The Boy Who Lived in His Truck
A Story About Life in Bard’s Backyard
By J.p. Lawrence
Sleeping bag in hand, I walk with Justin Gero to the parking lot near Manor. There, I find a black, somewhat battered pickup truck, a 1996 Nissan.
This has been Gero’s home for the fall semester.
I will be his first overnight guest.
Gero opens the hatch of his truck topper, and I see the entirety of his possessions at Bard College: a grey-green sleeping bag, assorted bookbags and mason jars, two footballs. A plastic pipe, affixed to the sidewall, serves as a makeshift clothes rack.
He clambers in, and I follow. There is just enough space for the both of us. We shimmy into our respective sleeping bags, with my head resting against the tailgate, and his resting against the cab. An iPod plays hits of the ‘90s.
Outside, the winter air is cool but gentle. Inside the truck is warm and humid. The heat seems to stick to me inside my sleeping bag. The smell reminds me of a locker room. I lean my head back and try to fall asleep.
Let’s rewind. Earlier that night, I meet with Gero in a classroom in Hegeman Science Hall. He has just completed his senior project on nitrogen-producing fungi, and tonight is his small celebration. He watches football and waits to drink champagne.
The blonde-haired Gero wears a red plaid flannel shirt and scratched up, nicked and muddied pants. The pants he wears are one of two pairs he owns. His wardrobe, pared down, has approximately 40 items.
“I think there’re some people who think I’m really poor,” says Gero, who receives financial aid from a scholarship, his parents, his work and money from his grandfather. “I think there're some people who think I’m trying to be a trendy hipster and going against the grain. And I think most people just see it as it really is: I just want to save some money and I’m an outdoorsy person, so living in my car isn't really that big of a deal to me.”
He credits his stinginess to his mother. Life in the lower middle class meant Wal-Mart shirts when he wanted Abercrombie and Fitch. Anything nice he’d have to pay for himself.
He decided to live in his truck last spring. He had lived in his car for two weeks the previous summer, and the ease of it convinced him to try it again during the fall semester. He found a truck in April, close to his birthday.
Now, he lives life in a small routine. He wakes up at 8 a.m. on weekdays, sometimes later if he’s been out the night before.
“Sleeping in has lost some of its oomph,” he says.
In the afternoon, after classes, he goes to gym. “I actually shower more now that I’m living in my car,” he says, “because I go to the gym every day, and I shower because that's the only place I can shower.”
And at night, he works here, in Hegeman.
There’s a certain sense of untethered time when one comes home, time when one can sit on the couch or lie in bed watching movies, without care and without a schedule. Gero doesn’t have that.
“I don't hang out in my truck,” he says. “I go to the library or I go to Hegeman, and I do work.”
It’s a semi-spartan life, very minimalist, and it’s just way Gero likes it.
When it’s cold at night, he wears more layers in his sleeping bag. When he has to pee, he pees on a small, discolored patch of grass outside his truck—or in a bottle.
As for the other bodily function, he says has never had a late-night emergency call—yet.
“There've been a couple close calls in the morning, where I get up, and I’m like, ‘alright, I’m driving to the campus center, right now,’” Gero says.
His love life, he says, has actually been more energetic since he began living in his truck, although no one, other than me, has slept over in his truck.
“I came to the conclusion that if [a girl] was really someone that I thought was going to be worthwhile, she would be down with living in a car,” Gero says.
“There was one point where I saw a car that I thought that someone was sleeping in, and later I saw a girl driving around in it, and I thought it was a match made in heaven,” Gero says, but he was mistaken.
He began sleeping in his car a few days before school started. His first parking space was in the big overflow lot of the Fisher Performing Arts Center. It wasn’t very inconspicuous, Gero says. Security guards would tap on his window to see if he was okay, or drunk.
His second parking space, in the Tivoli Bays, was even less successful. Within four nights, local police kicked him out.
The parking lot near Manor Annex, Lot C, proved to be the best fit, Gero says. But it was while parked there that Gero received a call from Bethany Nohlgren, Dean of Students. Ten minutes later came a call from Ken Cooper, Director of Security.
Nohlgren says she wanted to check up on him to make sure he was safe. Cooper says he offered him a place to stay, either at Cooper’s home or on campus. Gero opted to stay in his truck. He hasn’t received word from either one since.
In the future, however, both Nohlgren and Cooper say they don’t anticipate more students like Gero.
“I can’t have people living in cars,” Cooper says, “but when you let someone do something that is somewhat over and above the official law, you get other people who think they can do that too, and I can’t let that happen.”
Cooper, who used to go on 22-mile bike rides with Gero, says he made the decision to let Gero stay on campus in his truck.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have let another student live in a truck, he says.
But Gero is an avid camper and someone used to living on his own. Back home in Northampton, Mass., he used to spend nights in his car in high school after fights with his mother. After one fight, he spent two years living in a friend’s pantry. The room, dubbed the “Nook,” was just big enough for a bed.
On the back of his truck are the words “The Nook II.”
The Nook II rumbles to Manor after a trip to Red Hook to buy crackers and cheese. Gero has been living on non-perishables and stolen meals from the cafeteria, but the beginning of winter has turned his truck into a makeshift refrigerator.
“Yogurt’s on the menu now,” he says.
At Manor, Gero celebrates the completion of his senior project and reminisces about his time at Bard. Soon, he will be going to Hawaii for five months to work on a coffee and macadamia nut farm. After that, he hopes to come back to Bard for graduation.
The plan after that: a train to Georgia. A hike up the Appalachian Trail. Hitchhiking out west. And then finding a job and a house out there.
“Especially if I want to start a relationship with a girl and be a real, functioning member of society, I’m going to need a house or apartment,” he says.
For now, however, he is a student of Bard—one on the verge of being thrust out into life after college. “Being a member of society at large,” he says, “is way different than being in college.”
In the morning, I wake up from troubled dreams. I kick out of my sleeping bag and lift the hatch. The sky outside the rear window is white and blank and vast.
“The world,” I say, “it’s so big out there.”
“Yeah,” a groggy, half-asleep Gero says. “It’s scary, isn’t it?”