Driving carefully and steadily in the right lane, exactly five miles per hour over the speed limit, I fought the shake and quiver of the aged Pinata’s rusted out front-end as it did its usual best to dash us against the concrete barriers lining I75. Meanwhile, I tried to look uninteresting to the occasionally predatory police patroler parked periodically along the ribbon of cracked and patched concrete making up this section of the Detroit landscape.
    I lived in the city of Warren, a 36 square mile expanse of suburban America with residents ranging from the poverty-stricken white trash in the South to opulent gated communities of fat, lumbering men and skinny, jogging women in the North. My small bungalow squatted somewhere in the middle of that, close to the 11-Mile Road area; that was my destination. I had no where else to take poor Chuck and I wanted a safe place to sit and think, so we were heading home.
    I kept looking at my rear-view mirror; not toward the traffic behind me, which was pretty light this time of day, but toward the back of the car and my strange cargo. I tried to calm my nerves and assure myself that the Chuck bits and the coffee urn were secure and well hidden beneath the silvery layer of emergency blanket I’d draped across them, but I just couldn’t see over the back-seat and I grew more nervous.
    I checked the needle on my speedometer again. 70 miles per hour. 80 was fast enough to draw the attention of law enforcement while anyone driving 65, which was the actual posted speed limit, would be automatically considered a drunk driver. Recent laws enacted in Michigan banned the discriminatory practice of field sobriety or breathalyser tests and replaced them with a set of mandatory hygiene courses. Courses which were supposed to culminate in a training certificate and a small tin of laundry detergent. The lobbyists most instrumental in the new legislation, dubbed “Lets Clean Up Drunk Driving,” were heavily tied to the Johnson and Johnson corporation, which stood to make a killing on government mandated sales of their heretofore slow-moving line of portable personal hygiene kits. I had no interest in going to jail with or without hygiene supplies, and really didn’t want the inconvenience of having to explain the gruesomely dismembered body in the back of my car.
    So it was with great care that I drove Northward on the I75 expressway, quickly approaching 8-Mile Road*, a large East-West surface street which acted as a defacto moat separating Detroit proper from inner suburbs like the City of Warren. Around about 7 Mile Road I began to hear Latin music wafting from my glove box; my cell phone was ringing.
    Workers at Furd aren’t allowed to bring cell phones into the factory, so I usually kept mine in the car. No one ever called me on it, really, especially at this early hour. Yet now it rang. Originally, I’d intended it to ring a beepy version of Beethoven’s Fur Elise, but through incompetence, frustration and bad luck I’d somehow ended up with an equally beepy but infinitely more annoying rendition of the 90′s Latin dance phenomenon, “The Macarena”.
    I repositioned my left hand to better control the wheel solo and then leaned halfway onto the passenger seat, fumbling at the glove compartment with my freed right while quietly providing the chorus, “Hey, Macarena!” under my breath. The catch to the glove box was fiddly, and resisted my attempts to free the desperate tuneful telephone from its cell–pun intended. I intensified my efforts, and in my preoccupied state the Pinata swerved halfway into the next lane. I hurriedly righted my course, biting my tongue in the process, and the compartment finally popped open. I tugged the phone out and into my waiting hand.
    Pressing the “send” button with my sticky red fingers, I held the little Nokia up to my ear, cleared my throat, and spoke.
     “Hello?”
    There was a moment of silence followed by a click, then a woman’s pleasant voice spoke,
    ”Please hold while we connect your call to… BANANAS.“
    The last word was spoken in a completely different and incredibly gravelly voice; so rough that I felt, perhaps, that I heard it wrong. You can’t talk to bananas, they are food. I’m almost 100% certain of this. There was music then, a bland saxophoney easy-listening sort of thing, and from sheer curiosity I continued to listen to it while I drove. A few seconds rolled by as did I, and with a sudden start I realized that a large car, a Throne Eliza with police markings, was directly behind me and was steadily drawing near. How long had he been there? My heart beat quickened, and I was about to put the phone down when a loud click came from the receiver and the rough, gravely voice from the earlier announcement spoke.
     “Good time of day, sir. I am Bananas with, uh, Franklin Mint activation tech support. How are you today?” What a voice! Whoever this fellow was–and was his name really Bananas?–he sounded like James Earl Jones with a tracheotomy. No matter, it was obviously a mistake. I looked in my rear-view mirror at the police cruiser still behind me and wrenched one-handedly at the steering wheel as my Pinata, under the influence of ruined ball joints, continued attempting to veer sharply to the right.
     “I’m ok,” I answered, squinting and trying to make out the face of the policeman behind me, “but I’m pretty sure you have the wrong number. I’ve never bought anything from the Franklin Mint.”
     There was a pause then. I heard heavy breathing broken by quiet grunts. In the background a keyboard tapped away.
    Finally, Bananas said, “that is slightly possible. I’m very sorry for any confusion. Are you Joseph H. Minnetola?”
     “Uh, yeah.”
     “Alright,” he said, “Of 6505 Beechcraft, Warren Michigan?”
    Whoever this was, he clearly had the right man. “Yeah, that’s me.”
     “Are you at home now, Mr. Minnetola?”
     “No, as a matter of fact, I’m driving,” I answered somewhat impatiently, “frankly, there’s a cop behind me and I think I better hang up the phone and concentrate on driving. Bye, Bananas.” I moved the phone away from my head, thinking to hang it up when the voice suddenly yelled out of the phone loud enough to be heard over the formidable road noise penetrating my rusty chariot,
     “WAIT, MISTER MINNETOLA!” I hesitated, holding the phone a foot away from my head, almost in my lap. Still looking at the policeman through my rear view mirror, I put the phone back up to my ear against my better judgement.
     “Ok. I’m listening.”
    Of course the policeman chose this moment to turn on his lights and sound his siren.

* 8-Mile Road is so named not because of its length, which is substantially longer than eight miles, but because of its distance from a theoritical 0-Mile Road deep in downtown Detroit. Every mile Northward in the Detroit area comes with another mile road. SafeTinspector lives in a city known as Utica, which lies near and around 21 Mile Road. Most mile roads are not major thoroughfares, with the exceptions of 8 Mile, 16 Mile and 20 Mile. There is no corresponding system for roads running North and South.