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In the lounge upstairs, drivers pass the time shooting pool or watching TV. Afternoons, a handful of drivers usually hang around the call board, smoking and talking. On the board are buttons that connect them directly with the Georgia offices of 29 nationwide freight carriers. "May I have your attention, please," an amplified female voice will vibrate through the room. "Anybody with a reefer interested in going to New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania, please come to the desk." What a driver hauls depends partly on his truck. "Reefer" is jargon for a semi that carries refrigerated items, flatbeds tend to be for shop machinery, a dry box hauls everything else.
Allen Carter, 29, who works for International Transtar, explains that for professional drivers, two chief problems are fatigue and boredom. Truckers fight off sleep with speed and pep pills (known as "pocket rockets"), but stories of dozing at the wheel are not uncommon. The only way to make money on the 2½-day trip from Florida to New York is by driving the 23 hrs. straight through. Carter thinks nothing of leaving Chicago and deadheading home to St. Cloud, Fla., without a break.
Weeks on the road are hard on a man's home life. One driver who has been married five times explains, "You get in the truck and leave, and they [the wives] see something they like better at home. But if you worry about that, you can't do your job." On the other hand, prostitutes flock around truck stops. Some drivers complain that Transport City harasses the women traveling with truckers. But the owners say they are just trying to protect the drivers. Like rock music and politics, trucking has its groupies, young girls who stand outside places like Transport City waiting for a hitch.
Even so, few truckers willingly share their cabs. "That's mainly why a driver is a driver," says Carter, pushing back his tractor cap and folding his arms over his ample paunch. "He's by himself. Drivers can't stand a lot of racket. They like to get out by themselves and think." But not many go to the extreme of one young trucker doing his laundry at Transport City. He literally lives out of his rig. His dispatcher even reads him his mail over the radio. "I wouldn't trade it for anything. You're never in the same place. There's no whistle telling you to go to work, take a break or go home."
Talk at truck stops centers on highway conditions, the size of the biggest pothole, state regulations and, endlessly, the highway crimes and misdemeanors of "the four wheels," the feckless, reckless drivers of private automobiles.