Truckin'

Written by Anonymous, Edited by Olivia Notaro

Corn by Maddie Lowe

Truckin’ 

The cigarette burn-hole on the back left seat fit my 10-year-old pinky perfectly. I’d twist my finger deep into the foam––a fidget to distract from how my knees would press uncomfortably into the front seat. That’s where Dad had one hand out the window and the other palming the steering wheel. He would bring his cigarette to balance on his lips, the smoke curling off the butt and into my nose, so he could turn up the radio dial. Some live version of a Grateful Dead song (and it was always a live version) would blare out of the back speaker and in my ear. Back then, the Grateful Dead sounded like how cigarettes smelled, and both meant that Dad had torn my siblings and me away from the Sunday comics (But Dad, this is the only day they’re in color!) or from a Pokémon Nintendo DS adventure (One more battle, please Dad!) to help him load the pickup truck at Point A and unload it at Point B. Our broken dishwasher has to go to the junkyard. Mr. Down-the-Street-Neighbor chopped down a tree and he wants us to take the firewood. I need plywood from HomeDepot. You get the idea. 

When my dad first bought the truck, its bed’s sleek gray paint matched the rest of its exterior coat. But with every piece of junk that slid around on bumpy rides, or with every hunk of wood we chucked into it, the paint chipped away to reveal a dull silver. Each scratch remains a souvenir from every Sunday’s labor, and I guess those days left some indents on me, too. The Grateful Dead is perennially on my Spotify playlists. Cigarette smoke is a comforting smell, one that fondly reminds me of my dad. And I now take pride in being well-acquainted with working with my hands. 

By the time we were teenagers, my dad surrendered the pickup and let each of us drive it for our last two years of high school. My three siblings and I are all two years apart, which meant that when one was leaving for college, the next was just getting their license. Retired from its manual labor, the truck went through four rotations of new smells and sounds: weed and ska with my older brother, sweaty cleats and Weezer with my older sister, greasy Five Guys and video game soundtracks with my younger brother. And on my 17th birthday, when I became captain of the ship, I unabashedly sprayed the inside of the truck with my Bath & Body Works Warm Vanilla Sugar perfume as I belted Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits all the way from the DMV to the high school. As my right hand gripped the grimey, leather steering wheel at 6 o’clock, I realized how much the truck elevated my viewpoint; I sat higher and mightier than all the little sedans in my suburban high school parking lot. To reflect how incredibly cool I felt driving that beat-up truck, I named it after the most suave man I could think of: Full House’s Uncle Jesse. 

Uncle Jesse became an integral part of my high school identity and reputation. (You’re the girl who drives the truck, right? Why yes, I am the girl that drives the truck.) That truck became every part of me as I became part of it, in the most subtle ways. A permanent dirt print of my shoe on the dashboard, which is where I’d tie my running sneakers every day before track practice. Cup holders that held an equal mixture of loose change and balls of chewed gum discarded in its wrapper. Layers of dirty sweatshirts in the backseat, which buried any sign of a burn-hole. At eye level, some faint and faded letters, “KM + BG,'' written with a fingertip on the passenger seat window. My first boyfriend wrote that in the condensation our impassioned exhales created when we first saw each other without clothes. And below eye level, the rip in the driver seat’s upholstery I anxiously dug into as BG and I broke up. 

I couldn’t see any scratches in the bed the weekend before I graduated high school, when 13 friends stuffed themselves into the back while I drove them up and down country roads. The engine protested against their weight, but I pressed that gas pedal anyway. Their joyful shrieks and my Tom Petty CD, turned to maximum volume, echoed off the hills as we propelled forward. The scratches were still concealed that night, when we laid blankets and pillows down to watch Jurassic Park and eat burgers at the drive-in.  

There were certainly no scratches to be seen the day my dad arranged all my luggage into the back, like a game of Tetris, before driving me to my very first college dorm room. My subconscious leg bounce dialed up as we approached campus. (I had graduated to the front seat and my ring finger didn’t quite fit in the burn-hole anymore.) After lugging bags up to my room and hugging me goodbye, he took the truck back home, where it awaited my newly licensed younger brother. I bet he had those windows wide open (no cigarette this time though; he had quit cold turkey by then) and I bet he played some obscure recording of a Grateful Dead show. If only my dorm window had faced the road; then I could’ve listened to the music fade out and watched the truck grow smaller and smaller, until it disappeared beyond a faraway bend in the road.  

But there was no final, bittersweet scene for me to watch. Instead, I stood all alone in my strange, barren bedroom. And I cried. I was never going to be the truck girl in college, that was a self I had to surrender. In its place, I was given a new space I had to make my own.