The Motor Route

It was one of my summer hustle jobs. Through all the problems I went through as a young man, especially in college, no one ever had to tell me to hustle for a living. I got the work ethic from a number of people but the continuous hustle part came from my mother and my Uncle Bobby. They never had enough jobs, because they never had enough money. Sometimes they got over their heads and I was pressed into service.

When I took a work study job at Anderson University when I was 18 years old, the building and grounds superintendent was surprised that I could run a floor machine. When I volunteered to polish the student center floors because he was short on help he looked at me and said “you can do some damage with that thing kid.” He was right to be worried because the place was filled with floor to ceiling windows and glass panels, and if you weren’t careful, the rotating pad on that machine could yank it out of your hands and send it veering into something. But after seeing me run it for a couple mintues he just said “I’ll be damned” and left me to make some overtime money. Bobby had taught me to run one when I was 14 because he needed help in the little side business he had cleaning offices.

And so it went. Everything from painting houses, to moving furniture to finishing a basement and building a cabinet from scratch. If I didn’t know how to do it, I figured it out. I was even in charge of cleaning an in-ground swimming pool. I figured that one out as well.

In college I fell in with a pair of enterprising brothers, whose habit of biting off more they could chew, went well with my doing anything (legal) for a buck.

One of the many jobs I was handed by this pair of friends was to fill in on an early morning paper delivery route. This was not like my paper route in Queens. This required driving (sometimes recklessly) deep into the rural countryside.

Since any car I had was less than reliable, I borrowed one of the brother’s cars. This had the additional advantage of warding off suspicious patrolling sheriff’s deputies since they recognized the car and knew I was delivering papers. An unknown car, driving erratically in the middle of nowhere at 4am, is like catnip for police.

My route guide was a cassette recording that I played as I drove the route. “Turn at the big tree on the left” or “It’ll be easier if you back down this road” were typical directions. My absolute favorite though was “look for the two horses humping.” I did indeed see the two horses but regrettably never saw them humping.

I’ve had many night time jobs, and I’ve had many driving jobs. But none that made you feel so isolated and cocooned. I rarely saw another car, and so I existed in a world where it seemed I was the only occupant. I knew in a couple of hours the normal world would begin to stir…it always stirs. Things always happen until they don’t.

Everything I saw, the run down service station on a lonely road, or the hulking towers of the state prison that was on my route, were gray, colorless… dull. But while the sense of sight was hindered, other senses and brain functions were amplified. I heard noises that you would not notice over the hum of daytime activity and I imagined stories for all the houses and buildings I passed that were far more dramatic than their likely realities.

I went through a series of short sharp imaginings followed by looking for the next delivery stop…the next gravel drive or the next paper box nailed next to the mailbox post. I would roll down my window, stuff the paper in the box, listen to directions to the next delivery and then go back into my semi dream state; that is until the next stop. It wasn’t like driving through a neighborhood. Stops could be 5 or even 10 minutes apart.

Things remain imprinted on my mind, almost 50 years later. The darkened IGA store, the backlit sign turned off but still illuminated by a pole light in the parking lot. The bank sign flashing the time and temperature over and over again. The “Do Not Pickup Hitchhikers” on the side of the road by the prison. As if. Then again, that was the mid-1970’s, and hitchhiking was much more common. I hitchhiked many times during that era, sometimes being picked up on the side of the road in the wee hours of the morning. So maybe the sign was not that silly.

I was struggling with a lot of things in my life during that time and so I tried to keep my mind occupied. Some jobs were torture because they were so mind-numbingly boring that I could not get out of my own head. When you can’t even play music you are stuck with yourself. But I didn’t need music for this job. Hitting all the stops (which changed each time I substituted) combined with my musings about what I was seeing kept my mind occupied, and happy, at least for the time being.

Even when I was done, there was something strange about it. During those days I often worked the morning shift at a local restaurant. Going from the isolated, dreamlike environment to the bright lights and the hustle and noise of the restaurant kitchen was at once jarring but also stimulating.

It is easy to look back at the past and romanticize it. But you need to look at both sides of the equation. It’s cool to look back at those times, but it’s also important for me to remember what I was going through. I was rudderless, lacked confidence, felt out of place and I didn’t see very much upside in the long run. Or maybe I did and I was just indulging myself in several years of wallowing. I do know one thing: I had friends…and that made all the difference.

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