Guest Post by Steve C.
HSF, when you wrote that back in the day when you were traveling alone you encountered a lot of broken souls I saw a bond that only those of us that have lived it can understand.
I have been a technical sales/application specialist for industrial electric motors for four decades. I spent almost three of those decades on the road and at least twelve of those as a road warrior.
You have all probably heard the term ‘road warrior’, but likely do not realize that there is actually a definition of the term.
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary merely says, “… Road warrior – a person who travels frequently especially on business…”, but that is not how those of us that have lived it define it. To us a road warrior was a person that logged a minimum of 250 overnights on business in a twelve-month period. It could be in sales, service, as with HSF – performing comedy, or anything, but it had to be business only. No working vacations – business. We called ourselves coyotes.
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It is a hard and empty existence. It literally sucks the life out of you. I could see it in the faces, particularly in the eyes, of other coyotes. I knew many of them from nights spent at the bar of whatever hotel I happened to be staying in. They were about the only friends I had and I would only see them in passing.
Life expectancy is short. Most road warrior/coyotes can only stand it for three or four years before either hitting the wall or succumbing to heart attacks, strokes, alcoholism, or unfortunately, one of the highest rates of suicide of any occupation. I suspect the high rate of suicides is due to the realization that you were giving away your life to companies that cared not a whit for you. They used us and discarded us like buying a bolt of copy paper at Office Depot. Mark Zuckerpig would likely call us dumb fucks. And so we were.
A home life is usually either unavailable or unsustainable. Mine cost me my marriage. You find that when you do go home that you don’t know anybody.
Hitting the wall is what we called it when a coyote would eventually have a meltdown. In my case, I was able to actually visualize it. It looked like the light you can see approaching the end of a tunnel. If you hit it, you were through by one of the earlier mentioned methods. Few survived it. I saw it coming and managed to get myself off the road before it ended what little life I had left in me.
I used to drive 50,000 to 60,000 miles a year. Back when I was still living in Buffalo, NY before moving to Texas and continuing my road warrior/coyote lifestyle, I used to drive on the NY State Thruway a lot. You would pull into the ticket booth at one place and they would give you a card with all of the exits on it showing the final price you would pay when exiting at your destination.
Keep in mind that driving wasn’t the job though, it was our type of commute. Usually a different place every night. Most of us didn’t travel to Paris, or Rome, or London, but to places you had never heard of and would be lucky to find on a map. Work all day and drive at night to the next place you had to work. It was those oncoming headlights. They hypnotize and eventually break you.
I was one of the lucky ones though. My friend Marilyn was too. She actually hit the wall and survived it. Hers was among the most unusual hits too.
Marilyn pulled into the ticket booth early one winter morning. It was still dark and like many of us, it was those oncoming headlights that eventually caught up to her. She reached out to accept her Thruway ticket and froze like a statue. The ticket guy had to reach in and put her car in ‘Park’ and call the NY State Troopers and then an ambulance. Her recovery was slow and for many years she simply could not drive a car at night. It’s those oncoming headlights…
Reading about the tragedy of these two lesbians and their final solution for themselves and those poor adopted kids I can’t help but wonder if their on-the-road lifestyle wasn’t their own version of hitting the wall before hitting the rocky bottom over the cliff.
We will never know what was going through their minds of course, but those that have never lived that road warrior life will find it even more difficult to understand.
In any case, it is tragic for all parties…
Don’t recall the name, but a famous musician told about traveling for decades on his bus, staying at motels, and the life as reported above.
He later said the money, fame, women were not worth it – what was important above all was doing what you wanted to do (life on your terms).
Truck driving. You are nobody to everybody, everywhere.
Steve C, your story reminded me of couple I have.
I fly most weeks, a few years ago I met a man – ex ‘road warrior’. He told me he walked on a plane one day, looked down the long aisle, right then he said he froze. Realized he could not take another trip flying in a tube. He was helped off the plane. Had to call he wife to come get him at the airport. In telling me his story, he said that was his last time on a plane.
