On the Road with a Broken Heart

         

 

           Valentine’s Day seemed like it happened yesterday. Easter, the third busiest holiday, is only a week away. The men who work in the warehouse are bustling around the dock as the clock strikes 6, picking and packing flower orders and breaking down boxes of flowers, vases and other floral products to their respective door. Each delivery run has its own door. Every Thursday door one is dedicated to LCT (Lower Connecticut), LNM (Long North Malone) at door two, SN (Short North) at door three and SW (Southwest) at door four. Seagroatt Riccardi is a wholesale distributor of flowers for florists in the Northeast United States.

            Sweating in their shirt and tie as a result of the day’s end of work, the operations crew is behind schedule tonight. The delivery staff makes their way into the steel door leading into the warehouse. Of course, Jim is the first one to walk in the door. Jim has a tendency to come in about an hour early each day that he works. There is no dress code for delivery staff, but the 60-year-old’s day-to-day outfit gives the appearance of a uniform: light blue faded jeans with a baby blue Lake George sweater and a large rosary necklace that dangles loosely around his neck.

            “Good morning, everybody!” he says as he walks in front of the will call desk, making his way to the punch-in clock. Though the sun has already gone down, the day has just begun for Jim who has just woken up two hours ago.

            His voice is raw and hoarse as a result of smoking Marlboros. Though a fairly small and thin man standing at about 5 feet, 4 inches, his voice is boisterous enough for a giant.

            “Sorry, Jim, you have a huge load tonight,” Tom the warehouse supervisor said in an apathetic kind of way.

            “Figures,” Jim said. “I always get fucked over at this place.”

            At this very moment, imagine somebody approaching Jim after having just worked an eight-hour shift and saying, “Hey, Jim, I’ll go on your run with you for $10 and Denny’s.” It happened.

            “You’re kidding, right?” No sir. Only having enough money to buy cigarettes on the road, Jim left to go grab more cash back at his apartment in Cohoes about 10 minutes away.

            The other truck drivers began approaching, shooting bribes of all-you-can-eat Denny’s. But what they didn’t know was that this wasn’t actually about $10 and Denny’s — it was about Jim’s story.

            Every last box was loaded onto the southwest truck as tall as a 6-foot man, stretching to the end of the truck with only a couple feet to spare. Jim had just gotten back.

            “So you’re really going with me?” He kept asking this question several times. Jim had always tried persuading the operations crew to go on his run, especially during busy holidays like Christmas, by paying them $80-$100 out of pocket, but for someone to help him for virtually nothing seemed like a gift from God to him.

            The truck was parked outside waiting in the parking lot. Jim poked his head out of the window and yelled, “Hey! Do you smoke?!” Assuming he was talking about cigarettes, the response was “No.”

            Expecting the passenger’s seat to be unoccupied, the presence of Deon, one of the local drivers, was surprising. Because he shares a car with his girlfriend and both of them were at work, Deon needed a ride to her job in Niskayuna, just down the road from Seagroatt’s.

            “We just have to drop Deon off real quick,” Jim explained to me. “Wherever you can find room, go ahead and pop a squat.”

            The space between the two seats of the truck provided the capacity necessary to curl up in a ball on the floor.

            Deon was wearing a flannel with a black puffy vest layered over it, giving more shape to his already portly body — winter’s bitterness was still lingering.

            “I’ve got a big load tonight, huh?” Jim said to Deon.

            “Yo, Jim, you still got big loads atcho age?” Deon quipped back.

            “I like to think so.”

            This ride isn’t going to be like this all night, is it?

            The topic of conversation quickly took a turn from sexual innuendos to Jim’s past. His wife, Kristin, had passed away from liver cancer in May 2012.

            “You know, Jim, I’m really glad you’re back to normal and happy again,” Deon said in a genuinely sincere manner. After Kristin’s burial, Jim spent the first few nights sleeping next to the headstone in Hudson View Cemetery in Mechanicville. The spring nights still brought temperatures in the 40s. Jim didn’t care.

            “I was miserable,” Jim said. “That’s why I had to move out of that house. I didn’t know what the fuck to do with myself. When people tell me to go to hell, I tell them I’ve been there.”

