Trucker’s Tales: A Bobble-headed dog, God, The Stars, Sex, Religion, Race and The Trinidadian

Spot, the bobble-headed dog who only wanted a potato chip...

Spot sits in the console of our car.

He’s a bobble-headed dog I picked up at some truck stop somewhere in America during my “Year I Saw America”…2002-03 when I drove an 18-wheeler from coast-to-coast.
Sometimes his head bobbles along as we roll on down the road. Most of the times he’s still because there’s usually something in the console up against his noggin.
Lots of times when I look at Spot I think of my co-driver during those months of trucking: Frank the Trinidadian.
One time I was driving the thundering Freightliner out west somewhere and Frank was in the passenger seat eating potato chips.
“Spot says he’s sees you have potato chips,” I said. “He says he too likes potato chips.”
Frank pointed at Spot.
“That thing has not said anything,” said Frank.
“He’d like a potato chip,” I said.
“It is not a living thing,” said Frank jabbing his finger toward Spot. “To pretend to feed that would be idolatrous.”
I laughed and waved my hand at Frank.
“Never mind,” I said to Frank.
“You think I am kidding,” said Frank.
Oh hell, I thought to myself, what door have I mistakenly kicked open?
“One must be careful of idolatry,” said Frank in his thick Trinidadian accent. “And demons, there are demons everywhere. You know when The Lahd kicked Satan out of Heaven fully a third of the angels chose to go with him and they came to Earth as demons and imps. They are monkeys on the backs of weak souls. Demons who represent all kinds of weaknesses…addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling and such.”
Frank's ancestors came from India, he grew up in the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Frank had been raised Hindu but he converted to Christianity. And Christianity couldn’t expect much more devotion from a soul than Frank’s faith in The Lord.
Frank owed everything to The Lord, or as he said in his Trinidadian accent, “The Lahd.”
Even being promiscuous.
One time while waiting to deliver a load in San Diego I awoke from a nap to find Frank leaning out the passenger side window talking to a couple of streetwalkers.
“Frank,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I am getting prices,” said Frank.
I laughed.
“Dude,” I said, “They ain’t coming inside here. Besides Frank, what’s going on here? You’re married.”
“I know this,” said Frank in his thick Trinidadian accent, “But The Lahd has blessed me with a great sex drive and I must use it to His glory.”
Hanging around with Frank I learned stuff. For instance I didn’t know that in Trinidad whether your ancestors came from Africa or India one was still considered “Black.”
Frank was quite convinced that Americans had it in for him because he was Black.
It all didn’t matter to me. What we look like is all related to where our ancestors came from. We’re all passengers on an organic spaceship zipping around the galaxy.
This topic of Frank, race and America came to a head one day when Frank and I fueled up at a truck stop between Austin and San Antonio, Texas. An old beater of a car rumbled through the parking lot. The dweeb passenger leaned out of his window, looked right at me, flipped me the bird and yelled "N***** LOVER." I looked the jerk in the eye as he drove away and made a motion with my arm for him to come back. He didn't.
"SEE? SEE?" Frank stopped and yelled at me waving his arms around. "Americans don't like me because I am black."
I stopped and looked at Frank square in the eyes.
"Dude," I said. "How often has that happened to you?"
Frank just stared at me.
"Yeah," I said, "Like I thought. Not often if ever. Look, I dare say 99.9 percent of the people don't give a rat's ass that you're black or Trinidadian. We're all here working on our hopes and dreams. And you came here because you're working on yours. Most people are too busy with their own business to care about a dude walking into the truck stop to pay for his fuel except for THAT asshole who just drove by. His momma probably beat him, he probably doesn't have a girlfriend so he's not getting laid and he probably doesn't have a job. He’s a loser and he has a loser’s view of the world. So get over it, dude."
One truck driving night I was pushing the rig at top speed on Interstate 80 eastbound across Wyoming…wide open country. The night sky was full of stars.
“There’s just no way we’re the only ones out here in the universe,” I said as I looked through the windshield toward the sky. “Kind of big-headed of us to think we’re the only inhabited planet amongst all those stars.”
“Oh no, Grant,” said Frank. He was sitting in the passenger seat eating potato chips looking through the windshield too. “We are all alone out here in the universe. God only made the moon, planets and stars so we would not be lonely at night.”
I drove on through the night and looked at the riot of stars in the sky.
Who was I to argue with Frank anyway?
Spot just sat on the dash, his head bobbing up and down.

