Meet the Egg, short for Eggenschwilermobile, the Mr Henry Institute’s wheels and house for most of the duration of the trip. Interstate 95, New Jersey to Philadelphia and Washington DC.
It is time to say goodbye to New York. Mrs Henry and I have taken our bite out of the Big Apple and the core goes the way of all cores. Mrs Henry will soon stop fretting about why the New Yorkers “in our neighbourhood” (we’ve been here for five days) all have dogs “in these tiny apartments” and why there are so many police out on the streets here. Mrs Henry puts it down to zero tolerance. Police numbers, that is.
I remember talking to a New South Wales politician some years ago about zero tolerance, who despairingly said: ‘But we can’t put a cop on every street corner!” Well, they can in New York, and not one, but three. They’re everywhere. At the entrance of subway stations. In subway stations. On street corners. Their cars are parked on footpaths everywhere. I counted twenty NYPD employees close together on the Coney Island boardwalk.
I suggested to Mrs Henry that this massive police presence had nothing to do with zero tolerance, but was instead a work creation scheme for fat people. Mrs Henry thinks that’s very judgmental, something she has zero tolerance towards, she says, but conceded that the idea was not unreasonable given the rampant obesity of New York cops. The Mr Henry Institute will continue to monitor, nay, will actively continue to monitor the relationship between embonpoint and uniformed law enforcement in the US.
It’s hot, bloody hot, in Washington. Since our arrival in the Cherryhill Park campground with our trusty old Dodge RAM 1500, Mrs Henry and myself have kept a necessarily low profile among the skyline of double-decker bus-sized Recreational Vehicles, sprouting side extensions and electrical cords and water- and sewer outlets. Freedom Towers on wheels.
The Mr Henry Institute is never cowed, but the rigours of our travels on the Interstate 95 (South) have momentarily sapped our energy. Energy is now returning as the sun sets and the Egg’s tiny on-board fridge produces admirably chilled beer.
The Egg is how Mrs Henry and I refer to the Dodge RAM 1500, hired from Adventures on Wheels – proprietor and director Dominic Eggenschwiler, a thin-lipped Swiss, who oozed competence, efficiency and a categorical lack of humour. I had proposed the Eggenschwilermobile as a name for the Dodge, but that is a mouthful, so the Egg it is. It’s from the 1980s, so it was new when Mrs Henry and I were young. Alas, where have all the years gone….?
Car hire companies for the New York market are all in New Jersey, so that’s where we’d picked up the Egg.
Driving along, as darkness started to fall, Mrs Henry grew increasingly frantic. It was time to pull into an oasis, but no campgrounds or even motels presented themselves. It soon was pitch-dark, as we were bowling along the Interstate 95.
Then Mrs Henry spotted, just outside Philadelphia, a place called the Highland Motel, an unlikely name, because Philadelphia is a port city and there’s no mountain in it or near it.
Anyway, we abruptly turned off the Interstate 95, not quite with screeching tires, and parked in front of the Highland Motel.
“It looks like Norman Bates lives here”, commented Mrs Henry, effortlessly falling in with the American custom of placing all reality in a context of motion pictures and TV serials. (“Do you see that street? That’s where the home of the Cosbies was in the Cosby Show.”)
The Highland Motel was extremely shabby, and I was very thankful Mrs Henry and not myself was the one who had spotted it. A rusty SUV with four flat tires rested outside one of the rooms. Despite at least ten signs forbidding smoking, the stale tobacco smell had to be clawed through to get from the lobby entrance to the Highland’s fortified reception, behind which not a sturdy Scot in a kilt but a wee, old Indian man in a stained kurta pajama wringing his hands, smiled ingratiatingly at us. He reminded me of Dr Yoshi, a GP I consulted once on the NSW Central Coast.
“Do you have a room for us, please?”, I asked.
The clerk made a great show of inspecting his ledger for any vacancies, although it was patently obvious that no one was staying at his motel.
“He’s got condoms for sale”, whispered Mrs Henry while the clerk ran his index finger along column after column, page after page.
“What do you need condoms for?”, I asked Mrs Henry nonplussed.
“No, no, he sells them singly. This is a hotel for hookers!”
Hookers, forsooth! I don’t know where Mrs Henry picks up this sort of language, but it was true that, over a shelf of packets of Doritos, was suspended a strip of condoms, priced at US$1.50 (plus sales tax) each.
Eventually, with an expression of relief and benevolence, the clerk discovered a vacancy.
“Sixty dollars and five dollars key deposit.”
The stale tobacco smell was as solid in our room as it was outside. The bed looked a bit charred and on closer inspection proved to indeed have been on fire at one stage. Indeed, who, in the throes of passion with a ‘hooker’, their penis safely tucked into one of Mr Yoshi’s $1.50 (plus tax) condoms, is going to be put out by such a minor and historical conflagration? Plus the bed linen was clean.
“Is the bed linen is clean!? Is the bed linen is clean!?”, shouted Mrs Henry.
I confirmed it was.
“I want those chairs up against the door! This is one dodgy place you’ve gotten me into, Mr Henry!” Mrs Henry almost sounded like Oliver Hardy.
How different was the Highland Motel from our New York accommodation. True, art deco Hotel 17 had shared bathrooms, but it had lots of personality; Woody Allen had filmed ‘Murder in Manhattan’ there, plus it had a lift where the lack of piped music had been ingeniously overcome by putting a ghetto blaster on the roof of the lift cage and tuning it to a radio station that played hits from the eighties. The reception clerk could be found at all hours talking to heavily tattooed and pierced persons with an astounding range of hair colourings, discussing heavy metal bands.
“Yeah, yeah”, the clerk would whine in his New York twang, “but I don’t know, you know, ‘coz, you know, I don’t go in for Slayer so much anymore, you know.”
Washington DC? The usual stuff, you know. Arlington Cemetery management will have you know, Arlington is “an active cemetery”, if that’s any help.
