The Bloody French

 

Lisa would cover for her mom when her mom couldn’t be at Miller Disposal to dispatch. Because there was quite a bit of downtime, I got to know her. She was about my age. She was cute and we would flirt.

Kevin didn’t like it but he wouldn’t say anything. He didn’t like my flirting with his wife until I told him my girlfriend thought he had a nice ass. After that I could flirt with Lisa as much as I wanted.

My girlfriend didn’t come by the office very often, but the first time she met Kevin she was bowled over by his six foot four, blond haired, blue eyed physique and told me so. Telling Kevin my girlfriend thought he had a nice ass was the best thing I could have done for our relationship.

I spent a lot of time in the office because, when there were no roll-offs to run, I refused to do work that Kevin wouldn’t pay me to do. Curly would be sweeping the shop or replacing mud-flaps on trucks, but I’d be lounging around in the air-conditioning.

There was only one time I would do work for free and that’s if NOT doing it prevented me from picking up containers. If I broke down on my route somewhere I would help the crochety old mechanic repair my truck just so I could get rolling again. I was mechanically inclined so I was pretty handy. If he was in the shop working on someone else’s truck I refused to help him because Kevin wouldn’t pay me.

Kevin Miller had a strained relationship with his father, Oscar Miller.

I was in the yard one day when Kevin burst out of the office with his father hot on his heels. Oscar was yelling at Kevin about moving his bowels in the office restroom.

Kevin yelled, “I’m not going to shit in the shop toilet, I manage this company.”

The problem was one of plumbing and the size of Kevin’s bowel movements. The office sewer line was too small and too far from the main sewer line and it couldn’t transport Kevin’s production all the way to the main sewer line without professional help. They were always calling someone to have the sewer line cleared.

Oscar would sit in his office with the door open. He could see when Kevin left his office to use the office toilet. If Kevin turned left as soon as he breached the threshold there was only one place he could be going: the bathroom.

Oscar would shout from his seat behind his desk, “Kevin!”

Kevin used to fight his father but he would just slam the door and lock it, knowing there would be a fight later. He’d be damned if he would get caught by his employees baking brownies in the shop terlet.

Kevin wanted to spend upwards of ten thousand dollars to have the lot dug up and a larger, more accepting sewer line installed but Oscar held the purse strings and wouldn’t allow his company to spend that kind of money just so Kevin could poop in the office bathroom.

That was part of the charm of working for a small company, you really got to know the people who worked there.

I didn’t drive trash trucks very often but I did from time to time. I didn’t have to know much about them because the helpers would run the trash compactor.

We were driving in the country picking up trash one day when the helper said he needed to climb into the bulkhead. He took a box and a roll of paper towels through the little access door with him. He told me to wait outside and not get back in the truck until he came out.

I guess he thought I knew what he was doing in there. I didn’t have a clue. After a while he handed the box out and told me not to look in it, just throw it in the hopper.

I walked to the hopper and, of course, I took a peak. I have no clue what I thought I would see in there, but of course it was a turd. I didn’t tell him I looked.

You learn something new everyday.

Kevin didn’t like to think of himself as managing a trash company that had faulty plumbing. He liked to think of himself as somehow above it all. So when he told me he needed my help picking up trash on a few streets I knew he’d be edgy. He didn’t want anyone to see him behind the wheel of one of his own company’s trash trucks. He wanted, even less, to be seen in the passenger seat.

He would drive because when he was a kid his father made him pick up trash in the summer and made him ride on the back. There was no way, as the manager of Miller Disposal, Kevin was going to ride on the back of a trash truck.

I love to play practical jokes on people. From time to time I would grease Curly’s truck. I don’t mean in the conventional sense, but in the practical joking sense.

I would rub my finger on a freshly greased roller, then smear grease on the backside of his door handle. He wouldn’t know I’d done it until he tried to open the door of his truck.

I would put a little grease on the underside of his steering wheel. Under the shifter handle. On the air switch for the PTO, making sure he couldn’t see the grease from the driver’s seat.

The first time I got ‘greased’ I thought the mechanic had done it accidentally but I kept bringing my hand back with grease on my fingers. I’d turn up the AC fan and I’d get grease on my fingers. It was very annoying.

While Kevin and I were picking up trash I kept looking for a ball to put between the duals. It would nest in there until the driver pulled forward. The resulting pop sounded like a tire had blown. The driver would jump out and look at his tires while his helpers laughed.

I couldn’t find a ball that I was sure someone wouldn’t miss, so I decided to startle Kevin in another way.

