I spend a little time out in the world and find it lacking
I am sitting at a Denny’s in Northfield, NJ, having coffee and waiting for my breakfast. I haven’t been to a Denny’s since I was in high school. If you’ve not spent time in America, Denny’s is a nationwide chain of cheap family restaurants known for their large breakfast and being open round the clock. This is the kind of cultural disaster you pray we don’t ever inflict on your home country. McDonald’s was bad enough, but this would wreck you.
The menu is designed to accommodate people who can’t read or understand English. These are highly laminated pages of glossy photos of impossibly fake-looking dishes that you will almost recognize as the food they attempt to serve you. You just know these heavy plastic menus are barely wiped, if at all, before being handed to the next poor slob.
If you want to ensure an efficient transfer of germs, you want to coat things with plastic. I’m not even remotely germaphobic, but I thought about this the minute she handed me the menu, which should tell you something. The entire place felt sweaty somehow, even though the AC was cranking. The salt shaker appeared clogged by humidity, and the sugar packets were incomprehensibly damp. How’s that even possible?
All I wanted was a basic breakfast, but I couldn’t find it among the regular breakfast items. Denny’s has a language all its own that I’m sure fans would know and understand. Every dish has a catchy brand name, such as Grand Slams® or Moons Over My Hammy®. Dishes of unthinkable gluttony in scale and complexity. It took me a while to figure out that what I was looking for was on the first page because it was considered so basic that it fell under the category of “Build Your Own Grand Slam.”
Denny’s is famous for their Grand Slam Breakfast. They’ve been advertising it for decades. Maybe my entire life. Today was the first time I realized they call it that because it includes four items. In baseball, a grand slam is when the batter hits a home run with the bases loaded, causing four runs to score. I always assumed they were just saying it was big.
You order a Denny’s Grand Slam from a list of items: Eggs (2), Pancakes (2), Bacon (2), Sausage (2), Hash-Browns, Ham Steak, English Muffin, Biscuit, and Toast (2), where you get to pick any four, but no more than two of the same thing. I ordered what I consider to be a fairly standard American breakfast: Two eggs over easy, bacon, toast, and home fries. Nothing terribly scandalous, but much more than I usually eat for breakfast, which is nothing.
I’m waiting for a friend who is having a minor medical procedure nearby, and I have two hours to kill. I was going to go to Starbucks, but figured I might as well get breakfast first. I’m sure this isn’t the most healthy food in the world, but really, it’s just eggs, bread, potatoes, and bacon. I mean, how bad can it really be compared to elsewhere? They’re not adding unsaturated fat to the toast or excessive salt to the hash-browns, are they?
I used to love this style of hash-browns when I was a kid. The shredded potato style with absolutely no seasoning. They were everywhere in Oklahoma. Not so much once we moved to Pennsylvania, when hash-browns became home fries and strange things like peppers and onions began being introduced.
I tried buying the shredded kind once, making them at home for nostalgia’s sake one Christmas, but couldn’t get them right. The trick is you have to cook them in a hot skillet on one side, flip, then cook the other side. You do not fuck with them in the process. You also have to find the right level of heat. I had no idea what I was doing and made a pile of disgusting mush. I kept fucking with them. My wife just looked at me as if to say, “What were you thinking?”
The interior of Denny’s might be the cheapest-looking place in America, though I’m sure there are far worse examples. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Waffle House, and they only stopped people from smoking indoors like three weeks ago. You could probably get a nicotine fix just by sitting in one of their booths.
Hell, Denny’s might be the fancy place in town for some. It’s all relative to what your options are. I remember kids from the hood talking about saving up money to go to Red Lobster and Olive Garden on a Saturday night. It was a big night out. All you can eat shrimp and bottomless breadsticks.
Say what you will about it, but if you’d asked me before today, I would have said that Denny’s would make a great breakfast. How can you fuck that up? The sad thing is, it really wasn’t that great. Eggs are eggs, and I have to say they were cooked to perfection. If you want good eggs, get a professional short-order cook in America to make them. The hash browns were not as good as I remembered, but I couldn’t tell if my memory inflated their value or if they were just poorly prepared.
