Joe College Page 15

  “Maybe I will,” he replied, smiling to let me know he was only kidding. “By the way, did you remember to turn on the coffee stoves?”

  “Damn,” I said. “I’ll go do it now.”

  “Don’t forget.” His face turned serious. “Maybe you should get some sleep when you come back in. Believe me, four o’clock’ll be here before you know it.”

  Prosaic and dependable by day, the Roach Coach took on a more alien aspect at night, the silver storage cube haloed in moon-glow, as if lit from some internal source. Sometimes it seemed as startling to me as a lunar module parked in one of our neighbors’ driveways might have been. I tiptoed across the dewy lawn in my flimsy corduroy slippers, unlocked the back door of the cube, and pushed it up on its groaning hydraulic arms to expose the familiar flat faces of the coffee urns and sandwich oven.

  Making coffee for a lunch truck isn’t anything like making it at home. You can’t just flip a switch and expect piping hot coffee to come pouring out a couple of minutes later. The Roach Coach was outfitted with two twenty-two-gallon double-spigot tallboy urns, each divided into two chambers—left side for coffee, right for hot water. The last thing you did at the end of the day was fill the two right-hand tanks almost to the top with water from the garden hose (it’s important to use a black hose; water from the green ones tastes like plastic). Then, ideally around ten at night, you lit the propane stoves under the urns to heat the water overnight. While you slept, the ten gallons of water heated to the optimum temperature of two hundred degrees; eight gallons would be poured through a flannel coffee bag containing two pounds of GoldPak restaurant-quality coffee first thing in the morning. The remaining two gallons of water would be held in reserve for the occasional tea drinkers and Cup-a-Soup fans among our clientele.

  Aside from failing to extinguish the pilot lights before filling the propane tank—an oversight that could be potentially fatal or at least hazardous to the eyebrows—probably the single stupidest mistake a lunch truck operator could make was forgetting to turn on the stoves before going to bed. Every driver had a cautionary anecdote on the subject—never autobiographical—about some bozo in Bergen or Hudson County, or maybe someone his cousin had heard about in western Pennsylvania, a fuck-up too stupid or hungover to realize that his urns were dispensing cold water coffee to the biggest, meanest, most unforgiving construction workers around (ironworkers, usually, though some guys substituted pipe-fitters, apparently for variety), who retaliated for this outrage, depending upon who was telling the story, by 1. dumping cup after cup of the undrinkable stuff on the head of the hapless driver until he was thoroughly marinated in the juice of his own error, or 2. teaming up to push the truck on its side, or, most simply, 3. beating the living shit out of the guy, who absolutely deserved it, because people need hot coffee in the morning, and lunch-truck drivers have undertaken a sacred trust to provide it to them wherever they might be.

  So I lit the stove and averted these potential humiliations, at least for the time being. My task complete, I lowered and locked the door and headed back across the lawn and up the steps, fully intending to take my father’s advice and try to get some sleep. At the last minute, though, I let go of the doorknob and turned around to look again at the truck. It seemed to be shining a little more brightly than before.

  A voice spoke in my head.

  This

  is it, it said.

  I waited for clarification, but the voice didn’t return. I gave a short, uncomfortable laugh and closed my eyes, thinking I must have been more tired than I’d realized. But when I opened them, a strange feeling of lightness filled my body.

  I can do this, I thought. I didn’t have to be Joe College or Jack Kerouac. I could just be myself, my father’s son, living out my life in the town where I was born, growing old among people who’d known me as a kid. I could accept the world I’d unknowingly volunteered for the night I started a new life in Cindy, learn to love her the way my father had learned to love my mother, learn to be content with the things other people learned to be content with. What was in front of me right now—the anonymous suburban street, the silent trees, the truck glowing with its hidden fires—all that could be enough.

