For whom the booth tolls

Toll booth workers are such a mystery. Has anyone ever met one in a non-turnpike context? I’ve a sneaking suspicion that they don’t actually exist in tangible society; that they self-generate inside their little booths like a video game solder re-spawning after stepping on a digital grenade. Grown in a fashion similar to plants, the highway equivalent of wild carrots.

 

That isn’t meant to be a general dig at these denizens of the roadways, or any kind of insult at all, in fact. Rather, it’s an expression of puzzlement over these curious creatures. Typically, they seem perfectly nice, or at least disposition-neutral, silently accepting their fares in a workmanlike clockwork of collect-and-make-change-, collect-and-make-change. Our interactions with them are usually limited to mumbled thank-yous as we hand over our fistfulls of quarters, paying our way to whichever exit has a working bathroom and a doughnut shop that sells sesame seed bagels. Not that they ever have sesame seed anymore. Jerks.

 

Once in a while, though, we have an extended interaction with one of these toll booth people. Everybody’s experience with this is different, I’m sure, but for some reason my conversations with them are always surreal, playing out as a kind of weird philosophical lesson from a wise old sage. I’ve got this knack for meeting “boothers” – my little word for them – who dispense advice as though they’re hermetic Jedi masters, patiently instructing motorists in the ways of The Force.

 

I’ll give you an example.

 

Two weeks ago, this was. I’m driving through the toll booth in Gray, and, lacking one of those EZ Pass doohickeys, I naturally stop at the booth to hand over a sum of money that could feed an Ugandan orphan for a month. Because I lack the motivation to set up the EZ Pass, the cup holder in my car has transformed into a tangled thicket of quarters and mashed dollar bills. As the line of cars in front of me inched forward, I reached into this maelstrom of loose cash, selected what felt like three singles – for the tax into Sherwood Forest is a might high, yar, so it is – and readied them in my hand. When my turn came, I handed the bills over to the boother and awaited my change.

 

Almost immediately, and with a flourish, the boother ripped loose one of the singles from the pile I’d handed him and held it about two inches from my face, waggling it as if he were trying to hypnotize a dog with a chew toy. He regarded me sternly, not speaking. I took the dollar bill from him – I’d given him an extra one, obviously – and stuffed it back into my cup holder.

 

“That’s why you always count them out,” he said condescendingly, as though I were new to the concept of monetary exchanges. Then he hit the switch to trigger the green light, disgustedly turning his head back to whatever he had been doing, which I’m pretty sure was watching “Days of Our Lives” on a transistor television.

 

An off-putting incident, sure, but not something that would necessarily make me wary of boother ways. 

 

Like I said, though, this is a pattern.

 

An almost identical incident occurred in 2006. (Yes, I know the exact year. I am a wizard.) I was driving back home from Portland and handed some cash over to the boother by the Turnpike entrance, as is custom – only this time, thinking it was a single, I handed him a crisp ten dollar bill.

 

Part of what made his reaction scary was the look of the man: Weathered, with gnarled, angular bones, he looked like he’d been carved out of a tree and infused with life by an evil warlock. Like the dude in Gray, he waved around the excess money in menacing fashion; only, to be extra creepy, he whirled on me with a dark and leering grin, the kind that, in horror movies, is usually accompanied by a flash of lightning and the high-pitched shriek of a soon-to-be murder victim. Inexplicably, he seemed genuinely angry.

 

“You gave me too much money!” he wailed, accenting each syllable with a wave of my bills. He was still holding them too far away for me to take them back. He seemed to expect some sort of reply. 

 

“Um ... sorry?” was my meek and confused response.

 

He huffed and shoved the bills in my face. “You need to be more careful!” he yelled, and thrusted the crumpled wad forward. When I took it, he added punctuation to the end of this strange encounter by shuttering the window of his booth completely, where, I assume, he later turned back into a bat.

 

Obviously, this man has succumbed to the Dark Side of the Force. 

 

“But Jeff,” you say. “These are isolated incidents that took place years apart. How is this enough to make you wary of these so-called ‘boothers?’”

 

 There’s one more.

 

A cold night this past December. I was about to enter I-295 through Portland when I inched up to the booth and did something risky: I asked for directions.

 

The boother, a bookish lady of perhaps 40, gave me directions which I knew to be circuitous; in a bit of a hurry, I was hoping for more of a direct route, like a top-secret auxiliary highway, or a wormhole through time and space. I asked her, “Is there anything a little quicker?”

 

“The quick route is more complicated,” she replied. “The simple way is better.” Now she was regarding me with something like cold steel in her eyes.

 

I nodded, disappointed, and started to ease my car forward again ... when she stopped me.

 

“You really shouldn’t be in such a hurry,” she said.

 

Expecting her to say more, I waited. After an awkward beat of silence, I cautiously started creeping forward once more.

 

She stopped me again.

 

“We all have choices to make in life,” she said.  

 

Another beat. Then: “You’re holding up the line.”

 

Open palm, insert forehead.

 

At a loss to explain why these encounters are always so surreal, the best I can offer is a wild hypothesis: that boothers are born into a secret society of irascible, would-be sages, cursed to dispense their wisdom from Plexiglas cubes in the middle of a four-lane blacktop. That seems about as likely an explanation as anything else.

 

Unless of course I just happened to catch people on bad days, with years and weeks separating totally unrelated incidents. But c’mon. Let’s not get farfetched, here.