Chapter One

Published November 14, 2025

I stumble into a shadowy niche of the art world.

I

    After a couple of years being a security guard—a ritual exercise in humiliation—I was desperate for something else. A good friend of mine tried to get me a job at a trucking company where he was working called Artransport. Most of its employees were artists. The company moved paintings and sculptures all over the country and gave its drivers a flexible schedule. So I was told. That sounded great! I wanted to be a novelist and needed all the time I could get. One cold January afternoon in 1985 I had an appointment for a job interview at 4:00 pm. I rushed there after my shift ended and changed out of my uniform so I would look like a normal person. The sun was going down.

    Artransport was located on a street ending in a cul-de-sac in Shirlington, Virginia, just off Highway 395. It was down from a garish hot dog shack called the Weenie-Beenie. A few trucks and vans were parked along the warehouse, with the main entrance next to a loading door. I rang the bell. The guy who answered worked in the crate shop, which was straight ahead and surrounded by bins of artwork. He directed me to stairs leading to the second floor and continued sweeping sawdust.

    My appointment was with Bob Lennon, the owner of Artransport. He was from Mississippi and had been in the oil business. His desk was behind some red curtains at the end of the office, and D.E., the manager who led me there, wore an extreme frown. He lingered on the other side of the curtain to listen in. Bob himself was gracious, stood up and shook my hand. He directed me to a chair near his desk and sat down again.

    “You’re Darick? I see Mike recommended you.” He told me about the company in a grand and vague way, describing its routes and clients, waving his right arm expressively. He had a full bohemian beard. Then he asked, “Do you have any experience driving a truck?”

    I had driven a truck when I did tree work in college. This piqued his interest. It wasn’t because I had truck driving experience. “I had a friend who did tree work,” he remembered. “I knew him well. He had long, thick black hair.” After waxing on about his friend, he sent me along to a second interview with a manager named Nick. Nick was waiting on the other side of the curtain and greeted me with a strange, exaggerated smile. He led me back downstairs to the crate shop. I was beginning to wonder what I was getting into.

    Nick leaned against one half-finished crate in the semi-darkness as I filled out an application on top of another. He quickly read what I had written and asked me a few more questions. As I answered him, he nodded, and his eyebrows went up and down. His expressions were remarkably plastic. I didn’t know what to make of him at all. Finally, I explained that the flexible schedule would be a wonderful opportunity for me. I’d be willing to work very intensely for a week or two at a time, then take a week off to write.

    “Aha, I see, okay.” He frowned, perused my application again, wrote something on it and stuck it in a folder. “We’ll be in touch.”

    But I never heard from him. I called Artransport a couple of times the next week, but Nick was always busy. Then Mike called me out of the blue.

    “Hey, can you go to the Midwest with me next week?”

    “The Midwest? But I didn’t get the job. I don’t think Nick liked me.”

    Mike thought about it. “Well, he probably doesn’t like you. But it doesn’t matter. They’re desperate. Nobody wants to go there. Even after they increased the mileage rate for the Midwest and New England. The trips don’t make enough money for the drivers. If you’re willing to go, I think they’ll hire you.”

    “Really?” Anyhow it was better than being a security guard. The Friday before the shuttle I drove back to the warehouse to fill out more paperwork. Nick was all smiles, and his eyebrows were busier than ever. As he stuck my W-2 in the folder I tried to peek at what he had written, but he shut it immediately. A few years later, after Artransport had gone bankrupt, I was briefly in possession of all its personnel files and read through the notes about me with great interest. On the second page of my application, with a flourish meant to send me to oblivion, Nick had scrawled: “Bad Vibes!”

---

    The first art object I handled was a massive pair of breasts. On the way to my car, Bill Willis, one of the dispatchers, introduced himself and asked if I could help with a delivery. It was for an alabaster sculpture one of the local trucks had left behind that morning. The piece was supposed to be in an opening that evening, and the gallery kept calling. Bill told me I’d be paid for the hours. So I went back inside while Bill got the van. A carpenter from the crate shop who had been pulled for the delivery was standing over the object, mesmerized. The sculpture was resting on blankets on a dolly. It was a pair of breasts, not even a torso. They were the kind of breasts men dream about, incredibly supple, slightly parted by gravity as if the model had leaned back, posed in a position of ecstasy. Bill backed the Ford box van into the loading area, walked over to us and glanced down. “Let’s get this loaded, okay?” He had other work to do.

    The three of us lifted the sculpture onto blankets on the back of the van. It was incredibly heavy, almost three hundred pounds. We pushed it gently on the blankets to the left side of the van, placed a lot of other blankets around it for protection, and Bill secured it with two cotton straps. He handed me a bill of lading as we got into the van. The sculpture had come down the night before from a studio in New York. The artist was a woman. A simple condition report noted that the sculpture was pristine, which was true. We crossed north over the Potomac, against early rush hour traffic, to the Touchstone Gallery on P Street. The sidewalk leading to the entrance went uphill. I thought about that as Bill parked.

    We placed the dolly on the sidewalk, padded it with blankets, slid the sculpture to edge of the van, and kept our hands on it. Bill said: “Okay—one, two three.” We lowered it onto the blankets. Success! Every movement without damaging a piece like that was a victory. Bill told me to grab the left breast; he grabbed the right. The stone was cold. The carpenter held the back of the dolly, his back contorted. We pushed the breasts uphill, to the great amusement of other people on the sidewalk. Finally we got the sculpture inside.

    The young woman running the gallery, relieved we had arrived, walked over with her hands on her hips. She joined us staring at the breasts. “Wow, that artist is really talented,” she said. “Hey: can you guys help me get this thing on a pedestal?”

---

    Mike told me we were loading the Midwest shuttle at midnight Sunday. Our first stop was in Pittsburgh Monday morning at 9:00. That sounded extreme to me, but okay. When I arrived, he was just getting out of his car and looked tired. I followed him into the warehouse. He turned off the alarm and we walked upstairs to the office and picked up the clipboard. Mike also lifted the keys to the truck we were assigned and went out again. He backed the truck up to the loading door. It was a new Mercedes. But don’t let that impress you. The Mercedes truck division made uncomfortable, bone-rattling tanks. Bill Willis once said they were designed for Nazis who only had to go two hundred miles. We unlocked the back door and began going through the paperwork.

    The top sheet was new to me, and I was intimidated by the number of bills of lading. There was a lot to load. Basically, you turned the stack of BOLs upside down and started from the back, marking off on the top sheet each bill of lading that corresponded to a stop. Each artwork had a bin location. The first things loaded went to the front of the truck and were the last to be delivered. The first things delivered were the last to load. They were strapped in closest to the door. The exception were items that were exceptionally delicate. These were also loaded as close to the front as possible because anything strapped over the back wheels was going to bounce all over the place and was likely to be destroyed. We padded everything on the floor, including stacks of paintings strapped against the sides, with layers and layers of blankets. The paintings had cardboard between them, and the straps holding everything in place were tied with sailor’s knots that I came to admire. Once everything was loaded, we went through the pick-ups and threw on material for everything we had to wrap: more cardboard, plastic, tape, boxes, tissue, newsprint, and foam. By the time we closed the back door it was just after 4:00 am. We had five hours to get to Pittsburgh and it was 250 miles away. It was tight.

    I drove first. I had never driven a truck before. Mike gave me a few pointers, then leaned against the window, and fell asleep. I went north on 395 and on to the Beltway. The Mercedes was surprisingly easy to drive. I had been driving a VW van and this was just larger. I could already drive a stick. So, I gained confidence, and after taking the exit for 270 looked for a place to get coffee. Hours later we approached Pittsburgh on highway 376. There were abandoned steel mills on either side of the road and old slag heaps around the entrance of the tunnel leading to the city. They were grown over with clumps of grass. At the other end of the tunnel when the light came back, I was surprised by what I saw. I had grown up abroad, reading about Pittsburgh’s factories and smog. But the smoke had cleared, leaving a lovely, sparkling city. Our first stop was at the Carnegie-Mellon, and when we backed into the dock it was 9:15. A pretty registrar with glasses came out to greet us. She signed for a little crate with a sculpture and took it away.

    “I didn’t know it was possible,” I told Mike. “Loading all that stuff in the middle of the night and still getting here on time.”

    “Yeah, it’s possible.”

    Our next stop was U.S. Steel downtown, a skyscraper designed with a patina of rust; then deliveries of antique furniture to collectors with old money; and on to Cleveland. We drove into winter. The windshield wipers could hardly keep up with the snow as we arrived at the Cleveland Museum of Art. They received a painting at 5:00, just as they closed. We wrapped another painting at a private client’s and found a Japanese restaurant at Cedar and Lee. It’s long gone. After dinner we drive west. Our first stop Tuesday was at the Detroit Institute of Art. Mike knew of a hotel outside of Toledo, and by the time we checked in we’d been going for twenty-two hours. That was the kind of life and schedule I had to get used to. I later found out Mike had told me to start at midnight Sunday because he wanted to see a band at the 9:30 Club a couple of hours earlier that started at 10:00. That’s why I had gone for a day without sleep. It had nothing to do with the office.

---

    We went from Detroit to Grand Rapids to Chicago; then Evanston-Milwaukee-Madison, down to Kentucky (Lexington and Louisville); back to Ohio. Friday evening, we finished some stops in Columbus, found a restaurant on High Street, drove east, and found a hotel. That was the schedule: Sunday through Saturday, insanity for seven days. Arthur Cadieux put it later as: “Boom-Boom-Boom!” There were a lot of stops. Saturday evening, we unloaded the truck, did the paperwork, and folded all the blankets we used. Over the years I would think about the blankets I had folded, thousands and thousands of them, late at night, week after week. There are all kinds of purgatory.

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Chapter Two

Published November 21, 2025

I meet the Red Queen

    The art market then was vibrant, cresting with froth. The mid 80’s economy was extraordinary. The stock market surged in wave after wave, feeding gallery openings in New York and other great cities. People were getting rich and artists were getting famous. The people who were rich bought art and threw elaborate parties to show it off; and other rich people, artists, and models, attended. Not to mention journalists and politicians. Someone had to service the patina of luxury, imagination, and sex. That’s where Artransport came in. Bob Lennon must have been bored with the oil business, and he knew a few artists and gallery owners in DC. Sometimes they needed to move paintings around from one place to another. One of Lennon’s acquaintances was Jesse Clark, a young man living a Zen life. He had a small box truck outfitted for hauling art. They began using the van to move paintings from local galleries to collectors, and from artists’ studios to galleries. Soon they needed a bigger truck. Paintings had to go to New York, the art world’s beating heart, and from New York everywhere else: especially museums, the final imprimatur of reputation. When I rang the doorbell for my interview, Artransport had trucks going everywhere: New York, New England, Florida, the West. And the Midwest, of course. Most of the trucks were driven by artists anxious to make their name on the cusp of their talent. A few were brilliant, brave souls; and the ones that weren’t, thought they were.

    Most of the senior artists locked themselves into the New York shuttle schedule. That’s where the real money was, up and back from DC. A one-day shuttle could get you fifteen hours easily. It was totally illegal, not that anybody cared. On a two-day, the hours piled up: twenty-four hours for a light trip, thirty or more for a heavy one. Think about it: in one day you got paid for two days of work, and in two days you got paid for four. Add per diem and the thirty bucks you split with your partner if you slept on a floor somewhere instead of finding a hotel. That was how some guys worked two days a week and spent five in the studio, especially if their girlfriends helped them out. That work ethic, a combination of grit with a fierce desire for independence, was Artransport’s secret juice. 

---

    But the idea of a flexible schedule for a person without seniority was purely notional. After the Midwest I was told to come in Tuesday for locals. That’s how I met the office manager. Bob Lennon, in his charming, grand way, always doing people favors, needed someone for his dirty work. He had hired the Red Queen. Her contract included designer dresses purchased from regular funds, and she was parading resplendently in a yellow number, proclaiming, “Fucking shit! Fucking shit!” when I picked up the clipboard. “Stupid drivers! Oh.” She walked over. “So, you’re Darick, Mike’s friend?” She looked me up and down. “Hmm. Anyway, you need to train a new guy.” I glanced around to see if Bill Willis was in the office, but he had been sent out on another emergency. I took the new guy downstairs to load up. He was a musician sold on the flexible schedule, and after working all day doing stuff we weren’t prepared for, I never saw him again. The queen was in another mood when I turned in the keys because one of the New York guys had called in sick. Suddenly I was in her sights again. She asked me to come in at 4:00 am.

    Two box vans were loading before dawn, both one-days. Things were so busy the company was sending several trucks to New York a week and could barely keep up. A Tuesday-Wednesday shuttle was already in Manhattan. It had made deliveries the day before and would be doing its own pick-ups as we scoured around the island later. Two guys going through the paperwork greeted me with veiled contempt: I was a new guy. Most new guys didn’t last. They were both Argentinian. My assigned partner Phillip was a sculptor I vaguely recognized from an article I’d seen in a magazine. His friend Roberto, the lead on the second truck, was—I don’t know what he was. He was trained as an architect in Buenos Aires. His partner Billy was a painter. They lightened up after a few minutes and pretended I was one of them. “So, this is your first New York, okay,” mused Phillip. We continued looking through the BOLs. We had a few deliveries and a lot of pick-ups midtown on 57th Street and along Madison, with a final stop at Sotheby’s. Roberto’s truck was working Soho, that was it. A couple of paintings, wrapped in plastic, were so big they barely fit in the van. We didn’t need to load many materials: the art handlers in the galleries packed things themselves. Sotheby’s was a different story. We closed the doors to the vans and drove north before the sun. 

    Phillip continued being friendly. “So, if you’re a regular on New York’s,” he explained (unlikely, since I was a rookie), “you’ll be working with the other guys too, uh, Bobby Donovan, and Francis, and Bing—he’s a stone carver—and Tom Morris, and Arthur, and Mike—Mike is your friend, right? Yeah. And Steve Cushner. But Steve has a gig at the Corcoran now, and he’s showing a lot, so I don’t think he’ll be around that much.” Phillip showed at the M— Gallery, the most prestigious place in DC. Whenever he had enough material, they gave him a show. I realized he had shown recently, that’s why I had read about him. “Yeah, right now I’m comfortable being a big fish in a small pond,” he explained. “But I’m afraid of the New York crowd. I guess really, I’m a dilettante, because I’m afraid of New York. But I want to do great things when I stop being a dilettante.” We met the other truck for breakfast at Penns Grove, then up the New Jersey Turnpike till we saw the Twin Towers and the first great view of the city. It was 10:30.

    Roberto’s truck took the Holland Tunnel for Soho: we made the spurt to the Lincoln Tunnel and midtown. From then it was Go-Go-Go! A stop at the Kraushaar Gallery on Fifth: park the van of 56th Street, unload one of the huge paintings, steady it against the breeze, into the building, catch an elevator. Say hello to the receptionist when the door opens, get her to sign the BOL, glance at the exhibit, back to the street. Phillip was driving, he knew the way. He said: “When you’re in New York, forget the rules. See the traffic on Madison? Nobody stays in a lane. Nobody. Cars course around like fish. Move like they do. It’s a stream. If you see an opening, take it. Just move over. Don’t wait for anyone else. You’re bigger than they are. They’re watching us. We’re in a truck.”

    Then 57th Street. We had four stops at 24 West: truck, elevator, gallery, return. I had never thought entire buildings could consist of gallery after gallery, with such color and energy on every floor. It was extraordinary. The elevator opened, and—another view, carefully lit, of paintings, sculptures, snippets of dreams. There was real money behind it. We went up and down, in and out. We parked on 58th behind a UPS truck, made a delivery to the Fuller Building, got slices of pizza, and went north on Madison. Galleries were sprinkled along the route. We doubled parked on Madison for each one. Ahead of us, around 71st, was a Schlepper’s truck unloading furniture. Its workers had jumpsuits with white and pink vertical stripes, like convicts sprung into fairyland. 

    “Bob Lennon would sure love his boys to wear stuff like that,” said Phillip. “He’d love it. He proposed pink jumpsuits for everyone at a driver’s meeting once. He thought it was brilliant. We talked him out of it.”

    “How’d you do that?”

    “We threatened to quit.”

    Our last stop was Sotheby’s on York Avenue. I pulled the van into 72nd Street and Phillip went inside with the paperwork. We were picking up a painting going to Florida. A few minutes later he came back. “We can back in now,” he said. He guided me into the loading dock. We opened the back, lay a blanket on the dock floor, and brought out materials to wrap the painting. And waited. It was 4:30, just before closing. One of the Sotheby’s guys, in a gray uniform, came out pushing an A-frame cart with the painting. Phillip and I lifted the painting onto the blanket and leaned it against a pillar so we could look at it. I wrote a condition report, checking for chips in the frame or paint loss. Then I had the Sotheby’s rep sign for the painting’s release. He was in a hurry to get off work. He twisted the A-frame around and clipped the painting. It fell forward with a splat. He glanced down and kept on going.

    Phillip looked after him. “Change the condition report,” he said.

    We met the other two trucks at ‘Food’ on Prince Street. Bobby Donovan and Francis Byrne were on the two-day truck. Bobby had painted nocturnes around Manhattan the night before, and his new panels were screwed together with a gap so that they could dry facing each other. He was strapping them in when we arrived, and he was still wondering whether his colors and brushstrokes were right. We all had dinner and coffee’d up. Afterwards the three trucks left together, spiraling down into the Holland Tunnel and out to the Turnpike. They were packed: full of paintings and sculpture with expressions making their way out to the world. Money was behind them, ambition, a lot of salesmanship; and, as I was to discover in the ensuing years, a fair amount of fraud. 

Chapter Three

Published November 28, 2025

We’re sent to jail in Kentucky.

I

    Against a wall of the loading area between the art bins was a worn box labeled “Logbooks”. No one told me anything about them. I glanced in the box once and saw what looked like a bunch of used receipt books tossed in the trash. But I quickly learned about logbooks when Mike and I pulled into a weigh station in Ohio my second month on the job. It was the middle of the night and Mike had been driving. I woke up under a pile of blankets in the passenger seat. A trooper peered into the driver-side window and said good evening. “Your logbook, sir?” he asked Mike. 

    “What? Uh, okay.” He looked into his bag with alarm and pulled out one of the receipt-books. He opened it to the middle, scrawled something in it and handed it to the cop. The cop raised his eyebrows, glanced at the page Mike had modified, and handed it back.

    “Good enough, I guess. And your logbook, sir?” he asked me.

    What? “I’m looking for it!” I declared. I made a show of pulling up blankets.

    “Okay. I’ll come back.” The trooper walked away.

    “What’s a logbook?” I asked Mike.

    “Uh, we’re supposed to keep track of the hours we drive and rest, all that stuff.”

    “Really? No one told me about that.”

    “No one takes it seriously. I was working with Bing once and a cop asked where his logbook was. He pointed to me and said, ‘I’m using his!’ The cop let him off. But sometimes they don’t. You better look around the cab and see if somebody left a logbook behind.”

    I pulled up blankets, looked in glove box and behind the seat, but there were no logbooks laying around. A few minutes later the trooper came back. “Have you found your logbook, sir?” he asked. 

    “I’m still looking for it.”

    “Uh-huh. Maybe you’ll find it next week.” He waved us on.

    We were lucky that time. The cops mostly didn’t take logbooks any more seriously than drivers did when I started, but enforcement tightened up over the years. Later, if you were popped without an up-to-date logbook, the fine was hefty and came out of your per diem money. That meant you didn’t eat. It was simple.

    The truth is that driving schedules were brutal. Logbook regulations were meant to ensure truck drivers got some rest. Good luck with that. Most drivers didn’t have time to pee, not to mention sleep. Often, I’d be at a truck stop and see a fleet of tractor-trailers roll out. They would leave behind quart glass bottles on the tarmac, filled with pee. Many drivers peed into empty bottles while driving—they couldn't afford to stop—and had to get rid of the waste once they stopped for fuel. What do you do with bottles of urine? It was a delicate problem. Guys were too embarrassed to walk around holding their pee. So they left it on the asphalt as they pulled away. In the morning you could see bottles of yellow gleaming in the sun in the truck parking lot. Behind that image was desperation, and many hard lives.

    We didn’t take speed limits seriously, either. The faster you drove, the more you got ahead of schedule—that meant more sleep! Tractor-trailers whizzed by us all the time. Once in Kentucky, however, I saw a trooper’s lights flashing when I was going seventy-three miles an hour. I pulled over with a sinking heart. The trooper parked in front of us on the shoulder and walked over to the window. 

    “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said brightly.

    “Good afternoon, officer.”

    “I saw on my radar that you were driving seventy-three miles an hour. That is over the speed limit. The speed limit here is sixty-five.”

    “I’m sorry,” I replied. That was irrelevant.

    “Now we give everyone some latitude here—of seven miles an hour. So if you had been doing seventy-two, I could let it pass. But at seventy-three I have to do something.”

    “Okay. What do we need to do, Officer?”

    “I’m going to ask you to leave your truck, and lock the doors, and come with me in the patrol car. Bring your licenses and registration, please. I’ll be taking you where you can pay the fine.”

    “Where are we going?”

    “To the county jail. You can pay the fine there.”

    “Oh.”

    We got the registration, closed the Mercedes, and walked over to the trooper’s car. He had us sit in the back. He was very friendly and cheerful. “Now, most people,” he explained, as he pulled away, “think something bad is going to happen at the jail. But that’s just where you pay your fine. It’s too bad you weren’t going seventy-two. I wanted to let you go. But it was seventy-three. I had to do something.” He looked back at us through the rear-view. He drove a few miles off the highway though a forest. Eventually he came to a gray building by a river and parked. It wasn’t a very prominent jail. “This where you pay your fine, gentlemen,” he announced.

    We got out and followed him inside. There was a front desk inside, a bathroom, three cells, and a television. Only one cell was occupied. I could see a kitchen in the next room.

    “The fine is seventy-five dollars, gentlemen,” announced the trooper.

    “Can we pay with cash?”

    “Cash is acceptable. I will note it here in the book and give you a receipt.”

    I looked in my wallet and found seventy-five dollars. It was most of my per diem for the week. Oh, well. I handed the money to the trooper.

    On the TV the Andy Griffith Show was just starting. Andy and Opie were going fishing as the credits rolled. I remembered watching the show as a little boy. The inmate was straining to get a better look at the screen. A policeman in a chair, who was also watching, looked over at the prisoner. “Can you see all right, Lloyd?” he asked. 

    “If you could turn the TV just a little bit, sir,” replied Lloyd.

    “OK.” The policeman angled the screen toward the cell. “How is your lunch, Lloyd?”

    “It’s okay, sir.” The prisoner had a metal bowl on his lap with carrots and potatoes covered with gray slop. He was eating slowly. Barney Fife walked into the scene on the TV.

    “Here is your receipt, sir,” said the trooper. “I can take you back to your vehicle now.” 

    “You know,” said the trooper, as he drove through the forest to the highway, “the state legislature is considering a bill to raise the speed limit to seventy-five. I would like that. Then I wouldn’t have to stop so many people for speeding. You could drive, for instance, up to eighty-two miles per hour and be scot-free. I’m okay with that.”

II

    Sometimes the people in the office were real idiots. A couple of months later, in the Spring, our first stop on the Midwest was to a collector in a high-rise in Pittsburgh. He was a receiving a small ivory sculpture from Sotheby’s. The problem was that our dispatcher had typed a warning in the special instructions of the bill of lading that said: “Careful—this customer is an ASSHOLE!” There was no way the client wouldn’t see it. So, I had to spend a few minutes parked in front of the building blacking out everything offensive with a pen, making sure there was enough pressure to go through every copy of the BOL. When we got to the gentleman’s apartment there was nothing wrong with him at all. He was elderly, polite, and wore a bowtie. “Ah, yes—my piece from Sotheby’s.” He was very happy to receive his purchase. After we had unwrapped it, he cradled it in his hands. “I have never been disappointed in Sotheby’s,” he declared. He massaged the th with his tongue. “Sotheby’s is the best. They always deliver for me.” He placed the sculpture on a shelf with other delicate East Asian works, then stood back and admired it. “I work with Sotheby’s exclusively. I trust them. And your company picked this up.”

    I felt bad because people paying lip-service to the client had been nasty behind his back. I wasn’t so sure about his confidence in the auction house, either. I could have told him a few things about Sotheby’s.

---

    When you enter their complex, it is very impressive. I had been there many times by then. Heaven may not exist on earth, but some places, by design and careful lighting, seem like the astral plane until you get better acquainted. Sotheby’s was like that. You felt lightness and possibility in the place. A flight of stairs at the entrance took you up to the galleries: there, pinnacles of endeavor, snatched out of time, were on display in various rooms. Abstract paintings, with incipient bursts of color; Old Master works, sculptures, antique furniture, antique anything. Well-dressed men and woman perused the galleries with discerning eyes. Everything was attainable at a price—to be determined at auction.

    To the side of the galleries, in a space with windows overlooking the street, was the Art Transport department; a name just like ours. The fiefdom was run by a competent young man named Tommy Sullivan, who treated all customers alike, which is to say very well. The winners of auctions stood in line to arrange for delivery of their prizes; often, their servants did. At our turn we approached the counter with our BOLs. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?” asked Tommy. He knew exactly who we were. He perused the lists of items we brought and called downstairs. “OK, I’ve got three things from Sale—: Lot 57, 88, 101. To the loading dock for Artransport.” He handed back the BOLs. “You can back in to 72nd now,” he assured us. So, we went downstairs, out to the street, and waited in the loading dock, where the usual laws of gravity and friction applied to the wonders of the world.

    The union guys, who shuttled loot all over the building and looked forward to tips from rich customers, were never happy to see us. We were just truckers. They got nothing for taking care of us. (There was only one exception to this rule, which I’ll get to in a moment.) When we gave the foreman our paperwork, he did not greet us with a smile. He called one of his guys over and handed him a ticket. “Hey—go back to storage and bring back this shit, okay?” Or: “Go to 71st and get this other shit.” So the guys went into the bowels of the building and brought us our shit. Sometimes it was handled professionally; sometimes not. You never knew what to expect. Some of the guys liked what they were doing and took care of the magic items they touched. Others just bounced things around. One day I was waiting in the dock for a massive gold leaf frame. It was going to a major client, so we had laid out plenty of material to pack it well. After a while we heard a screeching sound from down the hall. We waited.

    “Screech! Screee-eetch!” 

    Two guys entered the dock pushing the frame over the concrete. A trail of chips and gold grew behind them. They leaned the frame against the pillar by the truck. “Okay, guys, what we got to sign?” one of them asked.

    “We have to do the condition report first,” I replied. There was no use getting mad. They waited as I looked the frame over, signed, and left.

    When the office scheduled Sotheby’s at the end of the day and there was a big pick up, it was hard to get everything packed before closing. This is what led to well-timed grease. One afternoon, at 4:45, the union guys were bringing out a bunch of antiques: a bed frame, sideboard, desk, some chairs, and an armoire. It was a lot of stuff. We looked the furniture over for scratches and chips, added descriptions to the BOL, then wrapped everything with blankets. Fifteen minutes to closing. Suddenly the guys were milling around on the dock, and the foreman was smiling. “What about the armoire?” I asked.

    “Oh, the armoire.” The foreman handed me a ticket. “That’s at the warehouse. 111th Street. Good luck, guys.”

    That meant ‘Lutherville.’ It was forty blocks away. I rushed to the phone and begged Luther, the storage god, for mercy. Luther went off. “You want me to sit here in the middle of all this old shit when I could be home fucking my wife? I want to see some dead presidents.”

    “Forty bucks?”

    He thought about it. “K. Hurry up, now.”

    We rushed north on 3rd, running yellow-to-red lights and sometimes reds. When we backed into the warehouse, a single bulb was burning in the corner of the fourth floor. Luther buzzed us into the freight elevator, and we rose to a scene of orphaned treasure: heirlooms auctioned off, polished tables, dressers, four poster beds waiting for owners who weren’t dead. All had sale and lot numbers and were gathering dust. 

    A corridor between the antiques led to Luther’s office. I doubt many managers from York Avenue dared to show up there. Luther protected his sinecure with an amazing display of pornography. It was plastered everywhere outside his office and inside, photographs of men and women in the throes of every kind of passion and pleasure. There was anal sex, frontal sex, group sex, cunnilingus, blow jobs, black flesh, white flesh, Asian flesh. The centerpiece of his collection was a cartoon of a heroic pussy-dive. 

    “You got the money?” Luther swiveled in his chair. He had been watching TV. He wore a Sotheby’s sweatshirt over his pot belly and had a grizzled beard. I handed him two twenties.

    “Uh-huh.” He stuck them in his pocket. “So, you got the ticket?” Even he couldn’t help smiling when he looked at it. “Oh, an armoire.” The names people thought up for old furniture were an endless source of amusement. He led us through the maze on the floor to the huge object we were picking up. Luckily it wasn’t too far from the elevator. “That is one heavy piece of shit,” Luther said with admiration.

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Chapter Four

Published December 5, 2025

My week with an anxious photographer.

I

    In early June, about four months into my job, Mike was fired. After locals on a Thursday the Queen came up to me all sweet and smiling: “Darick, can you do the Midwest with a new guy?”

    “What?”

    “Oh—Mike doesn’t work here anymore.”

    “What?”

    “He quit. He didn’t show up for work today. You’ll be with Lenny instead. A photographer. Thanks.”

    Mike was as confused as I was when I called. He mumbled through the Novocain in his mouth. He had requested the day off for dental surgery, and the dispatcher, Shelley, forgot to take him off the schedule. Then she lied about it. The Queen didn’t like my friend and was glad to have an excuse to get rid of him. So I was stuck as lead on the shuttle with a guy I’d never met. At that point I hardly knew how to do the job. 

    We loaded on Sunday at the Dart warehouse on the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. The shuttle artwork and storage had recently been moved there to make more room for the crate shop. It was advertised to museums as a climate-controlled facility—a parlance that was very important—but really the climate was controlled by God. If the weather was hot, so was Dart: if it was cold, so was Dart. The humidity jumped all over the place. We loaded in and out of a freight elevator at the dock. There was a type of temperature control in the back of the truck itself, as it had a reefer unit that cooled it in the summer and warmed it in the winter, marginally.

    Lenny had never driven a truck and I gave him some lessons on the way out of town. It was dark. I was worried because the load going out was heavy, and the load coming back was heavy. The bills of lading rarely had true dimensions on them, but we had a lot of crates and sculptures to pick up. And there were a lot of stops, all over the place.

    “I don’t think we’re going to get much sleep this week,” I told Lenny as we passed the lights of Hagerstown.

    “Why is that?”

    “The schedule is tight, really tight. I don’t think the office figured it out. We have a lot to pick up, too.”

    Lenny continued staring ahead at the highway. He took his right hand off the steering wheel and handed me a book he had placed in front of the windshield. It was called “Emotions Anonymous”.

    “What’s this?”

    “It’s about a support group I belong to—for people who have emotional issues. I have an anxiety disorder.”

    “I see: okay.”

    “I’ll try not to let it affect my work. But I get anxious under stress.”

    “Okay,” I said. Anyhow he was a nice guy. As we drove north, he told me about a gig he had done recently with John Waters teaching photography to prisoners in Baltimore. We found a hotel after midnight. It was almost three hours to Pittsburg. Our first stop was at 8:00 am.

    “I think we can     sleep about four hours,” I told Lenny.

“That’s all? I’m going to turn in, then.”

    I stayed up another hour poring over maps and bills of lading, trying to figure out how everything would work. I was worried about Chicago. Lenny was on his side on the other bed. I don’t know when he fell asleep.

    Three hours later I woke with a charge. It was amazing what a small amount of sleep could do. We washed up, grabbed some coffee, and moved north. I drove first. We did Pittsburgh, its suburbs, Akron, the Cleveland area, finishing some private stops after eight in the evening. We found a place to eat. “That wasn’t so bad,” observed Lenny. “We got it done, anyway.”

    “It’ll get worse,” I assured him. “It’ll get worse.” All day I had been watching for signs of his disorder, any clue he would not be reliable. But Lenny had worked calmly and deliberately through all the stops. The only sign of his anxiety was that his forehead would sweat when the pressure was on. He must have internalized everything and kept on going. He was a good companion on the road to Hell. On Monday night that led to the hotel in Toledo where the scent of chlorine wafted up from the pool as we climbed the stairs to our room.

II

    Tuesday was Ann Arbor, Detroit, Bloomfield, Flint, Lansing, Grand Rapids, then Holland, on Lake Michigan, to a private residence after dark. Holland had become run-down after the war: then it was re-discovered because of the number of houses there designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Collectors from Chicago began buying and restoring them. We delivered to an address with the porch light burning where a man waited patiently for two Prairie Style chairs. We carried them into his living room. He studied them proudly before signing the BOL. It always surprised me how often collectors were willing to wait into the dark hours—almost any hours—to receive their prizes. He paid us a tip. After midnight we got a room in Gary, Indiana. Lenny fell asleep as I pored over the map of Chicago again.

    The morning was new: there was something beautiful about the highways pouring into the city. On the left of a huge ramp we ascended after paying the I-90 toll, was a factory of red steel and glass glowing in the sun. The view from the loading dock of the Chicago Art Institute, our first stop, was of the skyscrapers lining Michigan Avenue north and south, jewels of architecture. In the middle of the stress and impossible schedule were visual openings like big breaths. Then reality set in again. Our second stop was the Kelmscott Gallery in the Fine Arts Building. We parked in front, on the west side of Michigan. We rode an unusual elevator up. It was enclosed by glass. The operator was a white-haired man whose eyes were askew, looking into some personal mystery. He let us off in front of the gallery and ascended somewhere else. We picked up a Frank Lloyd Wright desk heading east. It was huge. I wrote a condition report while the gallery owner paced around skeptically. The elevator operator came down from the heavens, let us in, and dropped us off in the lobby. 

    “Is this going to fit?” asked Lenny.

    “It has to,” I said. We opened the back of the truck, placed the desk on blankets on the lift gate, and found a place for it on the left near the front. We padded it, strapped it in, and moved north. My mind was on the desk the rest of the week as we added and moved things around the truck. We did the Terra Museum, a sprinkling of other stops, and ended up late afternoon among the galleries on Ohio and Huron streets. Somehow, we had found places in the front for a Chamberlain sculpture of welded car parts, and four steel frog sculptures, also of car parts, now wrapped in blankets. We parked in an alley behind by the loading dock of the last gallery building before we headed to the suburbs. On the fourth floor we delivered a nude self-portrait of Manon Cleary wrapped in plastic (gaining two inches of space on the truck). The gallery director stared at the artist’s breasts as we placed her work near the receptionist. He mused, “That girl sure can paint!” 

    The next floor was a pick-up of four paintings going to New York: no dimensions on the BOL. That meant eight inches of width at least. Lenny’s forehead was wet. We walked into the gallery casually and looked around. In the middle of the floor were four huge paintings, each folded around 10” tubes, with plastic all around. Hopefully they had nothing to do with us. They would take up an entire section of the truck from side to side! We glanced over the work on exhibit as I clutched the BOL. “Can I help you?” asked a young woman.

    “Yes, uh, we’re with Artransport.”

    “I see.” Her arm swept proudly toward the monsters.

    I pretended not to see them. “Do you mind if I make a call?”

    She crossed her arms. I found a pay phone down the hall. 

    “The paintings are folded,” I told D.E., the dispatcher.

    “So?”

    “They’re huge. I don’t think they’ll fit.”

    D.E. thought for a moment. “Just figure it out! We have to do it.” He hung up.

    At least it wasn’t raining. We brought the paintings down the freight elevator and into the alley. “This is one fucked up job,” muttered Lenny. “Last week I was working with John Waters.”

