I'm sorry

that I posted that last howmanyareyou thing before I read the methodology (which susanbeeswax actually looked up). While it served my purposes for exlpaining to my parents they gave me a name 13 times more likely to be reversed (which they have always denied), the reason many of you can't find your names is that it isn't based on real life name combinations.

Road trip diners I have known: Billings, MT 1993

It had been a long trip, seven months or so, and now we were just trying to get home to San Francisco. Unfortunately, our 1974 Toyota wasn’t cooperating. The car was overheating and we were driving through the plains states where every day was over 100 degrees. We called out hippie mechanic back in San Francisco and he said, "Well, either it’s a $10 thermostat or you need a new engine."

It was a Sunday and we were limping our car to Billings Montana which we figured would be big enough to have some choice in mechanics the next day. And if that didn’t work it was probably easier to get home from there than from say, Miles City. Though we were too hot and anxious about how fucked we were going to be, the hospitality of the locals came close to making everything better.

We spent the middle of the day in Miles City. There was a park in the center of town. It had shade trees and pulled in to let our car cool and to read our novels. We anticipated a few quiet hours but, unbeknownst to us, it was the day of the park’s new gazebo dedication. We were flying enough freak flags to attract the unusual locals. The teenage girl runaways, the rocker dude, the political and scary Vietnam vet, they all came to greet us and tell us their stories.

Eventually we moved on, rest-stop-to-rest-stop stopping every hour to let the car cool down. We made it to a motel in billings and the owner took pity on us. I don’t know what she saw. Our old broken down car? A young white heterosexual couple, depressed, sunburned, and lightly tattooed? Just a couple of people who needed a break?

Whatever it was, she rented us a room, recommended a local mechanic and even called him to let us know we were coming. I don’t think she said anything to the restaurant next to the motel but when I went in the next morning they gave us our morning beverages for free. I know that sometimes motel diners include beverages with a room stay but this wasn’t like that. It was surreptitious in the way of service workers everywhere redistributing the boss’s stuff to people they deem worthy. It was the only time I've even been given free stuff from a non-urban restaurant.

Billings Montana seemed like the friendliest place on earth. We even recommended the motel a couple of weeks later to friends in Seattle who were driving across country the opposite way. Unfortunately, when they walked in the door the same proprietor turned on the "No Vacancy" sign, not happy with the idea of renting a room to a Black woman and white woman together.