I was back outside a few minutes after four the following morning, feeling distinctly less upbeat. The previous night’s epiphany hadn’t vanished, exactly, but it had already begun to slip out of reach, like a good dream interrupted by the alarm clock. Part of me wanted to close my eyes and summon it back to life, but the lunch-truck driver in me knew better than to try. If I closed my eyes for even a couple of seconds, I would have passed out in the driveway like the beleaguered heroine of a Victorian novel. The paperboy would have found me three hours later, curled up and snoring on the blacktop in blue sweatpants that spelled out Y-A-L-E in enormous white letters marching all the way down the length of one leg.
I raised the back door again and stared dumbly at the steam leaking out of the coffee urns before remembering that all I had to do was turn on the stove to heat the sandwich oven, which just then contained no sandwiches, only single serving cans of pork and beans, Chef Boy-R-Dee ravioli, and Campbell’s soups. Unlike the urns, the sandwich oven wasn’t outfitted with a thermostat; if you accidentally left it on over the weekend, it would just get hotter and hotter until the cans exploded. You’d open it up on Monday morning and find the oven dripping with goop, like the walls of a gory crime scene.
Concentrating hard, I twisted the knob and listened for the whoosh of ignition. Then I shut the door and rested my forehead against the cool metal for a couple of minutes before stumbling back inside for a shower, several cups of double-strength Folger’s
crystals dissolved in hot tap water, and a Snickers bar, the first of many I’d consume in the course of a long day on the Roach Coach.
Most people have never seen a coffee bag. It’s a reusable flannel filter that looks like a diaphragm custom-made for a woman who just happens to be a hundred feet tall. You fit it into the basket on top of the urn, dump in a couple pounds of ground coffee, and then pour hot water over it, one gallon at a time, from a stainless-steel pitcher. It’s not that easy to do; a gallon weighs a lot, especially when you’re balancing on the back bumper of a truck and your hands are shaky from lack of sleep. Aside from not spilling too much, the main thing you need to wormy about is keeping track of how many pitchers you’ve poured. It’s easy to space out around five or six, and end up skipping or repeating a number. You wouldn’t think an extra gallon one way or the other would make that much difference, but our regular customers were surprisingly discerning in this respect. They could tell from a single sip if we’d screwed up and would be happy to remind us of our failure for months to come.
Once the coffee was taken care of, I made a quick trip to the basement fridge to grab the box of sandwiches my father had been storing there since Friday afternoon, the usual mix of Turkey, Liverwurst, Roast Beef, Ham & Cheese, Taylor Ham & Cheese, Sausage & Cheese, Steak & Cheese, Pastrami & Cheese, Beef Patty on Roll, Monte Cristo, et cetera, all of them wrapped in filmy plastic at the warehouse, their names and prices neatly handwritten on circular white labels. The cold sandwiches went on the bottom shelf of the display side of the truck, right above the ice bed, and the hot sandwiches went into the oven. You wouldn’t expect sandwiches to taste that good nearly three days after they’d been assembled, but picky as our customers were about the coffee, none of them ever complained that Monday’s sandwiches tasted any less fresh than the sandwiches we served any other day of the week.
It was five thirty by the time I closed the doors, climbed into the cab, and started the engine. I changed the radio station from
WPAT to WNEW, then ran down a mental checklist—made the coffee, got the sandwiches, loaded my change gun—before releasing the parking brake and shifting into reverse. Then I backed out of the driveway and into the world, already singing along with the Boomtown Rats’ “(Tell Me Why) I Don’t Like Mondays,” which the deejay was playing especially for me and all the other poor stiffs just like me, a whole legion of us up before the crack of dawn, driving with our headlights on into the long dark tunnel of another work week.
The warehouse—Central Jersey Lunch & Canteen in Roselle—was hopping at quarter to six, more than a dozen trucks crammed into the narrow spaces, parked so close that their raised doors formed a broken silver roof stretching the length of the lot. I waited in the street until one of the drivers finished loading—it was the surly Lithuanian everyone called Pete the Polack—and then nosed the Roach Coach into the space he’d vacated, threading the needle between Chuckie’s Chuck Wagon and a truck I’d never seen before, the door of which sported the words “Lunch” by Anthony, painted in flowery cursive and framed by a wreath of laurels.