    We placed the four folded paintings between the passenger side of the truck and the alley wall so they wouldn’t blow over if a gust came through. Then we opened the back doors and emptied most of the truck into the alley. It was five in the afternoon and the entrails of the art world were lit by golden light.  The waiters and busboys from a Chinese restaurant came out with trash and smoked as we pieced everything together. One of them studied the Chamberlain and the steel frogs. “What is this stuff?”

    “Sculptures and paintings, mostly.”

    “That’s what you guys do?”

    “Yeah, we move this stuff.”

    “People pay for this?” 

    “They sure do.”

    “How much?”

    “A lot.”

    He shrugged and went back inside.

    We loaded the folded paintings first. They filled up the front of the truck, over forty inches wide and six feet deep. Above the paintings we hung a shelf and placed boxes and anything light that would fit. We re-loaded the Frank Lloyd Wright desk just behind the huge paintings on the right, padded it with extra blankets, and then strapped smaller paintings on top of it. The steel sculptures lined the rest of the right wall, and we created two new painting stacks on the left. Somehow everything fit. We were both sweating and astonished. We got coffee and headed north: cars and trucks glinting in traffic like salmon pushing home.

    The collectors waiting in Glencoe, Highland Park, and Lake Forest were gracious. It didn’t matter what time it was. We installed a couple of paintings, accepted coffee, and drove into Wisconsin. We were starving and exhausted when we found a room. “Darick, so far this is the weirdest week of my life,” said Lenny as he turned in.

    After doing Milwaukee and Madison Thursday morning we had an add-on in Toledo. That was strange. “We were in Toledo Monday night,” I mused to D.E.

    “Yeah, well, this is for the Smithsonian, so we have to do it,” he replied. I was noticing that he always said we when actually I had to it. “And it has to be done today, okay? This client is really particular.”

    “Okay.”

    “Cincinnati will stay late for you.”

    “Really? The Cincinnati Art Museum?”

    “Everyone’s desperate to get their stuff on this shuttle. And call the guy in Louisville. He’ll be waiting for his screen tonight.”

---

    We arrived at our stop in Toledo after four. It was south of the city, past what looked like a refinery. It was an isolated gray clapboard house with a porch. There were no trees around it and nature seemed to have abandoned the place except for a lawn in front. The sun was hard. It was hot. I wrote up the BOL. There were four items to pick up, paintings and signage from an old circus for the American History Museum. I walked up to the porch and knocked on the front door. Lenny stood behind me on the lawn with wrapping materials in his arms. No one answered. I stepped back to glance in the window. It was dark inside. The window was partly open, letting air in through the screen. There was a lace curtain behind it shivering in the draft. I saw a figure a few feet back watching me.

    “Hi there. It’s Artransport.”

    “They said you were coming.” It was a woman’s voice.

    “We’ve come to pick up the things for American History. Can we come in?”

    “No.”

    I looked back at the shadow. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but I’ve been brutalized by men, and I can’t let any of you in the house. I told them that.”

    “Okay.”

    “I’m going to hand you these things through the window. Don’t get too close. Stand back, sir. If you get too close, I’ll call the police.”

    “Okay, no problem. We wrap them on the porch?”

    “No. Outside, on the grass. Tell the other guy not to come closer.”

    I motioned Lenny to stay back. He looked confused. The woman lifted the screen slightly. I stayed where I was. A moment later she began lifting the first painting through at an angle. I leaned forward to grasp the frame. It was light. I saw that the woman had beautiful hands. How old was she? Late thirties, early forties? It was hard to tell. I took all the weight and brought the painting out. I leaned it against the railing of the porch. She handed me the other three works carefully and I leaned them against the railing. They were all happy circus paintings of trapezes and clowns and freaks. The frames were flimsy. “I’m going to take these down to the yard and do a condition report and wrap them, okay? And then I’ll bring back the BOL for you to sign.”

    “Just put it through the window when you’re done.”

    I lifted the first piece and called out to Lenny. “Can you get a couple of blankets from the truck? We’re wrapping everything on the grass.”

    “What?” He got the blankets, though.

    I brought the paintings down one by one and lay them face up on the blankets.

    “What’s going on?’ asked Lenny.

    I whispered: “The woman told me she was brutalized. I think she was raped. She won’t let us near.”

    “Oh my God.” He looked down at the painting of trapeze artists. The sweat from his forehead dripped on the canvas. Drip, drip. “Oh my God.” Drip, drip. I dabbed at the droplets with tissue. The painting was cracked and flaking; the sweat didn’t help. I finished the condition report, placed the painting face down on some plastic and wrapped it. Lenny looked up at the window on the porch. He couldn’t see anybody. It was hot and his sweating was uncontrollable. Knowing the kind of person he was I think his anxiety was amplified by empathy. We finished wrapping the paintings in plastic, then wrapped a layer of Kempac around each one. The material gave them padding and additional protection. I walked back up to the porch. “Ma’am, we’re done.”

    “Stick the paper through the window.”

    I leaned forward and placed the BOL partly through. A beautiful hand took the paper. Moments later the woman pushed the paper through. I looked at her signature.

    “Thank you, ma’am.”

    She shut the screen.

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Chapter Five

Published December 12, 2025

Sometimes you have to apologize anyway.

I

    We fit the circus paintings in the stack and drove south. An hour later we got fuel for the truck and tried to wash the smell of diesel off our hands before getting coffee. Summer bugs splattered blindly on the windshield. It’s hard to describe how tired we were. We’d had days with little sleep, and nothing but adrenaline to get us through. We arrived in Cincinnati around eight p.m. Two art handlers were waiting in the museum loading dock as we backed in.

    “We thought they were sending a tractor-trailer,” one of them remarked as I approached with the paperwork.

    “Why’s that? We don’t have tractor-trailers.”

    “See for yourself.”

    They led us back to the crate. It was huge: 105” high and just as long. Lenny rolled his eyes and spun around. The back door of our truck was 96” tall.

    “Oh, shit,” I said.

    “See what I mean?” said the guy. “You have an itty-bitty straight truck.” 

    “Can you help us get it on?”

    “Sure man, whatever you need. We’re on overtime. Tick-tock. This has to get to New York.”

    I pulled Lenny aside. “We have to unload the truck again.”

    “Oh my God.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Can’t we just tell the office this is impossible? We aren’t supposed to commit suicide, I don’t think.”

    “My friend was just fired. I can’t afford to get fired.”

    We unloaded the painting stacks and leaned them along the side of the dock. It was a better place to rearrange a load than an alley. Out came the frogs, the Chamberlain, and Frank Lloyd Wright; everything but the folded paintings and the shelf above. The art handlers walked around the sculptures curiously. “You have a Chamberlain, huh? Very cool, man; very cool. Don’t know about the frogs, though.” 

    “I think we’re going to need some 2 x 4’s and some nails,” I said. I was nervous. I’m sure Lenny looked calmer than me, but he was sweating again. He had stopped talking about his wonderful week with John Waters.

    “Sure thing.”

    “You got any plywood? Can you cut it?”

    “We’ve got something.”

    The four of us pushed the crate to the back of the truck. It was facing the right side. Then we leaned it over to the left. 

    “Whoa!” 

    The crate was heavy. With the two guys from the museum under it we pushed through the back at a diagonal; then lifted the crate up to nestle it into the upper left corner. I crammed 2 x 4s against the bottom skid and nailed them into the floor. Then we strapped the upper and lower halves of the crate against the wall, running straps under the corners. We fit the painting stacks under its lean; placed the Frank Lloyd Wright between the skids and the right wall; then I asked for the plywood. We put blankets around the desk and secured it with plywood in front in case the crate, or anything else, slipped into it. We placed the Chamberlain to its right. Then we placed more plywood on top of the leaning crate. It was the only place to put the frogs and the wood spread out their weight. We strapped them on blankets as if they were riding someone’s back. The art handlers from the museum watched silently as the frogs took their place on the museum’s property. But everything fit and the crate was on its way to New York.

---

    At eleven that night we slid into Louisville, to a grand house with the porch light on. We slipped a Japanese screen from Christie’s out of the stack behind the crate, carried it to the front door and rang the bell. A man in a bathrobe let us in and asked us to unwrap it. The screen was fine. He signed the paperwork and hesitated. “I wanted to ask you guys something,” he said.

    “Sure.”

    “Since I bought this screen and they told me it was coming on an art truck, I was wondering what one was like. It was an industry I’d never heard of, moving art. I was wondering what the truck is like, how you pack things. Do you mind if I look inside?”

    It was an awkward question. I suppose I could have gotten around it by mentioning the privacy of other clients and all that, but I was tired, and he was polite and had been waiting for us for hours. So, I led him to the back of the truck and opened the door. Cool freshness from the reefer wafted into the night. The customer looked inside. He saw a crate leaning at a diagonal with a stack of paintings strapped beneath it; he saw the Chamberlain and the desk squeezed between the skids and the right wall; he saw the steel frogs riding shotgun on the painting crate. He nodded silently and walked back to the house.

II

    Friday, we did Lexington and deliveries around Columbus. I called D.E. to tell him we needed help getting the Cincinnati crate off the truck. He didn’t sound surprised. He told me the guys from the Florida shuttle would wait for us. After we were done that evening, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant and found a room. It was the first night we got some real sleep. In the morning Lenny sat up and muttered, “One more day.”

    When we arrived in Shirlington that evening the Florida guys were waiting in the office. They were tanned and had had a much better week than us. But when we walked them over to the Dart building and opened the back of the truck, they weren’t happy.

    “Holy fuck!” They weren’t expecting the frog sculptures and everything else that had to be moved before we could get at the crate. An hour later they left to start their weekend. Lenny and I unloaded the folded paintings, the boxes above them, and measured everything for billing before we put the objects away in bins. Around midnight we were folding blankets together. There were dozens and dozens of them.

    “What am I doing here?” Lenny asked suddenly. “I could be a with a girl right now.”

    It was a good question. I told him he could go home to Baltimore, and I would finish the rest myself. We said goodbye and he walked to his car with his luggage. I never saw him again.

---

    I parked the truck and carried the clipboard and keys to the office. The desk with the least amount of clutter on it was the Red Queen’s, so I organized all the paperwork and used her calculator to add up all the expenses. I put everything in place in the clipboard and closed it. I noticed that a ledger on her desk was open. It had her calculations for the cost and profit of the Mid-West shuttle I’d just completed. The profit margin was 65%. Damn: that was a lot of money. Thousands and thousands of dollars. All the work Lenny and I had done, driving all over the place, not getting sleep, squeezing every possible add-on and artwork on the truck amounted to real money. That’s why they pushed us so hard.

    I noticed a little note stuck between the two open sheets and held it up. The scrap read: “Darick—no excuse!” No excuse for what? Years later I found the note along with other acerbic comments in my file that were out of context now, fits of pique that affected my pay. I put it back.

    On Monday Mike was hired back. He came over to celebrate and we opened a bottle of wine and began watching The Godfather. “So, what happened?” I asked him.

    “Well, they had me come into the office, and told me it was all a misunderstanding, and Shelley apologized, and then the Queen apologized, and then I apologized.”

    “Why did you apologize? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

    “Yeah, I know. But sometimes you have to apologize anyway.”

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Chapter Six

Published December 19, 2025

Why most men are idiots.

I

    Arthur Cadieux was Artransport’s New England guy. He was from New England, loved New England, and had family in New England. So, he did the New England shuttle every month, though, like the Midwest, it was not a popular shuttle with the other drivers. The miles weren’t good—we got paid by the mile on long-distance trips—and the winters were snow, ice, and sleet. Since I was a new guy and got along with everybody, I was paired up with Arthur once a month. My bread and butter became the two shit shuttles, with locals and New York’s in between.

    Arthur was known as a character, and I didn’t know what to make of him at first. For one thing, he was “forty-two going on seventy,” as one driver put it. I was in my twenties, and at the time anyone over forty seemed old. Arthur looked old for forty-two. His face was lined, he had balding blond hair going white any minute, and deep-set eyes that were all over the place. One moment they were an impish blue, then a funnel of despair. He had been almost famous in his twenties, with solo shows in New York, followed by positions teaching art in South Dakota and Michigan. Then he had a fall of some kind. I was never sure what happened, but it explained why he was driving a truck. I met him in the Dart warehouse early one morning as he was sifting through the art bins for our load. He turned around to glance at his new partner. “So, you’re a writer, huh?” he asked politely. “That’s interesting.” (Which meant it wasn’t interesting at all: I can tell you from experience that most painters think what writers produce is a complete waste of time. Articles about art and philosophy are an exception, the more pretentious the better.)

    Once we were loaded around 6:30 we made way for the first local truck, and Arthur got in the driver’s seat with a look of satisfaction. “You know what, Darick?” he observed. “We’re doin’ it! Let’s go to the Weenie-Beenie. Then wheee!” Up though the New Jersey Turnpike: two stops at Princeton, one at the Montclair Art Museum, then White Plains. Our last stop that day was the delivery of a painting in Greenwich, Connecticut, to a rich client who commuted from New York. “We’re doin’ it, Darick, we’re doin’ it! Boom-Boom-Boom! Let’s call the orifice and let them know we’re done.”

    His younger brother lived in Branford, north of New Haven, and we spent the night there. That allowed each of us to pocket fifteen bucks. His brother's family was welcoming and made us dinner. There was no hint anyone considered Arthur a failure. They asked about his wife and son and showed us our beds. Then Arthur and I went on a walk. It was high summer, and the sun lingered in the sky. He told me the history of the commons areas in New England as we passed through the green in the center of town. Every new corner was an object lesson in something. He talked about his dead father, who he despised. He had been a demeaning man, dismissive of his wife and children.

    The next evening, after stops at Yale, Hartford, Providence, and the Cape, we parked at his mother’s house in Framingham. Each of us saved another fifteen bucks. “Oh, Ahtha!” declared Mrs. Cadieux. She hugged her son, led us in and made dinner. Arthur stayed in his old bedroom. I got his brother’s childhood room for the evening. Mrs. Cadieux was delighted to point out Arthur’s paintings throughout the house, especially those from his heyday; but I could tell this irritated him, and his eyes grew dark. “Oh, yeah, I was a real hotshot back then,” he said. But the next day he bounced back, and as we made our stops at the MFA Boston and a bunch of galleries, he described his early success impishly. He had loved the attention, declarations of genius, the future of creativity and acclaim. Then it went away. His life bobbed up and down. He tried to shrug it off. It was fortune. It had nothing to do with talent, little to do with what he painted; fashion picked him up and then picked someone else. He seemed to think it had nothing to do with his own character. As we bounced around the city and up the coast, his remembered life had a similar random quality. Now he was driving trucks. 

    The next couple of days he didn’t talk about his past or his ambitions. He had stopped painting a while ago. But when we stopped at the Portland and Rockland art museums for deliveries and pick-ups, we perused the galleries, and he was in his element. He knew the history and work of the artists there intimately. He had dropped out of their company. 

    When I met Arthur, his life had hit bottom. He had his wife Helene and his son Adam, and he had a job. His reputation and his prospects were gone. Everyone’s life is unpredictable. In the art world it is especially so. When you are up it can be ephemeral fluff, praised and forgotten, and when you are down, out of sight and mind, you often do your best work. That year Arthur started painting again.

II

    Most women know that men are idiots. To understand why, try sitting in a truck for hours listening to the guy next to you talk about women. Many of the people I worked with were incredibly intelligent, sensitive to color and form, but when the subject of women came up, they barked like monkeys. Driving up the turnpike I had to listen to tales of conquest over and over again, the connection between art and sex, the idea—always implied—that girls could not resist their talent. Maybe some of the stories were true. 

    One of my partners told me about an opening he had in Georgetown. A pretty curator attended and kept her eyes on him. She thought he was brilliant! She got more flirtatious as the evening went on. She brought him glasses of wine. She picked up finger food and brought it to his mouth. She licked her lips and smiled. Finally, he had enough: did she mean anything by this or was she playing with him? He invited her outside and they walked a few steps down to the C & O Canal. She smiled up at him again. He reached for her panties and pulled them down. Then he pushed her onto the towpath and slid between her legs. A few minutes later she brushed off her skirt and they went back inside.

    Another tale involved a delivery to an artist in New Jersey. She had a place in the country and was receiving the return of a solo show. It was late in the day and both drivers were tired. After the paintings were brought into her studio and she signed the paperwork, the artist invited both guys to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. She was in her early forties and very attractive. Her daughter, who came downstairs to join them, was also attractive. Coffee was followed by glasses of wine. As both women moved around the room, they brushed the men with their hands. Then came dinner and more wine. The artist sat by one guy, the daughter by another. The meal was delightful. They talked about art. Every so often the women brushed the men’s thighs. Their hands lingered, stroking with playful fingers. It was going to be a mother-daughter thing for sure, and in case the guys had any doubt, the artist suggested they stay longer. “You can spend the night,” she said.

    It was an incredible opportunity. But the person who told the story had a girlfriend, and with her came an attack of conscience. “I’m sorry, but we have to go,” he said.

    On the way to the truck his partner was glaring. “What was that for? We were in!”

    “The schedule,” he murmured.

    “The schedule? Who gives a shit about the schedule!”

    When it came to barking Arthur was one of the worst. He loved his wife and son dearly, but nothing overrode an artist’s God-given right to pussy. To a lot of the guys it was charity to donate sperm and glints of talent to as many willing women as possible. One evening a couple of months after I met him, we had finished our stops in Boston and looked for a place to eat before heading north. There was a lit sign for a Vietnamese restaurant in the business district, and we parked the truck. We were hungry and the food was great. It was a family-owned business: the owners’ daughter was our waitress. She was a willowy beauty with perfect skin, and as she walked away after delivering a plate, Arthur looked after her. “I want to fuck her,” he declared.

    I shrugged. Who wouldn’t?

    Under bushy eyebrows, his eyes flashed at me. “I mean it,” he said.

    “Okay.”

    “Do you think she would be willing to fuck me?”

    “No.”

    Arthur looked around the room. “Maybe I should talk to her brother,” he said.

    “I don’t think that would help.”

    “Really? What if I offered him money?”

    “Arthur.” I looked up from my plate. “This isn’t the best part of town. I bet they keep a gun in the kitchen. If you offer him money to sleep with his sister, I think he’s going to shoot you in the face.”

    “Really? Hmm.” Arthur wasn’t convinced. “I really want to fuck her.”

---

    One day I made a minor contribution to Arthur’s family life by convincing him to keep a kitten. It was offered to him by a client, and he accepted it out of politeness. We had been scheduled together for an exclusive use in Southern Maryland. An exclusive is a trip for a single client. We were picking up for an exhibit in Baltimore of the Egeli family of portrait painters whose studios were up and down the peninsula between the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay. They were a Maryland version of the Wyeth’s but less famous. Our first stop was an older brother of the brood, from what I remember. He had a place just south of Route 50. It was a beautiful, sunny day, with breezes tickling the fields nearby, and all the trees. We spent about an hour wrapping the paintings at his studio. A young kitten jumped around playfully as we set down materials around each frame. It was a delightful little creature. Arthur kept up a conversation with the artist about work they admired, and the gallery scene. Every so often he chirped up with a “Hey, kitty-kitty!” as the little fur ball jumped between us. 

    “Would you like to keep the kitten?” asked Mr. Egeli as we were finishing up.

    “What?”

    “Do you have a cat? We’re looking for homes for our litter. Anyway, you seem to like her, right?”

    “My son would love a kitten!” declared Arthur.

    Half an hour later, after we had loaded the paintings and driven away with the cat on his lap, the gravity of what he had done hit home. I stopped at an intersection and was checking the traffic before turning right. “You know what?” declared Arthur.

    “What?”

    “I want to take this cat and just—throw it out the window!”

    “You can’t do that!”

    He turned to me. “Why not?”

    “Because you accepted the kitten. Now you’re responsible for it the rest of its life.”

    “What? I never thought that.”

    “That’s the way it is, Arthur. You’re responsible for that cat now. You accepted it. If you throw it out the window, it’s going to die. Anyway, you said Adam wanted a cat.”

    “I was just saying that.”

    “Well, you said it,” I admonished him. “You better roll up that window. I’m not going anywhere till the cat’s safe.” I kept my foot on the brake until he complied, and he fumed at me a while. By the time we arrived at the next stop further south—one of the Egeli sisters—he was cooing at the kitten again and petting her gently.

    “Are you riding around with a cat?” asked the artist as we were pulling materials. The kitten was protesting being left in the cab.

    “It was your brother’s. He just gave it to me,” explained Arthur.

    “Well, that explains it. He just had a litter, I know. Would it like some milk?”

    About an hour later we headed to next Egeli studio. I had never driven through southern Maryland before. It was incredibly rich and green. We stopped for coffee and looked at a cornfield shimmering in the afternoon. “The British lost a lot when they lost the colonies,” I said.

    “They knew what they had. That’s why they fought so hard to keep it,” replied Arthur.

    We had five stops that day. The last studio was Carolyn Egeli’s. She was the youngest sister, and we arrived late in the day as the sun began declining over the bay. The kitten had been fed twice. The studio was on a farm, and the artist came out to greet us as we pulled up. She was warm and friendly and incredibly pretty. She had blond hair down to her shoulders, bright eyes, and a perfect figure. She was older than me, not that it mattered. She was hot! I was smitten immediately: I couldn’t help it. I was a fool the rest of the afternoon.

    As we laid out materials in her studio and did our condition reports she kept us company. We had a lot of paintings to pack, but I kept looking over at her and making conversation. She chuckled and smiled. I think a lot of guys hit on her, though she wasn’t exactly single. (As I soon found out: her husband was lurking back in the house, and she had little kids.) Arthur was bemused and kept on working. By the time we were finished it was dusk. As we carried the paintings to the truck, I decided to give her something. It was a copy of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. I had just finished reading it and had the copy in my bag.

    “Why, thank you!” she declared. “Now I’m going to go back to the house and get my notebook so I can write down your address. So I can return it.”

    “Oh, you can keep it,” I replied immediately. She beamed and went to the house anyway. A few minutes later she was back with the notebook and took down my address. Her husband and kids watched through the screen door. 

    “And your phone number,” she added brightly, “so we can discuss this when I’m done.”

    Arthur’s eyes followed her from the passenger seat as she walked away. “You just want to fuck her,” he said.

    I thought about it. “Yeah, that’s true.”

    It was completely dark now, and we could see her in the kitchen preparing dinner with her family. “What were you thinking?” asked Arthur. “She’s married.”

    But I wasn’t thinking. I was just being an idiot like everybody else.

    “I’ve been watching how you work all summer,” continued Arthur. “Whenever you see a pretty registrar, you chat them up, talking about books and movies, and all that stuff. It’s how you try to charm them, get their attention. Your technique.” He obviously wasn’t impressed by my technique. He put on his safety belt, careful not to disturb the kitten, who had taken up residence on his knees again. “When I was an art teacher,” he remembered, “I fucked my students all the time. They sensed my passion.” He sighed. “Let’s get some coffee, okay?”

    By the time I drove back to the warehouse, Arthur was asleep with his head leaning against the window. The kitten was still curled up on his lap.

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Chapter Seven

Published December 26, 2025

The Crab Trap, an experiment in Found Art.

I

    That summer Bill Willis left Artransport for a teaching position in the Southeast. I didn’t see him again until Arthur’s opening at the Anton Gallery on R Street over a year later. In the meantime, Arthur was mum about his new work. He didn’t seem to trust himself and kept the effort quiet in case he failed. Yet he had been following an idea for months, and when I arrived at his family's apartment for Thanksgiving, canvases were leaning all over the place. The apartment was a long art studio in The Lafayette on 7th Street NW. It had a kitchen and bathroom, a bed for Arthur and Helene, one for Adam, and no privacy for anybody. But there was plenty of room to paint, beautiful hardwood floors, and fresh natural light. A leg o’lamb, which Arthur had been anticipating for months, was roasting in the oven, and the smell of a good meal permeated the place as the kitten bounced around looking for attention and something to attack.

    The Lafayette had been remodeled for artists. Steve Cushner lived on another floor with his wife, as did George Hemphill, then the photography curator at the M— Gallery. Arthur liked Cushner and hated Hemphill over some dispute he didn’t explain. I had met George a few times by then and had no problem with him, so I shrugged. I passed the time walking around the apartment looking at the canvases Arthur was working on. I was very impressed. I say this from the perspective of a person who had no art education before handling artwork on the trucks. The advantage of being ignorant, if you have an open mind, is that everything is new at first, unfiltered by opinions. The expression is naked to the eye.

    Arthur was painting a series of toys. They were wooden antiques of a rocking horse, a propeller plane, a sheep, tractor, and a truck. He had played with them as a little boy and then Adam had played with them. They were arranged sometimes singly, sometimes as a group, on each canvas. The colors and perspective were unusual. Sometimes the toys looked like beautiful still lives. Sometimes they emerged from a swirl of consciousness in bursts of color and darkness. And the colors were new. They were recognizable and immediately fresh, like they had just been born. “I really don’t know what I’m doing, Darick; you know it?” Arthur confessed. “I just had an urge to paint my old toys.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair, and we walked back toward the kitchen.

    The meal was wonderful. It was a relief, as a single guy with no money and no relatives nearby, to be welcomed so warmly. I liked Arthur’s little family. Helene worked at the Air and Space Museum gift shop, was angling to work at the Hirshhorn, and was very, very smart. Adam was preternaturally mature, petting the kitten absently as he watched over his parents. After we finished the red wine and deserts, Helene hugged me before I left. “There’s a girlfriend of mine I really want you to meet,” she whispered.

II

    Whenever friends from college, rising in the world a lot more quickly than me, asked why I was driving a truck, it was hard to explain in a way they would understand. It wasn’t for the money. There was no status in the job either (obviously), though I wasn’t ashamed to tell anyone what I did for a living anymore. And really, it had very little to do with my supposed career as a writer. The flexible schedule was a complete fantasy for new drivers. Yet it was an exciting, difficult job with a variety of experiences that were hard to match anywhere else. I went to parts of the country I’d never seen, got to know New York, and met a very unusual group of people. Many of my colleagues were brilliant. Beyond trash talk on the trucks they were perceptive about art and culture (though rarely about women). Meeting our clients was another jolt entirely.

    We art handlers could get in anywhere and did. To the White House, the Capitol, studios of artists, bowels of museums, the suites of collectors riding the pulse of the world. We handled peaks of expression that were coveted and rare. We also handled a lot of crap. It all came down to how a painting or sculpture was sold. But if a museum or collector wanted it, we were there. That is how a bunch of guys who made very little money flitted in and out of the lives of the great. During a local day I might meet the Secretary of Labor, receptionists, security guards, janitors, a museum registrar or two (or three), the owner of an art gallery, and end the day with a collector who had just spent a fortune on a Phillip Guston painting and was eager to see it installed. After unloading at the warehouse and finishing paperwork, it was back to wondering if I had enough cash for groceries. It was bizarre. 

    On a shuttle to Philadelphia Arthur and I installed 19th century American paintings at an apartment in Rittenhouse Square from an exhibit in New York. The frames had new Met stickers on the back, which added to their value. We finished after a couple of hours and rode down to the loading dock, where our truck was parked next to a dumpster. The elevator operator recognized us. “Hello again,” he said.

    We nodded back.

    “Did you get a tip?” he asked a couple of floors down.

    “Nope.” I shook my head.

    “With all that valuable stuff you brought. You know how the rich stay rich, don’t you?” he asked.

    “How?” replied Arthur.

    “They say ‘Thank you’. ‘Will you please move a few boxes for me? Why, thank you. Will you carry my groceries to my apartment? Thank you very much! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Never a goddam tip. That’s my experience. And I been here a long time.”

    I didn’t expect to get tipped often (and wasn’t). People at the bottom of the art world got close to nothing. The way money fed and flowed through the system was interesting, though, and followed the law of irony. Artists, on whom the whole edifice depended, were cheated all the time. Some, who cultivated critics and curators and had good lawyers, avoided that fate. They became rich. But most were at the mercy of their dealers. Bobby Donovan was walking in DC one day when he encountered a collector who had bought a few of his paintings. “Bobby! I’m sorry you couldn’t make it to my dinner party last week.”

    Party?

    “Well your dealer said you were out of town and couldn’t make it, so I invited him. I wanted to show your work to my friends.”

    The dealer had lied to maintain control of the artist-collector relationship. Once Bobby realized he had to break with his gallery, he showed up with a truck to take his work back. Several paintings were missing. “We need to do an inventory!” the dealer declared angrily to his assistant. But the paintings never showed up. They had been sold under the table and Bobby never saw a cent. I heard stories like this all the time.

    Cheating and dodging occurred up and down. Galleries cheated artists; dealers cheated collectors—the fleecing of the rich was something to behold—auction houses and moving companies hid damage to paintings, sculptures, and antiques from everybody. Some artists gamed the system too. When the definition of art is flexible, and new ideas, new movements, are pushed by gobbledygook in art magazines, anything goes. That was my experience, anyway.

---

    After a few stops on the Eastern Shore that fall, Mike and I were driving back to the warehouse at twilight. We had hours to go. Lately we had delivered a lot of Found Art to collectors all over the place. What is Found Art, anyway? Well, it depends. Duchamp placed a urinal upside down and challenged conceptions on when form becomes sculpture. Fair enough. Found Art can consist of pretty much anything if it’s looked at the right way. Metal, plastic, wood, painted or not. Some discarded forms, when looked at with fresh eyes, are quite beautiful. Some look like pieces of trash with intellectual underpinnings. I happened to be in a cynical frame of mind that evening and was mulling over a nasty remark of the Red Queen. She was always picking on us. I saw a trash heap near the shore and something in it caught my eye. I asked Mike to stop the truck. I jumped down, picked up a piece of junk and brought it inside.

    “What are you doing with that?” he asked. It was a turquoise crab trap, not an uncommon sight along the Chesapeake Bay.

    “I have an idea,” I explained. “A little experiment.”

    Back at the warehouse I tied a piece of twill to one of the trap’s metal ribs and attached a sticker to it. I made up a job number, wrote it on the sticker, and specified “CA” for the destination. Then I changed its orientation, placing it on end in the California bin. It didn’t look like a crab trap anymore. It looked like a weird sculpture. Anyhow, it had the legitimacy of a job sticker. I was proud of my little prank.

    “How long before they discover this, you think?” I wondered. “A few days, a week?”

    Mike crossed his arms. “You never know,” he said.

III

    John Douglas ran the crate shop. He was an extraordinary craftsman and created the standards for crating in the art business, with precise and cushioned support for paintings, sculptures, objects—anything valuable. Registrars loved him. Even years after he was murdered his work was famous. In the storage areas of museums and on loading docks you would still see his designs with the Artransport stamp. Every so often someone would point one out: “That’s a John Douglas crate over there; an original John Douglas. Poor John Douglas.”

    J.D. wore a simple uniform of tan trousers with a tan shirt. He didn’t require anyone else in the crate shop to wear a uniform; he just wore one himself. He was a tall man with thinning hair combed back with oil. He had the features of a little boy shocked into middle age: big ears, expressive eyebrows, mischievous eyes which blinked through his sneaky, embarrassed laugh. He covered his mouth when he smirked. His glasses gave him a look of perpetual wonder. He had an unpredictable temper like a child, and held long, simmering resentments. He sometimes referred to Bob Lennon and his friends as “those sodomites;” but was unfailingly polite to most people when they were right in front of him. Upstairs in the office the Red Queen was “Ma’am;” downstairs in the crate shop she was “That Bitch.” Most of the time he referred to Bob Lennon as “Mr. Lennon,” though, because Bob was a nice guy and it was hard not to like him.

    The drivers and his employees in the shop he called “Sir.” When I was brand new and asked where a bin was, he replied, “Yes, Sir, let me show you.” But he looked at me sharply. He probably wondered if I was going to last more than a week. His exchanges with Lap and Wei, brothers who were his favorite employees, were filled with honorifics as they competed to show respect. “Lap, now, I’m telling you, I’m telling you—okay? Stop calling me ‘Sir.’ Call me ‘John.’ Okay?”

    “Yes, Sir, Mr. Douglas. Okay. We work on the next crate.”  

    John Douglas’ wife had discovered Lap and Wei when they became her employees after they arrived from Vietnam. She ran a local McDonald’s. Rumor had it that she ran John Douglas too. But John Douglas ran the crate shop and gave them better jobs. They were talented and hard-working, and he loved them to death. In fact, no other employees could measure up to them, so he fired people all the time. The quickest way out of the company was through the crate shop. One guy who he tolerated briefly was always a step behind the brothers and had a filthy mouth. He fantasized aloud about women who passed through the shop. “Oh, my God, she’s one to fuck. I’m going to do it; I can see myself doing it. And I want to lick her, oh my God.”

    One evening Bobby Donovan had finished a job and J.D. pulled him aside. “See that boy over there?”

    “Yeah?”

    “You know what would happen if someone cracked open his skull? Pussies would come out! Little bitty pussies—a fountain of ‘em! That’s all he’s got in his head—pussies!”  

    Other people came and went, but Lap and Wei were up to the job. I didn't know how talented they really were—especially Lap—until I did a New York shuttle with Bobby that was very memorable. It opened my eyes to a reality in the art service business. Namely: that what you see is what you get. What you don’t see never happened.

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Chapter Eight

Published January 2, 2026

Lap’s masterpiece.

I

    It was a Thursday-Friday shuttle. We had deliveries up and down Manhattan the first day, and across the river in Astoria. Then we parked the truck before checking into the Hotel Earle on Washington Square. The trick was always finding a spot where the truck wouldn’t be towed before breakfast. We checked in and had dinner. Bobby went out for a couple of hours and did sketches around the Village, and he showed them to me after I came back from a movie. As usual he was querulous about whether this line or that line worked, and the efficacy of its expression. Personally, I thought most of his work would be at home in museums.

    The next morning, I started the truck. As it warmed up, the battery light kept blinking. That was bad. The alternator was dying. The battery wasn’t being recharged. Shit! Bobby and I looked at each other. We only had so much juice left. We went through the paperwork. We had pick-ups along Madison, 57th Street, Long Island City, a string of galleries in Soho. A very full truck. Paintings were coming on, a bunch of paper mâché furniture for an event at the Watergate sponsored by George W.H. Bush—paper maché? That was weird. A two-hundred-year-old chair bound for a museum in North Carolina was on the schedule; and there was a steel David Smith sculpture: several hundred pounds, at least. We needed the lift-gate for that. The juice in the battery had to be saved to get the sculpture on. “Up Madison, sir,” said Bobby.

    The battery light went red as the alternator gave up its soul. Every time I used a turn signal, electricity drained; when I slowed down, juice went into the brake lights. We made our way north and parked on the left side of Madison north of 72nd. I left the engine running. The gallery assistant was surprised to see us so early but released the David Smith after we did a condition report. It was a pristine, beautiful sculpture about six feet tall. We tipped it over slightly on a blanket to get a dolly underneath the base. Then—carefully—we put it upright and wheeled the sculpture out to the freight elevator. Down we went.

    “I had a friend Jeff who was a sculptor,” remembered Bobby. We kept our hands on the David Smith. “He worked in the office before you started. He was going to be great, right? He started doing these medium-sized sculptures, three feet or so. Just getting started. But every year they got smaller. I’d say, ‘Hey Jeff, how’s the sculpture goin’?’ He’d have this wood piece a foot high he was real proud of. Then he started showing me things made of toothpicks—tiny! Now he just thinks them. Talk about shrinking ambition!”

    “We’d have an easier time moving miniature sculptures, anyway,” I said. 

    The elevator door opened to sunlight in the lobby. 

    “Yeah, we’d also be out of a job. Let’s get this thing to the truck.”  

