BUDDY
When I worked the tolls I knew a guy named Larson. He was one of those guys who had friends that had done everything, but who hadn’t done much living to speak of on his own, short of bearing witness to a lot of foolishness. You kind of felt sorry for him. I did, anyway. Although I felt bad about it, he engendered true exasperation in me—a kind that densified to sadness.
To make matters worse, he thought he was funny. That’s worse than just telling bad jokes. Funny people can tell bad jokes and then rebound okay. But Larson delivered ridiculous anecdotes with sheer gracelessness. His tactlessness made him the perfect toll booth operator. He was only tolerable for a few sparse moments, and that’s as long as most had to deal with him, I suppose.
I was coming in from an overnight one morning and who do I not feel like interacting with at all but Billy Larson, who perks up at the mere sight of me in the locker room. He’s got some small piece of yellow tape stuck in his thick curly hair. He doesn’t know it’s there. The little piece of litter seems embarrassed to be up there.
“Had a few honey’s come through last night, brother!” he says. “Man, this one chick, I could tell she was all over it.
“I had a friend who worked the tolls outside St. Petersburg, and this chick turned right around over the median and into the Operator parking lot and waited for him to get off shift,” he went on. “Said she was wild, man! Shit!” He rubbed his hands together and released them like a bad magician. Then he asked, “So, where you goin’ now?” and started rubbing them again.
I don’t know if it was lack of sleep or Larson’s awkwardness, but until he addressed me I’d felt like a spectator, watching our entire interaction.
“Heading back down into town, I imagine. Try to get a nap in.” I said, getting my things together.
“Nap? Shit, man. Let’s go to the track and get a beer! See what’s down there for pelt, brother! Friend of mine says you can clean up pretty good on those weekend simulcasts.”
I wasn’t convinced. I ended the conversation like we hadn’t been having one. “Take it easy,” I said. I zipped my duffel bag and strolled out.
In the truck, on my way past the Operator house, I drove past Larson. He’d found his way to the entrance hillock and had bummed a cigarette off some unsuspecting new guy who stood on guard while Larson went on talking, his hands flailing around—one landing smack onto the other—as if to mimic a plane. His buddy once landed a plane on the highway outside of Tallahassee. I’d heard that one before.
I had the overnight again the next night and was feeling more depressed about it then usual, since it was Sunday. I have in me an engrained tick that makes each Sunday the longest and most poignantly sad day of my entire life, and I get fifty plus of them a year.
There’s something about leaving home as the sun drops off. Something about highway driving, when the last of the light and shade mix and fall off the silhouette of the tree line and onto the sandy gravel and into a storm drain.
There’s desperation in the empty gas station parking lot when I stop to load up on snacks for the booth. There is melancholy in the last of the bulky Sunday edition papers that will never be read, sitting unclaimed in the wire rack. Something about the exhaustion in the eyes of the clerk behind the counter and the crookedness of her name tag that makes me want to crawl under the rind of the earth and never come out. I wear it on my face these days and walk slow.
It’s dark when I get to the Operator’s lot and amble up to the entrance. I’m not five steps out of the truck until a car door slams and I get a “Hey! Buddy!”
Larson couldn’t know the nettling I get from being called ‘Buddy’. Buddy is a dog, or a crazy guy who hangs around bus stations with a suitcase full of crossword puzzles. I hate the appellation. Find it demeaning. Always have.
“How you doin’, Buddy?” says Larson. He looked slimy and smelled like he swallowed a bar of soap, his curls wet and closer to his head. Poor bastard didn’t even clean up well.
“Good, yourself?” I didn’t break stride.
“Oh fuck, dude, you shoulda’ come to the track with me this morning, dog. It was wild!” He was walking beside me, but backwards.
“No kidding?”
“Yeah! Yeah.” Either Larson sensed my total disinterest or those two ‘yeahs’ comprised his entire tale—the first an excited sputter, the second a reminiscent little moan.
With him tagging me, I didn’t even bother with my locker. I headed straight to my island, weaving carefully around each station, each little path around the giant half-barrel pots of dying plants and trash. I skipped through one of the EZ Pass lanes that a Semi was bearing down on, past the back of an old station wagon with faded bumper stickers. When I got to Babe Lucy she was zipping up her windbreaker and gathering her things under the bright fluorescent lights.
“You’re right to bring that jacket,” said Babe, already out of the booth before I could even get a ‘hello’ in.