-30-

  

  

The Hotel Child: A Home in the Bahamas

  Actual factual pic of the hotel where my dad worked...Paradise Island Hotel and Villas...in the Bahamas.  Here in the future the huge Atlantis resort is off to the left of this location.  Notice everyone's parked the wrong way...hahaha...a poke in fun at the Brits and Bahamians....

  By Grant McGee

  It was a yard sale find, it held the promise of fun.  It ended up being a time machine.

  An electric scooter.

  It had two flat tires, a rusty chain and it wouldn’t go.

  The tires I could fix.  The chain I could clean off.

  But I didn’t know why it wouldn’t go.  It could’ve been the motor, it could’ve been the batteries, it could’ve been the computer “brain.”

  I didn’t have the time, inclination or money to fix it.

  “Take it to the Scooterman,” said The Lady of the House.

  The Scooterman was this dude who had set up shop around the corner from our house.  He seemed to be doing a brisk business in putting motors on bicycles.  Judging by the number of people who zipped up and down our streets on these things with unmuffled engines that went “BLAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTT” on down the way this was THE thing to have if you couldn’t afford a car.

  I pulled up in front of Scooterman’s place, a little hole in the wall in an old wooden building that looked like it used to be a warehouse.  A number of old, beat-up bicycles with motors on them sat in front.  I stood at the door of his shop.  He was sitting at his work table fiddling with something with wires coming out of it.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He stood up, smiled, stuck out a hand and said, “Hello, my name’s Reggie.”

  “Not ‘Scooterman’ hunh?” I said smiling.  “That’s what we call you at the house, you seem to be right popular around here.  You and I have a little in common, I used to have a bicycle shop out west.”

  “In California?”  It seems many times when you mention “The West” people think of Texas or California.

  “No, out in New Mexico,” I went on.  “But I picked up this electric scooter at a yard sale.  I was going to fix it but I don’t know what’s wrong with it.  Now we’re thinking about moving back there….”

  “To California?”

  “No, New Mexico…and I’m not gonna be able to do anything with it.  So The Lady of the House said, ‘Give it to Scooterman.’”

  “I like that name,” he smiled.  “Maybe I’ll call my shop that.  Well let’s see what you have.”

  We strolled out to my car and I opened the trunk and there it was.

  “Oh,” he said, “Nice, nice, very nice.  I can use this.”

  “Cool,” I said.  “Say, what’s that I hear in your voice?  A touch of an accent.  Where did you grow up?”

  “I am from the Bahamas,” Reggie said.

  I laughed.

  “Dude, how cool,” I said.  “I lived there for a brief bit back in 1969.”

  And then it came rushing back from all those years ago.

  My dad had taken a job running a hotel on Paradise Island, just across the water from Nassau, the Bahamas capitol city.  We had an apartment in the hotel.

  It was a different experience for a kid who had just been Boy Scoutin’…camping trips, hikes and such…in the mountains of Virginia to be plopped down in the middle of a British Crown Colony surrounded by water.

  The fishing was good.

  I would call room service and order up some raw shrimp then head out to the beach with my fishing stuff and catch pompano, yellow-tailed jacks and the wicked looking gar…a fish with a long, snake-like body, green, slimy with scissor-like jaws that bristled with teeth.