    You get a real sense of mass moving through space when handling a David Smith. They feel dangerous. We maneuvered it carefully on the little dolly wheels through the lobby, out to the sidewalk, and down to the truck. There was a slight slope. I held on to the sculpture as Bobby lowered the lift-gate with a clang! onto Madison. He opened and secured the back doors. We maneuvered the sculpture onto a blanket on the gate, bit by bit. “Pray, pray, pray this thing works!” muttered Bobby. He was wearing a red bandana and scrunched his face as he stared at the steel base. He looked like a penitent. We stood on the gate and held the sculpture from either side. I turned the lift-gate on.

    “Scree-eech!” 

    It struggled up, jiggling every other inch. It reached the top with a metallic sigh. “Clunk!”

    “I actually prayed, you know,” Bobby admitted.

    We slid the sculpture on the blanket to the front of the truck as far from the bouncing back axle as possible. We padded it with more blankets and tied it in with straps. It looked like a fussed-over mummy with flailing arms. We closed up the back and looked over the top sheet in the cab. “Yeah, this is going to be something else,” remarked Bobby. We had to go south again to our first scheduled stops. “I better call the office.” I was glad he was calling the office. We didn’t have good news and they didn’t take new guys like me seriously. A few minutes later he came back.

    “So, what’d they say?” I asked.

    “I talked to D. E., Mr. E. He wondered why we’re doing stops out of order. I told him the alternator’s dead. I asked him to find a place we can fix it or wire us money.”

    “What’s he going to do?”

    “He’s working on it.”

    “You really think he’s working on it?”

    “I don’t think he’s doing shit. They’re gonna wait until we’re out of the city.” We only had fuel cards for the Turnpike, cash for per diem and tolls; and a bribe to Luther, if it came to that. We were broke. We had a third of a tank of diesel left. Chug, Chug, Chug.

    We moved south on Lexington, then turned east to Madison, and moved north again, doing the rest of our stops in order. The turn signal was blinking more slowly—Click…Click……..Click—as the battery drained. We lifted the rest of the pickups into the back of the truck at each stop: some huge paintings, the paper mâché furniture for the Vice-President, odds and ends from Sotheby’s and Christie’s; the beautiful two-hundred-year-old, Chippendale chair. Early afternoon the blinkers died. So did the brake lights. That worried me going up and down the avenues of Manhattan, coursing through traffic, over to Long Island City and back. But no cars bumped into us and the cops left us alone. We packed the truck well. We finished our last stop in Soho after darkness fell and parked the truck just south of Houston. It started drizzling. The windshield wipers didn’t work, of course, without juice. We had less than an eighth of tank of diesel left. Bobby walked over to a pay phone and called the office. I was glad he was making all the calls. The Queen didn’t like me.

II

    He came back with a grim face and slid into the passenger seat. 

    “Well?”

    He had spoken to the Queen. “She said, ‘Bobby—you’re on your own. It’s five o’clock on Friday night. I’m going home. I’m fed up with you guys.”

    “They aren’t going to help us?”

    “Nope. She hung up.”

    We stared at the water dripping on the windshield. The diesel chugging through the engine would last another hour or so. We couldn’t get through the Lincoln Tunnel without being pulled over. But ahead of us, just north of Houston, was an interesting sign:

Hittner Truck Rentals

    Their bay was still lit. An idea hit us. I pulled the truck north to Houston and waited for the light to change. We stopped outside Hittner’s office and went in. A manager was sitting at his desk, wrapping up the day. “How can I help you, gentlemen?” he asked game-fully.

    “We need a truck.”

    “You got $550?”

    “Nope.”

    “Got a credit card?”

    “Nope.”

    He smiled and swiveled in his chair. “Whaddya got, guys?”

    “We’ve got a truck. We can leave our truck as collateral and our office will pay the rental on it and bring it back next week. Can you have someone fix the alternator?” I asked.

    The man stopped smiling. “What kind of truck you got?”

    “A Mercedes.”

    “Huh. A Mercedes?” He got out of his chair and followed us outside, looking the beast up and down. “Damn. A Mercedes. OK. You got registration and stuff?” 

    “We got it, sure.”

    “Okay. A twenty-foot straight truck, you got it.”

    Victory!

    One of his guys rolled out a truck with ‘Hittner’ emblazoned on the sides. It had a twenty-foot box. We parked it back-to-back against our truck and opened both sets of doors. An hour and a half later we had switched the load. The problem was that what we had strapped into the front of Mercedes was now at the back of the Hittner; and the Hittner was a piece of crap. The bounce of the rear axle now threatened everything we had been trying to protect. But there was no space to move the artwork otherwise. On top of that the rental was not designed to carry artwork. Instead of metal tracks inside to secure straps to the wall and floor, there were sets of wooden slats to tie the webbing more haphazardly. I turned around as I was strapping in all the paper mâché pieces to watch Bobby secure the David Smith. He had the sculpture smothered with blankets and crossed and crisscrossed with straps. He did a really good job. Together we strapped in the beautiful chair across from the sculpture. It was time to eat.

    Still, we were nervous. Halfway down the Turnpike we pulled into a service area, got some fuel, and opened up the back door. Nothing had moved. Paintings and valuables were snug and secure, tucked in like children on Christmas Eve. At the end of the Turnpike we checked the load again. I switched over to the passenger seat and let Bobby drive the rest of the way.

---

    I woke up as he pulled up outside Artransport around 2:00 am. I yawned, went inside to get the keys for the Dart warehouse, and watched from the office upstairs as Bobby moved the truck down the cul-de-sac. A moment later he was walking up to the street toward the office. That was strange. His face was bent down, and his fists were clenched. His bandana flashed red under the streetlamp. I met him downstairs.

    “What’s up, Bobby?”

    “This you have to see for yourself.”

    He was silent as I followed him to the end of the street. The Hittner was backed into the dock at Dart. We climbed up and Bobby unlocked the back door of the truck.

    The slats holding the David Smith had come loose from the wall and the sculpture had collapsed over the chair. “It must have just happened; just as I turned into the circle. See that dip? I heard a little bonk as the axle bounced and now this. Holy shit.” We stared at it a while. The sculpture had kneeled into the chair. The straps around its base were still tight. There was a mess of blankets where the antique had been.

    If you have ever wondered what two-hundred-year-old wood sounds like as it scatters in little chunks, I can tell you: it sounds like ice. With all our strength we lifted the David Smith against the wall. Then I studied the pile of blankets and pulled them up.

    Clink! Clink! Clink! Oh my God. Bits and pieces landed all over the floor. The miraculous thing was that the Smith missed the paper mâché thingy strapped next to the chair by a quarter inch. The George Bush exhibition next week was going to be fine.

    “You know what, Darick?” mused Bobby. “Think of it: that chair has survived two hundred years. It was a different world then. It’s going to a history museum, right? Now it’s history. Think of the guy who made that chair and all its owners, and where it’s been passed around. And it survived all that time in order to be pummeled by a David Smith. Amazing." 

    We pulled together all the pieces we could find, wrapped them in a couple of blankets, and labelled the package “Two-Hundred-Year-Old Chair.” We left it prominently next to the Florida shuttle bin. I glanced over at the California area. The crab trap hadn’t moved. We unloaded the rest of truck and measured everything over the next couple of hours. By the time we finished the paperwork and parked the rental it was 5:00 am. As we punched out, we saw a memo to us left by the Queen on the time clock:

    Bobby and Darick—

    Leave me a note accounting for every minute of your day!

    Bobby tore it off and threw the note in the trash. I drove home and unplugged my phone. At least, I thought, the office would have to fess up to the history museum: they deserved some discomfort for not helping us.

III

    I was off until locals the following Wednesday. When I walked in John Douglas had his hands on his hips and looked at me curiously. “Good morning, Sir,” he intoned.

    “Morning. What’s up?”

    “Lap’s masterpiece!” He giggled and covered his mouth.

    “What?”

    “Look at this.”

    A perfect replica of the two-hundred-year-old chair was on a little stage on the east side of the shop by the circular saw. Actually, it wasn’t a replica. I walked over to it.

    “This is amazing,” I said. “What did the office tell the museum?”

    “Oh, they told them it would arrive on the next truck. It’s just a shuttle job.”

    “He must have picked everything up with tweezers. You can’t see any breaks. Good staining job.”

    “Yeah, he went looking through the back of that piece of shit truck, too. But you guys cleaned it pretty good. Glue, putty, and stain can fix anything.”

    “You think the curator will see the difference?”

    “Nah—nobody will notice. It looks good. I tell you: Lap’s a genius! And my wife discovered him at McDonald’s!”

    Lap came over to glance at his work, but couldn’t find anything to add, and went back to building a crate. I went upstairs to get my clipboard. I was expecting a lecture as soon as I showed up, but Bobby must have talked to the Queen already, or at least smiled at her. She gave me a quick side-eye and left me alone. I delivered the George Bush exhibit of paper maché furniture to the Watergate Hotel that morning; and at the end of the week drove the Hittner truck to Manhattan and picked up the Mercedes.

---

    Many years later I was driving in the South and passed by the history museum that had received the chair. I was curious and went inside. The (now more than) two-hundred-year-old Chippendale chair was displayed prominently on the second floor. A sign nearby explained its history and the furniture style it represented. There was no mention of its introduction to the David Smith. I leaned over and looked closely at the wood for any imperfections. There was no evidence of wood grain, not to mention repairs. I stood back and studied it for a while. I remembered the wisdom the late, great, John Douglas had imparted to me in the days when I was driving a truck:

    “Nobody will notice."

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Chapter Nine

Published January 9, 2026

Some dreams will kill you.

I

    As I began doing Virginia shuttles, and occasional trips to Florida, I began to wonder if the difference between the New South and the Old South was simply a changed face. I mean that literally. Many of the wealthier houses and estates I encountered in my travels had figures of black jockeys holding a little lantern at the entrance to the driveway or front steps. They were a very traditional sight. Some clients who worried about appearances— “Oh, my God, the jockey is a racist symbol!”—painted the jockey’s face white. The result was odd. The jockey’s features were black, the skin and eyes white: the eyes were literally painted over, like blind orbs. Since all the figures wore white gloves, they didn’t have to paint the hands over, and saved themselves some trouble. When we arrived at an address to deliver or pick up an artwork, I noticed either a black jockey or a white jockey, bent over in deference as they welcomed a guest.

---

    On a Virginia shuttle that summer we arrived at a plantation south of Richmond. The job was to pick up a horse and jockey painting for Sotheby’s. Horse and jockey paintings were a big deal for people who had horses and money. Our special instructions were unusual: “When you go through the gate, look up for a plane.”

    What on earth did that mean?

    My partner and I had puzzled over that one as we studied the paperwork that morning. My co-driver was a photographer in his 40’s. He had seen a lot and was pretty cynical. “I guess we’re supposed to look for a plane,” he shrugged.

    We arrived at the estate early afternoon after a lovely drive in the country—green fields on either side, scattered trees, and hills—and came to impressive gates. A brick wall extended on either side of the entrance, seemingly for miles. I spoke into a call box in front and got a squawk in reply. Very slowly, the gates parted. A straight driveway, wider than most, stretched ahead of us. We pulled into the property, stopped the truck, and looked up. There was no plane bearing down. Further down the drive on the right were some hangers and a windsock. 

    “This a first,” muttered the photographer.

    On our left was a hill with a Greek Revival mansion with columns in front. A winding road led to the top, with little houses along the way. They were servants’ quarters, and had once, possibly, been slave quarters. We drove down the runway about a quarter mile and turned left up the hill. We passed three little houses, and after three curves, the road widened at the front steps of the mansion. We parked the truck. A black jockey was bent over on the grass staring down at his lantern. 

    The painting described on the bill of lading was less than two feet square, so we cut a small amount of plastic and Kempac, then walked up the steps past the columns. There was a wide patio in front. I knocked on the door and waited. We looked behind us at the huge estate. Men were standing near the airplane hangars; another rode a mower over the fields on a journey to infinity. Further on were horse stables. The door opened suddenly, and we turned around.

    “Hello,” said the housekeeper. She was a calm middle-aged woman wearing glasses and a loose house dress.

    “Hi there—we’re from Artransport, here t o pick a painting for Sotheby’s.”

    “Oh—the horse and jockey painting. Come in.”

    She let us into an alcove inside the door, told us to wait, then walked under an arch of elephant tusks to retrieve the painting. She passed through a salon with more trophies.

    “Rich, but tacky,” observed the photographer as he eyed the tusks. The housekeeper heard him, looked back curiously, and disappeared through another door. “You can have money, but it doesn’t mean you have taste,” he pontificated.

    A few minutes later the housekeeper returned with the painting. She handed it to me, glanced at my partner coolly, and waited as I wrote the condition report. There was nothing wrong with the painting. It was a typical horse-and jockey painting. It had a flat, two-dimensional quality, with subdued colors and a simple frame. It was a painting describing property. 

    “Is the lady of the house here?” asked the photographer.

    “What for?”

    “To sign the paperwork—the owner.”

    “I am the lady of the house,” replied the woman in the house dress. She smirked as I handed her the paperwork. A black woman in a uniform popped into alcove from the dining room, glanced at the three of us, and turned around. The mistress signed the release and handed it back to me. “Is there anything else?”

    “I’m going to leave you the pink copy.”

    “All right. I guess you weren’t run over by the plane as you drove in,” she remarked as she led us to the door. “My husband’s flying back today. You never know.”

II

    Bobby Donovan had a dream once that he was a shepherd guiding sheep through a pasture. Gradually he realized he was driving a truck, and the sheep were cars barreling south on the Jersey Turnpike late at night. He woke up.

    In my own dreams, overcome with exhaustion after days with little sleep, I saw mountains. Maybe it was because I grew up surrounded by mountains. I remember driving south after pick-ups in New York, fascinated by the range that crossed New Jersey from East to West. It was a hard to make out at night, and I blinked a few times to bring it in focus. But the mountains were always on the edge of consciousness. With great concentration I reminded myself they weren’t real: and woke with a rush of adrenalin and fear. Then came the desperate effort—ten more minutes! Five more minutes!—to the next service area to pull over and rest my eyes. We worked crazy schedules in an industry that serviced dreams. If you drive trucks long enough, you realize some dreams will kill you.

    Dreaming at the wheel in daylight was the scariest experience of all. On one Midwest the schedule was so tight Mike and I worked thirty hours straight. I was driving north to Cleveland in the bright afternoon when I saw a range of mountains again. Death was so close, so comfortable. I squinted to see the mountains more clearly, and then—oh my God! —pulled over. We got the stops done, though. The funny thing was that the Midwest, a loss-leader when I started, began getting busier and busier. Eventually Artransport scheduled two Midwest shuttles a month to keep up. It turned into a nice gig. Mike and I had a group of collectors who liked us and requested that we bring their art over and over again. We began making decent money on every trip. Then the shuttle became so successful we were kicked off it.

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Chapter Ten

Published January 16, 2026

The Worst Two Words in the English Language.

I

    Every company has its politics. Mike and I weren’t popular with the office. The drivers who were had no problem smiling at the Queen and charming her when they had to. Maybe they even liked her when they were stoned, I don’t know. Anyhow she eventually passed the Midwest to people she liked. We were thrown other scraps.

    The most prominent charmer was the sculptor Bing. He worked with stone. He loved stone, the expression within it, the manliness of cutting and shaping hard rock. In his own way he was a sensitive and perceptive soul. I really think that when he saw boulders and exposed strata, he perceived forms of God waiting to be released. “Stone, man—stone!” he’d call out if he saw an interesting formation on the side of the Turnpike. His ego was as massive and fragile as a balloon. One of the drivers pointed out that Bing, in his pursuit of art, had missed his true calling as the leader of a cult.

    On my first trip with him we were having breakfast at Penn Grove. He asked me what kind of work I did. I told him. He looked at me carefully, taking in the qualities of my mind with his subtle eyes. He leaned back and crossed his arms. “You could be the one, you know,” he decided.

    “The one what?”

    “The one great writer.”

    I wasn’t the only person he used that line on. A bunch of artists fell for that very observation, and thought he respected their unique genius. So they respected his genius. He had a lot of admirers. His flattery made me uncomfortable, though. I think he knew it.

    He loved to talk about dialectics, the dance between opposites and contradictions, facets of an idea like the many aspects of Christ. Who was He really—who knew? Jesus was like the mystery of a diamond! Sometimes Bing’s ideas were brilliant, sometimes flash. He’d finish with “You know what I mean? You know?” Once I told him his spiral of thoughts didn’t make any sense. “Well, that’s the dialectic,” he replied, looking out the window.

    He had a beautiful wife he had seduced after asking her to pose. (An old trick in art school.) “Okay,” she had replied. “But I won’t sleep with you!” Now he had a wife, momentum, and people believed in him; on the shuttle he had momentum too. He knew the quickest ways in and out of stops, between uptown and downtown, where to skate between avenues. Yet every so often his confidence slipped away, and it was hard to watch. Late one Thursday morning our first stop was St. John’s Cathedral on Amsterdam, to pick up a crate. The cathedral is perpetually under construction. We arrived after the usual push through the Lincoln Tunnel and flowed up to 112th Street. The bill of lading was vague about where in the complex the crate would be, so I parked the truck and Bing got out to ask directions. A group of masons in front of us were chipping away on soon-to-be gargoyles. Bing walked over and talked to one of them. The guy looked up, pointed to his left, and went back to work. Bing slipped into the passenger seat fuming. “They don’t know who I am!” he declared.

    “Well, they don’t know who I am, either.”

    His eyes flashed. “I’m the one, the one great stone carver.”

    I waited for him to settle down and asked where we needed to go.

    One of his side gigs in New York was to find a mistress. Since he spent so much time in the city it seemed only fair to have a woman in Manhattan and one in DC. He never followed through but liked the idea of sex on demand. He was charming to gallery and museum registrars, and they soaked up his self-confidence, smiling and flirting back. Once a particularly lovely woman was leaning over to sign our paperwork at a design museum. “She could be the one,” Bing confided to me. “The one.”

    The one what? I wondered. He had a lot of ones in his vocabulary. Then I remembered. Oh—that one. 

    He won clients easily with his talk about the art of art handling, great artists he had studied with like Anne Truitt, his own unbounded future. But a competitive streak showed if an artist made him jealous. One evening our last stop was a pickup on Crosby in Soho. The artist was an Israeli who lived with his wife and son in a little apartment on the third floor. We took the elevator up and ran the bell. The artist opened the door and smiled. His wife and a little boy also smiled—they were finishing dinner. “Oh, it’s you guys—Artransport, right?” We introduced ourselves. He had an upcoming show in California. He had a slight accent, but it was obvious he had been in New York for many years. “Let’s see—all my stuff is downstairs. Let’s go down, okay?” We followed him into the freight elevator. His studio was in the basement and was much bigger than the apartment. He had a combination of two and three-dimensional work, all well packed in bubble. From what I could tell peering through the plastic the work was quite interesting. There was a lot of it. Bing put his hands on his hips and looked very serious. He was making a show of figuring out how all the work would fit in the truck. But I could tell from the tight expression on his face he was upset. The artist wasn’t much older than Bing was. He lived in Manhattan and had a studio in Manhattan. He was a sculptor! And he had a one man show in LA coming up. Bing, on the other hand, drove a truck. He eyed the work carefully.

    “So what’s next, guys?” asked the artist.

    “We’re going back to the truck so you can get dollies and com bins to load everything. Then you’ll bring it to me and I’ll pack the truck,” said Bing.

    “Me and Darick are going to bring everything toyou?” asked the artist.

    Bing looked back at him from over his shoulder. “Uh-huh.”

    The artist rubbed his mustache. “Ooookay.” 

    The freight elevator opened directly to Crosby. The artist, with a bemused expression, followed us to the Mercedes. Bing let down the lift gate and opened the back of the truck. He and I up rode up on the gate and gathered a couple of dollies, some blankets, and commercial bins (these are boxes four feet long). I rode with the materials down to the street. Bing looked at us from his position above. “Bring me the 2-D work first,” he said.

    “Ooookay.”

    The artist and I rolled the com bins on the dollies back to the freight elevator. “This isn’t quite what I expected,” he confided in me. “That guy’s a personality, huh?”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “He’s an artist?”

    “Yup.”

    “I got it.”

    We brought the com bins and dollies down to the studio and loaded as much of the two-dimensional work as we could. Every so often the artist shook his head. He had been expecting us to be working for him. We brought the load up to Bing and returned to get more flat works. After the second group of paintings was delivered, the artist leaned on one of the bins and looked up. “How’s it going in there?” he asked.

    “Everything will fit,” Bing declared. “Bring the sculptures now.”

    “Oookay.”

    We went back to the studio and loaded about half the sculptures. We brought them to the truck, returned to the freight and waited for it to arrive. We looked toward the truck. Bing was standing at the back of the Mercedes with his arms crossed, watching the sunset over Crosby as if he commanded the sky. 

    “Tell me, Darick,” mused the artist. “What do you think Bing will have me do next—scratch his balls?”

II

    After a few months on the job I developed a dread of two particular words. They weren’t curses or obscenities that everyone used liberally anyway. Even “You’re fired,” the ultimate weapon of the Queen, was a threat so omnipresent I decided not to worry about it. The words that put me on edge threw a wrench into any plans, attempts to get ahead of schedule, grab a day of freedom, or make a date with a pretty girl. The words were “add-on.”

    Add-ons could suck the hope out of life. One Friday that Fall—it was a beautiful afternoon—Arthur and I had finished our last stop on the New England shuttle a couple of hours early. We were in Troy, New York and had just picked up an engine from the technology institute bound for the Museum of American History. The engine was bolted to a very flimsy pedestal, and we padded the hell out of it as we strapped it in the truck. We strapped the hell out of the engine as well, just in case. I didn’t trust that pedestal. At least we had smooth highways ahead us back to the warehouse. The truck was only half full. It was 2:30. We’d be at the warehouse by 9:00, unload, do the paperwork, and out by midnight. Then—the weekend!

    “Boom-Boom-Boom!” said Arthur.

    I called the office and spoke to DE. “We’re done!” 

    “Oh, really?” 

    That didn’t sound good. “I’ve got a couple of add-ons for you guys,” he announced.

    “Where?”

    “New York.”

    “New York City?”

    “Uh-huh. Sotheby’s.”

    “We can’t get there by five.”

    “Yeah, well the dock is open Saturday morning, you know.” 

    “Huh?” I didn’t know that. “What about the New York shuttle? It’s there now.”

    “Roberto told me they just can’t fit the stuff, and you know I trust Roberto, he’s been doing this a long time. He has experience. You’ll do this for me, right? It’s going out on the Florida this Sunday. And the other stop is Mary Miss Tribeca.”

    “Who’s that?”

    “An artist. She just has some sculptures. She’ll meet you at her studio and you can check them out.”

    “Do they need to be wrapped?”

    He deflected the question. “Well, Darick, she really needs to get this done.” He gave me the job number for each pickup as well as Mary Miss’s address, then pretended he was really busy. 

    “Was his nose up the Queen’s ass?” muttered Arthur. “Goddam Roberto. He could’ve done it. I know it.” He called Helene to let her know he wouldn’t be home for another day; then called her again once we got a room in White Plains. She wasn’t happy. I cancelled out on dinner with some friends on Saturday.

    “I wonder sometimes if I have a life,” I complained to Arthur.

    “You don’t.”

    We pulled up to 72nd Street Saturday morning and I gave a hand-written BOL to the dock master at Sotheby’s with a sale and lot number. That’s all I had. “Well, gentlemen,” he said with a smile. “We’ll bring it out to you. But you can’t pack on the dock this morning. Look at the line behind you—too many customers.”

    “Pack what?” asked Arthur.

    The union guys brought out an A-frame full of two-dimensional works—prints, mostly. We took them off, placed them on blankets, and began doing condition reports. Then they brought another A-frame, then another. Then another.

    “Sorry—you can’t pack here, guys,” said the dock master. “Gotta go.”

    “What’ve we got here—forty, fifty prints? We’ve got to pack at the warehouse, goddamn it. All night. Goddam Roberto, that pseudo-architect. He could have done it, you know. That lazy ass. His wife is hot, though,” he admitted, as we strapped the prints in the stack. “Nice tits.” Arthur tried to be fair even when he was angry. Since we didn’t have time to do condition reports, we wrote “Normal Wear” on the Bill of Lading beside the list of artworks. That covered almost anything.

    After Sotheby’s we took 2nd Avenue down to Houston, then Broadway, and south below Canal. The streets were full of potholes—Bump, Bump, Bump! Arthur was driving. We pulled up to the address we’d been given for Mary Miss’s studio. I looked up at it through the windshield and got out the BOL. “I’ll go talk to her,” I said.

    “Who knows what the fuck we’re in for,’ replied Arthur. “Her work is big. I’ll check the back.”

    I found a freight elevator next to the lobby and rode up a few floors. The doors opened to a cavernous, dimly-it space. It was Saturday, nobody was working. I stepped out into a row of huge, pristine columns supporting air. They looked like they had been pulled from some forgotten building and were holding its memories. 

    “Hello, there. Artransport?” said a striking woman about twenty feet away. She was wearing a long skirt and had long brown hair that shimmered under the far lamps. She was all elegance.

    “Yes. You’re Mary Miss?”

    “Uh-huh. So what do you think?” She motioned toward the columns. 

    I didn’t have to think at all. Some jobs are barely possible, some nearly impossible but doable with imagination; some are part of another reality completely. “These columns are what we’re supposed to pick up?” 

    “That’s right.”

    “They won’t fit. I’m sorry—we’re driving a straight truck. And there’s just two of us.”

    “A straight truck?”

    “A little box truck,” I explained. “You need a tractor-trailer—one, at least. And at least six to eight guys to load these.”

    Mary Miss looked around. “That doesn’t surprise me. But your guy DE was very confident when we spoke about it yesterday.”

    “Maybe he didn’t know how big they were.”

    “Oh, I gave him all the dimensions.” She smiled. 

    I didn’t know what to say. I wondered, as I had many times before, whether DE thought about anything before he made a decision. 

    “I guess it isn’t going to work out,” said Mary Miss. “A tractor, then.”

    She wished me a good afternoon and I rode the freight elevator back down. The back of the truck was open, and Arthur was sitting there tossing chips of wood into the street. “What’s up?” he asked.

    “It’s impossible. She needs a tractor-trailer. She made a line of columns. They’re huge.”

    Arthur shrugged. He threw another piece of wood off the truck. Behind him I saw the engine barely suspended by a web of straps. The pedestal under it had collapsed completely. It must have been the potholes. Together we picked up the engine, made a box for it, and pushed the remains of the pedestal toward the back. Then we both sat at the open-door tossing chips into oblivion. We had a long drive back and hours of packing ahead of us, and now we had to write an incident report. “Mary Miss is really pretty,” I said after a while.

    “Oh, yeah? Huh. Well I’m going to call the orifice.”

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Chapter Eleven

Published January 23, 2026

Art education on the trucks.

I

    For a person with such a modest demeanor, Anne Truitt had a very long wake. After she published her journal Daybook, her ex-students carried it around like a Bible. Months before I met her, I heard about Anne Truitt this and Anne Truitt that, in such glowing terms—well, it was hard to believe. Drivers like Mike and Bing talked about her a lot. Even Bob Lennon, in his ironic way, spoke of her with reverence. “We can’t disappoint Anne Truitt, not Mrs. Truitt, oh no.” He actually meant it. Bob Lennon had exacting standards related to people that he liked. It also happened that the gallery where she showed in DC was owned by his partner Ramón Osuna. But bowing and scraping to her had little to do with money. Instead she had a reputation. Her integrity was so strong she awed the rascals in the business into a higher form of hypocrisy.

    Every new employee at Artransport was warned before being sent her way that Anne’s columnar sculptures were heavy, and as fragile—with their many layers of paint—as eggshells. A conscientious person understood that every moment around them was weighted with effect. Each sculpture had a presence that was still and vibrant, with vertical and horizontal colors that seemed to live in space. I remember walking around one for the first time, wondering about the person who had made it.

    The alley to her studio off Ordway Street was overgrown with bushes owned by an exiled royal of Albania—her neighbor. The journey through them was a terrifying Thump-Thump-Thump! as branches slapped the side mirrors of the truck with their life force. After that pummeling the alley took a breath. We swung the truck around and backed up to an elegant little building in her back yard. My first glimpse of Anne was through the left mirror as she opened the door to the studio and let us in.

    Once I introduced myself, she smiled, shook my hand, and studied me with her blue-gray eyes. That was unusual. In the service industry very little attention is paid to the people doing the work. They are greeted politely, set to a task, and dismissed when it is done. That’s about it. She offered us coffee and walked across the yard to her kitchen. After she returned carrying a tray with our refreshments she watched as we wrapped her sculptures for the next couple of hours. No detail seemed to escape her, and she kept an eye on every movement we made. Time didn’t seem to escape her either. By that I mean that in her studio every movement was measured as carefully as the sugar in our coffee. Once we had packed the truck with her sculptures and the door to her studio closed behind us, the spaciousness of the moment seemed to pop. We were on a schedule again.

II

    I received my art education on the trucks. In college I’d glanced through pretentious art magazines in the library. And I had friends who talked about painting and sculpture classes they were taking and their strong opinions of artists, current and dead. But that was about it. I didn’t think about art much until it was in my face. You experience paintings and sculptures differently when you handle them. So I learned by how they affected me. Anne Truitt caught my attention right away. So did Willem DeKooning. It just happened.

    DeKooning’s work seemed to move all the time in New York: and he was famous, so each pick-up was a production. There were layers of security and paperwork, and a lot of eyes were on us when we loaded the truck. Most DeKoonings were crated. But when a canvas was unpacked, displayed under a lamp for its condition report, I got a glimpse of its brushstrokes and color before sealing them up. Their energy was like a Zing! So I wanted to see them again. A couple of times when the schedule wasn’t tight, I unwrapped a smaller painting in the truck, in between stops, and observed it in natural light. For a few minutes it spoke under the beauty of the early to mid-afternoon sun. Then I wrapped it again into a pristine package, knowing I’d never get another glimpse.

---

    Julian Schnabel’s plate paintings were all the rage then. They were a pain in the ass to move. Mike and I brought a few of them to the Midwest. They were heavy and packed in open slat crates so you could see what you were handling. Their images had art history references that impressed a lot of critics. They were famous for the shards of pottery Schnabel glued onto his canvases with Bondo and painted over. It gave the references texture, a new look. It was innovative! But there were stories at Artransport about the plates falling off. Those Mercedes trucks shook a lot, Bondo or no Bondo. So Mike and I stuffed the crates with tissue to dampen vibration against the plates each time we loaded them and removed the tissue before making a delivery. It worked. I never saw porcelain dust or fragments at the bottom of a crate when we wheeled it into a mansion.

    Jeff Koons was also rising then, with his pastiches of this and that, from Rabbit to Bubbles: a leer at pop culture from all kinds of angles. I suppose collectors like to feel intelligent when they spend their money, and galleries appeal to intellectual vanity very well. And Mark Kostabi was hustling his work all over the place. He did lonely robot paintings and paintings of robot-like people, and the crap really sold. Kostabi appealed to the upper middle-class more than the truly rich—he was at that price point. But his collectors were just as excited to receive their works as anybody else. So I kept a straight face when we rang a doorbell in the suburbs of Detroit, and a happy woman opened the door.

    “Oh—Artransport! You brought my Kostabi!”

    “Yes, ma’am. Where would you like it?”

    Withholding judgment—in front of the customer, anyway—was a form of professional restraint. It isn't nice to call people idiots if they’ve just wasted a lot of money. But on the trucks opinions were all over the place. Some of the guys liked Koons or Schnabel, some didn’t. The ones that did like them usually had master’s degrees. That allowed them to argue with a more sophisticated degree of bullshit. Everything was context, context, context. But the experience of seeing an expression with new eyes seemed to be lost sometimes. I often wondered if many collectors simply bought a stake in the ferment of creativity. The expression they acquired may have been true—or not. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

---

    I got my first glimpse of a Joan Mitchell painting at the loading dock at Sotheby’s. It was a piece going to the Midwest, and as I waited by the back of the truck I glanced at the bill of lading and wondered if the artist was also the singer. I’d never heard of Joan Mitchell. Eventually the piece was wheeled out on an A-frame by a couple of the union guys. The plastic stretched over its face flashed under the lamp as they pivoted around more closely.

    Plastic? That was odd. Usually Sotheby’s brought out everything unwrapped.

    “This is already wrapped,” I said stupidly.

    “Uh, yeah. It was already wrapped.” The guys looked at each other.

    I knelt and studied the work more closely. Its color was amazing, mostly orange in extraordinary swirls. I was impressed. It was incredibly beautiful. But something was wrong. The plastic was stretched too tightly over the face and pushed down on the paint. Picture a thief with a stocking pulled over his head. “The canvas is still wet,” I observed. I peered up at the two handlers. “You guys know this is damaged, right?”

    They leaned over and brought their eyes closer to the surface. “Oh, shit.” One of them rushed off to get a manager. A few minutes later a suit followed him back. He looked flustered.

    “Why didn’t you guys unwrap this back in storage?” he demanded.

    The Sotheby’s handlers shrugged.

    “Shit. You can’t just take this, huh?” he asked me.

    “No. Look at it. The paint isn’t dry. The plastic is flattening it. I have to note this in the condition report.”

    “Yeah, I know.” He glared at the union guys. “Take the plastic off so Artransport can do the condition report.”

    Immediately they took the plastic off. A couple pounds of the artist’s original intent peeled off as patches of orange paint. The funny thing was that the painting still looked great. That was why the manager had wanted his guys to unwrap the painting in the storeroom. Would I have noticed the damage without the plastic? Possibly not. I wrote the condition report, noted the loss, and the manager signed the release. He stalked off glaring at his subordinates.

    My partner and I built a cardboard collar around the frame of the Mitchell so the plastic wouldn’t touch the surface after it was sealed. On the next Midwest shuttle Mike and I delivered the painting to a collector. He said nothing about the damage or the drama at the auction house. A couple of years later we picked it up again and brought it to a museum. The painting was as beautiful as ever and I couldn’t tell if it had ever been repaired.

---

    The second Joan Mitchell I handled went to Chicago. It was part of her Grand Valleé series and had been bought by Gene Siskel, the film critic. We were given specific instructions on how to behave when we delivered it.

    “He does not like to talk about movies,” DE instructed us the Friday before. “People talk to him about movies all the time, and he’s sick of it. So don’t even mention movies, okay?”

    Mike shrugged.

  “That means you, Darick,” insisted DE.

    “Yeah, okay.” I was writing movie reviews for a local music paper at the time, so it was a bummer I couldn’t show Siskel my work. We arrived at his building the following Wednesday, halfway through the shuttle. It was dinnertime after a long day, and there was ice everywhere. I parked on the street behind the loading dock. We took the painting out of the back, carried it inside, and rode the elevator up. We didn’t know what to expect. On TV Siskel seemed to have a sharp personality, but when he opened the door to his apartment, he had a kind face and ushered us in.

    “How are you doing, guys?” he asked.

    “We’re fine, thanks.”

    “I really love this painting,” he said. “What do you guys think of Joan Mitchell?” 

    “I really like her,” I said.

    “She’s a good painter. Solid. A very good painter,” said Mike.

    “Isn’t that so? Can you guys unwrap it?” 

    “Sure—of course.”

    The living room had a high ceiling and a view of the skyline, glowing with possibilities. There were contemporary works up and down the walls, and a mural of Greek figures in the dining room. We took the cardboard and Kempac off the painting, then the plastic. 

    “Oh wow.” Siskel walked around it. The painting was spectacular. “Isn’t that something?”

