collected writings

The Midway Cafe

The front door opens with the ding of a bored and exhausted bell, and the guy in the corner hides his face in his open-faced sponge of a gravy sandwich, because the four guys who walk in the diner are the four guys that have picked on our hero for the last five decades of his life.

When he was a little boy his mother died of natural causes (actually during her second pregnancy - back then this was a very natural cause) and his father had to take up the house chores, which until then he had always just assumed somehow got done. His father accidentally washed a red bandana in a load of whites, and the little boy had to go to school with a pink shirt, and all the other boys laughed at him and called him a queer.

He was of course not gay, but since he could never leave the town he grew up in, he could never leave the cruelness. It of course didn't matter, because the four guys that walked in the diner couldn't remember the pink shirt incident, and likely wouldn't have cared. They only cared that he was a fag.

The guy in the corner glances up, and accidentally catches the eyes of the third guy in the door. He glares. The fellers sit in a far booth, in a café where booths are just tables pushed up against the laminated wood wallpaper walls, with one less chair and only a little more dignity and privacy, and order their meal of fried air.

One of them, the leader, looks over at the corner.

"Shit, look'et Dale o'er there."

... he says, talking that way not because that is how cowpokes talk, but because the town receives two faded television stations, channel 9 and 13, both of which happen to play the same material, but channel 13 has a four second delay. TiVo and instant replay don't have much meaning in a town where you can watch what you just watched again in case you missed the details of the local newscast as they count up the daily toll of deaths from drunk driving.

He talks that way because he saw a movie-of-the-week a long time ago about domestic abuse in a cow town, and that's how the alpha male and abuser in the movie talked, and as the alpha male and abuser in this town, he adapted his language as such. He drives a white diesel truck, and has taken to do so because somehow either all the domestic abusers in the town have taken to driving white diesels, or they abuse because they drive white diesels. Either way, it works out, and although the noise and sound and sight of a speeding white truck does more than any Megan's Law ever could, they are still perpetually with a girlfriend. It just sort of works out like that.

"Hay Dale! What'em you doin' eaten them sand'witch fore?"
"Thought you liked them tofu burgers and shit like that?"

Dale had gone through a vegetarian phase several years ago, which didn't go over well in a town that survives only by the carnivorous appetites of the good ol' American as apple pie USA, and it didn't help his being called a fag.

Dale smiles and turns back to his gravy, sad with the knowledge that a tofu burger he ate once tasted better than anything that he could eat at the diner, because the tofu soaks up any flavoring you add and never ever tastes like grease and gravy. He could never eat that good in town, in a diner called the Midway Cafe, which sees a lot of business now that the other diner in town, the Bulldog, has closed.

Dale would like to live in a place where he could buy fresh vegetables for a good salad once in a while, a place where carrots and potatoes were not the only "greens" available. But he can't, because this is home, and he has never known anything different. He would like to plant a small garden behind his house where he could plant spinach and lettuce and borage, but he runs cows and knows and respects the pride taken in being a rancher and not a farmer. He couldn't possibly.

So he has to subject himself to the weekly insults and his daily dietary allowance of grease, and when he dies from a busted ventricle at fifty-two (too much fat in his diet, the coroner will say) he won't have more than five people at his funeral. Several years later, in a long unbroken streak of drunk drivers, an unidentified man plows off the frontage road and into the cemetery and snaps Dale's thin tombstone in two, the only permanent mark Dale could leave on the earth broken and forgotten. The drunk driver survives the car wreck only to drown moments later in a pile of his own waste. People would call it poetic justice, if they knew what that was in a town where one diner supports the entire epicurean population.

The next boy in town that the town's people call gay really is, and so one night, the night before he graduates from high school, he is beaten up and dies from the resulting violence.

The media descends on the town, eating at the Midway because there is no where else to eat, and the four guys, still at the same booth, eat quietly because they are intimidated by the surrounding madness, not voicing their feelings till they leave the diner and laugh at all the girls wearing suits.

Half a year later, a movie-of-the-week about the beating is filmed in a studio set 2,000 miles away, and when it gets shown on the local channel 9, a new generation of cowpokes learn how to act and talk like toughs, using the delay between channel 9 and channel 13 to make sure they don't miss a word.

D sits down to join the four males as they take a break from their work of making Dale feel bad. D's real name is Dan, but everyone just calls him D. Ignoring the Johns and Peters in the town, and all the other names that were plagiarized from the Bible, over eighty percent of the remaining men's names start with the letter D. Not getting much further in the alphabet, the remaining twenty percent start with E, usually some variation on Ernie. D just simplified that little known fact. Everyone just calls him D.

D is the romantic of the bunch. When the waitress walks up to check on the boys and make sure everything is equally well fried, D snakes an arm around her apron. What a hopeless romantic.

"What's yer sister up to tonight?"

She doesn't know.

"Tell 'er I'm lookin' out for her."

That old smoothie. He certainly has a way with the sisters of all the ladies. The waitress turns away and sags inside because she has always had a blushing, embarrassing love for D, and now he has moved from sister to sister to her younger sister, her younger sister who has always gotten everything she ever wanted and was spoiled from day one and here she is working hard every day just to pay for her one room annex in the basement of the Methodist church and her younger sister still gets to live at home, her younger sister who over her shoulder she hears D brag that he is currently "humping."

