By Brian Trzeciak
I ENVY THE COMPLACENT.
Having just returned home from a seventeen-hour work day, I need no further proof of mankind’s inevitable self-destruction. We live in an apathetic world, and I had to drive a tow truck in the dead of a Buffalo winter to realize it.
“Wait ‘til you get the asshole whose $80,000 car you pull from a ditch, and then he spits on your goddamn shoe without looking you in the eye,” says another J-truck driver in response to my complaints over the CB. “Then you change a tire for a poor old guy who’s worked all his life, and he kicks you a five spot . . . tells you to get a cup of coffee to warm yourself up. That’s how it is brother.”
Why is it that a man will tip a barber three bucks for cutting a few hairs off his head, but all a tow truck driver gets for hauling, say, a 2003 Lincoln Escalade from underneath a foot of snow—which requires putting tow dollies on the rear wheels (a 4x4’s transmission will tear you apart if you don’t), dropping to your knees in the sick brown slush, getting the lame car out of the lot without hitting any of the other cars mere inches from the one being towed, and backing the whole mess down a quarter mile driveway—is a “Man it’s cold out here! Do I need to sign anything?”
Perhaps I should explain why I even have such a God-awful job.
I’m of the school that we are all gluttons of our own doom. I do things, like most people, in the hope of benefiting from the experience. I actually like driving a tow truck. Like all men these days, I am still a kid at heart. I get to drive a big diesel around and do what I did when I was five years old: play with cars. Only back then I caused the accidents, I never did the oh-let’s-pretend-this-guy’s-battery-is-dead situation, and I never had to deal with triple-A dispatchers and people who regarded me as the “working poor.”
Other than that, driving a tow truck is Matchbox city.
I should let you in on a few details. Ironically or not, I am an English Graduate student. I have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and thought it lacked substance, and can quote more Shakespeare than the general public will ever read. This I must keep in mind when talking to a customer under the impression that all people who do blue collar work are idiots, such as the doctor’s wife who asked my co-worker Brett, after he had changed her tire and engaged her in pleasant conversation, “So what, are you planning to go back to school one day? I mean, you wouldn’t want to do this your whole life.”
What is so wrong with driving a tow truck? Granted, there is no obvious glory to the job, but doesn’t that dunce driver look like a knight in shining armor when he’s pulling your Jeep from a ditch because you’re the idiot that thinks that a four-wheel drive vehicle magically sticks to the road? (While I have this opportunity, a bit of advice: a 4x4 will get you out of your driveway and then, well, you’re just another sled on the hill).
I am a grad student because I quit my job as a toy designer for Fisher-Price. We’ll not get into what I did there but let’s just say it was a bit like being Hermie the Elf from Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. I left for many reasons, but above all was that my disgust with the banality of the cubicle class outgrew my love for them. I’d always had a desire to get to “know” the working Joe (bourgeois fuck that I am), and above all, efface the softness from these silk hands of mine. A couple months ago, I saw a “drivers wanted” ad, considered it fate, and here I am writing once again about the uselessness of people.
My ambivalence comes from the fact that while I do believe that humans are generally good, I am running out of patience for them. I was under the naïve impression that the working class does their jobs because of a desire to do so. But while some love what they do, most need money and that’s why they work; they just happen to prefer a truck to a cubicle. They hate the customers just as much as the customers hate them. It’s this Mexican standoff between the worker, the consumer, and respect, an ugly situation that transcends occupations. I’d even say that it’s entirely American, but I know better. We are animals, and although we try to ignore our instincts, we all have them.
I have to go back to work tomorrow, eat or be eaten. The realization of the universal apathy of people has made me numb, and I long for a glimmer of light, a messiah in the shape of Woody Guthrie to appear before us workin’ folks. Barring that, I simply take his words of advice, “Take it easy, but take it.”
Sweet complacency, take me now.
Brian Trzeciak, an English grad student at the University of Buffalo, got Manifest editor Paul Salamone hooked on dirty martinis this past summer. He drives a tow truck.
