Pilgrim’s Progress
Easy Work
Never Cut Your Pleasure Short
Goodbye, Tootsie
Solidarity Forever
By the Rivers of Babylon
The Romance of the Road
The Good Soldier
O Beautiful, for Spacious Skies
The Loves of Our Lives
The Screwing You Get
The Skirmish of Tippecanoe
Between Past and Future
One Nation, Indivisible
Defender of Freedom
Ed’s Golden Girl
Born to be Free
Happy Families are All Alike
Jockey Rides Again
The All-Bran Affair
The Kid with the Jealous Eyes
The Last of the Bourbons
Floating with the Tide
The Fruits of Labor
Looking Out for Number One
Letters from Sally
All Good Things . . .
I was born in Cleveland, Ohio on the last day of 1928. Both my parents were college graduates, my upbringing—and values and standards—were upper-middle class, and in the normal course of events I would have acquired a “higher education” and quite likely proceeded into one of the professions.
I made a couple of stabs at college, but dropped out both times after a few weeks. I had several dull jobs, and then—in the young man’s tradition of perversity—I did what was most inimical to my own interests: I joined the Navy.
The Navy was dead time—a period of going through the motions while waiting to get out. Once I was free again I reentered college, sat through one class, and dropped out while I was still ahead. I hadn’t the least idea of what I might do in life—or with my life—and the urge to travel was my primary motivation.
After an eight-week stint as deckhand on an iron-ore carrier, I signed on with the “Old Man” to make a one-way trip from Detroit to Los Angeles, with no notion of what I would do when I got to the Coast—and I wound up driving for the Old Man for nine and a half years. My companions on the job were not the sort of people I had known before. They thought and acted differently, and had different expectations and prospects in life. What we had in common were travel fever, no plans for the future, and no homes. The real home was the job—constant motion and a succession of hotel rooms. The future was the next trip. The knowledge that there would be several trips in a row constituted our version of stability and permanence.
I was on the road for the Old Man from May 1949 to December 1958, and during that period drove new cars and trucks from Detroit to Los Angeles 130 times. When I started, the country was still recovering from the Great Depression and the Second World War. Nine and a half years later it seemed as though the entire country had become well off if not actually prosperous. Millions of people had realized their onward-and-upward aspirations: a new car, a house in the suburbs, a good job, money in the bank, and the kids had braces on their teeth.
The world passed us by. The end of the fifties saw us no better off than at the beginning. There was motion without progress, and nothing to show for our labors. We were older and tireder, wiser and more cynical. I acquired some of the outlook of my companions while retaining my own, and gained an education of the sort that cannot be taught but must be learned.
What follows is an anecdotal account of who we were, how we lived, and how we talked. None of these tales is precisely true in every respect, yet none is false. Most of the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty alike.
When the Old Man folded up his tent we were left stranded, but we were not without resources. Our instincts, our experience, our habits, the very history of the country showed us the way. We went west once more, to start life anew.
“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon long experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Quincy, Illinois and Albuquerque, New Mexico were the biggest towns we went through on the entire route. In 1950 both had populations of about 40,000, but Quincy had enough action for a town three times its size. With a little money and a little carelessness a man could get laid, relaid, and waylaid all in an evening.
The various forms of vice were illegal in Quincy, but minor-league gambling and prostitution flourished openly. Restaurants and bars usually had slot machines tucked away in back rooms or dark corners, placed so that you would pass them going to the restroom. Every eating and drinking place, hotel desk, market, drug store, and service station had punch boards, which was true of the entire state.
Quincy had so much cheap prostitution that the local girls had been forced into giving it away, meaning that their ministrations were free but out of pride they wanted a guy with a big shiny car to spend money on them —which automatically disqualified anyone working for the Old Man. It was sometimes embarrassing, because the free girls and the ones for hire looked and dressed pretty much alike, and both classes tended to feel insulted if mistaken for the other.
Third Street in Quincy, three blocks up the hill from the river, had the sort of notoriety to attract traveling salesmen, farm boys, truck drivers, and others of the wayfaring and excitable breed. One warm evening in the spring of 1950, Vic and Jim and I took a stroll down Third Street to see if the reputation was well earned. There was no mistake: twice, girls in second-story windows attracted our attention by throwing pebbles at us. In a three-block stretch there were eight taverns, each with blinking colored lights, a squall of fiddles and nasal singing from a jukebox, and a lonesome girl or two sitting at the bar and staring expectantly at the door. There were three establishments with big picture windows. The girls sat next to the windows, wearing pants and bras made from print material that looked like old flour sacks, knitting and creaking back and forth in rocking chairs. When we walked by they clicked their fingernails on the glass and gave us the high sign. A girl standing in a doorway said that she’d like to give us something we’d never had before, and Vic wanted to know if she had the Chinese crud. Her answer showed that she was no lady.
