It is a known fact
that many working journalists actually aspire to be anything but.
Usually they fantasize about being best-selling novelists, sitting on their
asses, collecting royalty checks and living off the profits of whichever
of their works they most recently sold down the river to that great big
serial rapist of books we call Hollywood. Yet the reality of the
situation is, they're still journalists and are still stuck wherever it
is they would rather not be stuck. This is why so many of them are cranky
and have alcohol problems. They eventually get pissed off and shuck
the whole thing to become truck-drivers. And, oddly enough, this
is where many of them began.
Before landing their
first journalism job, many journalists find they have to drive trucks in
order to earn a living. Such famed journalists as David Brinkley,
R. Emmett Tyrel, Bob Woodward, Sam Donaldson and Connie Chung all got their
start driving the big rigs. (In fact, Connie met her husband,
Maury Povich, on such a haul, back when he was just a bar fly in Tulsa.)
You might say that trucking has become something of a rite of passage for
the modern American journalist. Take a look at Cokie Roberts' music
collection you'll no doubt find a double CD set of Trucker's Gold.
If you were to ask Mike Wallace what his favorite film is, odds are he'd
say Every Which Way But Loose. And if you asked William Safire
his advice for braking on a downgrade, he'd say, without blinking, that
you should intermittently apply all of your service brakes in a way that
will reduce the speed of your fully loaded vehicle by about 5 or 6 mph
during each application.
Yes, the journalist/trucker's
life can be a lonely one. All those long hours on the road, dreaming
of seeing your by-line in print, and your only company a guy called Edible
Steve on Channel 19. And though it does have a certain Keroakian
poetry to it, the prospect can be a dismal one to ponder; even for a pre-trucker
like myself. For, yes, even though I have a BA in journalism from
Mississippi State University, I have not yet landed my first journalism
job. In fact, I've spent most of my post-college years working in
radio. Were I to try and break into journalism, though, I'd have
several years of trucking to look forward to before I could even consider
getting stuck at some crummy weekly paper, writing feature stories about
how local socialite Old Man Manning and his wife Fanny Maye are having
the Preacher over for lunch, Sunday week. After that, I'd have at
least a decade to go before I could start developing a taste for vodka
laced coffee. Couple more decades after that and I'd be looking to
shuck it all to become a truck-driver again.
In the meantime,
I'm working in the public library in Lewisburg, WV, helping put my wife
through medical school and doing my damndest to stay away from the local
weeklies. Instead of chronicling the local news, I choose to chronicle
some particularly horrible events that have befallen me during my pre-trucker
years. The story begins in a little Mississippi
town called Tupelo.
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