“Well, well,” said Chuckie when I hopped out of the cab. He was a shaggy-haired, foul-mouthed fireplug of a guy with a droopy mustache, wearing his usual cool weather outfit of an orange down vest over a green hooded sweatshirt. We’d gotten fairly close over the previous summer, had even gone out for beers a couple of times at the end of the workday. “Look who’s back from the groves of academe.”
“The groves of academe? Where’d you get that?”
Chuckie looked hurt. He claimed to have taught seventh-grade social studies for a couple of years—at which institution I couldn’t imagine—before quitting to take over his father’s route, and I’d forgotten how prickly he could be when he thought I was pulling rank on him.
“It’s a common fucking idiom,” he informed me.
“Not as common as you think.”
Chuckie grinned to let me know he was giving me a free ride on this one.
“Well,” he said, “I’m a special fucking guy.”
“Special’s a nice way of putting it.”
“Whadja take a class in smart-ass remarks this semester?”
“Howdja guess? Don Rickles was a visiting professor in the groves of academe.”
“Eat me,” he said, giving his genitals a hard upward yank.
“Lovely,” I told him, popping up my storage door at the same moment he pulled his display door down. “I miss you when I’m away.”
Chuckie breathed into his cupped hands and then rubbed his palms together. His face grew thoughtful and concerned.
“By the way,” he said. “How’s your dipshit father?”
You entered the warehouse through a curtain of heavy strips like the ones that slap your car at the car wash, and found yourself in a no-frills supermarket specializing in snack cakes, soft drinks, and paper goods, all of which you loaded onto a flat-bottom cart big enough to sleep on. When you had what you needed, the owner’s daughter, a hot number named Sheila who dressed like every day was Saturday night, tallied up your order and sent you on your way with a sweet smile and a few words of encouragement. No money changed hands in the mornings; the whole point was to grab what you needed, throw it on the truck, and get the hell out of there. There would be time enough to settle up at the end of the day, when everybody had cash in their wallets and a little more room to breathe. Besides, Sheila’s father didn’t have to worry too much about getting paid. If you wanted to drive a lunch truck in central Jersey, you had better stay on Pat Swenson’s good side. Either that or make your sandwiches by hand and buy your Tastykakes at the A & P.
The truck was pretty much cleaned out on Monday mornings,
so I loaded up on baked goods, box after box of icing-striped danishes sweating inside their crinkly cellophane, tiny packs of Rich Frosted Mini Donuts, individually wrapped buttered rolls, Mell-O fruit pies, peanut butter crackers, and sandwich creme cookies, not to mention the all-important milk for the coffee—whole, skim, and half-and-half—plus some SnakPak cereals, a big jar of nondairy creamer, a three-week supply of plastic stirrers, two cartons of cigarettes—one Marlboro, one Kool—and a dozen copies of The Daily News. Sheila barely glanced at my haul; instead she looked me up and down, smiling like I’d just offered her a surprise gift. She was wearing a black polka-dot miniskirt and sheer black stockings, an outfit my mother would have said she didn’t have the legs for, but even so, she was a welcome vision inside that drab warehouse full of wooden pallets and metal racks and cardboard boxes. The only other women in the place were the sandwich makers, four sweet-tempered middle-aged ladies who seemed completely at peace with the fact that they had to wear plastic bags on their heads for eight hours at a stretch.
“Oh my,” Sheila said, scribbling mechanically on the pad attached to her clipboard. “You get better-looking every time I see you.”
“Thanks.” I might have been more flattered if I hadn’t heard her say the exact same thing a minute earlier to Ted McGee, the three-hundred-pound operator of Fat Teddy’s Belly-Bustin’ Chow Barge. “You’re looking pretty good yourself.”
Her expression grew momentarily uncertain, and I wondered if my compliment had broken through her thick shell of boredom to the actual person inside.
