I showed up at my uncle’s house where I had been promised a floor spot in the attic. The house was decorated in the latest from Grieving Widower Monthly. Unopened mail, Daily Times piled all over, pizza boxes with petrified crusts. The house smelled like spoilt Crisco. In the only spot clear enough for a body to fit, my uncle sat in his greasy recliner and watched reruns of Law and Order all day. The floor in the attic was cleared ahead of time with a snow shovel––dirty laundry heaped halfway up the wall in the corner of the room. But it had central air and a solid internet connection. It was perfect.
My cousin Brian had offered up the spot when I got fired from the landscaping job and my uncle didn’t notice until a few weeks in.
“So, you living here now?”
“Kinda.”
He said okay or maybe he didn’t say anything. He didn’t give a shit but he warned me about stealing his cigs. Seemed like that was the only rule since my Aunt died five or six years beforehand. And it was a new rule. The kids were good and hooked.
All I had was a suitcase of clothes and a strange desire to be a tow truck driver. It seemed pretty easy. All I’d have to do is drive around Philadelphia and save the day. And, in my mind, there was a strong possibility of a sexual encounter with a beautiful nurse with a flat tire. I was gonna have a job and get my own place and get married to a hot nurse. Towing cars was the ticket.
I scraped myself from the attic floor each morning and walked to Terry’s Deli for a newspaper for the help wanted section. Delivery driver (no car), mechanic (no experience), landscaper (not that shit again). No tow truck jobs. I blamed it on new cars being reliable and the job being so sweet that no spots ever opened up. I called my friend Jim, he used to tow cars. He said to come over with a case of beer and he’d tell me everything about towing I needed to know. I told him I was still eighteen, and that he’d have to pick me up, but we could get some beers on the way back to his grandmom’s basement.
Jim didn’t tell me shit about towing cars, but I left the basement driving an 800 dollar car that I’d pay him for when I landed the job. It was a Z-24 Chevy Cavalier with a missing section of muffler and broken motor mounts. It was super fast and you didn’t need a key to start it if you took the key out between accessories and lock. I loved that feature, but it was tough to keep track of my keys because I never really used them. It also made it easy for my cousin to steal the car in the middle of the night. Text, 3 a.m.––I can’t start the car! Who’s car, my car?
Brian’s sister, Kim, had an oxy problem. She rolled the car halfway down the street so the loud ass muffler wouldn’t alert me to the junky-stunt that was taking place. She got her drugs and I got my shitty car back and I used the key at my uncle’s house from then on.
Cold-calls got me the job. I walked in and told them I was their man. Three places laughed me out before I changed my approach and told the next one I was the son of a legendary tow truck driver. It was true. Murph towed cars for thirty years so anyone with a garage knew him. He did police work, so all the cops and judges knew him, too. I’d spent my partial custody summer vacations driving around West Philly and through the boroughs of Delaware County in his truck. He taught me in Drexel Hill, Traver’s Market had the best ham and cheese on a kaiser, and they’d start a tab if they saw your face enough. You could settle up on Friday. In Upper Darby, John’s hot dogs was the spot. Two hot dogs, a Coke and maybe a cheeseburger if you were still hungry and still have a tip on that ten dollar bill. The two brothers hated each other in that place. One wrote your order in pencil on the counter in front of you while the other one cursed from the grill about how poor the Phils bullpen was.
And Murph knew where all the clean bathrooms were. McDonalds on Main in Darby was the cleanest for miles. Could eat a McMuffin off the floor, he’d say.
There was a spot in each section of town and that’s really what hooked me on the job. I could learn all these little spots and know who had the clean shitters and I’d just be driving around all day learning the best places to eat and poop. And maybe a hot nurse would find trouble on the way home from her shift.
It was pretty fun at first. The company did subcontracting for triple A, so if you paid $87 annually and had a flat, ran out of gas, locked your keys in your car, or if the piece of shit car just broke down, I’d show up. I had a pinstriped, baby blue button up shirt with Robert embroidered above the pocket and dark blue Dickies. I could get into a locked Ford Taurus in under thirty seconds, but an Acura would take up to thirty minutes.
