I woke from a delicate sleep to a hooker knocking on my truck window. It was late evening. I stretched out in my bunk, naked except for clean boxers and socks to keep my feet from getting cold. Before sleep, I'd been lightly chewing my tongue and squeezing the head of my cock from all the speed I'd taken earlier. I was twenty-seven, months into my career as an over-the-road driver. The trucks were huge, the highways endless as an ocean. Drugs helped. The little furnace at the back of my brain heated the rest of my life with the amphetamines I swallowed and inhaled and smoked then the fire turned the boredom and made the endless hours tolerable. Other drivers took pills to be able to drive at night or at odd shifts but I got high to write poems and listen to music and to not eat so I wouldn’t get fat then I’d have the energy and confidence to get laid, all things that made living in a box on 18-wheels and delivering paper towels less like living in a box pulling paper and more like an adventure. The hookers helped too.

I'd been hoping one would show up.

Hookers who worked truckstops were known, not so kindly, as lot lizards for the way they scurried from vehicle to vehicle, watching for cops, then pounding on windows of trucks operated by exhausted men who missed their families. These were men who considered a hot meal a blessing, men who drove all night to watch their kids play soccer or softball. Waking from sleep to turn away aggressive women who treated sex like a Tupperware party was not appealing. Being solicited where you lived—in a bunk in the back of your tuck—was not appealing.

What was appealing was home.

In truckstop diners and gamerooms and standing by outdoor ashtrays, men said terrible things about hookers. Hookers, in similar places, said terrible things about the men they serviced and worse things about the men who did not want their services. While I was reading or writing or drinking or taking drugs, I listened. I listened constantly. I tuned my ear to the frequency of work and money. The sounds were loneliness and desperation, interrupted by the pleasures of the moment and the hope of friends and lovers and family and, sometimes, god.

I wrote down things I saw and heard and still barely believed.

A week before this I’d met a hooker at a karaoke bar in Toledo, Ohio. Within five seconds of our making eye contact, she asked me to buy her a drink. It took two sips for her to give me her prices. Head, fuck, jerkjob—sixty dollars, eighty-five dollars, fifteen dollars.

“You want to come on my tits, it’s five extra bucks.”

I said, “Okay,” and bought her another drink.

I wanted to watch her finger herself while I jacked off.

She said, “That’s stupid but whatever.”

She looked old enough to be my great aunt and was built like a nail.

Now I climbed into the driver's seat and opened the window. This hooker was thin with a muscular neck and as crank-eyed looking as I felt. Her hair was new wave, a style I knew from the music videos I sometimes watched growing up, though no one wore their hair like that anymore: buzzed on the sides, longer on top, a huge swan’s wing of bangs feathered down into her face.

She said, “I’m sorry if I woke you up,” which sounded like a pitch, like a saleswoman on the showroom floor, like a man with an eye patch in a movie selling snake oil, and I waited for her to say, “But what I have for you is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

I said, “That’s some crazy hair.”

Balanced on the top chrome step of my truck, she raised her hands and roughed up her bangs and said, “You like it?” then started to fall and had to reach out and grab the window’s ledge to hang on. She said, “Whoo, that was close.”

“You’re funny,” I said.

“No one ever notices,” she said. “Thanks.”

“What’s your name?”

“Lilly. What’s your name?”

“Daddy,” I said.

She said, “Fake two-syllable names are the best.”

I looked her over to see if she had a gun or a place to hide a gun.

One of my two rules for truck driving was: don’t get shot.

The other was: don’t overdose.

I’d managed one, not the other.

I looked again at my hooker friend and her fly-by hair. She didn’t carry a purse. Her shirt, with the collar cut away, fell from her shoulder. The gun possibilities were nil. She probably thought I was looking at her tits.

She said, “You want prices?”

I didn’t need prices.

I needed to grind my teeth into diamonds.

She said, “You a faggot?” but not mean.

