Route 66 is America’s most iconic road. But for me, it’s my origin story.
I was born in a honky-tonk motel on Route 66. Well, not exactly born, I did that in a hospital, but starting from day one, Route 66 is where I lived—room number three, with a bed, a dresser, a toilet, and a sink. My dad played guitar in the biker bar next door. The Hell’s Angels loved the skinny hayseed from Oklahoma who played the hell out of a Fender Stratocaster. They rarely saw his old lady, Marysue, my twenty-year-old pregnant mother with a toddler in tow, but the fact that Kenny had snagged the most beautiful woman they had ever seen only added to his legend. Surely there was a deal with the devil in there somewhere.
Kenny played five hours a night for fifteen dollars, took home whatever beer money landed in the tip jar, and worked days at the aerospace plant for $1.51 an hour. They had come west with the Okies, chasing the postwar California promise that a poor boy with strong hands and a mean guitar could better himself and buy a house of his own. But “better” was still just a shine on the horizon. Motel living was the reality, and Marysue was a rose planted in the hardscrabble soil of a biker bar motel.
When I was one day old, fresh home from the hospital, my mother set me in a blanket-lined box on the motel floor. She didn’t own a crib, so she made do with the box and made it as warm and comfortable as she could.
It was 7:30 in the morning, and a hard cold had settled over the Green Lantern. Kenny had overslept after the previous day’s vigil at the hospital, waiting for me to be born. He would be late for his new job building airplanes in a mile-long hangar outside town. He grabbed his jacket, kissed his sleeping wife, and hurried out the door without checking on his newborn baby girl lying in the box on the floor, something that would haunt him the rest of his life.
Kenny didn’t own a car, so he rode his bicycle the five miles to work.
My brother Craig was awake and not too sure about this new baby in the box. There was not much to occupy a rambunctious two-year-old in that cramped motel room. Marysue woke soon after Kenny left and thought about feeding me, but I was sleeping so peaceful-like, she thought she might try for another twenty minutes of rest.
Two hours later, she woke to a frosty wind blowing through the open bathroom window. She crawled out of bed and reached into the box to nurse her baby.
She screamed.
I was cold, listless, and purple. She tried to feed me, but I would not latch on. I would not cry. My limbs hung like a rag doll.
There was a phone booth in front of the motel. She clutched me against her chest, ran to the booth, shut the door against the wind, and rifled through the book for a doctor. The closest one was more than a mile away.
She ran little Craig over to Sunshine, the bottle-blonde woman in the room next door. Sunshine was rough, with heavy smeared eye makeup that seemed to get refreshed about once a week, but she had always been friendly.
Marysue pounded on her door. “Can I leave my little boy with you while I go to the doctor? My baby is real sick.”
“Sure, honey,” Sunshine said. “You do what you got to do. Just leave me the key.”
Marysue hurried back to her room and put on her only pair of shoes: stiletto heels, because her everyday shoes had “plum wore out.” She threw on her new cashmere sweater. She had never owned anything so soft and luxurious. When Kenny got his first paycheck from the plant, he wanted Marysue to have something pretty, so he took her on a thirty-dollar shopping spree.
If she was going to run down the street with a baby in her arms, she did not want anyone mistaking her for a floozy.
She wrapped the blanket tight around me and ran out the door.
Big mistake. She could not run. She could barely walk, and the one mile felt like fifty as she tottered up the road. By the time she arrived, her feet were bloody and blistered. She pushed open the door and hobbled inside, haggard and stooped from pain.
The receptionist gasped. “You poor thing! Is there something wrong with the baby?” Then she yelled over her shoulder, “Doctor, we need you!”
The doctor saw the limp, blue baby, took me from my mother’s arms, and disappeared behind the closed door of the examining room.
The receptionist brought blankets to Marysue, who was shivering from cold and fear. She pulled a chair close and sat with my mother. “I’ll pray with you, honey.” Marysue nodded and stared at the door.
But no sound came from the exam room.
Marysue did not see the doctor squeeze my shoulders to make me open my eyes, move, or cry. She did not see him place me on the hard table, check for blockages, tilt my head back, and lift my chin. She did not see him put his mouth around my mouth and nose and gently blow. She did not see him compress my chest over and over and over.
In the waiting room, Marysue forgot to breathe. “Why won’t she cry?” She kept her eyes on the door as if looking away might make the answer worse.
In the exam room, the doctor ordered the nurse to iron a blanket. While he waited, he rubbed his hands to generate heat and warm my ice-cold body. When color finally crept back into my face, he held me upside down and slapped my butt.
I wailed.
Marysue wrapped her arms around the kind receptionist. “Thank you, Jesus. It’s Hallelujah time!”
The doctor swaddled me in the freshly ironed warm blanket and carried me back to the waiting room. His voice softened when he told my mother, “She’s going to be all right now. Just keep her warm. Newborns need a lot of warmth.”
Then he took a hard look at Marysue and changed his tone. “A newborn baby out in the cold, what were you thinking?” He pointed at her feet. “And wearing those god-awful shoes. She could have died. Feed her. I’m calling your husband.”
The doctor called the sheriff to track Kenny down at work. I never asked my dad what the sheriff said or how he responded. By the time I heard this story, my father had been dead many years, but I always felt his fierce protection.
Marysue says Kenny came into the room looking scared in a way she had never seen before. He asked the doctor how much he owed. The doctor said, “No charge. Just take care of that baby.” With one arm holding his newborn and the other cradling his scared and exhausted young wife, he walked his family out into the cold.
That was when Marysue noticed the name on the door: Dr. Proctor, Urologist.
The sheriff drove them back to the motel. Kenny thanked him and invited the lawman to come hear him play sometime. Then they shook hands and Kenny walked into room number three to see to his family.
Marysue had already crawled into bed, her body curled around me, blowing hot breath onto her pink sleeping child. Then she remembered Craig.
“Honey, I left Craig next door with Sunshine. Can you go fetch him?”
Sunshine’s door was open. Kenny walked in and called for his boy, but Craig and Sunshine were not there.
Kenny went door to door until he found Craig scared and crying in the corner of a stranger’s motel room, where Sunshine had dumped him after stealing Marysue’s thirty-dollar shopping spree.
Last anyone saw, Sunshine was on the back of a Harley heading out of town.
Kenny and Marysue didn’t stay long at the Green Lantern. They found a classier joint across the street with a bathtub, a refrigerator, and a patch of grass for the kids to play on. It was three dollars a week more, but they were upwardly mobile.
They didn’t have a suitcase or enough arms to carry both kids and all their clothes, so Kenny and Marysue put on every piece of clothing they owned. They did the same for Craig and me. Then the Montgomery family waddled across the street to their new home at the aptly named Shangri-La Motel.
It was two years before they saved enough money for a down payment on an 800-square-foot house in a cul-de-sac on Alvarado Street, Spanish for “bright place.”
They both agreed they would never speak of the Green Lantern Motel or the blue baby in the box.
I asked Marysue how often she thought about what happened. She answered, “I thought about it every day for the first two years, but then you grew into such a strong-willed, happy child. Eventually, I could forgive myself.”
Marysue was ninety-two when she finally told me this story. I asked her, “Why now?”
“I’m pretty close to going to heaven, and I think about stuff,” she said. “It’s best to talk about them, and I figured you would want to know. It’s your story, after all.”
She hesitated a moment, then said, “One more thing, Lynnie. If you write something for my posterity, I could go on living.”
I came into my earthly existence as a lead character in a sad country song, a Hank Williams ballad of longing and loss. All I had to do was pay attention to the heartaches, the humor, and the tender mercies, and shine them back at the world.
