We had shows the next three nights, but after the last one we headed on into Livonia, getting in late but relieved to know we were going to be in the same place for a few days; moving out every day starts to get a little tiring after a while. Since we didn’t have the house rented anymore, Vivian had lined up a motel for us a ways away from the dealership. A little to our surprise, each one of us had single rooms, which was something that had never happened before. That was nice, since I didn’t have to listen to Sonny trying to blow up the room with his farting all night. What was even better was that I didn’t have to smell it. I hadn’t had a night in a room to myself since we’d left the house back at the first of April. It felt good to be alone again for a few nights. Hoss’s wedding was going to be the next day and we understood that things were expected to go pretty late, so we just headed to our rooms and tried to get some sleep.

As far as I know, the main reason we came back to Michigan around the first of June was that Vivian had worked out a series of race dates in the area for a price that Frank couldn’t afford to turn down. He didn’t mind, I’m sure; given a choice I think he’d rather have stayed a little closer to home most of the time, anyway, but with a show like that you can wear out your welcome if you stay in the same area too long. So far that year we had never been to a place where we’d been the previous year. There weren’t a lot of places the rest of the year, and then most of them were fair dates.

Now, Vivian knew the schedule as well as anybody, better than Frank, even. I suspect now that having Frank gone for four months was longer than she wanted to put up with. Going back to Livonia along about that time at least broke it up into two-month segments. In any case, those race dates had been set long before Hoss and Helen decided to tie the knot. Our being around was a main reason why they set their wedding date for when they did, on a Sunday when the blue laws meant we were unlikely to find a place to race, anyway.

Clear back in the spring before we’d left on our early swing around the Midwest, Hoss had made it clear to us that Helen’s mother had insisted that they were going to go the whole nine yards on this wedding. That meant that I had to break down and buy a suit. I had never owned one in my life, mostly because I had never needed one, but it was made pretty clear that those of us going to the wedding were expected to put on the dog for the event. I’d bought one at some store in Livonia before we left in the spring, but had left it with Vivian since there was no point in taking it on the road. She dropped the suit off the next morning, the day of the wedding, and I commenced getting cleaned up and dolled up better than I had done since the last time I’d stood an inspection in the Army. I hadn’t tied a tie since right after I left the Army and took off the uniform for the last time in Bessie’s house back in Chadron, but I discovered I hadn’t forgotten how.

Not everyone on the crew wound up going to the wedding; the guys that had only run with us this year were left out, but Rocky, Dink, Chick, Hattie, Skimp, Pepper, Woody, Sonny, Frank, Vivian, Spud, and I went along, which made a pretty good representation from the MMSA. Vivian had even gotten her mother to look after Carol, so Hattie could join in the festivities and enjoy it more. I think that in general most of us cleaned up pretty well, and it was hard to recognize some of us. Vivian was especially good looking and classy, and Frank looked pretty darn good himself.

The wedding was interesting. I had only been to a handful in my life, including Chick and Helen’s, which didn’t really count. This one was full scale nice, in a big church with a big crowd. I thought Helen looked great in her white gown, and Hoss just looked uncomfortable in his tux, which was a long way from the jeans and T-shirt that he usually wore. Helen was from a Greek family, so the church was Greek Orthodox, which meant that things seemed a little on the strange side to me, not that I was very familiar with being inside a church anyway. I didn’t understand a whole lot of what went on because a lot of it was in Greek, but figured when they went down the aisle after the ceremonies they were married so I guess that had to count.

Greek weddings – actually, Greek wedding receptions – have a reputation for being a pretty good party, and this one sure lived up to the reputation. It was held in a rental hall not far from the church. There was enough food to feed a small army, and enough booze to get a small town lit up. There was a great big band there, and they were pretty good. What was more I think every single Greek girl within a thirty mile radius was there; all of them wanted to dance, and there were several that wanted more – in fact, quite a bit more.

It was nice that Vivian had booked us into single rooms in a motel only a couple blocks away from the reception. I thought it was a case of just being nice, but it turned out that Vivian had us pretty well pegged and had a better idea than we did of what was going to happen. A bunch of single guys at a wedding like that were pretty likely to get some action, and that’s just what we got. There was a steady stream of us running between the reception and the motel most of the night. Over the course of the evening – which ran until after dawn – I went over to the motel room with three different girls and there may have been more than that since things got a little bleary after a while.

