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.