Here's a mild retelling of some time spent with Crazy Tony. I had to write a paper for my interpersonal communications class, this is what I came up with. It's not the best paper I've ever written but the professor liked what he read... enjoy!
Where have all the good lines gone, those great opening statements that summarized a novel in its first sentence of its first paragraph of its first page? Dickens had his, so did Faulkner. I had a few today at work, but failed to write them down. No matter, this paper will be written despite my best efforts in personal sabotage and department store madness.
I like to start college papers with the first things, namely a title (it sets the tone), and move on. I’ve met relative success with this formula, why stop now? “Artful Communications” or “The Skills of Listening” both sound academic enough and are on point, but lack the certain attitude I feel pouring over me. “So you want me to communicate…” does nicely. It puts the blame of what’s to come on the reader, and leaves me free to do what I do. Then I consider what is being asked of me in the assignment and plan accordingly. In this case, four topics covered in the class text must be discussed in such a manner that I prove some proficiency over said topics to anyone who reads my work. I have the items picked out with no particular order in mind: Self-disclosure, Self-Awareness, Perception, and Listening. The challenge comes in the delivery of their meanings and importance, for my life particularly. How can I do this in a way that’s uniquely mine, and will it have impact? The answer came this morning while folding yet another pile of young men’s tees near the junior’s department, “Crazy Tony and his man-beast wife Michelle”. I’ve been waiting quite some time to write this story; this will be its first time in print. So here then is my thesis (can’t have a proper paper without one) and the actual point to the wild ride that follows: While relating an actual event from my not-to-distant past, I intend to define and discuss the aforementioned topics listed above and show how they helped me cope with one of the more surreal times in my life.
Back in the spring of 2001, my beloved brother Charles left for a career in the Air Force. We’d spent the previous year perfecting a social malaise that most would find unnatural and disturbing. Texas Outlaw music and “No-pants-Tuesdays” had become a way of life, the Dao of our existence, much to our father’s dismay. I wasn’t fully committed to the path; at least I had a well paying Internet job to mark the passage of time. This also funded many of our greatest misadventures the previous summer. Charles, however, found fishing, not work, an excellent balm to the mental wounds he suffered during his last semester at college. By March he’d healed and moved on, leaving me there in Houston with little else to do since the tech bust had ended my employment. Our gonzo buddy Chris was going in the Navy, and our youngest brother Jason was letting loose around College Station by way of some drug-induced haze. Living in my parents’ dining room had lost whatever desperate appeal it had, and I too felt the need to be gone. For reasons I still don’t fully accept outside of Divine Providence, truck-driving school seemed like the new way for me. With a quick loan and three weeks to spare, I had a Class-A Commercial Drivers License (CDL) with all the perks and a top rated certificate of completion to prove I deserved it. Yes, I deserved it.
The company I hired onto was based in the town of Lancaster, TX, just south of Dallas. It’s practically what Moore or Bethany is to Oklahoma City. I waited until after Charles graduated from basic training before heading out. Nothing kept me from seeing that through. Trucking companies, as a general rule, don’t allow green drivers to go over the road (OTR) fresh out of trucking school. The price of a brand new rig is four hundred to five hundred thousand dollars ($400,000-$500,000), and can haul up to eighty thousand pounds of cargo. Facts are facts. Their interests, as well as that of the general public, are best served by sending new drivers out with trainers, seasoned veterans of the road. These people have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of miles logged with no accidents reported and usually no late or missed deliveries. They fit every stereotype that comes to mind when thinking of truckers, and the company expects them to show what they know to new recruits. After a few days of orientation, I was assigned to a subsidiary hauling group within the company specializing in dry goods.
The company’s dispatcher desk was in the middle of the main office lobby where all off duty drivers could catch up on the news/weather, watch outdated movies, shower and eat. The old guy behind the desk was quick to let anyone know that the lobby was his domain. Loud noises, rude speech, and bad food for ten-hour shifts, five to six days a week were his haven. I couldn’t wait to leave. The call came that evening for me to meet my trainer on the tarmac, and none too soon. National politics had become the topic of discussion at the domino table; the dispatcher would soon have his hands full. Outside was a white, 1999 Freightliner hitched to a fifty-three foot trailer, just like the one so many of us had trained with.