  “I can do this,” I said out loud, and admitting it was such a mighty relief that I might have sunk to my knees there and then if our next-door neighbor, Mrs. deFillipo, hadn’t stepped out onto her own porch at exactly the same moment and begun chanting, “Muffin, oh Muf-fin,” into the night in such a plaintive, melodic voice that it seemed like prayer enough for both of us.

  a shitload of salad

  I was back outside a few minutes after four the following morning, feeling distinctly less upbeat. The previous night’s epiphany hadn’t vanished, exactly, but it had already begun to slip out of reach, like a good dream interrupted by the alarm clock. Part of me wanted to close my eyes and summon it back to life, but the lunch-truck driver in me knew better than to try. If I closed my eyes for even a couple of seconds, I would have passed out in the driveway like the beleaguered heroine of a Victorian novel. The paperboy would have found me three hours later, curled up and snoring on the blacktop in blue sweatpants that spelled out Y-A-L-E in enormous white letters marching all the way down the length of one leg.

  I raised the back door again and stared dumbly at the steam leaking out of the coffee urns before remembering that all I had to do was turn on the stove to heat the sandwich oven, which just then contained no sandwiches, only single serving cans of pork and beans, Chef Boy-R-Dee ravioli, and Campbell’s soups. Unlike the urns, the sandwich oven wasn’t outfitted with a thermostat; if you accidentally left it on over the weekend, it would just get hotter and hotter until the cans exploded. You’d open it up on Monday morning and find the oven dripping with goop, like the walls of a gory crime scene.

  Concentrating hard, I twisted the knob and listened for the whoosh of ignition. Then I shut the door and rested my forehead against the cool metal for a couple of minutes before stumbling back inside for a shower, several cups of double-strength Folger’s crystals dissolved in hot tap water, and a Snickers bar, the first of many I’d consume in the course of a long day on the Roach Coach.

  Most people have never seen a coffee bag. It’s a reusable flannel filter that looks like a diaphragm custom-made for a woman who just happens to be a hundred feet tall. You fit it into the basket on top of the urn, dump in a couple pounds of ground coffee, and then pour hot water over it, one gallon at a time, from a stainless-steel pitcher. It’s not that easy to do; a gallon weighs a lot, especially when you’re balancing on the back bumper of a truck and your hands are shaky from lack of sleep. Aside from not spilling too much, the main thing you need to wormy about is keeping track of how many pitchers you’ve poured. It’s easy to space out around five or six, and end up skipping or repeating a number. You wouldn’t think an extra gallon one way or the other would make that much difference, but our regular customers were surprisingly discerning in this respect. They could tell from a single sip if we’d screwed up and would be happy to remind us of our failure for months to come.

  Once the coffee was taken care of, I made a quick trip to the basement fridge to grab the box of sandwiches my father had been storing there since Friday afternoon, the usual mix of Turkey, Liverwurst, Roast Beef, Ham & Cheese, Taylor Ham & Cheese, Sausage & Cheese, Steak & Cheese, Pastrami & Cheese, Beef Patty on Roll, Monte Cristo, et cetera, all of them wrapped in filmy plastic at the warehouse, their names and prices neatly handwritten on circular white labels. The cold sandwiches went on the bottom shelf of the display side of the truck, right above the ice bed, and the hot sandwiches went into the oven. You wouldn’t expect sandwiches to taste that good nearly three days after they’d been assembled, but picky as our customers were about the coffee, none of them ever complained that Monday’s sandwiches tasted any less fresh than the sandwiches we served any other day of the week.

  It was five thirty by the time I closed the doors, climbed into the cab, and started
the engine. I changed the radio station from WPAT to WNEW, then ran down a mental checklist—made the coffee, got the sandwiches, loaded my change gun—before releasing the parking brake and shifting into reverse. Then I backed out of the driveway and into the world, already singing along with the Boomtown Rats’ “(Tell Me Why) I Don’t Like Mondays,” which the deejay was playing especially for me and all the other poor stiffs just like me, a whole legion of us up before the crack of dawn, driving with our headlights on into the long dark tunnel of another work week.

