story by Steve Vire
photography by Sam Wilson

6:05AM May 27, 1975.

It’s barely dawn. The entire night has been spent on the road. Two gym bags hit the shoulder of the highway, followed by two silhouettes swinging out and dropping from the cab of an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer truck sitting in the pre-dawn haze, stopped dead in the middle of the road just long enough to allow a couple of weary travelers to return exactly to the spot from where their journey began seven days earlier. Thanks, good-byes, and meaningful handshakes are shared, and the 18-wheeler rolls on and makes its way up
and over Dobbs Hill while the two stand alone watching it disappear into the morning mist, contemplating their fate, and waiting to get on with their lives after a week-long adventure that will remain etched in their memories forever. This is the story of those seven days, their encounters with friends, relatives, and strangers who pick up hitchhikers along the way, but most importantly, the realization that we all are mere time travelers, mortals with our own stories and agendas, constantly moving from one place to another in this world, and occupying our time by interacting with others whose lives, whether
opposite or similar, are moving as well and at the same pace as our own. Somehow thru chance, fate, or some may say ‘divine intervention’, these lives manage to intersect and share a common reality at a certain particular place in time.

And that my friends, is precisely the place where this story begins………….

Chapter One: The Whitewash Job

It’s my birthday today. I am 22 years old. No cake, no party, no bullshit. I called my best friend, Big Chad, who just returned home for the summer from college in Tennessee, just as I had returned home a few days earlier for the summer from college in eastern KY. At that time, I had known him for 20 years, our families lived adjacent to each other in rural south-central Ky. We had played together since he rode his tricycle up the hill to see who I was when he was 4 and I was 3, and I was playing outside in a sandbox in the yard. Times were different then, kids actually played outside and had fun, really a time of
innocence that no one wanted to mess with or had any need to. Since then, we thought there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot we hadn’t seen, heard, talked about, or done in our short years, but we both were looking for even more adventure and trying to find ourselves. Both our families were expecting us to get summer jobs and earn some money for college in the fall. Since we were next-door neighbors, it didn’t take long for him to walk up the hill to my house and we quickly disappeared into the old barn to burn one. We both had the long hair, Fu-Manchu look of the day, and we thought we were “cool” and part of the
hippie movement sweeping the country at the time. In reality, we really didn’t know shit. We weren’t looking forward to summer jobs at all, what we envisioned was a summer filled with beer, pretty girls, and hanging out on the banks of Lake Cumberland, building bonfires until the wee hours of the morning getting trashed and pissing on rocks. But hey, reality would soon set in, as it always does. The pressure for summer jobs was on, starting with my dad who got home around noon for lunch. When we heard him pull up,
we quickly walked out of the fog in the barn, and into the sun outside, so as to keep him from coming in and figuring out what we were doing, although he probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. He was cool like that, you know.

“Hey, what are you boys doing in there?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing, just shootin’ the shit, lookin’ for something to do.” we said, not looking for a confrontation about what we were “really” doing.

“Well, what are you boys planning to do this summer, before you start working?” he asked. We looked at each other for some direction as to how to answer this trick question, but before we could get a word out, he said, “How about I pay you two to whitewash this house? I’ll pay you $120, and you can split it. Think about it and I’ll get the whitewash and brushes and if you want to do it you can start in the morning.  Probably take you a couple of days.” He left for work, and we quickly returned to the barn to discuss this project and burn another one.  

Big Chad says, “You know we could take this money and take a trip somewhere just for fun, where could we go? I know, let’s hitchhike to California.”  

“No way,” I said “That’s too far I’ve only got about a week before I have to start working for the state on the road crew filling up potholes, picking up dead dogs, and scraping roadkill off the pavement. Besides, that would take a lot more than $60 apiece, we need something cheap. Hey, maybe we could take a trip with our truck driver friends; let’s find out where they are going.”  

I called Wally, another old neighborhood friend, and he told me the small freight company he worked for was going to Florida to haul watermelons in 2-3 days, and we could go with them if we wanted. They weren’t supposed to have riders in their vehicles, but nobody had to know we were along for the ride. I had a cousin, Kenton whose family had recently moved from our hometown to Ft. Myers, Fl. so we hatched a plan to ride  with the truckers to the watermelon fields, then hitchhike our way down Florida’s west  coast to Ft. Myers 400 miles or so to visit him, and go hang out on the beaches, drink umbrella drinks and get fried, in more ways than one, most likely. He was a little younger than us, but still had a reputation when he lived back home as a “cool dude” and didn’t mind some heavy partying with something to drink and a little smoke and whatever else might go along with it.  

I let dad know that we were “in” for the whitewash job, and Big Chad and I got started early the next day. We were determined to finish in 2 days, collect the dough, and then hit the road. We told him our plans and his reply was, “Sounds like you boys just want to have a little fun before you get back here and settle in for the summer. Good luck!”  

If you have never whitewashed a house in the heat of summer, you just don’t know what you are missing. Whitewash is about like slopping mud on a wall, and the brushes are really big, get heavier with each stroke and as time goes on it just gets worse. You think your arms are about to fall off.  

Big Chad says, “No matter what, we are gonna finish this job, we’re gonna get that  money, we’re gonna go to Florida, and we are going to get plastered with Kenton, meet  some hot chicks, do who knows what, get some cool rides with people who like to toke  up and pick up hitchhikers, and have a helluva time, my friend, I can feel it in my bones!  Fuck it, fuck it ALL, Big Chad!”  

