Getting Trashed at Malty Moe's

My editor says I have to say this in exchange for leaving the rest of the story as it is: Please drink responsibly.

I park in a gray strip mall outside of Kansas City after two days of driving and one night in a cheap motel bed, on the way up north to donate couches to a mutual friend. My buddy Danny - another friend, not the one with a couch in transit except that he’s hauling it -  is already through the front doors of the diner. Generic signs light up above the storefronts: "smoke", "laundry", "nails". “Malty Moe's” peeks out with neon cursive red. We choose to stop here.  Our hotel is across the street. We have the good sense to check in and drop off our backpacks of clothes before we go eat. I don’t want to pay for hotel parking more than I have to. Neither of us want day-old waffles from the kitchenette. I hope we haven’t wasted good hours of sunlight on the road for bad food.

The door opens up to a diner that got built in an imaginary mid-century Americana and then never left. An art snob would call it googie. More neon pink and chrome than you would think can fit inside. Classic rock crackles out of the radio and insists it is rock and roll. A jukebox in the corner is rusted from tobacco stains - we have no need to make it move tonight.

As I walk up to the cashier, Danny goes towards the bathroom in much the same way a car goes towards a deer. I prepare a medley of excuses that he’s with me and we’re really going to eat here, but the topic never comes up.

I study the menu above the front counter, and I pace. I can't help myself. It feels good. Car seats can't stretch how I need them. Headrests push my neck forwards. The dashboard makes me bend my knees high.

Thursday dinner rush is over. No one else has stuck around.

The waitress is polite, a brunette in a bubblegum pink polo and khakis. She's patient as I waffle over what to eat. She will kick Danny and me out fifty-eight minutes from now. We will deserve it.

I order two cheeseburgers medium-well with everything on them. Fries. Onion rings. A chocolate milkshake. Two cherry sodas. And a beer - one of the cheap neon ones in twist-cap bottles that can still chew up your hand. That should cover the two of us with some liberties. I only know this because Danny reminds me of it later. They could have brought out platters of any type of food and I wouldn’t have second-guessed it.

The meals have funny names. There's some fine print on the menu sign that I also don't bother reading. I'm tired.

I follow black and white checkerboard tiles to a booth table with a napkin holder. I stretch my knees.

The waitress brings our drinks along with an overflowing basket of shoestrings and house ketchup-mayo sauce. In Utah, this might be called frysauce, but most burger places have a house sauce that starts out like that. For respect to our current region, I don’t make the comparison out loud. The fries crunch. They get the stale air conditioning taste from the car out of my mouth. Couldn't ask for more.

By the time Danny comes back to the table, most of the fries and my first beer are gone. Only the fries are free. I'm hungrier than I thought. I'm also on a tirade about salt while dumping more salt onto my plate. It was really important at the time, but this part of the discussion is a bit lost to me at the moment. Danny isn't listening to me. He takes a sip of soda. I ask if he's tried the fries.

The squeaky leather in the booth seats rubs against our legs. When I close my eyes for just a second too long, I hear the whole place at once. Clinking plates. Pouring, fizzing soda. Sizzling grease. Silverware plunking into soapy water.

Danny wakes me back up. I am more tired from the road than I thought, now that I’m out of the car. Food is on the table. Easy to think, in my distracted moment, this is a work of magic instead of just work. The polite bubblegum waitress is already a little annoyed with us as she rubs her sore arms. I should have read the fine print that told me the burgers are the monthly special: eighteen ounces each.

Well, we can’t take it with us. I swig more from my beer and get to work. Heavy, hand-cramping, jaw-cramping work.

At least they make all the patties thin and smashed so we don't have to eat meatloaf sandwiches. Not that I think anything bad about a half-decent meatloaf sandwich. But that's not the point here. I just don't expect smashing this far from the west coast. And meatloaf can fall apart in a way that these patties don't.

Everything shiny - thin film of grease. Solid lettuce leaf. Tomato bright red but no sign of moisture. Red onion circles. Fries are unsentimental but this is not the time  for that, anyway. First full bites still do not approach the patty.

Between bites, Danny mentions that people have been putting salt on food for thousands of years. “We’re like ancient cavemen, with beer and meat and salt. Fry-sauce has probably only been around for a hundred years or so.”

