Corey

By the time the big rig pulled into Albuquerque I had grown rather concerned that I'd made a horrible mistake.  The last two days had been Hell.  Breathing in deeply as I stared straight ahead, I tried to muster a compassion for Corey that I wasn't sure I felt.  At best it lay buried deep beneath layers of frustration and anger.  For those past two days he and I had sat trapped in the cab of his truck, unpleasantly enduring each other's company as the miles passed slowly by.  He thought I was naive, ''indoctrinated'' by the education system; I knew he was insecure, nervous, and lonely, and that it was to hide these feelings that he put forth a brash, stubborn front.  To admit that his views might be bigoted or to revise them in light of new evidence would be to admit a flaw within himself, and it was against this mindset that I had been forced to converse.

The mood of the conversations would twist and turn, dipping into the bitter exasperation of politics before wending into his beliefs on God, his divorce, or the son in Philly he sees once a month.  At times I was the enemy, other times the therapist, and all too often I was the witness -- witness to a man who wanted to believe he was happy, who tried desperately to convince me of it as if that would make it true.

He was twenty-nine and had been driving truck for eight years, crisscrossing the nation on a weekly basis.  'A thousand miles a day is pretty normal,' he said.  Given that his truck maxed out at sixty-five, that meant he drove around fifteen hours a day, and after the two days we drove together I can't say I doubt him.  It was a miserable existence -- staring numbly at the passing signs and cars with nothing but the gutteral churning of the diesel engine to drown the silence; somehow that just made it feel deeper.

His days were punctuated by two notable events: times to get gas and food.  While sitting in a greasy truckstop diner he admitted that he rarely ate at sit-down places anymore; he disliked all the people around.  Instead, he'd often get fast food, retreating back to the solitude of his truck and eating as the miles continued by.  Lately even that had been too much trouble.  He showed me a shelf lined with cans of beans and Campbell's Chunky soups.  ''It's faster, you know,'' he'd remarked at the time.

And speed of delivery was everything to Corey.  He spoke proudly of driving through the night when on a tight schedule and boasted in particular of the time he took a load from LA to Atlanta in under 48 hours.  ''Left on a Tuesday night and was there by Thursday morning.''  It was one of the highlights of his career.  None of this was legal, of course -- truck drivers are limited to driving eight and a half hours in any twenty-four hour period.  Still, the dispatchers looked the other way, and Corey had developed a kind of accountant's sleight-of-hand on his worklogs that would make even Bernie Madoff proud.

He was impressive at what he did, pouring everything he had into it.  Both mornings we woke up at 3:30 am to continue onwards, the six hours of sleep showing as plainly on his face as on mine.  He had no hobbies, no passions, no interests.  His radio was a forgotten relic, rarely used.  He had six trashy audiobooks, all Westerns written in the same exaggerated style of good versus evil and right versus wrong.  He loved that writer and said he could probably recite those books by heart.  The books were frustrating in their depiction of the world, but by the time my own exasperation with Corey's bigotry led me to suggest that we listen to one, they seemed like a breath of fresh air.

I spent a long time trying to understand why Corey picked me up, and even longer on why he didn't throw me out.  He even bought my lunch one day, in recompense for a meal I'd bought him.  He was lonely, true, but I began to see that -- beneath layers of jaded misanthropy and self-aggrandizing political beliefs -- he was also, somehow, a nice guy.  He told me how back in Pennsylvania, before the divorce, he'd been a volunteer firefighter.  He told me of how he responded to an accident, of how he watched a child die in front of him, and I could hear the tremor in his voice.  I learned of the grandfather with Parkinson's that he'd tried to care for, and of his despair when he finally realized it was too much for him.  And eventually I saw that, underneath it all, Corey just wanted someone to care for.  So isolated from mankind, he just wanted to touch some other life with a kindness stifled deep inside him.

Back at the Albuquerque truckstop, as I stared straight ahead, I tried to pierce beyond my frustration and anger, to say goodbye to Corey with genuine goodwill.  I thanked him, acknowledged our differences but told him that I believed he was a good person and that I wished him well.  He grunted stoically, I closed the truck door, and he was gone.  And right now, somewhere between two yellow lines, Corey's probably driving.  But maybe someday he'll stop -- stop being afraid and alone -- and will instead open himself to the world and let mankind past that brash, stubborn front.  At least, that's what I'll hope.