I’ve been to Lexington a few times in the past couple of years and Stavros hadn’t been up there for about 20 years. His people used to have a farm up in the thumb and he spent many idyllic summers there, much like my summers in southwestern Idaho, only without all the Mexican gangbangers.
We stayed at a bed & breakfast in town. The house was an 1870 farmhouse with three guest rooms. We stayed in the “Movie Star Room” which had a very nice chenille bedspread, the type that one might expect Jennifer Aniston to have, and a lot of black and white photos of has-beens like Natalie Wood.
Another highlight of the B & B was a room called “Settee.” This is what they say about “Settee” on their website: There is a coffee pot located in the room for early morning convenience. You are welcomed to relax and watch the morning news or read the daily newspaper in your robe on the provided loveseat.
We arrived in town at about 3 PM and immediately went to eat, because I must eat almost continuously. We shared a “pizzette” at a place called Smackwater Jack’s then walked along the breakwall, where we naturally ran into some acquaintence of Stavros’s. We could be rappelling in Brazil and someone Stavros knows would swing by on a rope.
We made our way back up the street and stopped in a few stores. Stavros determined that the attractive people were the out-of-towners and the homely ones were residents. This seemed to reinforce his earlier observation at a gas station in Port Huron: “Say what you will about Detroit….but the farther away you get, the weirder people are.”
We picked up some groceries for the barbecue we were attending later on that evening and returned to the B & B to lie down for while. We ran into the proprietress in the kitchen, who was wrist-deep in what I knew to be “French toast casserole,” because she told me what she’d be serving for Sunday breakfast when I made the reservation. Stavros lay immediately upon the chenille and closed his glorious eyes while I read my book in the nearby chaise and jostled the bed with my foot every time he seemed to be drifting off. Finally, he awoke and we departed for the barbecue at the cottage of some friends of ours. They were up from the Detroit area with their kids; two couples, Pierce and Joanne Nawtee and Krystal and Pete St. Patrick.
The gentlemen had apparently been sampling the contents of the cooler for several hours by the time we arrived. The ladies were busy in the kitchen making salad and mac & cheese for the children. I uncorked my Pinot Grigio and poured three glasses while Stavros trotted out the back door.
“Salud!” I said, as Krystal and Joanne and I touched juice glasses.
I helped Joanne prepare salads and do the dishes then went outside when she got to the “cheese” part of the mac & cheese. There is nothing that smells quite as bad as mac & cheese to me. The guys were standing around the barbecue trying to seem busy when I stepped out the back door. Pierce didn’t put much effort into it and plopped down in a lawn chair, his head lolling backward.
“He’s gone,” murmured Stavros.
“I see that!” said I, smiling brightly at Pierce, who suddenly lifted his head and attempted to focus on us.
We ate and played catch and chased the children and told them some scary lies about what happens to kids that try to go to the beach alone and stuff like that for a few hours. When the s’mores and the sparklers were finally gone, they were sent to bed and the adults gathered around the bonfire. It was very nice, even when the wind changed direction and fully engulfed my person in smoke and flying soot.
This sort of classic summery memory-making went on for maybe another hour and we decided to pack it in. Forgetting nearly everything we’d brought with us, including my sunglasses, the bug spray, and our baseball and mitts, we clambered into the car and bounced down the dark highway the two miles back to town. After the “Zappa Plays Zappa” show, I am all about FZ so we had to listen to “Any Way the Wind Blows” a number of times before I felt we could end the night.
We entered the front door and crept stealthily upstairs to our room. The owners’ room was directly next to ours so we had to be extra quiet. Naturally we both slept like logs and awoke 22 minutes before the official breakfast call. I took a shower and made sure to use some of every product in the bathroom, even going so far as to steal a Biore blackhead remover pad.
We trundled down the stairs and onto the wide front porch, where the B & B’s two other couples were already tucking into breakfast and revealing dull things about themselves to one another.
“Thank God we don’t have to sit with them,” I whispered, as we took the other table.
A margarita glass filled with fruit salad was at each place setting and within seconds, the proprietress rushed out with platters of French toast casserole topped with warm berry sauce and grilled sausage patties. Regular readers of Modern Coastline will not be able to believe the following statement but I assure you it is true: Stavros did not like the French toast casserole. His official explanation was that it “didn’t taste like anything,” but I suspect that it simply didn’t taste like sugar. I thought it was really good, as far as those things go, but the sausage was spectacular. I ate all of my sausage (two large patties) and most of the fruit salad and about half of the giant French toast wedge. The proprietress came to take our plates and looked genuinely hurt that Stavros had left one sausage patty.