So have cars. I don’t see what his point is. As I chew on beef, I feel a headache at the front of my forehead. Only part of it is from listening to Danny. Another bite helps with the headache. It means I can drink more.

Danny laughs, full of onion breath, at his own joke. I’m sure it’s funny when he tells it all at once. I nod along. I would want the same encouragement from him if it was my joke. My legs still hurt from the car.

I wonder what good a diner, that looks like a piece of a train, might be in a country overtaken by cars. A pedestrian can't hardly even fall dead from frostbite on an aimless walk through the winter-crushed crop fields outside of the city anymore. Not that I'd prefer frostbite or any other kind of exposure. Nasty way to go. Connecting the coasts by rail brought coastal sensibilities to the middle country in exchange for a frontier that no one believes in. It’s hard to have an adventure when everything kind of looks the same. Every corner will either have a small dive or a chain. But an empty train-car turned into food for an automobile driver just feels a little on the nose. Most people don't even have the holy righteousness of delivering a couch to get them through the cold nights. They also don't have to contend with slabs of ground beef. And I don't mean Danny, either, who's burly enough to move a couch on his own and smart enough to not say anything stupid to a waitress.

There's a feeling deep in my gut that accepts beef and potato and wheat and pickled cucumber and demands more, even as my mouth numbs to the sensation of burger. It's a horrible consideration - apathy towards a vibrant food. It happens no matter what I feel about it.

Danny asks, with volume in his voice, why the tomatoes didn’t get extra salt. He might have been talking for many minutes now.

I clear my throat. “The pickles come in a brine, the beef is seasoned. Does it really make a difference if the tomatoes aren’t salted?”

He insists salt brings out the flavor, especially when it’s a fresh tomato.

“I can't tell the difference. You really think these are farm-fresh tomatoes?”

“They could be. It’s farm country.”

I can't tell the difference. “Do they even grow tomatoes out here? I thought it was mostly wheat.”

“And corn.”

We take a swig.

“Okay, but we don’t have corn on our burgers. They probably get the tomatoes from a farm somewhere else.”

Danny lifts the bun. “That still doesn’t explain why it doesn’t have salt.”

“I thought we were talking about tomatoes.”

“We’re talking about tomatoes because we’re talking about salt. And why are we having diner food you can get anywhere in the lower forty-eight instead of tomato-molasses barbecue?”

Well, we didn’t have to go to a diner in the first place if we just want diner food. I could have stopped to get takeout at a chain. I tap the shaker and ask: Why not just put salt from the shaker onto your tomatoes? It’s right here on the table.

“So it does make a difference if the tomatoes are salted or not.”

“I’m not drunk enough for this.”

We take a swig and the volume is down.

The waitress comes back around to check on us and refill our drinks. There's something important I need to tell her. I can't, for the life of me, parse what that important something is. She consults the menu and mentions something about six hundred milligrams of salt. I ask her to repeat herself. Six hundred milligrams in the burger. Danny asks about the tomatoes. I tell him to shut up. The words are meaner than I mean them. My neck doesn't hurt anymore.

The waitress’s voice calls out to us. A warning to keep it down.

My shoulders relax on their own. My breathing slows down, too.

Danny thinks we’re making good time on 44. I think we’re actually on 49 now, but I guess a road is a road is a road. Danny turns back to me. “How am I supposed to know?” His words have more teeth to them than usual.

“I’m just making conversation.”

“You’re making a mess.” He points at strewn vegetables and sesame seeds on my tray.

“Well, how did that get there?”

“You. You spilled your burger.”

“I’m holding my burger.” At least it’s still in my hands.

“And it’s falling all over.”

“Fine,” I agree, so he stops. “Just don’t say I’m making a mess.”

I don’t know when the waitress brought our next round of beers. I don’t remember asking for them. The next time I see the bottles, they’re empty.

Well, these people know how to make chocolate milkshakes. If I was at home, I would have crushed half a sleeve or more of mint cookies into a coarse dust, added Irish crème, really any sort of crème would do if it had enough wallop, pour in some coffee creamer and shake the whole thing over ice until it was indistinguishable from the slush left over after a hard freeze. I don’t know why I ordered it. It’s too damn cold for thinking about a milkshake for as long as I have. It gives me a headache I hardly need. But it hits the spot after all the salty, oily mess of a burger. It’ll be a hard winter.

