{"id":169101,"date":"2024-11-15T10:30:21","date_gmt":"2024-11-15T15:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169101"},"modified":"2025-09-15T15:48:38","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T19:48:38","slug":"what-i-want-to-say-about-owning-a-truck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/11\/15\/what-i-want-to-say-about-owning-a-truck\/","title":{"rendered":"What I Want to Say about Owning a Truck"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph courtesy of J. D. Daniels.<\/p><\/div>\n

When I was seventeen, my father put me in charge of his black Nissan Hardbody pickup. Its driver\u2019s-side brake light got smashed when I backed into a dumpster. I sealed it with red translucent lens-repair tape. (Can you say the word translucent<\/em> if you are talking about your truck?)<\/p>\n

My truck kept me out of the car-pool game, since it really seated only two. In the summertime I was happy to drive other kids around in the back on short jaunts from party to party, but nobody was going to ride sixteen miles one way from Fern Creek to our high school downtown in the back of a truck, on the Gene Snyder Freeway and I-65.<\/p>\n

So I spent a lot of time in the cab of the truck by myself, smoking dope and listening to this or that cassette tape. At lunchtime, I\u2019d walk out the side door of my high school to where I\u2019d parked on Second Street by the art school annex, and Danielle and Allison and I would cozy up in the cab of my truck and roll one and do shotguns and listen to the Breeders. Sometime in 1992, John Scofield\u2019s Grace Under Pressure<\/em> got stuck in the tape player. When it comes to being trapped in a loop, you could do worse than to spend an hour with Bill Frisell, Charlie Haden, and Joey Baron. I\u2019ve always been lucky. Sometimes I think I\u2019m the luckiest man who ever lived.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I guess I had started working for System Parking down at the hospital complex, or was I back in the decal shop at Kentucky Trailer with Knox and Bad Tom and Other Tom, or had I started driving for Ermin\u2019s Bakery by then, or by that time had I totaled Ermin\u2019s box truck on Hurstbourne Lane\u2014no, because by then I would have been in the house on South Preston, between the cemetery and the White Castle on Eastern Parkway, a couple of blocks from Uncle Pleasant\u2019s, that would have been 1998, I was twenty-four, I was married. It was 1996, and I was still living over the corner grocery store, when Jimmy and Micah wandered past in the dark.<\/p>\n

I was drinking by the open window on a summer night, listening to nothing. Jimmy and Micah walked down the street, singing a James Brown song, I forget what it was, he had been playing down on the waterfront. I sang some of it back out the window to them. They stopped, and we talked through the window for a minute, and pretty soon I went down the fire escape with three tall cans and we drank them sitting on the broken pavement of the parking lot.<\/p>\n

And then Jimmy said, \u201cIs that your truck?\u201d<\/p>\n

When people see your truck, they tend to see what you can do for them.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Jimmy and Micah and I got in my truck and drove a couple of blocks over to Micah\u2019s nearly empty apartment, \u00a0chucked his couch in the back of the truck, and drove to Thirty-Eighth Street, where we parked in front of a house with five sleepy-eyed girls sitting on a long porch and we hocked Micah\u2019s couch for crack, something I wouldn\u2019t have believed possible if I hadn\u2019t seen it with my own eyes. Jimmy passed me a folded piece of aluminum foil. \u201cI\u2019m good, man,\u201d I said, but Jimmy said, \u201cIt\u2019s all I\u2019ve got to pay you for your trouble.\u201d I put it in my freezer and went to bed. The next afternoon, Jimmy came over and bought it from me. That was how it started.<\/p>\n

After a month or so, a guy called Carlos dropped by, calm and frank, trying to understand who I was and what was going on in the neighborhood. I remember Carlos kept talking about Master P\u2019s Ice Cream Man<\/em>. That\u2019s how I know it had to be 1996. Carlos looked around my kitchen, opening cabinets, looking at coffee mugs. He opened the closet and looked at the litter box.<\/p>\n

Micah was in bad shape from the start, but Jimmy was keeping it together, more or less. He would walk down Hill Street to my apartment and climb up the fire escape and knock on my door. Britt and Sean had carved a pentagram into the door with a jackknife. We\u2019d have a couple of drinks and record some blues on my TASCAM Porta four-track. Jimmy played my sparkle-blue Aria Pro II strat copy. I had cleaned toilets in Fern Creek all summer to be able to afford that guitar. Tim, who played for Human Remains and worked at the Preston Music Center in Okolona, taught me how to tune it, but my next lesson was canceled because Tim was back in Central State after cutting open his own forearm with a carpet knife, trying to find his bionic parts. That\u2019s enough about the guitar Jimmy was playing. I was on the Telecaster I\u2019d bought from that big music showroom on Bardstown Road, near the Toy Tiger and Showcase Cinemas and El Caporal.<\/p>\n

