Holy Toledo (pt 2)
I woke up the morning of the Underground Lit Fest snuggled in a warm bed, absolutely ecstatic I didn’t spend the night in the backseat of my Jeep, which seemed a very real possibility less than eight hours earlier.
My wife roused herself, stretched, asked me what poems I intended to read during my ten minute set. I’d been married to this woman, the love of my life, for almost eleven years; she began every day with a question I’d be hard pressed to know the answer to.
“I don’t know,” I shrugged.
“You drove over six hundred miles, eleven hours on the road, risking our lives at every turn, and you don’t even know what you’re going to read?”
“My driving’s not so bad that your life was endangered with every turn.”
“I knew no safety or security the entire drive, darling. And my question still stands.”
“Well, it’s all right there in the name, baby. Polish Hammer. What’s there not to understand? I never think this shit through…”
I knew I couldn’t win over the hearts, minds, and groins of my peers, and the good people of Toledo, Ohio, with my ignorant stabs at profundity. I’d have to lean into the entertaining aspects of my written words, sprinkled with just the right amount of edgy humor. I’d have to resort to reading poems about my cock.
“Just so long as you’re not reading any poems about your dick. People don’t want to hear that nonsense. And nothing about what happened last night.”
While my wife took her shower and began to prepare for the day ahead, I sat down at the desk and wrote a poem about what took place the night before.
Toledo is the sort of town where you can walk outside a bar and run right into W. Joe Hoppe attempting to engage you with some Polish banter. Now, one thing the Polish Hammer does not advertise along with his dwindling eyesight, directional retardation, rampant diabetes, and early onset alopecia areata is his meager hearing. Thirty years in the factory has rendered me virtually deaf, so unless someone is screaming at me, every spoken word sounds like someone muttering to me in the Polish language.
“Yeah… yeah… Yeah.” I said.
Joe arched an eyebrow. “Do you not speak Polish?” He asked.
“Lord, no. I’m not even Polish. That’s just a persona. One thing, I don’t advertise is I’m actually German.”
“That’s hard for me to believe. Because you look and act entirely Polish.”
“You got me there, W. Joe Hoppe.”
This is perhaps why my entreaties to be referred to strictly as The German Solution moniker has been met with such ardent pushback.
Having bid goodbye to the lovely Dan Denton, the lovely Jess Bryant, and the rest of the Toledo gang, my lovely wife and I hopped into our Jeep and set off the fifteen minutes back to our hotel room.
An hour and a half later, I finally admitted I had no idea where the fuck we were at. That night I learned Toledo is a city heavily resistant to the vagaries of GPS, as if the rebels and revolutionaries of northern Ohio had rallied together and said “fuck you, Google Maps.” And who pays for Toledodians knee jerk resistance to technology? This guy. The Polish Hammer who simply wants to return to his room at the Comfort Inn and eat a chocolate Frostie from Wendy’s.
“I don’t think we’re going the right way,” my wife informed me ten minutes into the trip.
“Of course, we’re going the right way; there’s only one way to go according to the GPS and this is it,” I said, blithely taking the Jeep onto 280 South entrance ramp.
“We’ve never been anywhere near this bridge.”
“Sure we have. This all looks familiar to me.”
And it did look familiar to me, the same way every corner of Toledo mirrored my recollection of the city of my birth, Hammond, Indiana, another industrial wasteland cuddled up against another indifferent great lake.
Now, while I’m driving further away from the Comfort Inn where all my shit’s at, while my wife’s consternation grows, while the GPS’s soothing, feminine voice gleefully leads me horrifically astray, I should mention here that I suffer from an acute form of directional retardation. You could grab me in a chin lock, point out to me the north star, and I still couldn’t grasp the compass points. I can literally get lost on a flight of stairs. It’s always been this way. As a kid, I’d be sitting in the back of the family Pinto, as my mother drove us the three miles to River Oaks mall, and I would marvel at her ability to find her way there every time. We’d get over the Burnham bridge, and I wouldn’t know where the fuck we were at. This went on for years…
And, another thing, while I’m nodding my head assuredly at familiar landmarks that exist only in my mind, here’s another thing I had difficulty wrapping my mind around. Some people’s, my father for instance, talent for being able to differentiate between the makes and models of motor vehicles.
“That’s a beautiful ’72 Cadillac Eldorado,” my father would say.
And nine-year-old me would think “how the hell do you even know that?” It’s a car, yes. It’s big. It’s black. Shouldn’t that be description enough? Why would you even go any further. Ford or Chevy. Maverick, Nova, or Monte Carlo. Who could say and why? The reason most people lock their cars in the mall nowadays is because I would jump into the backseat of any vehicle that was no more than three shades of color removed from the gray or blue or burgundy of the family car. Then, I’d search the back seat wondering where the hell my X-Men comic book fucked off to until one of my parents grabbed me by the neck and jerked me out of the car.
My father would tell people I was retarded. Not clinically retarded, just, you know… fucking retarded.
So, anyway, I was starting to intuit that something is amiss; the GPS telling me we’re thirty-six miles away from our destination.
“We must’ve gotten really turned around,” I said.
My wife snorted derisively. I sensed some pent-up energy my wife considered releasing upon me, and I entertained the belief it wouldn’t be the good kind.
When I merged onto 75S toward Dayton, Ohio, she finally reached her breaking point.
“Where the fuck are you going?”
“Comfort Inn. You know where we’re staying.”
“Well, it ain’t in fucking Dayton.”
“I know that. Dayton’s like an hour away.”
“Get off this exit, now. No, this one right here. Get off, now.”
“It doesn’t look familiar…”
“Get off, right fucking now.”
Once off the freeway, I was forced to pull over into the parking lot of a possibly abandoned ice cream shop.
Dealing with this phone was like consulting a fucking magic eight ball. A malignant magic eight ball. A magic eight ball that dealt exclusively in “fuck yous” and “I don’t know.”
“Wait a second,” I sat up in my seat. “That crop of abandoned houses looks familiar.”
I threw the Jeep in drive despite my wife’s protestations.
Five minutes later, we were on the main thoroughfare. Soon, we found the likely conglomeration of Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell. And behind the fast food joints loomed Comfort Inn, a monument to my incredible tracking ability.
My wife refused to speak to me as I parked the Jeep in the back lot. Wow, I thought looking through the back window. This Comfort Inn has an indoor swimming pool. I knew it had an outdoor pool as well, closed for the season. It’s rare you find a hotel with an outdoor pool that suddenly becomes an indoor pool. And once inside, I couldn’t help but notice the suddenly spacious lobby, the clean carpets with a suddenly distinctly different pattern. Kinda feels like I just entered the twilight zone.
Anyway, “we’re on the second floor,” I announced.
“We’re in the wrong fucking hotel.” My wife glared at me.
Back inside the Jeep, we managed to backtrack all the way back to the Attic where the night’s goat fuckery began.
Once there, my wife took over. Tyrannically. “Go left,” my wife said. “Go right here. Go over the bridge. Right again. I said right, I don’t care if it don’t look familiar to you, go right.”
Ten minutes later we were pleasantly ensconced in the correct Comfort Inn. Propped up in our hotel bed, eating chocolate Frosties.
“I never should have taken a puff off that joint Dan Denton offered,” I said, sheepishly.
“You didn’t. I watched you the entire time.”
“Yeah, well, the contact high might have discombobulated me.”
“You held your breath like a total putz.”
“Yeah, well, Toledo doesn’t even know where the fuck it’s at,” I huffed. “Good news is, I totally remember how to get to Culture Clash Records, now, though.”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
