Thursday, January 19, 2023

Mark Wahlberg vs. Matt Damon

Apparently, I am not the only person who has trouble telling Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg apart. I’ve read articles about the phenomenon. The difference seems obvious to me now. Now - after watching several Mark Wahlberg movies believing they starred Matt Damon.

Which is why it was not surprising that when, around the turn of the last century, I passed a friend a note (pre-texting) at a trendy LA restaurant “Matt Damon is at the next table.” She responded, “No. He’s not.” 

She was right. He wasn’t. Mark Wahlberg was. Not that I could convince her of that. 

Mark and what appeared to be three of his buddies were seated beside us. Mark picked up the tab. For their table. Not ours.

Me: See. He paid.

Friend: They were just some guys who wandered in off the street.

Me: Number 1, we are in LA. Guys don’t wander in off the street. They probably valet parked. Number 2, we just paid $60 each for a snack. We didn’t even have a meal. I don’t think they are just some guys.

She still didn’t believe me. She never would. Not that the topic came up very often. Until Entourage came on HBO when I brought it up again. 

Me: See. We were there at the beginning.

Friend: Blank stare.

She never believed me. 

NOTE to self: when you ran into Matt Damon in Cambridge MA, you did not think he was Mark Wahlberg.

Monday, January 16, 2023

Stuckey’s

During a year of illness following two years of pandemic, I really missed taking road trips. Even before I got sick, I accepted that I would never be the road warrior I had been when young. Sixteen hour days with only an AM radio for company in a 1971 VW convertible - not the most comfortable car ever manufactured - were out of the question. My dream was to drive across the country again but this time in two hour hour spurts. Two, two-hour shifts a day.

Ideally, I would rise at a reasonable hour (i e. leisurely pace), drive two hours to a roadside attraction where I could sightsee, find refreshment and gather the strength to move on. If no attraction was available, I might be able to find a spot for a leisurely lunch before starting an afternoon drive that had to end at an overnight accommodation with proximity to a nice meal. 

Previous driving trips were challenges. Get there fast. Keep moving. Tell yourself you’ll come back to visit the scenic sights. Don’t waste time on meals. If there was ever a time to take advantage of convenience stores, those trips provided the right opportunity.

Many years ago, when I started my first drive cross-country from Pennsylvania, I found a band of Wawa, another area of Sheetz and then, when I hit the Midwest, Stuckey’s. Miles and miles of interstate punctuated by little else than Stuckey’s. A traveler in those days could pick one on a whim. A traveler in those days had to pick one on a whim. There was not much else around. And, if you missed the exit? No worries. There would be another.

All Stuckey’s looked the same. I found that comforting. They sold the same tchotchkes, offered the same facilities and served the same food.  I forget what I would order but I am sure it was the same thing every day. Same was a keyword. 

So, I was really surprised when I stopped for lunch one day at about 1PM and just did not want the same-old-same-old. I don’t know what I found to substitute but the desire for change mystified me. I got back in my car and started driving. I just wasn’t hungry. It took me a while to realize that was not surprising. 

I’d already eaten lunch at 11AM.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

My Life as a Trucker

More than 2,000 legionnaires came to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia in July 1976, for the American Legion's annual three-day convention. Over 200 people who visited the hotel became sick. Twenty-nine died. The mystery disease that killed them would come to be known as Legionnaire's disease. The hotel closed that November. 

Eventually, all the furnishings were sold off - including the dishes. The illness was related to the duct work. None of the hotel furnishings were in any way at fault. But, the stigma persisted over the years. So when my brother bought the dishes for a large hotel he was running, he got a good price. What he did not get was anyone willing to transport them on a five-hundred-mile trip to Northern New England. Enter little sister, Janie, graduate student, fortuitously on break.

I was happy to serve. Being an over-the-road trucker had always been a dream of mine - before I learned the reality of long hours, tight deadlines and loading your own truck. I envisioned hours of leisurely drives through lovely settings to exciting locations while my brain enjoyed the free time to do whatever it chose. Any trucker can tell you why I was wrong. 

My own experience had been and, with this one exception still has been, limited to a few UHaul trucks. Most for moving. I loved the opportunity to transport hundreds of place-settings of china. A true trucking job. I was very proud, but given the public's suspicion of all things Bellevue for many decades, I could not brag about my new career for forty years i.e. now.

I did not have to pack or load the dishes. I took a UHaul to a location that I have long since forgotten. In my memory, I went after dark but I think that scenario might be a product of my imagination. It all felt very cloak-and-dagger as I set off up I95 - the next morning I am sure. I wasn’t so into intrigue that I wanted to travel in the dead of night. Besides, in those days, without social media, there wasn’t as much intrigue. Nonetheless, I would not have shared info about my load with the guy in the next truck at the rest stop, let alone the world at large on the Internet.

The ride was a quintessential East Coast trucker experience. Uneventful except for a snide toll-collector on the Jersey Turnpike ridiculing me for not knowing how many axles my truck had - as if I were the first Uhaul driver who didn’t have the correct change ready. I am still annoyed.

Anyway, all remained quiet until Rhode Island. In the late seventies, the drive from Philadelphia to Boston had a couple of hairy spots not least of which was the merge of I95 and I195 in Providence with a little Route 6 thrown in for good measure. (It has since been moved and adjusted.)

That intersection used to be a huge merge. I can’t find out how many lanes at its largest. Not two. Not three. Not even, I doubt, four. It felt like eight. I was in the far left lane when it happened. A blow-out. In heavy traffic. Heavy merging traffic. 

I can’t describe the details of what happened next. I should dramatize wild careening through unforgiving traffic while the truck veered out of control. I am sure there was some swerving involved but my recollection is that sensible drivers figured out what was going on and let me pass. In fact, I have no idea how I pulled it off but I would say less than a minute passed before I found myself parked neatly on the side of the road in my unscratched truck.

How did I get help?  I have no idea. Certainly not by cellphone. I assume I waited until someone (cop, Good Samaritan or tow truck operator) stopped and somehow got in touch with the local UHaul guy who came and got me. He lived in the office and was thrilled for the company. He even offered to share the roast he was preparing in a toaster oven.

That turned out to be unnecessary. High-school friend, Ginny Walsh, and her mother came to retrieve me and took me home for a great meal, a good sleep and, I am sure, a nutritious breakfast. They returned me to the UHaul office the next morning and I resumed my trip on a new tire. I arrived without further disaster. 

No one was ever harmed by the unjustly maligned dinnerware which arrived almost completely intact. Almost. Tragically, one dinner plate was lost.

Thus ended my career as a trucker.


NOTE TO SELF: Mike Perlis

I had a passenger in the empty truck on the way home. A recent college grad who worked for my brother had gotten sick and needed to go home to Connecticut to recuperate. His mother was a music librarian/professor at Yale so I dropped him off in New Haven. Then I moved on.

Years later when I worked from my apartment in New York City, I kept the TV on for background noise. It was the height of the trashy-talk-show era. I am pretty sure Sally Jesse Raphael was on. I looked up and spotted the kid. Mike Perlis had become the publisher at Playboy. I checked on him to write this. He went on to other jobs including serving as President and CEO of Forbes. He is currently on the Board as Vice Chairman.

I take some credit for his success. I saved his life. Okay, he wasn’t that sick. And, okay he probably could have gotten to a train. But I like to think I played a small role in his career. Whatever. We had a fun ride.