Big Time Truckin: True Trucking Stories
Dispatch 5: Some Nights Start Badly

by Kirk Gonnsen

In the new moon darkness my headlights fail and die inopportunely on an unplanned detour through northern Detroit's 30,000 abandoned buildings. At 3 AM old black men wait at bus stops. Heads down, grey whiskered beards, lunch pails in hand, aging slowly while young black dudes jaywalk proudly staring up at my rig.

The motor-city potholes force a tire to blow and I decide not to stop here, knowing I'll never get a service man to come until daylight. I limp back to the interstate and hole up in the Detroiter truckstop for repairs and eat up stale sugar donuts and burnt coffee while watching the unpaid hour tick slowly by.

Caffeine-freaked, wanting daylight, everything frightens my senses as the blink-blink dotted yellow line is sucked up beneath me. My eyes blank too long and I drift to the rumble strip and pull into the next REST AREA I see. It's pickled with big trucks, every spot taken and blocked in by more trucks. The car parking is overrun with idling day-cabbers.

The shoulders, in and out, are jammed with long-haulers. I'm about to head out when luck leaves me a spot on the bend and I spend the last remnants of energy jockeying my 53 footer into a parallel park-job. I jot down the stop in my log and trying to see the odometer I flick the lights on and off, on and off. Unknowingly signaling before I fall into the sleeper and drift roughly off.

The pounding is on the doors. Then rapping on the steel walls of the sleeper-cab and through the night, through sleep, into me. I leap up and pull back the heavy curtain between bed and cab window and there she is.

The lot lizard has climbed up the side of the rig and her round black face is peering into the darkness of my cab. She hollers, "need some company?"

"What?" I mutter back.

"Need some company, honey?"

"No. No." I return, and we look at each other through side window glass and I see she's young, pretty even, compared to the other women who have leapt aboard my rig before.

"Come on baby," she laments as she climbs down. But I do not move.

And now sleep does not return. My penis, my loins, my cock, (depending on your literature) hates me now. It does not understand my decision not to romp when it has been so many nights on the road, and so many nights alone, especially now, in this fearful hour where everything seems like the last chance.