“You know what?” she told me. “You’re half a dozen short on the buttered rolls.”
Chuckie’s space was empty by the time I rolled my cart back out to the Roach Coach, but a muscular man with a shaved head and an honest-to-goodness waxed handlebar mustache—I assumed he was
the Anthony of “Lunch” by Anthony—was busily rearranging the storage compartment of the truck to my right. Like most drivers, my father treated his storage area like a big car trunk, tossing in anything that didn’t fit anywhere else, crucial supplies mingling freely with mysterious junk, gold foil coffee packets nesting inside an old sweater, threadbare road maps scattered among stray napkins and winter gloves with cut-off fingertips, a broken change gun resting on top of a case of eight-ounce cans of Bluebird orange and grapefruit juice. One of our shelves was broken, and the other had been permanently bowed into the shape of a smile. Anthony’s storage compartment, on the other hand, was more neatly organized than our own display side, everything lined up and readily identifiable, not a candy wrapper or soda can in sight, the metal buffed and gleaming.
“Maybe you can whip mine into shape when you’re done with yours,” I told him, raising the lid on the sorry jumble of sandwiches and candy and chips that was the business end of the Roach Coach. Everything had shifted during the ride; boxes were out-of-kilter and a couple of roast beef subs had tumbled into the ice bed, which luckily had no ice in it just then. Even the stainless-steel shelving looked dull, as if all the shine had been sucked out of it somewhere down the line.
“I’d need about a week for a monstrosity like that.” Anthony’s he-man build and novelty mustache made him look a little like a circus strongman in a Fellini movie, but his voice was as pixieish as Truman Capote’s. He was wearing jeans, black combat boots, and an unzipped hooded sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, but on him there was nothing casual about this outfit. Everything was crisp, snug, considered. He reminded me of men I’d seen in Greenwich Village, fierce-looking guys who sometimes wore leather chaps over their Levis and checked each other out with startling candor, almost like they were spoiling for a fight.
“I’m Danny,” I told him, holding out my hand. “I’ll be filling in for my dad for the next couple of weeks.”
“Anthony,” he said. “Delighted.”
“Did you just start this route?” I asked, loading the danishes on the second shelf from the top. “I didn’t see you here in January.”
“I’ve been catering for three years,” he explained. “The lunch business is an experiment. In fact, it’s not really lunch as we know it. That’s why I put the word in quotation marks. It’s an entirely new vision of lunch.”
“How so?” I asked, clearing space for a box of fruit pies at the end of the sandwich shelf.
“I only serve salads and healthy foods. No lunch meats full of nitrites, none of those horrible fattening danishes wrapped in plastic, none of those carcinogen-filled cherry pies.” He shuddered at the litany, then steeled himself to continue. “And no Twinkies! My God, are you aware of the crap that goes into Twinkles? If there was a nuclear war tomorrow, people would come back a thousand years from now, open a package of Twinkies, and basically taste exactly what you or I would taste if we opened that same package this very minute. Isn’t that frightening?”
“I guess,” I said, though I actually felt a certain grudging admiration for a snack cake that could withstand Armageddon. “But who wants to eat salad for lunch?”
Anthony smiled like a man holding a winning hand.
“Come here. I want to show you something.”
I followed him around to the display side of his truck, which looked nothing like any other lunch truck I’d seen. Where standard trucks were outfitted with four shelves, Anthony had customized his truck to accommodate six. The shelves contained nothing but plastic containers full of salads, three deep and two high the entire length and width of the box, packed as tight as books in a library.
“That’s a shitload of salad,” I observed.
“I make them myself.”
“You’re kidding.”
“What? You think they’re going to make them here?” Anthony pulled one of the containers out and held it in front of my nose. It was nothing fancy, just iceberg lettuce topped with a couple of
cherry tomatoes and a tuft of alfalfa sprouts. “Dollar fifty a pop,” he said proudly. “You know how many I sell on an average day?”
“How many?”
“Two hundred.”
“Two hundred?”