If you’ve ever watched a trash truck go down the street it stops a lot. It moves forward thirty feet, men jump off the sides and fill up the hopper with trash, grab a shifter handle and make it eat up all that trash. Then they climb back on the sides and the truck moves forward another thirty feet. Over and over again.

When there’s only two men on a truck the process is even slower because the driver will get out at nearly every stop to help put trash in the hopper.

While Kevin and I were picking up trash in a cul-de-sac, or circle drive, I decided to run to the front of the truck after filling up the hopper and turning on the trash compactor.

When you’re running two people on a truck it takes longer for the truck to move to the next stop because the driver has to get back in the truck, settle himself, check his mirrors, then pull forward. Usually the helper will just run to the next house.

I squatted down in front of the cab of the trash truck and watched Kevin get in through the windshield and settle himself. I watched him check his mirrors and wait for the hopper to grind through it’s cycle before he put the truck in gear.

When I felt the truck lurch I knew he'd put the trash truck in gear so I hit the front of the cab with the flat of my hand. It made a loud boom!

Kevin’s eyes popped open wide and he jumped out of the truck and chased me around for a minute while I laughed my ass off. After he realized people could see him running around like a lunatic he stopped and got back in the truck.

Kevin didn’t like to be startled. It made him feel small, so I quit doing it. There were a lot of things that I quit doing while working at Miller Disposal. Telling jokes, flirting with his wife, giving him good ideas and generally enjoying myself.

Kevin’s wife Lisa was a cutie-pie and she would ask me what I thought about how she was dressed or if I liked her hair.

One day she came in to dispatch with braided hair. She turned around and waggled her hair at me and asked me what I thought of it. I acted like the sight of her hair made me want to vomit.

“Ugh,” I said. “I hate French braids! It looks like your spine is crawling up the back of your head!”

I did. I really hated French braids. I don’t know why.

My reaction made Lisa want to French braid her hair everyday. She thought I was a hoot.

That I had grown quiet made Kevin think I’d grown compliant. Though I wasn’t as servile as Curly Jones, he thought maybe I wouldn’t openly rebel and make him look like an ass.

Kevin was the youngest of the three sons of Oscar Miller and the last one to try managing the day to day operations with his father in an office on the other side of the lobby.

Kevin’s elder brothers would stop in at the office from time to time. I knew them by their cars because I’d never actually met them. Shake hands with a driver? Perish the thought!

Kevin’s eldest brother John had pulled in to the parking lot and Kevin walked over to chat with him. They leaned on the bed of his pickup truck and stood talking about this and that.

I had pulled my truck into the shop to work on it because the mechanic was working on another truck. I was in a foul mood because I had asked Kevin to have the mechanic drop what he was doing and work on my truck. He flatly refused my request.

It delighted Kevin that I worked on my truck for free even though it made me furious.

It was summer and the shop was hot as balls with all the overhead doors open and there wasn’t enough light in there. I had a greasy part in my hands that I’d just pulled off my truck. The part I’d pulled and my arms were covered with grease. I stepped into the parking lot, into the bright sunlight, to get a better look.

I could tell John and Kevin were watching me turn the greasy part over and over in my hands. I could also tell that Kevin had a shit eating grin on his face.

Had Kevin been alone, leaning on his truck watching me work, I would still have been furious but I wouldn’t have cared. John being there made Kevin want to show off. John’s presence made him want to prove his dominance over me in front of his big bubby.

My hair was a couple of feet long. Kevin hated it but would never tell me I had to cut it. He would just make snarky comments.

Lisa told Kevin with a giggle how much I hated French braided hair, so they all gave me trouble about it from time to time. That was a few years before this day.

Kevin remembered my aversion to hair styles from countries that speak a romance language and he shouted across the parking lot, “Hey Elvin, why don’t you let me French braid your hair?!”

On my best days I’m a smart ass with the quickest turn around of anyone with a witty comeback. When I’m in a bad mood my instinct is to go immediately to DEFCON 1. No hesitation, I push the button.

Hidden doors slide back on silos buried deep in the mountain side and nuclear warheads rise out of the ground preparing to launch: preparing for global thermo-nuclear war. Klaxons sound and the emergency alert broadcast is engaged, warning citizens in the area that this is not a test.

I looked up from the part I was turning over in my hands. I looked John and then Kevin in the eyes. Then I shouted, “Why don’t you French kiss my ass?!”

I looked back to the part in my hand, then walked back into the shop knowing my world had been forever changed.

Great Ideas

When you get to know someone well you get to know their quirks. No matter how boring someone is on a daily basis you can nail them with one defining feature. It might be the way they laugh, or an overused phrase.