  The warehouse—Central Jersey Lunch & Canteen in Roselle—was hopping at quarter to six, more than a dozen trucks crammed into the narrow spaces, parked so close that their raised doors formed a broken silver roof stretching the length of the lot. I waited in the street until one of the drivers finished loading—it was the surly Lithuanian everyone called Pete the Polack—and then nosed the Roach Coach into the space he’d vacated, threading the needle between Chuckie’s Chuck Wagon and a truck I’d never seen before, the door of which sported the words “Lunch” by Anthony, painted in flowery cursive and framed by a wreath of laurels.

  “Well, well,” said Chuckie when I hopped out of the cab. He was a shaggy-haired, foul-mouthed fireplug of a guy with a droopy mustache, wearing his usual cool weather outfit of an orange down vest over a green hooded sweatshirt. We’d gotten fairly close over the previous summer, had even gone out for beers a couple of times at the end of the workday. “Look who’s back from the groves of academe.”

  “The groves of academe? Where’d you get that?”

  Chuckie looked hurt. He claimed to have taught seventh-grade social studies for a couple of years—at which institution I couldn’t imagine—before quitting to take over his father’s route, and I’d forgotten how prickly he could be when he thought I was pulling rank on him.

  “It’s a common fucking idiom,” he informed me.

  “Not as common as you think.”

  Chuckie grinned to let me know he was giving me a free ride on this one.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m a special fucking guy.”

  “Special’s a nice way of putting it.”

  “Whadja take a class in smart-ass remarks this semester?”

  “Howdja guess? Don Rickles was a visiting professor in the groves of academe.”

  “Eat me,” he said, giving his genitals a hard upward yank.

  “Lovely,” I told him, popping up my storage door at the same moment he pulled his display door down. “I miss you when I’m away.”

  Chuckie breathed into his cupped hands and then rubbed his palms together. His face grew thoughtful and concerned.

  “By the way,” he said. “How’s your dipshit father?”

  You entered the warehouse through a curtain of heavy strips like the ones that slap your car at the car wash, and found yourself in a no-frills supermarket specializing in snack cakes, soft drinks, and paper goods, all of which you loaded onto a flat-bottom cart big enough to sleep on. When you had what you needed, the owner’s daughter, a hot number named Sheila who dressed like every day was Saturday night, tallied up your order and sent you on your way with a sweet smile and a few words of encouragement. No money changed hands in the mornings; the whole point was to grab what you needed, throw it on the truck, and get the hell out of there. There would be time enough to settle up at the end of the day, when everybody had cash in their wallets and a little more room to breathe. Besides, Sheila’s father didn’t have to worry too much about getting paid. If you wanted to drive a lunch truck in central Jersey, you had better stay on Pat Swenson’s good side. Either that or make your sandwiches by hand and buy your Tastykakes at the A & P.

  The truck was pretty much cleaned out on Monday mornings, so I loaded up on baked goods, box after box of icing-striped danishes sweating inside their crinkly cellophane, tiny packs of Rich Frosted Mini Donuts, individually wrapped buttered rolls, Mell-O fruit pies, peanut butter crackers, and sandwich creme cookies, not to mention the all-important milk for the coffee—whole, skim, and half-and-half—plus some SnakPak cereals, a big jar of nondairy creamer, a three-week supply of plastic stirrers, two cartons of cigarettes—one Marlboro, one Kool—and a dozen copies of The Daily News. Sheila barely glanced at my haul; instead she looked me up and down, smiling like I’d just offered her a surprise gift. She was wearing a black polka-dot miniskirt and sheer black stockings, an outfit my mother would have said she didn’t have the legs for, but even so, she was a welcome vision inside that drab warehouse full of wooden pallets and metal racks and cardboard boxes. The only other women in the place were the sandwich makers, four sweet-tempered middle-aged ladies who seemed completely at peace with the fact that they had to wear plastic bags on their heads for eight hours at a stretch.

  “Oh my,” Sheila said, scribbling mechanically on the pad attached to her clipboard. “You get better-looking every time I see you.”

  “Thanks.” I might have been more flattered if I hadn’t heard her say the exact same thing a minute earlier to Ted McGee, the three-hundred-pound operator of Fat Teddy’s Belly-Bustin’ Chow Barge. “You’re looking pretty good yourself.”

