By Clint McElroy
HQ 43 | WINTER 2002
I have to preface this column with the following statement: Every word in it is true. No lies, no exaggerations, nothing but 100 percent fact. If you don’t accept that right off the bat, then the power and significance of this story will be lost on you. It may sound like I made it up, but I didn’t. Nobody could make this up.
All of this talk about weddings and marriages in this issue of HQ caused me to reminisce about my own wedding day. In the summer of 1977, I proposed to Leslie Kitchen, my girlfriend of four years. She accepted and I in turn left for a new job in Florida the next day. This left her to plan every aspect of our wedding while I basked in the sun and surf of St. Petersburg, a coming attraction of how our married life would be ‹ she does all the work and I float blindly through lifeoblivious to such things as detail.
I returned in October to be married to my darling girl on Saturday, October 15, 1977. We exchanged vows in Ironton, Ohio, surrounded by friends and family who, unbeknownst to us had a pool going as to how long the marriage would last. My friend Rick Mayne had the longest prediction at seven months. The ceremony took place at noon, we had a very nice reception and then set out on our honeymoon.
This is where Stephen King takes over as storyteller. You see, I had gotten off from work Friday and Monday, so the “honeymoon” was nothing more than us driving to Florida to set up house together. All of our possessions, ranging from house plants to comic books, blankets to the 18 toasters we had received as wedding gifts, were packed into a U-Haul trailer which was attached to my 1968 Thunderbird, the most magnificent car I had ever owned.
We kissed the reception attendees goodbye, and hit the road on our brand new life together.
We had been on the road for about 15 minutes and decided it was almost time to stop for the night. True, it was only five o’clock in the evening, but it was our wedding night for crying out loud. Another reason to stop was the weather. Believe it or not, it had started snowing in the middle of October. If you don’t own an almanac, ask Spencer Adkins to look it up. So, here we were driving through a blizzard, sliding around on Interstate 64. We pulled off in Morehead, Ky. to find a motel room, but everything was booked. It took me 45 minutes to back out of the parking lot. I had never driven with a trailer before and was completely mystified how, when going in reverse the trailer would cut right if you turned the wheel right but if you turned the wheel left, the stinking trailer still turned right!
We were back out on the highway, laughing about the hilarity of all the rooms being booked, until we got off at the next exit, and every hotel there was filled to the brim. This continued well into the night. We would stop at a hotel along the interstate only to find there was no room at the inn. Around midnight, we were told by a nice lady in a hotel 50 miles from the Kentucky-Tennessee state line that not only was her hotel full, but so was every hotel from here to 50 miles beyond the Kentucky-Tennessee state line. To this day I have no idea what caused this particular pilgrimage to Eastern Kentucky, but the bottom line was, we had no place to lay our weary heads.
We did finally stop for the night at the rest stop in Jellico, Tennessee. Yes, it’s true, and to make matters worse, the backseat of the Thunderbird was filled with Leslie’s delicate house plants that needed the shared heat. So we opened the trailer, hauled out all the blankets we had received as gifts, wrapped ourselves in them and spooned our first night together as husband and wife in the front seat. I still have the pictures from the next morning, my new bride posing on the hood of the T-bird with hair pointing upward and outward at 20 different angles, a look we henceforth referred to as “flu hair.”
Still smiling over our wacky first night together, we piled back into the T-Bird and headed out. But after about two hours on the road, the car and trailer began to shake and shimmy like Chubby Checker in a blender so we pulled off and limped to a little service station where we met Shorty.
I am fairly sure Shorty spoke English, but the exact dialect was indecipherable. I caught words like “U-joint” and “suspension,” but eventually threw my hands up. Using a complex system of gestures, facial expressions, and the brandishing of the money in my wallet, I communicated to Shorty that I wanted him to fix my car and then call the motel up the hill and tell me when it would be fixed.
Of course, it was only 11:00 in the morning so we couldn’t check into the motel quite yet as they hadn’t finished preparing the rooms. We sat in the lobby, reading brochures about the local flea market until 2:30 when our room was finally deemed worthy of our presence. We fell into bed and immediately set about doing what newlyweds do on their honeymoon – we slept. Word of honor.
The next day we were awakened by a phone call from Shorty that the car was ready. We walked down the hill to be told, through a translator (the lube guy Jimbo) that the trailer had been loaded wrong, with all the weight to the front of the trailer which had flattened my two back tires. But have no fear, Shorty had replaced them to the tune of $300.
Jimbo informed me that it had cost that much because they had used “steel belted radials” and he said it in tones usually reserved for phrases like “the holy grail,” or “the ark of the covenant.” Were they fleecing me? Well, of course they were. But I was anxious to get back on the highway, and I had the money, so I paid them and we hit the road.
Before too long, we were driving through Atlanta, Georgia, making pretty good time, but very low on gas, so I stopped at a service station next to the busy highway. As we left the gas station, I hit a pothole and popped the trailer off the hitch. I remember accelerating to merge with the cars whizzing by when I noticed in the rearview mirror that the trailer wasn’t accelerating with me. If someone had a video camera that day they got great footage of my lovely slip of a bride jumping up and down on the back of a U-Haul trailer while I risked life, limb, and groin pull lifting the front of the trailer back up on the hitch.
If you do the math you can see that it was already Monday. I called my boss at the radio station and explained that I would need another day. He was very understanding. It helps when your boss is your older brother Dave. The next morning, the car wouldn’t start. My other brother Mark had told me on cold mornings I might need to remove the air filter and prime the engine a little bit, so I did.
It backfired in my face, burning off most of my left eyebrow and the left side of my mustache. Ever smell burned hair? Ever ride in a car for 10 hours with someone with burned hair? I spent most of that day hanging out the window to keep Leslie from gagging.
We stopped in Ocala, Florida for lunch, and from there, we were home free. Soon we were crossing the Howard Franklin Bridge, and I was excited because for the first time, my wife was going to see her new home. The only problem is, she had left her glasses at the restaurant in Ocala, and so the beautiful vistas of St. Pete resembled nothing more than sun-splashed splotches.
Exhausted, disgusted and squinting, we arrived at my duplex and unloaded the trailer and the car. When we finished three hours later, Leslie opened my completely empty refrigerator and we realized we would have to go shopping.
I couldn’t find my keys. We searched everywhere, but finally came to the realization that I must have shut them in the trunk of the T-Bird. When the locksmith arrived two hours later it was going on 10 at night. He popped open the trunk which was empty. Furiously, I stomped back to the bedroom to get the last twenty dollars out of my wallet. I moved Leslie’s bouquet and there were my keys. I think most men would have snapped at that point. But I didn’t. I did what my family always does in times of great stress and sorrow. I laughed my keester off.
As of this October my wife Leslie and I will have been married for 25 years. That will beat the longest guess in the pool by 24 years and five months. Our theory for that longevity? Any marriage that can survive that first weekend together, can survive anything.
