Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [28]
American adults believe in having fun. They’ve got more toys than us Europeans. If you go into an American’s garage, you’ll find a four-wheeled vehicle and a three-wheeled vehicle and bicycles and boats and dirt bikes and a motor home. I’m in total agreement with them. Life is supposed to be fun. It’s not a job or an occupation. We’re here only once and we should have a bit of a laugh. So these big men by the side of the road totally appeal to me.
Wilmington itself is a nice enough place. There’s a dinosaur model on top of a tyre garage and a few other remnants of Route 66’s heyday in the main street, such as a boarded-up drive-through restaurant.
Pushing on, heading for Pontiac, I was cruising happily when my eyes darted from the road and right there, in a diner’s car park in Bramlington, I spotted Elvis, James Dean and Betty Boop. Yelling at the crew, who were driving ahead of me in the truck, I pulled over. The Route 66-themed, 1950s-style joint – the Polk-a-Dot Drive-In – was a charming place, but this was Easter Sunday and it was closed. In Britain it would have been open, but they take the Christian thing more seriously in these parts. Outside the diner, lined up along a wall, stood those three fibreglass, slightly larger-than-life-size effigies. There was space for one more, which I later discovered had been occupied by Marilyn Monroe, with her white dress billowing in the classic pose from The Seven-Year Itch. I had some fun with Elvis and Betty. I cleaned up her skirt and posed and jived around in front of them, making a fool of myself, before moving on down the road.
After just two miles I came to Godley, a tiny place with a population of less than six hundred but a racy history. Not so much a town as a single street with a collection of buildings on either side, Godley has a geographic quirk that shaped its destiny. The left side of the main street, which crosses Route 66, is in one county and the right side is in another. You might think that’s nothing special, but in the 1930s, when the Illinois coal mines and stone quarries were in full swing, it made Godley the hottest destination for miles around on a Friday night. Loaded up with their end-of-week pay, the miners and quarrymen would head for Godley, knowing there was a brothel there that had a unique way of evading the law. Some enterprising resident had turned a railway carriage into the brothel and parked it on the line. The lads would turn up and get down to drinking and shagging their earnings away. If word came down that there was going to be a raid, a shout would go up and all the lads would interrupt their activities to push the carriage into the neighbouring county. Once across the county line, neither police force could do anything about it. The crime had been perpetrated in one county, but they were now in the neighbouring county, so unless they got down to business again, they were back to being law-abiding citizens.
Driving through Godley, I could barely concentrate on the road, I was laughing so much at the mental image of all those bare-arsed men diving out of bed to push the carriage into the next county while the hookers looked on and the two counties’ police forces scratched their heads, unable to do anything about it. The thought of a bunch of mad-shagging train-pushers made my heart sing. There’s something wonderful – and very pragmatic, in that typically American, no-nonsense way – about a brothel on wheels. And to think the little village was called Godley. It should have been called Godless.
At first glance, Pontiac is just an ordinary town, like hundreds, maybe even thousands, of others in the Midwest of America. Located smack bang on Route 66 and built around a town square with a county courthouse on one side, it’s like so many small towns portrayed in so many Hollywood movies. It was even used