She hadn’t been gifted the language I knew from being in a master’s program for writing. She thought it was okay to say faggot with love and concern. I’d taken out student loans for a professor to tell me my poems about working as a janitor were unnecessary and that I should leave the program and write somewhere else.

She said, “It’s okay if you’re a fag.”

I shook my head, meaning I liked women.

She said, “I know a dude who does dude stuff if that’s your thing.”

“Not my thing,” I said.

We were in Iowa, though it could have been Wisconsin or Indiana or even parts of Illinois for how similar the small towns near the interstates looked. A warehouse is a warehouse, a diesel pump a diesel pump, only not at all and not always. There were differences and they were huge but the sameness blurred them out and I often felt disorientated from the hundreds of miles I logged each day. The size of the bed in my truck was exactly the size of my body, maybe a little smaller. I either never slept or couldn’t fill my desire for sleep. Otherwise, I was writing six books at the same time, all in longhand, scribbled in cheap notebooks.

I said, “How much would it cost to interview you for the night?”

One of the books I wanted to write was a collection centered on people whose careers were touched by the road, by fuel and freight, meaning: truckers and waitresses and hookers and forklift drivers and drug dealers and bartenders and karaoke DJs and busboys and chick singers in country bands that covered Garth Brooks and Reba fucking McEntire. I would ask questions and people would answer my questions and the conversations would go for hours. We’d s maybe have drinks or maybe share pills, then the talk would continue, becoming more honest, sharing truths that people who didn’t depend on the interstate for a living needed to know and would pay to read in a book, long personal histories mixing with other histories, union strikes and deregulation, all bound by class and money and labor. Then I’d edit their words down to prose as perfect as a newly paved highway and I’d call it a book.

Only I’d been too embarrassed to ask anyone for an interview but a secretary at a warehouse who’d been reading an Ernest Hemingway novel for a class at a community college.

Only I didn’t know how to publish a book.

So I talked to people and listened or just eavesdropped and wrote poems and novels and short stories and essays about what I heard and saw and did.

I kept the interview dream alive because I loved Studs Terkel and the way he told other people’s stories and sometimes my bookdream leaked out like moonlight over a midnight delivery but mostly I just asked questions because I was curious about how so many of us ended up doing shit jobs we couldn’t stand. Studs said, “One is a realist if one hopes.” I tried to wear that.

One day I’d understand how to publish a book.

I said a version of that, sorry.

It still shocks me that I was able to pass through a graduate writing program without anyone mentioning how to publish a book. Imagine going to med school and no one mentioning hospitals and one of the doctors in charge pulling you aside to say, “You don’t need to be in medical school to practice that kind of medicine,” meaning medicine, of course, for poor people.

Nonetheless, I kept writing.

Nonetheless, I read constantly, educating myself—books, local newspapers, books, magazines, national newspapers, more books, endless books. I worked relentlessly to understand the difference between writer and journalist, the difference between facts and truth.

My face was often smeared with newsprint, my bunk filled with paperbacks.

After every newspaper article I read, I wondered: how did newspapers manage to publish so many stories about criminals and dirty politicians and narcissistic athletes without ever using the language spoken by criminals and dirty politicians and narcissistic athletes? The answer was obvious: they presented the world as if illegality and greed were the languages of the gentile. I recognized it as the writing style of professors trying to bang their drunk students while writing PG-rated books of poems.

I thought words offered more freedom than that.

The hooker said, “What do you mean, interview? Like: dirty?”

How she used the word dirty escaped me.

“Just like talk,” I said. “You tell your story.”

She said, “Are you a writer or something?”

I said, “I want to be,” surprised by my own honesty, because I wanted to say: yes, yes I am a writer, I have many books.

“Cool,” she said. “I want to be something else too.”

“Like what?” I said, hoping she meant a writer or an actress or a painter or singer or guitar player or photographer or even someone who made trinkets to sell at flea markets.

Another one of my dreams was to be around other artists, any kind.

