Big Time Truckin: True Trucking Stories
Dispatch 2: BJ and the Bears

by Kirk Gonnsen

Some people might remember the old television show BJ and the Bear, about a handsome young truck driver, his chimpanzee and their escapades on the highways of America. Although this show was born and bred on the fantasy of a Hollywood writer, its title rings true for truck drivers everywhere.

First of all, let me dispell any beliefs that a real BJ and Bear exist. People driving the Toronto-Detroit corridor known as the 401, might have seen a truck with the name BJ and the Bear. He hauls garbage to Michigan. Toronto garbage. But he's not the real thing. He's not the TV show BJ and the Bear. There's no chimp, and no escapades. And that's not where the show got its title.

Bears, in the trucking world, are cops. This part of the title is obviously the foil of the story: the police. But if you're out on the highway, driving your big rig and listening to the CB radio, you're more likely to hear truck drivers refer to the cops as:

County Mounty: Local Police
Full Grown: State Troopers
Smokey: Sheriff

With one of these endings:

Shooting you in the face: Using Radar Gun
In the Grass: Parked on Median
In the Woods: Behind Trees
With a customer: Pulled somebody over

Which brings us to the lead character: BJ, played by 80's TV hunk Greg Evigan. It's a funny name for a truck driver, but there's no in-joke there. A BJ is the same thing to a truck driver as it is to pretty much everyone else.

One of the great things about driving trucks is the view. Some drivers call it the mobile office. The scenery is always changing: the beautiful vistas, the tragedy of traffic accidents, the toil and trouble of inner cities, the drama of street corners, and the eroticism of front seat shenanigans.

A lot of drivers will bullshit you about sex acts they've seen in passing cars. But I'll swear to you, after spending day after day glancing down at every car that passes me (from my truck driver's vantage point, which affords a view of everything that happens inside a car, above and below the passenger side window) that I have witnessed two blow jobs.

One was in Chicago, when a young punk in a beat-up Mustang pulled beside me at 55 mph so I could watch his girlfriend suck him off while he pulled down her track pants and fingered her.

The second blow job occurred in the morning, in the hills of Kentucky (Let me first say that I have seen some of the most beautiful women driving the Kentucky highway, destroying the notion of Kentucky as a hillbilly state). This oral delight was performed by a beautiful young woman in a summer dress, on a middle aged contractor, in a pick-up truck at 10:30 in the morning. I immediately recognized an affair in progress. Good for them.

I have also seen a couple of masturbators, one large-chested flasher in Michigan, and one blonde college girl who gave me the split-finger-lick-me gesture made famous by the truck driver in Thelma and Louise.

So the next time you're watching Prime or Classic TV, anywhere you might see BJ and the Bear, remember: it may only be fantasy trucking, but its heart (or title) is in the right place.

By the way, "westbound, you got a Full Grown in the grass shooting you in the face."