Long trips were the best. I could be out of radio range and finally stop at a diner and relax. They also paid the best––three dollars a mile after three miles. I took a Japanese man to Brooklyn. He didn’t speak much English, but I could understand that he was nervous about my age the way he kept shaking his head no, wagging his finger and repeating professional before we left. He paid his $87 and I was what he got. We made it there fine. I saw a street fight and got pancakes in a shiny diner before I headed back to Philly.
Crossing the Verrazano bridge in traffic, I lost the clutch in my truck. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a tiny plastic bushing that held the pedal to the linkage part that went from the cab to the clutch itself. Well, the plastic part fell out and I had nothing. A floppy pedal that went straight to the floor and no way to contact the shop. This was in the days of roaming charges and my Nokia had about six minutes on it at all times.
Good news is that I was still moving when this happened. A few weeks beforehand, I learned how to match the RPMs to the gear I was shifting into in a move that was called synchro-shifting. It didn't require a clutch, but you couldn’t stop the truck or you’d never get it into first again. It was all by feel. Rev the engine a little and it would slide into gear when the RPMs were right. Downshifting was tough––going from low RPMs to high caused a lot of grinding.
I kept it moving and somehow never fully stopped in the traffic jam. Once on the highway, I was in fifth gear and had no worries at all. I contacted the shop when the CB radio was in range and the old head, Chollie, walked me through it. He had lost his license on his third DUI but somehow worked it out with the judge so that he could still drive for 60 hrs a week. I picked his jaundiced ass up every morning on Passyunk Ave and the other guy, Harz, dropped him off. Chollie knew all the hot dog spots in the city, and how to fix the clutch before I got off the highway. Thank god for that judge.
It took a few months, and I had my own one bedroom apartment, when I finally picked up a nurse. She asked if I smoked weed. I answered yes because I did, but I would have said yes anyway. She was beautiful and her name was Erin and I was going to marry her and take her to all of my little lunch spots and show her who had the best sittin’ toilets in every corner of the Philly Metro area. She took out a Hall and Oates change purse that looked like its sole purpose was weed. She separated seed and stem from the brownish-green and started rolling a joint.
“You don’t mind I do this, do you? Long goddamn day.”
I said I didn't mind but I did. I didn’t want to have a disagreement so soon in the relationship. She asked if she could light it. Of course, but I couldn't smoke because I had a job to keep.
She had dark brown hair that was all shiny and conditioned. The kind that sat in exactly the right spot no matter where it wanted. I didn’t fall in love until she started rolling me a joint while she smoked the other one, eye half-shut from the smoke. Said it was all she could do for a tip and since I couldn’t lose my job, I could save it for later.
Our ride from the hospital at UPenn to a shop in the County was about 5 miles and I didn’t have time to propose marriage, or the guts to ask her out, so I never saw her again. I went back to my one bedroom apartment smelling like diesel fumes and axle grease, sat on the carpet and ate pizza. I still didn’t have enough money for furniture, but the Cav was paid off before it exploded, so I was doing well. I smoked that joint of schwag and thought of Erin.
Goodwill had a couch for a hundred bucks, so I called Scotty because he had a truck. I found out when I went to pay, the loveseat was part of the deal. When the folks asked if we could fit both pieces in Scotty’s little Dodge Dakota, we looked at each other and said no problem. We dropped the tailgate and flipped the loveseat on top of the couch. The man at the Goodwill shook his head and gave us a tired piece of twine to hold it all in. It looked like we were heading to the dump as we drove up Girard Ave, but we were heading to my apartment with my new furniture, laughing like we robbed the place.
The apartment was starting to come together. I took the bi-fold doors off the closet in the living room and made that an entertainment center. I was only waiting on a tv. The couch and loveseat sat in an L in front of my entertainmentless closet, with a coffee table I stole from Jim’s grandmom’s basement when he was passed out on a Xani drunk. I also got a single bed from Jim that was handed down through his brothers––I got it home and realized all three Clark boys learned how to jerk off in my brand new bed.
Mom was still down south. Colleen was living with her boyfriend, two counties away. I was on the side of town that had check cashing instead of banks and my cupboard was filled with a bottle of ketchup and three cases of ramen noodles. I was grateful to have anything. I had my own place.