At this very moment, Big Chad had unintentionally created a motto, almost a mantra, which we could use extensively during this trip, and would be repeated time and time again for over 30 years and longer, when and where the situation was applicable. It mostly applied when one “throws caution to the wind” and moves on, or experiences some very bad luck or life situation which cannot be reversed or changed in any way. I was hoping he was right, because all I felt right then was sore aching muscles, bone weary from brushing that damn whitewash over, and over, and over again.  

After 2 days in that hot summer sun beating us down, we FINALLY finished the job, dad inspected it, we made a few corrections, and he says, “OK boys, you worked hard, you got this done quicker than I thought you would, so I am going to give you an extra $10 so here is $130 for your trip.”  

We were ecstatic. $65 each WOW! Visions of cold beer, hot chicks and beaches, great parties and cool people swirled in our heads that night, and the next day we packed up a couple of bags and planned to depart with the truckers. We had no idea how unprepared two inexperienced young, sheltered kids could be.  

5:00 PM May 23, 1975.

Dad gave us a ride to the shopping center parking lot to meet brothers Ronnie and Gary Muse, Wally Brown, and Bobby Bates. The tractor-trailer trucks were sitting in the middle of the parking lot, running lights on, idling and waiting for us to show up. We were running a little bit late. As soon as we get out of the car, they’re yelling at us, “C’mon motherfuckers, we ain’t got all day, we’ve only got 10 hrs. We have to be in Chiefland at the melon fields by 5 AM. and you shitheads ain’t gonna make us late.” 

Dad waved bye to us and drove off. They had 4 trucks, with each of the bigger trucks already loaded with a smaller truck called a “tandem axle” but they could still haul 15 tons of watermelons. The tractor-trailers could haul 2-3 times that much. They were already in the mode of watching the time really close, because if you are hauling perishable goods like ripe watermelons on open trailers with no cover or refrigeration, you had to be quick, efficient, and on-time cause “ain’t nobody gonna pay for no rotten melons,” they would say. Ronnie and Gary were driving the big 18-wheelers, with Wally and Bobby set to drive the smaller trucks when they were off-loaded at the watermelon patches.  

So, off we went into the dusk, in two eighteen wheelers hauling two more trucks, looking forward to what we hoped would be the time of our lives. Little did we know we were also in for the rides of our lives, both on these trucks and in the vehicles of the strangers who stopped and picked us up, almost all of them making an honest effort to help fellow human beings get along their way, to and from our destination of the Ft. Myers beaches  and, depending on how you looked at it, thru life as well. I brought along a little yellow notepad to keep notes in about our trip, in case something interesting happened. What follows is mostly derived from memory and also the notes Big Chad and I jotted down in that little yellow notepad, which I kept in a drawer for over 30 years.  

Chapter Two: The Trucker’s Ride South:  

Big Chad went with Ronnie, and I climbed into the cab with Gary. Wally was in the sleeper of Gary’s truck and Bobby in Ronnie’s sleeper. The deal was they were going to nap until about the halfway point, and then while Ronnie and Gary were sleeping, they would drive on into the headquarters of the watermelon operation. But that was just a loose plan; it depended on how everybody felt. With us not being truck drivers we were literally just along for the ride, and we had to stay up all night unless one of the others wanted to ride shotgun, and then we would get in the sleeper.  

Gary had the reputation around the area of being an absolute crazy, freaky, hippie type dude hell bent on having fun at all costs, monetarily or otherwise, and NOTHING (and I do mean nothing) was taken off the table. He could drink more beer, shoot pool better, drive faster cars and outrun the law easier, grow better pot then you could buy, do more drugs, and love more women than anybody else. Just ask him, he’d tell you. But besides all that he worked harder than anyone else as well, trucking and farming along with his dad and his brother Ronnie, who by the way shared all the same character traits as Gary.  That being said, it was not unusual for them to have words, or even escalate into a brawl or a fistfight at any given moment, but in the end, blood was thicker than water, and if anybody threatened either one of them or their friends, they were brothers above all, and a formidable team you wanted on your side in the event of any trouble. They never started very many fights, but they damn sure ended a lot of them by whatever means required, certainly not excluding all types of weapons and/or firearms.  

Wally and Bobby were younger drivers, barely 20 but both had years of experience on the road already. This was one of the longer trips they had taken, and both were anxious to get behind the wheel of their own ride and do some major hauling in those tandems to prove they were ready whenever the time came to move up to the big rigs. Not more than 5 miles up the road the first thing Gary said to me was “Got any dope?”  

“No, sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if you cared if we had any in the truck or not”.  

“Hell no, why would I care I just wanted to help you smoke it.” he said. “Anyway, it don’t make a damn, we can get some when we stop, but that won’t be for a while, we’ll go till we have to get fuel. If you need to take a piss, we ain’t gonna stop, there’s a Coke bottle under the seat, just use that. The only thing you can’t do is take a shit your pants, cause I’ll be damned if I’m going to clean up this truck, so just don’t do it.”  

I agreed that I would not be doing that. He yelled into the CB microphone “Got yer wild man here eastbound and down, what’s yer 20?”. Wild man was Gary’s CB “handle” or nickname so only those who really knew him would know who was talking. “How about  ya, preacher, you on the air?”  

Then Ronnie replied from the other truck, “10-4” to acknowledge he was on and communicating. I don’t believe he ever preached anywhere, but somebody once said he got really drunk and could have held a revival and converted a few people one time.  Gary was shifting gears and looked over at me and said, “What’s your CB handle?”  

I thought for a minute and said, “Well, I don’t have one, but I might can make one up.”  

