As we blast across the state line into New Mexico and all the crusty poop-colored scenery it contains, it dawns on me that the only thing green about this trip are our faces on the mornings when Loren and I have dropped the hammer the night before and pounded a bottle of whiskey. The Red Giant gets around three and a half miles to the gallon, which means we are bitch slapping the climate on a daily basis.
So far we’ve powered back around 9,000 miles of American highway and have another 5,000 to go before we finish in Wisconsin. On average we travel about 250 miles per day while shooting this documentary on Alex Debogorski, Legendary Ice Road Trucker, so gassing up at least once a day has become a welcomed daily ritual. Getting out to stretch, take a piss, and breathe something other than our collective road-marinated man-odour is a necessity, but the real pleasure comes in the form of checking out what kind of weird shit awaits us inside the doors of America’s Flying J’s, Love’s, and Pilot truck stations. There are approximately 3.3 million truckers on the road everyday in the USA, bringing the shit you need to live from A to B and then back again, so the spin off industries to support them are huge business.
You’ve seen them before. All these stops consist of a massive parking lot, gas pumps, and a large convenience store attached to a restaurant like Denny’s, The Iron Skillet, or some other home-grown grease joint at which you can kiss your already poorly attended waistline goodbye. I’ve put on around five pounds since I signed up for this gig. Chipped beef with cream that looks like a sex crime exploded on your plate, 72oz steaks that are free if you can eat them in under an hour without dying, grits and biscuits with gravy, pulled pork, Twinkies, dumplings… the list slobbers on. This is method-filmmaking in the vein of De Niro’s Raging Bull, except the only award we will win in the end is a general feeling of shame.
While shower numbers are called out to smelly truckers over the loud speakers, we cruise the aisles of the store on the lookout for strange little gems to buy. If you’re looking for a good time you can scope the stop for lot lizards–prostitutes who troll the stops looking for what will no doubt be one of the most tragic displays of financially induced carnality known to man. There are also women there who are not officially prostitutes, but simply use sex as payment for a ride to Anywhere-USA. If your tastes venture more into homoville, you can try your hand at being a “tapper.”
“Tapping” is the move that Senator Larry Craig went for back in ‘07, and it’s what gay truckers do after a long, hard, sweaty day on the road, when they head to the men’s washroom to “take a dump.” You sit on the can and wait until that delicious bear of a trucker stomps in to deuce in the next stall over. Seeing the side of his boot peaking out under the stall divider, you lightly tap it with your shoe in hopes he taps back. If it ends in bum love, you are a now a “tapper.” If it ends in getting shot in the dick and dumped in a ditch, you are now dead. No one I’ve talked to has admitted to ever meeting or experiencing either, but I’ve heard that they are in abundance from the staff who run the joints.
Loren, the director, getting ready for a good night.
If you are not into either of those lovely pastimes, my suggestion for a good night are as follows–buy a 70oz “King Mug,” which holds enough coffee to drown a litter of unwanted puppies. Add a “Big Dog” footlong with a smashed croissant deep fried to its girthy length, a 2×2 foot square Rice Crispies brick, a DVD entitled KLA$H starring Jasmine Guy, an audio book called Demon Spirit and get ready for a proper mind blowing. It’s all wonderfully weird stuff that has serious life changing potential, but none of this prepared us for our stop at the Pilot in Jamestown, New Mexico where we stumbled into the store of the infamous “Bubba P. Waters.”
Mark Bush aka Bubba P. Waters became a trucker in 1978 at the age of 20, after hitchhiking across the US and getting picked up by a trucker along the way. During that ride he was sold on road-life and bought it hook, line, and sinker. Promises of good money and the freedom to be your own boss kept him at it for three and a half trying years, but the money never really panned out. Mark ran himself to the bone on the job, “The longest I was awake while I was driving was 37 hours straight. You’d pound the coffee and people would give you little vitamins, speed actually, like Black Beauties or White-Crosses to keep you going. Nowadays it’s all that energy drink crap”.
Mark kept hearing truckers talk about “chickenhaulers,” a term that refers to drivers who pimp their rigs out in chrome. “I did up a picture of a nasty little rooster in front of a hot rod and it took off and the American Chickenhauler Association was born. Two months later I bought a used trailer and starting selling T-shirts and knives. Truckers always need T-shirts and knives.” The store is a family run affair. Tina, Mark’s lovely wife, was the store’s first cashier back in 1997. Mark is the loveable frontman who can often be seen playing a banjo behind the counter and singing to his son, Cowboy Zack.
One section of the store is devoted to religious T-shirts beckoning truckers to “Put on the armour of God” with a picture of an archangel floating above a platoon of American soldiers. Another section displays pro-military shirts that proclaim “Peace is dead. You’re next”. The most intriguing section is along the back wall where all the political shirts hang. Right wing, ultra-conservative, liberal hating is the general flavour on display. I was tempted to buy the one about killing a liberal then eating them to see if they taste like chicken. Pepper spray is abundant, literature on homemade silencers and “how to hide stuff” in your house sit beside an entire showcase devoted to stun guns. Another display case holds switchblades, throwing knives, and faux lipstick containers that conceal one inch knives just in case your woman gets into a tough spot some night and needs to paper-cut a rapist to death.
I bought a DVD called Death from the Shadows: Techniques of Sentry Stalking and Silent Elimination. It teaches you how to kill human beings. It was my wife’s Christmas present. Over and out.
JAY BULCKAERT
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