Some of the major ports like Calcutta, Karachi, we stay eight days, twelve days picking up cargo. I’d stay aboard ship. I’d go to movies almost every night ’cause I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t gamble. I was just a poor ass seaman. (Laughs.) I’d do other things, naturally. (Laughs.) There’s always women. (Laughs.)

“Women-chasing was my weakness. You can love your wife, but a man is like a dog. He’ll chase anything with a skirt on it. Drop the skirt, he’ll still chase. I’ve never cared for women singly. There’s always two or three at a time. I found in traveling the most beautiful women are less sexy than others. In India, they’re beautiful, delicate. Chinese women, delicate—like a piece of porcelain. In bed? Nothing. In these countries, you find a great deal of prostitutes, because they need it for survival. The seaman doesn’t meet the better class, the families. His time is limited.”

A stop at the Wisconsin state line, a place to eat. Big trucks stop there. Maybe meet a bunch that have been in the steel mill all night. Coffee-up, tell all the stories, about how badly you’re treated in the steel mill, tell about the different drunks that try to get under your wheels. Then move towards your destination and make the delivery at seven ’ in the morning. We’re talking about thirteen hours already. My routine would be to drop two days like this and not come home. Halfway back from Milwaukee take a nap in the cab at a truck stop. You use the washroom, the facilities, you call your dispatcher in Gary, and pick up another load. Went home for a day of sleep, wash up, get rejuvenated, live like a human being for a day, come back to the mill after supper, and be off again. During the last ten years almost everybody bought a sleeper truck. It has facilities behind the seat. If you were to get a hotel room every night you were on the road, why, you’d be out of business shortly.