I’d grown up without books and fallen in love with reading at twenty-one like nothing I could have imagined and I’d been in love with drinking and drugs and sex and fighting and friends and at least two different women, maybe three, so I knew about love, I’d chased it down. Now I imagined talent and vision as being contagious, like a good disease, so I wanted to be near as many other artists as possible, to catch their words and ideas and images and melodies. I thought graduate school would be like that, an escape from the working-class worries of money and career that I’d grown up with but it was mostly hummus with nods to Derrida and the occasional accusation of racism or sexism or writing prose with line breaks and calling it poetry.

Lilly appeared stupefied by my question, that I wanted to know her dream.

I said, “Like a model or a singer or something?” and kept nodding along with my speeding brain, thinking of her hair and how it looked like rock n roll or fashion.

“Not like something else,” she said. “Like anything else, you know.”

“I know,” I said, masking my disappointment, but I did, unfortunately, understand.

She leaned back, stretching her arms and shoulders.

“Don’t fall,” I said.

I wanted to buy a fancy tape recorder but those were expensive and I needed a new refrigerator for my truck, one you plugged into the cigarette lighter, to keep the sodas and sandwiches I packed from home cold.

Dreams were expensive, even practical ones.

It stunk having to pack everything on ice.

I said, “You want to be interviewed or not?”

She said, “If you give me twenty bucks, I’ll take you to a party.”

I said, “Will there be people there who want to beat me up?”

She said, “I hope not.”

“Drugs and alcohol?”

“Probably a keg.”

“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m in.”

“Where’s your car?” I said.

I’d pulled on cargo shorts and a t-shirt, a red one with my company’s name on the chest that I’d bought from the company store at the main yard in Wisconsin.

She said, “I don’t have a car.”

“We’re walking?”

“It’s like a mile, maybe two.”

“Where do you live?”

“Like I’d tell you,” she said. “No offense.”

We walked along a service road then through some woods then through a neighborhood of small brick houses. Lilly outpaced me and I struggled to keep up. I wore clunky-ass steel-toed boots and the laces were loosely tied so my feet shifted around. The inside of my stomach tried to force itself into becoming the outside of my stomach from all the drugs I’d taken. I was thirsty. I was sweaty. I licked the sweat off my lips and felt gross.

I said, “I thought I was going to interview you,” pushing the words out to catch her.

She said, “The twenty bucks was for the party.”

I said, “Do you have another job or is this it?”

The next road led to more woods. Lilly held branches from trees she seemed to know so they didn’t swing back and sting my legs or slap my face.

She turned and walked backwards for a few steps, slowing.

She said, “You don’t look good.”

I said, “I thought you’d be friendlier.”

We were back in a neighborhood, a poorer one, wooden and shingle houses, very few bricks. It was garbage night and bags and metal cans lined the road.

“I’m friendly,” she said. “I haven’t tazed you yet.”

I said, “I either took too much speed or I’m coming down.”

She stopped walking and I caught up to her.

She said, “You’re really sweaty.”

“I know. I’ve always been sweaty.”

“I’ll sell you two Ritalin for five bucks.”

I said, “Ritalin? The stuff kids take who can’t sit still in class?”

This all happened more than twenty years ago. I hadn’t known Ritalin was a drug you could get high on or a drug that students took to stay awake to study for finals.

“It’s just speed,” she said. “It’s all the same shit.”

To be safe I kept most of my money in my sock, in my boot, the sweat turning the bills dark green. I had twenty-five bucks in my front pocket, along with my ID.

I said, “I’ll take the pills,” and reached for my money.

I handed over the five.

She saw my twenty.

She said, “I’ll answer a question for that twenty.”

I said, “That’s like an hour’s worth of questions.”

“We’ll see how this party is,” she said, and started to walk, faster than I’d hoped.

