In a snow covered parking lot on the edge of Chicago, two giant Kenworth semi trucks sat idling in the darkness, side by side with no trailers attached. Like a couple of old buddies, the drivers were sitting inside one of the cabs talking. They were drinking out of chilled aluminum cans from a smuggled case of LeBatts beer that was half buried in the snow, keeping it cold, just outside the rumbling truck’s passenger side door.

They’d actually just met a few hours before in a tiny bar a few blocks away from the railyards, taking advantage of a rare moment of being locked down by winter weather, when they could get good and drunk and sleep it off before the freezing snow melted enough for the shipping business to reset.

There was no concern if it was legal, or against company policy. As long as they were cool and quiet, no one would ever know. It was, for a moment, very illegal when the bar closed at three a.m. and the scrappy female bartender informed the intoxicated commercial drivers they would have to move the bobtail trucks to a nearby parking lot for the night. It was ignored that it would involve actual operation of a giant motor vehicle and be considered a DWI. But it was Chicago at three in the morning, after all, and sometimes the rules just don’t apply.

I guess the frizzy haired bartender didn’t tell us earlier so we wouldn’t leave and quit buying drinks. I remember being so incredibly pleased that I was going to stumble out of the door of a bar and have a nice, warm bed waiting for me just a few feet away. That’s when the bartender, who resembled a coyote wearing mascara, told us, “Uh yeah you guys gotta move them trucks so’s they don’t get towed with you in em’. Take a yoo-ee and don’t go cross them tracks, that’s a bad part a town down there. That’s a big empty parkin’ lot cross the street. You’d be good in there for a night. Lotsa drivers do it”.

For me, and my inebriated thinking skills, I chose in that moment while crossing the street, to lock the differential into eight wheel drive, dump the clutches into seventh gear, and see how high in the air the giant truck tires could throw snow. I reverted to my High School mentality with my logic being, when would I ever again have a chance to do donuts and rooster tails in an eighteen wheeler? Never. I surely would have been fired, locked up, and had my expensive commercial drivers license revoked if I’d been caught. But just like in High School, I was smart enough to hide it and not brag about it later. I’m betting the statute of limitations has run out by now.

I can’t speak for how intoxicated my temporary friend was. I knew he could handle his alcohol as well as me, since we’d been drinking all evening and continued to drink well into the early morning hours.

I didn’t make a large habit out of drinking on the road in those days. Maybe four or five times in a year. Hangovers while driving big rigs were dangerous and miserable. Dealing with dispatchers, deciphering their bad grammar and incomplete sentences on the satellite messaging system, mapping out an itinerary, fueling up in the freezing cold, eating unhealthy and poorly prepared food, getting directions on a stinky, germ infested pay phone and writing them down in a miniature spiral notebook, using my own hieroglyphic shorthand language, and using disgusting smelling restrooms was hard enough with a clear head. Who knew truck driving would be so glamorous? It wasn’t anything like my career inspiration, the movie, Smokey and the Bandit.

A week before, I had gone to Canada to deliver the biggest avocados from Mexico I’d ever seen. Once the trailer doors were opened, I wondered why I’d never seen them in the United States. They were as big as Nerf footballs. As I wandered through the world market in Toronto, I wondered why I had never seen most of that amazing food in the United States. I still don’t know, but we sure are unhealthy and fat.

I did have a delicious glass of beer at my next Canadian working tourist destination. I stopped at a local shopping center, had an afternoon meal and an authentic brew, then saw a movie called Fried Green Tomatoes in a mostly empty theater. After the show, a random, polite, young man told me, “Good movie, eh!” I’d only heard that phrase from my Bob and Doug McKenzie, Great White North album before and wasn’t sure people really said that until then. My only response was to nod upward, like a Chicano in a passing low rider. He’d probably only seen that in a Cheech n’ Chong movie. He probably didn’t know people really did that.

When I left Canada, I bought three cases of the delicious LeBatts beer. Since it was Federally illegal in the USA to have alcohol in a commercial vehicle, I decided I would hide it until I got back home. More High School logic. Be cool and keep your mouth shut.

It is very against the law to transport alcohol into Canada, but I was leaving, so it didn’t matter. There wasn’t a checkpoint entering the U.S. for some reason. I guess we trusted them more than they trusted us.

I was absolutely terrified when my next load from New York sent me right back into Canada, but I wasn’t about to ditch my brewskis. How bad could a Canadian prison be?

And of course, as luck would have it, I was randomly pulled aside at the border and inspected. I watched in horror as she had me open my side box door on the sleeper, exposing my three cases of contraband. She looked at me, closed the door, and let me go. I guess I was damn lucky it was Canadian beer.

I remember, in truck driving school, they told us not to say “Texas” when we were asked about our nationality. We would be instantly detained and inspected for guns. I guess that happened a lot to people from the Nation of Texas.

I’d bought one case for my brother and two for me. I had no intention of drinking it before I got it back home to Texas, until that night in Chicago.

At first, the only thing my new friend and I had in common was the logo on our company trucks, but we talked for hours about life and women, and growing up and doing dumb things. That’s all most drunks ever talk about. He was never going to get married, and he was serious. I told him about a girl that loved me, but I didn’t know if I loved her. Love was confusing. I said she was just my friend. He just smirked and said, with a combination of confidence and disappointment, “You’re gonna marry her,” as if he’d seen the future already, 

Many years later, our circumstances led to a real choice and guess what? I did marry her.

I had to look deep inside myself. I had to learn that, for whatever buried psychological trauma, I was probably not a person who was even capable of real love. But I could respect it. I could recognize it and I did believe in it. Kind of like how a sociopath knows about empathy and what’s right and wrong.

And maybe I couldn’t actually, completely, fully fall in love with her, but I really liked her. I respected her, and I believed in her. I knew that I would never find anyone that loved me more than she loved me, and maybe that was enough.

And maybe, that’s what love is for everybody.

Love enough.

That drunken trucker had seen the future. His confidence was just one of the voices in my head, pointing me to my destination. He was the unknown, unnamed ambassador to my destiny. In retrospect and memory, that strange moonless night was out of place. It was out of time itself. It was my future visiting me, guiding me. There were no other people around. The bar was foggy and empty, except for the scrappy bartender who I could barely see through my booze riddled glassy eyes. I was visited by the Ghost of Christmas LeBatts.

I delivered a case to my brother in time for Christmas and the other back home to share with my future wife.

This is our twentieth year of being married and I’m still overthinking and just as confused as I ever was. Luckily, in my marriage I’ve learned that it probably doesn’t matter what I think anyway.

There’s love, and that’s love enough.