Road trip diners - intro

I’ve done a lot of driving in my life. It’s one of the most American things about me. I lost track of the times I’ve driven across country but it’s at least 7. Add in the trips up and down the West Coast and times I’ve spent visiting folks when I had an excuse to be in another part of the country and I’ve logged a lot of miles.

Along with this comes the need to stop in the areas I think of as "the middle of nowhere" but where other folks spend their whole lives. By definition, these visits are incomplete pictures of life where I’ll never live. I try to lay low. Speak when spoken to. Be extra polite. Tip well but not so much that people think I’m an asshole. I’m open to conversation but won’t really initiate it. "Where you from?" "San Francisco." can get ugly real fast so I keep that to myself for awhile.

Anyways, I am starting a new ongoing series on my LJ, "Road Trip Diners I Have Known". They’re not exactly vignettes and not exactly stand-alone stories. You are warned.

Road trip diners I have known: Roanoke VA, 1986

Five of us, all looking tame by today’s standard but unequivocally punk/weird/homosexual by the judgements of the time, were tired. We’d just driven from upstate NY on our way to see The King. We couldn’t make it to Memphis without stopping and Roanoke was proving to be a mystery. Nothing was open, things that looked like restaurants turned out to be bars or, worse yet, churches. Finally we found a college-y part of town with an open bookstore. We figured there must be food nearby.

Punk flyers were on telephone poles. Graffiti on the walls. This was the part of town for our people, even if there probably weren’t many there. Still, food was elusive. Finally we saw a small diner a few more blocks away. Ravenous, we walked in without checking it out from the outside.

It was packed. They sat us at a table too small for five so we were elbow-to-elbow. The professor’s kid ordered a beer and showed his fake Oswego State ID card as proof. The lamination had come off and the card was in two pieces and not a great fake to begin with. The waitress called over a manager to look at it. The tension rose.

We were all politicos. We were acutely aware of trying not to be judgey about the South. But we were all starting to notice that this diner was unlike places we had previously been. While we were not all middle class, we were all college students and all from the Northeast besides me. We were all white (though 2/5 Jewish), as was everyone else in the diner, but we weren’t really blending. People at the counter had openly turned their stools to stare at us.

I think it was a Friday night and the diner was a social hub for some community we were obviously not a part of. People moved from table to table like a party. Only a few old folks sat alone and they were now openly staring at us too. One was mixing Ketchup with his Budweiser, something I haven’t seen since. A group of four punk rockers entered and I think we all took a breath of relief. It looked like the band playing down the street. After conferring, they backed out slowly. Alone again. They looked much tougher than us and they were obviously scared away.

A few minutes later a guy about our age entered. No shirt, bleeding from the nose, he announced that he had just kicked the shit out of someone in the parking lot. He was acting out the fight for the front half of the restaurant. One of the waitresses gave him a bar towel to wipe up the blood but made no other attempt to intervene. We got through the meal as quickly as possible.

Still, no one really messed with us. They stared but left us alone. Was the punk oppression all in our heads? I had been hassled more at the Novato (Marin County, California) Denny’s where I was a semi-regular and was friends with some of the waitresses. Luckily I was never been small enough to get beat up there in the bathroom like happened occasionally to the poor skinny Goth/drama kids.

Being college kids we debated the rest of the way to Memphis: Scary Neo-Klan Hangout or Social Hub for Working Class Folks to Blow Off Steam?