Along in the middle of the night, I got to dancing with this one girl by the name of Ariel. She sure enjoyed the dancing, and before long it was pretty clear that she was interested in something a bit more, like beating the bride to the sheets. We snuck out of the building, walked up the street to my room at the motel, and the next thing I knew she was slipping out of her good-looking dress to reveal a first rate body. I didn’t get much of a chance to look at it in all of its bare glory, because I was playing with it awful quick. I found out that she was a first rate screamer. That was just fine, since there was a screamer in the next room at the same time and it just inspired us onward.

After an hour or so we were both pretty well wrapped out and figured we needed to get back to the party before we got missed. Ariel said that her mother kept a pretty good eye on her and really didn’t want to get caught. I have to say it took her longer to get back into that dress than it had taken her to get out of it, but before long we were heading back, walking with our arms around each other, all lovey-dovey.

We turned a corner and came face to face with Skimp Winkelman, who was walking with his arm around a woman about his age, but a real looker. She had her arm around him and it was pretty clear about where they were headed. We got real close, and then the woman said, quite calmly, "Hello, Ariel."

I have to give the girl credit; she didn’t miss a beat when she replied, "Hello, mother."

Not a word more was said and none of us slowed down a step. Ariel didn’t say another word about it all the way back to the party, and shortly after that we were each dancing with someone else, getting set to start the cycle all over again. I never got more than a brief glimpse of her the rest of the evening, but I still think it would have been interesting to have been a bug on the wall around their house after everyone sobered up. I didn’t think about it too much at the time, since before long I was headed back to the motel with another girl on my arm. I don’t remember a whole lot about her, but by then all the booze was starting to catch up with me a little so I guess I have reason not to remember.

I’ll tell you how good a party it was: Dink got plastered and got laid. Those of us at the party had run with Dink most of last season and all of this one, and we’d learned that Dink was about as straight as straight could be. None of us had ever seen him drink so much as a beer, and he was the guy that we depended on to drive us back to the motel or tourist court if we really got to knocking it back after a race. Sometimes he would have to make two trips to get everybody home. While not a religious nut, he usually took advantage of our blue law days off to go to the nearest church, whatever brand it was. At that, he was crazy as a fox since he often got invited home for a good home-cooked meal, so although he wasn’t much of a talker he made a lot of friends.

But something flipped old Dink’s switch that evening, and that evening only. Before too long he was knocking them back pretty good, and since he looked like he might have been Greek there were several girls that were giving him more attention than most. I don’t know the details; he never would talk about them much, but I suspect that he had enough Greek firewater in him to not remember much anyway. What I do know is that he woke up the next morning with a hell of a hangover, sandwiched between two nude and snoring girls that he said had to have gone three hundred pounds each. In the process of trying to wiggle out from between them so he could breathe a little, he managed to wake both of them up and they were both ready to go again that quick, hung over or not.

At least so he said, but I don’t have any reason to doubt him. I happened to see him and the two girls when they left the motel room the next morning. Both of them were pretty cute despite being so fat, and both of them were still all over him when he borrowed my car to drive them home. He didn’t get back for a couple hours and there was something about him that just told me that he’d gone at least another round or two with them, although he never said anything about it. I never saw Dink take a drink again, but then he may have had more reason than most to avoid it.

Dink wasn’t the only guy who woke up hung over with a hung-over girl in his bed the next morning, although as far as I know he had the only double. I know I did, although it wasn’t any of the girls I’d taken to the room earlier, even though I had no clear memory of taking this girl back to the room with me. After we had a little morning action, I offered to take her home. She said she had her own car, so I was gentleman enough to at least walk her to it; it was on the way back that I saw Dink and his two heavy lovelies.

In the days to come we found out a little more. Skimp woke up with an older woman in his bed, and it wasn’t Ariel’s mother, whoever she was. I got the impression later that he’d done some heavy scoring with women more his age. I think most of us had some stories about that evening involving booze, women, or both. Chick and Hattie didn’t; they had to leave early to pick up Carol, but I wouldn’t want to say what happened when they got back to their trailer. I also know Frank and Vivian didn’t stay the night, but I don’t know whether they went home or what, although after our trip to Daytona back in the winter I’d have bet against their going straight home.