“Two hundred,” he repeated, replacing the container on the shelf.
“Where?”
“Hospitals. Big office buildings. Anywhere you got nurses or secretaries. Half the phone company eats salad for lunch.”
Anthony pulled his display door shut, then did the same for his back and storage doors.
“I’m telling you,” he said, climbing into his cab, “it’s the wave of the future.”
“Two hundred salads,” I said, my incredulous voice drowned out by the sudden roar of his engine.
Anthony waved to me as he backed out of his space, then tooted the horn for good measure as he pulled into the street and headed off to wherever it was you went to sell salad at six in the morning. I waited until he was decently out of sight before pulling a pack of Twinkies off the shelf and tearing open the wrapper. The sweaty yellow missile slid easily off its cardboard base, and I sunk my teeth into it in the spirit of scientific inquiry, tasting the spongy sweetness as if for the first time and chewing thoughtfully, like an archaeologist savoring the glories of a lost civilization.
There was a long line at the ice house, so I left the engine running and hopped out of the cab to resume my conversation with Chuckie, who was standing outside the Chuck Wagon a couple of trucks ahead of me. A cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he surveyed the activity with a calm, almost proprietary air, as if he were the owner of this bustling warehouse instead of an anxious customer cooling his heels while precious minutes ticked away.
“Hey,” he said. “Whose dick were you sucking?”
“Pardon?”
“You got white shit on your face.”
“Oh that.” I wiped at my lips. “It’s just Twinkie filling.”
“Twinkies? At six in the morning? What are you, eleven fucking years old? You gonna have Ding Dongs for lunch?”
“I was just talking to Anthony back there. He said something that got me thinking about Twinkies, and once you start thinking about Twinkies you might as well eat one. Otherwise you’ll spend your whole day thinking about them.”
“Kind of like jerking off,” Chuckie pointed out.
“Kind of,” I agreed, understanding him more readily than I would have liked to admit. “Anyway, Anthony was ragging on Twinkies, how they could survive a nuclear war or something, and I hadn’t really eaten breakfast or anything—”
Chuckie cut me off. “You sure you weren’t sucking his dick?”
I swirled my tongue around the inside of my mouth.
“Pretty sure. I mean, it’s hard to be a hundred percent certain about anything, right?”
Chuckie’s expression was stern.
“He’s a faggot, you know.”
“Yeah, I kind of got that impression. He’s got a pretty good thing going with the salads, though.”
“Yeah, right,” Chuckie scoffed.
“He said he sells two hundred a day.”
“That’s this week,” Chuckie said, shaking his head with sad amusement. “I got one word for your pal Anthony. One fucking word.”
“What’s that?” I asked, bracing myself for the word in question.
“Crepes,” he said. It wasn’t the word I’d expected.
“What?”
“Crepes,” he said again, nodding like a man in the know. “It’s just like crepes a couple of years ago. The next big thing and all that bullshit. Everybody loves crepes, right? America’s going apeshit over crepes. Cover of Time magazine and everything. You start seeing
these crepe places opening up at the malls, people are buying special pans so they can make crepes for supper, you can’t wipe your ass without hearing about crepes. This one buddy of mine fell for it. He got his whole truck re-outfitted for crepes. Monsieur Crepe, that was the name of his business. Well, you wanna know where Monsieur Crepe is today?”
“Where?”
“Vocational school.” Chuckie laughed to himself, as if this were a particularly pathetic place for a guy who called himself Monsieur Crepe to end up. “Majoring in lawn-mower repair.”
“Crepes were a novelty,” I said. “Salads are pretty much here to stay.”
Chuckie had made his point and wasn’t about to get enmeshed in a broader discussion. His eyes had narrowed, and he was gazing into the distance, like a philosopher lost in thought.
“I wonder how they do it,” he mused.
“Who?”
“Fags. What would possess them to put another guy’s cock in their mouth.”
“I guess it’s a matter of taste.”
“I guess,” he conceded. He seemed to be making a genuine effort to take the imaginative leap. “I could see maybe taking it up the ass. Maybe. But sucking another guy’s cock? What’s the point of that?”
