Back in the early 2000s I had a job I loved hauling tropical plants out of Florida to the Pacific Northwest. These were high-dollar multi-drop loads that required the driver to physically unload around 3,000-4,000 loose plants. One January, I even teamed a load to Alaska. But it seems like any sweet gig in trucking has its own shelf life and expiration date.
Things began going south when the old man hired his grandsons to help him run the company. The race cars began taking up residency in the diesel bays. With the race cars occupying the spaces where trucks were once serviced, the checks started getting “lost in the mail.” When the checks started getting lost in the mail, if you got hung out over the weekend you were lucky to even get a cash advance there toward the end.
One Thursday I was loading Christmas trees in North Carolina that needed to be in Miami the following morning. This was pre-cellphone American trucking. At least it was for me. As I recall, I got hung out too long at the farm and missed my chance to phone dispatch during business hours. So now I had to be in Miami the following morning. I was broke, desperately broke, and in dire need of a cup of coffee.
On I-95 I spied a sign that spelled salvation:
Free Coffee for Truckers
Santee Truck Stop
I wheeled in there, sighing with relief. I thought I’d just slide through the diesel pumps, get parked up, grab my coffee and go. The parking lot of the truck stop looked like its own truck show. Pressed-out Peterbilts with chicken lights, stainless steel trailers, chrome everywhere. I’d never seen such a concentration of chicken trucks in one space anywhere outside of the Mid-America Trucking Show. There was one problem, though. I couldn’t find any diesel pumps to slide through.
“What kind of truck stop doesn’t even sell diesel?” I asked out loud.
When I walked inside the place, I got my answer. There was a bevy of big-haired women of every race and creed congregated around various parts of the space. The room smelled of perfume, tobacco smoke, and sweat. One of them hailed me heartily, as if we were old acquaintances. A type of panic seized me. Is that Delia, my 8th-grade girlfriend? What will she think of me if she sees me in a place like this?
“How ya been?” she asked.
“Do we, like, know each other?”
“I’m Sugar. Would you like to go in back and talk?”
I stuttered then about just what we might talk about, and Sugar, sensing my naiveté, patiently explained the nature of the establishment I was in. Sugar’s profession was a much older one than truck driving. I stuttered some more and explained my financial predicament, my desperate need for a cup of coffee. She was unfazed.
“We do take all major fleetchecks," she said.
I learned later they even had a tire shop back there. Should you encounter, say, an “unexpected issue” with a tire in their parking lot, they could create a service call and help you capitalize a memorable experience. Maybe they were finding synergies and symbioses before synergies and symbioses were even a thing.
“Go getcha yer coffee, baby,” she said. “But if you change your mind, I’ll be right here.”
Not a lot of takers on the free coffee, apparently. It tasted like it had been sitting there all day, and was about strong enough to walk out of there with me. I was awake, now. I was wide awake. I made it to Miami on time and luckily got my advance the following morning.
A few years later, I had occasion to pass by the place where Santee had been. The old truck stop had been converted to an adult-DVD emporium. Gone was the chrome and stainless, glistening in the night. Now the lot was peppered with fleet trucks, container haulers with missing bumpers.
For some reason, I was overtaken by sadness. Maybe my brief but memorable encounter with Sugar and the stop’s free coffee represented what singer-songwriter Tom Russell called in his “Old America” song a time when “music still resonated through nightclubs, people gambled and drank and screwed and smoked… . The Old America where the big guilt and political correctness and the chain stores hadn’t sunk in so deep.”
The old truck stop had been no chain store, that's for sure. (Somewhere I heard it had been owned by a local politician -- some sheriff or judge, or so I’d been told.)
Or maybe its demise signaled my own pending decrepitude. I’ve been consigned to the fleet trucks now, too, rendered by age and injury just another hobbled old trucker, long broken from chasing myths. And yes, I’d been long-married by the time Sugar reduced me to a stuttering bumpkin. And in that regard I truly have a better wife and kids than I deserve. This year will make 44 years for Denise and me. As for that crooked old trucking company, it’s as faded in my memory now as the color of Sugar’s nail polish.
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