[LEMONS] 11.03.2005
The Truck
This story starts in Montgomery, Alabama, and ends in the desert outside of Kuwait City, Kuwait. But before it goes there, it needs an explanation. A disclaimer.I never fully accepted the notion that a successful life was one spent inside an office garnering promotions, praise, raises, and a stack of relentlessly positive performance evaluations. Not even when I was a kid. I mean, it is for some people, but it wasn't for me. For a brief, unhappy time in college--and immediately afterwards--I tried to clothe myself in this idea. I found it awkward, tight-fitting. It chaffed me when I walked, and rode up my ass when I sat. Just as my lifestyle, with its necessary lack of job security and opportunities for wealth creation would distress the career-minded, so, too did my attempts at being a good corporate citizen drive me to a desperate sense of boredom, and mad PC Solitaire skillz.
I think I was doomed by the middle east. By a boyhood in Iran. By frequent moves growing up. By a youth spent camping, hunting, and pursuing anything and everything that laid beyond the boundaries of Montgomery--geographically, socially, politically.
But what drove me, what drives me, is not a quest for financial remuneration, but a fear and dread of boredom. I'm a terrible at boredom. I can't handle it. Routines depress me. And moreover: I need adventure. It's why I like to travel still, whether over land and sea internationally, or mentally in the pages of books. And it's why, at eighteen, fresh out of high school, I went to Kuwait.
In 1991, you may recall, the world was very different. The Soviet empire was history. The wall had fallen. The world looked new and fresh for the first time since the 1950s. I spent that year, my senior year, at Jefferson Davis. A high school of some 3,000 people spread out over three grades. It was directly across the street from my elementary school, and though I had long wanted to go there, it was never in my plans until after I was thrown out of private school for drinking.
Jefferson Davis was one of two high schools in Montgomery named for Confederate leaders. The other was Robert E. Lee. Other public high schools in town included Sydney Lanier and George Washington Carver. Draw your own conclusions.
Back to 1991. I was about to graduate from JD, as it was universally known. I had applied for early decision to Emory University in Atlanta back in October, and knew well before Christmas that I had gotten in. I was a National Merit Scholar. I was a letterman. I had a slew of activities under my belt. I was hopelessly bored.
That summer I wanted adventure. It was a new era, and I wanted to start it with an enterprise wholly different from my sleepy days in pre-Cal. Working on a fish boat in Alaska, or at Yellowstone for one of the Park Service contractors. I also had a plan to drive the perimeter of the country with my friend DVK. But he was too young, and we never finalized those dreams, nor had the money to follow through with them.
Instead, I shipped out to Kuwait, where I worked construction rebuilding the country following the first Gulf War.
Do you remember those stories, following Gulf War I, of how Arabs would stop Americans on the street, proclaiming "Thank you America! Thank you George Bush! USA, number one!"? Well, they were true. Or largely true. Truer than the smart bombs. It happened to me repeatedly over the 90 days I spent there that summer. Especially in the early days, when there was no power, and we lived off of MREs, eating meals in the mid-day dark beneath the oil-black sky.
And yet, there was resentment also. U.S. policy in the middle east did us no favors. But this isn't about that. Not really, at least.
The Arabs, mind you, are among the most hospitable people on the planet. I dare you to walk through an Arab neighborhood without being invited in for tea. (Or, at least, I dare you to do it before we invaded Iraq. These days, perhaps not so much tea is being poured for Yankees.) I can't count the number of times I was welcomed into a small dwelling, invited to sit down, and served piping hot tea as we made determined small talk in broken Arabic and English.
Yet just as I found this welcoming attitude disarming, I was equally flummoxed by the culture of haggling. Just about every activity in which two people might engage first required extensive, and often animated, discussions before a consensus was reached. This could be frustrating.
And now, background laid, we shall skip ahead to the part of the story involving The Truck. Those who know me well know this story already, and can stop reading now. Others may wish to continue, although I want to warn you that this story has neither a point nor a moral. Beginning in the daytime, and ending late at night. It crosses a border, briefly, and illustrates the best and worst of human nature. Cultural distinctions are touched upon, but they are not the crux of the story. Or so I hope.
We needed to pick up some trucks. It was hard getting equipment in and out of Kuwait. Visas were a hassle. You couldn't just truck things in from Saudi. Instead, trucks would come to the border, and at the crossing, we would pick them up, and drive them back. In this case, what we were picking up were trucks themselves. Several of us carpooled down. There were four or five LandCruisers to pick up, and one Mitsubishi flatbed.
I was to drive the flatbed back. It had no radio. It didn't go fast. It was, well, a shaft. Whatever. I found my vehicle, took the keys from the Egyptian driver who had driven it to the border and hopped in. That's when I noticed the tank was half-full.
There was a gas station just over the border, on the Saudi side. And not another one until Kuwait City. I asked the driver if he could take the truck back over, and fill it up.
"No problem," he replied, "Pul-hen-tee gas, pul-hen-tee gas." We went over this same line of discussion for a few minutes. Me, insisting that there was not enough gas, him insisting that there was. Finally, unwisely, I took his word, and set off towards Kuwait.
There were, more or less, no traffic laws. I typically enjoyed this. It made for interesting drives to and from job sites, and allowed me to roll along at whatever speed I found agreeable (which, at eighteen, tended to be roughly equivalent to a vehicle's maximum speed). The other Americans I worked with were similarly enamored with Kuwaiti rules of the road, and sped off, 90 or more miles an hour, back to Kuwait City, as I slowly plodded along in the flatbed.
