PLEASE STAN BY

FRIENDSHIP

    In 1964 my brother got me a summer job driving a truck for Friendship Dairies. It was a big truck, air brakes and all that stuff and I had to get a special license to drive it. The job? Every night the truck would be loaded up with fifty thousand pounds of farmer cheese, pot cheese and other cheeses and at midnight I would set out from the markets in lower Manhattan and unload different orders at various locations throughout Brooklyn and Queens. I had keys, (many, many keys), to refrigerated lockers or warehouses at all of these locations as they were all closed and abandoned as I made my rounds.

    For the first week on the job I went out with Jimmy, the regular driver, to learn the route and the different things I had to know about each specific delivery. The driving was relatively easy at night, no traffic, but the physical unloading was pretty tough and all the while I kept realizing that I’d be doing this all alone next week.

    So finally it’s my first day, I mean night, on the job. In addition to my normal anxiety of driving and remembering the route and the various peculiarities of each delivery, I had one new big extra thing to worry about.

    It seems that a white cop had shot a black kid in Harlem that day and it had set off sporadic race riots in the city. The word around the market drivers was that there was trouble in Brooklyn and the cops were holding up trucks before they crossed the Williamsburg Bridge until they had five trucks and then they sent them across in a convoy for their safety.

    A CONVOY! Holy Shit! A convoy! My first night on the job and I’m gonna be in a fuckin' convoy. Besides, I’m thinking, what good is a convoy gonna be? All the drivers would be heading in different directions after we left the bridge. Well, I didn’t have much of a choice so I headed to the bridge.

    Midnight. The cops were there and I got on line behind several other trucks, waited and watched as the cops counted off five trucks and waved them across. Finally I was first on line and by chance there’s nobody behind me yet, so I hit the brakes to wait. But no. The cop is waving me across. “What about MY convoy?” I yelled at him. He spread his hands palms out, cocked his head to the side, smirked like only a New York cop can and said “Ya Got Cheese! YA GOT CHEESE! and forcefully waved me on.

    I guess he figured that no rioters would bother with cheese. I hoped he was right as I rumbled on into the dark Brooklyn night.

    He was.