Here, Crazy Tony enters the story.
Before going any further, perhaps a quick explanation of self-disclosure is in order. The definitions of disclose are to make known or public, to expose to view as it were. This paper is a form of disclosure, not necessarily self-disclosure. That, as stated by Mr. David Johnson in the class text, “is revealing to another person how you perceive and are reacting to the present situation and giving any information about yourself and your past that is relevant to an understanding of your perceptions and reactions to the present.” In other words, it’s telling someone how I feel right now and how I react to what is going on in the current surroundings. Academicians have a funny way of complicating what is essentially small talk. Ideally this type of communication starts out shallow, with nothing intimate from one’s past. Reacting with feeling to what is said or happening is fine. Gradually broadening topics discussed and revealing more about the past is also proper. And hopefully the other person(s) involved will open up in kind. Self-disclosure is a gateway to getting to know other people better. Too much too soon can have negative effect. Neil Postman, also from the text, finds concealment to be an important part of disclosure. Just speaking one’s mind without considering or knowing the audience and setting exemplifies disaster. He’s quoted as saying “that ‘authentic communication’ is a two edged sword.” For Crazy Tony, it was a rusty war hammer with spikes.
We said our hellos as I hopped in the cab, nothing special. He explained where I’d be sleeping, where the refrigerator was, the no guest policy (no hookers), and so on. Dutifully, I explained how excited I was to finally get out on the road, that I viewed the truck as his home, and how I’d be as good a guest as possible. Seeing as how we were to spend an unspecified amount of time on the road together, driving God knows where, I wanted him to be as at ease as possible. Tony had pictures of himself and some young girl plastered all over the dashboard, sun visors, and the bunks. She looked like a younger sister or cousin. We took our turns at the wheel and chatted. He and I were born in the same state, raised in the South, and came from military families. He’d been in the Navy himself, married twice with two boys, ages eleven and twelve. All information normally exchanged between two strangers sharing a confined space for hours on end. Day two met with similar talk, but I made some inquiries about the pictures, and why his taste in music ran deep in teenybopper sludge. Brittany Spears and LeAnn Rimes were the bulk of his tape collection. For a man who by my estimate couldn’t have been a day over twenty-nine years old, this seemed odd. Quizzically, he responded with, “You’ll soon see.” “Soon” was day three just east of Kansas City after receiving our new load of cotton goods with orders to deliver them in San Diego, the place Crazy Tony called home. Without describing the sordid details as Tony had (decorum won’t allow it), here’s the bulk of what he told me:
His first marriage and Navy career had ended about eight years ago when his wife divorced him. She won sole custody of the kids, and Tony hadn’t seen them since. No pictures, no phone calls, no contact whatsoever as per court order. He sent the child support checks to her attorney. The girl in the pictures was Michelle, his wife of officially five years, but with whom he had lived with for nearly three years prior until she turned eighteen and they could make it official. Her parents were “cool with it”. They allowed them to live in their basement. His family back east tried talking him out of the situation, but they “don’t know a good thing when they see it” and had disowned him. Michelle was Tony’s baby-sitter at the time of the divorce, his almost sixteen-year-old baby-sitter. Tony revealed his true age, thirty-eight, and apologized for allowing me to believe otherwise. He liked that people usually got his age wrong, found this a source of amusement. He said Michelle was his secret to being young, and that I’d be meeting her soon enough when we got to Twenty-Nine Palms, CA where she was staying for her sister’s birthday. I was far from amused and farther still from home.
Now, perception is awareness with a sense of comprehension. There are many forms of perception. For example, depth perception is the ability to judge the distance of objects and the spatial relationship of objects at different distances. Extrasensory perception (ESP), according to Webster’s, involves awareness of information about events external to the self not gained through the senses and not deducible from previous experience. Self-perception is how someone sees himself or herself, his or her self-concept or mental image. To perceive someone or something usually involves three steps:
1. Observation – recognizing the unusual or distinctive
2. Categorization – taking the observation and looking for similarities in other people, places,
and/or things (these are known as constructs).
