Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived in North Carolina for well over forty years–not consecutively, but after years in Bridgeport, Connecticut, New York, New York, Seattle, Washington, and Key West, Florida (which isn’t really the south either), I kept returning. Nowadays, I’m retired and live in the hurricane-ravaged western North Carolina mountains, near Asheville.
I saw a dead wild boar along the highway just yesterday, but I’ve spent over forty years in the south and I’ve yet to see (or smell) a dead mule, which like many mythic creatures, is clearly quite elusive.remains elusive.
Movers
Back when I would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, I once worked for an entire summer at Allied Van Lines as a mover. Every morning I’d show up at their terminal to wait for the owner-operators to arrive. The hope was that somebody would want to hire an extra man or two to help with a residential pickup or to unload stuff into storage.
Basically, it was day labor. Sometimes I’d sit all morning with the other movers and nobody would want us, but on other days there’d be dozens of arriving drivers who needed some extra muscle and were willing to pay us twenty bucks an hour for our services. In theory, the only prerequisite for the job was a back strong enough to lift one end of an upright piano, but in practice you also needed to stay sober and look presentable.
If the drivers were headed to the suburbs to load the contents of some executive’s home with expensive furniture and accessories to be wrapped in plain brown paper and carefully packed into sturdy cardboard boxes, they wanted to hire movers who looked like they worked for a reliable major company rather than guys who’d just as soon dropkick the boxed lampshades or hide tablespoons from a heirloom silverware set in the pockets of their sagging jeans.
So unless there was no one else to be had, most drivers were reluctant to hire the middle-aged but often toothless Appalachian types, many of whom were Oxy junkies, or even the silent, hard-muscled young Chicanos, who often looked like road-crew convicts with chips on their shoulders and dew rags on their heads.
But because I was young and healthy, and could be mistaken for a college-student, which I wasn’t, I was often chosen by the drivers for their residential runs, which obviously wasn’t fair, but fairness was another issue that I couldn’t do much of anything about. Besides, I frequently found myself partnered with a leathery-skinned, sixty-plus-year-old Oklahoma cowboy named Jessie, who always wore the same worn-out denim clothing—a pair of faded Levis with a threadbare matching jacket that I don’t believe he’d ever washed.
Jessie never said much, but he was sinewy and reliable—and still plenty strong enough to
lift what needed lifting. Personally, I was always on the lookout for something valuable but small
that I could appropriate and pawn, but I don’t think it ever once crossed Jessie’s mind to steal
anything he handled. But it wasn’t like I actually coveted anything those rich folk owned. If
anything I pitied them for having accumulated so many valuable things that they needed the likes
of Jessie and me to move them.