            Arriving outside of what appeared to be a cell phone store, Deon got out of the truck and walked in front of the truck to cross the road. Jim pulled the string attached to the top of the cab, boisterously sounding the horn three times. Everybody in the store, including Deon’s girlfriend, looked outside to see what was going on. As Jim was waving his hand with an ear-to-ear grin on his face more times than Miss America, Deon had a look of embarrassment on his face.

            “Deon really has a heart of gold, you know that?”

            Deon would call Jim after his wife died to check up on him even during the night when nothing seemed like it should be checked up on.

            The first two stops were Hannafords: one in Niskayuna and one in Altamont. The process for delivering Hannaford product was the same for each stop: Back the truck up into a space that seems virtually impossible to fit in and unload the boxes with the sticker labeled with the appropriate Hannaford location written on it. More importantly, just make sure the number of boxes you pull off the truck matches the piece count on the driver’s manifest. The product is stacked two boxes high on a U-boat cart and is then wheeled out through the receiving area into the produce section.

            Seeing where and how pallets of food are stored for shoppers to buy is quite a weird sight. Nobody would notice if Jim were to just take a Gatorade for the road, but if he were to try this out in the grocery store, there would be an arrest made in aisle two.

            The stops weren’t hard. Driving an hour in between each stop was the most challenging part. Similar to Wes Craven’s “Nightmare on Elm Street” films, the goal was staying awake.

            “Now I have to warn you about one thing,” Jim said as he just merged east onto Interstate 88 toward Stamford Florist. The tone of his voice was frightening. “Sometimes I micro-nap while I’m driving. Do you know what that is?”

            Micro-napping is when the driver falls asleep at the wheel for less than a second — long enough to feel the sensation of dreaming. According to a poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, 103 million people have actually fallen asleep at the wheel. Jim better not make it 103,000,001 tonight. Jim is mandated by Seagroatt Riccardi to pull over every three or four hours to rest for 15 minutes. What was that going to do?

            Jim took his first nap at about 11 p.m. near Oneonta. He rested his legs on the dashboard and sank into his seat, his body leaning on the side of the door for support. For any ordinary person, the position was beyond uncomfortable, but for Jim, these naps were a luxury. The grimy looking New York Fire Department hat that appeared as if it was a lighter shade of gray back in its day was gently placed over Jim’s face. Only God knew what Jim was dreaming about.

            The sound of the reefer, which keeps the product cold, awakened Jim. The next stop was in Binghamton.

            “This year would have been our 40^th anniversary,” Jim said. Nothing had been said prior to this statement to make him say this. He had been dreaming of her — it only took 15 minutes.

            Last year, Kristin went to the doctor for what seemed like a normal check-up. But the doctors had found a tumor near her liver. Jim took her to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, one of the best cancer treatment facilities in the United States. After running several tests, the doctor came back into the examination room with a grim look on his face.

            “The doctor said, ‘You really wanna know how much time you have left, Kris? Two weeks.’ And she said, ‘Two weeks?! That long?!’ I fell to the ground bawling my eyes out.”

            While Jim was hyperventilating and pacing back and forth not knowing what to do, Kristin just laid there content in her bed with a smile on her face — she was ready. Kristin would pass away surrounded by family exactly two weeks later at St. Peter’s Hospice in Albany.

            “I had never seen so many people crammed into one room like that before,” Jim said.

            Following Kristin’s death, Jim was emotionally unstable living by himself in the house he once lived in with his wife. A letter came in the mail from Social Security saying, “Your marriage was ended by death.” The harshness of just six little words possesses enough power to affect anybody’s psyche. One night, Jim made his way into the bathroom and opened up the medicine cabinet. Kristin’s cancer medication stared Jim straight in the eyes. Looking back at the pills that exhibited all shapes, sizes and colors of the rainbow, he contemplated swallowing these pills in order to end his own life until he thought about the rest of his family.

            “If it weren’t for them, I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”

            Right before the next Hannaford in Binghamton there was a Denny’s on the same road.

            “You want to stop here or find another one later?”

            Afraid that there wouldn’t be another one, the answer was “yes.” We walked inside at about 1 a.m. The night crew at Denny’s is — well, different. Our waitress who was wearing more eye shadow than a drag queen showed us to our seat. The diner was promoting some special called Baconalia, an entire menu filled with bacon-based foods.

