10-4, Good Buddies

If today, October 4th (10-4), isn't National Truck Driver Appreciation Day (NTDAD), I don't know of a more appropriate day to hold NTDAD. I would imagine most people's interactions with truck drivers start with the childhood fun of pulling your arm down from a passing car, attempting to get a trucker to honk his horn, and end with cussing a big rig driver as he cuts you off on the highway, and maybe somewhere in between, pulling your hair out as you get stuck behind one trying to make a wide right turn on a city street.

I, however, have the privilege of seeing truck drivers every day at work and getting to know some of them. I've never seen one spit tobacco juice (well, one, but we call him Mr. Sunshine for his sour disposition--a true anomaly among truck drivers in my experience), or heard one refer to his truck as "my rig." Most of them are friendly, funny, family guys. With one of them, originally from Germany, I discuss modern day comedians and trade off-kilter jokes all the time. They all are easy to deal with, help me in my job enormously, and I truly look forward to their individual, routine stops. So here's my personal shout out to them all on NTDAD.

There was one, though, who was a bit strange. He was older and moved about as slowly as molasses in a Bergmann movie, and he always called me cuz or bro, about twenty times in one unloading: "Goddamn snow, hunh cuz? You gotta lotta unopened boxes back here, don't you bro? Lemme use your bathroom, hunh cuz." On and on. One day he asked me if there were any old Playboy magazines in our dumpster. He kind of looked like the type--even at about 60--to go dumpster diving for mild porn. Anyway, he was a pretty regular deliverer for a couple months. Then I never saw him again, for over a year. By this time I had become good buddies with another driver from the same company. This guy was great, but he'd stay and talk forever, mostly about his son's baseball exploits, which was fine, and he called me by name, not cuz, so everything was good. One day I asked whatever happened to the dumpster-porn-salvaging cuz-bro guy. I didn't know the guy's name and did my best to describe him, figuring there couldn't be many guys like that, even around a truck depot. "Oh that guy," the new driver said, chuckling, "he died a few months ago." Geez, I felt kind of bad. He may not have been my cup of tea among truck drivers, but I never wished death upon the guy. I kind of had a mini-memorial thing for the guy the next time I dumped the old Playboys.

So anyway, no more than two weeks later, the back bell rings, and I go to answer it, thinking to myself which one of my truck-driving buddies was waiting out there in the wind or the rain or the snow or the hot sun. I open the door and what do I hear? "Hey cuz, long time no see." The only time in my life I thought I "seen a ghost." The only time in my life I came close to uttering the words, "I thought you was dead, bro." The rest of his visit is a daze. He puttered around and tossed off a score of bro's and cuz's, I scratched my head wondering how the other truck driver could confuse this one with another one, and then the guy finally finished unloading the skid of books and said, "See you around, cuz," and left. I haven't seen him since. Makes you wonder.

In high school I was good friends with a kid whose family had emigrated from Europe a few years before; they were dogged about their assimilation. To the point where one spring they went all-out American: they bought a big blue Buick, packed up the family, and road-tripped to Florida for spring break. This being the late 1970s, of course the old man also had to buy a CB radio. As my friend told the story, about a half hour onto the highway for the long trek to FLA, the old man made a big show of turning on the CB and in his heavily accented, but proper English, spoke into the speaker, "10-4, good buddies. Any smokeys out there?" What followed, according to my friend, was a hailstorm of abuse from truckers advising him to get off the airways. The CB sat holstered and un-turned on for the duration of the trip, to and fro.

Elvis started as a truck driver. Really, that's all you need to know. Happy NTDAD.

Moby Grape-Trucking Man

Link Davis-Trucker From Tennessee

And as a bonus, the trailer from Steven Spielberg's TV-movie Duel, which must be the ultimate dark fantasy of truckers everywhere.