Dink

Well, the trip so far has been rocky at best. While driving to Indianapolis, the battery or some fuse in Ryan's car must've given out, because the radio, AC, everything failed and the transmission wouldn't kick in. The car died, and after a talk with AAA, were waiting for a tow when it miraculously started again. Relieved, we got back on the road… until the car died about 30 miles later. It stalled, of course, during a segment of construction where concrete walls left us no room to pull off. Fearing that we'd literally clog the highway with the car, we managed to find an area to the right of newly paved road and parked it there. AAA said they would dispatch a tow truck soon, would flag our car as 'urgent' since it was on the freeway, yadda yadda. Well, as these things go, the tow truck arrived almost 2 hours later (during the wait we haphazardly traversed a partially completed bridge to reach a gas station for drinks).
The towman, wearing a blue collar shirt with 'Dink' on the sewn namebadge, stepped out of the car. While repositioning Ryan's car, he described himself as a 'horse' if that's any indication of his stature. The three of us wedged into the front seat. He was quick to talk, tell, and advise us on anything from the reason gas prices are high, to the war in Iraq, to the world of 18 wheeler truck culture, where they have nicknames for all the big companies (C.F.I.- “Can't Find It”) and where prostitution in truck rest stops is commonplace. He told us he hadn't slept in almost 3 days straight because of work (it's about midnight at this point). As he talked more and more about himself, his job, and his childhood, I realized that this was a man who had grown up too fast. His current boss, a family friend his whole life, had a daughter who had just passed away in jail, incarcerated for the murder of her husband, which occurred when Dink was 5. Dink had beat a friend in a drinking contest at age 12 by downing a case of beer in 3 hours. His speech, peppered with a chain smoker's cough and his droopy features gave him the look of a man in his 40s, although he was only 28 (only 7 years older than us!) For all of this, Dink had remained very genuine and simple, with an ingrained desire to help people. It was obvious from the way he talked. He described the horrors of traffic accidents that he had to help clean up as a towman, scenes so vile and sickening that we could hardly fathom their existence in reality. But in some of these stories, lives were able to be saved, sometimes directly because of him. Yet he didn't seem overly proud of these things; it was, it seemed, just a part of his job.
We finally made it to Indianapolis at 2:30 AM (instead of our planned 10pm arrival) and got to bed, in the end, around 4AM at Ryan's parent's new condo.