  Fishing on the beach in the Bahamas did have its drawbacks.  There were a few times I’d have my line in the water and I’d get hit in the head by a rock someone had thrown.  I’d quickly turn around and there’d be some kids behind the dunes, rocks in hands.

  It would be here on the beach on Paradise Island in the Bahamas 1969 that I, as a boy, would see my first real-live topless woman.

  I had a gar on the line, it was a big one,  I could see it as the waves rose getting ready to hit the beach, it was kinda like a window to an aquarium.

  “Have you caught many fish today?” said a voice from behind me.

  I turned around to see a topless woman standing behind me, just wearing a black bikini bottom and a smile.

  I dropped my fishing rod and it went rocketing out into the ocean.

  “Oh, did I cause you to lose your fish?” she said with a decidedly French accent.  I knew because I was taking French lessons.

  “Ah, um, oh, ah…no ma’am,” I said.

  She reached into her beach bag, pulled out a towel and gave her hair a nice fluff then draped the towel over her shoulders.

  I just stood there like a dork.

  “Well,” she said, “I hope you get your fishing pole back and catch more fish.  Au revoir.”

  There you go, she WAS French.

  I watched her walk down the beach.

  I couldn’t wait to get back to the apartment and write a letter to my buddy Catfish back in Virginia about what I just saw.

  It was also the summer my big sister was tasked with trying to cram French into my head.  If I wanted to stay on track and be in the same grade I was in in the states when school started I’d have to know some basic French.

  I guess I retained some of it but at the time I was more upset that she was stealing french fries off my plate when room service brought up lunch.

  While my folks were trying to get me to be a cosmopolitan dude by learning tennis and French I was more fascinated by the critters in the Bahamas:  Lizards everywhere…one kind was huge…about 2 or 3 feet long and super fast…the locals believing that if you could catch one and crack its head open there were gold coins inside…I think they made that up because they were so fast.  There was the occasional snake and there were these HUGE land crabs, things that dug burrows in the undergrowth and were maybe two feet across.

  One time I caught one of the land crabs using a snare on a pole and I carried it through the hotel lobby much to the consternation of some of the guests.  I was given a stern lecture by The Old Man about bringing critters into the hotel.

  It turns out adjusting to life in the Bahamas wasn’t necessary, the French and tennis lessons weren’t necessary because we’d be back in Virginia by the end of summer.

  I know that wasn’t my dad’s plan.

  I was just a kid, nobody ever told me about the REAL stuff that was going on in my family’s life at the time.  The Lady of the House tells me that’s okay, kids really AREN’T supposed to know the heavy stuff of the family’s life.

  I do know that Dad always seemed to be more tightly wound than usual at this Bahamian gig and that he spent a few days in a Bahamian hospital because his blood pressure was dangerously high.

  It came to pass that one Friday late that summer my mom tells me, “Start packing your things, we have to be out of here by Monday.”

  I would find out sometime later that my dad and the big hotel kahunas who ran the place from New York City got into some kind of dust-up over a guest at the hotel…a guest at the hotel who was unhappy about something…a guest at the hotel who was unhappy about something and he had money and he had “connections.”

  Come on girls and boys, when a boss and an employee get into a dust-up, who wins?

  My dad had held a lot of hotel jobs in my young life by then, I’d never seen us clear out of a place so fast as that.

  I flashed back to the present:  Florida, 2017, standing in front of Reggie’s place.

  “You guys in the Bahamas drive on the wrong side of the road,” I said smiling.  While we drive on the right here in the U.S., in the Bahamas they drive like the British do, on the left.

  “You Americans drive on the wrong side of the road,” he said. 

  We laughed.

  “Anyway Reggie, the scooter’s yours,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Reggie.  “When are you moving to California?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said.  “A few things have to happen, but I’m thinking maybe October or November at the latest.”

  “I would wait until next year,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “There’s a big war with North Korea coming, California will not be safe,” he said.

  “Aww Reggie, it’s okay,” I said.  “The dude’s missles can only reach Alaska at best and even then they’re not that accurate.  New Mexico will be okay.”

