Work in progress: Jack Clark on giving books titles

     Regular contributor Jack Clark has been on a roll. Readers like him, I like him. To be honest, I might not even have thought that today's contribution was "a bit of a self-promotion" unless he himself worried aloud about it. Maybe so. But as I tell young writers, — or would, if any of them ever asked, which they don't — if a writer doesn't care about his own stuff, then nobody will. If it's a plug, then Jack has earned it.  I don't pay him for his contributions to EGD. But maybe you can take the plunge and order his book. 

     When self-driving trucks take over the highways, the long-distance furniture mover will probably be the last to climb aboard.
     I wrote that a couple of years back as the introduction to a proposal for my book Honest Labor. The subtitle back then was, Adventures in the Moving Trade. The proposal led nowhere. I recently gave up and published the book myself with a new subtitle, Writing & Moving Furniture.
     I worked on the book for more than a decade. Not continually but here and there between other writing projects. It’s had several titles along the way. Big Trucks and Taxicabs may have been the first. But then I decided to cut the taxi. I’d already covered that subject in a couple of novels. We Haul Anything Cartage Company, I got that one from The Man with the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren’s novel. This is what he dubbed Hebard Storage, the moving company that hauled the unclaimed bodies from the county morgue to potter’s field. I spent most of my 15-year moving career at Hebard. One of my first published stories was about the same trip that Algren had written about.  

     A Writer Behind the Wheel. That might have been the worst title of all. 48 States. I still kind of like that one, and I have been through all of them. Over the Road. That one’s not too bad.
     My favorite title was Longhaul and I probably would have published the book under that name but Finn Murphy beat me into print with his book The Long Haul, which, like mine, is the memoir of a long-haul furniture mover.
      I heard about the book before it came out and then tracked down Murphy via email to ask how he’d managed to find a publisher. He was nice enough to tell me the truth. A brother and a sister were both well-established writers. He’d used their agent.
     One of my friends suggested that Murphy might have stolen not only my title but my idea. Well, I’d queried widely looking for an agent so it’s possible he’d heard about my book. But coming from a literary family, I think writing about the kind of work you're doing is a pretty obvious thought. You can’t steal ideas anyway. They’re like air and also, like titles, non-copyrightable.
      Now you might think one book from a furniture mover is more than enough. But the two books are nothing alike. They are completely different takes on the same long-distance world.
     I was first inspired to write mine by a John McPhee article in The New Yorker. He went along on a cross-country trip with a hazardous material (HazMat) tank truck driver. It’s a good story but that’s due to McPhee’s skill as a writer. I can’t think of a more uninteresting form of trucking. The only excitement might come if something bad happened along the way. But if the truck explodes, who would be left to write the story?
     Other than that, it’s a trip from one tank to another, from a hose to a nozzle.
      I guess the real trucking is all those miles between tanks. To a furniture mover, those same miles are when you’re relaxing and letting your body heal. The real work happens when the engine is off and the truck is sitting still. We sometimes called the driving part of the job windshield time. You could sing along to the radio and glance at the passing scenery, but you could never take your eye off the road. And yes, Windshield Time, I used that as a title for a while too.
     Sometimes I took a notebook along on my trips. But when I finally sat down to write, the only one I found had a single entry. “World’s largest prairie dog,” it said, alongside an exit number. I think it was off of Interstate 70 in Kansas. One way or the other, I never stopped to see the dog.
     Without notes, I had doubts that I could write the book. Maybe that’s why it’s one of my favorites.
      What I did find was an entire box full of moving paperwork, old log books and trip settlements. These came with bills of ladings attached, which showed pick-up and delivery addresses, the weight of the shipment and other details. Once I put those in order, much of my memory came back.
     What brought all this to mind was a New York Times article about self-driving trucks plying the highways in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, among other places. They’re having a problem with phantom braking. Well, I did a bit of that myself, in days of old. In a big truck, if you think you see something, you don’t wait to make sure. You have to slow down immediately, in case it’s not just another highway hallucination. It takes a very long time to stop those heavy vehicles.
     Anyway, this is an enticement for you to pick up a copy of my book and enter a world that could soon disappear.
     You might think, why would I want to read about moving furniture? Well, you’ve read this far. What’s another 70,000 words?