3. Interpretation – the meaning derived from steps one and two and how it is taken.
When in the process of perceiving, people tend to be influenced by what is most obvious, often clinging to first impressions even if wrong. Tendencies toward assumed similarities and favored negative impressions skew the truth of what is observed and should be avoided whenever possible. In my particular case, however, skewing was all I could do to stay sane in that tiny desert town. Nothing Crazy Tony said could have prepared me for who waited there.
Until this time, the farthest west I had ever traveled was Window Rock, AZ on mission trips to build churches on Navajo land. The desert is a wild place and people who live there reflect it. Thankfully that fact wasn’t new to me. We pulled into Twenty-Nine Palms a little after 8AM. Tony was yelling and blowing the air horn all the way to his sister-in-law’s house. I was just sitting up in the bunk as he burst out the cab, leaving the door wide open. Scrambling for my shoes I notice Tony is already talking to someone, I assumed it was Michelle. Then I hear the loudest, wettest, most throaty burp I’ve ever heard. Bullfrogs with bullhorns would be proud. “Good one Honey,” Tony yelped excitedly. I peek out from behind the privacy curtain to behold a visage I won’t soon forget.
Physically I’m considered large, with a barrel chest, broad shoulders and thick stocky legs. So was Michelle. I weighed in at around three hundred and fifteen pounds at the time. So did Michelle. There standing next to Tony, wiping her chin, was Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Shakespeare’s Lady Mac Beth and Stephen King’s Annie Wilkes all rolled up in a carpet, beaten together with baseball bat’s, and hung up wet to dry, forging a new being that happened to be female. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Tony’s were a thousand lies. Her personality was just as brutal. I call her “the Man-beast” because I like women. I love women. Women naturally possess and gravitate toward compassion, tenderness, and kindness, all traits that men have to be taught. That is why the role of a mother in a boy’s life is crucial. In just five minutes I knew Michelle possessed none of these things. She was a Jungian archetype for the anti-feminine embodying coarseness, cruelty, and deception. Poor Tony couldn’t see it. He also refused to see that she was cheating on him with the nineteen-year-old Chris, who was also “visiting” from San Diego to help Michelle watch her nieces and nephews. Her sister was “cool with it.”
We spent two days there in and around the sister’s tiny desert hovel, sweating, swatting flies, eating cake, and crying. I did mine in the cab; he did his out in the middle of the street in front of Michelle, her sister and brother-in-law and their friends. They had an argument; I was homesick. One bright moment for me was finding out Charles had proposed to his longtime girlfriend Lindsey and they were to be married in August. It was now early June. Tony sincerely stated hope that they’d be as happy as he and Michelle. I nearly punched him in the mouth.
Remembering the undelivered load of cotton products due in San Diego, we left out early on the third day. Michelle and Chris drove ahead to tell her parents we were coming. The delivery was quick and we drove “bobtail” (to drive a big rig without a trailer) over to their house. It was here that I began to wonder if this was all a terrible mistake.
Awareness is having or showing realization or knowledge. Self-awareness is having or showing realization or knowledge of oneself. It is tied closely to self-perception, but not quite the same. People can lie to themselves about who they perceive themselves to be. Once the lie is broken, or the truth of who they actually are is brought to light as fact, that then is awareness. Often the company people keep reflects such truth. The class text states that “[a]nother function of friendship, then, a reason why we need friends, is to keep us emotionally stable and to help us see where we stand vis-à-vis other people and whether we are ‘doing OK.’ It is particularly noticeable in times of stress and crisis.” This was just one of those times.