I drove past the old house a few times but it was gone. The home I grew up in had become a house where someone else lived. They cut down the Japanese maple that sprouted from Pop-Pop’s tree. They tossed the old piano that sat on the porch. The whole thing was painted a different color. The stoop was empty, no more spit puddles between our feet, thinking of something else to do, somewhere else to be. I was back and all I wanted to do was sit on the stoop with nothing to do.
I didn’t know their names, but I didn’t need to. I hated them. I didn’t want them to be happy in the only place I’d ever known happiness. It was the same address, but all it brought was loneliness. I was beginning to learn nostalgia is just a different brand of pain.
I kept towing cars and finding good spots to eat and poop, but I was striking out on the nurses. I was only picking up Wilford Brimley’s target audience. My dream job sucked. I drove around all day getting yelled at on the CB radio from my dispatcher. Truck eleven, where are you? Truck eleven, Shaggy, where are you? Truck eleven, how long are you gonna be, we have four calls waiting on you.
They called me Shaggy because Chollie said I looked like the dude from Scooby-Doo. Red goatee, gangly, a voice that hadn’t quite taken adult form, and I appeared to smoke a lot of reefer he said. They gave me a ton of grief because I was so young, but they loved me.
I got a call for a no-start, which meant it needed a tow. 41st and Chestnut. I got there and found that I had to pick up a car on the corner of a fairly busy intersection. I drove a flatbed. That creates a problem because the long bed had to go all the way out before it could tilt down in front of the car’s tires. I could get the truck really close to the car from doing it so much, but I’d still be blocking the entire intersection.
I pulled into and out of the intersection about fives times to let people pass before I finally said fuck it. I wasn’t moving again, no matter what. I pulled up and got out to start sliding the bed back and two men in a black Acura with tinted windows laid on the horn. I didn’t look. I was not moving again. The horn kept going and I kept sliding the bed backwards.
“You don’t hear my horn, motherfucker?”
I didn't look. “Sorry, sir. I’ll be done in a minute.”
“You ain’t even hooked up yet. Lemme through real quick. Real quick.”
“I’ve moved like five times already, I have to get this car.”
More people started honking and I wanted to crawl into the sewer and disappear. Maybe I’d find a nurse down there. The angry man was yelling and I was ignoring him. I almost had the bed all the way down and it looked like I was just gonna kiss the front of the tires as it bottomed out––perfect placement. He screamed Look at me, motherfucker, so I did. He had a gun and was tapping it on the half-down window.
“Move. The fucking truck––”
I got in the truck and got on the radio as I pulled forward with the bed dragging across the asphalt. Truck eleven to whoever's listening. Dude with a gun here making me move, might be a little late with this one.
Chollie and Hars knew my location and were there in minutes. They put on their beacons and stopped dead in the middle of the heaviest artery in West Philly.
Nobody could get past them.
“Hook it up, Shag.”
The next time I was threatened with a firearm, I was cutting down a section of Brown Street that was tight like an alley. It wasn’t a good section of town, but it was a fast route and I was tired of getting bitched at on the radio. A man walked into the middle of the street and stood there. It was too tight and too far to back out, so I stopped. He did the thing where he rolled down an imaginary window. I opened the little smoker’s window on the side. We could chat from there, I thought. Felt slightly safer.
“You got J-chains?”
I told him I had a job I had to get to. He lifted his waistband and showed me a pistol, said I wasn't leaving until I pulled the bumper of his car out of his wheel well. I understood what he meant by pulling his bumper out with the chains, but I wasn’t leaving the truck so I tilted my head over and directed him from the smoker’s window. Told him he could hook it up.
The car was a real piece of shit. Little Honda Civic, early 90s model, faded red. The bumper on them is plastic, couldn’t be pulled the way he wanted but I didn't say a word. He hooked the chain from my truck to the flimsy plastic corner of an already wrecked car.
“Nice and slow,” doing the internationally recognized hand signs for take it easy.
I took the truck out of low gear, shifted into second so I could take off faster, feathered the clutch with the throttle pinned and took off. Half the bumper came off, which solved his problem. It was no longer wedged in the wheel well but it stayed attached to my chain for half a block before falling off into the street. I drove a few more blocks before I burst into laughter and stopped to collect myself and the chain.
