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.