Fenby’s

I went home once. For a wedding let’s say, not any one celebration in particular, but we’ll use a ‘wedding’ ’cause it’s less maudlin than a funeral or any other ‘rally ’round the family’. And I’m a guy so talking about baby showers or the like won’t sound natural, anyway. So the tone is a happy one, we’ll say, we don’t need a device or the scenery adding to the darkness. There are plenty of feelings that leave queasy grease spots on your mood, waiting for you when you go home. Like a coffee stomach that wont go away. There’s lingering jitters of excitement but the whole prospect leaves you a little chill and vaguely sweaty. But thats what you get when you over indulge in anything, coffee or nostalgia. Or maybe it’s the diabolical combination of those two, nostalgia fueled by coffee.

Now, I won’t get into a big thing with you about “My home town diner could kick your burger stand’s ass with one fryer tied behind the dumpster”, cause if I had to stand up in that fight, I don’t think it would be for Fenby’s. Now, here in my imagination and, for the most part, in real life Fenby’s has served as a classic work horse of form and function. It is, or was, a simple diner in the tradition of a ‘Bob’s Big Boy’. A low squat building with wooden eaves that had regular gaps in them to allow for the news paper machines to rust out proper like. But that’s o.k. ’cause you can smoke inside, which is where the dang grill is anyway…

“Would you get in here!, dammit boy you ain’t in Cali…bring the Camel in with ya like you pay taxes, n shit”, he said, leaning out the single hung glass door ( it had some funky super plastic handle, no doubt installed in the ’70s). Ah my boy; the only one I could get to pick me up from the airport at 10:30 on a Tuesday morning. He’s not working and I can see it wearing on him. But he’s happy to see me, and for my part I feel the same. He trys to flop into the enormous eight man corner booth, a nod to when we used to do awful things to the wait staff when were kids. I grin as I walk by him to a simple 4 man (brown vinyl with the ‘brass tacks’, brown everything-wood grained Formica in fudge swirl). The carpet a faded memory of green and gold geometrics, repeating.

“C’mo.aaaaahhh(n)” he yawns, palms up in a gesture meant to convey our need for space and our right by divine yada yada to take up that many seats in the diner. When it was fun it was about holding off the waitress with stories of late friends who “should be here any minute”, while drinking coffee like it was drying up in Columbia…maybe picking at an order of fries. And of course you get the evil looks from little staff lunches from the local office or what not, who, showing up late in the rush, end up taking the two seat booth attached to the coffee station with three more at the bar (awful squares of plywood and foam riveted to a strip of tile by the cash register and the pie case). Then we’d round the last dollar for a tip and leave while the coast was clear.

Juvenile, ya know. Not nearly as bad as my brother and his friends, who practiced their aim in the bathroom on any flat surface there in, soap dish, potted plant, sink of course. My brother also took great sadistic joy in verbally abusing the waitresses, boasting at various meetings that he’d made that one cry and that we could expect the worst in customer service from that one (cute blond, our age) as long as he sat with us “it didn’t smell good, kinda like BBQ Frito’s”.

Anyway I got my boy to join me at our new booth. More fudge swirl, wood grain Formica set with salt and pepper shakers (molded glass with a deep silver cap), a sugar caddy as well as one for jam. The problem later might be the little syrup jug left from the previous ticket’s pancake/waffle plate. I didn’t have to be anywhere for several hours ( the bachelor party) and I knew he would need to talk. He would need at least two hours, I figured, of solid debriefing before we could call it… pay the tab, and drop me off at my ma’s for a disco nap. The sugar packets were done for, that was a given. And the shakers may meet startling ends depending on how bad this little Podunk town had gotten. But the syrup could be used in horrible “children look away” feats of randomness, and I’d hoped not to have to talk to the law enforcement community until much later in this four day weekend or at least later on tonight.

“Tell me about it, your California….you been there for what eight years now”, he sips at his newly arrived coffee (brown ceramic mugs shaped like Jenny Wiess, bigger on the bottom but plenty on top), I don’t recognize the waitress and I don’t think he does either. She had the luck or good sense to collect the syrup (and the jam) when she left the coffee and menus

“Yeah, something like eight”, but I’m more interested in the breakfast offerings after my red eye outa SFO. But I give him the low down, in a Cliff notes fashion. It’s easier because the standard of living is higher, blah, yes the girls are almost always beautiful but a little vapid, no… I’m doing very little exciting. There was a film gig I got on, and good bar tending for a while, maybe I’ll look at driving cab or something. The menu is full of pictures to aid the very drunk in late night ordering. But it has the opposite effect on the very stoned who suddenly wanna color on the place mats; interpretations of the steak and eggs photo in purple crayon.

“Three eggs, over easy, bacon, rye toast’n browns and a large milk with the food”, I hand the girl the menu and spend a few awkward seconds getting him to order more than a bagel. “Waffles!”, he gins at both me and the girl “ No…o.k”, he plays at grumpy, “Since the gay, hippy, surfer is afraid of a little ’syrup hockey’, all of a sudden,”,fake shock (I invented it after all),”I’ll have a bacon and cheese omelet”. She turns away and he barks for more coffee. His is, two cream and five sugars, I drink mine black. We’re seated just across from the coffee station , if she’s smart she’ll start bringing a pot with her every time. He’s managed to get a few paper wrapped straws from her and is making little scrunched tubes with the wrappers. With a few drops from his mug they grow and ‘crawl’ a little into small pools of joe.

The screw lathe plant in Hudson laid him off. He says that his uncle might be able to get him on at the stamping plant in Monroe. He’ll be driving up for the first battery of tests on Monday. He broke up with Michelle, he tells me, and it must have been recent, because I see a little pain around his eyes when he says her name. Obviously not as ‘mutual’ a separation as he would want me to believe. I don’t push him on that subject much.

“I’m not getting any gold stars in romance either” I tell him and touch quickly on my latest catastrophe involving a little Italian girl. Some of the details make him belly laugh. He finds a bit too much pleasure in my pain and I’m warming up a few zingers designed to even the ground, when the food arrives. The coffee is kicking in and I remember bits of dialog from Dune. “It is by will alone I set my mind in motion, it is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed” alright maybe not some crazy drug imbibed by super intelligent men in the future. But the mind begins to float (3rd cup for me, 4th for him) in caffeine, making weird associations and leaps of relation.

The eggs are perfect. The toast is cold though, and the hash browns aren’t as crispy as they could have been. He’s happy with his plate and we eat in silence for a bit, he gets another cup of coffee, it’s the first from a new pot. I steer the conversation to the name game. I’d say a name and he’d give me the low down on what they were up to, or when it was they were last heard from. Most of the stories put a smile on my face and a lot of them devolved into retellings of when the three or four of us were together. “Do you remember when Josh Wheeler rolled his pop’s car?!” left us laughing about that night and that stupid commode we hauled around town. I think it ended up on Toby Schultz’s Buick hood.

But it was two names, in particular, I was the most interested in. And regardless of the happiness I’d get out of the wedding celebration, what he told me over breakfast broke my heart in places only touchable by years of baggage and remorse.

 

   To be continued…