He said “You gotta have a handle if you’re going to help get this truck on down the road, I’ll tell you what to say, and you can talk to the other truckers or whoever, so you need to figure out what’s yer handle?”  

I had been listening to this hippie California country-rock band called “New Riders of the Purple Sage” lately, and there was a song on their album called “Gypsy Cowboy”. So strictly for the purpose of this trip, I quickly became the “gypsy cowboy” from Kentucky.  

“Gypsy Cowboy, huh?” Gary said. “I like it”. We traveled east over to interstate 75, hung a right to go south, and then it was “hammer down”. The darker and later it got the less traffic we had to deal with, and that’s the way they liked it. Damn 4-wheelers were always in the way, cuttin’ you off, stoppin’ in front of you for no reason, shootin’ you the bird as they drove by, and generally just being a pain in the ass. They fell into the same category as Roadway trucks, Gary said “Always on the road, and always in the way.”  

And so, we were now on the interstate, runnin’ south, haulin’ ass toward Florida, me and the Big Chad, not a fuckin’ care in the world at the moment. Gary says to me.”Now it’s your job to make sure I don’t go to sleep, I’ve been up about 24 hours already, and you have to talk to me and keep me awake.”  

“What do you want me to talk about?” I asked, not sure if there was a particular subject he might have in mind. I found out when he said, “It don’t make a fuck to me what you talk about as long as you just keep talking, and don’t shut up either cause I’ll go to sleep.”  

So, we talked about every fuckin’ thing you can imagine to do with trucks, life, the quality and quantity of pot available, how and where to grow it, taking speed to stay awake, the price of diesel fuel, all things automotive, and how the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I could only guess, but I bet Big Chad and Ronnie were having some deep philosophical discussions themselves in their truck also. Gary had a big, huge thermos of coffee, but he had that downed within an hour of being on the road. I started drifting off to sleep about 11:30 and had run out of bullshit to talk about. Gary would periodically yell “Hey, fucker! Wake up! You are supposed be keeping me awake not the other way around!” So, I would start talking again, telling more bullshit stories about something I did in the past, or some trip I took somewhere, or whatever. Stories like this one:  

You know, man, last year about this time, we were at Virginia Beach, Virginia with that rock band we threw together when we were living in Lexington, Wally (the trucker) was playing drums, I was playing guitar and piano, two other guys on guitar and bass, and a roadie who handled the sound etc. called Pittman. We landed this gig at this after-hours club under this cheesy hotel, some booking agent knew the owners, so we drove all the way from Lexington, Ky. to Newport News, Virginia to do this gig for 2 weeks. It was from 1 AM to 5:30 in the morning, really shitty hours. We would go around to other clubs in the area at night and check them out, and since it was close to the naval base at Norfolk, the bars were always full of servicemen and chicks. We went to this one club, the band that was playing there was a cross between Alice Cooper and Kiss, some real weird looking dudes with lots of makeup and strange outfits from up East in Jersey. We were just longhairs with worn out blue jeans, so they probably thought we were strange.  We met the band on one of their breaks and the lead guitar player was some dude named Gene, pretty nice guy in a solid white suit and red tie, with a big black Abraham Lincoln top hat and a huge red ostrich feather sticking out of it. We talked and hung out during their breaks, and we invited them over to the afterhours club later after they finished for the night. There was this knockout waitress there serving us drinks, and I was kinda  hitting up on her to come over to the club too, I was hoping to hook up with her after we finished our set for some fun or whatever. She said she would try to make it over when she got off work about 2 AM. I wasn’t counting on it.  

We left the bar and went back to our place and started playing our after-hours gig at 1 AM, and sure enough the band showed up, and the waitress I had been hitting on was with Gene the guitar player. Damn it! Foiled again, I thought. We had a pretty good gig  going and the bar was really hopping with people early that morning, but we ran out of  songs to play about 4:30AM and this dude in the audience named Ty kept yelling “Free  Bird” at us but we only knew the chords to “Call Me the Breeze” and “Sweet Home  Alabama” off Skynyrd’s 2nd album, so to shut him up and buy us some time we asked him if he could sing the blues, and he said “Hell yeah I can sing the blues”. So, we got him up on stage and started jamming to Clapton’s “Have you Ever Loved a Woman” from Derek and the Dominoes album, and mixed in some “Stormy Monday”, the Allman Brothers version. This guy actually rocked! He could really sing and even knew all the words, so we jammed out with this guy for about 45 minutes and made it to 5:30AM and the set was over.  

During this time frame the other band and the waitress waved to us while we were playing and left. Damn it! We all had a whiskey and coke to wind down after the gig and old Ty was just going nuts shakin’ our hands and patting us on the back thanking us for letting him sing, he didn’t know he had really bailed us out since we ran out of material, and we didn’t bother to tell him. He said “Boys, I want to give you something as a token of my appreciation for letting me sing, here’s 4 hits of chocolate mescaline, the finest in the land, just better be careful with it.” He dropped 4 small tablets into my hand. Now we weren’t really into that kind of thing, but our roadie Pittman was. He would do anything once, twice if it didn’t hurt too bad. So, we gave him 2 of them and split the others into halves between us four.  

“Bottoms up” we said, with straight Wild Turkey and coke back, we all washed it down and walked out the door of the club into the early dawn, and since we were only about a quarter mile from the beach, we started to walk over there. Suddenly something touched my arm. It was the waitress from the club we went to, the one who came to our gig with the band.  

She said, “You were so nice to me, I just had to come back and see you and talk to you.”  

