I read an articles about the decline of the outlaw truckers this morning. Every time I get out on the highway and I get tangled in with a bunch of semi’s I can’t help but think about some of the guys I used to know.

I look in the windows of the trucks as I’m passing them. I see the straight-arrow patroits wearing an American flag on the shoulder of their uniforms, company men. Accurate logbooks, and seals on the trailers, and no more than 10 hours a day behind the wheel. Coffee and Winston cigarettes. The, “Coffee, that’s my drug,” truckers, the heroes of the highway, and too many sad country songs.

Than I think about the assholes I used to roll with. Rolling pharmacies, hundred thousand pound parties on wheels. Take a few hits of microdot, turn up the Floyd, and go Space Truckin’.

Guys so strung out they would reach a point where they actually could not make sentences. You’d go to talk to these guys at a truck-stop and they’d stare at you with vacuous eyes, but no words would emerge from their lips. One time, one guy quacked like a duck, looked shocked, then laughed hysterically and peed himself. Good times…

A small arsenal in the sleepers—had to protect the load—and for the love of God do not look at what’s back there in that trailer.

I can remember driving 200 miles out of the way on back roads in the middle of the night to avoid a weigh station. It wasn’t because we were heavy.

These guys, my friends, we were never immortalized in song. Kind of sad really. We were a lot more interesting. Conway Twitty and Porter Wagoner wanted nothing to do with us…

Lowell George did though, “Weed, whites and wine…”

The old woman pressed the flat palms of both her hands along her lap, trying to straighten the creases in her old, faded blue and white cotton house-dress. Then she looked back up at me and continued. ”Late July was a slow time, life kind of moved like mud up in them hills. A sweaty hot month, and nobody wanted to get goin’ too fast to go pickin’ in that hot sun.”

”Jimmy was fresh home from the big war. He went and got his-self lost in France for a year or two, we figured he was dead. I suppose I was happy as most when we seen him walkin’ his tired ass up that narrow dirt path, in between them blueberry bushes, smiling and a wavin’ like a hero.”

“I know’d looking at him that day he’d changed. A lot of boys went to that war and come home different, sad, kind of broke down. Not Jimmy, he walked like a man with a big plan and a bigger dick.”

“I didn’t think much of Jimmy or his dick at the time. I turned and went back up on the hill to pick them goddamn berries. I used to like to pick up by the dead lake, Lake Maratanza, they called it. That water was crystal clear all the way to the bottom. Nothing lived in it. No fish, no weeds, nothin’. There probably some science reason. We all just said it was a magic lake. When it got too hot pickin’ I’d strip off my clothes and jump in. The ice cold water damn near give ya’ a heart attack. Way up high, on top of the mountain, not even a tree for a mile or so. We called it the ‘sky lake.’ I’d lay on my back and feel like you was floatin’ in the sky.”

”I’ll not forget that day, I just climbed up out of the water and up on a big white rock. Jimmy come up behind, while I was naked, and raped me. He said it was my fault, fer bein’ naked and pretty. Later on, after I’d run home, so did my daddy. Jimmy said he’d been lonesome what with the war and all. That’s how it was back in them days. Most men is cowards to the subject of rape and I supposed Jimmy and my daddy was like most men.”

“Amyways, up on that white rock I turned on around, still naked, as Jimmy was zippin’ up his pants. I kicked him full on I the nuts. Kicked him so damn hard he flewed off the rock like a big-ass, goddamn bird, and a holding his nuts with one hand and the other a flappin’ in the air, he went down into the cold water. The bastard near drowned, doubled over from the gut pain. I watched him struggle as I put my work dress back on.“

“He didn’t drown, I’m neither here nor there on that fact, I recon. Jimmy climbed out of the water by his-self, he never come after me again unless it wanted it.”

“Sometimes I think I married him so he’d keep that swinging dick from raping any other girls up there on the ridge.”

“So, anyhow, that’s how we come to be married and whatnot. After he come‘d home from the big war.”

As a boy when I’d sit in church I’d feel intimidated and inadequate and scared. In later years I’d realize that was design. Church made me feel isolated and failed.

Everybody was in on the secret except me. Everybody knew and loved this man, Jesus, in their hearts. I could not know someone I’d never met. I was terrified of a god who demanded the sacrifice of goats and sons.

