn off he finds he has a choice of overtaking and going around in front of a slow moving truck or falling in behind and adding perhaps 30 seconds to his trip. He slows, lets the truck pull safely ahead, signals, and crosses the lane behind it. It's late. What's the point of forcing some driver to deal with a speeding 4-wheeler maneuvering in front of him?

The fact that the Passenger is asleep the moment his head hits the pillow makes moot the extra half minute it took him to reach his bed.

His dreams are of many things...

An alligator measuring 20 feet long, if somehow able to stand on its tail, could peek over the top of a two story building.

Lizards are uglier than alligators.

French fries are a lot like sex, in that even the worst is great.

The watermelon is a triumph of nature -- pleasing in color, texture and taste to both the eye and the palate.

Trucking is hard work.

###