Midnight at the Waffle House, Part 2

Click here to catch up on part 1

The first Waffle House was opened by Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner in the Atlanta suburb of Avondale Estates.  The two men had met in 1949 when Rogers, at the time working for the national restaurant chain Toddle House, had bought a home from real-estate agent Forkner and the pair became friends.  Rogers, who had grown tired of miserably toiling away in other people's restaurants and decided it was his turn to make someone miserable, sold Forkner on the idea of starting their own diner and, in 1955, Waffle House was born.

Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner. I don't dare make jokes about either.

Another soon opened in 1957, by 1960 there were a total of four and though it has never grown to Denny's-level ubiquity, Waffle House has become a fixture along the highways of America’s southeast.

On that night in Austin, heavy construction along Ben White Boulevard meant the access road leading to this particular Waffle House was reduced to a miserable dirt path in a dark gap between streetlights and consequently it took Mike and me two passes before we could find the thing.

Just up the road sat a Denny's, it's gleaming, modern interior a beacon of hospitable sterility, with a driveway plainly visible from the road; in comparison, Waffle House looked like an old screen door banging in the wind at the end of a donkey track.   However, by this point we had invested so much time in trying to get to Waffle House that giving up wasn’t an option and had abandoning the vehicle across three lanes of freeway and walking been the only avenue left to us, we would have seriously considered it.

Midnight at the Waffle House

On September 24 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.  Over the next couple weeks I'll be posting a handful of stories and photos from the trip.

Reading is for suckers.  Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones

From finding out that my beer at Denver International was going to cost more than the sandwich it accompanied to taking off in a thunderstorm and seeing the clouds outside my window light up from within, God's name got a lot of play during my journey from Seattle to Austin. It's not that I'm religious - far from it - but if you're going to lodge a complaint you may as well take it to the very top. 

Dr. Broseph, DDS doesn't go in for $9 beers.  Too many carbs, brah.
And yes, he did have his name and "D.D.S" sewed into the front of his shirt.

Consequently, when Southwest Airlines flight 409 safely touched down in Austin just before midnight and I stepped out of the terminal into 86 degree heat I decided to give God a break and cursed Texas Governor Rick Perry instead; the back of my shirt was darkening with sweat regardless of whether or not that reptilian bastard believes in global warming.

You're a bad man, Rick Perry

My last visit to Austin had been in the summer of 2008; I'd arrived around the same time, but on a Greyhound bus from New Orleans rather than a plane from Denver. That time, instead of a lightning storm we had a group of teens harassing other passengers to the point where our driver called Houston PD. The teens, who were black, called the driver a racist before fleeing the bus and hiding in a nearby gas station. Demonstrating a level of restraint one step removed from sainthood, the Hispanic man they had most recently been hassling for, well, being Hispanic, remained silent through their pulling of the race card. 

Thinking back to that, a plane ride through a thunderstorm didn't seem all that bad if for no other reason than it didn't last 12 hours. Also improving on last time was my choice of attire - my first visit to the South, all I had packed was jeans and black T-shirts, and I spent a month on the brink of heat stroke - this time I had exclusively brought shorts. Also black t-shirts, but that's because anything brighter makes me look like Gumby gone to seed. 

Still, even with shorts I was grateful that Mike, the friend who was picking me up, had the air conditioning in his new car set to "Fortress of Solitude." Mike and I have been friends for around six years now, having first met through the Couchsurfing network in 2007.

"Can you turn it down another degree or so?"

Earlier that year he had left his New York City home and begun hitchhiking across the USA, stopping to catch the odd NBA game and, memorably, a sermon by none other than the Reverend Al Green. After a spell in Olympic National Park he journeyed north to Victoria where I met up with him on the steps of the library; I wanted to vet him before letting him into my house. He looked much the same way then as he does now: bearded, six-foot-four, about the same across the shoulders and possessing of an enviably booming voice which, under the right conditions, can change the course of rivers and tropical storms. 

"I'll have a Coke, please"

I liked him then and still do, which was invaluable considering we were about to spend the night 12 days in each others constant company. 

After saying our hellos and stowing my bags we were faced with the question of what to do next: the plan had been to drive to the Grand Canyon, which Mike had never seen, but his work schedule meant we had to leave within a couple days of arriving in Austin. Prior to my arrival I had half-joked that we could leave right from the airport as long as I got some pancakes and coffee along the way and as we pulled away from the curb he said, "

"Were you serious about leaving now? Because my stuff is in the back."

Questions like that are the stuff of which friendships are made.

"Do you know a place I can get pancakes?"

"I do."

"Then yes."

That partially explains how, 30 minutes later, we ended up at the Waffle House on Ben White Boulevard eating grits we hadn't ordered, pining after the hashbrowns we had and looking at a grainy cellphone video of what the waitress claimed were the ghosts haunting her apartment. 

To be continued in Part 2: Meth, Grits and Life After Death

So You Think You Can Write: Juliette

For this, my third assignment in the Times Colonist "So You Think You Can Write" competition, I was tasked with creating a character in 500 words or less.  Descriptive writing was not something I often did and so this was an intimidating assignment, although it was easy compared to the one that followed.

"Juliette"

Gliding between Formica tabletops, her slender fingers around the handle of a coffeepot, Juliette remembers when John would take her dancing and, when the diner is quiet, she can almost pretend it’s still spring 1967 and the air smells of gardenias in bloom.

She closes her blue eyes and remembers the summer before John was drafted: drinking iced tea on the porch with her parents before sneaking away to make love by the banks of the Atchafalaya Basin. Juliette trembled in the moonlight, a tall, slim girl even then, and he handled her like something precious and rare.

The Un-Texan: A Quinn Martin Production

"The birth of a child, your first kiss from a new lover - neither compare to that sweet moment when your hangover finally goes away."

Those sage words are one of only two things I accomplished today in the fog that followed a friend's birthday party at Brown's Social House last night.  The other "accomplishment" adorns the top of this page and makes less sense even if it was more fun to make.  I will try to explain:

Artist's representaton

This morning I browsed Facebook while waiting for the hammering in my head to subside.  It was there I noticed that one of my friends, writer, editor & fugitive American Bob McIntosh (@BobMcVictoria on Twitter), was himself friends with a man named Hud Bannon.  

The name immediately appealed to to the child in me who spent hours parked in front of the television watching re-runs of Quincy, Barnaby Jones, & The Streets of San Francisco on WWOR.  I could just imagine "hot-shot detective" Hud Bannon sliding across the hood of his black '71 Charger (hemi, of course) as he chased down drug kingpin Mookie Davis.  So, in tribute, I created the above image and sent it along to Bob for laughs.

As it turns out Hud Bannon is a writer, author of the blog The Un-Texan, among other things, and though that’s not his real name it damn well should be.  I haven’t yet had the chance to delve into the man’s work but what I have seen so far concerns things near and dear to my heart:  America, truck stops, dusty roads and the strange carnival of people who inhabit all three:

“Looking at Delta Dawn's bare shoulders and back was like gazing across several acres of pale, drought-stricken ground in the harshest light of day; from the front she looked like all of those acres had gathered themselves into a shivering heap that might collapse at any moment. None of that seemed to bother her in the slightest.”

                                    -          Hud Bannon, "The Un-Texan"

Click on over to the man's site using either the link above or by clicking the image at the top of the page.  On a related note, does anyone know the name of the guy who narrated Barnaby Jones & The Streets of San Francisco?  This is the stuff they should teach in school.