Truck Stop Waitress
The other day (all my stories start with that phrase, I’ve noticed) I was driving back from Austin and radio station-surfing because I’d gotten bored with all my podcasts. “Low Rider” by War came on, and yee haw, ya’ll. Is it racist to just now realize, 30 years after first hearing it, that it’s performed by a black guy? How did I not know this? It feels a lot like when I realized that Michael McDonald is a white dude. It doesn't matter, but it changed my worldview a little.
I grew up in Faucett, Missouri, which is apropos of absolutely nothing, then and now. But having grown up there, one would know that there’s nothing to put that place on the map but a lot of nice, corn-fed brethren, Interstate 29 and one Farris Truck Stop. I grew up on a gravel road one mile from the highway with the constant sound of jake brakes and big rigs. My childhood consisted of gathering roadside elderberries while combines roared by on their way to the fields or climbing walnut trees while dodging wasp nests. You didn’t ride a bike with shoes on, so my toenails to this day look like hooves. It was a very homespun and wholesome upbringing.
Which is why, when I became a truck stop waitress when I turned sixteen, I was suddenly exposed to a cavalcade of worldly knowledge, including music explicitly outside the parental-sanctioned “Sabbath muzak” that they actually thought we were listening to in our rooms (LOL, amirite?!?). Every hour on the hour, the jukebox would play two free songs: “Low Rider” by War and “I Drink Alone” by George Thorogood.
Where the jukebox failed in my musical education, the cooks picked up the slack. Mike, hotness descended from Native Americans and my first crush outside my Christian youth group, preferred the new grunge rock. Nirvana was blowing up around that time. Scott, a coke-snorting, unstable sort (who was actually a nice guy when he wasn’t high) enjoyed harder stuff like Metallica and Black Sabbath. Tracy, who gave me rides home after work on occasion, listened to classic stuff like The Eagles and Aerosmith.
I learned a lot about life in those five years I worked at Farris’. I learned how to handle lonely men on the road week after week and how to clean out an ashtray in less than 3 seconds. I learned how silly it was to ask, “What would you like to drink?” when I worked the breakfast shift. I learned how to pack and light a cigarette. I learned how to serve alcohol after I laughed in the face of someone ordering a “shot of Wild Turkey” (I thought it was a joke. In my defense, we were in the middle of hunting season.). And boy…did I learn how to curse, a skill that is still serving me to this day. Serving me well? Not sure.
Now, before you think, “WHERE were this child’s parents? They let her work in tobacco fields and truck stops…where was CPS?”, let me stop you right there. My parents had a heavy hand on my sister and three brothers. We ate our vegetables, said our prayers and addressed adults as “sir” and “ma’am,” but let me refer you to paragraph 2. This was Faucett, MO. Farris Truck Stop was the only game in town if you didn’t want to drive a tractor in 100’F August harvest heat. And I did not.
So it was off to waitressing to save money for college, and on slow Tuesday afternoons around 3 pm, after the lunch rush and before the dinner crowd, I’d shoot the shit with the other waitresses and Mike (if I was lucky enough to get a shift with him), do my side work, and listen to “Low Rider” when it came on the jukebox.
Driving back from Austin this past weekend, hearing it again brought back a lot of memories from that time, good and bad. These were some of the good ones.
