Road Trip

I had never been to Oklahoma much less to such a small town that only had five restaurants and dust balls the size of my stomach that made their pollution known in my lungs resulting in me winding up in the hospital there for my asthma – again.

We had only been married less than two years and I hadn’t bargained for this journey.

So with me driving our Dodge and him in his 1970s model Ford pick-up with no air and AM-only radio we set out on the highway for money and adventure. Along with us was one of his employees who spoke no English but taught my husband all the Spanish dirty words he knew.

Michael and I left my mom’s house in Georgia where we’d been staying also for Michael’s job on an assignment there amidst the silent treatment from my step dad after a long argument and my mom’s home cooking we carried in the cars.

Our goal was to put as many miles between us as we could because Michael had a deadline that had to be met and as a supervisor many people were counting on him. We stopped more than we should probably from exhaustion and boredom.

There were long stretches of asphalt that were just plain boring, places where you could get no radio reception and you were lost with your own thoughts, not always good.

Someone once said “My mind is like a bad neighborhood at night. I should never go there alone.”

We were broke to say the least though on paper Michael made good money. The problem was our bills exceeded both of our incomes.

We finally made it to a little place called the Roberts Motel, a small lodge where a manager who looked like “Rosanna Rosanna Danna” with maybe a little tamer hair greeted us cheerfully. We worked out a discount on the room rate by me offering to clean the room instead of the maid which would insure that our Tonkenese cat we had with us wouldn’t escape.

He had serenaded us across five states since the Dramamine the vet promised us would work did not do its job.

We couldn’t afford to eat out every day so with our Wok we got as a wedding present I proceeded to make all kinds of variations of Ramen noodles and “name that meat” until we cooked so much we burned the skillet out.

We were so exhausted and delirious when we got to the motel we passed out without hardly unloading the car after getting into a heated argument. We were starving yet could not move due to fatigue though we managed to order a pizza then passed out overwhelmed with tiredness.

The next day Michael was scheduled to be on the job ten minutes away, a commercial contract for a storage facility out in the middle of nowhere. It didn’t help that two of his men who had been with the company for years were both cokeheads, later fired for jeopardizing the job involving a skyscraper under a drug-induced haze that could have cost the company millions if it wasn’t caught in time.

People were so trusting in this town that they would leave their cars running to go into the convenience store across the street from the motel which blew my mind to say the least. I got a telemarketing job, something I despised but a field I had worked in many times and the people there were odd for the most part with weird names like Reid A. Story and Wanda Boner. This couple was engaged and every time they introduced themselves on the phone sitting side by side it was all some of us could do to stifle a laugh.

We wound up leaving there in November headed for another job in Texas only to have to return back to Guymon in December till New Year’s Eve. Our Christmas was spent in that town stuck in a snowstorm in a trailer rented by the hotel with Michael working ten-hour days six days a week and me unable to breathe for the most part due to my asthma.

To say we almost killed each other on a weekly basis is the understatement of the year.