Driving for Dough

work work work

photo by Mike Mozart

Driving a dump truck for my landscaping job this spring was a special kind of heaven. Guiding that monster down the highway and over curving county roads with just an inch of margin on either side, two narrow inches I kept in check through the rear views. Is that a paradox? You keep from mauling any mailboxes in front of you by watching how close you just came to obstacles and the painted side lines behind you. You keep yourself safe in the onrushing future by constantly looking behind you at the path you’ve already taken, until retrospection becomes second nature and you feel the dimensions of the great beast like it’s your own body.

Lord knows I’m opposed to a fossil fuel-based society. And American drivers in particular elicit a special rancor deep in my heart.

American Cars

And yet, it’s probably no surprise that of the dozens of wild, mundane, illegal, strange, improbable, and boring jobs I’ve held in my life, several have been driving jobs. In the tumult of childhood, cars often brought some form of solace or escape. Always unhealthy, but you take what you can get.

I grew up in Virginia, and my dad’s family was from Michigan. Once every summer or winter, he’d get home from work, pack up the station wagon, and drive through the night, twelve hours, with a stop in Breezewood for gas and a stop in northwest Ohio for pancakes. I always got the chocolate chip. Those were the days of paper maps and stopping occasionally to ask for directions. He didn’t need to, though. Once he’d driven somewhere, years later he could find his way again. (He lost that ability once he started using a navigation app.)

I guess that was his form of caretaking, one of the only ways he knew how: driving us safely through the night as we slept. My older brother got the front seat so I would stretch out in the back, watching the highway signs, the clouds underlit by the neon eternity of gas stations or the diffuse orange of nearby towns, holding my peace and keeping the silence until I was eventually asleep and not just pretending.

One summer, a couple years after “It” happened, the huge violence that started years of war that ended our family, he decided he needed to take us out west. He had two weeks off. More than enough. In 24 hours, he drove us from Virginia to the Colorado border, about 1,500 miles. Somewhere in Kentucky, he kicked us out of the car around sunrise to wander an empty office park for an hour while he caught a wink. Then, back in the car.

(“Us” was me and my two brothers. Once the war started, he only mentioned my mom in the most hateful terms, and after the ceasefire, not at all.)

So yeah. Driving.

There was a cheap little Mazda 323 we had as a backup car. It’s what he taught us to drive with (“if you can’t drive stick, you can’t drive”), what my older brother and I used to get to school and then to our afterschool jobs.

My brother had a lot of friends. They were beautiful people and in my first two years at high school I got to be in that circle, partially. They were the last generation of punks in that town. (Most of them were also really into Ani DiFranco. Riot Grrrl served as the bridge). Somehow, my brother was the emotionally stable one as the others navigated alcohol, psychedelics, horse tranquilizers, and other means for coping with suburban depression and whatever was going on in their own so-called families.

He was also one of the only ones with access to a car, and like good punks, they shared what they had. That meant, usually, six of us going to school together in a small car. On at least a couple occasions, twelve of us crammed in. Whenever I had the chance, I called trunk. That’s how I discovered that the sound quality of the speakers in the old car we called ZKU was actually best… in the trunk! I’d listen happily to the raucous conversation that filtered through from the back seat and privately sing along to all our youthful anthems coming through loud and clear on the speakers. Minor Threat, Fugazi, Dead Kennedys, Bikini Kill, Operation Ivy, the Clash, Slant 6, Nirvana, Hole, Shudder to Think, Ann Beretta…

When he moved out and I got the car, well, I didn’t have that many friends and only one was on the way, Luke R, a gentle giant who on his lonesome barely fit in little ZKU, no need for another ten people to crowd things any more. We carpooled every day, talking about the crazy shit, then going on weird tangents to not talk about the real shit.

On the way back, there was this one hill about a mile two turns and a stop sign from home. To “save gas” I’d turn the car off right at the top of the hill and see if I could coast the rest of the way. Another time (to save gas?) I got a friend to help watch the road for me so I could stick my butt out the window while driving. And… that was how we got by.

After I dropped out of college, got out of prison, and quit a job waiting tables, I started driving a taxi. Yellow Cab. I was in Harrisonburg at that point. I guess I was pretty antisocial for a taxi driver. Shy still, but now with a well earned polish of hostility to cover it up. This was before the year I spent hitchhiking around, putting myself out there to meet people and learn about radical projects in whatever city I found myself in (and finding couch space in the process so I wouldn’t have to sleep in a park).Back in the taxi years, some customers would call in and ask for me by name, but it’s not when they were looking for conversation and a pleasant ride. No, people called for my cab when they needed to get somewhere, fast.

