July, 2005

The Art of the Pickup

By Matthew Klam

A truck is a wish, and I wished not to be a douche bag anymore. I'd just graduated from college with a very useful B.A. in philosophy, and two years later I stared out the window of a tall Midtown Manhattan office building and thought that I would die—from living on $17,000 a year, from working two blocks from my father's office, from rat urine in my kitchen. That's when I started looking for a new persona.

It was 1989 and I was twenty four, an editorial assistant at a travel-and-leisure magazine for doctors. The magazine aimed to teach doctors how to act rich: how to refrigerate their wine correctly and how to find the best cashmere sock in Edinborough. Acting rich was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to be free, be real. My father had dreamed of being real. He bought a pair of Frye boots and grew sideburns, and that was good enough for him. But I wanted to go further. So I quit my job and bought a truck.

The truck cost $3100, it was a black GMC 1500 pickup, a fleet truck with 62,000 miles. I scraped off the name of the company I'd bought it from, Santiago Construction, but left the logo, a skull and crossbones (made up of a hammer and crowbar) and the motto DEADLY ACCURATE on the driver's door, and I headed west. And because this was a quest, I brought some Cure and Billy Bragg for the ride.

My friend Jim had moved to Arizona to get his masters in archeology. He spent most nights in a tent in Show Low, so he invited me to live in his house in Flagstaff. I stayed two years. On my first night out, Jim took me to a real western place full of cowboys. He had me try some fried things that tasted like calamari before he told me they were steer balls. I tried everything. I earned a living waiting tables. On my days off, I camped and hiked. On my first day in the canyons west of Prescott, a javalina chased me down a narrow switchback. I found a scorpion in my sleeping bag.

I had no money. I had no idea where I was going. I drove around that strange place in a strange truck. Arizona is a driver's dream, and through the windshield of a full-size truck is a great way to view it. You could see it all coming: mountain ranges, incoming weather patterns. Those dusty two lane roads are beautiful, and there are desert climates and mountain ranges and little roadside geology lessons everywhere you turn.

When you're 24 and you make a big change, you wonder if people will see through your flimsy transformation. I had no confidence, but I had something else: hope. I'd climb down from the driver's seat and slam the big hollow door and look back and ask, Who's driving that truck? This wrangler here, I'd answer. Slowly, my confidence grew.

By the time I'd left Flagstaff, I'd learned to ski, paddled down class IV rivers, made many cheesy charcoal drawings, stole some $50 bottles of wine, seduced a waitress named Jacinta, wrote incredibly bad poetry, wrote short stories about talking dinosaurs, mountain biked through federal lands, almost got trampled by an ornery bull, got into actual fisticuffs in a McDonald's parking lot. And for once in my life, I didn't back down. I learned to shoot straighter pool and to cook Indian food, almost died when I lost my brakes driving my creaking, overloaded truck through the Rockies, saw a bald eagle in flight, hiked a 14,000 foot mountain range, ate balogna for dinner, trundled enormous sandstone boulders off cliffs in scenic red rock canyons, got lost in the woods five minute from my house and actually shit my pants.

I drove that truck all over the American Southwest, swam in Lake Powell, slept in a flashflood gutter in Albuquerque, hiked Havasu Canyon, and pissed along the highway at Shiprock as it shimmered in the terrible desert heat. I learned to identify yucca, saguaro, snakes, lizards, and prickly pears. One night, walking home with my friends, I threw an apple at a Maricopa County cop's head. We ran away, kicked down the plywood door of building under construction, hid there, and laughed until we had intestinal cramps. I did the Havasu Canyon hike with my father, it was a milestone for us, and at the bottom of the canyon I lit up a Marlboro and grinned. It might've been the worst insult I could toss at him. I took a class, banged the teacher and the best looking woman in the class, fell in love with the latter, and made her miserable, too, before she befriended the teacher and they talked about slashing my tires.

What did the truck have to do with any of this? Nothing and everything. When I think back though, to this blossoming of my new self, I think about the truck. Linking a personal transformation to a piece of machinery is problematic, not only because that machinery would eventually fail. It was a strange year, as I seesawed between high and low moments, between great decisions and awful ones, between bursts of outrageous confidence and despair.

Maybe that's how transformations go. The outlaw mentality—a big black truck flying a pirate's flag—represented my wilder ambitions: to climb a mountain, cultivate my inner artist, sneer down upon the structures that imprisoned me. To take the good with the bad. Anyway, my truck would protect me. It was a haven, a home on wheels, and an identity.

Over that time in Flagstaff, my confidence was reborn. Because I'd already run away from everything—home, a desk job, family crap—I lived by simple rules: When things got bad, I jumped in my truck and headed to the cinder cones, the Anasazi ruins, the great ponderosa-pine forests.

One day, a little sleet fell, and so I did the trick I'd seen truckers do when the snow had clung to the wiperblade—I smacked the windshield with my fist, and it cracked, a real crack all the way across. Every night after waiting tables, I drove back up the switchbacks out of the canyon, under a black sky, a blanket of stars, with that wavy crack messing up my sky.

The truck and I met a woman named Missy. She was small and dark and her olive skin made her look a little like she needed a shower. She cast a shadow of helplessness around her. She had a boyfriend, and they probably still laugh when they think of me. That spring, I backed out of a parking lot with Missy beside me, throwing the bedazzling charms of my rap upon her, throwing so hard that I forgot to close my door, and it got hung up on a big pipe and was basically torn off. I bent the frame back, until the door finally shut, but it was never right again. Wind howled and whistled when I drove.

As a last ditch to impress her, I gave her the keys to my truck and took my bike and a sleeping bag into the mountains to try to regain my sanity. During the two weeks I was gone, Missy and her boyfriend drove the truck to Phoenix. Somehow the cap blew off of the back while they were on the highway and it got smashed one side. I'm not sure what else they did to the truck, but when I got back it was filled with soda cans, candy wrappers, thousands of cigarette butts in the previously unused ashtray, and a pair of her boyfriend's underwear, sitting in the front seat and unclean.

I'd gone out west for a lot of good reasons. I'd flown my pirate flag proudly, and it had served me well, but that guy's underwear spoke to me. It said, "You're a New York Jew trying to fuck my girlfriend, but I was born here, and I'll be here when you're gone." I could've stayed longer, moved into the mountains or off the grid. I could've grown a beard and learned to smoke raw meat, but my overall confidence in a viable Arizona identity was slipping by then, and the truck and I had a few more run ins before I gave up.

Soon the ball joints went and the front wheels nearly fell off. I moved back east and got rid of the truck. I bought an Acura with 90,000 miles, a six cylinder Legend sedan that drove like a buck and change.