“You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” I reminded him. “Unless you go to prison or something.”
“I don’t even understand how women do it,” he confessed.
The conversation trailed off. I could see Chuckie still had some hard questions to work through.
“By the way,” I said. “What’s the story with the Lunch Monsters?”
That snapped him out of his reverie. He turned to me like I’d slapped him in the face.
“What’s the story?” he repeated. “I’ll tell you the fucking story.”
He yanked open the storage door of the Chuck Wagon and
fished around in the pile of trash he had painstakingly accumulated over the years. It looked like the hopper of a garbage truck in there.
“This is the fucking story with the Lunch Monsters,” he said, unwrapping a plaid dish towel to reveal a small, snub-nosed revolver, the kind police officers carried. “I don’t care if their boss is Don Corleone himself. They better not fuck with my stops.”
I filled the ice bed and propane tank and then I was off, roaring down North Avenue toward Springville Boulevard. It was a pleasure to be driving so early in the morning, before the congestion turned everything sluggish and ugly, before school buses began stopping at railroad crossings and funeral processions began their somber crawls through major intersections, before gigantic trailers had to be backed into narrow loading docks by drivers who would have enough of a challenge navigating a shopping cart into an airplane hangar.
The radio was on, but I wasn’t really paying attention to anything but the voice of Jack Kerouac chattering in my head, narrating the morning as if the man himself were sitting beside me in the damp-smelling cab, playing Dean to my Sal, giving the drab landscape back to me in the breathy cadences of beat rapture: The gas stations sleeping itt the heartbroken light of the wild New Jersey daybreak … The babbling American madness of the billboards … The lost parking meters crying Violation! to the empty spaces on Main Street …
My first stop was Franklin Typographics, a huge print shop that ran three shifts. I set up near the main entrance and caught the people coming and going, the fresh-faced newcomers—the dreamy typesetters of the Garden State, smelling of sleepy love and the first cigarette of the mad romantic morning—buying coffee and danishes to take inside, the bleary-eyed nighterawlers—zombies of the third shift, heads swimming with commas and despair—blinking in pained amazement at the light of day, grabbing hot sandwiches and candy bars to fuel their dazed journeys home.
It was all self-service; my job was to calculate prices, make small talk and change, and watch that nobody was ripping anything off. These early stops were just warm-ups, with none of the frantic hurry of factory coffee breaks, where sometimes you had to clear thirty customers in three minutes, a few of them wanting to break big bills, others paying off debts from last week, still others needing credit till payday. Every now and then so many people descended on the Roach Coach at once that the truck actually started rocking on its wheels, and it seemed for a few seconds that it was in the process of getting stripped to the bones, that there’d be nothing left of it when they got finished but four tires, a steering wheel, and a gas tank.
One nice thing about driving a lunch truck: people are almost always happy to see you. You’re deliverance, sustenance, a break in the monotony. With me that morning the effect was multiplied by my long absence and the fact that my father was in the hospital. It was old home week, customers I hadn’t seen since January slapping me on the back, calling out “Hey kid” and “Where the fuck you been?”, making polite inquiries about the state of my old man’s bunghole before demanding to know whether I’d finally stopped jerking off and begun applying myself to the serious business of getting into Jodie Foster’s pants, as if she and I were the only two people at Yale and destined to get together sooner or later. (Of course, as far as most of them knew, we were the only two people at Yale.) Even the guys at the Department of Public Works, whom I’d never met before, were eager to get an update on my progress with Jodie.
“I’m working on it,” I assured them. “She can’t hold out much longer.”