I told my buddy Rob that I had learned how to draw. I had him stand in front of me while I busily scratched a pencil on a pad, looking up at his face from time to time. I had drawn a smiley face with a line angling across the forehead that looked suspiciously like the one on Rob’s forehead. His girlfriend Lisa thought it was hilarious but didn’t want to laugh in front of him.

My defining feature was an overused phrase. I overheard someone imitating me by saying, “You know what you oughta do . . .” The person they were talking to threw their head back and laughed. Apparently I said that a lot.

“You know what you oughta do . . .”

I was walking towards my boss, Kevin Miller, while he was talking to the mechanic. When Kevin saw me coming he turned to Larry and said, loud enough that I could hear it, “Watch this.”

When I got close enough for conversation Kevin said, “What would you do about this?” He pointed to wires attached to the back of a halogen lamp. The lamp was fastened to a square steel rod. Larry had made a sliding lamp mount and couldn’t figure out how to keep the wires from just dangling off the back of the lamp. The screws weren’t meant to hold the weight of a thick cord. Eventually it would fall off.

Without missing a beat I said, “Extend the lamp as high as you can and use zip ties to hold the wire to the bottom piece.”

Kevin looked at Larry with a big, shit eating grin on his face and said, “See, told ya.”

It was odd to be made fun of for something I was good at. I mean, it seemed like they were making fun of me. I was confused.

My dad did the same thing. When I was a kid he handed me his watch. The band had come apart. It was a stretch band, made of multiple spring loaded links. There were small flat pieces of metal that held the links together. One of them had broken. So I removed the broken link and reassembled the watch band.

Dad was sitting outside on a lawn chair smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and shoot’n the shit with several of the men in the neighborhood, who had their own lawn chairs and their own cans of beer.

“Thanks boy,” he said and stretched the watch back onto his wrist. The other men expressed amazement. Apparently none of them thought I could fix the watch band, but my dad told them I could. He didn’t seem proud of it.

Miller Disposal’s trucks were all painted red with gold stripes, exactly like the trucks Joe’s Trash service used: a competitor the next town over. The only way you could tell the difference between a Miller roll-off truck and a Joe's roll-off truck was the color of the box it was carrying. Joe's were black and Miller’s were green; the same color green as Deffendum’s roll-off boxes.

I told Kevin, “from a distance we look like Joe's roll-off truck is stealing one of Deffendum’s roll-off boxes.” 

I couldn’t help throwing out ideas to improve the business. It was in my nature to see patterns and think of better ways to do things. I didn’t care if I was paid when Kevin used one of my ideas, I only wanted to see it working. I wanted Kevin to take my idea, that I got from seeing Deffendum's roll-off containers, and implement it on his. It was a great idea, worthy of stealing.

I told Kevin, “the difference between us and Deffendum is that Deffendum paints his name real big down the side. Our containers have a sticker the size of a sheet of paper plastered to the side of it. I can read the word Deffendum on a roll-off container from a mile away. I can even remember the phone number because I’ve seen it so many times.”

Kevin must have thought it was a good idea because he had Curly put a roll-off container in the shop. He didn’t pay him to do it. I didn’t have to ask Curly, I knew Kevin never paid him for the extra things he did.

I saw Kevin in the shop doing something on the side of the container. As I got closer I heard him bitterly complaining.

Kevin was holding a stencil against the steel wall of the container and spraying white paint at it. It was a little breezy and he got paint on his hands and was spackling the container as well. There were white dots all around the stencil.

I knew Kevin well enough to know he wouldn’t ask me for help, but the answer popped into my head, so I looked around for a box. I found one with a few bottles of antifreeze in it, took them out and handed the box to Kevin.

In the past I would have waited for Kevin to ask me what he was supposed to do with it, but I was tired of that game.

“Cut out the bottom with a box knife and tape the stencil to it,” I said.

What pissed him off is that I wouldn’t hint around until he figured it out himself, so he could say he came up with the idea. I never asked him to pay me for my ideas and I never acted like I was the boss. I even called him boss so he would understand that I had no ambition other than to drive a truck and draw a paycheck.

But I wanted credit for my ideas. They were mine.

I told him, “After you paint a letter on this side, move to the other side and paint another letter on that side so you don’t have to reapply the stencil when you’re done with this side. You can do the letters on both sides with one application.”

“I’m not a dumbass,” Kevin said.

I really didn’t think he was a dumbass but I know he thought I thought he was. Kevin was spoiled. He grew up in a house with a lot more money than mine. They paid people to cut the grass. His dad bought him a car and didn’t expect him to work until he got out of college.

Though I didn’t think Kevin was a dumbass if I hadn’t told him to paint the same letter on the other side of the box he would have spent all day applying and reapplying those stencils. I had a thing about efficiency.

