When Paula and Tami Went to Chicago in a Stolen Car

The following story took place during the first week of June in 1977.

School was out for the summer and Tami and I were out of a job. We both had jobs at Baskin and Robbins, where we were paid a dollar an hour under the table, and our employers had the audasity to pretend to tax it. One day we just revolted. Tami quit first, with me soon after.

So there we were, summer in the city, two fifteen year olds with nothing but time on their hands. Mostly what we did was hang around our old elementary school baseball field, usually sitting under these immense old oak tree's. We would do this for the next three months with no reprieve but the company of our friends whose lives were pretty much in the same crusty state as ours. Everybody we knew was bored!

On this particular day, we were sitting on the bleachers, which is something we almost never did. It was Tami, this girl named Barb, her husband and her two infants who were like nine months apart. Barb was eighteen, and her husbands name was Barry and one of the kids was Barry Jr. and I can't remember the other kids name so we'll just call him Curley. Barb was 4'9" on a good day, Barry was like 6'3" , and looked just like Abe Lincoln in all those pictures of Lincoln in his youth at his old Illinois (Kentucky) home kind of pictures. I didn't know Barb well, I knew of her, and she was three years older than us so I didn't really know her in elementary school. I think Tami may have known her better.

You could pretty much say that all of us were trailor trash, except for one thing! Me and Tam Tam are Jewish girls and there's no such thing as jewish trailor trash....the two things are diametrically opposed. On the other hand, Barb and Barry were not jewish so the trailor trash impression is pretty much dead on.

Anyway, we're sitting on the bleachers bitching about how there's nothing to do in Cincinnati and that we would die from boredom and so on. Barb looks at us and says "we're driving to Chicago, why don't you two come along for the ride?"

These were magic words for two bored girls who were to0 young to drive themselves on a road trip, but had the itch to travel even at that age. We decided that, yes, this would be a most excellent summer getaway, we would just hop into Barry's big fat pimp daddy Buick looking car and drive west off into the sunset. Too bad we didn't know that Barry's idea of a "getaway" was much more literal than our own version, and very different as well.

The first step of our plan would be the most difficult; talking (read: conning) our mothers into letting us go to Chicago with people we didn't really know much about. TO BE CONTINUED