One of the picture-window places was diagonally across the street from the police station, which showed that the cops weren’t gentlemen. As we sauntered by the place, a girl came out on the sidewalk and gave us a warm invite to step inside her lair for a little party. She even tried to entice us with an offer of coffee and cookies to get things off on the right foot. Jim thought that was a mighty peculiar ploy, and it made him suspicious about what other oddball things might be going on in there, so he declined to play and said he’d mosey on down the street. The girl got huffy and asked Jim if he was too cheap, and Jim said that he was saving himself so he’d have something to play with in his old age.
Vic and I let the girl drag us inside, and after a bit of dickering Vic, who was always game for anything, went upstairs with the girl, leaving me to cope with another one. She started out asking five dollars for a little short-time, and came all the way down to two dollars for around-the-world. To hear her tell about the aged grandmother she was supporting was enough to melt stone, and made me think that perhaps I should buy her wares just to be a Good Samaritan. But I fought down that impulse and respectfully declined to support her grandmother on the grounds that I had a noble and faithful wife whose memory I would not care to besmirch, whereupon that wheedling whore turned into a screech owl and yelled at me to get my ass out of that place, which I did with alacrity. When I saw Vic an hour or so later he was stunned at the low price I’d been quoted, and disgusted with me because I’d let the opportunity slip by. He said that even if I didn’t want any I should have taken it because that was a bargain-basement special, and even if it had been bad it would have been good. It had cost him a fin, which he had thought a rock-bottom price, to get screwed, blewed, and tattooed, and it rankled him that I’d let a live one get away. He didn’t think I’d had proper fetching up.
All the drivers who had knocked around a lot said that Quincy had a fair amount of life, but that for a really wild town you should go to Steubenville, Ohio; Hurley, Wisconsin; Covington, Kentucky; and any town in Missouri big enough to have a tavern. A couple of local boys overheard us talking, said they thought Quincy was fairly tame, and that when they were out for excitement they always went to Beardstown, sixty miles east of Quincy on the Illinois River, which was guaranteed to be a couple of notches ahead of Sodom and Gomorrah. This created certain longings in some of the Old Man’s drivers, since our route took us right past Beardstown but chances were slim that we would ever hit Sodom and Gomorrah.
A year and a half later, with a convoy of eight hookups of taxicabs, we were snowed in at Beardstown for two nights. Vic and Jim had long since left the job, but the mythology of driving for the Old Man had been passed on to their successors, and the reputation of Beardstown had become enhanced in the passage. Beardstown was known, or had been known, as Little Reno on the River. That title conjured up visions of wanton activity, and aroused great anticipation in the crew. By the time we had parked the taxis and checked into the hotel, everyone was ready for assault, rapine, lewd and lascivious behavior, dipsomania, and whatever other delights Beardstown might offer.
It was a dark and stormy night in the wilds of Illinois, and there wasn’t a bacchanalia in sight. Beardstown’s heyday was past, leaving the usual residue of inflamed memories and the exaggerations of old gaffers. We tried every tavern in town, walked expectantly down dark streets until our feet were wet and cold from the snow, and had our senses honed for the least sign of sin and corruption, but nothing of interest came within our purview. It surpassed comprehension. Beardstown had, for our purposes, died, and been buried standing. Word of the funeral had not reached us, and we suspected chicanery. But the truth, when we knew it, was clear and guileless: sin and corruption had been subverted by politics. Adlai Stevenson was elected governor in 1948, and had done much to clean up the state.
Most of the drivers, both the steady men and the one-ways, were broke most of the time. A convoy leader’s regular practice was to advance each driver three dollars a day, enough for a man to have three squares and buy some smokes. When we were delayed by bad weather or a breakdown, I upped the ante to five dollars a head to relieve the tedium of sitting around all day with nothing to do. If you were willing to eat lightly, you could do enough drinking on that five dollars to become mellow. The least fortunate circumstance, from the pilot’s point of view, was for a driver to be beset by a drinking problem and to have his advance in his pocket and time on his hands.