I had a friend who worked for a local weekly newspaper. He said every story he wrote was factually accurate yet he’d never written a story he believed. Time was an issue. The number of stories he was required to write every week limited the effort he could spend on any one story. By time, of course, he meant money. The woman whose house was being taken from her by eminent domain got a thirty-minute interview to tell her story because the reporter needed to be at the Woodlands Hills school board meeting at 7:30 prompt.

I think a lot about that still.

I think about it when I read.

I think about it when I write.

No one is paying me for this.

What you’re reading are the facts of my memory.

I remember Lilly because I knew some day I’d need to remember Lilly.

I remember Lilly because I made notes.

I’ve told this story to the people I tell stories to for a couple decades. It’s the only time I get to include a shotgun and poison ivy in the same narrative.

“This is it,” she said.

I tried to dry my face with the waistband of my shirt.

The quiet of the evening turned itself up until it sounded like my heart keeping time in my ears. I tried to stop sweating while staring at the house. It was a shitbox of broken materials, a collage of the downtrodden. The gravel and dirt driveway lead to a single garage with a tarp hanging down for a door. The door to the basement was wood and appeared to be hanging by the top hinge. The foundation was cinderblock, some painted white, most not painted. Above us was a porch, also cinderblock. The sides of the house consisted of siding and shingles and paper, whatever the wind hadn’t lifted away.

“Why are we here?” I said, confused by my earlier enthusiasm.

“You wanted to come to a party,” she said.

She straightened her loose-necked t-shirt so only one bare shoulder showed. She pushed her hair back and let it fall in a way she trusted. She adjusted her shorts, hiking them over her bony hips, exposing even more skinny leg. She smiled at me like before, like the woman trying to sell sex on the edge of my truck.

I said, “I didn’t want to come here. I wanted to interview you.”

She said, “You wanted to come here, trust me.”

“Maybe I did,” I said. “My mouth is dry.”

Trucking, with its lonely hours and straight lines and never-ending repetition, made the same recommendation repeatedly: go there, here is not where you want to be, drive on.

A skinny guy who wore a sleeve of tattoos like a t-shirt and ripped-up cargo shorts halfway down his ass stood by the basement door. I could hear what sounded like Metallica coming from behind the tarp in the garage, though it could have been Judas Priest or Iron Maiden or some other band of doom-screeching hellraisers. Metal music never leaves the Midwest, no matter what the trend, because people there need to pound.

Lilly said, “Let’s go inside.”

I assumed she had a boyfriend in there, a bad one, and I was there to either beat him up or be beaten up dramatically. I felt confident in either.

The skinny guy said, “Five bucks,” and showed me how much with his fingers.

I handed over my twenty and said, “Her too.”

He said, “Chicks drink free,” but made no gesture to show he knew Lilly then handed me my change, a thick pile of singles.

We stepped inside, Lilly holding my hand in a clasp.

The music was loud but not blaring, the basement separated from the garage by a wall of bricks and sloppy mortar. A few girls danced with each other. Mostly people talked in small groups and drank beer from plastic cups. I couldn’t tell exactly how old anyone was, somewhere between Lilly and me, a couple older guys with gray hair or beards, maybe a few high school kids, but mostly townies and community college students and waitresses and guys who worked construction, or so I guessed. I’d been at parties like this for years back home in Western Pennsylvania when I was younger. The music, now hair metal, suddenly grew louder and I noticed the sound coming from speakers hanging from the ceiling, or from the lack of ceiling, wooden support beams and a metal girder painted lime green and as chipped as a nervous girl’s fingernails.

Lilly looked around, startled by the volume.

She leaned into my ear and said, “Do you want to leave?”

She squeezed my hand.

I squeezed back.

“Yeah,” I said, suddenly wanting to fuck her or marry her or to be her best friend, the same feeling I had for most everyone in a room filled with cheesy guitars and denim.

“Let’s get a beer first,” she said. “You paid for our beers.”

“Sure,” I said, allowing her to lead me to the garage.

No matter what you read or what you have been taught in health or biology class, the pill popper knows the truth about our anatomy: the brain is wired directly to the heart which then wires both organs directly to the soul, meaning our sex but also our violence.

