WILMINGTON, NC — Dennis Lee Ray pats the hood of his Peterbilt 359, a wistful smile playing across his weathered features.
“Had a lot of good memories in this ol’ truck,” he says. “It’s amazing what we’ve lost. What they’ve taken from us.”
Ray, 64, began his career as a long-haul trucker in 1978. It was, he said, a very different time.
“It wasn’t like it is now,” he said. “There were different expectations. Men were men and women were women, and nobody saw anything wrong with that. Now everyone is woke and folks like me don’t have a place in the world anymore.”
This year, Ray has decided to hang up his hat and retire. It wasn’t a decision that came easily.
“I wanted to keep doing what I do until the day I died,” he said. “I guess it just wasn’t in the cards.”
Ray isn’t retiring from the trucking industry, however. He’s retiring from his true passion:
Murdering hitchhikers.
“No, I’m still hauling up and down the eastern seaboard,” he said. “They’ll still let you do that, at least. But when it comes to murdering young women I find on the side of the highway, it looks like the nanny-state liberals have won.”
Back when he was a younger man, Ray said, murdering hitchhikers was just a part of life.
“Some guys were blue-collar, some guys were white-collar, and some guys like me were what we called ‘red-collar,’” he said. “Hitchhikers went missing all the time, no one thought twice about it. You wanted to go see the Pink Floyd laser show at the planetarium and you didn’t have a car, you knew you were rolling the dice.”
Now, Ray said, “wokeness” has all but destroyed the pursuit he loves so dearly.
“These cowardly Millennials have had it drilled into them that you shouldn’t trust anybody,” he said. “‘Stranger danger,’ you know. And they’re too lazy to hitchhike. The ones that do, you pull up next to them and say something like, ‘Hey sugar, I hate to see you go but I love to watch you leave,’ they just ignore you, maybe even pepper spray you. That’s feminism for you.”
“I used to be called ‘The Nightmare Angel of I-95,’” Ray added. “Now they call me an example of toxic masculinity. Back in my day, it was just called masculinity. Boys growing up, they wanted to be firemen, cowboys, boxers, murderers. Can’t have that anymore on account of woke.”
“Wokeism” has had a chilling effect on public discourse, Ray said.
“If I go up to the average person and say, ‘Hey, my name is Dennis, and I murdered 28 hitchhikers between 1977 and 2015,’ I’m getting cancelled,” he said. “These liberals will drag up stuff you did years ago just to find something to get upset about. I sometimes feel like I’m the Louis C.K. of killing young women in a swamp.”
What’s most troubling, Ray said, is that the woke agenda has caused America to experience a loss of innocence.
“I want to go back to Mayberry,” he said. “I want to go back to a time when people trusted each other, when they didn’t bother locking their doors, when they didn’t bother closing their windows, when they didn’t wake up when you stroked their face while they slept. Now Antifa runs Portland and you have to use paper straws. Did this country lose a war?”
Now that he can no longer pursue his dream, Ray said, he feels he’s lost his identity.
“What am I supposed to tell my family?” Ray said. “What am I supposed to tell my secret second family? What am I supposed to tell the man on fire behind the sun who says he’ll stop shrieking at me if I offer him enough sacrifices? I’m at loose ends.”
“I just feel like my life has been destroyed,” Ray added. “I don’t expect anyone I’ve ever met would understand that feeling.”