            “Now I’m going to be sick to my fucking stomach,” Jim said. “Do people actually eat this shit?”

            Though Jim was exaggerating, his analogy wasn’t far from the truth.

“You get whatever you want, OK? I don’t care how much it is.”

Nobody had ever helped Jim on a run before. And as a matter of fact, he had never stopped to eat “breakfast” on the road in all his years of driving trucks. The ceramic coffee mug depicting the Denny’s logo on it had a quote written on the opposite side that read, “It’s always sunny side up in a diner.” I jokingly told Jim that I wanted to take it with me as a souvenir.

“How much do I have to pay you to take one of these coffee cups?” Jim asked a waitress who was not responsible for serving our table.

The waitress looked at him with a blank stare. I could tell she had never heard anybody ask this question before. Extra napkins or sugar packets were one thing, but for someone to bribe a waitress for a coffee cup? Jim took his New York Fire Department hat and hid the mug in it. When he paid the bill he passed me the hat underneath the table and told me to wait for him in the truck. We were outlaws on the run in the middle of the night.

Jim’s work cell phone rang and he looked over at me as if to say, “Well, aren’t you fucking going to pick it up?” I picked up the archaic flip-phone and answered it.

“Uh, hi is Jim there?” the woman’s voice asked.

Handing the phone over to Jim, his smile immediately radiated the darkness of the cab. It was Laurie, a woman from the Lake George village who Jim had been dating for a couple of months now.

“That was Chris,” Jim explains. “He’s helping me on my run tonight. I didn’t think people like him existed anymore.”

Jim met Laurie through a mutual friend. Laurie had called him, asking if he wanted to go out to get a cup of coffee sometime. Not feeling comfortable dating another woman just months after the death of his wife, Jim politely declined. That is, until he had a change of heart and asked to take her out the second time around.

“Guess where we stopped to eat?” Jim, still talking on the phone, asked Laurie. “Denny’s.”

Their first date had been at the Racino, a casino and raceway in Saratoga. After a night of gambling, Jim and Laurie had decided that they were hungry and wanted to eat somewhere. Though it doesn’t seem like a romantic place for a first date, they ate at a nearby Denny’s.

Whenever Jim is out on the road, Laurie makes him leave her a voice message on her cell phone at 5 a.m. so that she can wake up to his voice every morning even though he’s not there.

“I’m starting to run out of things to say,” Jim said as he was thinking of new ways to hone his poetry skills.

“I’m the luckiest motherfucker out there, you know that? I lucked out twice in my life.”

Jim had just finished leaving Laurie her voice message and the truck was en route back to the warehouse. It must’ve been a little past five when I felt my eyes starting to blur and get heavy.

The weight of my body whipped me forward. I woke up to see Jim frantically cranking the wheel to the right. Jim drove over the wakeup strips for about five seconds until the truck came to a complete stop with the help of the air brake.

“I fell asleep,” Jim confessed.

Seagroatt Riccardi made me stay on the clock for liability purposes. Handing all of my trust over to Jim, I thought the idea was trivial — until now. For the first time, I had realized how difficult staying awake can really be even if pots of coffee flow through your bloodstream like Jim’s. We slept double the amount allowed by the mandated resting periods.

The truck pulled into the parking lot after twelve hours on the road. Friday morning’s operations crew already clocked in and had received a shipment that just came in from Miami.

Spending the night on the road next to Jim was a life lesson. I saw the sun rise for the first time in years. I had learned the importance of coffee and how good it tastes after being deprived of such a delicacy. But most importantly, I had gotten to know Jim.

“I want to thank you for going on this run with me,” Jim said to me. I could tell this was his heart speaking and not the truck driver in him.

“Hopefully we can do this again sometime when you’re home for the summer.”

He could see how tired I was based on my bloodshot eyes and the one-word responses being given to him.

“I’ll tell you what,” Jim started. “What I want you to do is just get out of this place, get in your car and go home."

            And I did just that. But there was something different about the road I was driving home on. It was missing something. The road back home lacked the heart and soul compared to the road I traveled on with Jim.