On another trip, I was making a connection somewhere, the plane landed, people were checking their text and voice messages. One guy near me started cursing, loudly. I asked him if everything was OK (thinking he was acting like an @sshole). He told me he was just was laid off, by text, in the middle of his trip. He was going to have to re-book and fly back home. I though what a heartless organization he had worked for, they could not even contact him over the weekend before he started his trip.
My take on the 2 lesbians is fairly harsh. I think they were insistent of performing a virtue signaling, SJW experiment, basking in the praise of the left and crashed to earth when they realized their ozzie & harriet fantasy was just that……a fantasy with real life consequences. I’m sorry those children were caught up in their shit.
The truth is, we have virtually NO idea of what their scene was. From what we DO know, they supposedly abused the kids; refusal of food as punishment.
One report said the speedo was stuck on 90, but I doubt that SUV could get close to 90 in the 75 feet to the cliff edge.
Best thing I EVER did was 1) go into business for myself, and 2) becoming a pro at sales.
Westcoastdeplorable,
Yep, me too…best think I ever did was 1) go into business for myself, and 2) drive hard for P&L immediate RESULTS.
After my first sales call…I never had to make another one for 10 years until I retired…73 clients came to me.
“Reading about the tragedy of these two lesbians and their final solution for themselves and those poor adopted kids I can’t help but wonder if their on-the-road lifestyle wasn’t their own version of hitting the wall before hitting the rocky bottom over the cliff.”
I haven’t empathy for those two women. They were criminal.
They also were given headway to continue to commit child abuse. If they were alive, I would ask The People to attaint them.
The Road Warrior has an ethical order. The ethical order does not come from the top.
I watched an ethical respiratory therapist lose his job bc he would not push (cognitive) elderly individuals to add a, not needed, medication to their medication regime. He lost his job and was pushed out for applying ethical standards. (I have been educated to be aware, growing old is not a disease.)
A handsome white man told me why he left a sales job to somewhat sink in status. He was ethical. He gave up his status. America did not celebrate; his local community did not celebrate.
Steve C, is there more you want to say? I realize, from experience, the closest individuals should not expect road warriors to be known as strangers. I know HSF can relate to your experiences moreso.
I was once called upon to administer discipline – verbal reprimand, written reprimand, “plan to correct actions” and then termination – to a middle aged woman whose primary offense was being white and married to a black man. The owner was extremely prejudiced against black people, and felt she had erred. Why he thought it was his place to punish her escaped me.
What stuck out then was the supine obeisance of the HR department – another middle-aged white woman. She made no attempt to intervene, since it was a small privately owned company and there was probably little she really could do. It was all on me to follow orders.
I didn’t. I wrote her a letter describing what I knew of her innocence, but could not prove it was the owner’s prejudice that threatened her. I just wrote that as far as I, her supervisor was concerned, she had done her job well and properly and I could see no reason for the discipline that I wasn’t going to enforce.
I left that job and landed on my feet – that time. Be aware that any ethical stance you make, anywhere, will cost you, and just be willing to pay that price. I had another opportunity open up just in time to make the change, and left on my own terms .
A few months later she got into a fight in the parking lot with a redneck who also disapproved of her mixed-race marriage, and the plant manager fired them both. Later the company was swallowed up by one of their customers, then that customer was swallowed up by a multi-national conglomerate. All I did for her and all I ever did there was lost in the sands of time – but I can still look myself in the mirror when I shave in the morning.
I was a road warrior at a younger age (early 20s). I installed printing machines all up and down the east coast. Small towns in the middle of nowhere as well as downtown areas like Philly. It was cool for awhile but I am quite glad it was only a few years.
Up til’ last Fall, I was on a travel team running around the world for an organization with world-wide reach and a constant high-speed tempo. I was on the road nearly every other week around the US and world-wide. Despite going to some of the greatest locations in the world, Paris, Greek islands, Germany, NYC, Tokyo, Seoul, I never actually saw much of anything, just my hotel, a restaurant, maybe a few hours’ walk around the surrounding area, then back to the airport. I felt like Fight Club nailed it with the narration about how you fall asleep in one place and wake up in another, everything is single-serving, tiny life; single-serving friends. Could you wake up as another person?
I’m much happier now that I’m at home.
Great piece, Steve.