“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed enthusiastically as she took my plate. “Those sausages were wonderful! I am just…so full! Aren’t you full?”
“Yes,” Stavros agreed, pushing back from the table and standing up.
“We have a child in Indiana,” commented one of the time machines sitting behind us.
We packed up and left at once. Following a brisk stroll through town, we decided that maybe we weren’t full after all, and we popped into Wimpy’s, Lexington’s famed hole-in the-wall hamburger joint.
We ordered and perused the local “paper,” which was actually more of a pamphlet; a four-page (cover, inside front cover, inside back cover, and back cover) homemade effort. Most of it consisted of ads for real estate agents and rib night at the golf course restaurant, but there was a smattering of “content” also. My favorite part was the joke sent in by a reader about the guy who went to the store to get his wife some tampons but got her string and cotton balls instead to pay her back for getting him loose tobacco and rolling papers instead of a pack of cigarettes the night before. Also I enjoyed the riddle about “I am having lunch with my only sister’s husband’s mother-in-law’s daughter in law. Who am I having lunch with?” (The answer to that one was supposed to be somewhere in the paper but it was not so if you know the answer please tell me.)
“I gotta go the bathroom,” Stavros announced.
While I waited I puzzled over the riddle and stared at the 8-year-old Wimpy’s employed to bus tables wipe counters until Stavros abruptly returned and whispered to me that he hadn’t been able to go because while he was in the bathroom, some man kept rattling the door, trying to get in. I turned around. “Who?” I asked.
“I dunno.”
Two hamburgers (the misshapen blackish sort with greasy fried onions clinging to the surface) and a large chicken fries and order of onion rings later, we were finally really full.
We hoisted our hugely fat selves into the car and made one last tourist stop at the swinging bridge in nearby Croswell, home of Pioneer sugar. I climbed on the bridge and started trying to make it sway.
“Nice Biore blackhead strip,” said Stavros.
My hand flew to my back pocket and felt the edge of the package slipping out.
“You ever use one of those?” he asked. “It’s gross. You leave it on for like, eight, ten minutes, then peel it off and it’s like a forest of blackheads.”
Well, after that special moment, we bade a wistful farewell to Lexington.
And then the drama began.
About 45 minutes into our trip and during the zillionth playing of “Wowie Zowie,” we heard a noise. It was a repetitive sound, the kind of sound that follows the revolution of a tire going about 70 miles an hour. A tire that used to have air inside of it, but no longer does.
“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” screamed Stavros, “PULL OVER!”
Well, he didn’t curse like that but he did suggest pulling over. So we slowed down and stopped and he got out to examine the suspect wheel. It was indeed flat.
He opened my trunk and fished around under the Tupperware and paperbacks and old sweaters and newspapers and coffee cups, looking for the jack.
“Where’s the jack?” he yelled over the nonstop stream of semis blazing past at 120 miles an hour.
“I don’t have one.”
Well, to make a long, sweaty story short, a very lovely police officer stopped and offered to call a towing associate of his to come help us.
This was terrific because my insurance carrier, to whom I pay a large sum of money for the specific benefit of roadside assistance, chose first to be baffled by my inability to describe my exact coordinates, then to react by putting me on hold for 10-15 minutes.
A tow truck arrived lickety-split and a burly sort changed the tire after being sort of a prick to Stavros when my dear asked a simple question about my being billed. We chalked it up to the distance-from-Detroit thing and let it go.
Forty-five minutes later we were pulling off the freeway on our exit when Stavros received a text message from his next-door-neighbor, Arnie. “'Fuck the cops—Arnie,'” he read aloud. “What does that mean?” He called Arnie back and got voicemail. We decided to drive past his house—maybe there’d been a break in over the weekend? Some sort of crime on their block?
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I bet he was driving by and saw us on the side of the road with that cop.”
Stavros turned and fastened his heavily lashed orbs on me. “My God,” he said. “You’re right.”
Moments later Arnie called and confirmed my guess. He couldn’t believe what a dick the cop was, making us both get out of the car after pulling us over! We all were laughing, whooping, and hollering and high fiving over that one for a while.