  “You be safe, my friend.  Thank you for the gift.”

                                                                                -30-

Tales from the Edge of the Earth: "My Little *enis"

 

By Grant McGee

  Just today as I was working in the kitchen I had a brilliant idea.

  Well, I thought it was a brilliant idea.

  I tromped from the kitchen into the living room.

  “I have a brilliant idea!” I announced to The Lady of the House.

  “Oh?” she said, looking over the top of her glasses.  She was in her recliner with her newspaper.  “Do tell.”

  “We will make millions off a gag gift called ‘My Little Penis.’”

  The Lady of the House stared at me over the top of her glasses as she lowered her paper.

  And didn’t say a word.

  “You know, it’s this is a gag gift called…”

  “I heard what you’ll call it,” she said.

  “People who work in cubicles will scarf them up and they’ll sit on their shelves and co-workers will walk by and say, ‘Why, what is that?’  And the guy with ‘My Little Penis’ will say, ‘Why that’s ‘My Little Penis’’ and there will be jovial laughter in the corporate workplace!”

  “Jovial laughter,” said The Lady of the House.

  “And people will buy these by the millions and we’ll just get checks in the mail all the time.”

  “What color will it be?” asked The Lady of the House.

  “Pink,” I said.

  “Sounds like you’re pandering to just white people.”

  “Oh, well, then there’d be other colors.”

  The Lady of the House held up her hand to signify the end of the talk…my end anyway.

  “I think this is a really bad idea,” she said.  “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  “Well I mean there was ‘Pope on a Rope,’ the soap on a rope shaped like Pope John Paul…”

  “Just go back to your drawing board, dear,” said The Lady of the House as she went back to reading her paper.  “Besides, nobody wants a little penis.”

                                                                                -30-

Appalachian Tales: Going Home

Me 10 years (and 100 pounds) ago standing in front of the ol' home place...where I grew up....in Roanoke, Virginia.

By Grant McGee

            A co-worker found himself out of a job a few days ago when he and the company overseers had a “parting of the ways.”

            I felt for the dude because he had come from a whole ‘nother part of the country to work on The Gulf Coast.

            And the thing about his and my chosen profession in this region is opportunity is slim and the wages aren’t like what they pay back in his neck of the woods.

            “Dude,” I texted him, “Why don’t you just go on home?”

            Some folks don’t understand my thinking about “going home.”  Home is where they know you.  Home is where you can go to regroup and then go back out into the world.  Home is a safe place.  Home is where you perceive that safe place is.  Maybe it’s where the folks are, maybe it’s “where everybody knows your name.”

            This thing about coming back to the nest isn’t anything new.  I grew up thinking that’s what “home” is for.  If all else fails, come on back.

            I first got the idea home was a safe landing place when I got my first job about 150 miles from where I grew up.

            “What if I don’t make it?” I asked my dad.  “What if I get out there and get fired?”

            “Well then, come on home son,” he said.

            As it turned out nothing bad happened and I started down the merry lane of my career path.

            Flash forward six years.

            I had made some poor life choices and the “coup de grace” was losing my car in a one vehicle wreck.  With no car I lost my job.  With no job I lost my groovy apartment.  I figured I could go home until I pulled things back together.

            Boy, was I wrong.

            I called my folks.  My mom answered the phone.

            “Hi Mom,” I was smiling so she could hear it in my voice.  “Can I come home?  I’m in a bit of a mess.”

            “Well,” she said cherrily, “you’ll need to talk to your father.”

            She put my dad on the line.

            “Hi Dad, can I come live with y’all till I get on my feet?  You know, just for four or six months?”

            “No, son.”

            Wow, I was amazed at how fast he answered me (I think they knew I’d be calling).

            I was dumbfounded.  It took a few seconds to gather my thoughts.            I gave a nervous laugh. 

