The Teamster Story

(This story was told to me by the bus driver in question at a Holiday party Friday. )

About November 1975, somewhere above the Yukon on the North Slope haul road, a school style bus is parked on the road, idling. There is a large crew of pipeline workers on board due to work outside, who have just taken a break from an epic night of cocaine snorting, whoring and drinking, by smoking huge amounts of pot and waiting to eat lunch in bus, because nobody, but nobody, is going outside in the incredible white cold. The bus is sitting there all day. Teamsters, you ask? Sure.

The driver, who is more or less together, is looking down the road while everyone tokes away fiercely in back, playing cards.

Way, way, way down the road, he sees a dark spot. He watches it a while, as it gets closer. Soon it's apparant the spot is furry, and an enormous grizzly, attracted by 20 Teamster lunches, starts loping towards the bus.

"Hey, there's a bear coming."

"Yeah right, fuck off.

"Man, I'm telling you there's a fucking bear coming right for the bus."

"Yeah, fuck you!"

You would think, with the natural paranoia involved, that some of them might have gone for the increasingly accurate bear report.

The bear naturally runs straight for the bus, and as the driver looks to his right and the school bus doors between him and the bear, the bear stands up, smacks the doors in like a Diet Pepsi can, and climbs in as the driver dives right out the window. The driver rolls and gets up to observe the following mayhem, as, in the confines of a school bus made somewhat tighter by an enormous hungry bear, Teamster after Teamster dives out the windows in succession toward the back, dropping to the ground and running off in all directions, leaving the lunches for the bear, who eats all of them, destroys the inside of the bus and then poops all over it.

In other words, like the proverbial panda, he eats, shits, and leaves.

The supervisor tells the driver to clean up the bus. The driver says cleaning up bear shit is not in his job description.

Every man to his craft, sir.