“OK”. I said slowly with a smile, “I am so glad you did”, thinking my luck was finally changing. Together we walked over to the beach and watched the sun rise and shot the shit for a while. What a beautiful sunrise it was. Huge US naval ships were in the distance on maneuvers or protecting the harbor. I asked her back to our hotel room, hoping I would get lucky. I mean, this girl was hot in more ways than one.  

Unfortunately, the air conditioner wasn’t working very well so we left the windows open for whatever breeze might blow thru. Anyway, I thought to myself, now is the time to make a move here, so I somehow talked her into bed and just when things were getting interesting, BAM! Pittman jumps thru the hotel room window, hits the floor, then bounces onto the bed almost trampling us, does a cartwheel and ends up in the middle of the room, wild-eyed and looking around everywhere:  

“It’s the fuckin’ cops they’re after me, we’re all gonna get busted, they’re out there looking for me”. I jumped up and looked outside, there was nothing.  

“Damnit, Pittman!” I said in severe frustration, “Get the fuck out of here, man, gimme a break!” “OK, OK,” he said “I’m really sorry I was just trying to get away from the law.” He quietly slinked over and climbed back out the window and was gone.  

“OK baby, now where were we,” I said, knowing that the mood was gone, but hoping for a miracle anyway.  

“Well, I believe you were just getting ready to take me home, sweetheart.” she said.  

Damn it! Just my luck, I thought. I swear I could fall into a truckload of tits and come out sucking my thumb every time. We got dressed, went outside and got into the car, and she started giving me directions to her place.  

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said. “I have to go by my mother’s and pick up my kid first. Do you mind?” Oh shit, I thought what I have got myself into now. But being the unlucky son-of-a-bitch that I am (and such a nice guy), I said OK. I nervously pulled up in front of this house she had directed me to and she said, “I’ll be right back”. I checked the rearview mirror and looked around like crazy. Visions of pissed off husbands and/or boyfriends flashed thru my mind as I waited, it seemed like eternity. I thought about just driving off but in less than a minute she was back with a little 3-year-old boy.  

“Get in the back honey”, she said as she raised the sat up, put him in the back seat and climbed in the front. The little boy looked at me and said “Gene, Gene, hey Gene!” I was speechless. The waitress said, “No honey, this is not Gene, this is uh, …uh, ………what did you say your name was?”  

“Chad”, I said, just call me Chad. “OK, Chad,” said the little boy. The waitress just looked at me and shook her head, “Your name’s not Chad, is it?”  

“Sure, it is”, I said. She gave me this dirty look and said, “I just don’t fuckin’ know about you, ya know?”  

“Nor I, you,” I said. “You could have taken me out here into a rat’s nest, and I would have been a sitting duck.”  

“Yeah,” she said, “but I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that to you. You’re such a really nice guy”  

Nice guy, I thought. Finishing last, or not at all comes to mind. What did that get me in this case? Nothing. Damn it! On the way back she gave me directions, I dropped her and the kid off at some apartment complex and drove away, wondering how in the hell I can get my ass into these situations.  

When I got back to the hotel, it was about noon or a little after; the sun was burnin’ down hot as hell. After dropping them off, I had stopped and got a 12 pack of beer on the way, and planned to go back to the beach, drink some beer and chill out for a while, and just meditate on my unluckiness. Nobody was in the hotel room; I figured they were off fuckin’ around somewhere. I headed down to the beach with the beer and just started walking along the water’s edge. There laying on the sand on his back, looking like a whale that had just washed up, was our roadie, Pittman, with nothing on but a pair of cutoff blue jean shorts. The tide had come in and gone back out while he was lying there, and he was just motionless on a little sand pedestal kinda thing where the tide had gone out and pulled the sand out all around him, really weird looking. Sorta like some kind of offering to the Gods. I checked to see if he was breathing. He was.  

“Hey, asshole” I yelled. He woke up with a start.  

“Where’s the cops, oh shit”, he said, looking around like he had just seen them.  

“Hell, I don’t know, but they’re not around here, what the fuck have you been doing?” I asked.  

“I came down here after the cops were after me to hide, and laid down, I guess I’ve been asleep since then,” he said.  

“Well, you look like a damn lobster that’s been thru a fire, you are sunburned all to hell, you need to go inside,” I told him, and I mean he looked rough. It was the worst sunburn I had ever seen. He was miserable for days after this, blistered and peeling. Even his eyelids were burnt. He bought a fifth of Jack Daniels and was chugging it straight all day just to try to kill the pain.  

“Goddamn, it hurts even to blink,” he said. “This suck! Sunglasses hurt my damn head, it’s so sunburnt, I need to prop my eyelids open somehow. I swear, I am never going to sleep on the beach again, much less take too much chocolate mescaline. Hey, I did have some pretty good dreams though, I might just try it again.”  

“Forget that shit. Put some damn sunblock on your eyelids next time”, I said.  

I turned and looked at Gary, he was drifting off to sleep at the wheel again.  “Now it’s your turn to tell me a story so wake up,” I said.  

“OK,” Gary said, and he thought for a bit. “Here’s my story. I had been on the road for 3 weeks or so trucking cross-country hauling steel when I came home for a few days the first of April. I wanted to spend some time with my wife, but she tells me she is having a fuckin’ Tupperware party at the house that night, so I had to find some way to kill some time until that Tupperware bullshit was over with. I hadn’t cleaned my .357 Smith & Wesson in quite a while, so I thought I would just take it apart on the kitchen table and clean it while they were in the living room playing games and whatnot, just to sell those damn pieces of plastic.  