A few years ago I sat down and did the math. The car I used during that period of my life was a 1988 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe I bought brand new about a month before I hit the road. When I took it off the road at the end of my career it had over 800,000 miles on it. If I was driving 60 mph every moment I was in it I spent almost two solid years of my life with my hands on the wheel, 24/7/365. That’s like going to Mars and back. Lots of time to think about things when you spend that kind of time in your own head. I also learned that if you have to pick something to listen to, Journey is 100x better than the Cowboy Junkies, especially if you want to stay awake. I always felt like I had a lot more in common with long distance truckers than I did with the showbiz people in LA and NY even though I was in the same industry.
Being a road comic had it’s upside as well. I got to see America before it went completely off the rails in a way most people never do. It was varied and distinct with different regional flavors and sights not just McDonald’s and WalMarts. I played so many small towns and off the beaten path venues in every kind of weather and season that I was able to get a real grasp of just how vast and varied this country really is. Huge doesn’t begin to do it justice. I was lucky enough to have the background of having been an airborne infantryman so living out of a car was, as they say in the South, like shitting in high cotton. I had a trunk full of camping gear and fishing tackle so I stopped wherever and whenever I liked and set up camp and fed myself. I learned how to hunt mushrooms, stopped to look for arrowheads in farm fields, camped out in empty kivas in the desert, went swimming in glacier lakes. I stopped at every obscure museum and attraction to see what was there and five or six nights a week I was treated like a minor celebrity as long as I brought my A-game to the stage and then I got to disappear back into obscurity the next morning. I learned to eat at church suppers and potlucks to get some decent grub and conversation, and went about my business unmolested and unnoticed. There was the instant camaraderie and good humor of the road comics in the green room, and the blessed silence of the empty National Parks on the off nights. I was paid cash and lived a spartan life- I had no apartment or home other than the car and the hotel room and I had a suit bag for my stage clothes and a kit bag for toiletries and no desire for any other possessions so I socked away a nice little nest egg without really trying. If I got tired or stressed I just dropped off the radar (this was before the Internet and cell phones) and holed up in some abandoned campground until I recharged my batteries and hit the road again.
You become a whole different kind of resourceful when it’s just you and there’s zero safety net. Timing chain goes at 3 am in the middle of a blizzard 200 miles from the nearest town in a place you’ve never been before and your nearest friend is three states away and your next gig is in 11 hours? You better figure it out. Book a gig in Winnipeg, Manitoba that ends on a Saturday night and you have to be at your next booking in Ft Lauderdale by Wednesday at 8pm? Drink a lot of coffee and sleep in the rest areas for an hour or two whenever the lines in the road start to go fuzzy on you. You also develop an armor plated confidence that allows you to skate through virtually any kind of situation from homicidal hitchhikers to ego maniacal superstars and drug addled club owners.
It did get old though and after I met my wife and we got married it was clear that it wasn’t going to work and when she got pregnant with our son that kind of slammed the lid on that part of my life. I consider myself supremely lucky to have done that time and to have gotten out without incident. It gave me insights into life and human behavior, built up a decent launching place for the next part of my life and it gave me a lot of great stories, some that I can tell my children to their delight and amusement and some I wouldn’t tell anyone, not ever.
Oh no, not Journey, noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!! I think that is why you may have left that lifestyle, if not unintended. I have traveled a bunch for work, including driving home from ft. lauderdale after 9-11 and the planes were false flag grounded, but having to listen to that would be the most horrific of evils. So sorry for your predicament. And hopefully see you in a few weeks if those neo-con bastards haven’t started wwiii yet dammit. Damm good syrup year though, eh???
some I wouldn’t tell anyone, not ever.
____________________
These are exactly the ones you must tell here.
I fired all my employees and have done the 50-60K miles/yr since 2008 but don’t mind. It’s my business & have developed a wonderful client base over the last 29 years. Sure, sometimes you tire of it but the freedom to set my schedule and the money it entails more than make up for the road time.
I guess it’s to each his/her own.
I’d imagine that life is a lot less stressful if you work for yourself and set the schedule for yourself. Not having to worry about the boss, getting laid off, etc.