Kevin and the mechanic used a forklift to put a trash compactor inside a roll-off box. It was going to be installed behind a grocery store, but they couldn’t figure out how to secure the machine inside the roll-off box while it was being transported. They had ratchet straps but the roll-off box had nothing to hook the ends of the strap to.

Kevin was expanding into trash compactor leases. He would buy the unit and lease it to a company that needed one. When he complained about the cost of having a third party deliver them I said, “Why don’t we deliver them?”

Kevin wouldn’t talk with me about the company anymore. He didn’t want me to come up with ideas that I wouldn’t allow him to take credit for. He wanted credit for everything.

Were we to have had a conversation about it I would have told him to buy or make a roll-off flat-bed that we could strap a compactor to. It would have a long flat strip of steel welded down the side that you could attach a strap hook to, just like on a flat bed trailer.

Kevin would take a piece of what I said and assume I meant something half baked that he would blame me for because it didn’t work. One time he even said, “I did exactly what you said!” He didn’t.

Since he’d taken part of my idea: hauling trash compactors with our trucks, and shoved a unit into a roll-off box, I knew I had to salvage the situation or he would blame me for something that didn’t work again.

“Just tack weld the feet of the compactor to the floor of the container,” I said. Neither of them acknowledged me. They just shook their heads when I was done speaking. “Let the installer know he’ll have to use an angle grinder to get it out.”

I knew if I didn’t tell Kevin to pass it along that the installer would need a grinder he would be scratching his head wondering how to get it out and Kevin would blame me.

Though Kevin didn’t acknowledge my idea of tack welding the feet of the compactor to the floor of the roll-off box, when I looked at it later it was welded in place.

They’d welded it halfway up inside the box. I would have told him to put it by the door, but I can only give him so much before I quit caring about the consequences. The trash compactor was going to have to be dumped out the back, which might damage it.

Kevin didn’t think my problem solving tricks were amusing anymore. He no longer enjoyed showing me off. I grew my hair long. Not to piss him off but because I liked wearing my hair long. He would make snarky comments about my long hair but he would never tell me I had to cut it.

Miller Disposal provided uniforms for us to wear. He paid for 5 pairs of pants and shirts to be washed once a week. He hadn’t thought it through because, when we’d turn in our uniforms on Friday we would have none to wear the next week. Typically a company that provided uniforms would order eleven sets. The eleventh set for when you had to turn over a week’s worth of dirty uniforms and pick up the next week’s.

Kevin’s solution was to quit paying for the cleaning service. That way we could wash them ourselves and not wait a week for the service to deliver our cleaned and pressed uniforms.

I thought the uniforms were dorky but it was less laundry for me when they were being cleaned. After Kevin quit paying to have them cleaned I quit wearing them. I preferred sweatpants and t-shirts. He complained and made fun of me but I was immune by then.

Kevin never quit wearing his uniform. We all suspected that he still paid to have his cleaned and pressed; that he just quit paying to have ours cleaned. Eventually he quit buying uniforms for the new hires. In the end he was the only one wearing a Miller Disposal uniform.

Curly Jones’s wardrobe rapidly devolved into holey shirts and pants that had been stitched up hundreds of times. Kevin complained bitterly about the clothes Curly wore. It was Curly’s one act of rebellion against Kevin. Curly loved having a clean, freshly pressed uniform to put on in the morning. It made him proud. If Kevin didn’t care anymore then Curly wasn’t going to pretend to care either.

The men who did well working at Miller Disposal had nothing to offer but servitude. They didn’t solve problems. They didn’t have ideas. They did what Kevin told them to do without question.-

I was burned out. I grew quiet. I no longer put forth any ideas. I was a ghost. When I got to work I would grab my route sheet and leave. I wouldn’t talk to anyone unless I was directly confronted or if it was business.

So I was surprised when Kevin gave me a jacket with Driver of the Year printed across the shoulder blades. Every year Kevin would dub a driver, “Driver of the Year.” I’d been at Miller Disposal for 4 years and knew I’d never win, so I was shocked. It was a decent looking jacket, but I was puzzled. Why me?

I asked Kevin and he said, “Because you don’t bitch, you just do your job.”

There it is. I’d finally been bent, broken and molded into exactly what Kevin wanted: seen but not heard. Service only, no smile required.

Peanut

I was hired to drive a roll-off truck for Miller Disposal because I could shift gears. In the 80s, when automatics in commercial trucks were rare and a very expensive option, all of Miller Disposal’s trucks were automatics, but for one.