Now about 2 or 3 weeks before I left this last time, my wife told me there was a mouse in the kitchen, cause she had seen mouse shit everywhere around the stove and around the trashcan, so I put out some traps trying to catch him. I would find the traps snapped, but the cheese was gone and no mouse. So, I would move the traps around and reset them and the next morning they would be snapped again but no mouse, I mean this fucker was Houdini mouse. So, without catching him, I had to go on the road.  

Then a day or 2 before I was to get home on April 1^st, I called my wife from the road to check in and she said the stove had broke and we needed to get a new one, so I told her just call somebody and have them deliver a new stove and set it up, so she did.  

Now I am sitting there at the kitchen table cleaning my .357 and out of the corner of my eye I saw something move, it was that damn mouse crawling around on my new stove. I just sat there and watched him for a little bit, and just kept on cleaning my gun, and then like he knew I was watching or something, that son-of-a-bitch stood up on his hind legs and looked wiggling that damn little nose and whiskers at me, and waving his little bitty front feet at me like he was saying “You can’t catch me, motherfucker!”  

Now that really pissed me off to the point that I just slowly and quietly started reassembling my pistol piece by piece. Now and then I would look over there and the mouse just kept walking around and occasionally stood up to scoff at me and sniff around on top of the stove. I got the pistol put together and picked up a bullet and put in it, really slow like and cocked it and had it ready to shoot. I pointed it at him and he just looked at me. I really wanted him to get off that stove before I shot him, but he just stayed up there wigglin’ that dame little nose, so I said “Fuck it, if he stands up and looks over here one more time, he’s a goner.”  

Sure enough he stood up and I had a bead on him and KABOOM! The pistol went off and I blew that Houdini son-of-a-bitch to kingdom come! I blew a huge hole thru the back of the new stove and thru the wall and blew mouse brains and guts everywhere, there wasn’t nothing left of him. Not knowing what the hell was going on in the kitchen, after hearing the gunshot, my wife and the women in the living room at the Tupperware party came running into the kitchen yelling, “Oh shit, what happened, what happened!”  

My wife says, “Oh my God, are you OK, Gary?” and then I realized she thought I had  shot myself, putting 2 and 2 together and seeing the guts brains etc. all over the wall and  the stove, so just for fun I rolled my eyes back in my head, dropped the pistol and fell out  of the chair into the kitchen floor and rolled over like I was dead or something, just like those guys did in those old Western movies. I just laid there face down and she started hollering and crying and shakin’ me and shit, and one of the women at the party says, “Hey, he’s not bleeding anywhere! He’s fakin’.”  

So real quick, I jumped up and yelled “April Fools” and took off running, my wife  grabbed a cast iron skillet from above the stove that still had mouse guts on it and started  swinging, I mean I was running around the kitchen like hell trippin’ over chairs and  whatnot, and finally I made it out the door with her right behind me cussin’ and swinging  the skillet, she called me every fuckin’ name in the book, and I was laughing so hard I  couldn’t hardly run, I thought I was going to fall over right there in the yard. It may not have been that funny to somebody else, but if you knew my wife you would have laughed your ass off too. I kept telling her “Don’t hit me goddamn it, I killed the fuckin’ mouse didn’t I!” She didn’t give a shit about the mouse; she was just pissed at me for playing dead. Anyway, that’s my story, now you have to tell another one.”  

‘OK,” I said, “I’ll try.”  

Really getting tired, I was nodding off in the middle of another story, then I woke up with a jolt when I felt some unusual bumpiness and some loud noises kinda like we were running over something rough. I looked over and Gary was dead asleep slumped over and laying on the steering wheel, his foot still on the gas and the speedometer was reading 85 and the truck had drifted to the right and was almost into the guard rail. Oh shit, we were running off the road!  

I went ballistic, “Gary, goddamn it, wake up! Hey! Wakeup! You’re asleep! Wake up! We’re running off the fuckin’ road, but he wouldn’t wake up, so I climbed over the doghouse and grabbed the steering wheel to keep us out of the guard rails, at the same somehow, I grabbed him and started shaking like hell. He went wide-awake bug-eyed, sat up evaluated the situation and instantly reacted gradually bringing the truck back onto the highway, man it was close as hell. Talk about a puckered-up butthole. You wouldn’t believe how much talking I did after that; I wouldn’t shut up. I was talking, singing,  playin’ drums on the dashboard, starting small fires in the ashtray, hell anything to keep him awake until we got to the truck stop for fuel, coffee, some white crosses, and black beauties to stay awake. Scared me so bad, I thought for a moment I was going to break the cardinal rule of trucking. Don’t take a shit in the truck. I’ll admit it was close, but I didn’t.  

A little after midnight we pulled into a truck stop somewhere in Georgia. Everybody went in and got something to eat, made sure they didn’t break the cardinal rule in the future, drank a shitload of coffee, filled up the thermoses, shot the shit with other truck drivers, traded some cash for some pills etc. They did some calculations to try to determine when we would arrive in Chiefland at the watermelon patch headquarters. We were on time, and all was well.  

Gary said, “I’m thirsty so I’m going to get a case of Bud and ice it down in that cooler I have in the truck.”  

While he was doing that, I told Big Chad, “You know I think you might want to ride with Gary for a while, he’s about to just talk me to fuckin’ death.”  

“OK, no problem”, says Chad, so, we swapped out and he went with Gary for the rest of the way. Gary never fell asleep on him, but I got in Ronnie’s truck and crawled up in the sleeper to calm down. Wally and Bobby got their naps out and were ready to drive or ride shotgun. I thought if anything like that happens again, at least I wouldn’t have to watch. 

