Chapter Three

The Beginning

(Denver, 2019)

Lots of over-the-road truckers don’t make it to the end of the road anymore and those who do usually already have one foot in the grave. It’s not the work that’s so hard, but the lifestyle -- living in a truck for sometimes months at a time, on-the-run hot dogs, Snickers and chips and irregular sleep to meet new market-driven demands for just-in-time delivery schedules cooked up by bean counters to better manage on-site inventory costs.

It’s the market, stupid!

Listening to old timers talk, it didn’t use to be that way. When Jimmy Hoffa ran the Teamsters, he made sure his boys got time off the road to live regular middle class lives -- mow the lawn, school plays, Little League and a pension on top of Social Security. If you argued with him about it he had the power to shut down the country to make his point that truckers had rights to a life, too. He was Labor. He was Motion. He was the Force of self-organizing nature clothing ideas in form. So they threw him in prison and then killed him gangland style and things had been going downhill for truckers ever since. Gradually, truckers started thinking less about retirement and more about surviving. Fewer and fewer of them were making it to the end of the road.

But Benny did!

And for a long time he just sat there as the sun went down behind the Rockies to the west and the city lights of Denver flickering on to the east as the High Plains of America beyond began disappearing into the night.

He just sat there.

For a long time he just sat there, like waiting for instructions to make his next move. Without instructions, when you get to an intersection you can’t know whether to turn left or to turn right. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there or even know if you’re already there. Leave it up to feelings and you’ll go in circles or into a ditch.

He thought about changing his mind. He was only 71 years old -- only. He knew drivers in their 80s still at it out on the road. He’d been with the same company for almost the entirety of his 20-year trucking career. They’d be glad to take him back. Trucking companies were always looking for over-the-road drivers with experience and a clean record. They would tell him what to do so he wouldn’t have to think about it -- pick up here, deliver there.

But he knew he couldn’t go back.

That’s what it meant to be a writer, or one of the things.

So he just sat there. Suspended. Waiting. For what? Like maybe if he sat there long enough the Word of the universe might suddenly be revealed… to him? To Benny Profante? Like he could possibly be deserving after all the things he’d done and sinned even though time and again he’d said he was sorry for going down forbidden roads, ignoring Dead End and No Trespassing signs.

But, mmm, he thought to himself, maybe he already had his instructions. Maybe he’d never been without them. Maybe they were just in a language he didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand.

And, so, he just sat there.

He took a deep breath.

Then he took another deep breath like he’s back in his youth working up the courage to hold her hand, or to make the leap from a Presque Island cliff into the icy waters of Lake Superior.

It was getting dark and he had things to do. He couldn’t just sit there forever, could he?

Of course not.

He decided.

So, he did what he’d been doing at the end of every long day for the past twenty years -- he flipped the big machine’s ignition switch to off.

The muscular Detroit diesel engine shuttered to a stop.

And, then, silence… just Benny in his truck parked somewhere on a planet in space.

And that was it… the end of the road.

But, oh, what memories!

Twenty years of memories…

From that time breaking down on the Brooklyn bridge and backing up New York rush-hour traffic for miles almost to Pennsylvania; or drinking beer perched like a desert bird atop the big rig’s hood somewhere out in the middle of a cloudless Mohave desert night; from getting squashed under that low Chicago bridge to watching L.A. disappear in the rear-view mirror; from Dakota ice to the first green shoots of Iowa corn. The truck stop angels… the CB chatter… the blown tires and sneaking into Miami when all is quiet in the middle of the night. I-80 crossing never ending Nebraska; I-95 up and down the eastern coast; I-81 and the Civil War ghosts of the Shenandoah Valley; the Columbia River gorge; Fresno fruit; Ohio steel; Indonesian trinkets at the port of Long Beach; Pacific Northwest lumber; Milwaukee beer and the bullshit stories truckers tell from Selma to Amarillo over heaping plates of chicken fried steak, hash browns, three eggs over easy, a pot of coffee and a dozen donuts to go. Gaining weight and New Year’s resolutions to walk and eat more greens. Lumper fees. Cops. Federal regulations. Sleeping on exit ramps. Getting stuck in Louisiana mud, not once, but twice, in the same spot! And that night crossing Donner Pass praying for an answer to his long neglected Catholic God -- “please, God, please let me know… is the pavement just wet or a sheet of black ice? Is this how it ends or is it time turn the page, to finally write it all down.” It was, after all, the biggest story in the world.