  Her expression grew momentarily uncertain, and I wondered if my compliment had broken through her thick shell of boredom to the actual person inside.

  “You know what?” she told me. “You’re half a dozen short on the buttered rolls.”

  Chuckie’s space was empty by the time I rolled my cart back out to the Roach Coach, but a muscular man with a shaved head and an honest-to-goodness waxed handlebar mustache—I assumed he was the Anthony of “Lunch” by Anthony—was busily rearranging the storage compartment of the truck to my right. Like most drivers, my father treated his storage area like a big car trunk, tossing in anything that didn’t fit anywhere else, crucial supplies mingling freely with mysterious junk, gold foil coffee packets nesting inside an old sweater, threadbare road maps scattered among stray napkins and winter gloves with cut-off fingertips, a broken change gun resting on top of a case of eight-ounce cans of Bluebird orange and grapefruit juice. One of our shelves was broken, and the other had been permanently bowed into the shape of a smile. Anthony’s storage compartment, on the other hand, was more neatly organized than our own display side, everything lined up and readily identifiable, not a candy wrapper or soda can in sight, the metal buffed and gleaming.

  “Maybe you can whip mine into shape when you’re done with yours,” I told him, raising the lid on the sorry jumble of sandwiches and candy and chips that was the business end of the Roach Coach. Everything had shifted during the ride; boxes were out-of-kilter and a couple of roast beef subs had tumbled into the ice bed, which luckily had no ice in it just then. Even the stainless-steel shelving looked dull, as if all the shine had been sucked out of it somewhere down the line.

  “I’d need about a week for a monstrosity like that.” Anthony’s he-man build and novelty mustache made him look a little like a circus strongman in a Fellini movie, but his voice was as pixieish as Truman Capote’s. He was wearing jeans, black combat boots, and an unzipped hooded sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, but on him there was nothing casual about this outfit. Everything was crisp, snug, considered. He reminded me of men I’d seen in Greenwich Village, fierce-looking guys who sometimes wore leather chaps over their Levis and checked each other out with startling candor, almost like they were spoiling for a fight.

  “I’m Danny,” I told him, holding out my hand. “I’ll be filling in for my dad for the next couple of weeks.”

  “Anthony,” he said. “Delighted.”

  “Did you just start this route?” I asked, loading the danishes on the second shelf from the top. “I didn’t see you here in January.”

  “I’ve been catering for three years,” he explained. “The lunch business is an experiment. In fact, it’s not really lunch as we know it. That’s why I put the word in quotation marks. It’s an entirely new vision of lunch.”

  “How so?” I asked, clearing space for a box of fru
it pies at the end of the sandwich shelf.

  “I only serve salads and healthy foods. No lunch meats full of nitrites, none of those horrible fattening danishes wrapped in plastic, none of those carcinogen-filled cherry pies.” He shuddered at the litany, then steeled himself to continue. “And no Twinkies! My God, are you aware of the crap that goes into Twinkles? If there was a nuclear war tomorrow, people would come back a thousand years from now, open a package of Twinkies, and basically taste exactly what you or I would taste if we opened that same package this very minute. Isn’t that frightening?”

  “I guess,” I said, though I actually felt a certain grudging admiration for a snack cake that could withstand Armageddon. “But who wants to eat salad for lunch?”

  Anthony smiled like a man holding a winning hand.

  “Come here. I want to show you something.”

  I followed him around to the display side of his truck, which looked nothing like any other lunch truck I’d seen. Where standard trucks were outfitted with four shelves, Anthony had customized his truck to accommodate six. The shelves contained nothing but plastic containers full of salads, three deep and two high the entire length and width of the box, packed as tight as books in a library.

  “That’s a shitload of salad,” I observed.

  “I make them myself.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “What? You think they’re going to make them here?” Anthony pulled one of the containers out and held it in front of my nose. It was nothing fancy, just iceberg lettuce topped with a couple of cherry tomatoes and a tuft of alfalfa sprouts. “Dollar fifty a pop,” he said proudly. “You know how many I sell on an average day?”

  “How many?”