“I-I thought that’s what home is for, Dad.  A place to come back to when it all goes down the tubes.”

I wanted to say “when it all goes down the shitter” but I knew he wouldn’t appreciate the term.  Dad may have said “damn” and “hell” but he didn’t use other words when it came to cussin’.

            “Well, son, your mother and I believe if you stay out there and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps you’ll be a lot stronger.  And one day you’ll look back on all this and laugh about it.”

            Now that I look back on it I don’t think I would have let me come back home to live either.  I was a trainwreck survivor and I acted like one at the time.

            But Mom and Dad did let me come home for the weekend and something most interesting happened.  It was the weekend that my aunt and uncle came down from Ohio to visit my folks.  My uncle handed me a paper from up in northern Virginia.

            “I bought this to have some reading material on the trip,” he said.  “There’s a job in the classifieds there that sounds like it’s right up your alley.”

            I opened the paper and saw the job.

            I knew the guy listed to contact.

            I called him and was hired over the phone.

            I moved to the new little town, walked or biked to work and got back on my feet.

My dad was right.

            What would I do if one of my kids wanted to come live at my house?  I’d say, “bring your stuff.”

            I don’t think that’s going to happen, though.  All of them are well down the merry path of life these days.  However, if one of them had a change in fortune the door would be open. 

            That’s what home is for, isn’t it?

           

                                                            -30-

The Hotel Child: God, Big Sis and Rock 'n' Roll

The Byrds on th' 1960's black 'n' white teevee.  That's Roger McGuinn on the right playing the Rickenbacker guitar.

By Grant McGee

  I, um...

  I don't quite know where to start.

  I just learned something that shook the underpinnings of my rock 'n' roll sensibilities.

  The actual members of The Byrds did NOT perform on their big debut single "Mr. Tambourine Man" back in 1965.

  Nope.

  There were professional studio musicians hanging with Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, knocking the single out in tight fashion so there were no mistakes and the record company could get it knocked out, on the radio and in stores right quick.

  Learning that Chris Hillman, David Crosby, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke weren't making music history with McGuinn for that big song has subtly altered my view of the world.

  It might be like if Jesus stuck his head out of the clouds and said, "Hey little buddies, you know that thing where they thought I was walking on water in the Sea of Galilee?  I was just strolling through the shallows."  Then if Moses stuck his head out right beside JC and said, “And y’all know those tablets?”  Sidebar comment:  Moses speaks with a Southern accent, just like other patriarchal-type dudes like The Lord Thy God and Uncle Sam.  Anyway, it’d be like if Moses stuck his head out right beside JC up there in the clouds and said, “Hey, y’all know those tablets.  I etched those in stone.  I was inspired by The Lord Thy God but it was me.

  I mean it would mess with your head a bit, wouldn’t it?
  I believed these rock 'n' roll stars were ALWAYS recording their own stuff in the studios.

  I learned this about “Mr. Tambourine Man” from hearing an interview about a documentary about the studio musicians who made the magic on the American music scene for years, particularly the ‘60’s… The Wrecking Crew.

  Here I'd been lambasting the American music scene for a long time, probably since the music generally began to sound like pre-processed homogenized pasteurized pabulum in the 1980's when it turns out a goodly portion of the stuff hadn't been "real" for years.

  Oh well.

  Thing is every time I think of The Byrds I think of a few of their songs I've dug over time.  There's "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" from 1965 with what I think is the world's greatest 12-string guitar solo in the middle.  There's "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" with its driving beat. 

   "Wasn't Born to Follow" was a hippie tune used in the soundtrack to the movie "Easy Rider."  Imagine my surprise when I found out that was written by Carole King who had written a bunch of crap for bubble-gummy Top 40 radio and Neil Sedaka back in the early '60's.