    Siskel’s wife walked in from the kitchen. She was pretty and wore a black dress. She crossed her arms lightly. “The screening’s at seven,” she reminded him. “They’re waiting for you.”

    “Oh, yeah, right.” He thought a moment. “Listen: could you call them back and tell them I’ll be a few minutes late?”

    “Sure.”

    “Do you mind installing this?” he asked us. “Above the piano?”

    “No problem. Of course.”

    After we were done the phone rang. “They’re getting impatient,” said his wife.

    “Oh, uh, can you tell them I’ll be along in a while?”

    She shrugged. “Okay.” They both studied the painting.

    “Hey—would you guys like a cup of coffee?” asked Siskel.

    “Sure!”

    He came back a few minutes later with a tray of cups and cream, set it in front of the couch and brought out some art catalogs. He sat next to Mike, showing him work he found interesting and had considered buying. He didn’t seem concerned about the screening. Every so often he looked up at the Joan Mitchell above the piano and smiled. But once we set our empty cups in the saucers, he accepted the inevitable, escorted us to the front door and sent us off with forty bucks.

---

    We placed the material that had covered the painting as well as our tools in the back of the truck. Then we slid into the cab’s hard seat. I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. I tried again. The battery was dead. I stared through the windshield and thought about the lyrics of a Blues song we had heard recently on the radio:
It’s snowing in Chicago and my truck won’t start!

    It was snowing in Chicago. It was really cold. There was a yellow Honda Accord parked in front of us being covered by a blanket of white. I thought: “That car starts when you turn the key.” But not the Mercedes. Goddam truck. It was a depressing way to end the day. It had been so pleasant in the Siskels’ apartment and now this. We stared out the windshield as snow piled up. “I guess we better find a phone booth,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Mike.

    Neither of us made a move. It was cold outside, and we were rubbing our hands. Suddenly someone tapped on my door. It was Gene Siskel.

    I rolled down the window. “Hey, Mr. Siskel.”

    “Hey there.” He looked over at Mike and nodded to each of us. “Listen, uh, I was thinking. I really don’t think I gave you guys enough. I’m glad you’re still here.” He handed me two more twenties.

    It’s funny how memory works. I’m sure we found a pay phone later, called for a jump, and eventually had dinner at the Mexican place on Fullerton, next to a funeral parlor, we always went to before heading north. It was open till midnight. But the last thing that stays in my mind from that evening is the sight of Siskel hunched over from the cold as he walked back to his building. I wonder what film was being screened for him that night and what he wrote about it afterwards.

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Chapter Twelve

Published January 30, 2026

Collectors (and their bathrooms).

I

    You can’t separate collectors from artwork anymore than you can separate readers from books. The best collectors lived in the work they bought, shared some of the consciousness of the artists, gave empathy to expression. As for the less sensitive collectors—at least they had money. Since Artransport rode the tide of demand, our schedule was punctuated by visits to the very rich. Monday evenings, several times a year, our last stop was at Eugene Stevens in Pepper Pike. We might deliver a Sandro Chia or Richter to him: often he had a drink in hand as he savored his new purchase. Tuesdays we saw Florence Barron in Bloomfield Hills; Wednesdays could be Stefan Edlis in the Hancock Building in Chicago. Thursdays were—nobody in particular, just the usual galleries and museums and privates in Milwaukee and north of Chicago. Fridays were the Wexners in Columbus. Let me be more precise: we dealt with the Wexner’s security. We handed off a painting at their estate and someone signed for it.

    Of course the rich are different than the rest of us. Some of them simply live on a bigger scale with more expensive toys, and angle for prestige. Some collectors breathe a different kind of air. I mean that exactly as it sounds. When we made deliveries to Florence Barron, she opened the door to her apartment and there was an immediate change in the atmosphere. 

    “Mike and Darick: come in."

    The air was suddenly still and fresh. That’s how it felt. The climate was tuned exquisitely. More to the point, Florence Barron was tuned to an easy poise. She was in her mid-eighties and had to conserve her energy. She moved with simple gestures, wasting nothing as she led us in. Her hair was in a tight bun above her head. Her thoughts seemed to have collected strands of gray and white to the highest point of consciousness.

    “There: can I see it?”

    We unwrapped the latest work. She collected Cy Twombly, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, whatever appealed to her directly. She had coffee made for us, then settled on big pillows on her bed to talk a while. She remembered convincing Warhol to do his first self-portrait and marveled at Twombly’s delicate touch. She asked Mike about his painting, and that of his friends. Occasionally she worried that she didn’t have much time in her life left, giving herself another four to five years (she actually had fourteen). Finally she dropped a suggestion: “I would like to see your work, Mike.”

---

    Stefan Edlis owned Apollo Plastics in Chicago, and was a clear-headed, successful businessman. He left work to meet us at his apartment in the Hancock building. The reception of artwork is not something he delegated. Delivering and picking up from the Hancock was a convoluted process and the effort illustrated a few truths about the class system: which, in this case, was extremely vertical.

    First you had to get a spot in the loading dock. The light is artificial there because you are deep underground. Fluorescents feel claustrophobic. Buildings like the Hancock are well-run, but you have to be approved to get inside with a truck and wait your turn for a coveted space. Then—quickly—you back in, remove the precious artwork as well as any tools we’d need to unpack and install it: knives, hammers, a drill, and a ladder. On this particular day we were bringing a painting by R. B. Kitaj. We carried everything to the freight elevators. Other tradesmen were milling around waiting for a ride. Everyone stared up watching floor numbers light up, pause, then either go up or down. Finally a car fell quickly—Blink, Blink, Blink! The doors opened and everyone squeezed in.

    An electrician riding with us glanced down at the painting. “Aaab-stract,” he observed disdainfully.

    “Actually it’s figurative,” I corrected him.

    He turned away. “Looks abstract to me.”

    Halfway up the building narrowed and we had to switch to another bank of elevators. The tradesmen who still had assignments above got out, shuffled down the hall, looked up and waited for another ride. Then we squeezed in again with our tools and the precious art. No one made any other comments about the painting. As the air got thinner, we arrived at our floor.

    The light changed. The hallway had more subtle, warmer bulbs in the ceiling than in the basement. When Edlis opened the door sunlight touched our eyes again. There is something beautiful and refreshing about natural light. You want to bathe in it. Edlis’ apartment had extraordinary views of other skyscrapers and the lake, and clouds that had settled below us over the city. In science fiction stories the elite live in the sky and avoid looking at the plebes below. But the elite live in the sky now. 

    Edlis had been waiting calmly in his apartment: the delivery was on time. He showed us to the living room and watched as we took the remaining plastic and bubble off the Kitaj. Satisfied with what he saw, he told us where the painting would go. He was cool and polite, with clear eyes and gray hair. I could imagine him running a large organization with no effort at all. He commanded respect naturally and was likable without trying to be likable. Anyhow his toil was below in the factory, where we met him occasionally as well. In the clouds he collected artwork.

    There is something else I remember about him. He wore white shirts without a tie. With the rich there is cotton; and then there is cotton. Edlis’s shirts had a sheen and texture I’d never seen before. He wore the raiment of a cloud and inhabited it comfortably. Once we were done and descended to the loading dock, switching to a different car halfway down and hauling our tools and trash everywhere, the world was grosser and heavier in the semi-darkness.

---

    There was an island of millionaires in Hyde Park. It was a tall building near the University of Chicago with a view of lake Michigan. It had the feel of old money. The money had survived all the struggles in the neighborhoods of the South Side and many other storms. Most of the furniture I saw inside were antiques. Every floor had hidden gems. One apartment had a collection of Leon Golub paintings. We were returning a huge unstretched canvas from Golub’s ‘Gladiator’ series shown at the Corcoran (it was called that at the time, but I can find no reference to the title today). They were paintings in a Roman/Etruscan style showing political violence through the ages. The client had his Golubs displayed in the dining room. Their cat also claimed the Golubs—at least the lowest sections. For the ceiling was too low to display the canvas properly. We hung the piece from grommets as high up as possible, but the last foot or so of the painting curled up on the floor. A spoiled Persian, who was sleeping on a gladiator on the opposite side of the table, woke up as we finished, meandered to the new stretch of canvas and settled as we got our paperwork signed.

    One of their neighbors on an upper floor had a Picasso over an end table. I had never seen it before. It was from 1937 and had a fractured view of a woman’s face and her elongated neck. I’ve never seen a more beautiful neck. I glimpsed it, never saw it again, and never forgot it. But when you think about what money can buy, it can make images like that an everyday thing, beauty to be savored or ignored in the course of a day.

II

    In New York City the dance to get art in and out of apartment buildings could be truly insane. In the ritzy ones, everything, no matter how big or small, must go up in a freight elevator—to protect innocent wealthy people from noticing the labor supporting their lifestyle. The problem is that it can be very hard to get to a freight elevator. Often you have to carry things down a maze of cast iron steps at the street level—where the truck is parked—to get to the hallowed entrance underground. The logistics of making deliveries to buildings are inefficient by design. God forbid entering through the lobby. No, no, no—that way is blocked by the valet! And if an artwork happens to be in a crate: try not to trip on the way down. Go carefully, step by step, and don’t lose control of the box. Gravity is a tough master. 

    Once you’re down in the basement things get really interesting if the crate is too big for the elevator. The work still has to go up. If the artwork or the travel frame inside the crate—a kind of box within a box—still doesn’t fit once it is removed, then it must ride on top of the elevator. And someone must ride along through the elevator shaft to protect the artwork and keep it steady. It is a dangerous and thrilling experience. You zoom through the innards of the building, mostly filthy, with pipes and conduits all around, and if you fall off, you’re dead. And once you arrive at the collector’s floor you need to make everything pristine before the presenting the artwork. Any dust from the experience is wiped away, you put on white gloves and the appearance of effort disappears. The brilliance of the creation being delivered is all that matters. If there happened to be grease on your pants from the ride up, most clients were too polite to say anything.

---

    Some clients allowed us to use their bathrooms, and some did not. It was an interesting tell. If we needed to wash our hands before unwrapping and installing a painting that was one thing. But if you really had to go, it could get awkward. Most clients were decent people and didn’t bat an eye if one of us asked permission to use the toilet—though some hesitated. Those that had servants also had service bathrooms, so no big deal. One client went through a lot of trouble to hide the function of his bathroom. It looked like a South Pacific party room with baskets, orchids, and bamboo everywhere—Happy! Happy! The toilet was under the biggest basket. The toilet paper was harder to find; I had to pull up baskets right and left to find it. After I washed my hands and replaced the baskets and covers it looked like a party room again.

    One collector was a great believer in the separation of classes. That included the separation of their bodily fluids. She had her toilets sealed with saran wrap before we showed up to keep them pristine. She was pleasant in an arch sort of way if we were installing or packing her wonderful collection of American art and she got to talk about it. When nature called, however, she told us to seek the butler. He was in the next room smirking away.

    “The bathroom?” I whispered.

    “For that, young man, you have to go to the loading dock.”

    “What?”

    “Twenty floors down. Don’t worry, that’s where I have to go too. Do you think she lets me take a piss in this place? No way.” He escorted me to the front door muttering about what a bitch she was and what she looked like in her underwear.

    With bathroom etiquette it was best not to take slights personally. But pride is pride. I did a delivery to Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate, once with Bing. Nelson and Happy had lived there. It was a remarkable place. The housekeepers had worked there most of their lives, the atmosphere was relaxed, and everything was well taken care of. The washing machines had wringers on them. They were decades old and had never been replaced, only repaired. After we had unwrapped a painting, Bing asked a woman in a white uniform where the bathroom was. “The service toilet is downstairs,” she explained.

    It was in the garage. I had the bill of lading signed, and Bing returned a few minutes later fuming. “They treat me like a servant!” he complained as we walked back to the truck.

    But we were servants.

III

    Toward the end of my first year at Artransport Mike and I did a California shuttle. Jesse, who had the gig, needed time off, so we took his place. It was a wonderful way to see the country. We loaded the truck and left the crab trap behind in the bin. I was surprised it was still there. We drove eighteen hours to St. Louis, went on to Kansas City, then Denver, looped up through the desert in Nevada to Reno, crossed over a high pass to California. Then Sacramento, San Francisco, and LA, and down to San Diego, where waves whispered over five-inch stones on the beach. If you feel cynical about the world or despondent about your career, go outside for a while. There was no GPS then and no cell phones. We figured out ways to get ahead of schedule, never told the office, then parked the truck at a hotel and climbed mountains for a couple of days. On to the Southwest and more mountains. In White Sands we were on the edge of military exercises, with missiles booming over the next range. Our last stop was in New Orleans, where we had peanut butter pie.

    The Queen still hated me but accepted that I was going to stick around. I was even made the lead on some New York shuttles, working with new guys who didn’t last very long. By then I knew how to zip around the city. One afternoon on the second day we were doing pickups on the way to Soho and the art handlers in the galleries were snottier than usual. They all seemed to be wearing black t-shirts. Maybe it was black shirt day. At one of the last stops the handler looked at me with contempt as he handed me a small, packed frame. “You have to be especially careful with this,” he blurted out. “It’s a DeKooning!”

    “A DeKooning? Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

    I took it to the back of the truck, opened it, and spent a few minutes studying its color and brushstrokes. Then I wrapped it up again. It was the last time I had a private audience with a DeKooning under natural light.

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Chapter Thirteen

Published February 6, 2026

Change the condition report.

I

    On the First Fridays of every month there were openings in galleries, studios, even restaurants that exhibited art. It was exhilarating. After locals—sometimes an early New York shuttle—I’d arrive to see what new work my colleagues were showing. Bobby Donovan and Steve Cushner seemed to be showing all the time. If our schedule was tight, we’d swing by in the truck, pop in for a few minutes, then go to the warehouse and unload. The newest ideas and images were in the air, everything seemed possible, and pretty women always showed up. These openings seemed to be real life, or a height of it; and the trucking work behind it, for very little pay, was on a different plane entirely. But life on the trucks was exhilarating for different reasons: and coming off a day of hard, satisfying effort to an evening of play was a jump from one peak to another. 

    After work Bobby loved going to his favorite hangout. If we had unloaded and it was only 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock, he’d say, “Hey, you want to go to the Space?”

    DC Space was on the southeast corner of 7th Street NW and E. It was a bar, pool hall, art exhibit space—and in the upper floors, rooms were rented out as studios. Partying was on the first level, and work occurred further up. Bobby had a studio there for a while and was very productive, but the party downstairs had a way of bubbling up and sometimes the fun didn’t stop. One evening after a New York Bobby and I were drinking at the bar. He was very popular and knew everybody. Hardly a minute passed before someone walked over and called out, “Hey, Bobby!”

    “Hey, man—how’s the paintin’ coming?”

    I was watching a pretty brunette playing pool. She had a great figure and a very precise shot. Whenever her turn came, she studied the table, bent over with the cue and never missed. Damn.

    Bobby glanced over at me. “Yeah, that’s Walter’s wife,” he explained.

    “You mean Walter the new guy?”

    “Yeah, my friend Walter.”

    I wasn’t sure how long Walter was going to last. He wasn’t really into the job. He was into being an artist without being much of an artist. A few minutes went by. The brunette looked up after making a shot and recognized Bobby. She walked over.

    “Hey, Bobby.”

    “Hey—this is my friend Darick—a writer.”

    “Okay.” She smiled.

    I stood up and offered her my hand.

    She was amused and brought my hand to her lips. She kissed my fingers, then began sucking them. She really knew how to use her tongue. After a while she let go and went back to the pool table.

    “She likes you well enough,” said Bobby.

    “I thought you said she was married.”

    “Oh, those two: they’re like Scott and Zelda, always getting into trouble.”

II

    Whether she was good trouble or bad trouble, I never saw Walter’s wife again. I didn’t see much of Walter either. The problem with Walter is that he lasted just long enough to be scheduled with one of Bob Lennon’s friends on a shuttle and it got weird. Being one of ‘Bob’s friends’ was not the same thing as being a friend of Bob Lennon. Anne Truitt was a friend of Bob Lennon and she was a wonderful and remarkable person. Bill Willis was also a friend—at least an acquaintance—whom Bob made a job for during a rough patch in Bill’s career. Bob was a generous person who helped a lot of people out, especially in the art world. He also collected young men, gave them a place to stay and promised them work. In a company with a human resources department the coming and going of so much riffraff would not have been tolerated. Artransport did not have a human resources department.

    Walter was scheduled with a ‘Bob’s friend’ on the Florida shuttle. The guy was mild-mannered enough. He had no experience, so Walter had to do the driving and almost everything else as the guy talked about his art world ambitions all day. That was annoying. But every night after they checked into a motel the BF applied talcum around his balls in a cloud of dust, dressed in black leather and went out. He returned plastered at three or four in the morning. After a few days of this Walter had had enough. He snuck out early, leaving the guy snoring in full regalia, and did the rest of the shuttle alone. The glamour of the job had worn off: he found something else to do.

    Every so often it was my turn to deal with one of the favorites. I came in early one day, didn’t recognize the name on the clipboard, and showed it to John Douglas.

    “Who’s this?”

    “Sodomite.”

    “Oh.”

    It didn’t take long for this particular ‘friend’, like most of them, to realize free rent comes at a price. He was very well dressed. No one had told him how much physical work the job required and that you get dirty quickly. Not to mention that we had to fill the truck with diesel and check the oil every day. By the afternoon he was pretty scuffed up. He had been doing his best to keep pace and looked demoralized.

    “So how do you like DC?” I asked him as we were driving back to the warehouse.

    “DC? It’s okay.”

    “Where are you staying?”

    “With Bob and Ramón.” (I knew that already.) He looked out the window at the cars in the other lane. “It’s pretty strange there.”

    “How’s that?”

    He turned to me. “I think there’s a peephole in my bedroom. I think they spy on me when I get undressed.”

    “Really?”

    “I think so,” he mused darkly.

    The next Bob friend was a Swede. He came from a more egalitarian country and was shocked by the disparities in the States. “There is no excuse for it here, when you have so much money,” he explained. 

    “Where do you live in DC?”

    “With Bob and Ramón.”

    I was silent.

    “It is not exactly my scene, you understand. I have a girlfriend.” He actually did have a girlfriend and moved out the next week.

III

    The next time a mystery name appeared on my clipboard I was a doing a delivery to the Atheneum in Alexandria of a traveling show of prints. Roberto had picked them up on the Virginia shuttle the day before. It must have been a long trip because he left a mess in the van. I was putting the paperwork together when John Douglas walked up fuming. “Lap and I are riding with you. Let’s get going. We have too much goddam work in the crate shop.”

    “What happened?”

    “Bob’s catamite called in.” It was the guy’s first day. There wasn’t a second day. John muttered about perverts messing up his schedule. Lap and I lay down blankets along the walls in the back of the van, then loaded the prints and a few old vitrines. We stayed out of John’s way. The week before he had fired the artist Tom Morris for taking a couple of pieces of newsprint to draw on from the crate shop supply. Bob re-hired him and John was pissed about that. Now he was pissed about Bob’s friend. John had the power to fire drivers, at least temporarily, and he wasn’t looking at me kindly. “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded.

    “I’m going to strap these in—the prints. And the vitrines.”

    “No fucking way. It’s only a couple miles down the road.”

    “What if they fall over?”

    “They won’t. I’m in a hurry. Just drive.”

    “John—really.”

    “I’m telling you! Let’s get going.”

    Lap and I glanced at each other. We threw blankets over the prints and bunched a few of them between the vitrines to keep them in place as John shouted at us. We closed the back of the van and went up front. The cab only had two bucket seats. I took the driver’s seat and Lap sat on the floor to leave the other one for his boss. John came up on the passenger side. “Lap, what are you doing?”

    “I’m sitting here, sir. You take the seat.”

    “Lap.”

    “I’m fine here, sir. You take the seat.”

    “Now listen, Lap. I’m going to sit on the floor. You take the seat.”

    “No, sir. I’m okay here. You take the seat.”

    John Douglas loved Lap like a son and glared at him though his thick lenses. “Goddam it, Lap, you’re too polite. You take the seat.” 

    “No, no, sir. I’m fine. You sit there—okay?”

    In retrospect I wish I had snuck to the back of the van while they were arguing and tied everything up. But John was in the mood to fire somebody and it wasn’t Lap. “Goddam it!” He gave up and took the other bucket seat. I turned the key in the ignition. As I made the first turn past the Weenie-Beenie, the first vitrine fell.

    CRASH!!! I heard the tinkling of glass.

    Lap and I glanced at each other. John looked ahead placidly.

    It was only a few miles to the Atheneum. A few miles, but a lot of turns. Each time I made a right or left, something fell.

    Crash! Tinkle-Tinkle!

    John Douglas yawned and scratched his chin. Lap held tight to his knees.

    I pulled up to the Atheneum and opened the back door. The vitrines had tumbled on top of each other and prints were all over the floor.  

    “What the hell are we going to do?” I asked John.

    “Change the condition report.” He glanced over the mess and walked inside to contact the registrar. I studied the BOL. Ricardo had made a few notes in blue ink about minor scratches on the frames. That was it. I pulled out my pen. It was black.

    “Lap, do you have a blue pen?”

    “No.”

    “Shit.”

    I crawled around the cab. There were crumbs and peanuts on the floor, coffee stains, and under one of the bucket seats—a pen. It was blue! Lap and I straightened up the latrines and made the prints vertical. I quickly began making notes such as:

    Vitrine A has a spider-web configuration of cracks on the back pane. (It had crashed into the corner of another vitrine.)

    The print ‘Placid River’ has a crack running from the upper right corner of the glass to the lower left corner.

    I tried to make my handwriting look like Roberto’s. By the time I was done all the blank space on the BOL was covered by blue scrawl. Just then John Douglas walked out of the Atheneum followed by the registrar. She was one of the loveliest women I had ever seen. She had brilliant blond hair, a perfect figure, and glowing eyes. I was astonished. There are times you think: God really does have a plan. She was eager to see her new exhibit and John led her right to it. 

IV

    Women in the art world are gorgeous. It’s a simple fact of life. The combination of beauty and brains in every museum and gallery is intoxicating. But intoxicated or not you have to get through the day without a making a fool of yourself. I was doing a New York with Bobby one day when he gave me some advice about how to handle myself in front of clients.

    “Darick, these beautiful women you meet—they’re not going to sleep with you. Don’t even think about it. Are you famous? Do you have any money? No. So they’re not going to sleep with you. Don’t even pretend it’s a possibility. Don’t bother to flirt. And if they flirt, don’t take it seriously. They’re probably trying to get you to do extra work without giving you a tip. But if you act cool, pretend you don’t notice how pretty they are, then maybe you’ll get some.”

    Over the past year I had developed a mantra I repeated silently whenever I encountered a goddess and her had sign a BOL.

    Do not look at her breasts.

    Do not think about her skin or her hair.

    Do not think about touching her.

    Act professional.

    The point of this restraint was not to protect women from harassment, though that was a secondary objective. The point was to preserve my dignity. I was no match for these beauties and I knew it. Under no circumstances, however, did I want any woman I met to cry. That, unfortunately, is what happened when John Douglas led the registrar of the Alexandria Atheneum to the back of the van.

    “Oh, my Go-oddd! What happened?”

    “Nothing, ma’am.”

    “You mean they gave you the show—like this?”

    “Yes, ma’am. See the condition report.”

    I gave John the bill of lading. He handed it to the registrar without looking at it. She gripped it with both hands and read through the blue markings and coffee stains. “Oh, my God, I don’t believe it. This could be my job! I booked this exhibit. We open Friday! What can I do?”

    John Douglas was watching a couple of birds flirting above the Atheneum. “We can help you with that, ma’am,” he explained after he lowered his eyes. “I know some framers who can fix everything.”

“You do?”

    “Yes, ma’am.”

    “By Friday?”

    “Yes, ma’am. They can help you out.”

    “I would be so grateful to you!”

    “We’re Artransport, ma’am. That’s what we do.”

    “Oh, God, thank you. Can you come with me into the office and help me set this up?”

    “Yes, ma’am. I’ll be right along.”

    We all watched her beautiful figure as she walked back clutching the bill of lading.

    “Get this shit inside while I’m talking to her, okay?” muttered John. He stalked after the registrar. 

    “Why do you think he ordered us not strap the stuff in?” I asked Lap. “It’s kind of perverse.”

    “Mr. Douglas is mad at Mr. Lennon.” 

    “Yeah, I guess so.” Lap and I brought everything to the gallery very carefully and set it down. We didn’t want the cracked glass to come loose and cut our fingers. None of the prints were damaged, though. It was a miracle. When we were done the registrar came up and handed me the signed BOL. “Thank you guys so much,” she said. “I know this was hard to handle with the cracks and all. A disaster averted, right?”

    “You’re welcome,” I told the goddess. I couldn’t believe she didn’t call the venue down south to check out our story. But she believed in John Douglas. He was her hero now.

    When we got back to the warehouse Tom Morris was pulling up to the dock at Dart in another local van. He must have had an easy day because he had drawn some sketches on newsprint and was showing them off to his partner. John Douglass put his hands on his hips and glared at him.

V

    While I remember the excruciating moments at Artransport vividly, most days were unremarkable, and nothing got damaged. In general, Artransport had a sterling reputation. It helped that the company covered up most of its mistakes. Whenever a client got really mad about something—a late shipment or damage that was undeniable—Bob and DE dressed up and did a charm offensive at the museums downtown. It always worked. The Queen was never part of the show because—she was a bitch. (Or as Gertrude Stein might have put it more poetically, “a bitch is a bitch is a bitch.”) I don't think any client could resist Bob Lennon at his best, pontificating, telling jokes, showing sincere remorse. It was a great act. And everyone knew he was part of the art scene and helped artists when he could (some of people he helped actually were artists). But one of the company’s sins was so egregious it led to the loss of a major client.

    One day the Phillips Collection decided to inspect the artwork it had in storage at Artransport. Everything was in the Dart warehouse, with a climate as predictable as the Old Testament God. I guess Bob didn’t have time to move their stuff to the building with the crate shop before they arrived. That had air conditioning. It was a sultry day, and the staff of the museum was sweating and angry as they looked over their masterpieces. They pulled their collection from storage and stopped using Artransport for anything else.

    That was very bad. It meant that Bob, to save his reputation and fortune, had to consolidate everything in a better building. Eventually we moved to a place on West Virginia Avenue NE in Washington, DC, and said goodbye to the Weenie-Beenie.

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Chapter Fourteen

Published February13, 2026

Openings.

I

    Everybody knew Bobby Donovan was going to be famous. His landscapes and portraits were stunning. Inspired by German Expressionists, his style was so powerful that most buddies who painted with him began imitating his use of color and form. The exception was Mike Semyan, who was equally talented and confident. I never heard Bobby talk down to his imitators. He'd say, “Nice painting, Charles, nice painting!” after spending an afternoon in a field in Maryland with an old friend. But anyone who saw what Bobby had painted could tell that Charles had not been observing nature. He had been observing Bobby observing nature. The same blues, the same greens, the same yellows were on Charles’ panel as Bobby’s, but with less intensity. It was obvious that the artist Bobby respected most was Mike; but he was also kind to his fleas.

    It was only a matter of when. When Bobby had an opening, people came. Collectors bought his work: it was easy to imagine his paintings in a museum. He captured the beauty and sadness of Washington like no one else. He had momentum.

    He wasn’t the only one. Mike Semyan was equally respected when he showed his abstract work, but he held himself back, claiming he wasn’t ready yet; not quite ready: but he was ready. Steve Cushner had a gallery and was building a reputation, and Bill Willis was building the foundation for a great career. I began seeing his presence in more and more collections as I made pickups and deliveries from movers and shakers along the East Coast. It was good to know that the man who helped me along my first weeks in the business was making his mark.

    Arthur Cadieux was working furiously on his paintings of the subconscious—which is what the depictions of his childhood toys essentially were. Every so often, when I was over for lunch or dinner, Arthur and I walked along the walls of his studio looking at the progress of his canvases. They were laid out like dark dreams. We were also getting away from his wife and one of her friends who couldn’t stop talking and got on my nerves. The friend had been after me for a while and called at all hours looking for a date. She’d coo “Daa-rick!” into the phone, and each time I’d make up an excuse to get away. Helene must have given her my number.

    “Are you fucking her yet?” asked Arthur once we were on the other side of the apartment.

    “No.”

    He shrugged. “Yeah, she can be a pain in the ass.”

---

    Every couple of months Mike had a party at his studio and showed off his new work. Bobby and Tom Morris were always there: Tom brought his latest canvases as well. They would critique each other’s work, talk about perspective, and color, and eventually weave the conversation to one their favorite topics: Painting vs. Content. Why was there tension between the two themes? I have no idea. To me even abstract painting had content, and figurative paintings were self-evident. At the time Tom was doing portraits of historical figures like Charles de Gaulle. They had an aspect of cartoon or caricature about them, without quite being either. I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

    “Now, Tom,” mused Bobby as he looked from one dead politician to another. “Since the subject of these painting are—politicians—wouldn’t you say these are political paintings?”

    “No, they’re just paintings,” replied Tom.

II

    For a while Arthur had been going around to galleries on his days off showing slides of his latest work. His earlier reputation was forgotten, and he was starting from scratch. But he had advantages over younger artists who were starting out. He had been wrestling demons and angels for decades and knew how to paint them. On top of that he was supremely talented, something he might not have admitted. His use of color was unique. When I looked at his toy paintings, they had a nursery freshness tinged with nightmares. The Anton Gallery must have recognized their quality because it gave him a one-man show.

    The Anton wasn’t the most prestigious gallery in Washington. That honor belonged to the M— Gallery, which collapsed years later under a mountain of fraud. Anton was a fine gallery, one of many good establishments on R Street just west of Connecticut Avenue. Arthur opened on a First Friday the fall of 1986. It was a cool, fresh evening bracing the weekend. Arthur and his family milled around inside holding drinks. Arthur kept looking at the paintings as if he wasn’t sure what to make of them; then more and more people arrived. Bill Willis came up from the South, gazed at Arthur’s carefully lit dreams, went up to him and shook his hand. He spoke to Arthur for a while in a calm, confident way. I don’t know what he said, but I’m sure it was encouraging. Steve Cushner arrived to show support, moving around the gallery like an amused sprite. Collectors came and passed through, drinking wine, shaking Arthur’s hand. He must have been overwhelmed and relieved. A third of his paintings sold that first night. His work was accepted again.

    They were serving Shiraz at the back of the gallery, and I ended up there toward the end of the evening. The wine was pretty good! Bill Willis came back to say goodbye, and I spent a few minutes talking to Steve.

    “Are you getting published?” he asked.

    "Mostly film reviews. Stories not so much.”

    “Hmm.” He thought about it. “The funny thing is, if you’re an unsuccessful painter, you still have paintings to show. For a writer—all you have is a pile of paper.”

---

    Arthur was enjoying the glow of the evening and Helene and Adam were proud of him. They watched as everyone came up to him. His months of creation had peaked and paid off. He could hardly believe how his paintings were admired. It was a very successful opening. But when I saw Arthur on the trucks a few days later he confessed that he had fallen into a depression after he woke up on Saturday. He realized he’d said what he wanted to say and didn’t know what to do next. He gave up painting again.

III

    Despite my ignorance about art I came to learn how artists talk about it. A lot of the drivers were obsessed with describing the ineffable. The politics of the art world required it. Any time one of the guys was invited to show in a gallery, a warehouse or a bar they had to write an artist’s statement to describe their work. For most curators the art was not enough. They had to have a statement. So the guys bent themselves into pretzels trying to come up with something. It might be: “I am attempting to describe the mystery of reality with color.” I began having doubts about the way language was used in the art world. Most of the time words and images did not sit well together. Statements no one paid attention to were one thing. The language of art criticism was more corrosive.

    In art criticism words that are supposed to be descriptive actually diminish careers. Take ‘local’ for instance: if someone was described as a local artist, that usually meant they were only local. In other words they were parochial. The same goes for ‘regional artist’ or ‘Maryland artist’ or whatever. Being a DC artist was no better. One’s career was more likely to be juiced if you were a New York artist and had a gallery because New York was one of the few places people took you seriously. In the end Anne Truitt was one of the few artists living in DC who acquired a world-class reputation. The quality of her work broke through. But it was important that she had a New York gallery and wrote books that helped define her to the world. It still wasn't easy.

    At the time there was a collector in town who had inherited a couple hundred million dollars. He was a nice guy. Artists I knew showed him their slides in the hopes he would buy something. But his main interest was in rising socially among other rich people and in making reliable investments. So he bought work from artists being pushed in New York and London, and not very selectively. I had a pickup from the home of a gallery owner one morning and arrived early. She invited me in for coffee. She was a wonderful gossip. “Everybody knows he’s a fool,” she explained about the heir. “You can sell him second-rate work by the most famous artists, and he won’t know the difference. He sure buys a lot.” He ignored the slides of unknown artists and cut off a path where he could have made a difference and earned a lot of respect. He still made a reputation for himself: just not the one he expected.

---

    After all these years I still believe that the great talents I worked with are still great talents. They made the work that they made, it has great value, and most of it is forgotten. They didn’t become comets in the art world applauded for the heights they had achieved. They were comets who drove trucks.

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Chapter Fifteen

Published February 20, 2026

Stowaways.

I

    In the months before the move to the new warehouse Bob Lennon had an inventory made of everything in storage. I was sure my little joke with the crab trap was going to be discovered. But nobody could understand the job number I had assigned the piece. They couldn’t find the file. No one wanted to admit they had lost it. Every so often someone from the office would come to Dart, look at the piece and cross their arms. All anybody knew was that the trap was an unusual sculpture and it was going to California. So it was treated with respect.

    It turned out during the inventory that some art that did have files was missing. I came into work one morning and there was a xerox of an Old Master painting plastered all over the place. Below the image was scrawled: “Has anyone seen this? Talk to Bob!” Well, I hadn’t seen it. And there were whispers of an even greater loss. Two Warhol’s were gone. It was a big mystery. The pieces were insured, anyway. After the claim was made the whole thing went quiet. 

---

    The Midwest shuttle, the orphan of the transportation system, began making a lot of money. So much work was going to Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee that Artransport began scheduling two trips a month—with a higher mileage rate than most shuttles. It became a very good gig! That was convenient for Mike because Florence Barron began buying his work. So we fit in stops at her apartment where none were scheduled. In and out, with a cup of coffee and pleasant conversation. Mike also showed her slides of his friends’ work. Soon we were delivering Steve Cushner’s. 

    The favor bank only grew. Bobby had organized a group show of DC artists in Chicago. Bob Lennon, in one of his easy displays of generosity, offered to provide the transportation. And then he didn’t.  I don’t know what happened: maybe the Queen talked him out of it. Anyhow Bobby had a show to get to Chicago: “Hey, guys, can you help me out?” 

    None of this would have been possible if the office had any idea where we were most of the time. But there was no way to track us. A dispatcher prepared a top sheet for our shuttle and called our stops for the first day of the trip. After that we had to figure things out for ourselves. It was annoying to hang out at phone booths, make a bunch of long-distance calls with a phone card, then re-arrange stops when customers weren’t available a particular morning or afternoon. On the other hand it gave us a lot of leeway. We quickly learned how to get ahead of schedule. In Chicago we could knock out many of our stops by early afternoon, then spend a couple of hours at a museum. On one occasion we made a big mistake and could only correct it by shifting the schedule radically.

    It was Tuesday afternoon. We had finished Monday with a stop at Eugene Stevens’ place at Pepper Pike, then had dinner at Corky and Lenny’s one exit down. Tuesday morning we had done Detroit and its suburbs; now we were in the loading dock of the Ford Museum in Grand Rapids. I was driving. It was a beautiful afternoon. Chicago was ahead of us. Mike put away the BOL of the crate we had just delivered, and he picked up another one. He kept staring at it.