Max Jankel was such a case on the trip when we stayed in Beardstown. Max was a journeyman carpenter. He made a trip as a one-way driver, saying that he had lined up a job in Alaska, and that getting to the Coast was the first leg of the journey. But in Los Angeles he got drunk and missed out on the job, so he made more trips. Each trip was to be his last, and he would then go on to Alaska. Each trip he blew his pay on booze, and when broke and sober decided to make another trip for the Old Man.
Max was a large, hulking man, polite in speech, benign in attitude, gentle and friendly. Even when soused he did not become belligerent or boisterous. He became less inhibited, but still behaved so calmly that you didn’t realize that the barriers were down until he gently and politely committed an untoward act.
In Beardstown, Max neglected to eat. He spent all his advance on beer, managing to be drunk for the first twenty-four hours. In midafternoon of the second day Max found me in a café, and hit me up for another advance—which he did every time he saw me. I was reduced to giving him fifty cents at a crack, with the stipulation that if he spent it then and there on food and coffee, I would give him another fifty cents to spend as he pleased. Max, without appetite, was dutifully mashing a piece of pie to a pulp with his fork, when he felt the need to go the restroom. The café had but one restroom, and when Max tried the door he couldn’t get it open—because the woman who owned the café was in there, sitting on the pot, and of course she had the door hooked. But Max was desperate, and was not to be deterred. He jerked at the door with ever-increasing strength, and finally tore it open with a mighty heave, ripping out the hook and splintering the door jamb.
Max peered in, the woman glared out, but it was Max’s inning and he was in full control. He reached in, gently patted the woman on the head, and politely closed the door. The customers and waitresses went into hysterics. Max beamed warmly, pleased that he was the cause of so much mirth. The woman broke the transcontinental record for getting her britches up, and stormed out with fire in her eye, the desire to commit mayhem, and terrible threats of a lifetime at hard labor for Max. I quickly gave Max his next fifty cents and sent him off to a tavern. We managed to sweet-talk the woman out of calling the law, and she settled for eighty-sixing Max for the rest of his natural life.
Deeply felt myths die hard, and the guys hit the taverns again the second night, hoping that the first had been a fluke. But reality is truth even when you don’t like it, and after another night of talking to bartenders and watching the neon signs flash, they all became believers in the new gospel: Beardstown was a cemetery with lights, a haven for the old and the weary, and any normal American boy with piss and vinegar surging through his veins should get on down the road to where the good-time girls had flown.
In the morning, Ernie Jeska bragged that he had picked up a girl in a bowling alley and screwed her in the back seat of one of the taxis, but the taxis had cold imitation-leather upholstery and no heaters, and the temperature had been near zero. Although Ernie was a nice guy and no one wanted to call him an out-and-out liar, there was an air of skepticism. Ernie admitted that the girl had been a mite disgruntled when her bare ass hit the cold seat, but he swore that it was true nevertheless. Well, if Ernie wanted to believe that it had happened it was okay with us. It was the kind of story that everyone wanted to believe, and in later years even the skeptics were converted. The tale about when Ernie had knocked off a hot piece in a cold taxi became part of the standard repertoire. Through that tale the reputation of Beardstown was preserved, and in the late fifties there was some mild yearning to stay overnight in a hotspot like Beardstown rather than in the moribund whistlestops of northeast Missouri.
In midmorning of the third day Max attempted to seduce a chambermaid in the hotel corridor, which terrified the girl and brought suspicion and disgrace upon us all. Max did her no harm, since he was merely being warm and friendly after his own fashion. He put his big hands on her and smiled and exhaled his beery breath. The girl was young and lacking in experience, and she mistook these friendly gestures for an attack, and as long as we were in the hotel she refused to go upstairs and perform her duties.
Fortunately there was a break in the weather, and by late afternoon we were on our way. There was agitation to stay in Quincy, but I took the convoy fifteen miles farther to Palmyra, Missouri, a town big enough to have taverns yet so peaceful that you could have fired a cannon down the main drag at nine in the evening and not hit anyone.
By 1952 Quincy had become more genteel. There were no slots, the picture-window places had folded up, and even punchboards were scarce. Those who had made money from such enterprises and those who had spent it bemoaned the passing of better times, and unanimously blamed the demise of a robust culture on Stevenson. If there was anything that the people of Illinois hated worse than a dishonest governor, it was an honest one.