Needless to say, it was good that our race that night wasn’t far away since there were some very big heads among the more senior MMSA drivers even on into the afternoon. We made it to the track on time, although most of us didn’t mess around with practicing very much since the unmuffled V8-60s sort of made our brains rattle around in our heads. I do know we had four guys who hadn’t been to the party running that night, and they swept the top four spots, which shows you what condition the rest of us were in. I know most of us were damn glad to load the cars up that night, head back to our motel rooms, and sleep until Spud came pounding our doors way late the next morning. We were heading down someplace in Ohio that day, and we barely made it there on time.

I think I ought to be fair and point out that not every girl at the wedding reception was going to it like a hooker on a busy Saturday night, but there were a few of them, and I’m pretty sure we traded them around a fair amount. It was hard to tell since we didn’t always have names to work with. I’m sure there were a lot of girls there that were satisfied to have a few drinks, dance a little and tease a little with nothing more happening than that, but there were some that came with the idea of partying hearty and that’s what they did.

As far as I know, Hoss and Helen left early, at least before it got too bleary in there. They went off somewhere on a real honeymoon. We didn’t see them until the next time we were in Livonia, a couple months later, when they invited the gang of us over to the house to sit around and chew the fat. Sometime since we’d left in the spring, the two of them had bought a fairly nice suburban tract house not too far out of town, mostly using Hoss’s VA loan. It was a nice little house, if on the small side in my estimation, but they were both comfortable there. Since both of them were working they seemed to have a nice little life going, but you could see that Hoss missed being on the road with us.

We got to talking about the festivities, leaving out most of the details of how we’d spent our evening outside the reception hall, of course. Helen said that she thought it had been a very nice wedding and reception, if a little on the sedate side compared to some she’d been to. All I can say is that if that was sedate, some of those others just about had to have been all-out Roman orgies, and I think I’m just as glad that I missed them. I’m not sure how I survived that one as it was.

That evening at Hoss and Helen’s sticks in my mind for one special reason. Hoss had invited us over for "something to eat and a few beers or something," but I noticed that Helen wasn’t doing anything to prepare a meal, other than keeping the Stroh’s coming from the refrigerator. Things looked to be getting a little hungry around there, but I didn’t think it was my place to say anything. Along about that time, a guy pulled up in his car, and got out carrying a bunch of flat boxes. Hoss handed him a bunch of money, and brought the boxes inside. "Food’s here," he called.

"What’s this?" someone piped up.

"Something new," Hoss replied. "It’s just starting to take hold around here. It’s called pizza pie."

I’d never heard of the damn things until that night and I don’t think anyone else had, either. These were pretty darn good, made the old fashioned way with thin crusts and piled high with everything under the sun. It tasted pretty darn good, and I remember making a mental note that if the chance ever came my way I’d have one of them again. I can’t tell you how many pizzas I’ve eaten over the years, but that was the first. I can’t imagine how we ever managed to get along without them.

I’m getting a little ahead of the thread of the story now, so I might as well get a little further ahead since Hoss doesn’t have much of a role to play in the rest of it. We stayed friendly with him the rest of the time I was with the MMSA, and he filled in once in a while to scratch at the bite the racing bug left him. We saw him several times a year, mostly to have him or his brother fix up body panels for us, and it was always good to stop and shoot the bull with him and remember the old days.

After I left the MMSA I lost track of him for several years, but when I finally came across him again he’d left the panel bashing business and had become an insurance adjuster, and was making pretty good money. He and Helen had two sons by then, both of them racing karts and quarter midgets when they were younger, and later Sportsmen on the local tracks. One of the sons quit racing when he went to college, and later medical school, but the other one stayed with it on the local tracks for years and years while working in his dad’s insurance business. The racing blood ran true in that family. Hoss is retired now, and we still get together once in a while to swap lies about how we tore up the tracks when we were young and full of shit.

Our stop in Livonia was short, although it was pretty interesting. Hoss’s wedding became something of a legend in the MMSA, something we swapped stories and traded bullshit about all the rest of the time I was with them. Over the years I heard a lot more stories about that night than I’ve told here, but the farther back in time it got the lower the truth content got to be. Finally toward the end there were only a handful of us that had been there and the stories we told were mostly legends full of bullshit that we told to dazzle the newer guys. That’s the way things work, I guess.

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