Thanks, but I’ve a unique situation. Since 1976 I’ve been involved with either filling (76-89) or digging up/foam in-place closures (89-present) of buried home heating oil tanks (“USTs”), becoming the largest closure contractor of those south of Yankeeland, and have learned to be a multi-family mold/moisture expert, despite being a MBA.
And, it’s a must to look 1-2 short term, then 4-5 years down the road for what is what next. Lonnie Strickland & Art Thompson taught me that back in the mid-70s. And I met God in Tuscaloosa back then several times due to family football relations (much older cousin played with Bart Starr & roomed with Hootie Ingram). Look Lonnie and A Cubed up, they’re the gurus of Strategic Management.
I worked for several years on the road steady. One project to another. Different cities, states, and employers. The only constant was my bank. After a while, I began to feel like a sort of ghost. It seemed like (outside of the work) I was losing presence in any sort of a substantial social world. Becoming invisible. Cruising around, hitting it hard, and going on my way, leaving not much in the way of a mark. No one looked forward to my arrival or missed me when I left.
Odd as Hell, it became. I still do a lot of roadwork, like right now, but am able to break it up with time at a real home. Work ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“Some I wouldn’t tell anyone not ever” Don’t we all have at least a few of those?
For those not yet inland county rural “GROUNDed” and . . . REPENTED, GROUPED/GATHERED, GUNNED, GARDENED, PROVISIONED and . . . S-I-M-P-L-I-F-I-E-D, the “clock is ticking” and the “quickening/entropy” will NOT be [forever] avoided.
Not as intense but soldiers lead a vagabond life (some prefer military reservations and some local economies) until they get out. Also, construction and agricultural workers who go from job to job. I liked the railroad that sent us x miles out, enjoy a meal at some town and then x miles back each day.
My dad used to tell me that during the depression the Burlington railroad would lay off their workers and if it was summertime he would ride freight cars with my grandfather looking for work. Riding with the hobos and living in jungles was a hard life but honest. He learned a lot about life but it turned him into a hoarder with every scrap having value. He would wear house slippers with duct tape repairs as he would want to get as much wear out of them as possible and saving the new slippers for later.
I used to travel in Eastern Europe and the dreaded FSU (Former Soviet Union) close to 100%, staying in 4-5 star hotels, big dinners and an unimaginable number of plane miles! Sounds grand except I have woken up in a darkened room and really had no idea what city I was in. Happened two or three times. gaining weight for low exercise and massive breakfast buffets and high calorie dinners. Yes you do burn out and it made me short tempered. Luckily I don’t have to travel for business anymore……
MH,
I’ve done the sea bag drag, lived in a wandering van for awhile, and I spent 5 years traveling the airport, hotel, consultant hired gun – road warrior (big money) red eye trek/blur in 27 states (went to two other countries) 24/7 almost 365…before landing in the consultants nirvana…the local bleeding big account…on retainer!
Now, after 5 years of nirvana I’m 5 years in Homestead Last Stand Heaven…I can go three, four days without seeing another being who is human (until my wife comes home) or until I go into town for more sipping liqueur and other staples . I suspected I was going to like it…I had no idea I was going love it this much.
Thrift and delayed gratification is sweet to the debt free…Banksters kiss my ass…bone.
“I suspect the high rate of suicides is due to the realization that you were giving away your life to companies that cared not a whit for you. They used us and discarded us like buying a bolt of copy paper at Office Depot.”
Every moment of your life is up to you to use as you see fit. You said yes to a bad deal. When it doesn’t work out the way you wanted or imagined. “I’ve been used”. Are you kidding me???
You have a skill set. A JOB you were hired for. Said yes to. Whatever it is. Football, Basketball, Sales, Engineering, Carpentry, Roofing, SeAL team etc, etc….
You don’t have the courage to get out yourself. You know it. And when you fold. It’s their fault…. They don’t love me. They don’t see what I sacrificed. They should have protected me.
EverClear
You put yourself in stupid places
Yes I think you know it’s true
You say they taught you how to read and write
They taught you how to count
I say they taught you how to buy and sell
Your own body by the pound
I think you like to be their simple toy
I think you love to play the clown
I think you are blind to the fact
That the hand you hold
Is the hand that holds you down