    “What’s that?”

    “That gallery in Birmingham.”

    “The one we delivered to this morning?”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “Those two paintings from New York?” 

    He looked ahead through the windshield. “This BOL has another painting.”

    “You mean there were two BOLs going there?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Oh, shit!”

    The Queen had fired Mike only a couple of months before. If she found out about this, she would have a reason to fire both of us. Touché!

    We got a cup of coffee and looked over our stops. Wednesday, we had deliveries and pick-ups all over Chicago. Thursday morning we had a stop in Milwaukee, then more stops around Chicago. The sequence had no logic to it. But we gained an hour going west. So we quickly worked the phones. There were three residences in the beautiful towers downtown. Then one in Highland Park; another in Lake Forest. They agreed to let us deliver that evening. They were getting their paintings!

    Wednesday morning we were waiting outside our stop in Milwaukee first thing. The gallery director looked at his watch as he got out of his car. “You guys have that piece from New York?”

    “Yes, we do.”

“It’s funny. Nobody called me about it. Usually somebody calls me. We’re not even open yet.”

    Mike and I looked at each other.

    “I guess your office messed up,” he concluded. “Anyway it’s here.”

    We got in the truck, rushed back to Chicago, and finished up our stops. Thursday morning we were back in Birmingham. The nice woman we had delivered to on Tuesday looked up from a cup of coffee. “Hey, guys.”

    “We have your painting from Brooklyn.”

    “Oh—okay.” She looked at us a moment. Then she signed the BOL.

    “Hey, we just did Milwaukee,” I told DE.

    “Milwaukee, okay,” he replied. “Right on schedule. How’s it going out there?”

    “There’s a lot of traffic. It’s pretty tough.”

    “Yeah, you know how Chicago is. You have—what? Six more stops?”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “Okay. Do what you do. Just call me tomorrow from Louisville.”

    We drove straight to Kentucky. To cover our tracks we bought a full tank of diesel ourselves and subtracted a few hundred miles from our total when we filled out the top sheet at the end of the trip. As far anyone could tell the trip had gone perfectly, just as the dispatchers had planned. 

    But the Queen still gave me a sharp eye whenever she saw me in the office. Bob Lennon noticed it once when he was passing by and chuckled: “That bitch really doesn’t like you.”

II

    One morning Roberto brought his wife to work, and she really was hot. She was wearing a tight leopard skin blouse that showed off her breasts to great effect. On the other hand, it was four o’clock in the morning.

    “Ah, good morning, Darick,” said Roberto with exquisite politeness. “This is my wife Julia.” She glanced at me.

    “Uh, hello,” I said.

She looked away again.

    “So, since this is a one-day, I thought we would bring her along—since she needs to get some things in New York. Okay?”

    “Oh. Okay.”

    Roberto and I loaded the truck. Julia stood to the side with her arms crossed. When we were finished, he got in the driver’s seat and she sat in the middle between us. The couple chatted amiably in Spanish until we crossed the Delaware Bridge. Roberto pulled into Penns Grove and yawned. “So, uh, while you’re getting diesel and some coffee, Julia and I are going to use the bathroom and get in the back so we can—sleep. Okay?”

    “Yeah, sure.”

    They returned as I was paying the cashier, and I opened the back of the truck. Roberto climbed up. His wife glanced at me again and followed him inside. They laid a bunch of blankets between stacks of paintings and settled down. I closed and locked the door. 

    About three hours later, after interminable traffic through the Lincoln tunnel, I pulled up to our first stop at West 57th. I went to the back of the truck, knocked on the door, and waited for them to get organized. Then I opened the door. Julia was up, straightening her clothes. Roberto made a great show of yawning. We helped Julia off the back the back of the truck and she went off—shopping!

    I called the office after we had made a couple of deliveries. “So you met Julia?” asked my dispatcher. “Heh, heh, heh!” So he knew. I was silent. Before he was promoted the dispatcher had been a blind local driver. That is to say he was legally blind. He couldn’t drive. When I had worked with him, I often wondered how far he could see, since he squinted all the time whenever he looked up from the clipboard. He was able pick out pretty women from a distance, though. “Where were they on the ride up?” he asked. “In the back, fucking with the art? Heh, heh, heh!”

    At the end of the afternoon when we had finished our stops we drove back to midtown from Soho. Julia was waiting at the intersection of 58th Street and 5th Avenue with a bunch of bags. She barely glanced at me when I opened the back and she climbed up. Roberto and I handed the bags up to her, then he yawned again and followed her inside. After they had made a nice nest of blankets, I locked the door. 

    One of the hidden perks of the job was that drivers brought wives or girlfriends along to New York. It was hidden because the office wasn’t supposed to know about it. If they found out you could be fired. Julia riding along was an exception because our dispatcher that day, like a lot of other guys at the company, like to imagine her without a blouse. But I had never heard of anyone bringing along a stowaway for a week. That happened, to my great chagrin, one Sunday morning when I arrived to load the Florida shuttle. Every so often Mike and I were assigned Florida when other guys needed to take a break. We never turned down work. I was going through the paperwork when Mike walked in with our friend Kevin.

    Kevin was a nice guy I knew from college. Mike had known him since grade school. He was friendly, a great conversationalist, and he was always broke. He started wandering through the crate shop. I pulled Mike aside.

    “Mike: what is Kevin doing here?”

    “Kevin has never been to Florida.”

    “So?”

    “Well, I thought I would give him that experience.”

    “Why doesn’t he just take a vacation in Florida?”

    “He doesn’t have any money. Anyway this is his vacation. He took a week off from work. He’s like my little brother.”

    “We could get fired!”

    Mike looked around. “Only if the office finds out.”

---

    Kevin sat in the middle of the bench seat. The middle is not comfortable. Your knees get banged up whenever the driver switches gears. We did North Carolina on Monday, and Kevin stared ahead all day, only mildly interested in all the pine trees. I got the distinct impression Mike had convinced him, lobbied him, to go on this excursion. I was pissed.

    The sleeping arrangements provided another interesting problem. We were given enough money to get a room with two beds each night. That’s how we always traveled. On this trip three guys stood in front of the desk as we checked in to a motel. I could hear the receptionist thinking, “Three guys, two beds. Hmm.” The reality is that two slept in the beds and one guy slept on the floor. That person was Kevin. Every morning he woke up moaning, “Oh, my back.” I had no sympathy for him. Mike was very amused.

    “Come on, Kevin, you’re on vacation. This is free.”

    “I didn’t think it was going to be like this.”

    Kevin took a long time in the shower. We had stops to do and he was being fastidious about his hygiene. We got behind schedule immediately. Tuesday afternoon I called the office from Savannah. “You mean you didn’t get to the museum before they closed?” DE asked incredulously.

    “No, unfortunately not.”

    “What’s going on with you guys? You missed the stop in Charleston yesterday.”

    “There’s a lot of construction along the highways. They stop traffic for hours sometimes. Nothing we can do about it,” I explained. I had become very good at lying when I had to. I didn’t enjoy it at all.

    When we crossed into Florida, we were pulled over at the weigh station. This was a normal procedure since the troopers recognized the name of Artransport on the doors of the truck. They knew we carried art. There were a lot of millionaire tax cheats in Florida and the state was always trying to catch them. They glanced through our logbooks—nobody took them seriously—then went for the real prize, our bills of lading. These contained information regarding the artwork entering the state and who had bought them. The troopers made a copy of every single one. Unfortunately for the state of Florida, most art collectors sent their purchases to fake addresses to avoid sales tax. A lot of artworks bought in New York, for instance, had a pretend bill of lading sending it to Delaware. From Delaware the artwork went off to paradise along the beach.

    “Who’s that guy sitting in the middle with the glasses?” asked the trooper. “He didn’t present a license or anything.”

    “Oh, he’s our courier.”

    “Your courier. Really. What does he do?”

    “Uh, he’s there to make sure the artwork arrives safely.”

    “So he’s a ride-along to make sure you guys do your job.”

    “Yeah, basically.”

    “So he’s your boss.”

    Tuesday night I let Kevin sleep in the bed and I took the floor. I don’t know why I was so kind to him. Maybe it was because he was complaining about his back all the time and how his knees hurt because of the gear shift. Anyhow I could sleep anywhere, and it didn’t make much difference. My back was fine. By the time we got to Miami we were another stop behind.

    “What the fuck is wrong with you guys?” asked DE.

    “We’ll try to make it up on the way north,” I said.

    Then there was the problem of what to do with Kevin while we rode around Miami-Dade on Wednesday. “I’d like to go to the Seaquarium,” he suggested. Well, that was an idea. We had a pack job at Marta Guttierez Fine Arts on Key Biscayne, and Sea World was on the way. Marta Guttierez was a gorgeous Cuban with Henna-red hair. Her son and assistant was always bemused by how much art handlers panted after her. We spent a couple of hours wrapping paintings and she signed the BOL.

    We found Kevin standing under a palm tree in the parking lot of the Seaquarium. He was beaming. “Hey guys—I met this Brazilian model in there. She’s beautiful!”

    “Really.”

    “Yeah. And she wants to hang out with me. She likes to talk about movies—Truffaut and Godard. She’s really great.”

    “So?”

    He handed Mike a piece of paper. “She wants to show me around, and uh—she wants to show me around. Can you guys pick me up from here—around 1:00 am?” It was Little Havana.

    “How does he do that?” I muttered as we raced to the next stop.

    “He’s like a puppy. Women want to pet him.”

    At midnight the alarm went off in our room. I sat up from my pillow on the floor and tried to figure out where I was. “What’s that?”

    “It’s time to pick up Kevin.”

    “Why can’t he get a goddam taxi?”

    “Darick. Kevin doesn’t have any money.”

    “You mean the Brazilian model not only picked him up, she treated him to dinner?”

    “Probably.”

    It was amazing. At that point in my life girlfriends broke up with me because I wasn’t making enough money. All the women that Kevin met wanted to take care of him. And now we were behind three stops because of a stowaway. That didn’t seem to matter to Mike. As far as he was concerned, the office hated us whether we did a good job or not. But we deserved to be fired, really.

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Chapter Sixteen

Published February 27, 2026

Saving money on the road.

I

    The company moved to a warehouse on West Virginia Avenue NE, near Gallaudet University in DC. Operations and storage were consolidated into one space, which was more efficient, and the rooms had heating and air conditioning for once. That made the lie about climate control for the art less of a lie. John Douglas and Lap set up the new crate shop, and the crab trap was transported safely to its permanent home in the California bin. Every so often, as I passed by, I had to correct its orientation.

    An irony of the move—so the rumors went—is that the missing Warhol’s were re-discovered, months after a settlement on them had been made.  A guy in the crate shop found them leaning against some other works in storage. He brought them to Bob Lennon’s office.

    “Look, Bob—I found them!”

    “Well, well, my boy—good job. Hand them over here, will you?”

    He hid them under his desk.

    There was a nightclub a couple of blocks toward New York Avenue where shootings happened all the time. Loading and unloading in the middle of the night was pretty interesting. No one threatened us, though. Every so often a guy walked up along the side of the truck we were loading and peered into the warehouse. 

    “Hey—what you doing?”

    “Loading the truck.”

    “Need any help?”

    “No, we got it, thanks.”

    “Huh. What you loading?”

    “Oh—artwork; antiques, that kind of stuff.”

    “You mean paintings and shit?”

    “That’s what we do.”

    “That is some kind of job, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty interesting.”

    “You guys hiring?”

    Of course Bob Lennon and the Red Queen complained constantly about how much the move cost. It was like all their profit. We knew perfectly well they were complaining because they didn’t want to give us raises. They wanted us to feel compassion for them instead. So we didn’t get any more money. Bob insisted he felt very bad about it, but the Queen still wore beautiful dresses.

---

    When you are poor you are forced to give up luxuries. Two luxuries we pared back to save our per diem allowances were food and sleep. Rel Crane, who did locals and Virginia shuttles, lived off milk and pickles. I never saw him eat anything else. On the New York shuttle some of the guys had friends we could stay with so we could split the $30 in hotel money. That meant laying on the floor somewhere. Francis Byrne knew a couple of artists who lived in a warehouse in Greenpoint. It was a big, dusty, space. I brought a sleeping bag with me always and covered the floor under it with moving blankets I brought up from the back of the truck. The warehouse was in a Polish neighborhood, and I wandered around for a while in the evening, got perogies and coffee in a diner for five bucks, read for a while and went to sleep.

    Roberto was careful with his money when his gorgeous wife wasn’t around. To save on hotels, he stayed in Alphabet City with his friend Antonio from architecture school. “He is an architect, like me,” he explained the first time he brought me there. “He designed this bathroom, an extra bathroom, in his apartment, for guests. A very efficient design.”

    He and Antonio showed me the bathroom as soon as we arrived. It was a very efficient design all right, squeezed into a weird angle—I wouldn’t even call it a corner—in a tiny kitchen. The kitchen did triple duty as dining room, living room and guest room. I was curious about the bathroom because I wanted to know if I could wash up in the morning. As it was, the toilet was kind of crammed under the sink. You almost had to sit down to wash your hands. I was trying to figure how I was going to wash my face when they gave me the keys and went out. A few minutes later I found an Indian restaurant down the street and went to a movie.

    When I got back around midnight Roberto and Antonio were still out. The cockroaches in the kitchen were having a party. They were moving this way and that way, all over the floor. It was disconcerting. I had to sleep down there. I tried to find a spot the cockroaches didn’t go, but they were very ambitious. No matter where I put my sleeping bag, it was going to be overrun. So I decided to read the paper. My strategy was to stay up as long as possible. Eventually I’d be too tired to worry about the bugs. So I sat at the table. An hour later I was reading an article about octopuses when someone knocked on the door. It was a portly man in black leather, including a black leather cap, with a very expectant look on his face.

    “Hello?”

    “Who are you?” he demanded.

    “I’m Darick. Are you looking for Antonio?”

    “Yesss. What are you doing here?”

    “Reading the newspaper.”

    “At one o’clock in themorning?”

    Well, it was one o’clock in the morning.

    “Are you sleeping here?” he asked.

    “Yeah, on the floor.”

    This didn’t register at all. “Well, where’s Antonio?”

    “He’s out with Roberto.”

    “Roberto? Who’s Roberto? He’s out with a Roberto?!

    “They’re old friends from Argentina.” I could have told him Roberto had a hot wife with incredible breasts, but I didn’t.

    “Oh, my God—my God!”

    “Do you want to leave Antonio a message?”

    “I’m Chris!” He ran downstairs. I went back to the article about octopuses.

    Around seven in the morning Roberto and Antonio were having coffee. The cockroaches were hiding again. I rolled up my bag and sat with them at the table. Antonio made very good coffee. “Has was your evening?” he asked politely.

    “It was fine. Your friend Chris came looking for you.”

    “Chris?” Antonio’s eyes wandered. “Oh, him.”

II

    Many of the drivers I worked with who had serious girlfriends complained about them all the time. On the other hand, they actually had girlfriends. One of the artists who drove to New York for a while—an ambitious guy named Jim—had a girlfriend named Jane in London. She didn’t give him trouble for being away all the time because she was away all the time. They wrote searing letters to each other, finding fault in this or that. We were on the Turnpike one morning when he handed me a missive she had just sent. Jim, it began, I really don’t think you take my feminism seriously.

    “See what I’m dealing with?” he exclaimed. “Of course I take her feminism seriously!”

    Jim had other issues. He couldn’t decide whether he was straight or gay. I didn’t think the relationship had much of a future. I figured that Jane was going to find herself a girlfriend, and Jim would find himself a boyfriend. It would all work out. In the meantime, they fed on each other’s accusations.

Jim was also an arrogant prick. He didn’t respect other artists—especially if they were famous. He deserved to be famous because he was better than anybody.

    “Really?” I asked him.

    “Yeah—I’m a genius. You know, I ran into Basquiat last week.”

    “You did? Where?”

“In Brooklyn,” he replied. “I was just driving along from stop to stop, and I saw him wandering on the sidewalk. Addled, as usual. You know he’s always high, right? Why does anyone take him seriously?”

“So what happened?”

“I rolled down my window and called out: ‘Hey, Basquiat! You owe me fifty bucks!’ He looked really confused. He was high. So I told him I had lent him fifty last week. He just reached in his wallet, mumbled an apology, and handed me fifty.”

“Why on earth did you do that? You took advantage of him.”

    Jim looked surprised. “I wanted fifty bucks.”

III

    “That bitch could have given us a raise, you know it?” complained Arthur.

    “Yeah, she should have.” It was hard to live on eight dollars an hour.

    “It’s Bob’s fault too, you know. He’s the owner. I like him, though,” he conceded.

    “Everybody likes Bob.”

    “But he’s a bitch too, really. I have a family.”

    It was Arthur’s last summer on the road. The economics of working at Artransport for a married man were not the same as that of single fools who may or may not have girlfriends. Helene had to supplement his income with a job running the gift shop at the Hirshhorn Museum. They had their son Adam to think about. He was a remarkable young man, and they needed to save for his college education. “You know they’re actually saving money with that warehouse. They’re paying one rent instead of two, with Dart out of the way. And they aren’t even throwing pennies at us! That bitch!”

    We had just delivered to Princeton and the Montclair Art Museum and were done with our stops in New Jersey. Arthur was looking for a place to spend the night. “Darick! Look at this! Eighteen dollars a night! We can split twelve dollars!”

    He pulled into a place called the Wishy-Washy Motel. It was on Route 1 heading north. The motel was fronted by a big neon sign. The rooms behind it were less colorful than the sign and looked pretty sad. Arthur came out of the front office with a frown. “With taxes it’s twenty-two dollars,” he said. “So we split eight. Oh, well. But we’re lucky! Someone just checked out.”

    “There’s only one room available? That’s odd.”

    “There are a lot of long-term residents.”

    That was never a good sign. We sat on the curb and watched as the owner’s family rushed out with blankets, sheets, and all kinds of cleaning supplies. They ran in and out of the room for about twenty minutes. Finally it was ready. We brought our bags from the truck and went inside. 

    The place smelled of talcum powder. The air conditioner was running on high.

    “See—we’re lucky!” declared Arthur. He plopped onto his bed. “We each get four dollars, and we have nice clean room, and we have TV!” He flicked on the news.

    Four dollars might pay for breakfast and lunch. Breakfast was usually a caffeine/sugar high of coffee and a doughnut, lunch a slice of pizza. The point of using hotel money to pay for meals was to save as much food per diem as possible. That way, by the end of the week, you might have enough to pay for groceries. I sat on my bed and looked around. I especially studied the rug and kept my shoes on. Then I lay back and watched the news.

    Somewhere between the state news and the local news the air changed. Arthur sat up. “You smell that?”

    “Yes, I do.”

    “What is it, you think? Oh, shit.”

    It was hard to pinpoint the smell exactly. It smelled like the history of the room. Something stale wafted up, mingled with corruption. It smelled like dirt; it smelled like sweat; it smelled like urine; it smelled like blood. The carpet was giving up its secrets. 

    “Oh, my God, I don’t think I can spend the night here. I can’t stand it.”

    “Let’s open the windows and keep the AC on,” I suggested.

    Even with a breeze the smell crept up. “Why are we trying to save four fucking dollars, do you think?” asked Arthur. “Why are we in this goddam room? Because that bitch won’t give us a raise. Goddam capitalist.” He wondered aloud: “Why do you think the guy here checked out all of a sudden?” 

    “I think he died, Arthur.” 

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Chapter Seventeen

Published March 6, 2026

I want to fire Darick!

I

    Mike and I continued to do two Midwest shuttles a month, a counterclockwise loop starting in the north. It was exhilarating driving through cornfields in the Spring; exhilarating passing golden harvests in the Fall. Winter was winter. A few drivers left for more regular jobs, and new guys were hired. A pianist named Neal began doing New York’s. He knew in every bone that he was brilliant; his fingertips oozed confidence, and he was lazy as shit. He and Bing got along great. They were both going to be famous.

    “He’s the one, you know,” Bing confided to me one day when we were working together.

    “The one great musician?”

    “The one great jazz pianist.”

    “Okay.”

    “He’s got it, the feel of the keys. He moves with the music, he understands it. You know what I mean? He’s kind of an asshole, though, really.”  

    Bing and I had finished our second day in New York. I was driving out through the Lincoln Tunnel. Neal was on the second truck in Soho, exiting the Holland Tunnel. Bing leaned back and closed his eyes. “Neal…” He muttered after a while. “…Neaaal…” He was concentrating.

    “What are you, doing, Bing?”

    “I’m communicating.”

    “You’re communicating with Neal?”

    “Yeah.”

    “What are you communicating?”

    “I’m telling him to meet us at Molly Pitcher.”

    Molly Pitcher was a service area halfway down the pike where we often got fuel and coffee. They also served Cinnabon’s, which provided a good sugar high. An hour and a half later I pulled into the station for diesel. Bing got out and looked around. Neal hadn’t gotten the message. We got some Cinnabon’s and Bing took over driving. He said nothing about Molly Pitcher when we ran into his friend at the warehouse.

    I had to work with Neal myself a few times. It wasn’t fun. Whenever he could, he’d stop the truck and check the load. He always returned reeking of cologne and with bloodshot eyes. “Hey, man! Everything’s fine!” he announced.

    I’d offer to drive the rest of the way. He was one of those guys that came and went. The Queen liked him, though.

---

    Mike and I had an Old Master painting from Sotheby’s going to clients in Bloomington, Indiana. They were professors at the university. It was February and very, very cold. The snow fell in blobs and swamped the roads. Plows pushed sheets off the highway as traffic followed behind slowly, single file. We were hours behind schedule. I called the couple late afternoon, early evening, then late evening as we inched closer.

    “Don’t worry—we’re waiting for you!” the wife assured me cheerily. 

    We finally arrived at 2:00 am. The house was in a cul-de-sac and we parked the truck in front. We removed the painting from the back and rang the doorbell. Light and warmth flooded us as the couple opened the door. The nice people welcomed us in, we unwrapped the painting, and the woman signed the BOL. Then they shook our hands and let us out.

    Back in the cab, I turned the key in the ignition. The truck started but wouldn’t budge. That was strange. I tried again. The truck wouldn’t move. I could rev the engine all I wanted, but nothing. “We need a tow,” I concluded. “At least we made it this far.”

    Mike suggested we knock on the door of the nice couple and ask to use their phone. They had said goodbye with such glowing smiles. So we went back to the front door and knocked. The lights were still on. “Hello?” I asked. “Hello?”

    I knocked again. “Our truck broke down!” I explained.

    Suddenly the lights went out.  Apparently, they weren’t going to let us use their phone. I was disappointed but didn’t blame them. It was 2:30 by now, and they had their painting. We had to walk a mile and a half to find a pay phone. That was the Midwest in the winter. It turned out our brake line had frozen. Two days later we got the truck out of the shop, and the brake line froze again. At that point we bought a blow torch. It did the trick.

---

    We were yanked off the Midwest. The Queen informed us that it wasn’t fair, it just wasn’t fair, we made so much money off the shuttle. Other guys wanted a shot. “Don’t you think it’s making money because we’ve been doing a good job?” I protested.

    “Darick: we allowed you guys to do the shuttle because it was a shit shuttle. It’s not a shit shuttle anymore. So that’s that.”

    I never saw Florence Barron again.

    Our schedules became more erratic: Locals, New York’s, Texas, Florida’s, more trips to California. On Arthur’s last New England, we had a stop at Robert Motherwell’s studio in Greenwich toward the end of the trip. Arthur was down on himself. Nothing I said could convince him he had a future. He was a has-been, he had no ideas, no way to make money off his art. The opening at the Anton Gallery was still recent. We parked the truck and entered Motherwell’s barn-like studio. The artist was on scaffolding, working on a huge canvas. His assistant brought out a small package to us. Arthur looked up at Motherwell in the middle of his own world. After a while Motherwell took notice of us. He was a polite man and nodded down. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said.

    “Good afternoon, sir,” replied Arthur.

II

Arthur took a job as a security guard. It was the same job I used to have, in the same building and the same shift. I took a pay cut to escape the humiliation, and he got a raise to accept it. But he didn’t see it that way. To him he finally had time to spend with his family, and he began making real money again, enough to save for Adam’s tuition. On some days off, I visited Arthur at the front desk where I used to work. He was always cheerful and professional to the employees whose badges he checked as they entered the lobby. It was just a job; he was making money. In a lot of ways he was more mature than I was. At one point an engineer forgot his badge. Arthur had him sign in. The guy scrawled “Mickey Mouse” before flitting into an elevator. Arthur shrugged. “He’s just an asshole,” he said. “But anyway, listen: I’m painting again, you know it? I have some ideas!”

---

    On my next New England with Bobby, we had a stop at Troy University and participated in the sacred transition of objects to artifacts. The university was donating a bunch of junk from the Manhattan Project to the Museum of American History. The museum had to deal with it. A physicist met us at the loading dock. He crossed his arms while looking at the clouds, musing about how difficult it was to make calculations out of turbulence. A bunch of maintenance guys showed up with boxy metal remnants on dollies. They dumped them on the floor.

    Clunk! 

    Clunk!

    Clunk!

    Crash!

    The physicist was disinterested. He went back to studying the sky. I took out the BOL and started noting scratches and dents everywhere.

    “What are you doing, guy?” asked one of the workers.

    “A condition report.”

    “Of this shit? It’s just been sitting around.”

    “The museum wants one before we pick it all up.”

    “Huh.” They were amused when we put on white gloves and started packing the old machines with layers of protection. When we were done the new artifacts were in pristine boxes. 

    “So this stuff is basically going from one basement to another basement, right?” asked the worker.

    “That’s basically it.”

    As we drove away, Bobby said, “I like talking to crusty old scientists. Their thinking is cold, like icy shafts of light. Pretty cool, actually.”

III

    Materials were getting more and more scarce. Blankets disappeared. If one got thrown out because it was full of holes, it wasn’t replaced. We began using torn blankets over and over just so we’d have enough on the truck. There was less and less newsprint, less plastic, less cardboard. Even straps were disappearing. I asked DE a few times to order replacements. He looked irritated as he scribbled something down. “We’re handling it,” he said.

    It’s not like business was bad. There were weeks and weeks when two trucks at a time had to go to New York to handle the volume of antiques, sculptures, paintings flowing out. We were on a crest: so much money chased rare and unusual things, we could barely keep up. One evening I was finishing in Midtown when I called the office: “Darick, you’ve got to meet Phillip in Soho; the paintings there are too big!”

    “How big?”

    “Huge. Two guys can’t handle them. Meet them on Prince, okay?”

    So we hustled downtown and met Phillip at an artist’s studio on the fourth floor. The paintings were massive and heavy and had to go to San Francisco. In a choreography of exhaustion, we moved them gently down the staircase, round and round to Phillip’s truck. Then up four flights to pick up more, and round and round again until we were done. We were young.

---

    Whenever I had the remotest idea that my job was secure, that I had gained some tenure at the company, something blew the illusion away. One morning I was working with a new hire when he mentioned he had heard my name being tossed around in the office.

    “What did you hear?”

    “Oh, that woman—the one who runs things—was marching up and down in her heels saying, ‘I want to fire Darick! I want to fire Darick! But I don’t know how!’ I guess she doesn’t like you.”

    “No, she doesn’t like me.”

    I had that conversation in mind when I arrived at the warehouse on Saturday to load the California shuttle. I looked over the top sheet and laid out the bills of lading to see what we had to load and pack. It was going to be a southern route from Texas to Oklahoma to the Southwest, on to the West Coast and up north. There is something beautiful about the desert. But in the back of mind, as I looked over the trip, I knew that no matter how hard I tried to do well I was always on ice. I could be let go on a whim. I looked up as Mike unlocked the front door and walked in. Someone followed him. I pulled Mike aside. “Mike: what the fuck is Kevin doing here?”

    Mike looked puzzled. “Kevin has never been to California.”

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Chapter Eighteen

Published March 13, 2026

Kevin rides to the desert.

I

    Over the next week I discovered an aspect of my character that was evil. It came out in a burst of inspiration the following Friday night, fed by peculiar circumstances along the way.

    “You tried this before,” I lectured Mike. “It was a disaster. We missed three stops in Florida. Why can’t Kevin take a vacation on his own?”

    “He doesn’t have any money. Besides, he’s already got a plane ticket back from LA nine days from now—next Monday. So it’s just to LA, not the whole trip. And if he doesn’t go—he loses the ticket.”

    “You guys planned this without talking to me?”

    “Mmm, I guess so. Yeah.”

---

    We loaded the truck—a very full shuttle—by mid-afternoon. Kevin passed the time looking around the warehouse. I tried to be nice to him. 

    “What’s that weird sculpture you’re leaving behind?” he asked as we were closing the doors to the back.

    “A crab trap.”

    “A crab trap? What’s it doing in the art bin?”

    “Pretending to be a sculpture. It’s an old joke of mine.”

    We had to make Houston Monday morning. Kevin took the middle seat and got his knees banged up by the gear shift as we were leaving town. “I need to lie down somewhere,” he moaned once the city was behind us. Eventually we pulled over on Highway 81—that languid stretch of hills—and made a bed in the back for him out of blankets and foam. It was between a stack of paintings on the left and a sculpture on the right, like the arrangement Roberto had on the way to New York, without the beautiful wife. Hours later I was driving into the sunset when I remembered something.

    “Kevin’s in the back.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Mike.

    “I’ll pull over and see how he’s doing.” I found a truck stop in Tennessee and got some diesel. By then the stars were dancing above the trees. I went to the back and opened the door. 

    “Hey, Kevin.”

    “Oh, man!” He sat up.

    “How’d you sleep?”

    “Sleep? Every time I moved, I got poked by that Beverly Pepper sculpture. It’s sharp!”

    “Well, it is steel.”

“And I’ve got to pee!”

After he was done, I asked if he wanted to go back to his bed.

    “Never again.”

    He returned to the middle of the seat, scrunching his knees to avoid the gear shift. But he enjoyed the view after those hours in the void. “The stars are amazing,” he said. “I really look forward to the desert. I’ve never seen the desert.”

    The problem with Kevin was that he was so likable. He appreciated the opportunity to have new experiences. It was refreshing to see the landscapes around us with new eyes. So when he mentioned his back once we found a room, I let him have the bed without thinking about it. 

    “Thank you,” he said absently.

---

    Sunday morning trucks zoomed by in the highway next to the motel. Kevin was in the bathroom. What was going on in there was pretty mysterious. Steam wafted in from under the door.

    “Today it’s not a problem,” I explained to Mike. “We just drive straight to Houston. OK. But if he does this every day, we’re going to get behind, real quick. The Queen’s already after me.”

    “It’s not going to happen again, not like last time,” Mike assured me.

II

    The beauty of driving through America, with its vast landscapes, is that everything seems possible. People have thought that for hundreds of years. After a while you come to realize that much of what is possible has already happened and happens over and over again. When speeding through a ribbon of highway with nature all around, there are ghosts and legends everywhere. The types of legends you think about depend on what you are exposed to. 

    The truck stops displayed all kinds of reading material. In addition to papers like USA Today, treats included The Weekly World News, The Globe, The Star, The National Enquirer. Their most popular articles were about aliens, the royal family, and celebrities who were having affairs. Celebrities mostly had affairs with other celebrities, but sometimes they had peek-a-boos with the royal family and sometimes with aliens. It was very entertaining. Kevin had not brought any books to read on his vacation, so when we got diesel later that morning, he bought plenty of trash. It was old stuff from last week.

    Down the road he looked up from the tabloid on his lap. “Are we going through New Mexico?”

    “Sure we are,” I replied. “We have stops in Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, right?”

    “Right,” said Mike, from the passenger seat.

    “Are we going near Roswell?”

    “Roswell? No, that’s to the south. Albuquerque and Santa Fe are further north. We’ll be coming from Dallas after we do Houston, then we do Oklahoma City. So we’ll be entering New Mexico from up north.”

    “Huh.”

    “Why?” I asked Kevin. 

    “I can’t believe this stuff!” he laughed. “I thought it’d be fun to go there. Anyway this article here—Hah! Hah! —talks about an alien base in Dulce, New Mexico; underground.”

    “Dulce,” I remembered.

    He turned to me. “What about it?”

    “Oh, there was an article about an underground battle there a few years ago.”

    “With extraterrestrials?”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “Where’d you hear about that?”

    “At a truck stop.”

    “Huh.” Kevin turned the page. He noticed a new article with the title, ‘Are You “Different”?’ He studied it carefully.

---

    We drove till midnight through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and found a motel outside Houston on Route 10. Kevin was complaining about his back again. The pattern became clear. I slept on the floor, he got one of the beds, and took a long shower in the morning. Monday, we got him out in time to do the Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil, then on to Dallas. Every time we came to a stop, Kevin had to get out in the parking lot and stand around like a vagrant. It wouldn’t do for the registrars to see a third person riding along. “Can I look around inside?” he asked. “I’ve never been here."

    “No time; we’ve got to get to Dallas: Sorry.” Then it was back to the middle of the seat for him. I’m not sure how Mike convinced him this vacation was a good idea. After three o’clock we slid into the Dallas Art Museum, the Barry Whistler Gallery, then rushed over to the Kimball Art Museum in Ft. Worth before it closed. As we retrieved Kevin from the parking lot, he muttered, “I would have liked to see where Kennedy was shot, at least.” But Dealey Plaza was behind us. We got some Mexican food before heading north and delivered to Oklahoma City in the morning.

III

    At least Kevin got to see the desert. The green rush of Louisiana thinned out toward Houston and got more austere going west. It was a different kind of beauty. Entire storm systems gathered, erupted, and dispersed through the eye of the windshield. When we stopped for diesel in the panhandle a fresh crop of tabloids had appeared. More conspiracies and revelations! They joined the other fun trash we were collecting in the cab.

    “Do you think the government is in on all this stuff?” asked Kevin. “I mean, it’s plausible, right? If you want to get information out there, you let it out as a joke. It isn’t threatening and people start thinking about it. So they won’t be shocked when something really happens. I saw a UFO when I was kid. It landed in a park at night. I saw it. The other kids made fun of me when I talked about it, but I saw it. So there is something in all this. There is.”

    “That’s true,” I said.”

    It was interesting reading the material as we approached the places many of the stories were set. Underground bases were everywhere. Abductions were a big thing. They happened all the time. Apparently being abducted by gray aliens was quite unpleasant and left marks all over your body. There were stories about radiation burns. Being abducted by reptilians was much worse. 

    Where did the writers come up with this stuff? The National Enquirer and The Weekly World News were part of the same company. I suspected they had the same employees. I mean, why not? In the morning they made up slander about Princess Diana and Charles. In the afternoon, after martinis, they wrote about Arizona ranchers raped by lizards.

    We found a restaurant as the sun set along Route 40. In the southwest we always had Mexican food. I never got tired of it. Kevin said, “I don’t know if this agrees with me, but it tastes good.” 

    Outside the electrical lines were singing in the breeze. “Do you hear that?” asked Kevin. “It’s like those stories in the magazines. Ringing everywhere and a thud-thud, from all the construction of those bases underground. Weird.”

    Reading the tabloids was like getting immersed in Greek mythology with a new cast of characters. In Hades there were aliens; flying saucers passed through Heaven. Thinking about them changed how the desert looked, whether you took it seriously or not. We got a room outside of Albuquerque, and I made a bed of blankets and foam on the floor. It was comfortable enough, but I was tired of reading under the overhead light. Mike was in the left bed, Kevin in the right. “So what do you think of Koons?” he asked Mike. “You take him seriously?”

    “I like everybody pretty much. I like all kinds of expressions. The more expressions the better.”

    “Maybe Koons is an alien,” said Kevin. “He has a weird enough expression. He’s kind of perverse."