The old lady, she’d wail, banging on that old piano, with skinny, arthritic fingers, singing them hymns; blood-curdling loud in that scary-screech owl voice. Singing praise to a god that wanted to butcher me on an altar for crimes I’m sure I’d yet to commit.

Sitting at the old lady’s knee, the only one I’d trusted. Even she won’t let me in on the secret. So I stay here on the outside, siding with my sin.

It was so clear to everyone but me.

Then I realized they’d weaponized religion.

I liked the street on the hot summer day. Everyone saluted and stood tall as the flag went by. Hoisted high by men in crisp and creased uniforms.

I had questions, a lot of things were broken. I had a friend home from Vietnam who said he’d kill me himself before he’d let me go to that Hell hole.

I was no chicken, but I didn’t want to die for no good reason. I only had one life—and the old lady and the church people went to great lengths to scare me—daily—that my end would not be a good one.

The TV, and the president, and some uncles made me feel a coward. Then I heard Ali speak, and he said, “I got no quarrel with the North Vietnam man,” and I realized I didn’t either. For Christ’s sake, I didn’t even know any North Vietnam men, I wasn’t quite sure I could even find it on a map.

Then I realized they’d weaponized patriotism.

My hometown was a small city in the north and it always felt like mid-October. A place that always was always in-between, like summer just passed and winter not quite yet come. Like twilight.

A warm and colorful and dark and foreboding place. Full of life and lifeless. At times quiet and complex and terrifying as a Halloween night, full of cold full moons and witchcraft and things that couldn’t be explained.

It was good to live in a time when everything couldn’t be explained.

We all seemed to live pretty much the same life in that town. Some kids had fathers and families and some had none. Some of the kids were rich and most were dirt-poor. We were all scared of the bomb and the white kids and brown kids and black kids mostly got along, and when we did fight—and I fought a lot, with just about everybody—it wasn’t particularly violent. Fighting was more a sport than a way of war. We collected scabs and scars as tokens of our collective rage.

My friend Archie and me were deadly scared of the bomb. It seemed like every day we hid under our desks, hiding from the coming blast. Archie said he was pretty sure hiding under a desk wasn’t worth a pinch of shit, but we hid anyway. I figured he was right.

Farms we’re nearby and we worked them when school was out. We killed the animals we raised as pets and we ate them because the world has an inherent cruelty that needed to be passed down like a torch, and understood and accepted.

There were a lot of rituals of passage in that town. Rituals of terrible importance that have now faded into memory and dust..

And, every brick and cement building had a yellow and black fallout shelter sign on it. If those signs were meant to comfort us, they did not.

Maybe we got along ok because we all knew any minute the Russians would bomb us, so we figured we might as well stick together.

Wiping his greasy hand across his craggy and pockmarked face; rubbing two fingers hard and deep in his eye sockets until tears appear. “I spose, I shouldn’t a killed her, that girl. The junkie hooker. It wasn’t my fault, entirely, you got to remember, I went there to preach to her, to heal her. I put hands on her and before I know’d what was what I fucked her. Then it all came apart right quick.”

“I kept layin’ hands on her and a prayin’. Then I felt the comfort and presence of the Lord and I know’d I’d done the right thing. I could tell by her sad eyes and the way she smelled her life wasn’t no good and I saved her from that life; in a harsh way, I suppose. She didn’t even put her panties back on and she was a stickin’ that needle-spike in her arm. The devil was in her. I saved her from that.”

“It was Christmas Eve, 1968. I turned on the TV as she lay there bleeding and I saw them Apollo spacemen men showing movin’ pictures of the moon and back to Mother Earth. I heard the one spaceman readin’ from Genesis and talkin’ about all of us on the good earth and I know’d I done right. I kept my hands on her as I watched the spacemen. When the TV program was over I saw the dead hooker’s blood had dripped on my Bible. I know’d that was the blood of the lamb and I’d done Gods work.”

“Then I got the Hell outta that motel, I’ll tell you that, Boy. I know’d I’d done Gods work, but the police wouldn’t a see it that way… Besides, I had my preachin’ work to attend to. Souls to save.”

—Reverend Jimmy B. Tester