I could have fucked but I also could have fought.

I could have asked some more questions.

I could have fallen in love and I don’t mean romantic.

I could have impersonated sleep.

In line for the keg and staring at two long fluorescent bulbs running parallel in a white metal fixture and listening to Jani Lane strum an acoustic guitar and sing about factories and heaven, I thought: more, now, please.

I asked Lilly how old she was.

She said, “I’ll be twenty-one in three weeks.”

I nodded, thinking maybe we could head back to the truckstop or a nearby bar.

I said, “You have a fake ID?”

She said, “I don’t need one.”

The DJ, wherever he was, invisible as sound, maybe upstairs, maybe out back, maybe on the crumbling porch, kept pumping hair metal, a genre of music already forgotten by anyone who read Rolling Stone or Spin or Details or even fashion magazines with their models dressed in flannel and their articles on grunge.

The rock n’ roll playing at this party was like a big fuck-you to the tastemakers.

Or we didn’t know better.

Or both.

Or it all sounded good on drugs and keg beer.

I looked for Lilly and she was gone.

No one spoke to me but I kept on smiling.

After eight or nine cheapie beers from the keg, none of which tasted good, and I consider Coors Light a fine drinkable beer, I moved to the other room to see if I could find Lilly, hoping she’d walk me back to the truck and try to sell me something, like a handjob or more speed or a map, once we made it there.

As I stepped from the garage to the basement, the music abruptly stopped then the voices quieted to understand what killed the vibe. We all waited, confused faces slowly turning.

Then a man came down the stairs one step at a time but fast, slapping each step with his bare feet, the wooden stairs creaking like shelled peanuts on a dance floor. If he was not older than all of us, which he appeared to be, then at least he grew a better beard and wore a roomful’s worth of tattoos from his neck to his ankles. He’d ditched his shirt somewhere and his arms were wire wrapped around a shotgun. A couple steps from the bottom he raised the shotgun from his side then sighted us all, both individually and collectively, so you weren’t sure where the first shot was going. He pointed and looked, pointed and looked, the gun nodding like an angry head, partiers raising their hands or backing slowly away.

I did what seemed sensible: I stood motionless, beer at my side.

Then he swept the whole room like he held a machine gun and was about to spray bullets.

When the shotgun barrel swung away from me, followed by the guy’s head and vision, I stepped back and leaned against the wall, thinking I could dive into the garage if he started to pull the trigger. I tried to find Lilly. Lilly was not to be found.

The man with the gun breathed deep like his throat was made of wire.

I heard flem and meth.

It was not so much that I was scared, which I was, but that I needed to intellectually force myself to acknowledge that I was not bulletproof when all my drugged-up emotions and youth assured me I was, in fact, bulletproof.

The man with the gun was a scrawny little fucker.

The shotgun made him arrogant.

I was thinking I could wrap the barrel around his neck.

I leaned against the wall, waiting. I looked at the gun like it was a man’s eyes but I never looked at the man’s eyes who held the gun.

All the women, and the men too, had faces similar to Lilly.

None of them were her.

I held my half-filled beer cup to my chest and the weight of it was enormous, eight ounces plus the weight of a shotgun, plus the thought of dying in Iowa, the cup wet with sweat and condensation, and I knew dropping it would read like an invitation to be shot through.

The gun moved away.

I took a sip.

My grip felt stronger.

“Fuck all you,” the mouth in the beard above the shotgun said, “drinking my beer,” and he lowered his weapon and turned back up the steps, creaking, and said, again, “My beer,” and, as his feet disappeared from sight, “Mine.”

People did not immediately rush out the basement door.

This stupefied me, unless they all knew something, like the shotgun had not left the room but repositioned itself for a better shot.

So the shotgun was now a sniper?

I said, louder than I meant to but not as loud as I would have liked, “Has anyone seen Lilly?”

