Untitled Document

28 May 2004

The Waffle House

It is unique, the blast of smoky air that hits you when you walk into a Waffle House. It is as unique as the people that are sitting there, black and white. They are big, for the most part, and they favor sweat clothes and t-shirts.
It is regional America, the vast red part of the electoral map.

It is where country men stopped getting haircuts around the same time the city folks started cutting all theirs off. The Vice President travels at his own rhythm and pace.

He was interested in some breakfast. I know my roads pretty well. I suggested the Waffle Shop off the interstate in a town called Burlington. There used to be vast mills to process southern cotton into million square miles of textiles here.

They sent that business offshore a long time ago. I don't know what they do here now. We pulled off the interstate and wheeled the Buick majestically into the parking lot. The sign on the glass door of the Waffle House advised us that there was a non-smoking area available if you couldn't handle it.

Not the other way around.

We had been rolling along in Northern North Carolina. It was a magnificent day, sun and blue sky and temperature not bad at all. We were eastbound on I-40/I-85 with a lot of concrete to process under the wheels of our rented Buick, a comfortable ride the color of monkey-turds, or at least that is what Steve Canyon said while we were talking about a troop of Vietnamese Rock Apes that caused him some hilarious inconvenience one time.

Steve Canyon isn't his real name, of course. That is what the Vice President called him, from the back seat. Bernie earned the name through a dramatic maneuver in heavy traffic, headed south on I-95.

We were talking about Rock Apes and pythons, among other things.

I was the only one who wasn't a hero in the car. I'm a lot of things, and comfortable with most of them. But I am not a hero. But I have been around enough of them to know who they are, even the ones who deny it. The Vice President in the back seat is one. He is a feisty son-of-a-bitch who was one of the lead cadre of Cobra Drivers in Vietnam.

I'm not going to burden you with the nomenclature. You either know, or would recognize it when you saw it.
It had a mini-gattling gun under the chin and little stubby winglettes festooned with rockets and ordnance. The sides are sharp angles and the cockpit is narrow. They are designed to go bring bad things to bad people, up close and very personal.

The Vice President got seven of them shot out from under him, and he walks erect because his back was broken a couple times. He has a chest-full of medals he doesn't need to wear. He is tough as nails, courteous in a southern way, and does not suffer fools.

The guy driving is my partner in crime. He was a MAC-SOG guy. If you don't know what that is, I'd say it was the Studies and Observations Group that worked for the Military Assistance Command, though I am not sure they worked for anyone, if you know what I mean.

Suffice it to say he used to walk around in black pajamas when he went to work and got a break when the moon was full.

We were in the car for ten hours, there and back, rolling across the verdant countryside. That is a lot of time to fill up. The Vice President asked me if I had been to Vietnam, and I had to tell him that I had, but not during the unpleasant part. I had to meet with some people in Hanoi, and was maneuvered into making a speech of congratulations to the Mayor of Ho Chi Minh City on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of its liberation from us.

The Vice President snorted. He thought it was ridiculous. But one thing about the VP. He is unfailingly polite, and always says "sir" when he is addressing you. He would say that even if he was training a mini-gun on you. He grew up on the pan-handle of Florida. It's a regional thing.

We talked a lot about Vietnam, arcing through it conversationally on the way to other things, like baseball and some of the colorful people we knew when our former lives were lived in Technicolor, not corporate gray.
We got onto the subject of Force Reconnaissance Marines through a long complaint about the Long Range Patrol guys, five man teams that were supposed to go out and scout the terrain, identify concentrations of the enemy, report the information and vanish back into the jungle.

Instead, these small patrols would always- always- growled the Vice President- go out and attack a North Vietnamese battalion and call for air support, which caused him to have to strap on his Cobra and go shoot it out with angry people in the dark.

The Force Recon guys were different. They weren't crazy, just tough bastards and would kick your ass if there was nothing else to do, just to stay in practice. The driver laughed. One month, in the bright of the moon, his guys wound up partying in a hooch where the Recon guys had a cage with their mascot, a great Burmese python about ten feet long with a massive triangular head and an imperturbable gaze.

They decided the python needed to be fed, and dispatched one of the junior guys down to the Ville to get him something for breakfast. He came back with a duck, and they put it in the cage and decided to go down to the chow-hall for something themselves.

Just like we were doing at the Waffle Shop.

Waffle Shops are the same all across the South. There are booths to the right, a counter with some stools, a hze of smoke, and some double booths in the front. The grill is in back of the row of booths to the right, and there are coolers with some of the desert specialties and coffee makers along the wall.

We took a booth and a formidable woman in an apron was yelling something to the cook, who was standing about five feet away. She was very loud. She was not our waitress.

Martha was. She spoke a dialect of what I took for English, though it so thick that we had to say everything twice. She had the Waffle Shop brown visor pulled down tight on her head so that her ears stuck out to the side like jug handles. Her hair might have been brown at one time, though she had hacked it off in that old-lady way that announced she no longer gave a great goddamn what it looked like.

Her eyes were blue and had a strange luminescent quality to them.

She said "Hi, Sugar," or maybe it was a question about what we wanted with the coffee. I couldn't tell. Then she said she was delirious because she had just had three days off. The Vice President flipped the metal ashtray right-side up and lit a cigarette. I joined him and added to the gray haze against the yellow and black tile walls.

Martha had little NASCAR pins on her visor, and one from the Bureau of Engraving in Washington. She had once lived in Indian Head, which is near Washington. She knew right away we weren't from there, and I won't even say it is because we had all our teeth.

At least I think that was the upshot of the conversation, but it was hard to tell, since we were negotiating our order and coffee all at the same time.

The menus are laminated plastic, for hard usage, and one side has too much information on it to process and the other has some planer pictures of what they might serve you. We pointed to some hash-browns and eggs, and I think I asked for some onions with mine, though it might have been something else.

The order was shouted down the line to the cook who was standing a few feet away.

We smoked and waited for our eggs. I looked over the Vice President's shoulder at an African American man with a lot of gold dealing with a side order of bacon with great precision. Behind him was a white guy spooning up some grits with a straggly gray beard trimmed down the cheeks below his jaw line. He could have been straight from a civil war re-enactment, or a single-wide out in the pines.

The eggs came and we dove in, catsup passed, salt and pepper. The signature hash-browns were oily and hot and mine actually had onions in them.

"So they put the duck in with the python?" growled the VP as he stubbed out his cigarette.

"Yeah," said Steve Canyon. "That was the interesting part. When we got back from chow, they found the duck had killed the python."

"No kidding" I said, spooning up some eggs.

"Yeah, this is no shit. Really happened."

"So what did they do?" asked the VP.

"They dumped the dead snake and decided they had the toughest duck in Southeast Asia. They made it the new Force Recon mascot."

The VP picked up a piece of toast and smeared some jam on it. "Tough frigging duck" he said, with a certain amount of respect.