shots on goal

I like waffles. Waffle House is all over the south. If you haven't been, know that Waffle House is just about everywhere, seemingly at every offramp on every major highway. It's almost surprising that we didn't eat at one sooner, but it took us until Arkansas to do so.

The day before we'd driven across Georgia and Alabama, and at some point outside of Atlanta, we resolved to eat at Waffle House. Now I don't remember why we actually didn't that day; something to do with timing exits with refueling and whatnot--you get into weird predicaments on long drives, like how we nearly ran out of gas on our very first day, not six hours into the trip...that's another story. That night we had dinner in Oxford, Mississippi, at the fabulous Ajax Diner. It was the next day, in Arkansas, somewhere past Little Rock, not an hour before Russellville. The yellow and black Scrabble-board sign of Waffle House rose up into the magenta-smeared horizon of the darkening sky, and we knew what we had to do.

We pulled off the highway, parked, shook off the memory of a thousand dead armadillos, mopped the small lake of water off the floor of the car, went inside and grabbed a seat in a narrow booth.

My forearms stuck to the table. I tried to pull the paper placemat/menu thing towards me so I could read it better; I had to yank it. The grease on the formica tables apparently makes a formidable adhesive if left undisturbed. A thin, vacant blonde girl with a Waffle House hat drifts up to the table, staring down at us through glazed, dark brown eyes. She mumbles. I don't understand a thing she says. It's not the accent. She may just be shy. We're not sure. She looks at us, and there are long pauses between our answers and her next questions. Somewhere, the gears of time come to a shuddering halt.

A booming woman's voice cracks the stillness, as another waitress behind the counter yells about something we didn't catch; a joke. Two guys at the counter laugh. Time catches back up with itself.

The girl drifts back behind the counter. The door opens, the roar of a passing truck amplified. A woman and two men walk in. They pass us and sit at a larger booth at the end of the restaurant. The men are fairly plain, possessed mainly of an attenuated roughness; unkempt beards, one tattoo, sunburned, greasy, not very long hair, a net baseball cap, tanktop shirts, faces that have been worn a little beyond their years. She is fat; not huge, but fat, her belly rolling into folds when she sits. She spills out of her black hot pants and tight black tank top. Her face is puffy and red, her cropped brown hair capped by a bleached blonde mini-mullett. She speaks through a black hole where one of her front teeth used to be. Her voice is like coarse grit sandpaper, the beginnings and ends of words vague, the overall effect one of slurry. Her skin is littered with prison tattoos, the ones that are made with improvised, hand-ground needles and Bic pens. The tattoos are blurry, mostly incomprehensible, haphazard scrawls of simple lines, with only the outline of a heart on her upper thigh truly legible. Here and there--on a knee, or a calf, or above a breast--there is a word, and maybe a figure. Around the base of one thigh is a line. Just a line. It wraps all the way around. I am somehow reminded of one of Henry Rollins' tattoos.

They settle in, light their cigarettes, and have a chat with the loquacious brown-haired girl who works there. They're all friends.

I reach for a napkin to clean off the knife. The metal dispenser is beaded with the accumulation of an untold number of greasy fingerprints. I wipe off the knife. Our food comes. I got waffles and hash browns. I reach for the syrup dispenser. It too is sticky. We begin to eat.

The waffles reminded me of those frozen waffles we used to sometimes get as kids: thin, sort of like recycled pressboard, with no variation in texture from the outside to the inside; not, you know, like these things are sold: "crisp on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside!." After a good soak in the syrup and a liberal application of Butter Product, they began a unique transformation into a kind of shaped paste.

I also had hash browns. Each little grated piece of potato remained an individual entity, each lubricated by a film of grease. Should I have wanted to, I could have teased the whole thing apart into a field of hundreds of soggy, limp little grated potato pieces. The whole thing failed to stick together. I'd pick up a forkful and the mass would disintegrate, falling off the fork. Ketchup helped bind the pieces a little, but not much.

The door opened. With the blast of highway noise came four men about my age, maybe a little younger. They sat at the counter, in a row.

I turned back to my dinner, distracted by the sensation of unnamable sticky residues faithfully migrating onto my hands and forearms as if drawn thereon by some magnetic force; innumerable, animated films of oil and years-old syrup, heeding the siren call of human flesh. I thought of body snatchers. I went through numerous napkins, finally resorting to wetting them with pieces of ice. It helped a little. I started to eat with my arms off the edge of the table.

"FAGGOT!"

I nearly dropped my fork. I was sure it was us.

It wasn't us. One of the four guys behind me was ventilating a particular principle of his, relating an anecdote about mumble and how mumble mumble and then mumble fucking faggots mumble I swear I'd mumble growl boot up angry growl ass growl mumble. One of his buddies sympathized with an unintelligible opinion. A back was slapped, a snort of approval punctuating the fervid exchange.

I thought of Bill Clinton.

A few stools down from them, a young couple changed their baby's diapers on the floor. The dad wore a bright orange shirt, she, a purple flowered blouse. The baby wore nothing.

Nobody else seemed to notice the conversation. I returned to my meal.

Soon we finished. The blonde girl made her way back over to the table to collect our plates. We got our bill, paid, and got up to leave. I went to the rest room to wash up. I almost expected someone to say something to us. What, I did not know. Just something.

Nobody said anything. We were hardly even stared at on the way out, which isn't quite how it went down later that night at the PDQ gas station convenience store in Russellville. I do believe that the middle girl of that trio of buxom blondes may still be collecting her jaw from the pavement.

On the way out, two young guys stood outside smoking, slightly hunched over, feet at shoulder widths, bodies swaying slightly, the smoke snapping around their dark heads in the early evening wind. Their voices were the voices of purposeful young men, set on a mission. What few words I could make out amidst the rushing din of the highway suggested it involved cars, but it was hard to tell. Robert came out after me, we got in the car, the two guys went inside, and we left.