But as I drove through the desert, getting closer and closer to the city, I watched with increasing apprehension as night approached--sending the normally dark Kuwait sky to an utterly inky black--and the needle on my gas gauge steadily fell closer to E.
Kuwait City is circled by ring roads. The outer-most is the 7th ring road (or, was at the time, unless my memory has given out, which is possible). And it was just beyond this road where the truck died. Horror. Alone. In the desert. At night. Without water. Without warm clothes. Without a weapon. Without anything.
To stay in the truck overnight meant facing certain banditry. There was only one option.
I got out of the truck and started to push. Getting it to move, initially, was the hardest part. As I approached the ring road I spied, to my joy, a petrol station. And as I continued to slowly close in on it, a truck stopped behind me, and out jumped a Pakistani (I think) truck driver.
"George Bush, Number One!," he exclaimed with a grin, patting me on the back as he helped me push the truck the rest of the way to the station. "America, Number One!," he said when we arrived. Then he waved, grinned, jogged back to his vehicle, and left. Hoo-ray. Thank you, Mr. Truck Driver, thank you for helping me out of the desert.
I approached the station. I wanted help. The book, inside the glove box, was in Japanese and Arabic. I could read neither. Did the truck take regular gas? Diesel? I didn't know. I asked. They spoke no English, and dismissed me with aggressive hand waves, clutching their crotches through their dishdashas with one hand, and motioning me back out into the night with the other.
Diesel, I decided. Don't all trucks take diesel? They must. And with deliberation, I pushed the truck forward into the Diesel lane. The gas pumps there were divided into lanes, separated by curbs, and curved around the station. From overhead, they would appear like so:
) ) )
I removed the cap, the nozzle fit, and I began to pour. When it was full, I climbed back in the cab, started the engine, and heard a loud BANG under the hood, as the truck lurched forward a foot or so.
Shit.
Not diesel.
I went inside again, to ask for a hose. They spoke no English, again gesturing me out into the night. I pantomimed a hose. They may have thought I was being obscene. I'm not sure. In any case, no help was forthcoming.
So instead I went back out and nosed around my vehicle. I found the truck's tool kit, and climbed underneath, to undo the bolt on the gas tank and (hopefully, I wasn't sure, perhaps the bolt was for something else) release the diesel. Directly under the gas tank, I strained as I cranked the bolt open--have you ever undone a factory-set bolt? As it came to the end of its threads, suddenly, pressed upon by 35 gallons of fuel, it shot from its mooring, hitting me in the chest, followed closely by 35 said gallons of diesel fuel, pouring over my torso and head and I scrambled out.
I emerged stinking and pink, watching the fuel run across the pavement. When it emptied, I climbed back below, and redid the bolt. Then got in the cab, and started and re-started the truck repeatedly, exploding what was left of the fuel, clearing it from the carburetor.
And it was sometime around then that another truck pulled up, and wanted to get to the diesel. I, of course, was in the way. And due to the curved track, it was very hard for me to move again. Now, the station manager emerged. His English suddenly fluent. And angry. He was bearing a hose. Thanks, dude, but too late. I'm covered in fuel, yo. Together, as he berated me in English and Arabic, we pushed the truck backwards and then forwards again.
Lo. And I did stand before the regular unleaded, here in the country of its genesis, and saw that it was good. And I filled up my tank, and drove to the compound where we all lived. Secure. My mission accomplished. My horse delivered to its barn.
I said there wasn't a point to this story. Or a moral. But there is a conclusion that I drew. And then forgot (only to remember again years later when our car ran out of gas in Ireland, and an extremely unhelpful mechanic told me that it was beyond my abilities to push an automatic transmission vehicle to a gas station): I can do anything. Anything that can be done by a human being; I can do. All of us can do. We are all capable. We are all skinny eighteen year-old kids pushing trucks through the desert at night, alone and unafraid. Sometimes truck drivers come help us; sometimes they do not. Sometimes we make it to the station; others we are shot dead by the side of the road at 3 a.m. and watch as bandits fill the tank with purloined gas, and drive off into the oilsmoke. Either way, the important thing is that we get out and push.
Was that moralizing? Perhaps. Probably. And if so, I apologize. And I seem to be finishing up in the comfort of my living room in San Francisco in 2005, rather than in the oily air of Kuwait City in that summer of 1991. So allow me to return, and eschew morals for an ending.
It was late at night now. There were, as always, gunshots ringing out around the city. (Due not to violence, but simply because there were so many delicious Kalashnikovs about that who, really, could resist picking one up and letting off a few rounds in the evening. This is what you do in places where alcohol is illegal.) The others had arrived hours before. As I climbed the stairs, a door opened below me, and my boss stuck his head into the stair-well. He was angry, as construction supervisors often are. He began to berate me, wondering where I had been. Why I was late. What the hell I had been doing.
I pointed to the diesel fuel covering my body, the half-empty truck, and my abandonment by my co-workers, who had sped off with nary a thought as to my well-being. (Not that I blamed them. It was merely that they did not consider me at all. It was a lack of thought, not malice of thought.) Muttering a few face-saving angry words, he let me go, and I climbed the rest of the stairs to my room, and went to sleep.
6 comments
what a story.....
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: 3:48 PMa real man would've drunk long and deep from that pool of diesel and then breathed rotten fire in the face of the station owner. but i regret that i was not there to help you push as i know you to be a hot and spicy individual.
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highplainsgrifter : 5:49 PMthis story is always, always good.
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Amber Dawn : 3:37 PMI like it when you tell stories
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Kidd Matteo : 8:07 AMI guess I hardly know ye...never heard this before
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: 9:17 PMwow, i mean, that story is amazing matt.
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poly800rock : 8:54 PM- l i n k -