IV

    Thursday afternoon we had done Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Flagstaff, and Phoenix. We had to get far enough west to start LA Friday morning. Wednesday night we had been held up entering Arizona. The west lanes of Route 40 were closed. At the first weigh station I asked a trooper what was going on. “They’re painting, “he explained.

    “Painting what?”

    “The desert. Hah-Hah-Hah! Hey: who’s that guy sitting in the middle of your cab? You didn’t bring me his license.”

    “He’s our courier.”

“Courier. So he’s your boss.”

    “That’s right.”

    It was hard getting Kevin out of the shower. I was tired of sleeping on the floor. Now I was pushing west. I didn’t want problems in LA. I had called all the stops for Friday starting with LACMA between 9:00 and 11:00. The sky had loitering clouds. I saw a green hill on the right with a brave tree growing on top. It was perfect. I looked over at Mike. “Let’s climb it,” I said.

    “Okay.”

    I pulled the truck over.

    Kevin looked up from an abduction article. “Why’d you stop?” he asked.

    “We’re climbing that hill.”

    “What? Now?”

    “It’s the only chance we’re going to get. It’s beautiful. We have to climb it.”

    “Are you crazy? You have to go over barbed wire to get there.”

    “There’s barbed wire everywhere in the West. You climb over it.”

    Kevin looked at the hill skeptically. “I don’t know.”

    Since I had let Kevin have the bed for five nights straight, I left Mike to deal with him. Kevin could stay in the truck if he wanted to. I climbed over the fence and started hiking uphill. The green I had seen from a distance was scrub grass clinging to the slope. Small cactuses staked out territory of their own. It was an easy climb. Under the shade of the tree there was a view for miles of desert and the ribbon of road going east and west. A breeze passed through. Under the tree was the skeleton of a horse. I looked down the slope and saw Mike helping Kevin over the fence.

    Where had the horse come from? How had it ended up under the tree? I stood for a while looking at it. I’ve wondered about the horse for decades since. Mike and Kevin climbed the hill. 

    “Oh, wow!” said Kevin. “It’s beautiful. I didn’t want to climb up here, but I’m glad you guys made me.” We stayed another twenty minutes looking around and feeling the breeze. Then we went back to the truck.

    We crossed into California on Route 10 after dark. There were flashes in the sky up north near Twenty-Nine Palms. We checked into a motel in Indio and found a restaurant a block away.

    “Mexican—again?” scoffed Kevin.

    “We always eat Mexican in the Southwest.”

    “This is California.” 

    “I guess we’re having Mexican in California,” said Mike. “Listen: this is the part of the country to have Mexican. It’s always really good. You won’t regret it.”

    It was a family-owned restaurant. The food was delicious. In retrospect I’m not sure if I remember the restaurant because the meal was good or because of what happened afterwards. Kevin ordered a very ambitious enchilada plate with jalapeños.

    “Are you sure you want to eat that, Kevin?” I asked. “I thought this food didn’t agree with you.”

    “I don’t know if it agrees with me, but it’s really good.”

    “Yeah, eat it up Kevin, it’s good for you,” said Mike. “It’s a good experience.”

    Kevin ordered more. He was on vacation. We got back to the room and I made my usual bed on the floor. It was my seventh night on the floor. It was the seventh motel on the trip in the seventh town. I can’t tell you what exits we stopped at earlier in the shuttle, or what townships we crashed in for the night. But three years later there was a news flash on TV about the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart arrested at a stop light with a prostitute in Indio, California. I remembered, “Indio—oh, yeah! That’s where Kevin got the shits.”

---

    I had set the alarm early so we could slide into LA. It was still hours away. I took a shower before the sun touched the curtains. When I came out Kevin was clutching his stomach. “Ohhh!” He rushed in and closed the door. That was the last we saw of him for a while.

    Seven o’clock came. “Kevin?”

    “I’m busy!”

    “We have a stop at nine!”

    “Well, I can’t stop!”

    If you have ever wondered about the effect of jalapeños on the human body, I can tell you. Kevin left a trail of stink from Indio to LA to San Diego. It almost reached Mexico.

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Chapter Nineteen

Published March 20, 2026

Kevin is abducted by aliens.

I

    Around nine o’clock Kevin came out of the bathroom, walked halfway to his bed, looked shocked, and turned around. An hour later Mike wanted to take a shower, but Kevin warned him, “It’s dangerous to go in there.” We left the motel at eleven. 

    As we passed through Riverside Kevin looked queasy again. We had to pull over. At 2:30 we finally made it to Los Angeles. I had to call the office to check in. It was five in DC; the dispatchers were ending their day. “So, Darick: How many stops have you done?” asked DE.

    “None so far. We just got to LA. But we have over two hours.”

    “What.”

    “There’s been construction all along 10, it’s really bad, I’m sorry.”

    “You’ve done nothing? And it’s past two there?”

    “Well, yeah, as I said. But we’ve gotten through all the congestion.”

    “What the fuck.” DE filled in the Queen. “Darick and Mike are in LA: it’s two-thirty. They haven’t done any stops!”

    “Holy fucking shit! Are they on drugs?”

    Back to me: “What’s wrong with you guys? You should have taken traffic into account. LA is traffic city. You’re the ones who take pride in how efficient you are. You’re the efficient ones. You whip through shuttles, right? Except for—that weird Florida trip you did last year. And now this. Are you partying? Don’t think we don’t have eyes on you. You should be thinking carefully about your future.” He whispered. “You know what the Queen thinks of you, okay? You are not exactly integral to this company. Get to LACMA, right now, and call me Monday morning at nine, my time. You’ve got to get back on track!”

    “Absolutely.” We were seven stops behind.

    When I left the phone booth, I found Mike and Kevin on the sidewalk staring at the sky. 

    “What’s up?”

    “There was a UFO up there. It just disappeared.”

    I looked up into the blue. “I don’t see it.”

    “Well, it just left,” said Mike. “It was really still. It didn’t move: it was like a black cylinder. It just hung there.”

    “Maybe it was the Aurora,” I said.

    “The what?” asked Kevin. “Oh yeah—I read about that. But that’s supposed to be a supersonic spy plane thing. This was still, like a huge blimp that didn’t move, but it wasn’t a blimp. It was just completely still. Really weird. It looked really big, way up there.” He turned back to the sky.

    “What did the office have to say?” asked Mike.

“They threatened to fire us.”

II

    We hit real traffic. We barely made LACMA before they closed. As usual we dropped Kevin off in the parking lot. “Do I have time to see the Tar Pits?” he asked.

“No.” 

    We picked him up twenty minutes later.  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he complained.

    We had two private clients in La Jolla. They would accept their deliveries after-hours. We high-tailed it to Route 5 south and hit traffic again. How were we going to make up our stops in LA? I was leaning over the wheel.

    “I have to go to the bathroom again,” said Kevin. 

    There was a service area under construction with a bunch of Jolly Johnnie’s by the side of the road. I pulled over. “You want me to go there?” asked Kevin.

    “Well, it’s a bathroom.”

    “Can you wash your hands there?”

    “I doubt it.”

    “Okay—you go first.”

    I came back a few minutes later. “What’s it like?” he asked.

    “It wasn’t the best experience of my life, to tell you the truth.”

    “Was it sanitary?”

    “Not particularly. You have to be careful where you sit.”

    Kevin’s face fell. “I think I’ll hold it. I better hold it.”

    He was miserable the rest of the way south. Before our deliveries we dropped him off at a public beach with a bathroom. He took his camera with him.

    “This is worse than Florida,” I told Mike.

    “Yeah, I know.”

    We briefly went from stress to the world of luxury and ease. Both collectors had seaside villas. They let us in, accepted their paintings, and let us out. It was Happy Hour. We drove north a couple of miles, parked by the public bathroom, and walked down to the beach. The sun was dying above the horizon. Waves went in and out, massaging the stones along the shore. Kevin was nearby, taking photographs of a beautiful girl.

I don’t know how he did it. He’d been expelling poisons all day and now he was fine. His charm was back. I’m sure the camera helped. I was amazed by how many women fell for the camera/posing trick. He usually said something like, “Excuse me, but—you’re so beautiful. Do you mind posing for some pictures?” And it worked!

    “Is she taking you out to dinner?” I asked Kevin.

    “What? No, I don’t think so. She has to go home to her mother.”

    “Well, Mike and I are hungry. We’re going to get dinner. So we’ve got to go, okay?”

    “Is it going to be Mexican again?”

    “No, we saw a Lebanese place on the way here. We’re going to try that.”

    He was relieved. He went to say goodbye to the girl. They hugged each other.

    The Lebanese place was a nice change. Its terrace had an ocean breeze. The full moon cast a wake over the sea. The check came around nine o’clock. Kevin took out his wallet and looked inside carefully. He looked up. “Hey: can you guys lend me ten bucks?” 

III

    We drove north again, looking for a place to stay. There was a cheap motel in Oceanside, not far from Camp Pendleton, and not far from a nuclear power plant. That part of the shore was bit strange. The moon hovered over the parking lot as we carried our stuff to the room. The hallway was an open sidewalk facing the ocean. It was a few doors down from the office.

    I lay down a sheet of foam from the back of the truck and a couple of blankets to make a place to sleep. As usual Mike took the left bed and Kevin took the right. Kevin sat down on his bed. “The last couple of days have really been something,” he said. “That UFO this afternoon—I don’t know what to think about that. And those lights over the desert last night—I don't know what they were.”

    “The saucers are following you,” I told Kevin.

    He laughed. “Yeah, I don’t know. The government is covering up something, though.”

    “You know it.”

    “I need a Coke,” he declared suddenly. “I’ve got to get a Coke. I think it’s all the salt in that middle-eastern food.” He stood up.

    I stood up too, because I had just started lying down and didn’t want him to step on me. He walked over to the door and tried to open it. “The door’s stuck,” he said.

    “The door’s not stuck, it’s just tight. Pull harder.”

    He pulled. “The door won’t open,” he said.

    I walked over and pulled the knob. “There—it’s open.”

    “Okay, thanks, Darick.” He walked outside and tried to pull the door shut. “The door won't close.”

    “Pull harder, Kevin.”

    “I just tried. It won’t close.”

    “All right.” I pushed the door shut with a click as Kevin stood back. He began walking to get his Coke. I turned to Mike. “I’ve had it.”

    “Yeah, I know.”

    “No, I mean I’ve had it. I’ve had it. Set your watch forward two hours. To midnight. And set the alarm clock ahead too.”

    “Why?” 

    “Because Kevin is about to have an experience of missing time. Like he’s been reading about all week.”

    Mike rubbed the side of his face. “Oh, that’s brilliant. I’m going to turn the shower on.”

    The trick would only work if Kevin concluded that he had been abducted on his own. We could only set up the clues. I wanted enough time to have passed that he would imagine the worst: a full examination by the Grays: and an anal probe if he was paranoid enough. Soon the clocks read 12:02 am, water ran in the shower, and the lights were out. Mike and I pretended to be asleep, me on the floor. We heard footsteps come down the sidewalk and pause outside the room. “Damn, what door was it?” he muttered. “I thought it was this one. Mike—Darick?” I saw his silhouette on the other side of the curtain. He tried to peer inside. “Mike—Darick?” He tapped on the door. “Hey there. Hey!”

    Since we were unconscious, we couldn’t hear him. “This is really weird,” said Kevin. He walked back to the front office.

    The phone rang. I answered it with a sleepy hello. “Yeah, this is the front desk. Guy here says—Kevin—that he knocked on your door and you guys wouldn’t let him. He’s with you in Room 10, right?”

    “That’s where I knocked!” Kevin cried in the background.

    “Yeah, we’ve been asleep.”

    “Are you going to let him in?” asked the desk guy.

“Sure. Where’s he been the last couple of hours?”

    “What? How the hell should I know where he’s been, sir? He’s on his own!”

    Kevin trudged back to the room. Tap-Tap-Tap. I opened the door and yawned. “Where’ve you been, Kevin?”

    “I just went down the hall to get a Coke.”

    “Well, you took a long time. You woke us up.” I closed the door after him.

    “I was gone five minutes.”

    I lay on the floor again and gathered some blankets over me. Kevin stood where he was. “I can hardly see in here,” he protested. His eyes adjusted to moonlight lazing through the curtains. He treaded carefully to his bed and sat down. “Mike,” he whispered. “Mike.”

    “Huh? What?”

    “The clock there says 12:07.”

    “Why’d you wake me up?”

    “The clock is wrong.”

    “No, it isn’t. Where’ve you been?”

    “I went to get a coke.”

    “For two fucking hours? Come on, Kevin. Were you seeing that girl?”

    “No! Anyway, she lives with her mother.” Then: “Why is the shower running?”

    “Were you taking a shower?” asked Mike.

    “No! This is really weird.” He stood up, stumbling over my feet, and found the shower knobs in the dark. He twisted them off. “This is so weird.” He walked out again and sat on the foot of the bed. He was kind of wet. “Hey, guys, do you mind if I turn a light on?”

    I grunted. 

    Kevin moved around the bed gingerly and turned on the lamp between the beds. He just sat there. I let him stew in his thoughts for a while. Then I pretended to wake and sat up. “Hey, Kevin, you’re back,” I said.

    “Yeah.”

    “Where’ve you been?”

    He looked at his wristwatch. Then he looked at the alarm clock. I looked at my watch. “Yeah, it’s after twelve. We were kind of worried about you, actually. I read a couple of stories, then it was after eleven, and I couldn’t’t keep my eyes open. Figured you’d gone on a walk.”

    “I was away longer than I thought. My watch isn’t working.”

    He sat there, thinking, thinking, thinking. He must have felt lonely, going over the symptoms of the moment, the hole that had opened in his experience. Time was out control. I actually wasn’t mad at him anymore. He seemed to be figuring things out, pulling together everything he had seen and read the last few days. It was a lot to take in. And he was a nice guy, actually, a good fellow. But the devil was in me, and when you start something, you finish it. I gave him the last clue; the radiation burn clue. I couldn’t help it. “Hey, Kevin,” I asked him. “Where’d you get that sunburn?” 

    “What?”

    “The sunburn. Your forehead is all red. It wasn’t red before you went out. Like you’ve been in the sun for hours.”

    “It’s red?”

    “Yeah, your forehead is all red,” added Mike.

    “Red? I’m red?”

    “You sure are.”

    “My God.” He felt the top of his scalp. “Oh, my God.” He put his face in his hands. “Oh, my Gawwddd!” he cried, “I can’t belieeeve it!”

---

    We dropped him off at LAX Monday morning and scrambled to do the rest of our stops.

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Chapter Twenty

Published March 27, 2026

Art and the military-industrial complex.

I

    Bob Lennon sold Artransport to an unusual entrepreneur. He had spent months looking for a buyer. That’s why he had been so tight with cash. Not spending on materials or wages made the balance sheet look better than it actually was, and Lennon found a sucker soon enough. The new owner arrived with good intentions and little idea of what he was getting into.

    Dan Smith was a former Navy pilot who made a living buying and selling planes. Why a person with that background would suddenly have an interest in the art industry and trucking was beyond me. I asked him about that the first time we met. “Well, Darick, I thought it would be interesting,” he replied placidly. I assumed he had plenty of money because he had just paid a lot for a hobby.

    Bob Lennon shook everyone’s hand when he left and wished everyone well. He was charming and friendly as usual. I’m sure he did want the best for us, just as much as he wanted to get away with his money as quickly as possible. He was a rascal, but a likable rascal. Many years later I saw him again when he showed up for Anne Truitt’s funeral and paid her his final respects. I appreciated that and shook his hand one last time.

---

    Mr. Smith brought his daughter Sheila in with him, and she became his Number One. They learned as much as they could from the Queen, then got rid of her. Whew! Soon DE was gone as well. They set about learning the business. Because they knew so little about art, they spoke about it with inordinate respect. There was no more “Move this shit,” or “Wrap that shit”; it was ‘The ART’ this and ‘The ART’ that. “Taking care of The ART is very important,” remarked Sheila at one of the first driver meetings she attended. “The ART is—everything!” She might as well have been talking about The Baby Jesus.

    She made a point of going around the warehouse asking questions, especially of John Douglas. “So—tell me: if The Baby Jesus is going on a shuttle, how do you protect Him?”

    “Well, ma’am. If The Baby Jesus is two-dimensional, and isn’t too valuable, we wrap Him in plastic and bubble and strap Him in one of the stacks.”

    “Oh! And that’s enough to protect Him?”

    “Yes, ma’am.”

    One of the certainties of the business was that some Baby Jesuses were more valuable than others. If they increased in value over time, they were treated much better, just like rich people. “And if The Baby Jesus is going to a museum, He’s crated?”

    “Yes, ma’am, most of the time. We have different crate styles depending on what The Baby Jesus needs.”

    “And we charge more for that, of course.”

    “Yes, ma’am. We charge out of the wazoo if we can. But we have to be competitive.”

    “That makes sense,” concluded Sheila.

    John Douglas managed the transition between owners very well. He pretended to have as much respect for the Smiths as they pretended to have respect for the art. Behind Sheila’s back, though, he wondered aloud if she was a virgin.

II

    The downside of the balance sheets Bob Lennon had shown Mr. Smith is that he hadn’t invested in the company for months. Soon the Smiths had to buy all kinds of supplies to keep the place going, and they realized the drivers were underpaid. Their response to the problem was decent. A couple of weeks after they took over, I was invited to Mr. Smith’s office.

    Gone were the art posters and reproductions Bob Lennon kept. In their place were photographs of aircraft carriers and fighter jets. It was an odd look for meetings with museum people. But I heard that Smith was still buying and selling planes, so clients in the defense business must have been right at home.

    “Good afternoon, Mr. Smith,” I said, walking in.

    “Ah, Darick, good; take a seat,” he replied. He leaned back and smiled in his bluff way. He was a big, confident man. “I’ve been asking about you; you and Mike. I’ve been asking about everybody. I’ve been trying to understand who works here and what they do.”

    “I see, okay.”

    “And I’ve heard a lot of good things about you and Mike.”

    Really?

    “I'm told you’re the best. The most efficient. So I’m going to rely on you guys a lot. And frankly you’ve been underpaid. I’m giving you a raise. Two dollars an hour.”

    “That’s good to hear!”

    The change in our fortunes was sudden and surprising. And then gradually, inevitably, everything went to hell. It wasn't the Smith’s fault that the stock market crashed; but they made plenty of other mistakes.

    After the crash of Black Monday October 1987, business receded for a while. The wealthy were suddenly less wealthy. There was less demand for art in New York, the New York shuttles were less full, and fed less to the rest of the country. Everything slowed down. The crate shop had less and less to do. Mr. Smith called a meeting with the drivers one evening to address the problem.

    “You know, guys,” he began, “I am kind of a bridge between two worlds here. So I see things differently than other people in this business. I see The Art side of things, and I see another side. And right now, The Art side isn’t doing too well.”

    Everybody listened.

“And this meeting—look around you—is in the crate shop. The crate shop isn’t doing well. That isn’t good for anybody. If we don’t make crates, we can’t fill trucks to move them. It’s a lose—lose. You guys have nothing to do, and I’m losing the money in my pockets.”

    He jingled the change in his pants. He actually did that.

    “So, I’ve been thinking. The other part of my—business—is doing well. So why not use the demand in the other side of business to support The Art side?”

    He looked over the drivers placidly. “The crates John Douglas makes—those are works of Art!”

    Everybody nodded in agreement.

    “And look at those crates he makes for Anne Truitt—those long crates—for her Art! For those sculptures. And she is such a nice woman.”

    Mr. Smith could not make heads or tails of Anne’s columnar sculptures, but she was polite to him, as she was to everybody. Why was he referring to her crates? “Look at the shape of those long crates—beautiful. And they protect her Art so well. We can use John Douglas’s Art to protect other things, very valuable things. And there is demand for them. We can use John Douglas’s crates for missiles.”

    What?

    Bobby Donovan raised his hand. 

    “Yes, Bobby?”

    “Mr. Smith—Sir—did I just hear you correctly? Did you just say missiles?”

    “Yes, Bobby, I did.”

    “Missiles?”

    “Yes, Bobby. I have a client who needs missile crates. We have a crate shop, doing practically nothing. It’s common sense that one hand helps the other.” He made a balancing motion with upturned palms. “So we can support the Art side with the defense side, until The Art business recovers. And everybody keeps their jobs.”

    Bobby wasn’t finished. “Mr. Smith—Sir—you know the art industry is pretty liberal, right? What you may take as common sense they may take offense at, you know? I mean, if the museum world got wind of the fact that you were building missile crates in the same shop they’re getting their art crates, they would be pretty upset. Their business might go elsewhere. No offense, but that’s the way the art world thinks.”

    “No offense at all, Bobby.”

    “I’m just saying this you know, because what you think logically might be good business could have the opposite effect.”

    “I take your point, Bobby, I take your point,” said Mr. Smith calmly. “I’ll take that under advisement, thank you.” Mr. Smith’s eyes withdrew in detachment, and he said nothing more about the matter. 

III

    In fact Mr. Smith never said anything about the missile crates again. It was strange, considering how revved up he was by the idea. The crate shop puttered along without visible assistance from the military-industrial complex. But other changes were afoot. 

    Artransport began hiring a lot of veterans. That was largely because of Mr. Smith’s career as a pilot, and the veterans deserved work as much as anybody. Most of them were nice guys who wanted to do a good job. But it became obvious that Smith didn’t trust artists and thought most of them were flakes. It began a division in the company—perhaps inevitable—between artist types and trucker types. There were flakes and solid people on both sides. 

---

    Bobby and Arthur had an exhibit in Budapest, Hungary. Arthur was out of the trucking world, but he was in the art world more than ever, pushing boundaries beyond his self-doubt. Bobby was unstoppable as usual. In the world of labor for money, of driving here and there, everything was slow. I called in one Friday to see when the Florida shuttle was loading out.

    “It’s cancelled.”

    “Cancelled?” 

    “There were only eight stops booked. Not enough to justify the trip—so, call back next week, okay?”

    “Are there any locals to do? New York’s?”

    “It’s June: everything’s slow. We have to spread the work around. Just call back next week, okay?”

    I was back into calculating how long I could survive without a check. Then a part-time job came through. I was making a pick-up from the M— Gallery a couple of weeks later when one of its curators asked if I could make a delivery to New York that Saturday.

    “You mean with Artransport?”

    “No, no, no. You. Does Artransport go to New York on Saturday?”

    “No.”

    “Then you, okay?” she concluded.

    “Sure—I’d be glad to.”

    “Just work out a price and be here at 8:00 am Saturday, okay? Good.”

    I showed up Saturday in my car, loaded a couple of Mary Cassatt’s in the back, and delivered to a gallery in the Upper East side. It was pretty simple. The gallery signed a receipt for the paintings from M—, and I was on my way. Monday afternoon I stopped by to pick up my check. The curator greeted me with a smile. “That went pretty well! How would you like a job?”

    I began working at the M— gallery two to three days a week, packing artwork, installing, and lighting exhibits. It was fairly interesting and I was treated well. The owner was a pleasant, confident young man: smooth, smooth, smooth. But the work was too slow and I hated it. When the schedule at Artransport picked up again I quit right away. At the time the M—Gallery was the most prestigious in DC. Phillip showed there. He was one of the lesser-known artists. Sam Gilliam was part of the stable, Jacob Kainen showed there, so did William Christenberry. A couple of years later the gallery collapsed like a cardboard box.

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Chapter Twenty-One

Published April 3, 2026

Bestiality and Jesus.

I

    I was living in a group house in Mount Pleasant at the time with a bunch of other misfits. The head misfit was Tim, my editor at the Unicorn Times. He had the bedroom on the third floor and his own bathroom. I worked hard writing film reviews for the paper in my off-hours and never got paid. The job did get me into movie screenings, and I met and interviewed a lot of famous people in the film world. It was a connection to a higher life—the glimpse of one—and to other writing gigs. Tim’s job editing a monthly was much more prestigious than mine driving trucks, and he made even less money. But he did have prestige, and with the prestige came three girlfriends. The three girlfriends didn’t know about each other at first. The situation became sticky once they did. It was frustrating being a witness to it all because I had trouble keeping even one girlfriend. Tim’s bed was directly above mine, and it squeaked. So I heard everything, every night.

    The saga of Tim’s girlfriends was tied up, in a strange way, with my attempts to get out of the trucking world. Artransport was getting unstable. I wanted to be independent, making a living as a writer. So I tried to use my connection to the Unicorn Times and the clips of my published work to get work with other magazines. Tim used his connection with me to get a job at Artransport.

---

    Girlfriend #1 was a very nice lesbian named Tina who shaved her head. She had been Tim’s steady girlfriend for years until she began swimming in other waters. She had moved out to San Francisco and came back to DC occasionally for business and crashed in Tim’s room. They still made love and weren’t terribly loud. The bed was more expressive than they were. Whenever I came back from a long trip and couldn’t find my keys, Tina threw spares from the third floor with a smile. I liked her a lot.

    Anna, Girlfriend #2, was a redhead from New York who wanted to get married. She was friendly and practical, and looked around the house with a wondering, “What kind of place is this?” expression that a lot of women had when they first showed up. Their lovemaking was louder, as if they both had something to prove.

    “Ooohh—Ahhh!”

    “Oh—Oh—-Oh!”

    Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!

    “Ahhhhhh!”

    But she had nothing on Girlfriend #3. Polly was a typesetter at the Unicorn Times (one of the few people who got paid). She got on my nerves. On a trip to Europe she had observed women who did not bathe as often as Americans and did not wear deodorant. She thought that was cool and followed their example. Walking behind her on the stairs was an experience, especially in the summer. But she was good-looking. Tim couldn’t get enough of her. I was surprised when I came home from a trip one Saturday and found Polly hanging out on the couch. Tim knew I didn’t like her. I pulled him aside.

    “What’s Polly doing here?”

    “She, uh, spent the night with me.”

    “Huh. What about Anna?”

    “She’s in New York for a few days.”

    I tried not to be judgmental. That night I was treated to a concert.

    Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!

    “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

    Squeakkkk!

    “Ahhh! Ohhhh!” “Ahhh!”

    Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak Squeak 

    Squeak!

    Squeak!

    Squeak!

    Squeak!

    Squeeeaaaak!!!

    “Ohhhhh! Aaaahhhhhhh!”

    Silence.

    “Cough-Cough-Cough.” (Tim)

    “Burp.” (Polly)

    Soon I could tell which girlfriend was upstairs by the tenor of squeaks and moans. Polly made it impossible to sleep. Then she hung around the house with her unique bouquet.

---

    I had approached the publisher of In Motion, a film magazine, with a proposal to do two articles a month for $300 apiece. I explained my situation to him and he was sympathetic. I could survive on $600 a month. It was ironic to me that each time I made a bid for freedom I made less money. When I gave up the security guard job to work for Artransport I took a 30% pay cut. If I gave up Artransport for magazine work I’d lose even more. And I had other possible gigs: I'd sent a couple of clips to an advertising agency and they offered me a job immediately. An insurance magazine gave me work all the time. I felt like throwing up each time I turned something in. The editor was a very pretty woman who didn’t take the stuff seriously. She was just moving product. She kept offering me a job as well. But I couldn’t do it. I was afraid of being in a situation where I hated my job and had a crush on my boss. The path out of the trucking world was pretty narrow.

II

    After my agreement with In Motion I began scheduling interviews with filmmakers famous and less famous in LA, DC, Baltimore and New York. It was easy to get time off at Artransport. In Motion especially wanted articles about independents. The world of independent filmmaking had a few gems every year and a lot of coal. I saw both. I respected some directors more than others. I turned the articles in and waited for my checks. The checks didn’t come. So I made an appointment with the publisher. That was the only way to get paid, apparently.

    Each time I met the publisher he took me out to lunch at a fine restaurant in Annapolis and was very friendly. At the end of the meal he gave me a check. It was always short. In the end it cost me more to write for the magazine than I was paid. I had flown to the West Coast and driven to New York over and over again without being reimbursed. The publisher was eventually sued by his printers.

---

    The truth is that the Smiths were fair to both me and Mike and gave us as much work as possible. When there wasn’t work there wasn’t work. Anyhow I was stuck working for them for a while. They hired as many artists as they did veterans, and that was fair as well. I worked with one of the new guys one day on locals. He had just gotten out of the Marines. He had an unusual, flat expression, and was already being called “Fish-Eyes” behind his back. 

    “I’m going to learn what I can on the trucks—everything,” he told me, “and then I’m going into the office.”

    “You want to work in the office?” I was surprised. It never occurred to me that any of the drivers would want to work in the office. All the artists wanted to be rich and famous instead.

    “Yeah, I’ve got to move up. The trucks are a dead-end, really. I want to get into management. If I have to fuck Sheila to get in, I’ll do it.”

    “You’d be willing to sleep with Sheila to get in the office?”

    “If I have to, sure. I’ve faced worse things in the military.”

III

    One of the advantages of working for Artransport, something I’m still grateful for, is that it peeled my eyes open. If I had an illusion about something I was relieved of one assumption after another. That can lead to cynicism—there’s nothing wrong with some cynicism—but it can also lead to more clarity in one’s point of view: freedom from judgment, if that’s possible. At the end of one Midwest shuttle we had an add-on in West Virginia. I was given the news Friday afternoon after we’d done Columbus, and I knew immediately my plans for the weekend were shot.

    The clients were in a remote town in the mountains, and it took hours to get there. We arrived Saturday afternoon. The job was to pick up antique furniture going to Christie’s—a lot of it. We didn’t know how much until we arrived. The furniture was divided between the family shop on the right side of the road and the residence on the left. The Christie’s team had already passed through and done their magic, selecting the best items for auction. We were there to pick up the cream. “Would you like any coffee, young man? Any lunch?” asked the proprietress. She was a nice woman in her late fifties with fading blonde hair. Her husband was equally pleasant. They explained that they were moving to Las Vegas because the desert air would be better for the wife’s arthritis. “We are hoping the change of air will help; and with the blessing of the Lord she will get better. So we are giving up our business here and retiring in the desert.”

    They were a kind couple and very religious. There were pictures of Jesus and crosses everywhere. In the meantime, we had to figure out how to make the pieces with Christie’s stickers fit. We unloaded and re-packed the truck, tightening everything we had picked up already. Then we loaded the largest, heaviest pieces of furniture first— a wardrobe and some dressers from the residence. We built a deck with cross-bars and loaded lighter items from the store above everything else: chairs, side tables, a spinning loom. By 6:00 pm we were ready. The couple made us a nice dinner and sent us off. “Our future is in your truck now: that auction helps our retirement. God bless you guys!”

    We drove through the twisty roads of Cumberland in the rain and arrived at the warehouse after midnight. Then we had to unload the truck. Everything felt heavier. Eventually we got to the dressers from the residence. We were so tired we decided to remove their drawers before lifting them up. When I opened the first drawer it was full of sweaters.

    “Damn. They forgot to pack their clothes.”

    Beneath the sweaters, beneath the clothes in every drawer, was porn. Men’s clothes, women’s clothes. I had never seen anything like it. The magazines had the most disgusting images I’d ever seen. It was blonde on bear stuff. It had to be illegal. The bear screwed the blonde every which way. The bear licked between her legs. The blonde licked the bear. It must have been a very well-trained bear. 

    “I don’t want to embarrass them, do you?” I asked Mike.

    “No, I don’t want to embarrass them,” he replied.

    We packed the clothes into bags and left a note for the office to send them to West Virginia. I supposed the couple would figure something was up when they received their clothing, but the less said the better. We threw the porn in the dumpster and didn’t mention it to anyone. But I thought about our little discovery as I drove home that Sunday morning. A few things turned over in my mind.

    Was the blonde model the husband’s projection of his wife?

    Did the wife with the fading hair share in the fantasy? Was she into bears?

    How did they reconcile bestiality with devotion to Jesus and the cross?

    These are questions no one can answer.

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Chapter Twenty-Two

Published April 10, 2026

“That woman makes a living off her body.”

I

    I discovered her secret because she had a habit of leaving little poems around the kitchen. I often found them in the morning when I was making coffee and tried to forget them. One Saturday I noticed a new ditty and read it right before she came down for breakfast:

    It was inevitable that Tim’s girlfriends would find out about each other. Anyway, as far as I could tell, he didn’t change the sheets much. Tina, with the shaved head, withdrew gracefully and stopped coming over. She had slept with him out of affection and old time’s sake and didn’t have an agenda. Anna, with the red hair, gave him an ultimatum and listed the benefits of a family and a better publishing job in New York. But Tim couldn’t get enough of Polly, and that was that. Then it turned out that Polly was already married.

    I wanted security

    —so I got married

    I wanted a long-term relationship

    —so I got a dog

    I wanted love

    —so I had a baby

    Then I wanted my freedom

    —so I moved to Africa!

    “Hey, Polly, you’re not leaving your dog with us when you go to Africa, are you?” I chided her. She blushed slightly and turned her face. Something was up. “Are you married?” I asked.

    She confessed that she was. The story she told, and its aftermath, revealed something noble in her. She had fallen in love with an Iranian boy in high school and they eloped in Ft. Lauderdale. He was from an aristocratic family that had escaped from the revolution. Polly’s mother put an end to the marriage after she found out and both went back to school. Eventually the boy discovered he was gay, and they remained friends. But as the years went on the revolution back home didn’t crumble, and her friend was in a predicament. He needed papers to stay in America. Gay men in Iran were treated brutally. So she had recently offered to marry him again in the full eyes of God and the law. “Then we’re going to move to San Francisco and start a family,” she explained.

    “You and your husband?”

    “And his boyfriend.”

    That left Tim out in the cold. On top of that the Unicorn Times had just gone under and with it the lynchpin of my writing career. The publisher became a motorcycle courier. My editor Tim and his typesetter girlfriend were both out of work and couldn’t pay rent. Tim asked me to get him a job at Artransport.

    He was raring to go to San Francisco. Polly and her husband (and his boyfriend) moved there after a big Persian wedding. Tim volunteered for every shuttle going west. He was away for weeks to and from California and was able to fit in two days of sex every trip. That went on for half a year. But he couldn’t get enough of Polly. He decided to move west himself. He quit his job at Artransport and offered to buy my old VW van for six hundred dollars. Tim used it to move his stuff to San Francisco and I bought an old Peugeot from Arthur for fifty dollars to replace it. But by the time Tim made it to California Polly had found herself a girlfriend. Tim ended up sleeping on the floor and had to listen to them making out. Polly’s husband and his lover were in the other room.

II

    One of the Smith’s new hires was a veteran named Ed and a complete nut. I had a bad feeling about him when I walked by the table where he was being interviewed and saw his manic enthusiasm. Yes, he wanted the job—he was ready for anything! He kept puffing on a cigarette. Luckily, he wasn’t assigned to me. He was scheduled on a New England run with a very calm young artist named Paul. Paul was a methodical worker who always got the job done. His new partner was the opposite of calm. It was a Yin and Yang situation, except that Yang brought a knife.

    The trouble began Monday when they had finished their stops in New Jersey and still had to drive across the Tappan Zee bridge. “I’m not going anywhere,” announced Ed.

    “Why not? We have to be in Greenwich first thing in the morning.”

    “I had enough of this shit on the military. I didn’t become a civilian to pretend I was in the military again. We should be working eight to five. We began at five o’clock this morning and now it’s five o’clock in the afternoon. How crazy is that? I’m done.”

    “Unless we drive across the bridge we’re going to be behind schedule.”

    “Fuck the schedule.” At that point Ed brandished his knife. It was military-grade, designed to slice and puncture the human body in many efficient ways. The next morning Ed called the dispatcher.

    “Morning. It’s Ed.”

    “Hey, Ed, can I talk to Paul?”

