When I was in college at Chapel Hill, my wife, who was two months pregnant, and I decided to drive 542 miles in an old car to Cullowhee, N.C., and back, to spend 36 hours with friends.
It might help you understand why we did that if I tell you we were 21 years old and didn’t have good sense.
Donna and Judy Wall got to be friends working as stenographers at the FBI’s Charlotte office. Both women got married that summer and Donna and I palled around some with Judy and her husband, Jim, until it was time to go back to school. I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina. Jim was a student-athlete at Western Carolina University, a defensive end on the football team. That fall the Walls invited us to Cullowhee for a game.
So, one Friday afternoon after class, we got in the white, bug-eyed Austin-Healey Sprite Donna bought while I was in the Navy and headed west.
The Sprite was a sporty looking car but it was on its last leg, worn out. I wasn’t all that surprised that night when a warning light blinked red –the generator had stopped working, had stopped charging the battery. We made it on in to Morganton, looked for a mechanic, and found one at what would now be called a sports bar, watching the Fight of the Week on TV. He told me he’d take a look when the fight was over, so we waited.
The man didn’t have any tools to work with other than a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, but he was able to take the generator apart. He sanded it with a piece of screen wire he got out of a trash can and put it back together. It might work for a few days, he said, or it might not work at all.
Fingers crossed, so to speak, we returned to I-40 and headed west. Minutes later, the red warning light came back on.
The moon was full and I could see pretty good so I turned off the headlights to save the battery and prolong the life of the fuel pump, which was slowly pulling the battery down.
I drove another 20 miles or so with my lights out, to Marion, and stopped at the first hotel we saw, a three or four-story brick building downtown. I didn’t like the looks of it but I didn’t have a whole lot of choice. I didn’t know how much driving around I could do looking for another place to spend the night, how much battery I had left.
The night clerk at the hotel looked at Donna kind of funny — her hair was in curlers and she was wearing Bermuda shorts, a white, short sleeve blouse, and flip flops –before telling me: “That’ll be three dollars and a half. In advance.”
***
Our room was a doozy.
The door was whompyjawed. I wedged a chair under the knob to prevent someone from just pushing it open and walking in.
The ceiling was stained. It looked like water from the tub, or commode, in the room above had leaked through.
A single light bulb hung from a bare wire in the middle of the room.
One wall was bathed in a soft red light, the glow from a neon sign outside our window that blinked on and off, on and off, all night: “HOTEL,” it said.
It was noisy, too, footsteps in the hall, late into the night, coming and going.
* * *
On Saturday morning I went hunting for a mechanic. When I found one he asked me, “Where was that car built?”
“In England, I think,” I said.
“That’s where you ought to be,” he told me, and refused to work on it.
Later that morning I bought a Lucas generator at a junk yard, found a mechanic to install it, and we were on our way.
But not for long.
When we stopped to get something to eat I noticed fluid pooling under the car. It smelled like gasoline. It was gasoline. There was a small hole in the copper line from the fuel tank to the engine.
I walked to a drugstore nearby, bought gauze and medical tape, wrapped the gauze around the fuel line as tight as I could, taped it, and we got back on the road.
But not for long.
The motor blew up and we coasted to a stop on the shoulder of the highway.
And then we caught a break.
No sooner had I pulled our suitcase out of the car when two strangers, Pat and Jerry Gaudet [with whom Donna exchanged Christmas cards for the next few decades] stopped and offered us a ride to the next town. I don’t remember the name of the town, but from there we were able to get a bus to Cullowhee. And from the bus station we took a cab to Jim and Judy’s apartment.
We had been on the road for more than 24 hours.
* * *
The trip home, by comparison, was a snap. On Sunday morning Jim and Judy drove us back to our car. I put a chain on it and Jim towed me to a repair shop in Asheville.
Donna and I caught a bus to Charlotte, bought an old car from brother Dave, and by late Sunday evening we were back in Chapel Hill.
Oh, one more thing: That hotel we stayed in Marion? Judy, who grew up in Marion, told us it was a whore house.
Coming Friday: I Ran Over Someone