They tasted both slightly burned and slightly raw, like they’d been cooked just a little too quickly, which I imagine is entirely possible in a place like Denny’s. They weren’t horrible, just not great. The bacon was mediocre at best. Why do I keep eating bacon? You know the two slices came from an enormous tray of oddly soft, greasy bacon that was cooked six hours earlier, left to sit in congealed fat. The weirdest part was the toast, which I found surprising.
I’ve been to hundreds of diners in my life, and there’s nothing like pre-buttered toast in a diner, where the butter was sitting room temperature in a large tub before someone slathered it onto hot, toasted bread with a fat knife. The toast is made from that cheap white bread you find in prisons and school cafeterias, the kind that is devoid of any nutritional value.
What was strange was that the toast hadn’t been buttered at all, or at least not in a way I had ever seen or was accustomed to. It looked like someone had squirted the slices with a slightly yellow substance from a squeeze bottle rather than spreading anything on them. I imagined it was the same goo they pour over movie theater popcorn and euphemistically call butter. Some sort of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil with artificial flavoring, designed from a product made by the barrel in New Jersey. You know it’s getting bad when real butter is too fancy to use on diner toast.
The good thing about visiting a place like Denny’s now and then is that you no longer feel any curiosity about it when you see it advertised on television or pass one on the highway. Just the other day, I came across an advertisement during a Phillies game, and some chain was promoting their chicken-fried steak with white gravy, eggs, and hash-browns. I thought, “Damn, that looks good. I need to get myself to a diner and get myself some of that.”
Here I was, less than a week later, eating at a diner, and the minute I finished, I decided I didn’t ever need to visit another Denny’s for the rest of my life. I was good. One less thing I needed to do before I died.
On the way out, I noticed there was an entire room full of video games and those crane-grabbing machines where you try to rescue a worthless plushy from the depths of hell. It was completely blacked out and lit the way you would a nightclub. I wouldn’t want to see it under a black light.
After leaving Denny’s, I drove a few minutes away and found myself in a very different world from the one I’d just left. I’d gone from brown and poor to white and wealthy in less than a mile. There hadn’t been a single skinny person at Denny’s, including the staff, and there wasn’t a single fat one at Starbucks.
I was somewhere in the middle, I suppose, although now I was far and away the oldest person at Starbucks, whereas I was a good bit younger than any employee at Denny’s. This is probably not even true, as I regularly think people my age look considerably older than I do, but it’s hard to tell with people of color. Your waitress could be 36 or 65. You can’t really tell.
I have been thinking about cutting my beard off, which is long and mostly grey. I doubt I’ll do, but sometimes these thoughts get into my brain and don’t leave until I do something about it. It’s how and why I first shaved my head. It was just a look I wanted to try, and one day I did it.
There are two reasons for wanting to cut the beard. The first is, I lost a bunch of weight and feel a little more comfortable with the idea that there won’t be six chins underneath all that facial hair. The second is, I enjoy the shock of changing my look so drastically that people don’t recognize me. I know from past experience that they won’t. They won’t even be able to wrap their heads around the change. That part is fun, but I’m sure I’ll miss the beard almost immediately, and it could take years to grow it back. I don’t even really know how long it would take, and I’m not sure it’s worth the brief thrill.
Back when I was still shaving my head clean bald, I had what I thought was a long goatee. It was nothing compared to what I have now, but we were at a fancy restaurant in Mexico, and the server wanted to know how long it had taken me to grow it. I honestly had no idea. I’d had the beard for years, and it’s not like I’d been counting the days. The length had nothing to do with the time it’d taken to grow it.
I don’t know much, but I know this is too much coffee for me.
I had two cups this morning at home before I left, another half a cup on the drive up, then two to three cups at Denny’s (it’s hard to know when they keep topping it off), and now I’m staring at a large Starbucks coffee.