    “Paul’s in the truck. In the passenger seat.”

    “Okay, can I talk to him?”

    “I’ve taken command of the shuttle, sir.” 

    “What?”

    Ed’s terms were simple: Hours 8:00-5:00, nothing more, and at a pace he determined. Paul wasn’t allowed to call in. Every so often he was shown the knife to remind him who was in charge. The truck rolled into the warehouse four days later. Mr. Smith and a dispatcher were waiting on the dock with baseball bats. At that point, somewhat reluctantly, Smith began to understand that veterans could be at least as unhinged as artists. In general, though, the artists were stable and worked very hard.

III

    A few months later Bing and I were having a hard time in New York. It was Friday. The dispatcher who had planned the trip didn’t know the city at all. He had stops arranged north to south on avenues one way north. He didn’t know the flow of east-west streets either. On top of that we had stops all over the place: Manhattan, Long Island City, Astoria. We arrived at our last pick up in Soho at 7:00 pm, an hour behind schedule. We were exhausted. But we had to do the stop: the artist had a solo show in Missouri and her works were being delivered Monday on the California shuttle. They were loading out Sunday morning. As we rode the elevator up, I studied the bill of lading. There were thirty-five framed pieces to pick up. No sizes were given. We were screwed.

    “Do you have any idea who Hannah Wilke is?” I asked Bing.

    “No, man. I have no idea.”

    The elevator let us out on the third floor, and I knocked on the artist’s door. Moments later we heard footsteps and the door swung open. Immediately we saw a black and white photograph of a beautiful nude crouching with her legs spread wide. It was above the entry table. The text along the image read:

    What do you see?

    How does it make you feel?

    “Hi guys!” Hannah Wilke popped in from behind the door. My eyes met her face. At the same time—forgive me for being a man—I was thinking of the image of her crotch a couple feet away. From the way her lips curled she knew what I was thinking. “Do you guys need some coffee?”

    “Yes, ma’am, coffee would be great,” replied Bing. “And—do you mind if we look around to see what we’re taking?”

    “Oh, sure—feel free. Everything’s marked.” She walked toward her kitchen. Our eyes followed her.

    “Wow,” mumbled Bing. “Wow.”

    I don’t think I had ever been affected so immediately by a woman. It wasn’t just because of the images of her all over the apartment. I looked toward the kitchen, then Bing and I took stock of the load. There were thirty-five stickered photographs of Hannah Wilke in different poses—some brazen—and with different props. They were very large nudes. As a nude she was stunning. The work was shocking. She meant to shock so that viewers would think about the reason they were shocked. She used irony in her depiction of herself and her sexuality. The work was very intelligent. And it all had to be wrapped. It was after 7:00 pm, and we had five to six hours of work ahead of us.

    Bing whispered: “This should have been an exclusive-use, man; an ex-use! They can’t expect us to wrap this on a shuttle! They just pile it on!”

    I agreed. “It should have been an ex-use.” But it wasn’t.

    “Hey, guys,” said a mild-looking man with glasses who walked in from the bedroom. He watched us measuring the frames and the naked glory they contained. Then Hannah appeared with two steaming cups of coffee. Her presence brought another rush: yet it seemed perfectly natural. She was dressed comfortably in loose clothes, wore no make-up, and had a buzzy friendliness. Her boyfriend smiled as he watched us following her around. She showed us out to a balcony-fire escape so we could talk for a few minutes in the air.  She was relieved we had shown up, even late. “The show is so important to me—it’s a big step. I’m really excited! Is it going to make it in time?” It had to. Seeing how exhausted we were, she agreed—after a polite suggestion from Bing—to let us take the frames to the truck unpacked. We’d wrap them in the warehouse when we got to DC. It was surprising how trusting she was. She and her boyfriend even helped us load. An hour later, after many trips relaying the photographs to the back of the truck, the visit was over. Hannah signed the paperwork and said goodbye.

    I have thought about the evening for many years. I wondered about Hannah’s effect on me when we were in the apartment, and I wondered about her effect as we were driving out of the city. There is no doubt she was beautiful. She was lovelier in person than in any photograph. But her beauty was enhanced by something else—call it intelligence, call it charm. The funny thing is, I met many beautiful women in the art world over the years who were charming. When the encounters were over, I often felt manipulated in some way, consciously or unconsciously. Yet with Hannah Wilke I didn’t feel any manipulation at all. 

IV

    After a logjam through the Lincoln tunnel, we got sandwiches and more coffee on the turnpike. We arrived at West Virginia Avenue at 2:30 in the morning, made more coffee, unloaded the truck, and began to wrap the photographs after we laid out blankets. About twenty frames in, there was an image of her sunbathing with a middle-aged man.

    “That’s Claes Oldenburg!” declared Bing. “Now I recognize her! She was Oldenburg’s girlfriend!”

    “Not anymore.” 

    Another hour went by. Sunlight streamed through the windows of the office. At 7:00 am, a key turned in the main door. It creaked open. John Douglas walked in with Lap and another crate shop guy.

    “What are you guys doing here?” demanded John Douglas.

    “We’re working! We’ve been wrapping all night. It was a crazy New York. What are you guys doing here?” I asked John. “I thought the crate shop was slow.”

    John Douglas put his hands on his hips. “We’re working, young man,” he replied sternly.

    “Okay.”

    Lap walked over to the A-frame cart where we had placed some of the Hannah Wilke photographs that still needed to be wrapped. He studied them. “That woman makes a living off her body,” he concluded. I didn’t think that was fair, but I knew where he was coming from. He was very practical. The woman was beautiful, took photographs of herself, and sold them for money. But above all she was brave. As she was dying a few years later she also took photographs of herself. Her body was ravaged by cancer, and the beauty she documented was in her soul.

---

    Bing and I wrapped for another hour. John Douglas and the other two guys stood around watching us. It was strange. They were obviously waiting for us to leave. I wondered again why they were working on a Saturday when there weren’t enough orders to keep them busy during the week. Then I remembered the meeting about the missile crates.

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Chapter Twenty-Three

Published April 17, 2026

Art is an accoutrement of power.

I

    I began doing stops at Roy Lichtenstein’s studio on Washington Street. It was a Mad Hatter playground. His assistants—oh, my God, the women there—were gorgeous. My heart lifted whenever I saw the address on the top sheet. Little changes like that, new encounters with art and artists I hadn’t met, made the job worthwhile, even as the company gradually, very gradually, fell apart.

    For a while there was a Rapture fad. A few artists, mostly in Brooklyn, painted bubble-like souls ascending through subways and moving cars as chaos exploded on the Earth below. The idea faded away and the Earth remained pretty much as it was. Sotheby’s had sales of antique carrousel horses. The objects must have sat forgotten for decades and decades. Then marketing and presentation made them valuable suddenly. They were shipped all over the country. A particularly worm-eaten deer with antlers—it was unique!—went to a collector in Wisconsin. A woman in Birmingham acquired a herd of figures. There were 300-series BMWs in her driveway for her children, 700-series for the adults, one mansion for her family, another establishment next door for her carrousel dream. Horses lived in every room.

    I never doubted the country was fabulously wealthy because so much money was wasted on whims every day. That money paid for my livelihood, such as it was. And my connection to art, simply by handling it, gave me access to extraordinary places—and I am nobody. 

---

    Art is an accoutrement of power. It has a beauty and quality of its own, and at its best is unworldly. That is one reason worldly power covets it. Having great art is like living with a blessing. In the government, people in high positions were allowed to choose their blessings. Officials in the cabinet could select from work in storage at the Museum of American Art or the Portrait Gallery. Much of it is spectacular. There were strict security protocols one had to follow to bring paintings from the bowels and attics of the Smithsonian to the offices of the political elite.

    To begin with the local dispatcher gave our social security numbers and dates of birth to a functionary at the other end. Who knows what information the government keeps on everyone. Any driver delivering an artwork was investigated a couple of days in advance, and either approved or not. (A pool of handlers at the company was never let in.) On the day of the appointment, we picked up the selection from the museum. Invariably cabinet secretaries choose paintings for political reasons. A Secretary of Agriculture thought it prudent to decorate his suite with images of American farms—so it was cows this, cows that. He did select a Thomas Hart Benton, though; I’ll give him some credit.

    Once you arrive to make the delivery there is more security. The truck is inspected, you are inspected, your ID is checked: and you wait. At some point you are approved to bring the artwork, and your equipment, and yourselves, to the elevator: and up you go. Then you approach the reception area of the official, deal with an assistant or two, and wait some more. Usually, the door to the inner sanctum is closed, and mysterious things are going on there. You wait, until finally the door opens.

    What do these layers of security protect? Dervishes of intelligence and charm. That was my experience. Politicians of one kind or another inhabit the highest reaches of influence, and politicians know how to be liked. One evening I delivered to the new Secretary of Labor. My partner and I had gone through the usual procedures and waited and waited. I was tired and wishing for a cup of coffee. Suddenly Ann McLaughlin popped out.

    “Hey, guys—how are you doing? Come on in!”

    We brought in a portrait and unwrapped it.

    “Oh, good!” she said. “There she is. You know, I’m only the second woman to be Secretary of Labor. So I thought: I should honor Francis Perkins, the first Secretary of Labor—the first woman in this position. You know? What do you think?”

    She was engaging, pleasant, and behaved as if she were thrilled to meet us. We were members of the public, not just servants. She made sure to leave a good impression because that impression went into the world. 

II

    We installed artwork in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Capital, the Federal Reserve. They all got a piece—temporarily—of the nation’s trove. Sometime later I made a delivery to an intelligence facility. After the truck was inspected the artwork was scanned. We were scanned. Then we had to weigh ourselves. If one’s weight went up or down more than two pounds during the visit, it was possible something was being snuck in or out.

    We were each assigned an escort. Mine was a pretty marine with bobbed hair, and she followed me everywhere, even the bathroom—nothing was left to chance. With all that the atmosphere was friendly. The director had chosen a group of paintings with bold colors and images—landscapes, figurative work, abstracts. It was like nothing else I’d brought to a government agency, and I realized it was because he did not have a constituency to appease. The Labor Department displayed WPA paintings of workers and factories; Transportation had railroads and cars and planes; the Pentagon had portraits of generals and military parades and a few battles—you get the idea. The Smithsonian doesn’t have many paintings of spies and assassinations and attempted coups. So, the director got to choose anything he wanted.

    We brought everything up to the director’s suite. His staff was excited by the artwork. Work seemed to stop. The director was away at some meetings. We unwrapped the paintings and placed them in different rooms. The director would make final decisions about the installations whenever he was ready: in the meantime, we played around. The marine wondered if an impressionistic landscape would look good in the dining room. 

    “Wait a minute,” I told her. “I’ll bring one here.”

    “Okay.”

    Moments later she ran after me. “You’re so baaaaaad!” She glanced over with minx eyes. “You tried to trick me!”

    Together we brought the painting back to the dining room and leaned it against the wall so she could admire it. We sat down at the table, and she ordered coffee and cakes. Other members of the staff joined us. The marine told me about where she had been stationed around the world and asked about other agencies I’d delivered to and whom I’d met. Every so often she’d look up from her coffee and smile: “Really? You’ve been there?”

III

    I borrowed one of the company’s vans to move Arthur and his family from the Lafayette to a duplex in Arlington—he was making more money with the security job and had been promoted into management. Adam finally got his own room. The living-dining area of the new place became Arthur’s studio. But I found that the old Peugeot he sold me was only drivable for half an hour at a time. It barely got me to work before it overheated. At the end of the day, I had to fill the radiator again to skate home. The car wasn’t exactly girl friendly. I couldn’t take it on dates. So, I got rid of it after a few months and bought an old sports car from another friend that was marginally more reliable. Out west Tim had gotten on his feet. He started a tabloid called Film Month in San Francisco, and I started writing for it. My old VW died nobly on a hill while he was making deliveries of the paper to a coffee shop. Tim eventually found a two-bedroom apartment on Castro Street with his old lesbian girlfriend Tina. In the meantime, Polly met another guy and got pregnant. The last time Tim saw her she was pushing a carriage.

    Every so often Mike and I did a Midwest shuttle again. The route was the same, the museums the same, but the collectors were different. Our old clients had moved on after the Queen took the shuttle away from us. One day we did a pickup for the Portrait Gallery from the descendants of Howard Chandler Christy. An eight-year-old girl watched over us as we packed.

    “I am Howard Chandler Christy’s great-granddaughter. He was very famous.”

    “I know him,” I told her. “He did a portrait of Scott Fitzgerald—and Zelda.”

    “Who’s that?”

    “A writer.”

    “Did he write ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’?”

    “No.”

    She lost interest. “Anyhow Howard Chandler Christy, my great-grandfather, is very famous. Why do you have paint on your shoes?” she asked Mike.

    “Because I’m a painter.”

    She crossed her arms. “Are you the one who cut off his ear for his girlfriend?”

---

    One of the new hires was a Canadian artist obsessed with sex. He was very intense. The work he did was erotic and tinged with sexual politics. One image he showed me was of a half-naked woman wearing long stockings and a sneer. It was called “Klaut.”

    “What do you think of it?” he asked.

    “It’s good,” I replied. "Your work would be perfect for Playboy or Penthouse. It reminds me of Vargas—you know: Playboy publishes him all the time.”

    “Vargas isn’t art. What I do is art.”

    “Okay.” I couldn’t tell the difference. “Anyhow, all I’m saying is that if you want to sell it—they’d be a perfect market.”

    “Playboy and Penthouse don’t publish art.”

    The Canadian had a tall, pretty girlfriend with a good job. She pulled in most of the money while he did his artwork and drove a truck. For a lot of guys, it was an enviable arrangement. He had plenty of time to paint. But my new associate found the situation frustrating. One morning while we were loading the New York shuttle he was more intense than usual, veins popping on his forehead. “How are you doing?” I asked him as we drove north.

    “It’s been three days, man,” he replied.

    “Three days from what?”

    “Without sex.”

    “Oh.” That didn’t sound so bad. 

    “I mean, isn’t that part of the deal? The deal?”

    “I guess so. It depends on how often you’re supposed to have sex.”

    “But three days? That’s not part of the deal, man. If you’re with a woman sex is part of the deal.”

    “How often?”

“Whenever.

    “You mean, whenever you want it?”

    “Yeah, that’s the deal, right?”

    I kept on driving. By the end of the second day, I was worried about his blood pressure. His forehead was red, and by then—he was keeping count—it had been five days. But when his girlfriend arrived to pick him up, he was bouncy and pretended everything was fine. “Hi, honey!” he called out. He kissed her on the cheek.

    She eyed him coolly. “How was your trip.”

    “It was fine!” He loaded his bags into her car, and they drove off. I was amazed at how many guys at Artransport found girlfriends willing to support them. That was not one of my talents. All the women I went out with told me I should be making more money.

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Chapter Twenty-Four

Published April 24, 2026

The most segregated island in America.

I

    Tom Morris nailed a Dupont heiress and moved to Georgetown. I don't know what her family thought about her hooking up with an artist, but they put a good face on the situation when they announced the wedding. The groom was an “artist working in the medium of oil.” He continued driving part-time on the trucks, was an amiable partner and drew sketches all day. But the job seemed like a hobby to him, just as owning Artransport seemed like hobby to Mr. Smith. At driver meetings Smith continued complaining about how much we were costing him and jingled the change in his pockets to make the point. The new regime was getting on my nerves.

    One of Smith’s brilliant ideas was not to pay our per diems up front. This improved his cash flow. On a Florida shuttle I did with Mike we were given enough money to pay for two days of food and hotels—that is, Sunday and Monday. After that we had to find a truck stop to get a wire transfer. Most of our jobs were in southern Florida, and southern Florida was not known for its truck stops. The truck depots were north on 95, away from the rich people. We stretched our money to Thursday morning, then we were broke. We woke up in a cheap motel in Lake Worth with instant oatmeal and coffee for breakfast. No cash for lunch.

    We had an appointment at 1:00 pm to deliver to the northern spit of Palm Beach. It was the third Joan Mitchell I had handled. We were instructed to install it. 

    Palm Beach is one of the most segregated places in America. The richest of the rich live there, and no one else counts. There were traffic snarls to and from the island twice a day. In the morning servants going to work crowded the bridges east; after five o’clock they jammed the bridges going west. After-hours only the elite and their most trusted vassals remained. I would not count the vassals as lucky people, but they did not have to travel as much. We crossed over at mid-day with a few scattered cars. At route A1A we made a left and cruised north. We passed fancy resorts like Mar-A-Lago and The Breakers as Palm Beach went from thin to thick to thinner again. A1A became North County Road. The houses became more secluded.

    The predominant colors on the island were white, green, and blue: white clouds and beach, cool sky, glistening ocean, palm trees and lawns. The wealthy paid for privacy and had plenty of it. Some of the houses were beautiful. Money paid for architects. As the land seemed to forget itself back to nature we arrived at the address on the top sheet. It was a place along the water with glass walls reflecting shore and sky. The reflections camouflaged the interior. A butler completed the appearance of ease. He met us in the driveway.

    “We’ve been expecting you,” he said graciously.

    “Oh my God, it’s the Joan Mitchell!” exclaimed the lady of the house. “I’m so excited!” She ran out from the garage, said hello, thanked us, thanked the butler, and ran back inside. She told us it was going to the living room. She was one of those unpretentious rich people who came up from nothing and was very likable. She had a strong Jersey accent. Whether her accent and manner were accepted by posh people on the island I don’t know. She was probably richer than most of them, and her butler had the right accent. He was English.

    “Will you gentlemen require any assistance with the painting?” he inquired.

    “Oh, no, we’re fine,” I replied. “It isn’t heavy. We’ll bring it in and bring our tools; then unwrap it.”

    “Oh: I wouldn’t unwrap it just yet.” A shadow passed over his face. “Her husband has not seen the painting. He must approve. He is flying in. Would you like some iced tea?”

    “Maybe we should leave the plastic on,” I suggested.

    “That would be appropriate.”

    We opened the back of the truck, removed the Joan Mitchell, and carried it toward the front door. The walkway around the house was unusual. It was made from coral and looked like sliced brains. There was a breeze, and the combination of light and shadow as we passed from awning to awning was pleasant. The lady met us at the front door.

    “Oh, thank you, guys! Can you put it over there, on the other side of the living room?”

    The room was sunken, so we carried the painting down one set of steps and up another. Between windows on the west was a wall just large enough for the piece. We leaned it against the plaster facing out.

    “Can I see it?” she asked.

    We removed the cardboard and bubble, leaving only the plastic. It had a sheen. “Oh, it’s lovely!” she exclaimed. “I can’t quite see it right.”

    “The uh, gentleman told us to leave the plastic on until your husband arrives?”

“Oh, he’s right! But can you take it off and put it on again so I can see it?”

    “I'm making iced tea for the young men, madam,” the butler called out from the kitchen.

    “Oh, that’s so nice of you, Harvey—really!”

    We removed the plastic from the painting and held it up in all its glory.

    “Oh, it’s beautiful—fantastic. And that wall is perfect. Just how I imagined it. But can you wrap it in the plastic again? So my husband won’t think I’m being presumptuous. He told me I could bring it here on spec, but it costs a lot of money.”

    We did as she asked, and she walked into the study to answer the phone. She came back worried. “His flight’s delayed. Can you guys hang out for a few hours? Do you have the time?”

    We did not have a stowaway with us this time and had gotten ahead of schedule. We did not tell her we were starving and had to survive on the tea.  She showed us comfortable chairs looking out at the ocean. She explained that her husband worked in finance and was the kind of person who moved around millions of dollars at a time. He had flown up for some meetings.

    We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the sea and the sky and the clouds. Every so often the butler would bring us more tea and some crackers. He was in a very good mood and was humming all the time. “Someone is going to make a lot of money today!” he sang. “A lot of money!” 

    I looked after him. “Really?”

    “On word of the lady. She likes you two.”

    Just after six o’clock, as the light shifted gold, a Jaguar pulled into the driveway and maneuvered around the truck. A man in a suit got out, glanced at our Mercedes, and shook his head. The butler helped with his luggage. “Hey, guys,” the husband nodded politely as he passed by. The moment had come. We followed him to the front door as his wife greeted him effusively. He was tired.

    “See, honey—it’s over there!”

    “What.”

    “The Joan Mitchell painting! Remember, we talked about it?”

    “Oh, yeah.”

    “Come see it, okay?”

    She led him to the living room, down one set of steps and up another. He was carrying a briefcase. “You see, honey? It's a beautiful Joan Mitchell. She's one of the greats. The plastic is still on until you approve.”

    He studied the painting. “Okay. It’s fine.”

    “Really? You like it?”

    “Sure.”

    “Oh, thank you, honeeey! I’ll tell the gallery.”

    “Okay.” He walked into another room.

    “Quick—quick!” The woman whispered to us. “Install it before he changes his mind, okay?”

    We unwrapped the plastic, held up the painting silently to the height she wanted, moved it out of the way and did some measurements. We tapped a couple of florets into the wall and hung it.

    “Oh, good!” she exclaimed. “Good, good, good!”

    The butler nodded. He also approved.

    “Where’s my TV, honey?” The husband walked out clutching The Wall Street Journal. He was wearing a bathrobe.

    The butler, looking alarmed, rushed to the back somewhere. The lady explained: “We moved it because we were cleaning. Harvey'll bring it back! What do you think of the painting?”

    “It looks great. You always have good taste.” The man glanced at it somberly and walked back to his study. Shortly afterwards the butler brought in the TV.

    “Do you have a Bill of Lading for me to sign?” the lady of the house asked triumphantly.

    She put her signature down with a big smile and pulled two hundred dollars bills out from her purse. “I’m giving you guys this on one condition,” she said.

    “Yes?”

    “That you buy yourselves a good dinner—okay? There's a fantastic Thai place in West Palm that’s my favorite! Will you go there—for me?”

II

    I’m not sure money changes anybody. It can bring out the best and worse in us like a spice, but the essential qualities of a person rule one way or the other. I had a good experience in Palm Beach with a wealthy couple, and a couple of months later I had one that was uncomfortable. The second experience involved something called “stressed furniture.” You may be wondering what that means. I had no idea myself until I saw the items on a bill of lading one day. I was picking up from a warehouse north of Washington, D.C. Inside was a little torture chamber.

    The moment I walked in I heard: “Wham! Wham!” A couple of guys in polo shirts were whacking a settee with chains. They looked like Romans educating a slave. A woman with a clipboard kept an eye on them. “Hey, Mark, that left armrest needs a bit more work. After that move to a smaller chain to even things out.”

    “Okay.”

    I showed the woman the bill of lading, and she said, “Oh, yeah, the summery suite. Follow me.” Down the chamber was a collection of a sofa, armchairs, and a coffee table with scarred wood and bright green upholstery that looked like it had been nibbled by rats. “It’s ready,” she announced. “We finished yesterday.” Further down was a shipment of new furniture that hadn’t been ravaged yet. Otherwise, there was nothing interesting about it.

    “You guys will take care of the furniture, right? You’re supposed to be the guys who know how to handle everything.”

    “We’ll make sure it arrives the way it is. Everything will be protected with blankets and strapped in.”

    “Okay, good. This client takes her antiquing very seriously. She’s very particular.”

    I have to say that the stress on the furniture was done evenly and with perfect justice. Nothing was unharmed, and everything was harmed equally. This niche in the furniture market was an interesting perversion. We backed the truck in, loaded the furniture carefully, and covered it with blankets. The woman with the clipboard was satisfied. 

    The next week I delivered it with one of the new army veterans. He couldn’t get over how people paid to have their furniture damaged. He thought the whole art business was crazy. We came to an address in a neighborhood of mansions without a view. The ocean was a couple of blocks away. The garage door was open, and a seedy-looking man in a white leisure suit walked out to greet us. “So what you got? The furniture?”

    “Yeah, it’s the stressed furniture from Maryland.”

    “That shit. The old lady told me about it. She’s expecting it.”

    “Where would you like it?”

    “The garage.”

    “Okay.” We made a show of bringing each piece out carefully, lowering them on the lift gate, and carrying them inside.

    “Is this everything?” the guy asked skeptically. As he leaned over the sofa, I saw a gun holstered under the jacket. He didn’t seem to mind my seeing the gun, but buttoned the jacket anyway once he stood upright. 

    “It’s everything.”

    “Well, I gotta get the lady. She wants to do her inspection.”

    He called into the house. A few minutes later a woman with helmet hair and a stiff bra walked out. Her eyebrows lifted when she saw the summery suite. “Did it arrive in good condition, Frank?”

    “Well, it looks stressed, ma’am.”

    “There’s stress and there’s stress. This is a very delicate operation. It has to be done right.”

    “Yes, ma’am. Well, it looks like it was all handled carefully. I watched the guys.”

    She ran her fingers, with long white nails, over the scratched and notched wood. “It looks all right. It can come inside.”

    “Where would you like it?” I asked.

    She waved me and the veteran away like flies. “You don’t need them,” she told her man. “Just get your guys and bring it all to the parlor facing the garden.” She went back into the house.

    “I got to get off this fucking island,” the man complained as he signed the paperwork. “You guys hiring? After all I been through, I never thought I’d end up watching over that old lady and her fake tits.”

---

    The schedule changed and was ever the same. On a trip to New York one morning, I saw a truck passing us with long horizontal boxes strapped to its flatbed. They reminded me of missile crates. I wondered if John Douglas had built them. They had the form and elegance he demanded. Yet I never saw one being made. Monday through Friday he built the usual painting and sculpture crates when work came in, and everything seemed normal. But the crate shop was clean most of the time, and no one was laid off. A lot of drivers wondered how the shop kept going at all. Some evenings, after a long day, I glanced into the room with silent saws and thought about missile crates made in secret. At the same time, I dismissed the idea entirely. Why would Smith do something that stupid? The museums would be furious if they found out—and that would be the end of that. His business would fail.

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Chapter Twenty-Five

Published May 1, 2026

Artists and girlfriends and money.

I

    One reason I did New York trips repeatedly, even two or three times a week, was that I had a girlfriend there for a while. We met on the trucks. She was the courier on a shipment from a museum in New York to one in DC and had mentioned she didn’t know Washington. I gave her my number in case she wanted a tour. I didn’t expect anything to come from it, but a couple of hours later, just as I got home, the phone rang.

    “So: you want to show me around?”

    Soon, I was going to New York as often as possible, and she came down to DC once a month. Nothing motivated me to work long hours as much as the promise of intimacy at the end of the day. I wasn’t the only one. A few guys met their girlfriends and future wives when the women rode along as couriers on shipments of art. When members of the opposite sex are stuck in tight quarters toward a common destination, things can happen.

    Jesse, the Zen master of the California shuttle, met his future wife when she rode along as a courier on shorter trip, and lost his independence very happily. A new guy named Kyle struck gold once in the courier sweepstakes. He had great self-confidence and was proud to show me all his new work. One slide of was of a big canvas he’d just finished.  “It’s worth fifteen thousand dollars,” he pronounced. “That’s what I’m going to charge.”

    “Okay.”

    A month later he showed me another slide. “This one is worth twenty-thousand dollars.” As far as I know he had never sold anything. But the riches kept piling up in his studio. One morning he showed up at the dock especially pleased with himself and pulled me aside. “Can I tell you a secret?” he asked.

    “Sure.”

    “You can’t tell anyone. It’s a secret, okay?”

    “I won’t tell anyone.”

    He looked around to make sure no one was listening. “I did a Dulles run last night: picked up this painting and a British courier. She’s director of a gallery in London. She’s hot.”

    “Oh, that’s cool.”

    “So we dropped off the painting and we drove her to her hotel. As a courtesy, you know?”

    “Uh-huh.”

    “You know what she whispered to me before she got out of the truck?”

    “What?”

    “She said, ‘When I saw your fingers on the steering wheel, I knew I wanted you inside me.’  She said that. She wants to fuck me. Tonight.”

    “Wow, that’s great! Very impressive.”

    “Yeah, so I'm going to wear my best sports jacket and a tie, and get her flowers, and—do you think two hundred dollars will be enough for dinner?”

    “That should cover it.”

    “Good. And I’m going to get my Alfa out of the shop. I want to treat her right before we have sex.”

    “Good plan, man, good plan.” He was a romantic at heart. His red Alfa was mostly beautiful to look at, and persnickety on the road. It spent most of its life getting repairs.

    Twenty minutes later another guy came up to me on the dock. “Do you know what happened to Kyle last night? It’s a secret.”

    “What?”

    “He picked up this British courier, and she said, ‘When I saw your fingers on the steering wheel, I knew—’”

    “Oh, yeah, he told me.”

    “I thought it was a secret!”

    “It was until he started bragging about it.”

    The date that evening was successful (the details were very secret, and he told them all over the place). Kyle and the gallery director had a thing for over a year, with him going to London and her visiting in the States. He showed me photos of her in his Alfa. She was gorgeous. Eventually it fizzled out. She had prestige and money, and he did not. She was also a lot more mature.

II

    In general, I was wise enough not to date women who were well-off. Rich girls had certain expectations. It doesn’t mean they weren’t nice. But I couldn’t pretend to be something I wasn’t or that I was destined to be rich. After I had finally gotten a place of my own, I brought a date over and heard her mutter as she looked around: “Lower middle-class.” I never forgot that and obviously the relationship didn’t last. 

    Once I did ask out a young woman who ran the local office of one of the auction houses. She had been the winner two years straight of a poll I had started among the drivers: Who is the most beautiful registrar in Washington? (We called all women who worked in museums and art galleries registrars.) The auction house lady won hands down, time after time. I had a crush on her and she was friendly. So, I asked her out to one of Bobby’s openings. She showed up with her brother for protection. He had just come from a polo game and was wondering what he was doing there. I knew immediately I had made a mistake.

    After Tom Morris married the DuPont heiress, he brought her along to studio parties that Mike gave a couple of times. She was pleasant but seemed uncomfortable. Then Tom started coming alone. His wife ran in different social circles and didn’t mix with riff-raff like us. Eventually they got divorced and he married another heiress and that didn’t last either. My strong impression was that the wealthy were friendly to poorer artists as long as we were servants. Arthur and Bobby had wives who were jewels. They didn’t come from money.

III

    One reason I left the security guard job to begin art handling for less pay was to get out of wearing a uniform. I hated uniforms: they were humiliating to me. But Mr. Smith decided to bring them into use after a few months. He didn't like the way the artists dressed and wanted to ‘professionalize’ the crew. How dressing up his drivers in janitor outfits was supposed to impress museums and rich clients, I don’t know. We really looked like janitors. Our shirts were made of rough gray polyester that didn’t breathe. Each had an Artransport logo, and the name of the driver imprinted on it. The pants were equally uncomfortable and had an unnamable mix of brown, gray, and green to cover up grease. Whenever we appeared at a client’s house they no longer asked for our names. They glanced at the tags on our shirts and mouthed, “Hello, uh—Darick; hello, uh—Bobby.”

    Smith was very proud of the deal he made to get the uniforms and have them cleaned every week. He jingled the change in his pockets show how much money he was saving. We were each assigned lockers full of company kit. Every morning we changed into the uniform, loaded the trucks, and drove away. Then we stopped a few blocks away from the warehouse and changed into our regular clothes again. Smith got wind of it after he started sending questionnaires to clients.

    How was Artransport’s service? Professional? Friendly?

    Did the shipment arrive on time and in good condition?

    How well does the driver’s uniform present the company?

    Some clients sent back: What uniforms? So, the office began pairing artists with veterans more and more. The veterans didn’t mind wearing uniforms and thought it was silly of the artists to moan about their dignity. Every so often I heard a dispatcher whisper to my partner at the end of the day: “Was he wearing his uniform at every stop?” 

    In the middle of this Smith announced the company was moving again. It was an efficiency measure. The new warehouse was in Jessup, Maryland, a town of warehouses and truck stops off Interstate 95. It was another large, consolidated space with heating and air conditioning. The office was in the front of the warehouse. Smith and Sheila had their own offices. The dispatchers and salespeople had desks in an open space, and wondered, like the drivers, what the owner and his daughter did all day. Smith decorated his office with photographs of aircraft carriers and fighter jets all over again. That’s what clients saw when they came in for meetings about The Art.

    Behind the office, connected by a door, were the warehouse and crate shop areas, riding on a sea of concrete. John Douglas and his men set up their saws and tools again. The bins for the various shuttles, and everything in storage, came over in truck load after truck load. To my surprise, the crab trap survived the second move of Artransport. It was placed in its sinecure in the California bin, waiting for a shuttle that never came.

    The bathrooms and uniform lockers were in the warehouse side of the door. Everyone in the office had to glimpse the time clock world when they relieved themselves. It was a democratic arrangement and led to a practical joke.

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Chapter Twenty-Six

Published May 8, 2026

Is it warm back there?

I

    “Oh my God! The Baby Jesus has a huge Dick!”

    Sheila screamed this discovery early one morning after she stepped into the underworld. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. What happened is that she was confronted by a sexual piece of Art. It was a silly wooden sculpture of a naked man with a grin that came down from New York. Its member was like Pinocchio’s nose after a serious interrogation. A couple of drivers had observed the patterns of the office. They knew that Sheila went to the ladies room first thing after driving in, for a moment of delicate privacy. They decided to surprise her. The sculpture was placed behind the warehouse door so that she would see it immediately on her way to piss. The job sticker was hung from the penis, with a sign that said: “Hi Sheila!”

    “Oh, my Gaawwwd!”

    It was a fire-able offense. Smith vowed to get to the bottom of it. He brought the drivers to his office one by one. I remember looking at all the fighter planes scattered around the walls when my turn came and wondered what the museums thought about them. 

    “Do you, uh—ahem! —have any idea who placed the sculpture in the hallway to the bathrooms? Any idea?”

    “No, Mr. Smith.”

    “You didn’t see anything? Have you heard anything?”

    “Nothing, really.” I was telling the truth. No one had admitted to the prank. It could have been anyone. But I suspected a couple of the new guys out of art school who didn’t expect to end up looking like janitors. Anyhow, poor Sheila never trusted the drivers again. She wasn’t a bad person, but she was disliked because she was the owner’s daughter. Her father didn’t trust the artists anymore. He realized he was riding a mutinous crowd, and all the money he jingled in his pockets, at every meeting, did not earn their respect.

II

    Late one evening I had just come home from New York when the phone rang. It was Sheila. I was exhausted.

    “Hi Darick, look: can you do us a favor?”

    “Uh, what’s that?”

    “We need you on an ex-use: tomorrow at 4:00 am. Two ex-uses, one after the other. First you do a bunch of pick-ups going to New York, then you do a pick-up in New York going to the Midwest, all over. We really need you, okay?”

    ‘Tomorrow at 4:00 am’ was only five hours away. But I agreed to it. I always needed money. Then she told me my partner was going to be Fish-Eyes. That gave me pause. He had never done anything untrustworthy to me, but his eyes were as flat and expressionless as mirrors. He was doing everything he could to ingratiate himself with the Smiths. There was something mercenary about him. I suspected I was being sent out with the company spy for a detailed report.

    After three hours’ sleep, I made coffee and drove to the warehouse. I was five minutes early. Fish-Eyes was waiting in his uniform. There was no getting out of the uniform around him. So, I changed and brought a few extra plastic shirts and pants from my locker to last the rest of the week. We drove to the first of several stops in Delaware and New Jersey. 

    They were pack jobs. I noticed Fish-Eyes watching me carefully as I wrapped each piece; he copied my methods when he packed something on his own. His work was diligent. He was serious. The paintings were very high-value. The auction house was willing to receive us any hour that night, which was unusual. We delivered at 11:00 pm, got some pizza, and headed to The Washington Square Hotel. I parked the truck in a loading zone and checked in. A museum was releasing the dispersal to the Midwest at 7:00 am. That was also unusual. We had a tight schedule. I set the alarm for 5:00.