"Yeah?"
"Shit."
"I banged 'er once too."
"No shit?"
"If you can do it, damn near anyone can."
"Fuck you."

D goes on to meet Sarah, the younger sister, that night, and does indeed hump her in his diesel truck. He drives a blue truck, so she safe from all but the most passion-stoked smacks to the face. They park on Lovers Lookout... more a description of the events that usually take place there than an actual description of the scenery. In fact, it is no more elevated than any other rolling hill in the surrounding two hundred miles, but Lover's Lookout overlooks the Paint Mines, the town's one geographic oddity and the one that that occasionally brings tourists into town to snap pictures and have an uncomfortable meal at the Midway.

The Paint Mines sink about twelve to twenty feet into eroded clay cliff, named as such because either the clay was once mined there as an additive in some sort of specialized and useless paint, paint that would sit on abandoned shelves in abandoned local hardware stores until they were thrown out, or it just looks like that.

In ten million years tourists (if they still exist... maybe they will be the endangered species and others will come to gawk at them) will peer over the lip of a broad and beautiful canyon, reading about how nobody really knows about the natives that lived in this area when the Painted Canyon was just forming, reading about it on a plaque firmly rooted in the ground at the exact spot where D thoughtfully and romantically fills Sarah full of the smallest cells that the human body produces.

In ten million years tourists will speak in hushed language, not wanting to disturb the native whales that lumber across the basin of the canyon (in ten million years a lot can happen), blissfully unaware that on a starry night long ago a little boy named Benjamin was conceived here in a blue diesel truck by a man named D who realizes several months later what he has done and shots himself.

But for now the Paint Mines are only twenty feet deep, and they look less of a natural wonder and more of a natural landfill. In the cracks and ledges trash sits, rusting. Gutted houses compact layers of domesticity.

Tires are the only thing not thrown in the Paint Mines - they go to a separate pile fifteen miles out of town that was started by some local government somewhere after it was found that tires could not be thrown in landfills. They had to be trucked out to the plains and abandoned instead. It seems that when tires are lost in landfills they get compressed under tons of debris, and as they fill up with gas from the decomposition the tires slowly accordion their way up, through the trash, to one day pop out of the ground and ruin the sod that someone carefully laid over the trash so that the golfers did not sink waist deep in their own filth.

The tires had to be dumped somewhere, and so they were driven out east and unloaded, truck after truck, in somebody's pasture. The men directing the trucks had picked that place by a random guess, at a point that was a little under a half a tank of gas from the city. They did not happen to think that someone might own the land they were reclaiming for their own needs, that someone might notice if eight acres of useable space suddenly got buried under a pile of black, because if someone did own the land, they thought, then there would already be a park or a golf course or a track of houses that smelt all the same, and as there was none of this, it was free use. The man who owned the pasture recovered, and making the best of a bad situation began to charge other companies and towns to dump there tires there as well, and he made a tidy profit that was almost enough to reimburse him for the spreading ugliness.

That man had a grown son who probably had a name, but he was called Moose, and not just for his killjoy personality. The man could run through a wall if he built up enough steam. Moose had grown up under the shadow of the growing tire pile, and they say consequentially he wanted to clean up the world, figuratively speaking of course, and he went into law enforcement. His rise through the ranks of local and state agencies is probably more honestly attributed to the enormous expanse of his shoulders than anything that could have been carried atop that plateau, and he was drafted into the FBI narcotics department before he had moved out of his father's ranchhome.

The FBI was in desperate need of agents that knew the local terrain, to help combat the rising use of methamphetamines in rural areas. As the FBI made it sound, everyone that lived in the flatlands and had an unused shed or building on their land, which as Moose put it was damn near everyone, was a suspect, and they all had to be monitored. Just enough of the empty building actually did house drug labs, just enough to justify the FBI's presence and excited oversteps. Moose personally busted several local meth labs, never making any collars but closing down the supply of meth for the surrounding area.

When the drug traffic dried up, all the youths looked elsewhere for illegal excitement. As Moose would have it, everyone under twenty was a potential drug user or pusher, although he of course did not know that he was actually right. On of these users was Benjamin, Ben to you and me, the fatherless child of a young Sarah.

Being a quiet boy, Ben of course could not look for new and different sources of entertainment when the meth stopped, he could not simply walk up to the popular kids - roughly half of his class of thirty - and ask them what new illicit wonders they were using to escape life for a while. Faced with these unhappy consequences, Benjamin decided to do what until then had only existed in videos and brochures provided to the young people by D.A.R.E., and he turned his life around, got good grades, and decided to become a pilot.

He enrolled at the University of North Dakota, despite his mother's wishes for him to stay home, because he had heard somehow that they had a good pilot instruction program. He got his commercial license and began to fly small planes in South America, unknowingly running cargo for the real drug kingpins, the ones the popular kids all thought and acted like, and he was killed during an aborted hijacking, and news of his death never reached his mother or the United States because it was thought that no Americans were on board.