When Kevin took over the day to day operations of his father’s business, Miller Disposal only had trash trucks. Kevin wanted to start running roll-off trucks as well. Kevin’s father Oscar was skeptical that it would make money, but he let Kevin buy an old cabover Kenworth and a handful of rusty old Dempster roll-off boxes. When Kevin showed his dad what kind of profits could be made with an old truck and a few boxes he let him buy a new roll-off truck, but he ordered it with an automatic. I was hired to drive the old cabover Kenworth roll-off truck.

I didn’t think much about the fact that Miller Disposal ran automatics in their trucks until I realized that every trash truck driver they hired, they trained. They didn’t hire people with driving experience because an experienced truck driver would expect truck driver pay. Truck drivers were paid well in the 80s.

At the time roll-off drivers were paid by the container. Which meant each container you picked up and hauled to the dump paid a certain amount of money. Back then it was $16 per container.

A few months after I hired on I found out that Miller was paying $12 per container when their only roll-off truck driver was Curly Jones. The day I came to work there they raised it to $16 per container.

After getting to know roll-off drivers from other companies I found out that everyone else was paying $16 per. Miller got away with paying Curly $12 because Curly was lucky to have a job and he lied to everyone about how much he made. Curly lied about everything.

Since Curly had worked at Miller Disposal for a very long time, he got the first roll-off load in the morning. If there was only one I’d have to wait until another one called in. I wasn’t getting paid to sit around, but I did it, thankful that I wasn’t driving a big rig from coast to coast, knowing that, at the end of the day, I'd be going home. So I would bring a book with me.

Sitting in the office of a trash company reading a book made me the target of ridicule and hilarity from the drivers. They weren’t the type of people you’d meet while browsing the stacks of a library on a Sunday afternoon. Even Kevin made fun of me and he’d gone to college.

The drivers for Miller Disposal were a hodgepodge of sketchy characters. One day Kevin told me I might have to drive a trash route because one of their trash truck drivers was late.

We were standing outside discussing the possibility of me doing a job I hadn’t been trained to do when the absent driver tore past the shop in his beat up old Buick. He shot past the entrance to the parking lot and while Kevin and I looked at each other wondering what was going on, a car with flashing lights and a siren shot past us in hot pursuit.

“Seems like he’ll be otherwise occupied for the remainder of the day,” I said.

On another day, a different driver came up to me while I was filling my truck with fuel. It was the end of the day and since we hadn’t been introduced, I figured he wanted to invite me to a bar, maybe shoot some pool. Get to know the new guy a little. He was a handsome, clean cut guy, so I was shocked when he said, “Hey, you wanna smoke some crack?”

That was during the Reagan years when this new way of getting high was in its infancy. The only thing I’d ever heard about crack was that it was an urban epidemic. We were in Missouri, in a sleepy suburban town.

I was stunned. I said to this guy I’d never met before, “Am I in an after-school special?”

I wasn’t against getting high. I drank beer to excess but I shied away from anything else. Marijuana puts me to sleep. Pills of any kind make me paranoid. I wasn’t one to judge, but I passed on his offer.

Kevin showed me how to use the pressure washer to wash my truck. After I washed it I asked him how much that paid. He told me it didn’t pay anything but I was expected to wash my truck once a week.

That was a red flag. This little anecdote should have been in the first chapter. That was forty-five minutes of my life I could never get back and I had just given it away!

Kevin expected me to fill up the time between calls from roll-off customers by keeping my Miller Disposal truck clean.

Kevin Miller was a year younger than me. He was twenty-two and I was twenty-three years old. I thought twenty-two was young to be in charge of the family business but I learned that Kevin was the youngest of three brothers. The elder two sons of Oscar Miller had taken a turn at the tiller of the family business before Kevin and eventually left due to creative differences with their father. In other words, Oscar was an asshole.

I’m sure Curly Jones was the one who told me that story before anyone else did. We were the only roll-off drivers and our paths crossed all the time, but by that time I didn’t trust anything that came out of his toothless mouth, so I had to have the story confirmed multiple times by multiple people before I knew it to be the truth.

And Curly got paid the same way I did, hauling containers. Nothing else. Not washing trucks. Not sweeping the shop. Not changing tires. But Curly did all those things if Kevin asked him to.

One day, before I’d come to work for Miller Disposal, Kevin asked Curly to change a tire for him. It was a big steering tire. A balloon tire.

Some wheels are flared on both sides and large metal ‘spoons’ are required to stretch the bead over the flares. This wheel was only flared on one side making it easier to put a tire on. You created the flare for the other side with a lock ring, so you didn’t have to stretch the bead over the rim with tire spoons. You’d slide the tire over the wheel then secure the bead with a heavy lockring.

