America is a beautiful thing…
I’m at the Best Western in Peru, Indiana.
My son, Eli, works in Bethesda, MD. This morning he texted me an invoice from a towing company for $519.75 to tow a garbage truck eight miles. I know something about that.
When I was an undergraduate studying Chinese at the University of MInnesota (1978-1982), I drove a wrecker for Rice Street Towing in east St. Paul. I drove from 3:00 to 7:00 in the evening during the school year; rush hour in the winter in Minnesota. The job paid $7.50 an hour, big money in those days (tuition was $180.00 a quarter).
The company was owned by Dick and Peggy Berget. He ran the shop, maintained the trucks and drove a truck when needed; she took the calls, dispatched the drivers and took money from customers who came to pick up their cars from the lot. There were bars on the window of her office and she kept a .38 revolver in the cash drawer. At all hours, the place, was cloudy with smoke, Marlboros in the shop, Kool menthols in the office. They had a mutt, I can’t remember its name. The dog ate burgers and fries tossed on the oily shop floor by drivers cleaning out their cabs. Dick and Peggy were divorced and hated each other.
They had the Highway Patrol contract so we worked everything from jump starts to semi rollovers. It was a dangerous job; lying on my back dropping the driveshaft or backing off the brakes on a semi-tractor in sub-zero weather while rush hour traffic raced past on black ice a few feet from my face was, well, something.
Garbage trucks (we called them “packers”) break all the time and we towed them routinely. They’re heavy. One afternoon, I picked one up, the truck was full and I had to pull it to the dump to empty it before taking it to a repair shop. The driver was sitting next to me as we exited the long down grade on southbound Interstate 35W onto the exit at Black Dog Road. The exit is a sharp downhill curve and the wrecker brakes weren’t slowing us down, air brakes give you what they give you. And of course, all that weight on the rear means very little weight on the front tires of the wrecker, very unnerving when the steering wheel of a big truck goes soft in your hands and the truck isn’t turning and the weight on the back is shoving you forward and the bar ditch is getting close and you’re working the hell out of clutch, throttle and shift lever looking for a lower gear. We made it, although I’m not sure how, I must have found that gear, but I am pretty sure that poor driver is still losing sleep.
An experience like that is worth at least five hundred and twenty bucks.
Sorry about all that. What I planned to write about this morning was Cody and Justin, second marriages for both, three kids, nine, six and two, one from her previous, two together. He’s from Detroit, a history major at the University of Michigan and an Army medic in Fallujah, they met playing World of Warcraft on line. She drove to Detroit to meet him for the first time. He works second shift at the front desk at the Best Western, she works first shift at the breakfast bar. His politics are hard left and we had that conversation.
Cody and I chatted this morning. We talked about Cole Porter. Cole Porter is from Peru, apparently the town is reluctant to celebrate its most notable son because he was gay.
There’s a lot to say about Cody and Justin, and Denise who owns Club 14 where I had dinner and her waitress Katie but I need to take a shower and get on the motorcycle.