I’m not a fan of the Starbucks brand, but I knew they would let me sit here and write as long as I bought something. I don’t like Starbucks coffee. It tastes like burnt crayons. I like the taste of the espresso drinks well enough, but in order for them to be palatable, they need heavy cream, sugar, and flavoring. Instead, I’m having a large black coffee that I put some raw sugar in, which I tell myself is better than any of the confectionery alternatives.
The guy in front of me wipes down his table, then unpacks an enormous backpack, which is presumably his entire office. I am instantly annoyed. He looks to be settling in for the day. He bought a small coffee, which I suppose was one of the options for me as well. I don’t have a lot of respect for people who sit in Starbucks to use their power and WiFi and then buy a small coffee. Maybe he buys six to eight of them over the course of a few hours. What the hell do I know or care?
Of course, not moments after observing that there were no fat people in Starbucks, an obese white woman crawled out of a minivan and waddled in. Technically, I’m obese, and this woman easily had over a hundred pounds on me. Maybe more. Just profoundly large. This disturbs me for reasons I can’t quite wrap my head around.
Does it make me feel superior that I’m not that far gone? Is it self-loathing that I could just as easily be? I suppose all of that is possible. I’m not in anything resembling great shape, and am in no way lording it over anyone. I could lose another fifty pounds, and I’d still be out of shape. There has to be something in there somewhere.
I think it’s because I view the grossly overweight as being lower class, at least with a certain class of fat persons. Overweight rich people usually seem more put together, whereas poor fat people definitely look like slobs. I also view fat white people more harshly than fat people of color. You could probably argue that it’s all classist bigotry, and you wouldn’t be far off. Class is a real cultural marker, even in America.
I look down on poor people for being desperate and on wealthy people for being entitled. You can’t win with me. If you are somewhere in the middle, I’d likely criticize you for being basic. There’s nothing redeeming about any of this, and I’m not bragging. I’m just being honest about what goes through my head. I tell people all the time what a horrible person I am, and no one believes me. What’s a raging asshole to do?
There is something I find equally annoying when watching someone in workout clothes get out of their $85k SUV, come inside to order their $10 iced latte, then leave. Where are you going and what are you doing that you need a coffee on the run, and why didn’t you make one at home before you left? If you were in such a hurry, why didn’t you use the drive-through? What is going on in these people’s lives in the middle of a weekday? Is this what people do? This is how they live? That woman clearly has nothing important to do. She’s just killing time.
This is what goes through my mind while I sit here using the free WiFi and not drinking the overpriced large coffee I didn’t want in the first place. Oh, wait. Right. That’s what I’m doing. Just killing time.
Have you ever noticed that when people lose a lot of weight, they look older? There’s something about a fat face that is more youthful looking if not always more attractive — something cherubic, maybe. When a person was fat previously and they lose a lot of weight, they look gaunt to us in comparison, and this automatically ages them.
We say things like, “Wow, you lost weight. You look great.”
I suspect we don’t always mean it. We know it’s hard to lose weight, especially if you were previously fat, so we want to be supportive, but inside, we’re thinking, “You looked better fat.”
The truth is, when a person loses a bunch of weight, they look different from the picture we have in our minds. I admit that everyone who loses weight looks healthier; they just look older, which is another thing I think about when contemplating cutting my beard.
Even though doing so would knock at least a decade off my current appearance as Father Time, I won’t look as young as I think I will. This is because I will not look like I did the last time my beard was that short. I will not actually look younger. I’ll just look like some other, slightly less fat guy, with a shorter beard. Also, there is the inconvenient fact that fat fills in wrinkles. You lose weight, and your skin no longer bounces back. It just sags a bit more.
The point is, I no longer wish to be fat, don’t care for Starbucks, really shouldn’t eat out, and find most human activity to be maddeningly vacuous. I need to stay home where I can maintain a mystical view of humanity as spiritually inspiring and worthy of existence.
I can cross Denny’s off the list.