Next thing I know something is poking me in the back, and somebody says “Wake up, asshole, we’re here!” It was Big Chad. It was about 5 AM and I mean I had a really good nap. He said, “Well I guess I have a CB handle now, just like you.”  

“Really?” I asked, rubbing my eyes trying to wake up a little. “So, what is it?”  

“The Bartender’, he said. “Gary put that cooler full of beer on the passenger side of the truck under my feet and told me he needed a bartender to get beer out and open it up for him, so he started calling me ‘Bartender’ and declared that my new CB handle. I guess he drank over half of that case of beer, I couldn’t sleep for popping open beers all the time.  Every time I would nod off, he was yelling, “Bartender, get me another one of them beers.”  

“Cool,” I said. It was still dark and foggy outside, but there were people milling around drinking coffee and eating doughnuts etc. Dawn was almost upon us.  

Gary said, “Now all we have to do is figure out a way to get these trucks off these trailers.” There was no loading dock or anything, so they had their work cut out for them.  

Ronnie says, “We’ll pull over here and back up to this dirt mound and see if we can come up with some railroad ties or something to span this gap so we can drive the trucks off.” Gary didn’t agree with that, so they exchanged words, called each other a dumbass motherfucker etc. and almost got into a fist fight over it.  

Then Bobby Bates says, “If you back it up right over there, I’ll get in the truck and just floor it and drive off the end of the trailer.” Everybody looked at him like he had lost his  frickin’ mind, but actually that had happened years ago and there was no more to lose.  

“OK, by God, I’ll back it up there and I want to see you drive that truck off that trailer,” said Ronnie, so he gets in the semi and backs up to the dirt mound as close as he could get, and Bobby climbed up and got in the tandem truck. Keep in mind this was a brand-new truck and had never even been on the road yet, this was its “maiden voyage” so to speak. I guess there was about a 4-to-5-foot gap between the end of the big truck’s trailer and the ground of the incline, which was then approximately equal to the height of the end of the flatbed trailer, just too far away from it. The trailer was at least 5 or 6 feet high. They had found a couple of 4x4s and some 2 x 12 boards to make a makeshift bridge, which looked really weak.  

Somebody yelled “give her hell” and Bobby racing the engine, put it in gear and floored the tandem to get up at least a small amount of speed before getting to the end of the trailer. As soon as the front wheels hit it, the bridge splintered and collapsed, but it held long enough for them to kinda hit and bounce back up, and the momentum he had going carried the front end of the truck off onto the dirt mound, but left the rear end still on the trailer, I mean that thing bottomed out that front end hard! So now they had the 4-5 foot gap under the truck between the trailer and the ground and had to get the rear end off, as well. You could walk thru under the truck from one side to the other, no problem. 

By this time people were pouring out of the office to see what the hell these fools were trying to do. The brothers surveyed the scene for a few minutes, then Ronnie climbed under the tandem truck in between the end of the trailer and the ground and stuck what was left of the 4x4s and boards back up there so the rear wheels would hit them as the truck was coming off the trailer, now I mean this was no more than a prayer. Bobby jumped back up into the truck, put it in gear and took off again. When the rear wheels hit  the boards, they held for just a second before they gave way, but that was enough for the  rear end of the tandem to clear the trailer, and then it bottomed out and bounced up and  down as Bobby cleared the trailer and circled back around into the parking lot, hanging  out the window pumping his fist in the air and yelling “Hell Yeah, motherfucker!!”  

Then they did the same with the other truck. All the old timers just walked away shaking their heads in disbelief that some idiot would even consider driving off the rear of an 18- wheeler with no ramp, no loading dock, no nothing. They just didn’t know them ol’ Kentucky boys very well, that’s for sure.  

After crawling under the truck and surveying the situation Bobby said, “She ain’t hurt, and she’s drivable.” He got his hanging clothes from Ronnie’s truck and standing on the running board and looking around in the cab of the brand-new truck for a coat hanger, he noticed there was none.  

He said “Now that’s fucked up, a brand-new truck with nowhere to hang your clothes! I’m going to take care of this shit.” He found a chisel and a small sledgehammer in Ronnie’s tools, climbed back into the cab and proceeded to bash a jagged hole inside the new cab in the shiny red metal right behind the passenger’s seat area to the left of the rear window.  He stuck the hanger in the hole and says, “There you go, by God somewhere to hang your shirt, they shoulda done that at the damn factory.”  

We all then went into the office area of the watermelon operation. The cooks had a hot buffet style breakfast going for anyone who was planning on working the melon fields as well as the truckers who were going to haul the melons. For all they knew Big Chad and me were truckers, so we just went thru the line like everyone else. We were watching our money close as hell but still had to eat, and this was free, so we took advantage of it. We wanted enough money to be able to party hard in Ft. Myers, so we didn’t want to spend anything. Big Chad had only the $65 from the whitewash job, but I had rat-holed another $50 before we left so I had $115. They started passing out cards to the field hands who were going to pick the melons, dawn-to-dusk hard labor in the summer sun paid $50 a day. You got fed lunch in the field of 2 sandwiches and a soft drink, and when you got back you got your $50 and a steak dinner. Most all of these guys were black and were regulars working the fields. They were sizing us up, wondering what we were doing there and if we were going to do the field work as well.  

Big Chad said, “I think I might go for working and get some more money, what about you?”  

“Nah,” I said, “I’ve got enough I think to make it”. 

“Pussy”, said Big Chad.  