The basement crowd stopped whispering and turned, some confused, some pissed, some kind, some still scared like Lilly might have brought down the gun.

I said, “Anyone?”

A woman to my right, dressed in business clothes, in secretary clothes or car dealership clothes, said, “I think you’re on your own.”

“Thanks,” I said, and stepped from the house, thinking: sniper.

I walked and did not turn back.

I remembered something like that from the Bible.

I picked a house that appeared vaguely familiar and bolted down the driveway, hoping for the woods Lilly and I had walked through.

I stopped and turned back to the street.

Everything looked the same: the moon, the stars, the garbage cans, the trash bags.

The weight of my body, having alleviated itself from the weight of being pelted with buckshot, somehow weighed more than it did when all this started.

I wished the ground were a bed so I could fall down and sleep, even the drugged slumber where the movies of the day merged with fantasies and sometimes your eyes were open and other times they were closed.

I found the woods, some woods anyway, maybe not the woods Lilly and I had traipsed through, but it was private and dark and safer than where I’d been. I pushed through tree limbs and vines until I came to a clearing. The dirt path continued but the trees parted like they’d been asked to step aside. I took a few steps from the path and found a soft patch of weeds and grass and stretched out for what I imagined to be a powernap, which I’d wake from momentarily to find Lilly or at least my wretched career.

I made my body into a snow angel, creating wings and a gown with motion.

The moon shone down like a lamp and it was disappointing to not have a book, to not be able to read myself to sleep, what I did every single night.

I listened for Lilly and heard water and the distant song of the highway.

I closed my eyes not knowing what was drugs and what was alcohol and what was forgiveness and what was luck, just like I couldn’t tell what was poison ivy and what was a safe spot to relax for a minute and not die.

The doctor said, “What? Did you roll around in the stuff?”

I said, “More or less.”

She was a stunner, early thirties, long brown hair, slamming body, a brain large enough to hold my brain and all the other brains I knew and had ever known. When she talked it was a laugh, not an accusation. I thanked her every time she spoke.

She said, “I interned outside Yosemite, and I never saw anything as bad as you.”

“I feel horrible,” I said.

“You look worse,” she said, smiling, kind.

This was a Med First or something like that, one of those twenty-four hour clinics that seemed like a revelation when it first appeared, not because it was always open but because you didn’t have to shame yourself in front of the doctor who’d been handling your sickness and casual humiliations for years.

She said, “I need to clean this,” and picked up some gauze with her scissors.

From fingertip to bicep and from knee to ankle, I was scaly red and miserable. The doctor cleaned me with one thing then another. The sting made me pure. I never complained, even when her touch turned to fire.

She said, “You’re doing great, almost done.”

She was afraid the poison ivy would get in my eyes or spread to my genitals so she gave me a shot. I stared at the ceiling like the itchiness might leave my body like a cloud moving through the sky. The medicine helped. Medicine sometimes does.

What I did that night and the next day and all the days before, trucking and warehouse jobs and house painting and assistant-managing stores, makes as much sense as what I do now. I have never pretended to be anyone but a person who dreams something better and makes the effort. Whatever I did to get away from my trucking career, however pathetic that word, was nothing compared to how much I read and wrote. In a couple years I’ll have published more books than Ernest Hemingway. I speak nothing on my talent. I’m bragging on my effort and dedication.

I never finished my book of oral histories.

I wrote twenty-five other books before I published one.

The directions on a compass tell a lie, at least slightly.

True north is marked by the skies.

So it is with writing.

The next time I came back to Iowa I hoped for Lilly.

I hope for Lilly still but in so many different ways.

Dave Newman is the author of nine books, including The Same Dead Songs: a memoir of working-class addictions (2023), East Pittsburgh Downlow (2019), the novels Two Small Birds (2014) and Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children (2012). This essay is from his 2024 nonfiction collection How To Live Like Li Po in Pittsburgh. He is, finally, a professor at University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg. He lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley, with his wife, the writer Lori Jakiela.