On the Road #12

Jesse was up early and I barely had time to go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. There is reason that I don't eat a lot when I am travelling. I would have assumed that with the amount of fruit that Jesse ate that he would need to use the bathroom far more frequently than he did. Jesse was not a morning person and even after a huge cup of coffee he was not very communicative. But then even the day before he had not been overly talkative.

Some drivers like to talk and it only takes me a few questions about their truck or their load and they are good for 15 or 20 minutes. Others love to go on to great length about why they love driving a truck for a living. A few of my truck drivers have been interested in my life and have asked lots of questions. Sometimes the truck driver and I can go off on weird directions such as the time a driver and I spent a night planning a cross Europe car trip to the Pacific Ocean. There have been other drivers who have used me to talk about their failed relationships and why their fathers didn't love them. Jesse did none of those things. We did talk about his girlfriends and some of their problems. He talked a lot about his relationships with some of their kids. But it felt somewhat superficial. Not that he was intentionally superficial, just that our conversation never took off. Usually if I travel with someone for a day and a half I get to know them quite well. With Jesse this really never happened. It was until late on Sunday I even found out that he had kids of his own. But he had no contact with them. It was sort of sad and perhaps explained why he didn't seem interested in talking about my grand kids.

To make it even more difficult for us to have a conversation, Jesse mumbled and there were times that after asking him to repeat something twice and still not understanding him, I just agreed with him or stopped talking for a while. It wasn't until last evening together that he mentioned that he had a problem talking clearly or loudly. He said that he had never spoken very loudly. I wonder if his manner of speech, and perhaps his uncomfortableness with it led him into profession that did not require him to talk a lot.

The only topic that Jesse talked consistently about was this "self improvement club" he belonged to. Except it wasn't a club, it was a scam to take people's money. It appeared as is one went to a meeting, heard some sort of inspirational speaker, and were then convinced to buy a specific product. The hook was that if one could develop the skills to sell these products to other people - that is where the self improvement came in - then the products were free. Jesse was taking some sort of mood leveler vitamin and some sort of "fat reducer" pill. Jesse told me that if I had not been in the cab, he would have been listening to his tapes. Clearly not only were the pills useless, but to get people to believe that this would "improve them" seems to me to be fundamentally dishonest and perhaps even more importantly morally corrupt.

Jesse not only ate a lot of fruit he, also smoked a lot. In hindsight I wondered if that was why he liked driving in the States. Tobacco products are so much cheaper there. While he was polite the first time he lit one up, and quite often offered me one, the smoke did get to me. There were times when I thought about getting out at the next stop and trying for different ride, but the stops were few and far between and besides I had learned the hard way that the Hitchhiking Gods punished those who rejected rides.