My dad, he's a long-haul truck driver. Why? Well, because his dad was one. And grandpa was one because...well...his dad, my great-grandfather was one. Ah hell, I bet if you were to go back another generation you would find one of us hauling freight with a wagon and horses.
Want to hazard a guess what I've spent the last few months in training for?
Oh my name is Brace, by the way. Brace Pennington.
At first I was at a truck driving school, a standard Class A-CDL training course, paid for with seventeen years of saved-up birthday money. As soon as I had my CDL in hand, I was into the cab with my dad. I went on two month-long trips with him, and he got me started on what he called my "real" training. This included the bare-bones of how to drive a rig into the most insane places imaginable, big cities with streets laid out for horse and buggy traffic, what to do and what not to do, and all-the-more-important, when not to do something. All the while trying to move eighty thousand pounds worth of truck and trailer down a crowded road barely big enough to fit a pair of VW Rabbits.
Of course, this wasn't my first time behind the wheel of Dad's truck. Nope, he had been teaching me how to drive it before I ever drove a car. This was just the first time it was completely legal for me to have that huge wheel in my hands.
I guess every young boy gets the idea of driving a tractor-trailer at some point in his life. Hell, I grew up watching Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy, and BJ and the Bear when other kids were watching cartoons. My Hot Wheels were always trucks. I was talking fluently on a CB before I was ten. I knew every single bit of trucker talk there was before I hit puberty.
Hell, my first crushes were on Stacks and Sally Fields.
There was diesel fuel in my blood, and gear grease under my nails. I grew up playing on Dad's trailer the way other kids did on jungle gyms. Most of my childhood was spent in, on, or near a diesel truck. Lord, even my first sexual experience happened in one!
Oh, my god, if Dad knew that I had lost my virginity to a "lot lizard" in his sleeper at a truck stop in Texas...killing me would be just the beginning of what he would do to me!
When I was younger, my dad was gone a lot, off on a run somewhere, so it would be just Mom and me. We also moved a lot back then. While he was out of town, Dad would get a job offer from another trucking company for much better money. We must have crisscrossed the country twice before I was in my mid-teens. There weren't a lot of longtime friends for any of us. Mom used to joke that we were Gypsies.
I guess the first permanency in my life came around my fourteenth birthday. Mom told Dad she'd had enough and wanted a place where she could put a nail in the wall without having to worry about losing a security deposit. Well, Dad wanted land. He had some half-formed plan to be a farmer when he retired, something about a vineyard, or maybe an apple orchard. Like he wouldn't go stir crazy in a month! Anyway, he and Mom looked around with no luck till he had a chance to chat, with Drake, an old friend of his, over dinner. At a truck stop of course,
Now, I had never seen Drake or his wife, but I had talked to both of them many times over the CB. So when Dad came pulling in and told my mom to start packing up, that he had found the perfect place...across the street from Drake and Marion, a woman I knew only as "The Ice Queen," I was both hopeful and overpoweringly nervous. I mean you talk to someone for years and then you get to see them, it's kinda weird. Nice but weird. And to know that you were about to be living across the street from them made it even stranger.
But Dad was adamant, Mom liked the idea and I was not really consulted about my nervous concerns.
You know one of the awesome things about a truck driver family? Getting a truck to move your stuff is no problem. Having enough stuff to fill that truck so that it doesn't feel echoingly empty, yeah. That can be an issue.
So we moved, and I saw our new neighbors, who were old friends, for the first time. And fell head-over-heels in love with Marion. She had waist-length black-till-it-looked-blue hair. There was a white blaze by her left ear that sent a single lock of white back through that dark mane. It gave her this almost fake-looking Cruella DeVille colored braid that she wore often around her neck, almost like a necklace. But the body on this woman, damn! She was all curves, hills and valleys. And she smelled like honeysuckle and...Oh, I was "crushing" on her bad!
Looking back, I think everyone knew it. Color me embarrassed.
Anyway, we bought the land, and sank a ton of money into a house built just the way Mom and Dad wanted it. Again I was not consulted. Before the place was half-done, Dad had to hit the road to go earn back what had been spent. Leaving my mom and me pretty much alone. With a million things to get done and a half million decisions to still be made.
Drake and Marion were gone almost as much as Dad was. They drove the long, northern runs, working as a driving team. Up through British Columbia, Canada, through Alaska. They drove the Yukon roads where you spend more time seeing moose and buffalo than other cars. Hell, they even did the ice road hauls sometimes, which Dad called "insane in the brain" truck driving.
A couple of years rolled around with all the mercurial slowness for a teenager stuck in high school. Summers were always fun. One of the things Mom insisted on had been a swimming pool, and in the summer, I all but lived in that thing. When everyone was in town, weekends and vacations, that pool and the surrounding patio were the highlight of my life. Why? Barbecues, pool parties what's not to like? Why...?
Because Marion came over in a bikini.
Yeah, I didn't really get over that crush, and seeing her in nothing but three wet pieces of cloth and a few strings did nothing to make it go away. Reinforced it like steel-belting in tires...yeah that would be closer to the truth.
Anyway, I hit eighteen went and got my interstate CDL license. Picked up a part time job at a local furniture store driving their delivery truck, something I thought gave me invaluable driving knowledge, but that my dad told me wasn't worth "a bean fart in a whirlwind" when it came to driving cross-country long-haul. Yeah, my dad and his euphemisms. There were so many times when I wanted to kick him in his...greatest-truck-driver-to-ever-live ego.
Then I would think about going ahead and moving out, getting me my own little apartment, (probably a really good idea), and I would always come back to the fact that Mom would be here all alone. My twenty-first birthday was going to bring that empty house about anyway, so why rush it? I would soon be living out the sleeper of a truck just like dad, and his dad, and so on and so on.
So, a couple of years went by, I hit my twenty first birthday and got my class A. Got dragged across country by my dad for four months, with him telling me stuff I already knew, only to be told by his boss when we got back home that he had changed his mind.
Their company's insurance would not cover a driver under the age of twenty three, no matter how much trucking knowledge he had. Oh, they would hire me on, oh sure...but only for intrastate runs. Drive here, pick up this, take it there, come back, sleep in your own bed every night, but get paid half what they pay their long-haul drivers.
Did I want the job?
I told him to "let me think about it for a bit." I so badly wanted to add "Let's say...for oh, about two years, you know, the amount of time you've been stringing me along that just as soon as I got a Class A CDL and was twenty one, I would be hired on and I would start driving around the country."