    When I opened my eyes, Fish-Eyes was sitting upright on the other bed, watching me. He was fully dressed. I turned on the light. “How did you get ready so early?” I groaned.

    “Crack training in the Marine Corps.”

    “I get it. Okay. Well, I’m going to take a shower.”

    A quick breakfast. We drove north and picked up the new set of artworks. I let Fish-Eyes call the office. He reported: “We are done here and are fully dressed in our uniforms. We are heading west. Everything is on schedule.” 

    As we sailed through the Lincoln Tunnel I asked, “Are you sleeping with Sheila yet?”

    “Not yet. But I will if I have to. I want that office job,” he laughed.

    We made a couple of deliveries in Pittsburgh and called it a day. Fish-Eyes called the office and made his report. We got a room. The next day—Thursday—we delivered to Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Lansing, and Grand Rapids. We had dinner and drove to Gary, Indiana, for the night. I woke up at around 5:00 am as slivers of light came through the curtain. Fish-Eyes was asleep in the next bed. Suddenly I heard him moan, “Is it warm back there?”

    “What?” I replied.

    He went silent. As we drove through Chicago, delivering to museums and private collectors, he acted as if he didn’t remember anything about that morning. Fish-Eyes was very chipper. “Did I tell you I had a Picasso?” he asked me.

    “A Picasso? Really?”

    “A print. Just a print. It isn’t worth much. But it’s still a Picasso. I’m thinking of hanging it upside down behind the bed so that when I have a girlfriend over—and I’m on top of her—she’ll see it right side up. That’ll impress her, right? Heh-heh-heh!”

    “I’m sure it will.” I looked over at him as I drove to Milwaukee. I suspected he remembered his sleep-talking pretty well. “You know what? These fucking uniforms are pretty damn uncomfortable,” I told him. “They don’t breathe. You should tell that to the office.” 

    “Just part of the job,” he replied smugly.

    We made two deliveries in Milwaukee and the job was done. As we were finishing dinner afterwards, he looked down at his plate, and remarked, “I had an interesting dream last night.”

    “Really?”

    “Yeah. I was making a delivery in Beverly Hills.”

    “Have you been to Beverly Hills?” I asked.

    “No, but in my dream, I was there—with Artransport. I was making a delivery to Gregory Peck, the actor.”

    “Oh, yeah: To Kill a Mockingbird.”

    “The actor. He was very impressed by our service—in the dream.”

    “Was he?”

    “He was. He was curious about our climate-controlled vehicles. So, I opened the back of the truck so he could take a look.”

    “Ah.”

    “And it was a cold day in the dream, cold. So, when he looked inside, he asked, ‘Is it warm back there?’—Just so you don’t think I’m a fag!”

    Having made his point, we began driving back east. I guess Fish-Eyes gave the Smiths a good report about me. When I come into work Monday, there was an announcement on the bulletin board:

    Darick Allan

    Driver of the Month!

    I’m a person with a lot of pride. I know that’s a sin, but there it is. I wasn’t sure whether it was more humiliating to have to wear a janitor uniform at work, or to be declared driver of the month. But since three hundred dollars came with the title, I took it.

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Chapter Twenty-Seven

Published May 15, 2026

Lead soldiers and political murder.

I

    Our client was the beautiful woman who ran the local office of an auction house. I had invited her to one of Bobby’s openings once—oh, well. Her client was recently deceased. It was an estate job. The man’s legacy was a collection of toy soldiers. There was a market for the oddest things in our business. We were to pack seven thousand lead figures in the boondocks of Virginia.

    How on earth do you pack seven thousand lead soldiers? That's all the paperwork described. How big were they? (No sizes were given.) Was the number really seven thousand? Had somebody counted them? Seven thousand is a lot. Mike and I were assigned with a new guy who was the son of an artist. We threw hundreds of boxes, tissue, newsprint, tape, foam, into the truck, and left the warehouse before dawn. I was calculating how many seconds we could spend on each piece to finish the job. We only had a day.

    It was cool fall weather. When the sun came out, clouds passed over it right away. Ripples of light and shadow covered everything. When we arrived at the estate, a driveway squirreled up a slope. It culminated in a dream house made of cement. Its windows mirrored the sky. The house seemed as alive as the clouds, and just as moody. We backed up to the garage. Shortly afterwards our client arrived in her Volvo. With her we crowded at the front door and rang the bell.

    “You’re here to pack the armies?” The estate manager waved us in. The inside of the house was as striking as the outside. Clouds played on the walls through the windows. The manager walked us through. “I was his best friend: so he made me executor. And here are the first armies.”

    We were in the study. Two clashes were going on. A Greek civil war on one table; and the Romans conquering someone else nearby. There was a lot of attention paid to the weapons in each scene. Each soldier was exquisitely painted. On to the next room: Medieval knights on horses, foot soldiers before them; another slaughter. I whispered to our client. “So, you counted seven thousand pieces?”

    “Oh, Darick, there’s too many of them! We estimated.”

    “Okay.”

    “You can get it done, right?” she asked.

    “Sure, we’ll get it done, no problem.”

    “We’ll get it done!” repeated the artist’s son. He was a very nice, chipper young man. Mike eyed one table, then the next table, then the next. The dining room had a couple wars going on, the living room had three wars. Each room had one battle, at least. Room after room. Even the kitchen. I noticed that the collector had had a lot of books. Most were about history, wars, and conflict. The house had a strange feeling. Everything was beautifully designed, with clean lines. The furniture was modern and looked comfortable. But I felt strange. 

    We ended up in the man’s bedroom. There was a white bookcase of political tomes behind the bed. Two more battles were displayed near a lounge chair. “Do you think it’s seven thousand? I asked Mike.

    “At least. I think it’s eight thousand.”

    “Will you guys be able to do it?” asked the estate-manager with alarm.

    “We’ll get it done,” I assured him. “Excuse me: just one thing. What did this gentleman do for a living?”

    “He sold insurance.”

    “Really?” I looked around the room. “Really? Come on.”

    “Okay, he was CIA. Insurance was his cover.”

    “That makes more sense.”

    “He was good at it. He ran the invasion of Lebanon under Eisenhower. He was proud of that. That was successful.”

    “That’s interesting.”

    “He was well-known abroad, too. If he showed up somewhere, and the government wasn’t informed, they assumed something was up. Like a coup. He made people nervous. To me he was a nice guy. Very loyal. Intelligent.”

    We began walking out to get our materials. “His last year was very rough,” added the estate-manager. “He had nightmares of an assassination that went wrong. He had cold sweats. Over and over. Then he died. Would you guys like some coffee?”

    After the estate-manager had gone to the kitchen, I asked our client, “Did you know any of this?”

    “I read his obituary.”

II

    There is a ritual regarding obituaries in the auction world: Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, any number of local houses are in the mix. Our lovely client, a lovely person, hated this aspect of her job. Every Monday morning, she and her assistant combed through death notices of the wealthy and well-connected—anyone of note in the Mid-Atlantic region who had died over the weekend and owned valuables. She had to get a jump on the competition. They began with the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun, moved on to papers in Annapolis and Middleburg, and down to Richmond. Then they dressed up, descended on the heirs, and offered terms for their estates. The winning vultures, of the several flocks, got a percentage of the sale. Our client had won the sale of this portion of the CIA agent’s estate. Now here we were, wrapping the toy soldiers of a man who had specialized in political murder. 

    His nightmares seemed to live in the house. I felt darkness on the edge of everything, even the brightest rooms in the house. Our client bought us pizza for lunch. As the afternoon grew longer, there were actual shadows as the sun declined behind gray clouds. The evening was worse. We worked under lamps illuminating the soldiers. Beyond the lighting everything faded into shapes. I’ve rarely felt so creeped out. After seven our client ordered more pizza: the estate-manager made another pot of coffee.

    We each spent about three seconds on each soldier, picking it up, rolling it in tissue, placing it in a box with other troops. The armies kept marching on. At nine p.m., our client realized how desperate the situation was. She began packing with us, picking up one soldier at a time, rolling it in soft paper, placing it in a box with its companions. There were still thousands of soldiers left battling it out in different eras. This is what the agent lived with every day when he was at home.

    We finished packing at four in the morning. We were exhausted. The estate-manager was asleep on a lounge chair. We labeled hundreds of boxes. Each battle would be sold as a different lot: ancient, medieval, and modern armies, the many nations, were split up. We woke the estate-manager, had him sign the paperwork, and say good-bye to his friend’s legacy. Our client got into her Volvo and drove away.

    We arrived at the warehouse as the crate shop staff was coming to work. They were surprised to see us. We had been working twenty-six hours straight and stumbled out of the truck. The guys watched us stack pile after pile of boxes in the middle of the shop as they had their coffee. Then they went to work counting and measuring everything. The soldiers would keep them busy the rest of the week.

III

    Shortly afterwards I was rewarded with an easy day. All I had to do was drive downtown with John Douglas and measure an exhibit at the Museum of American History for a crating bid. I don’t even remember what the exhibit was. What I remember is having lunch with John Douglas in the museum cafeteria. He was polite all morning, calling me “Sir” instead of Darick—the way he addressed his underlings in the shop—keeping a friendly professional distance. But as we ate our sandwiches he started complaining about the Smiths and called me by name again. Motherfucker Smith was ruining the business; he was incompetent; the shop barely kept going. It was his usual litany and was always fun to listen to. But he kept his voice down. John Douglas was a gentleman and didn’t like to offend people unless they really disgusted him. Then he took another bite of his sandwich and said something I didn’t expect.

    “You know, after all these years in the business, I’ve learned how to handle the Jews,” he confessed.

    “What?”

    “The Jews. I know how to handle them. As customers.”

    “I don’t feel comfortable talking about Jews like that,” I told him.

    He looked surprised and studied me through his thick glasses. “I’m Jewish,” he explained.

    “Oh.”

    He laughed. “Half-Jewish, anyway. So I know how to make them comfortable. They’re my people.” But he seemed worried, after my reaction, that he might have offended someone at a neighboring table and looked carefully from side to side.

    “How?” I wondered.

    “By asking, ‘What temple do you go to?’ Ha-ha-ha. And I tell them what temple I go to.”

    “Do you go to the temple often?”

    “Sometimes,” he smiled. He took another bite of his sandwich.

IV

    John Douglas may not have liked the Smiths but did as he was told to make a living. Apparently, that included building missile crates on the weekend. I may have had my suspicions about it but didn’t want to take them seriously. Yet one morning, Michael Smallwood, the packing and shipping registrar at the Museum of American Art, saw a load of the horizontal crates with one of his shipments to Florida as the artwork was being loaded at his dock. He was furious. Missiles were mingling with his artwork—without permission! He stopped using Artransport immediately. Word started getting around the museums. It was a turning point, just as Bobby had predicted when Smith took over the company at West Virginia Avenue.

V

    I want to tell you about one of my proudest moments on the trucks. I was in New York with a new guy a year before the end. He was a musician and was very pleasant to work with. I was showing him the ropes. We had just done a pick-up at Cirkers at East 61st and had four stops to go. It was 4:25 pm. The problem was that our next pick-up was on Wall Street. It was rush hour. The place closed at five. The last stops were in Soho.

    “Is it even possible to get everything done?” asked the musician.

    “I have no idea,” I mused. We were at a red light on 2nd Avenue. I was gripping the wheel. Suddenly I heard a siren approaching behind us. An ambulance—an act of God! I saw its approach through the right rear-view mirror, released the brake and gunned it as the emergency swooped by. I followed it through the red. I felt like Moses. Everything parted in front of us. The ambulance screamed south. We were pulled in its wake. The thread of a life being rushed to hospital gave us a thread to Wall Street. Driving is ruthless in New York. We arrived at the skyscraper at 4:50.

    The receptionist in the client’s office looked up as we stepped off the elevator. “I didn’t think you were going to make it,” she observed. She handed me a small landscape. “You’re going to wrap it, right?”

    “We’ll wrap it, of course. Do you mind if I use your phone?”

    I called the three remaining stops in Soho. There would be no ambulance providing passage to the north. I begged them to wait. The people who worked galleries in Soho were decent. They knew what we went through to make our schedules. “Yeah, I’ll stay for you,” said the guy at the last stop. “I don’t have a life anyway. What’s fifteen minutes? I’ll wait to six-thirty if you need.”

    When we had strapped the last painting in the stack and closed the truck, my adrenaline was hopped up. Streetlamps lit up Greene Street and a light breeze was passing through. I apologized to the musician. I had put him through a lot.

    “It was thrilling!” he confessed. “Thrilling!” He sat down on the curb and lit a cigarette. “And you know what? We did our job, didn’t we? We did our job.”

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Chapter Twenty-Eight

Published May 22, 2026

In and out of the limelight.

I

    One night in 1990 Mike and I helped with a shoot at Artransport’s warehouse. It was deep into the dark hours. John Gossage, the photographer, was staging a series of Anne Truitt’s sculptures on the concrete floor for a spread in Art in America. We were handling and placing the work. Anne was watching from the edge of the set. The appearance of her sculptures under focused light was extraordinary. Being there was extraordinary. Anne seemed to bring with her the grand possibilities of life. With her, imagination and integrity were married in simple gestures; and those gestures echoed all around. That’s what it felt like as we moved her painted columns into and out of the light. They were gestures that had somehow escaped time. This all happened over thirty years ago. There was another gesture that evening that also escaped time, at least in my memory. It was a fart.

    Some farts are accidents, some are expressions. This fart was a protest against the injustice of the art world. It occurred after 10:00 pm. The shoot was staged at one end of the warehouse floor; at the other end were the loading docks. Halfway through the shoot the New York shuttle arrived after a long day and began unloading well outside the photographer’s circle of brightness. The drivers stayed out of our way, but looked over at the production as they placed paintings, sculptures, and antiques in the shuttle bins. Meanwhile Mike and I moved Anne’s work away from the spotlight after each photograph and brought in the next sculpture.

    One of the drivers on the New York shuttle was an artist named Francis Byrne. He had once been a teacher in the art department of the University of Maryland with Anne. He taught crafts since his specialty was jewelry. For some reason he was denied tenure and let go. I have no idea why. Now here he was, driving trucks with nobodies like me. Anne remembered him as he approached the office with his clipboard.

    “Why, Francis!” she declared. “How nice to see you!”

    “Anne,” he grunted, as he passed by. Then he stopped behind us to watch the proceedings. I glanced back and saw that he was glaring. He thought Anne’s pure expression was rather simple.

    John Gossage was setting up a shot. A beautiful columnar sculpture was bathed in light with an infinity of darkness around it. John knelt to get the right angle. At the edge of the light, I was standing next to Anne, chatting. Suddenly the fart erupted. It was a massive “Thrup-Boom!”—pushed out, not squeezed. Anne’s back stiffened: she turned slightly in her chair. The author of the Big Bang, tall and lanky, stood proudly with a massive grin. Anne blinked a couple of times, turned back to the staging, and pretended it didn’t happen. But Francis had made his point.

---

    Was he protesting the nature of Anne’s work, or the nature of her success? Probably both. But he was mistaken about the extent of her worldly success. Anne had a made a big splash with her first exhibit at Andre Emmerich in 1963: since then she had been struggling to be taken seriously in the art world. She struggled for recognition the rest of her life. Everyone involved in the shoot was ambitious for different things. Everyone was struggling to get into the center of the flood lamps, even Anne. But that night a massive “Toot!” was thrown into the limelight from the edge of obscurity. It was from someone who had lost his chance, or thought he had, and resented the terms of play.

II

    That summer Mike and Bobby did a California shuttle together. That would never have happened under the old regime. Under Lennon and the Queen, Mike and Bobby weren’t allowed to work together at all—ever. They got along too well. Most driving teams were meant to balance each other, like the House and the Senate. Mike and Bobby together were more like two People’s Houses legislating wildly. They were equals in talent and imagination and egged each other on. Bobby had a notion to place three of his sculptures around the country using the shuttle truck. They were open expressions to the wilderness and to God. The result was an almost complete disaster—in execution, not intent. There was no GPS in those days, so the company had no idea what happened.

    The shuttle was scheduled along the southern route: Texas, the Southwest, LA, San Francisco, Nevada, and east. It was the same route Mike and I would take on our last California before the lights went out. Each sculpture, when installed, was fourteen feet high. The sculptures were broken down into sections for travel. That they fit in the truck with all the clients’ artwork showed that Bobby and Mike packed everything well; and that the shuttle wasn’t terribly busy. Sometimes there were busy shuttles and sometimes there were light ones. Light ones, toward the end, were more common. While driving through New Mexico they found a beautiful spot in the middle of the desert, placed the first sculpture, and moved on. 

    Then through Arizona, California, and over the Donner Pass to Reno. They were a day ahead of schedule but didn’t tell the office. So they chose to cross Nevada on The Loneliest Road, Route 50—an existential treat of nothingness. On it you could be alone for hours, following a black thread under the sky. It was perfect! They pulled over with expanses of sand and scrub on either side. No other human eyes were nearby. “Hey, Bobby,” suggested Mike, “Let’s go off the road—over there.” So Bobby turned the Mercedes away from the asphalt into the power and randomness of nature. A few hours later they had placed three yellow triangular sculptures in the pristine landscape and admired their work. They started the truck to get back to the road.

    But they had had momentum gliding from the road to the desert. Physics are different starting from a standstill on the sands of fate. Bobby revved the engine—“Rurrrr!” 

    The rear wheels dug the truck into a hole.

    “Oh, shit—shit!”

    “Cut the engine—shit!”

    The body of the truck sunk level with the sand. The rear tires and axle were buried. They had no shovel. The sun was burning. They waded into the dry sea and began digging with paper cups. The sculptures nearby glimmered in the perfect light. Two hours later the rear wheels were exposed. Bobby and Mike threw anything that would give the wheels traction—pieces of wood, trash, cardboard—in the path of the treads. Mike started the engine.

    “Rurrrr!”

    “Go—Go—Go!”

    The tires grabbed the trash, pulled the truck forward, and out of the hole. Victory! Then the wheels spun again in the sea.

    “Shit!”

    “Cut the engine!”

    The paper cups came out again. Sometimes they just moved sand with their hands and forearms. The sun aged and retreated over the mountains. They continued digging. The sculptures became silhouettes under the stars. Again, Bobby and Mike threw anything with traction in front of the tires; again they pulled out of the hole and dug themselves a new one.

    “Shit! —Shit! —Shit!”

    The dance with the sand went on for twelve hours. The sun came up again. Eventually, after several ins and outs, up and down, they reached firmer soil and pulled back onto the road. The load of artwork in the back was still safe. They looked back at the triangles beaming in the distance, drove to the next town, and had breakfast. Bobby called the office from a pay phone.

    “Hey, morning—we just did Reno.”

    “Reno, huh?” A dispatcher two thousand miles away looked at his copy of the top sheet and made a note. “Right on schedule. Hey guys—you’re doing great!”

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Chapter Twenty-Nine

Published May 29, 2026

Hit ‘n runs.

I

    Bobby and Mike’s adventure in the sand was reckless, to be sure, but illustrates an aspect of the art world that few people really know or appreciate. It is the joy and desperation of expression without expectation of reward. Not many people can live on that diet. But for those that do, it can have great satisfaction, for the soul more than the body. In the world of money, pure motives are irrelevant unless you get a write-up and a gallery. Money changes everything. There is a wide spectrum of the art market in which the beauty of expression is aligned with a reasonable price. Not that I could afford what I handled: but the pleasure of seeing much of the work up close, even meeting the artists, was a privilege that is hard to value. On the other hand, we moved a lot of shit. After a long day in New York, I would cross Houston Street in the evening toward our last stops in Soho. Sometimes I saw the lights of the Koons and Kostabi studios as I passed by and imagined assistants inside toiling on the latest scams. What dreams of their own did those workers have? Money for the studios kept rolling in. You could smell it. There was a crazy part of the of the art world in which money was everything: the buying and selling of expressions turned into froth. It became gambling.

---

The M— gallery collapsed like a poker game. One moment the M— gallery was the most prestigious in Washington; suddenly it closed. The whole thing was a mystery to me until I ran into the curator who had hired me once for the summer. A couple years had passed. She was always fun to gossip with.

    “Did you know, Darick, that the owner of the gallery—my boss—was selling slides on the side?”

“Slides—what do you mean?”

    “I mean he was a damn good talker. You know he was a good talker. He just brought clients in—really rich guys—brought them into the conference room and showed them a slide.”

    The slide was always of a magnificent work of art—an old master, perhaps; something so significant it was held in a vault. In Switzerland. Dealer and putz sat in the dark room, staring at the screen. The painting was beautiful, inspiring, holy, even! And a good place to park cash. The value of a great work of art would never decline. It was protected far away. For a quarter of a million dollars, or half, one could buy a percentage. A proud, sophisticated investment. Deal! Only the dealer often sold more than 100% of the slide. I’m not sure what paperwork was involved, or how solid the connection was between the money and the prize. I mean, all the investors saw was a slide. In any case the owner of the gallery took the money and lost it in the stock market. He lived for risk.

    “And you know he went back for more, Darick; he had balls, that guy.”

    One of the dealer’s clients had lost one million dollars in art investments with him. That is bad to someone like me, who has never had a million dollars. To others it is simply a bet gone wrong. The client gave a party one Sunday afternoon at his place in Chevy Chase. All the best people were there—people with money. A person with less money showed up. He was not welcome. It was the dealer. The client’s wife opened the front door after it chimed. Her eyes popped.

    “May I speak to your husband?”

“Oh—wait here!”

    Moments later a tower of dignity appeared at the door. He ushered in the dealer without disturbing the party, led him to his office, and closed the door.

    “What the fuck are you doing here? I have my good friends here—people I trust. What gives you the right to intrude on our privacy?”

    “I have a proposition for you.”

    “Proposition? You lost me a million dollars!”

    “A million dollars, yes.” The dealer acknowledged the sum like a wandering fly. “I’m sorry."

    The powerful man at his desk faced a shameless one. “So what the fuck are you doing here?”

    "I realize you lost a million dollars in your investments with me. But I have a proposal. With another million dollars I can make your money back, and more. I will make it up to you.”

    What honey-pot scheme did the dealer dance in front of his client? I don’t know. Another slide? The leveraging of artwork in order to acquire more valuable prizes—a sure bet, certain to rise? Whatever it was, the dealer left the office with a million-dollar check in his pocket. He promptly lost it on risky stocks.

    “How come the owner of the gallery never went to jail?” I asked.

    “Pride. None of his clients wanted to admit they were stupid. Better to lose money than face, you know. They’re men. There was plenty more where that money came from, anyway.”

II

    The last months of Artransport new drivers came and went. I don’t know who hired them. I came in early one morning for a one-day New York and looked at the clipboard. I was scheduled with a guy named Miguel. Never heard of him. It was 4:00 am. He hadn’t shown up. I went through the stops on the top sheet, looked through the BOLs, then got the keys to the truck. I backed the truck up to the dock, opened the bay doors, and waited a little more. By then it was 4:20. I started loading the truck. The artwork was small enough to be manageable, and by 5:00 everything was on the truck. I strapped in the load and thought about what to do. If I called the dispatcher and he found someone to fill the new guy’s slot, I would only be an hour or two behind. But I didn’t like to tell on anybody and waited a few minutes more. At 5:15, a young guy walked in, confident and full of energy. He greeted me.

    “Hey, man! Did you clock me in?”

    “No.”

    “Why not? I thought that was the honor system—you know, you cover for me, I cover for you.”

    “Well, if I clocked you in and you never showed up, it would look pretty bad. Why are you so late?”

    “I had to do a hit ’n run—you know.”

    “Hit and run. What’s that?”

    “It’s when I show up at my ex-girlfriend’s house un-ex-pec-ted-ly, fuck her, then leave. Hit ’n run.”

    “Well, you showed more than an hour late and I had to load the truck myself.”

    Miguel shrugged. “I had to do it, man.” He walked over to the timecard slots, picked up the card with his name, and wrote: “4:00 am—forgot to punch in!”

    As I drove north, he bragged about his sexual conquests. He had energy for one thing, anyway. I was always amazed how some guys had all the women they wanted—easily—and I had to prove to the women I dated that I was a serious person. It was a long day. Miguel was lazy and I was glad to be rid of him as soon as possible. I let him leave once we had unloaded at the warehouse and folded the blankets myself. I never saw him again.

III

    Signs were everywhere the company was falling apart. No one wanted to believe it, including me. I came back late one night from a Virginia shuttle. We had delivered one small painting to Roanoke, that was it. There was no way the shuttle made any money. As we were closing the truck, I noticed Mr. Smith wandering through the warehouse like a ghost. I asked him why he was there after-hours.

    “I was investigating an alarm, Darick; an alarm went off.”

    “Did you know we only had one painting on this shuttle?”

    “One painting, really?”

    “I don’t understand why the delivery wasn’t bumped. It was a shuttle job. It should have been consolidated with something else, don’t you think?”

    “I’ll take that under advisement, Darick,” he said. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

    Maintenance of the trucks was neglected. The lift gate of one of the Mercedes kept falling on its own and nothing was done about it. It collapsed on Paul, one of the drivers during a Florida shuttle and snapped his leg. Smith wouldn’t fly him home. He jingled the change in his pocket and said he couldn’t afford it. So Paul rode back to DC, in a cast, in the bouncing cab. Bump-Bump-Bump! He quit immediately once he got back.

    Five years must have passed when I saw Smith walking on K Street one morning. He was in a pin-striped suit and had an abstracted expression on his face. He was carrying a briefcase. He may have been out and about soliciting business for some new enterprise. John Douglas was long dead. The demise of Artransport had been messy. Smith left an untold fortune of artwork and artifacts locked in the warehouse when he walked out. For weeks his clients—museums, galleries, collectors, artists—scrambled to get their collections out safely. Anne Truitt was one of them. Her life’s work was in that abandoned facility. 

    I was hired one day to pick up a load of file cabinets and blankets, and some office furniture, that belonged to Bob Lennon again. He had never been paid fully for the sale of the company and had a lien on the scraps. That was how I ended up with the personnel files one day. I plucked out my file, Mike’s, and Bobby’s, before I made the delivery. There was no reason anybody had to see the crap the Queen had written about us. 

    And Mr. Smith owed me money. I had gotten off easy. He owed thousands to some of the drivers. So when I saw him in that fancy suit, my first thought was to call out: “You owe me three hundred dollars, Smith!” But the truth is that I didn’t want to talk to him, and he pretended not to see me. 

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Chapter Thirty

Published June 5, 2026

The end of Artransport and John Douglas.

I

    When I saw our drive shaft rolling down the mountain, I knew maintenance on the trucks had gotten really bad. We had just done a couple of stops in Albuquerque, ate a wonderful Mexican dinner, and began climbing over the mountains going west. It was a cool evening. We had just crested the range when Mike kept pushing the accelerator. “The truck isn’t responding,” he said.

    “Clang!”

    I looked out the window to my right.

    “Clang! Clang! Clang!”

    The shaft dropped and kept bouncing downhill. It was quite a sight. “We lost our drive shaft,” I observed.

    “Huh. No wonder.” He pushed the accelerator again, then pumped the brakes. They still worked. We coasted downhill silently, curve by curve, watching the sunset. We had just enough momentum to drift into a gas station at the bottom. 

    “Thank God this didn’t happen in Little Rock,” I said. We had done Little Rock the day before. It is not a place you want to get stuck. But I was very happy to be marooned in Albuquerque. We called a tow truck from the pay phone. An hour later the Mercedes was hooked up and we were being hauled to a truck yard. “I never heard of Mercedes trucks,” noted the driver. “Good luck getting a part. You guys need to be dropped off somewhere? There’s a Super Eight nearby.”

    “Sure, the Super Eight’s fine.”

    We called the office the next morning. “So, what, uh, you guys are in Tucson, right?” asked the dispatcher.

    “Albuquerque. We lost our drive shaft.”

    “What.”

    “It just fell off.”

    The dispatcher thought a moment. “Did you guys pick it up?”

    “No, it rolled down the mountain.”

    “Oh, shit!” 

    I gave him the mechanic’s number and went to have a breakfast.  An hour later I called back. “So, what does the mechanic have to say?”

    “I’m sorry, Darick, he’s going to need some time getting a new drive shaft—seven to eight days. He just ordered it.”

    Seven to eight days—a free vacation! “That’s too bad,” I replied.

    “Yeah, so we’re going to wire you some money, and uh, keep in touch.”

    It was a beautiful day. Every day in the desert is beautiful. We were free! I had been working on a novel, so spent most of the week writing a chapter. Mike went off climbing mountains. I walked through the neighborhoods of Albuquerque late afternoon, then we went to dinner and saw a movie every couple of nights. I walked by the mechanic’s one afternoon and saw the Mercedes baking in his back lot. I walked in and asked if they could park it somewhere cooler. “That’s where we park trucks,” explained the receptionist.

    “The truck’s parked out in the heat,” I told the office.

    “Well, it’s only a shuttle, Darick,” the dispatcher explained. So that was that.

    A local manhunt was going on in Albuquerque. A murderer, on the run, was driving a blue Datsun pick-up—everyone was looking out for a that Datsun. The morning and evening news covered the situation endlessly—the murderer was still loose! Otherwise, the city was calm. It was a wonderful place to walk around.

    Every couple of days I called the office to see about the new drive shaft. “Well, they had to order it from Germany, it’s taking a while, so maybe by the middle of next week. Sorry, man.”

    “That’s too bad.” I was happy! We received per diem every day, I finished my chapter, and got to explore Albuquerque. But everything comes to an end. The drive shaft arrived after a week, and the mechanic pulled the truck into his shop and out of the sun. The morning the Mercedes was ready, I opened the room’s curtains as I had my coffee. There was a blue Datsun pickup truck in the parking lot outside. That was an interesting coincidence. Suddenly a squad of police cars pulled up and surrounded it. The murderer had been our neighbor all week.

II

    In San Francisco we stayed with Tim. He was sharing an apartment on Castro Street with Tina, his former girlfriend. Film Month, the paper he founded, had folded shortly after my old VW bus died on a hill. He had no way to deliver the paper anymore. So he was freelancing instead, reporting on the Apple-PC wars. “This is my city,” he proclaimed, as he showed us around. We walked up and down the streets until 3:00 am. Then I got up at six and climbed the to the top of the Twin Hills.

    Vertigo had recently been re-released. We delivered a painting to the apartment building where the character Madeleine lives in the movie: afterwards I stood across the street figuring out the camera placements for some of the scenes. The movie followed us around, as we recognized setting after setting of the film. Memories can live vividly. Sometimes they live in the present. After a day and half of stops we headed back east. It was our last California.

III

    After the company folded, and all the artwork inside was disbursed to other companies and storage facilities, another art service company, US Art, swooped in and took over the lease. A crate shop had already been installed, so US Art hired John Douglas and Lap to run it all over again. As the rest of us picked up our lives and figured out how to make a living, I knew that John and Lap were doing what they had always been doing, building art crates, this time with a new logo. And John went in to work with his usual uniform: tan slacks and shirt. No one made him wear a uniform, he had created one for himself. Just before Christmas of 1991, I received a terrible call. John Douglas had been killed. He had been Christmas shopping in Arlington the night before when a man walked up and shot him in the heart.

---

    It was the only murder in Arlington that year, and none of it made any sense. John Douglas had bought jewelry for his wife—that woman he loved and feared—and none of it was stolen. His wallet wasn’t taken. It was murder, pure and simple, without apparent motive. The killer fled the country.

    On the day of John Douglas’ funeral, I met up with Arthur. We attended it together. The grand and mighty of the museum world were there, people from all aspects of art services, who had learned from him, and of course Lap. Mrs. Douglas spoke, then a few distinguished people, and that was that. He was put to rest.

    Afterwards I invited Arthur over for lunch. We talked at my place for hours. He had brought a drawing for me. It was of a security guard: a ghost who monitors other people coming and going, without being acknowledged or earning respect. It was a position of emptiness we both knew well. “You know what, Darick?” he blurted out. “I finally realized what my toy paintings were about.”

    “What’s that, Arthur?”

    “They’re about Death. I was exploring Death all that time.”

    “I don’t know, Arthur. It seems to me they were about the subconscious, something like that. I don’t know about Death.”

    “They’re about Death.”

    “Okay, well, anyway, it’s important you keep painting, Arthur.”

    “Why?” he asked.

    “Because everyone is born with a purpose. Your purpose is to paint.”

    “Really? I never thought there was any purpose to life at all.”

    I drove him home late afternoon to his duplex in Rosslyn. Helene made us coffee as I looked at all his new work in the living room—his studio. He still had the drive to create, whether he believed there was a purpose to it or not. There were canvases here and there, and places to sit here and there. I was struck by a painting he had begun of his father. He was standing at the entrance to the family house in Framingham wearing a bowler hat. He looked dapper. But he didn’t have a face. He looked like a figure out of Magritte. “I’m going to get to it,” Arthur explained. “I’m going to get to his face. I have trouble with that fucker looking back at me. He used to hit me.”

    I said goodbye to him, Helene, and Adam, and we discussed getting together for dinner. I left him struggling with the memory of his father. I never saw him again. It’s easy to be careless when your life is ahead of you. There is always time to make plans. Arthur was promoted in his security position and transferred to Raleigh. He became a manager there—a manager of ghosts. Then I heard Helene had died. I drove down to Raleigh afterwards, knocked on his door, and found out he had retired and moved to Maine. A couple of days later he called me. “Hey, Darick, the guy living at my old place told me you stopped by. That was nice of you. Yeah, I moved back to Maine—Topham. You can visit me, you know. You can bring your wife. Visit me any time. We’ll have some fun. I’m painting again, you know it? I have a gallery!”

IV

    All of this happened a long time ago. When I was driving trucks for Artransport, we all had big dreams and the future was ahead of us. It is important to have dreams. There isn’t much of our future left anymore, and most of us failed. Not in the most essential way: we have expressed ourselves, each in our own medium. The artists—my companions—who I respected when I was younger, I respect now. But the magic of glamour, when money lifts a reputation with a blessing and a curse, never touched us. In the realm of money and fame we failed. Money is not the measure of a life. And for many, life itself is gone, and those lives are each measured in their own ways. For Arthur is dead and Helene is dead and Tom Morris is dead and John Douglas is dead and Rel Crane is dead and Bob Lennon is dead and Mr. Smith is dead and Gene Siskel is dead and Andy Warhol is dead and Cy Twombly is dead and Roy Lichtenstein is dead and Basquiat is dead and Sam Gilliam is dead and Manon Cleary is dead and William Christenberry is dead and Robert Motherwell is dead and Joan Mitchell is dead and Jacob Kainen is dead and Florence Barron is dead and Stefan Edlis is dead and Hannah Wilke is dead and Anne Truitt is dead. We all have a way in the world and then we move on.

V

A year before Anne Truitt passed away, she asked me to come over one afternoon and help out with some photography. It was 2003. John Gossage was taking images of her latest sculptures in her studio. I placed them, one by one, on the bare concrete floor for the camera. The floor had memories: paint splatter from her work over decades. Reds and greens and blues and yellows, remnants of inspiration and hard work. The light was warm, then cool, as the afternoon progressed. John adjusted his lights accordingly. In the northwest corner of the studio was an old John Douglas crate. We all remarked on it. It was a beautiful piece of work, a remarkable legacy. But he had been killed in 1991.

    “It’s a pity John Douglas couldn’t keep his mouth shut about the missile crates,” remembered Anne.

“Oh yeah, the missile crates,” added John Gossage. “It’s too bad what happened.”

“How did you know about the missile crates?” I asked Anne sharply. I had never mentioned them to her.

    “Darick, everyone knew about the missile crates for Saddam Hussein.”