The next step is very important: before putting air in the tire you stand it up and roll it into a tire cage.

The tire cage is a necessary step in the process of installing a commercial truck tire on a wheel because if something goes wrong the explosion will be contained. Car tires are inflated to about 30 pounds. Commercial truck tires are inflated to 110 pounds and they are exponentially larger than car tires.

Curly was putting air in the balloon tire while it was laying on its side. The air chuck wouldn’t lock onto the stem because it was worn out, so he was pressing the chuck onto the stem as it filled with air. To do that he had to stand over the tire.

Curly had lain the tire on its side because the tire cage Miller Disposal had in its shop wasn’t big enough. It was made for normal truck tires.

Oscar shuffled by and saw Curly bent over the uncaged balloon tire and yelled at him. “Don’t stand over the tire like that!”

Curly stood up and stared at Oscar until he shuffled away. Both men thought the other one was a fool.

While Curly was standing upright the tire wasn’t taking on air, so after Oscar was out of sight he leaned down and pushed the air chuck onto the valve stem again.

Kevin Miller was sitting in his office when he heard a shotgun blast from the direction of the shop, fifty feet away.

The shotgun blast was the sound of the lockring hitting the ceiling, which was thirty feet high. On its way to the ceiling the lockring slammed into Curly’s mouth.

Kevin sprinted to the shop to find Curly laying on the concrete floor of the shop. He was such a bloody mess Kevin thought he’d been killed. There was blood everywhere.

The lockring was a twenty pound hoop of steel that slid onto one side of the wheel and locked into place creating a bead. When it’s installed correctly. Curly had installed it backwards.

That’s the story I was told.

The story of how Curly lost his teeth was ghastly but enlightening. I wondered how such an incompetent, boastful person could still be employed by Miller Disposal. I could understand if it was sympathy for nearly killing a man. Or guilt from asking Curly to do something he wasn’t being paid to do, nor was he trained to do it, and could have been killed while doing it.

Curly Jones hired a lawyer that was suing everyone involved in manufacturing anything to do with commercial truck tires. The wheel manufacturer, the tire manufacturer and probably compressed air. I never knew if he sued Miller Disposal. I suspect they paid his medical bills and promised him a job for life and that was good enough for him.

The lawsuit had been going on for years when I was hired. It was old news.

After working for Miller Disposal for a few years I continued to wonder how on earth Curly kept his job. He was constantly getting yelled at for one thing or another. Was he Kevin’s whipping boy? I suspected that Oscar Miller was an asshole to all his sons and Curly might be how Kevin took out his frustration with his father.

I didn’t hate Curly but I was baffled by the relationship between him and Kevin because he deferred to Curly. He would choose Curly over me for easy jobs. Or, when Kevin would buy a new truck, Curly would get it, even though he’d tear it to shreds within a few months.

One day while sitting in Kevin’s office having an amiable chat after some screw up Curly was involved in, I asked Kevin why Curly still had a job with Miller Disposal. What was it was about Curly that kept Kevin from firing him. He obviously cost the company a lot of money due to his screw ups.

Kevin’s answer told me all I needed to know.

I’m sure I made mistakes and cost Miller Disposal a lot of money. You can’t avoid it in the roll-off business, but Curly’s screw ups were legendary. He would take out the power for a city block by driving around with his bed up while swapping containers and yank down multiple power lines and take a few poles with it. Curly’s screw ups were epic.

Kevin’s company would have been far more profitable if he would have taken the time to look for competent, mature drivers to put behind the wheel of his trucks, but it irked him when I’d ask for a raise and competent drivers would be looking to make as much money as they possibly could. Kevin didn’t mind if you had had a few accidents or that you had a few tickets on your record as long as you didn’t think your time was worth very much.

Curly was at work before everyone and was usually there after everyone left. If Kevin told Curly to jump he wouldn’t ask how high, he’d just jump until Kevin quit screaming that it wasn’t high enough.

Kevin Miller was six foot four. He had blonde hair and blue eyes. He was a good looking, charming, clean cut guy. His company uniform looked like it had been ironed. He was immaculate.

Curly Jones was dumpy, toothless and careless about his personal hygiene. His breath could knock a buzzard off a shit wagon. He was charmless and lied so often no one believed a thing he said. He only had a couple of pairs of pants, one of which was a blue pair of slacks that I called Frankenstein’s pants because they’d been sewn back together so many times.

If you were a roll-off customer; someone that hired one of Miller Disposal’s roll-off containers, Curly Jones delivered it to you. He was the face of Miller Disposal. He was Kevin Miller’s right hand man.