Jimmy said, \u201cIf you release these recordings while I\u2019m in jail, when I get out I will kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRelax,\u201d I said. \u201cIf anyone ever releases this, I will kill myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The last time I saw Carlos, he said, \u201cAre you trying to tell me you\u2019ve never had three bitches at once? Because it can be arranged.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last time I saw Micah, he was holding an empty silver picture frame and crying.<\/p>\n

The last time I saw Jimmy was at a birthday party for one of my girlfriend\u2019s coworkers who had just gotten into law school. My little apartment, with its cinder block and plank shelving, was full of girls drinking margaritas.<\/p>\n

I opened the back door and saw Jimmy wearing a tattered straw hat and a red T-shirt with its sleeves cut off. Next to him stood a bored girl.<\/p>\n

\u201cJimmy, this is not a good time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t you want me to get a little tail before I go back to prison? Give me twenty dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not giving<\/em> you anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

He shrugged and took off his hat. \u201cBuy my hat for ten dollars,\u201d he said. \u201cSomething to remember me by.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what? I will.\u201d I put the hat on.<\/p>\n

My girlfriend, smiling blandly, hissed into my ear, \u201cGet this over with.\u201d<\/p>\n

He took off his shirt. \u201cNow buy this for ten dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFine. You good?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI appreciate it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSure. Good luck, Jimmy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now it was almost over.<\/p>\n

One morning not long after, there was a knock at the back door. I opened it to see a man I didn\u2019t know wearing a dark suit.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan I help you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI just now come from my sister\u2019s funeral.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSorry for your loss. Why are you telling me this?\u201d<\/p>\n

He was holding a tiny velvet box. He opened it.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy sister\u2019s earrings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m glad you have something to remember her by.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBuy them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo what?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBuy them, motherfucker,\u201d he said. \u201cBuy my dead sister\u2019s earrings.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever forget Layton calling me late one night. The last time I had seen Layton, he\u2019d been cadging drinks at the Mag Bar.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey,\u201d the bartender said to me. \u201cYou can\u2019t buy a beer for Crazy Horse.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTake it easy. I grew up with this guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe you<\/em> grew up. He tries it in here every night. He\u2019s got to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s your bar.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is a fact,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all right, Long John,\u201d Layton said. \u201cDrive me home.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t drive Layton home. Instead he stumbled off, and I drank beers and played Golden Tee and shot some nine-ball with my friend Jay.<\/p>\n

That was the last time I saw Layton. The last time I heard him was on the telephone. My girlfriend had bought an antique red wooden chair with an attached table for the phone, a kind of designated telephone chair, and her black-and-white cat had commandeered it. Her cat\u2019s name was Delilah and she was aloof or aggressive unless the telephone rang, in which case she jumped on the chair and was sweet and wanted all your attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey, Long John. It\u2019s me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLayton? Are you okay?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSure. Do you still have your truck?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI sold that truck years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou got the number of the guy you sold it to?\u201d<\/p>\n

I did have that number, or at least I knew where I could find it, but I wasn\u2019t going to turn Layton loose on Thordy. That old hillbilly had enough trouble in his life. It was easy to imagine the state of my truck now that it was in Thordy\u2019s hands, such as Thordy\u2019s hands were. When I met Thordy, he had four fingers on his left hand and three on his right. Management put Thordy in the repair shop with my dad, because my dad\u2019s shop had the best safety record at the plant. I was sure that my old truck, Thordy\u2019s truck now, which I had always kept clean, almost empty, would be full of scratch-off tickets and cigarette butts that he had tumped out of an overfilled ashtray. I wonder what Thordy ever did about that Scofield and Frisell cassette. Thordy was a country-and-western man.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection\u00a0<\/em>The Correspondence\u00a0was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in<\/em>\u00a0Esquire,<\/em>\u00a0n+1,\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books,<\/em>\u00a0and elsewhere, including<\/em>\u00a0The Best American Essays\u00a0and\u00a0The Best American Travel Writing<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“When people see your truck, they tend to see what you can do for them.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68725],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-169101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-car-crushes","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat I Want to Say about Owning a Truck by J. D. 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