Diner Diner

originally published at www.policegazette.us

All my life I’ve been happiest with wheels rolling beneath my butt. When I was a baby my parents would drive me around the block to put me to sleep, and I’m still more likely to doze off in the most cramped car seat than the most comfortable hotel bed. Planes, trains, and automobiles, I don’t have the mathematical skill to count the miles I’ve gone. If you’re the kind of person that plans ahead, you can turn a loaf of bread into a stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that will last a week, but I’ve only had the foresight to pack my lunch on enough trips to count on one hand.

If you can successfully avoid the lure of Fast Food, you’re better than me. Remember that Subway is Fast Food and so is Pizza Hut, even if you have to wait more than an hour. Sometimes you pull in to a nearly nameless town at 6am to find nothing else open but a McDonald’s and a Burger King. Do a little research and you’ll find McDonald’s and Coca Cola are two of the most evil corporations in the world. But unless the fryer was changed yesterday, Burger King hash browns taste like burnt shit.

YIn the words of Sam Jackson, “My girlfriend’s a vegetarian. That means I’m a vegetarian.” I try to adhere to that life when I’m alone, because I definitely feel better when I do it. Sometimes you’re so happy you found a gas station with more than potato chips, you hold your nose and eat. I’ve littered countless parking lots with the off-colored sausages peeled from egg sandwiches out of the warmer. If you’ve spent your last five bucks at a bus stop on cold french fries and a hamburger reheated so many times it’s mummified you’ll pretend anything is exotic cuisine.

When I’m on the road with the lady, she’s on her Happy Cow mapping hundreds of miles of detours to find the one organic vegetarian-friendly restaurant in the half-savage farm country of western Pennsylvania. There have been gems, but outside the big cities you only find co-ops run by the four vegan punk rock kids in the Tri-State area. Five minutes past close they won’t make a meatball sub, even if you drove five hours for that (seitan) meatball sub. It was a good meatball sub. We drove an hour out of the way on the return trip to have one.

People spend too much time worrying about what other people eat. Since my best friend went vegan in senior year I’ve never understood how an alternative lifestyle could raise such ire. That meant more tacos for me, though he did steal an increased amount of french fries. We spent a summer on the road to visit a scattering of friends. Roughly half that month was on a bus or train. My meals were micro-waved White Castles in the lounge car. We circled the west coast and ended up at the Milwaukee Metalfest to meet a friend  with a cousin with an apartment in Chicago where we could stay a few hours and drive back to New York. The cousin had a party she swore would still be raging at 3am when we arrived. We could hear snores through open barred windows, but our shouts and knocks did not rouse someone to open the door.

Resigned to sleep on the back porch, where there was still plenty of beer, we first scraped our coins together in the car and walked around the corner to the only open Mexican place we could find. If it had a name, I don’t remember it. We had enough money for three tacos and a single can of orange soda.

These were the hottest god damned tacos I’ve eaten in my entire life.  We didn’t even put on additional hot sauce. I won’t tell you which of us three adult men openly cried, but we all did whimper. The Sunkist was gone before any of us finished half our taco.

Another trip I watched sunrise over the desert after 17 hours crossing Texas in a Ford Escort named Derf. We still had another day of travel before we reached the ocean. Just past the New Mexico border we were nearly out of gas for the second time that night. A shack off the highway promised breakfast and fuel.

Two of us went inside. We’d been asleep the last couple hours. The third guy passed out in the back seat. He’d driven most of the night. There was a diner at the back, where we ordered breakfast burritos. Our tables had telephones, and our breakfast came on paper plates. As we ate, a giant desert cockroach climbed onto the table and sat unassuming between our plates. We left, only to find we’d parked in a No Parking zone, and our car with sleeping friend inside were about to be towed. Once you reach the regional “Big City,” everything will be fine.

I stayed my first night in Seattle with a straight-edge vegan who tattooed his favorite virus on his forearm. He de-spined mice at the University of Washington for a living. We were friends of friends, and barely knew each other. I got in town late and he went to work early the next morning.  I had about eight hours to wander King County alone before catching a bus to Olympia. He lived in the University District near the waterfront, so I saw a lot masts and boat-shops, all in the shadow of the biggest freeway I’d ever stood beneath. That’s where I found Ivar. I’ve had a life-long weakness for fish, reading about them, watching them on TV, and eating them. Ivar sells salmon. He sells other things, but I was most interested in salmon. It was served on a paper plate and you ate at rough-hewn picnic tables on a concrete floor. I’ve dreamed at night of Ivar and his magical clam chowder.

I spent two weeks carrying four suitcases down the Nile and up again with my ladyfriend. Every corner shop had a shawarma cone hanging by the door with smiling chefs slicing sandwiches. Old women picked through crowds with cages of street pigeons that will be on the menu at the next restaurant. We survived on falafel.  It’s essentially the Middle Eastern veggie burger, eaten with pita, tomatoes, and an array of sauces that American’s assemble into a sandwich we call a gyro (pronounced gyro). That method earned a lot of stares when we didn’t tear off chunks of pita to use in place of a fork. Science proves the pita pocket is one way Western culture has improved traditional dining.

I was happy with street vendors and filthy cafes overrun with stray cats and cockroaches, but my ladyfriend was always on the lookout for something better. My job was to keep my mouth shut and carry suitcases.  A British ex-pat in Luxor was ecstatic to have drawn us into the restaurant she operated with her Egyptian husband. She regaled us with tales of ordering vegetarian abroad, and chefs removing chunks of beef in front of her. That little shop had the best strawberry juice we ever drank, and was the only restaurant that made us sick, right before we took a six-hour bus ride to the Red Sea.

When we returned to Cairo on the final leg of our trip, we took a cab to L’Aubergine across the Nile, down a maze of twisting streets that we’d never be able to navigate alone. The name means “eggplant,” and we drank giant bottles of Stella beer and ate our first eggplant parms since leaving the States. And bread. And more bread. And more bread. Every time we ate a slice, the waiter would offer to refill our basket. We were on our way back to the US the next day, and this was easily the best food we’d eaten in the trip. Then we received our bill.

I’m the type of person that when faced with an incorrect bill at a restaurant in an isolated section of a strange city in a foreign nation 5,634 miles from home, I pay it. I did it when my ladyfriend excused herself to the ladies room. Don’t mess with this girl’s bread products. I’ve seen her dress down a waitress in a diner over 60 cents worth of toast, so I should have known there would be trouble when our bill was twice the price we expected. The waiter was happy to point out that bread was 20 pounds per basket, which is fairly close to $3. We’d eaten a lot of bread. She argued each basket off the bill, and we were given back our money. As always, I made up the difference in tip when she wasn’t looking. Take care of the people that make your food. Their jobs suck worse than yours.