Once, it felt like a dream, a fare told me, “follow that car!” Sadly, there was no espionage going on. He didn’t want me to hang back half a block and find out where someone was going, he had just missed a meet up and saw the person pulling out as we were arriving. I caught up to them in half a minute and it was all done. Alas, I’d thought of all the techniques I’d use to discreetly tail someone, but this was just driving faster than them, and driving faster was easy.

When there weren’t any fares, you’d sit in one of the four sectors the town was divided into, and the driver at the top of the list would get the next call-in for that sector. If we got a call from a sector that didn’t have any stationed driver, the dispatch would radio “eastside!” or “northside!” and you’d press that button as fast as you could and call out “twenty-five twenty-five twenty-five” or whatever your car number was that day, and the first one the dispatcher heard would get the fare.

The dispatcher was a short guy with a beard who looked like Silent Bob from Dogma. He was in a wheelchair, I think from the first US invasion of Iraq, and he came from a little town up in the hills, Singers’ Glen. “God’s country,” is how he described it, one of the few times I heard him talking about something not immediately pertinent to work.

There were some good things about the job. All in cash, cause in those days only an asshole would pay for a cab with a credit card… before this scab culture screwed over professional drivers by switching to surveillance apps like Uber. A decent amount of independence, and some days you’d make bank. Other days, though… those shifts were twelve hours, 5 to 5, and you could spend a whole day on the road and not make anything. And you still had to pay 50 dollars for the car. To escape any obligations to their workers, the cab company classified us as independent contractors.

Since I could pay my bills driving two or three days a week instead of full time, I usually got the crappy cars. The whole fleet were retired police cruisers, special engines with amazing pickup, which I enjoyed. But it was an arm and a leg for gas and the old ones had really shitty seats, which gave me back problems and worsened the fistula I’d gotten from that punishment work shift in prison.

I stayed with it, though, because the only other jobs in town for someone without a college degree were in restaurants or in the slaughterhouses.

Then I was in Catalunya for 15 years, and over there the regulations are pretty strict for professional drivers… and I guess I’m a classic American in my belief that God Himself grants us the divine right to drive cars and shoot guns and anyone who requires licenses and extra training for any of that must be some kind of satanic atheist communist.

First week back in the States, 2022, I got a job driving box trucks and picking up food scraps, which was pretty nice, leaving aside the hypocrisy of the bosses. After a few years of that, I had the landscaping job and the dump truck this spring, and now I’m driving old folks to doctors’ appointments and supermarkets in a big bus that’s got a lift for wheelchairs or rollators. It only pays six bucks over minimum wage, but these days it’s healthy for me to have a job where I need to focus on driving safe, slowing down, staying calm, and taking care of people. A lot of my passengers are really sweet, some are salty as hell, a few have great stories, and most of them don’t get taken care of as well as they need. Capitalism for you.

Fortunately, I’ve gotten over some of my purism and in the last couple years started taking money for writing, whether it’s books or articles published in non-anarchist presses (here are the latest two, on the causes of the destruction of the Chesapeake Bay and on how Trump’s culture of censorship was being built up decades in advance, largely targeting sex workers, anarchists, and Palestinians or those who spoke up for them.)

Between the driving job and the writing job, I’ve been working seven days a week for most of this year and still making way below the median income. I’m trying to get to a more stable place and I’ve gotten some surprisingly good responses from editors. On that note, I want to say it’s really important to support independent writers, especially as AI begins to dominate the scene, driving down wages, and as smartphone culture in general makes people less likely to read long-form writing, or to read any writing at all, pushing magazines and publishers out of business.

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Anywho. I was back in a box truck last week cause R and I were moving (!!!), and I loved the feel of it, even though it wasn’t such a long drive. I got to thinking about how many driving jobs I’ve done, and how Labor Day was coming up.

What a bullshit holiday! International Workers’ Day is on May 1, May Day. It was born in the US, thanks to the 1886 general strike organized by a coalition of anarchists and reformers, thanks to the bomb-throwing anarchists of Haymarket Square in Chicago, determined not to let the police get away with murdering strikers, and thanks to the international movement that tried to stop the execution of the eight anarchists blamed for the blast. (Of course, they scheduled their strike for May Day since that date was already associated with a tradition of paganistic, anti-authoritarian, riotous festivals of high spring.)

To insulate the nation from the plague of international solidarity, the US government declared a holiday not to celebrate workers but to celebrate work, and they put it in September, months away from May. The only countries I can think of that don’t celebrate May Day are the US and the Netherlands. Most other governments declared it a holiday after years of strikes and riots because a great way to prevent a strike is to give people the day off. The beacons of the working class, Russia and China, have turned May Day into a holiday celebrating the military, which in the experience of the Communist Party was the most useful working class institution, great for crushing working class revolutions and installing working class governments.

But there I go again, griping on a holiday!

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