“Hey, fuck you too,” I said, as I wished him luck anyway as they jumped on the back of an old work truck to take them to the melon fields for the day. The black dudes were talking trash to Big Chad like he had no idea what he was getting into. I wouldn’t see him again until around 6 PM. The manager at the office told Wally he needed to have a tandem truck load of melons delivered to a produce vendor about 100 miles north, so Wally volunteered for that trip with his truck. He said I could just come along with him for the ride if I wanted and when we got back, we would hook up with Big Chad and the others and go hit some local bars for some beers and fun. So, in what seemed like no time, they loaded up his truck with melons and we were off.  

Man, what fun it was, windows down stereo blaring Allman Brothers Band live at the Fillmore, just trucking along with about 15 tons of watermelons. Wally had the address of the produce vendor’s warehouse, and when we got there, we could see the but couldn’t find the driveway to get over to the loading dock. Once we found the driveway, Wally was passing it and then hit the brakes and thru it in reverse. As he started to back up, POP! There was a hell of a loud bang under the truck like something broke. We jumped out to look. It did.  

The driveshaft was lying there on the road underneath, and that truck was going nowhere.  We were about 100 yards from the loading dock. After at least 5 minutes of cussing and bitching, kickin’ tires and throwin’ shit, Wally calmed down, sat down on the curb and said “Well, fuck it I am going to have to call a tow truck just to tow this motherfucker 100 yards and back it up to the loading dock over there, now ain’t this some shit if I ever seen it!”  

Since cellphones did not exist at this time, we walked to the closest gas station to use the pay phone. He looked up the number for a tow truck and called them to come out. When he hung up, he said, “Well there goes $175 for 15 minutes work for the tow truck. I ain’t  got but $200 in my pocket. They won’t take nothin’ but cash either. Hell, lets blow some more money while we’re at it,” so he called the closest truck stop to send a mechanic to fix the truck while the melons were off-loaded. At least they would take a credit card.  

We walked back over to the truck, and we picked up the driveshaft and laid it in the back on top of the watermelons. The wrecker showed up, hooked up to the front end and drove us over to the loading dock and backed us up to it, collected his money and left. Right then we got swamped with black dudes climbing all over the truck, every day these guys just hung out there at the loading dock, waiting for trucks to back up and pay them to unload the melons. The produce guys told us it was not the vendors responsibility to get the melons off, it was the truckers. So, you can see, this situation went from bad to very much worse just like that. 

The black dudes started heaving the watermelons out of the truck and we tried to stop them and Wally said, “Hold on, hold on, I don’t have any fuckin’ money to pay you all, stop!”  

They all laughed and kept on slinging the melons, they thought he was kidding. He damn near had to start a fight with them to get them to stop working. He opened up his wallet for them to see and said, “Look here, $25 is all I got now no shit stop working.”  

Everybody stopped and walked off, except one dude. He said “Man, my wife and baby is at home and I gotta go back with some money for some baby food, I’ll do it for $25.” And you know, that was a godsend; because without him I don’t think we would have ever got those melons off that truck.  

You know you don’t think about 20 lbs being very heavy, and you think throwing 20lbs for 10 or 15 feet is pretty easy thing to do, but if you combine that with degree Florida heat with the sun bearing down on you and a friggin’ truckload of 20 pounders to go, it’s not easy anymore. Catching a 20 lb. melon at 15 feet ain’t no piece of cake either.  

Here’s how we did it. First you get 2 guys in the truck taking turns throwing melons at one guy on the loading dock. Then when that gets to be too far, one guy picks up the melon in the truck and throws it to the other guy toward the back of the truck, then that guy throws it out of the back of the truck to the guy on the loading dock who puts it on a pallet with a cage on it. When the pallet’s full the produce guy has a forklift move the pallet and give you an empty one. You gotta get into a rhythm with the throwing and catching, or you fuck up and drop ’em. We threw melons for at least 4 hours or more. I thought my arms were going to fall off. I thought I was going to pass out from heat stroke and exhaustion. But we finally got it done. The mechanic had come and replaced the universal joints and reinstalled the drive shaft in the truck while we were getting all those damn melons off there. Wally gave the black dude the $25 and apologized for not having more, but the guy was thankful just to get that much. The wrecker had pulled the truck over the scales on the way in, so they had weighed the truck before backing it up to the dock. We were curious as to how many melons were on there, so on the way out when they weighed the empty truck to determine what the trucking company got paid, so we took the difference and divided it by 20lbs, which was an average melon. Out of 1,653 melons, we busted 3 or 4, but hey it’s easy to drop 20 lbs. thrown at you 1,653 times if you’re not careful. This made whitewashing a house look like child’s play. Man, I thought my arms were tired after brushing whitewash on a wall, but now my arms were absolute friggin’ jello. There was no comparison. This was a hell of a lot worse and paid nothing but a truck ride. But what a ride it was.  

So, with that done finally, we were heading on back to the melon fields. I mean we were fuckin’ beat down dead dog tired. We pulled up and got out, Ronnie and Gary were there, their 18-wheelers loaded up with watermelons, getting ready to leave out early the next morning. 

Gary says, “Well it’s about goddamn time you all got here, since you all been fuckin’ off all day ridin’ around doin’ nothing, we been here waitin’ on you to get back so we can go PARTY!”  

We told them our hard-luck story, but they didn’t give a shit that we had to unload the truck, whether we were tired, or anything else, they were just interested in hitting the bars, shooting pool, hustling some cash, women, etc. I found Big Chad who had been in from the melon fields for a while, asleep on a wooden picnic table inside the place.  