I get up to walk around again. I hope some increased blood flow will stop the brain freeze. Or at least to help me concentrate on staying awake. Then I try the other things people say to get rid of a brain freeze. I touch the roof of my mouth with my tongue. I feel my lips sting with salt and oil. Damnit, did this milkshake also have booze?

When I inform Danny of my headache, I get a second comment in return from the waitress to keep down. A perfectly reasonable request except that Danny seems to have lost all sense of hearing by this point.

I walk back to my chair, and the table keeps getting in the way. Just as no one's on the trains anymore but the diner pretends so any way, the diner is still a restaurant with walls and a roof - if I really wanted to, I could have ordered something delivered directly to our hotel room from some ghost that pretends to make food and a gig deliverer that the ghost pretends to pay. Room service would stop showing up at about the same time the bubblegum waitress asks Danny and me to leave. Maybe it's best I took my chances.

“We can’t take any of this with us.”

Danny looks at me. “Sure we can. We have a cooler full of drinks in the trunk of the car.”

“We do?”

“Yeah,” he smiles. “Do you want a beer?”

I don’t have enough energy to take a swing at him. He pours some maple syrup onto a pile of fries. I can’t imagine it will help. If he’s anything like me, all thoughts and electrical activity in his body are now refocusing themselves towards the task of digesting food.

Just for a second, I catch a look from him that I can’t put together. I get an inscrutable feeling deep in my kidneys that Danny would not be here if I did not ask for him. I don’t know what to do with that feeling. Crumbs of onion ring batter fill the awkward gap between us. A crunchy, acidic pickle is a remarkable feeling surrounded by beef.

I like food. I was hungry before this. But it just doesn’t end. Even worse, I have been drunk enough times to recognize each of the moments towards that pit stop in turn. It's a temperature thing. Your lips are cold, but your forehead is warm and your cheeks are flush. The usual fatigues are dulled and are replaced with new fatigues, more potent.

My brain is losing space for non-burger thoughts, my throat has no space for non-burger breaths, the way a skyscraper consumes its own sky. I grab a handful of napkins to wipe across the now-greasy chairs. We can't let the waitress clean up after this, too. This is the only meal we had today. Nothing summons forth piety like food you can’t turn down.

Still, I have no nostalgia for a place like this. In its heyday, my grandparents would have been too old to think of a diner (or a soda fountain) as a popular place to spend time. My parents would have been just born. For me, a diner is an instructed sentimentality. And as much as I try to keep thinking about anything else but food, there is still beef to eat. So I do. I’ve eaten this much food before maybe a few times in my life and always with help. Despite that we’re west of the Mississippi and people to the east of us still treat it like uncharted territory as if it hasn’t been charted for a hundred years at least, I know where I am.

That’s about the time the table goes belly-up.

The bubblegum waitress asks us to leave. She’s shocked from the sound and the mess and polite in a way that suggests these are her last polite words of the night. She’s the first voice in a chorus of voices from the kitchen that say largely the same thing, much less politely. Danny grumbles something under his breath. I say nothing. I don’t know how to move my tongue. We pay for the meal and as much cash as I could scrounge from the car seats is her tip.

We start going across the parking lot without much sense of urgency. I couldn’t say if there was any flat, even asphalt or not. Danny is too far away to hear me complain about shin splints. No, actually I don’t think that was out loud. The back of my mouth is numb. I go to tie down the couch before I feel the rope tight in my hands, just as it has been since this morning.

One of us spilled his drink. I don't remember who. I just know the beer filled my socks. I'll have to wash them out later with a lot of soap.

No triumph here. Only sin. Only in America. We stumble into the hotel room. Danny mentions going back to the diner for breakfast. They serve all-day breakfast. A great hangover cure.

I pull his chair from under him. Then I go hurl in the sink. I can put up with us smelling like salt and tobacco tonight. I cannot put up with driving around like this the next day when we can’t put down the windows for fear of losing gas mileage. Then it’s simply uneconomical to bring a couch all the way out here.

We only had enough money on our cards for one room. Danny gets the bed. I get the bathtub. Any sunlight was gone a long time ago.