LEGO by Bender Jonathan

Author:Bender, Jonathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

13

It’s Okay, I Work Here

Dan Brown (left) and I pose with a maxifig—an eight-foot, scaled-up version of a minifig—in the stairwell at the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum.

The last time I was in Ohio, Kate and I were halfway through a cross-country drive from Brooklyn to Kansas City in March 2007. The twenty-two-hour drive was going by slowly, as I struggled to adjust to Kate’s blue Volkswagen Beetle.

It was only the second time I’d driven a stick shift, a fact that didn’t escape my fellow drivers on the road. But I’d avoided drawing their anger until we came to a toll near West Virginia with a line snaking a dozen cars long. I managed to coast toward the toll window, and I thought we’d be fine until the driver in front of us took an inordinate amount of time to pay the toll.

In stopping suddenly, I failed to engage the clutch, and the car came to a shuddering, groaning halt. And then the horns began. A horn blared, flat and loud, as I fumbled to shift the stick and restart the car.

“It’s my fault,” I told Kate.

The horn sounded again. I started the car, but released the gas too quickly and we stalled again.

“It’s not your fault, they’re being jerks. God, why can’t people just learn to wait, like, a minute,” replied Kate.

I stalled another three times as I began to feel the cars lining up behind us. The air conditioning cycled on and off and it started to get hot in the car.

“It’s my fault,” I repeated over the sound of the horn.

We rolled past the booth, alternating between coasting and a jerky, uncoordinated tapping of the clutch, brake, and gas. I threw the coins in the basket and skipped a gear in my rush to get moving. The car caught for a second and then bucked forward.

“Honey, it’s not your fault. You’re doing the best you can,” said Kate as we mercifully sped away from the tollbooth.

“No ... it was my fault. I was leaning on the horn with my arm each time I had to restart the ignition. I was the one honking at myself to go,” I explained.

Kate was still giggling when we pulled over less than an hour later in Zanesville, Ohio, to stop for the night. A Fairfield Inn promised free Internet and had the same name as my hometown. It won the road-trip game of motel roulette. When we went to bed that night, we had no way of knowing that hundreds of LEGO models were less than ten minutes away.

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