I woke him up to go with us, but he said, “Fuck no, man, I am too tired and besides I can’t go, just look at my feet. All I had on was these tennis shoes, everybody else had on rubber boots, cause you’re standing in wet mushy clay and sand all day long. Nobody told me that. Those black dudes kept raggin’ on me tellin’ me to quit and go back to the office, that white boys couldn’t make it, pissed me off so bad I was just determined to prove them wrong.”  

His feet were all swelled up, a white wrinkled cracked and blistered bloody mess. I thought unloading melons was rough, but after seeing that, I realized that I was the one with the better job that day. I felt sorry for him, but there was nothing I could do about it.  

I said, “You’re sure you don’t want to go?”  

He says, “No, I’m just going to stay here and keep my money for the party in Ft. Myers.”  

So, as I was walking off, I turned about halfway around toward him. “OK, pussy” I said, and kept on walking, but I sped up a little bit in case he wanted to come after me and beat the shit out of me. Lucky for me, he didn’t feel like standing up to chase my ass, but I betcha he wanted to.  

He yelled, “Fuck you, too!” as I walked out the door.  

So, the rest of us left the melon fields and went to some little old backwoods roadhouse  there in central Florida, they had cold longneck beer and pool tables, a band playing  southern rock in the back, and people milling around all over the place, cigarette smoke  was so thick you could cut it with a knife, this juke joint was obviously jumpin’ and definitely where it was happening. It was full of bikers, day laborers, hippies, truck drivers, you name it. They should have called the place “The Gun and Knife Club”, but it didn’t have a name at all, just a big neon “OPEN” sign blinking out front.

We all got some cold longnecks and sat down at a table to observe the crowd and listen to the band.  Somebody yelled “Free Bird” and the band jumped right into it and started playing it.  Made sense, I thought, since Lynyrd Skynyrd was from Jacksonville, and if you were a band in central Florida at that day and time, not playing “Free Bird” might just get your damn ass kicked if you weren’t careful.

Ronnie and Gary started shooting pool and pretending they couldn’t even hardly hold a pool cue and suckered these guys in by losing a little money. They acted like they didn’t even know each other, getting into the game at different times. Then if one followed the other, they would set up shots for each other. It got to where Ronnie would win the money, then Gary would win the money.

Then after a few games of running the tables and taking everyboby’s money, the other guys wised up and figured it out. I thought pool cues were going to start swinging and a fight was going to break out. Then Ronnie and Gary ‘fessed up and told ‘em “OK, ok, we hustled you, but how about this, here’s all the money we won, we’ll pay for all the beer till it runs out and we can just keep shootin’ pool.” The rednecks looked at each other and said, “Well, OK sounds good, what the hell.” So, they started paying for all the beer with their winnings, that kept the guys from getting any more pissed off and everybody had a hell of a fun time.  

As usual, I was just along for the ride, so I couldn’t leave until Gary or Ronnie left in their trucks. They had dropped the trailers at the melon patch for the ride out to the bar and drove the trucks “bob-tailed” to the gun and knife club. About midnight, after I lost track of Ronnie and Gary in the club, I was feeling really dead from all that melon tossing earlier, so I had the bright idea I would go get in Ronnie’s truck and crawl in the sleeper to take a nap. Bad move. I had the door open and jumped up in the seat when Ronnie stuck his head out of the sleeper, “Hey motherfucker, ever think about knockin’ first?”  

Then I heard some chick say, “Who the fuck is that?”  

Ronnie says, “Just some asshole.” Then to me he says, “Hey I want you to meet my girlfriend here when I come down this way, we get together and have a lot of fun, I call her “Snagglepuss”, you know like that cartoon lion on TV except instead of Snaggletooth, I call her Snagglepuss, you want to see why?”  

Oh shit, I thought, another trick question here, so what-the-fuck I said, “Yea, I want to see why.” Then she stuck her head out of the sleeper, popped out her two front teeth, and holding her partial, grinned from ear to ear. Ronnie says, “I told her if she’d pull her teeth I would marry her.” They laughed their asses off at me, I guess I turned white, red, or whatever color from embarrassment, but anyway, I jumped out and left, they were still laughing at me as I walked over to Gary’s truck and knocked on the door this time. No answer. So, I jumped up in there and crawled into the sleeper and dozed off.  

The next thing I know somebody is poking me in the back, “Hey asshole, you’re not going with us, and you need to get out. Ain’t you goin’ to Fort Myers?” It was early morning. I had slept thru the trip back to the melon fields, and Gary and Ronnie were getting ready to leave.  

This was the point where Big Chad and me were to break off on our own with what was left of our $130, our thumbs, and 2 gym bags, standing in front of the melon operation’s field office early in the morning.  

Ronnie says, “If you guys are ready to go, I got this feller here says he will give you a ride out to the main highway so you can catch a ride thru Williston to I-75, you won’t ever get a ride in front of this place,” so this dude says, “Come on”. 

We got in the car with him and rode a few miles out to a main road where he dropped us off. It was still really foggy, and the sun hadn’t come up yet, and there we were by the side of the road by ourselves.  

“Well motherfucker, here we are”, I said to Big Chad. He was looking at a map we had brought along and plotting our course.  

“Yep, here we are,” he said, “And right here is where we’re going to be tonight”, he said as he pointed to Ft. Myers on the map.  

“I sure as hell hope you’re right,” I said. “When we get a chance, I need to call Kenton and make sure he knows we’re coming.”  

Steve Vire’s Whitewash Chronicles, with photography by Samuel Jacob Wilson, will be continued in a next installment/future issue of the Folk & Proper physical edition.

This installment can be found in Folk & Proper News, Volume 2, edition 3 (Summer ’24) newspaper currently circulating up and down the state.