“Yeah, I can feel it getting cooler already. Good day?” I don’t think Babe Lucy had too many good days, or at least hadn’t in a while. She was older than dirt and had seen it all. I’d seen her smile all of once, maybe. And I never did find out if Babe was her first name and Lucy her last, or neither, or both.
“Nah, it wasn’t too bad,” she said, tired.
“Well, careful walking over, Babe,” I said.
“Yeah. Say,” she said, “you don’t have any idea who that wet blanket asshole is, do ya?” She pointed across the lanes through the Plexiglas of the toll houses.
It was Larson. He had his arms spread on the roof of a small coupe and his head in the air laughing. He knocked on the trunk with his palm twice before it drove away. His replacement shuffled quickly off, acquitting himself.
“Name’s Larson. I don’t know him to speak of,” I answered.
Babe had a comically long white cigarette lit, and her arms on her hips. The gusts from newly arrived traffic whisked her large exhalations away quickly on a line. “This guy—Jesus, are you kidding me?” And she clenched her small plastic bag and started her slow weave back to the Operator house. “What a wet blanket asshole.”
There was always something sad about seeing Babe Lucy amble back through the booths with her purple sweatpants, and something even worse when Larson popped out of his booth to bum a smoke off of her. This guy, indeed.
People don’t realize just how many drivers go through a toll each day skinned, offering up whatever change they have short of the seventy-five. When you don’t have enough money to cover the toll, you’re given a form and an envelope to send the money to the State within ten days or face violation. It happened three times a shift at least.
It didn’t surprise me, then, when five hours later, near daybreak, after traffic had lulled a bit, Larson appeared at the window of my booth while I was sorting my ones, claiming someone had gone through his toll without any money. I looked at him and saw that the whites around his dark eyes were a little wider than normal, his hair dried and returned to its normal callous bulb.
“Buddy, I’m gonna shut down my booth there for a minute. I got a lady who says she’s outta loot and wants to make it up to me in the parkin’ lot! You believe this shit?” he guffawed.
“Not supposed to leave your cage unmanned unless it’s your break,” I told him, counting.
“Oh shit, yeah, Buddy, I know, but I’m gonna be right back. Do you believe this shit?” He skipped off laughing, giving the thumbs up to a bleary-eyed guy in a Corvette who almost hit him, who laid on his horn and gave him the middle finger, drowning out Larson as he hollered “My buddy’s got one in black. Sweet ride!”
Larson knew damn well I couldn’t ‘watch his booth’ any more then I could watch a river from the other side of a mountain. He was coming over to impress me, to make himself the hero in a story that hadn’t even unfolded and may not have even been true.
But as it turned out, part of it was.
Not even fifteen minutes later, the lamp was back on in Larson’s booth, the green signal back on above, and the scant cars on the road began going through again. He looked dejected. When he caught me looking at him through the nicked glass of my booth he crossed his arms back in forth, hands flat and turned down. Incomplete pass.
He still had a good part of the night to bake up a tale. She wanted it but there was no room in the car. She was humming him and he balked. He knew her from the track. She was the Governor’s daughter, snuck out. She was the Queen of his prom.
But Larson was far from animated when I saw him at shift’s end, sitting on the chipped bench outside the Vendor Entrance, cigarette rocketed down to the filter. I was caught off guard by the fact that he had no pants on.
“Well, how was your evening?”
“Man.” he said. Then he was quiet for a moment.
“Well, I hop in the car, see, and she tells me to take my trousers off, all nice-like. So I do. Then she draws this fuckin’ gun man! This little black Ruger number and cocks the god damn thing. Asks me if I think she’s kidding! So I say ‘Hey sweetheart, let’s not get fuckin’ crazy here’! And she says ‘I’ll blow your fuckin’ face off, you fuckin’ wet blanket asshole!’ Then she takes all I got on me for cash. Even took my gator boots.” He looks up at me and blinks slowly.
He wanted an answer. An answer for why he had shit luck. I felt bad. But in no way could I generate an answer for him.
I thought long and hard about taking the guy to the track, or the diner. Hell, maybe even get him some beach sandals and some short pants for walking around in. But I didn’t. I didn’t even offer him a ride. I offered a half-hearted ’son of a bitch’ and went straight for my truck. I felt like a rotten asshole for doing it.
When I swung by the bench on my way out, he was holding his nose like it was gushing blood. I could tell, even going by at twenty-eight, the man was sobbing tears.
