I-10 into Houston on a Monday morning, and traffic doesn’t stop so much as give up. Just lies down and dies like a tired old horse. Sixty-five to zero in a blink, brake lights stacking up until the whole interstate looks like a busted Christmas parade.

My CB comes alive.

“This is Bad Apple, eastbound at the 7-5-3, and we are officially parked, boys.”

That voice, hell, it was a velvet hammer. Smooth whiskey drawl, late-night DJ warmth, the kind of voice that makes you picture a man who’s seen some shit and decided to laugh at all of it. I liked him instantly.

“Anybody know what we got up ahead?”

Same old reports. Wreck at the 756. Maybe a fatal. Maybe an hour. Maybe three. Truckers start bartering routes, 610, surface streets, or just sit tight and bleed logbook hours into the Houston humidity.

Bad Apple’s in the mix like he’s been there the whole time, easy, friendly, tossing advice, catching some back. Then the air settles into that particular silence truckers know too well: the dead time. Nothing to say, nothing to do but idle and sweat.

And that’s when he starts singing.

No warning. No “y’all listen up.” Just launches into it:

“Bad Apple, that’s my name,

Bad Apple, that’s my game…

Bad women come and bad women go,

They leave me standin’ in the mornin’ glow…”

Raunchy. Stupid. Glorious. The man is damn near serenading half of I-10, and we’re all stuck enough to appreciate the show.

Somebody asks if he wrote it.

“Every word,” he says. “Took me five states and a failed marriage.”

Truckers laugh the way only tired men laugh, loose and grateful. He keeps going, spinning verses about motels with carpets older than sin, about mistakes he kept making on purpose, about being the fruit no woman wanted to take home to her mama but plenty sampled on the road.

Traffic creeps. Five miles per hour. Ten. Plans get made, who’s bailing out where, who’s rolling on, who’s wishing everyone safe miles. But every lull, every breath between transmissions, Bad Apple slips another verse into the world. Not trying to impress anybody, just refusing to let the morning be ordinary.

By the time we’re moving free again, scattering like birds flushed from brush, it hits me: I never saw his truck. Didn’t catch his company name, his lane, nothing. Just a voice and a song and a moment.

But I’ll be damned if he didn’t make that traffic jam feel like church. The kind of roadside congregation only the highway understands, strangers held together by heat, boredom, and the right kind of ridiculousness.

Sometimes the road gives you miles. Sometimes it gives you money.

And every now and then, it gives you a man named Bad Apple singing his heartbreak into a CB mic like it’s the only truth he’s got left, and maybe the only one we needed.

Wherever you are, brother, keep singing.

The highway remembers.

___

Michael Singleton spent thirty years in technology. Then he drove trucks. Now he writes about it. His memoir-in-progress, Blacktop Chronicles, is the long way home.

Photograph by Sherry Shahan