And when I asked Kevin the question: “why do you keep Curly around?” I wasn’t trying to be a jerk. I knew Kevin wasn’t going to fire him, I just wanted to know why. So he told me: “Curly would eat the peanuts out of my shit.”

I don’t think I would have been more shocked had a twenty pound hoop of steel hit me right in the mouth.

The Flag Factory

The phone chirped as I headed out the door with my duffel bag. I was leaving for my job driving over the road. I had worked there for a year hauling freight all across the country.

I was over it.

Driving an eighteen wheeler wasn’t the scenic vacation I had hoped it would be. I couldn’t go just any old way I wanted because I was being paid by the mile and someone else was paying for the fuel. I had no choice as to where I would be told to go.

I quickly learned that dispatchers delight in not giving a driver a run they would want yet every dispatcher I ever met used to be a truck driver.

It’s perverse.

Because driving over the road no longer charmed me I applied for local truck driving jobs. I wanted to go home every night, not just crawl into a box with a mattress attached to the back of a truck.

Sitting in a truck stop lounge is boring if you aren't a wildly misogynistic, homophobic lover of God, guns, Harley Davidsons, black and white movies and the open road.

I answered the phone. It was Kevin Miller of Miller Disposal. He was calling to offer me a job driving a roll-off truck. I’d never heard of a roll-off truck before but it was a local job.

“Hey,” I said to Kevin, “I’m heading out the door to go over the road. Can I call you back in a few weeks?” Kevin told me the job might be filled by the time I called him back.

I didn't know what else to say so I said, "Okay. Sorry. Bye."

“Jesus God,” Rob said. “Did he just offer you a job?”

I didn’t want to answer. It felt like a trap.

Rob was my neighbor and my roommate. He was sitting on my couch. We got along well and he asked if he could move in to my place while he rented out his place.

His place was the trailer next to mine in Mac’s trailer park. He liked my place because it was smaller than his and cheaper to heat and cool. Besides, I was only home a few days out of the month and he wanted the extra income.

“So,” Rob continued, “You just turned down an opportunity to quit the job you’ve been bitching about to go do the job you’ve been bitching about?”

“Should I call him back?” I asked.

Rob just stared at me.

I called Kevin back and accepted his job offer. Then I called my boss at the freight company and gave him two week’s notice.

I didn’t want to make that call. I was scared my boss was going to yell at me when I told him I was breaking up with him. I made up a sob story and everything, but I didn’t need one.

He said, “Okay, I’ll keep you in town for the next two weeks.”

He gave someone else my run and for two weeks I drove whatever truck was available while I picked up and dropped off trailers around town.

I was pissed that he didn’t ask me why I was quitting. Didn’t he care that I’d betrayed him for another company? Did my work mean nothing to him?

I tried to imagine what driving a roll-off truck would be like. That was back in the eighties so I couldn’t just pull up a video on my phone. After work I drove by the lot to look at Miller Disposal's trucks.

I could tell which ones were roll-off trucks because I knew what a trash truck looked like. The roll-off trucks were oddly shaped. If there was a roll-off container on it, it looked like an oddly shaped dump truck. If it didn’t have a container on it, it looked like nothing I’d ever seen before. Like it was hauling around a short section of railroad tracks.

The tracks could be tipped up, like a dump truck. There was a cable attached to hydraulic cylinders with a metal loop on the end. The driver backed up to a container sitting on the ground, line up the truck’s rails with another set of rails that ran along the bottom of the roll-off container, then put the cable loop on a hook. When the cable was retracted it would pull the container onto the rails.

Easy peasy.

Well, mostly. You had to keep the container’s rails lined up with the truck’s rails or it would flip over the side. I witnessed people flipping roll-off containers over the side of their trucks many times. I've done it a few times myself. It’s exciting though not something you should do for giggles: it’s really hard on the equipment.

During my last two weeks at the freight company Kevin Miller called to tell me he might not have a truck for me when I was scheduled to start. They had had a breakdown. The truck might still be in the shop.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to haul trailers anymore. I made great money at the freight company and had money in the bank, so when my two weeks was over I decided just to do what I wanted until Kevin had a truck for me to drive.

I never knew that if you saved up enough money to pay your bills for a month that you weren't required to have a job.

It was odd to think I’d be okay without going to work everyday. I could go to bed without setting an alarm. I could just ride my motorcycle around or read a book while all my friends were working. Having all the bills paid and not needing to go to work is a feeling I would chase for decades after that.

On my first day at Miller Disposal there was a flurry of activity as driver’s came in joshing with one another and gathering their route sheets before heading out. Trash trucks grumbled into life and trundled out the gate.