The house where Crazy Tony and his Man-beast wife Michelle lived was a duplex built into the side of a hill. The living room, kitchen, guest bathroom, and garage were all accessible upstairs, while all the bedrooms and master bathroom were down stairs. Roaches had access to all rooms, the “lady” of the house stayed mostly on the couch. Michelle’s mother should have been institutionalized years ago with paranoid schizophrenia. PAX-TV was all the medical treatment she received. Her father had a wild man stare. Martin Buber, whom I refer to as the William Buckley of interpersonal communication, said, “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.” This man’s eyes spoke Nimrod’s gibberish. The poor rottweiler lying at their feet was flea ridden and desperate, but they swore it was a great family dog; all the neighborhood kids adored it. Speaking of them, I defy anyone to find a more motley group of hellions this side of heaven. Their number is hard to recall, since more and more stopped by the house everyday, fondly referring to Tony and Michelle as “mom and dad”. The girls in the group were also fond of saying “age ain’t nothin’ but a number.” The boys heartily agreed. One girl in particular, whose name I won’t recall, was fifteen, and spent an unusual amount of time hanging around. Surely Michelle would have seen her as competition for Tony’s affections, had she not been sleeping with Chris. Tony, after nearly a week, accepted the fact that Michelle was going to leave him for a guy half his age, and began making out with some pregnant stripper Chris knew.
As for me, much time was spent out in the truck with the curtain drawn, trying to make sense of it all. Who were these people? What was I doing there? Why had I gone down this path to begin with? The previous year’s reforging of moral codes and social appetites into what I thought would be tough, rebellious, and edgy, was pointless. These people saw me as a saint. My moral outrage was found quaint and would have been politely laughed at if they’d known anything of the word. Who was I kidding?
Tony said his good-byes and made promises for a quick divorce. He said he’d come back when they got married and give Michelle to Chris in the ceremony. The two of us didn’t say much as we hauled paper goods back to Pennsylvania. I’d expressed a desire to go back to Texas and see my brother one more time. He put a word in with the dispatcher. We went to a truck stop for breakfast somewhere in Ohio nearer to Pittsburgh than Columbus. It was in this setting that Crazy Tony and I had a breakthrough.
Listening is often times confused for hearing. This is wrong. Unless of course someone is born deaf, hearing is one of the five senses; it comes naturally to most, if not all, living creatures. Listening then is a skill; it’s hearing coupled with attention and comprehension. Listening is the cornerstone to communication. Without such skill, the entire world would be filled with noise and no meaning. Communication is a complex multi-level process by which ideas, thoughts, beliefs, wants, needs, feelings, and the whole of human expression are born out. There are actual models for communication, graphs and charts relaying the most effective ways to speak and listen. There are accidental ways of communicating, expressive ones, and rhetorical. Our body language is one such accidental form. Effective listening involves empathy, eye contact, paraphrasing what’s said, perhaps a few clarifying questions, and finally some acceptance. Up until this point, nothing very effective had passed between Crazy Tony and I.
We sat down in the truckers’ section of the diner. The differences between our section and the regular customers’ were that our tables all had telephones and we could smoke wherever we wanted. Tony had grown strangely quiet over the last day. He didn’t flirt when the waitress took our orders. He didn’t flirt when she brought our food. A blind man could see he was hurting. I asked if he was okay and that was all he needed. In a split second we were the only ones in the room. Looking up, with tears in his eyes, he asked, “What have I done?” The moment would have been more than awkward except that I knew what he meant. I had witnessed part of it. In a moment of moral frivolity he’d thrown out a successful military career and tore up his entire family for a woman who was incapable of appreciating the act. And worse, didn’t respect him or want him around anymore despite what he’d gone through to have her. I was looking at a truly broken man; I was seeing the real Tony.
I took the only tact I had at the time and told him to call his family back east. He said they wouldn’t talk to him ever since he’d punched his brother in the face for bad mouthing Michelle. My heart wanted to break. The thought of estrangement from my brothers was rueful. I told him family has a funny way of forgiving and that they’d listen. He called from the table and spoke to his mom. She listened, asked him to come back home. I paid for breakfast; we walked out, made the delivery. At the next truck stop, we said our goodbyes and I got on a truck bound for Houston, never to hear from Crazy Tony again. Nor would I forget him.
I’m glad I stopped trucking because it wasn’t for me. There came a point where I asked myself, “What have I done?” But it had its plusses. Meeting Tony and his dysfunctional ilk was good for me. My view of the world was too narrow, so naïve. Had he and I never met, never interacted, who knows what type of man I’d be today. It is through the perception, awareness, listening and disclosure in such meetings and personal contact that we enrich each other. I hope he’s doing well, I know I am.