It was like climbing onto a bike for the first time after a long winter. After a few false starts and fumbles the rhythms came back to me, the names and faces, the quirks and the banter. This guy’s Walter, that one’s Pete. Jerry eats split-pea soup for breakfast. The
metal painters wear white protective suits and respirators that look like they were designed to withstand an attack of poison gas. Factory workers owe money; construction workers pay cash. Wooden skids are everywhere, and rusty metal drums. Dexter at the car wash is a dead ringer for B. B. King and buys three cherry pies every morning, one for each of his remaining teeth. “Hoo Wee,” he says. “Got to be cherry. Yes sir, got to be cherry.” They let you use the bathroom at the carpenter’s school; don’t forget to wash your hands. The salesmen at Everett Chevrolet are always pissed off; the secretaries from Pearl Industries giggle among themselves. By eleven o’clock I was working the change gun like it was part of my body, adding numbers in my head while taking money from the guy on my right and trading insults with the guy on my left, pausing to scribble a sum on my IOU sheet while shouting out the price of a Milky Way to a regular who knew exactly what it cost, but was hoping I might slip up and maybe charge him a nickel less than my father did. Keeping track of so many little things at once was engrossing and even oddly exhilarating, if only in a private way, like I was putting on a circus act for my own enjoyment, juggling small talk and numbers instead of bowling pins and flaming batons.
Without the Union Village stops to slow me down, I made all my coffee breaks with time to spare, and was unusually relaxed for the late morning downtime, which I filled by stopping for gas and making a quick trip to the bank to break a few tens and reload my depleted change gun. Lunch flew by in the same way; by one thirty I was back at the warehouse to pay my bill for the morning and loading up sandwiches for Tuesday. By two thirty I was back home in the driveway, filling the coffee urns with water from the hose. By three o’clock I was back in my room, pulling the covers down and belly flopping into bed, the workday already behind me.
If not for a single strange encounter, I would have counted the day a complete and unqualified success. It happened in the early afternoon, after I had completed my final lunch stop. I was waiting at a
red light down the road from this big construction site my father had warned me about—they were building a state-of-the-art twenty-four-hour supermarket and mini-mall on the border between Springville and Union Village—when another lunch truck pulled up even with me on my left. This was a fairly common occurrence, since we all fished in the same greasy waters. Noticing it out of the corner of my eye, I turned to give it the obligatory wave when I was struck by an odd shrinking sensation, as if the Roach Coach and I were suddenly growing smaller.
The truck beside me was all wrong. It was too big, too shiny, out of proportion with the rest of the world. I had to tilt my head to make eye contact with the goon in the passenger seat—my first impression was of a neck with sunglasses—who smiled down at me like we were old pals, his veiny, implausibly muscled arm protruding from the open window at an uncomfortable-looking angle, as if he were signalling for some sort of complicated traffic maneuver the rest of us hadn’t been taught in driver’s ed. I barely had time to take in the preposterous tires and the amateurish Frankenstein head painted on the box before he spoke.
“Hey chief,” he said, laboriously jerking his thumb in the direction of the construction site. “You don’t need to go there tomorrow. We’ll take care of it, okay?”
His voice was amiable, like he was offering to do me a favor, and I almost nodded my assent before catching myself.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“That stop’s ours.” With another herculean effort, he pushed the sunglasses on top of his head and squinted down at me. His voice was flatter now, more matter-of-fact. “You don’t go there anymore.”
I felt a brief flicker of fear, but it vanished as quickly as it came, leaving an unexpected sense of calm in its wake. Now that his whole face was visible, I couldn’t help noticing the acne on his cheeks and the almost alarming smallness of his head in comparison with his neck and torso. The overall effect of the mismatch was freakish and comic at the same time, as if a twelve-year-old dork had somehow succeeded in grafting his head onto the body of Mr.
Universe. It must have been to the twelve-year-old that I addressed my next question.
“You got a dentist?”
The non sequitur seemed to annoy him.
“Whuh?” he demanded, sticking his head a little further out the window.
“Make an appointment,” I advised, a split second before the light changed and we parted ways. “Tell him you’re gonna be missing a whole bunch of fucking teeth.”
The whole thing happened so fast it was almost like it hadn’t happened at all. And yet this brief exchange dominated my thoughts for hours afterward, filling me with a strange and giddy pride that nothing could dispel, not even the creeping suspicion that I’d just made a really big and really stupid mistake.