| Trouble
On And Off The Highway Ronnie Dee (c) Copyright 2025 by Ronnie Dee 
|
 Photo by Dietmar Rabich at Wikimedia Commons. |
Fords were the thing back in the early 60's in my neighborhood, but I had a neat looking 1950 Chevrolet Fastback, black with red rims and white sidewalls that I really liked. It was the first car I had that wasn't basically junk. It ran great with the one exception being a trip to Columbus, Ohio with my grandmother.
We left one summer day for the 200 mile journey to Columbus. This was in the days just before the interstate and we had to go up old Highway 42 to Cincinnati, pick up Highway. 22 to Washington Court House and then Highway 62 into Columbus. It was a narrow and twisty route, but the only way to go. We arrived in Cincinnati with no problem until I pulled up to a stoplight in the middle of downtown. When the light turned green, I stepped on the accelerator and we went nowhere. I revved it a bit and we grudgingly moved a couple of feet. I was perplexed. Horns were expectedly honking, but I was stuck. I looked around and saw a service station right across the street, so I pushed down hard on the accelerator and managed to creep across the street and into the station. The mechanics came out and couldn't figure it out either, so they coaxed it into the garage and onto the rack to check it out.
It turns out that my brake shoes had gotten wet as it had rained earlier in the day and they had literally swollen up to the point where they were rubbing against the drum with enough pressure to stop the car. It took them two hours to get the thing fixed as the whole apparatus was red hot from friction. I was very lucky to have been so close to a mechanic or we would have had a heck of a time getting it fixed anyway soon. But fix it they did and we were on our way again. It was, however, a harbinger of things to come.
Things went well in Columbus until our last night when my aunt Birdie (the one who fell out of the kitchen chair) and her spinster daughter Dorothy, thought it would be a good idea to visit their good friends, Horace and Mildred. So we go to their house, a nice place and they were very cordial, and after dinner, Mildred says, "Horace, why don't you show Ronnie your workshop."
Horace replies, "Yeah, come on Ron," and heads down onto the basement. It is quite a workshop. There are tools and vices and pieces of wood laying around on work tables. Horace turns to me and matter of factly says, "I just love to come down here and take off my clothes and work in the nude. I feel so unencumbered."
I tried not to picture Horace in the nude. He was a big guy, about 6'4", bald, with very large hands.
He continued, "Don't you like to just run around in the nude some time?"
DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!
"Uh, no I don't actually," I mumbled, planning my escape route in my head.
"Oh, I love to work in the nude," he virtually shouted.
His
constant and unctious use of the word "nude" was creepy
enough but then he handed me a small stack of cards, about the size
of baseball trading cards. Only they weren't baseball trading cards,
they were a bunch of "nude" men in various forms of
affection. I didn't want to hold them, let alone look at
them,
so I quickly put them down and said, "Yeah, I've gotta go to the
restroom," and fled for the stairs.
I went to the bathroom still feeling creeped out and when I opened the door to leave, there was Horace, standing right at the door, and he nudged me back into the bathroom and said excitedly, "Hey, I got a joke for you."
Before I could say anything, he says, "Okay, now I'm going to touch you," and quickly, but gently grabs my crotch and starts telling me this "joke."
I was flabbergasted. I stood there like a fool not knowing what to do. Do I make a scene and cause a big row or do I put up with this and get the Heck out of here as soon as possible. For the sake of my aunt and grandmother, I decided not to panic and ruin their evening. I knew I would never see this guy again, so I stood there while he kept probing me and the joke finally ended with the line, "He comes from where the men come from. Har har," or something like that. As soon as he let go of me I stepped around him and opened the door.
We left a little while later and as we were going out the door, saying our goodbyes, Horace said over the others to me, "Yeah, well we know where the men come from, don't we Ron? Ha, ha."
On the way back, one of my group says, "Well, that was nice wasn't it? And Harold and Ron seemed to get along well, didn't they?"
And I briefly thought about saying, "How would you all like to hear a little story?" But I couldn't do that to them.
Now
I don't consider myself a homophobe, and whatever Horace wants to do
with his life is all right, just leave me out of it. This was 1960
and I was still pretty green as to the ways of the world, or at least
that world. For some reason I had a flashback when I watched the
movie, Sixteen Candles, and at one point a perplexed Molly Ringwald
gasped in horror, "I can't believe my grandmother actually felt
me up." I hear you Molly.
Thank God, the rest of our visit passed without further incident and we started home. We got through Cincinnati without difficulty and headed down 42 as it began to turn dark. Somewhere down 42 I came to the crest of a hill and suddenly the car went dead. I mean no engine, no lights, no nothing. It was a pitch dark night and I was with my grandmother in a black automobile on a hilly, winding road frequented by Greyhound buses and semi trucks.
That was still a period in my life where I feared practically nothing, so wasn't frightened. I just wondered, "What to do next?" When I looked around I saw an oasis of light off in the distance. It was at the bottom of the long hill I was currently sitting atop. Whatever the light was, it looked like it afforded me a way to get off the highway. So I gave a little push and sure enough, we picked up speed and coasted down the road to the parking lot of a little diner.
It was like the Twilight Zone: a crisis, a spark of hope, a little diner in the middle of nowhere, were we saved? Yes. The diner was not only open on a sunday night, but they had a mechanic there. The highway from Louisville to Cincinnati was not very populated and there were few stations or diners along the way. We were just incredibly lucky, again. The mechanic was currently asleep, but the kindly waitress said she would wake him a little later. My grandmother wouldn't go along with my theory that these people might be aliens, just so we waited.
I
called my sister and she and my brother in law Jim, piled the kids in
the car and drove up to get us. Mom and I had a burger and coffee
while we waited, and the mechanic woke up and told me the battery was
shot. He said he could charge it up and it might get us home. It did,
as we followed my sister, but the next morning it was as dead as a
doornail. Two bad situations on the road and both
times,
there was just the help I needed within easy reach, turning two
possible disasters into relatively small inconveniences. Just lucky I
guess.
When I bought a new battery, I suggested to Mom that we drive back up 42 to see if that diner was really there, but she thought it was nonsense, and since the Freeways have now bypassed all of that area, we'll never know.