Kevin Miller was tall with white blonde hair. A driver I'd gotten to know who was constantly angry, described Kevin as Hitler’s wet dream, because he was tall, blond haired and blue eyed. Angry driver wasn’t at Miller disposal very long after I started.

Kevin's father, Oscar Miller, started the company in the early fifties. In the mid eighties it was being run by his youngest son Kevin. Oscar's two older sons took a shot at running their father's company, but there were, let's say, creative differences.

Oscar was a retired state senator. In the office there was a black and white picture on the wall of young Oscar on the floor of the state house sporting mutton chop whiskers.

Oscar liked to talk about the good old days when he’d empty his trash trucks into a large vat: he called it a warmer, and the pigs would eat the garbage. He told me black folks all over the county loved his trash-fed pigs.

Because Oscar had been a state senator he'd learned not to publicly bandy about the word that had to have been on the tip of his tongue.

Oscar sold the pigs cheap. He felt like he was a philanthropist.

Time travelling back to this moment I would love to tell you this was the first red-flag, but everyone I knew seemed to be racist, so I wasn't that surprised. Okay, no one I knew was quite that level of racist. Trash fed pigs? Wow.

I was also introduced to Curly Jones, a man who seemed to be about ten years older than me and toothless. Curly was a nickname due to his curly hair. He was Miller Disposal’s only full time roll-off driver.

My job on my first day at Miller Disposal was to ride around with Curly while he loaded roll-off containers and took them to the dump.

The truck Curly Jones was driving didn’t have a driver’s side door.

That they never mounted a mirror on the driver’s side might have been a red flag had I not been confronted with so many red flags at that point. Curly would just lean out and look behind him.

The door of Curly’s truck had been ripped off at a lumber yard. The story was that someone else had been driving the truck at the time: someone who no longer worked at Miller Disposal.

When they got out to throw a tarp over the container they neglected to close the driver's door. It isn’t required that you close the door but if you don't it's vulnerable to reckless forklift operators.

Curly had me drive his truck and load containers while he watched. I was pretty confident that I could do the job. So the next day I drove the truck I was assigned to.

I followed Curly to Excelsior Springs. We were to pick up two roll-off containers at a plant that made garden hoses. He would pick up the receiver box and I would pick up the open top box.

A receiver box is attached to a trash compactor with hooks and turn-buckles. Trash is loaded into a hopper in front of a large metal plunger that shoves it into the closed container through a hole in the back door. To dump the container you have to release it from the compactor by loosening the turn-buckles. You pull it away from the head and secure a small tarp over the hole that the trash is pushed through.

Receiver boxes are much heavier that open-top boxes because the materials are compacted until you can no longer put material inside.

Curly had lots of experience driving a roll-off truck compared to my nearly zero experience, so it surprised me to hear Curly loudly revving the engine of his truck.

When I was loading containers using his truck he said I didn't need to use the accelerator. The engine at idle was enough to pull it onto the bed.

Curly was trying to beat me to the finish line by getting his container on faster than I did.

I was busy watching my mirrors as I slowly and carefully winched the container onto my truck. I was a wee bit ahead of him because, as my trainer, he had watched me tarp and hook my container before he started loading his own.

Curly was watching my box slowly crawl onto my truck as the box was rapidly climbing onto his. Because his engine was so loud I couldn’t help glancing at his truck from time to time.

It seemed to me that Curly had lowered the truck’s rails too soon. The rails of the trash can are supposed to fit inside the rails of the truck, but it seemed like the rails were crosswise. That they were riding somewhat sidewards on top and not snuggled down inside.

I was watching my container's progress when the container being winched onto Curly’s truck slammed onto the ground.

It sounded like a stick of dynamite going off!

After everyone inside the garden hose manufacturing plant got a good look at what had made such a loud boom outside, Curly went inside to find a phone so he could call Kevin.

When Kevin got there he made it loud and clear that this wasn’t Curly’s first rodeo. Apparently Curly had flipped a different container off the other side of the truck. That was why the fender over the right side rear tires was all beat up. Now the fenders matched.

While Kevin was loudly interrogating Curly using colorful language that Oscar would never use I discovered that Curly was paying for the damage to the right side fender out of his paycheck and that Kevin expected him to pay for the left side as well.

Curly’s incompetent training was a red flag but what disturbed me more was that Kevin was comfortable screaming at his driver with a handful of people watching it happen. And that Kevin expected Curly to pay for an accident out of his own pocket. Or that Curly was still employed at Miller Disposal after having had so many accidents that he was personally paying for them.

The red flags were piling up and this was only my second day.