  And then I remember "Turn, Turn, Turn."  This was a song written by Pete Seeger and given the folk-rock treatment by McGuinn and The Byrds.  Now they actually DID record "Turn, Turn, Turn" and not The Wrecking Crew.  The difference was it reportedly took 77 takes for McGuinn and company to get "Turn, Turn, Turn" just right while it took McGuinn and The Wrecking Crew just one take to knock out "Mr. Tambourine Man."

  If you don't know the lyrics to "Turn, Turn, Turn" it's pretty simple...the lyrics are in The Good Book, that's "moun-tayne" speak for The Holy Bible."

  It's in the book of Ecclesiastes...chapter 3, verses1 through 8:

  "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

  A time to be born and a time to die,

  A time to plant and a time to uproot,

  A time to kill and a time to heal,

  A time to tear down and a time to build,

  A time to weep and a time to laugh,

  A time to mourn and a time to dance,

  A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

  A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

  A time to search and a time to give up,

  A time to keep and a time to throw away,

  A time to tear and a time to mend,

  A time to be silent and a time to speak,

  A time to love and a time to hate,

  A time for war and a time for peace."

  And so Pete Seeger set the Bible verse to music.  A few years later The Byrds grabbed it and ran with it all the way to the top of the charts in December 1965.

  It was on the radio as the Vietnam War was ramping up.

  And it was on the charts while my big sister was in high school.

  She had the 45 rpm record.

  I was just a dumb kid.

  I wasn't even 10 yet.  All I knew about Vietnam is that Walter Cronkite was talking about it every night on the evening news.

  All I knew about "Turn, Turn, Turn" was that it was a song on the radio.

  But I also knew my sister had the 45 rpm record.

  But all I really knew was that my sister had a song that they were playing on the radio.

  And she was playing it on the family's hi-fi stereo one evening when my dad came home from work.

  "GET THAT CRAP OFF MY STEREO," he bellowed.

  Let me introduce you to my dad.

  His career field was hotel management in the mid-20^th century so when he came home in the evening he was wearing a well pressed three-piece suit and tie.

  He would generally come home, change into some relaxing clothes, settle down in the master bedroom in an easy chair and watch the evening news whilst enjoying a martini…or two…or three.

  But this night things were different.

  My father, who I thought was God because he was always yelling and making pronouncements on stuff, was bellowing.

  And when he bellowed I got out of the way like critters scatter when people come walking in their domain.

  "GET THAT CRAP OFF MY STEREO."

  Sidebar comment:  It would be years later that I would discover, while listening to The Who on my dad’s stereo, that dad's stereo was not a stereo at all, it was basically a glorified, one-channel record player.  He was either mistaken or got ripped off.

  Big Sis had been listening to the song on the stereo.  She came running in from her room and stood right in front of dad with her arms crossed.

  I peeked from behind the sofa.

  "I SAID GET THAT CRAP OFF MY STEREO," he said, jabbing his index finger in the direction of the hi-fi.

  "I'm listening to it," said Big Sis.  "I'll turn it down."

  And she did.

  "THAT MUSIC IS PURE CRAP," he bellowed some more.  "AND I'LL NOT HAVE ANTI-WAR, ANTI-AMERICAN MUSIC PLAYED IN MY HOME."

  "How is this anti-American?" asked my sister.

  I watched in amazement.

  I didn't know anyone could talk back to God.

  "Besides," she went on, "The lyrics are straight from the book of Ecclesiastes in The Old Testament."

  "THAT'S SACRELIGIOUS," said my father.

  "Why is this sacreligious?" asked Big Sis.

  "BECAUSE IT IS," said dad.

  And with a wave of his hand to signify he was done talking he turned, walked down the hall to the master bedroom and slammed the door behind him.

  The song ended.

  Big Sis walked over and turned off the stereo and went back to her room.

  If I was a few years older I would have come from behind the sofa and patted her on the back and said, "DAMN, I didn't know you could talk back to God!"

  But I wasn't a few years older, I was just a kid.

  And all I knew was that my sister had talked back to dad.

  And that was an amazing thing.

                                                       -30-