A Christmas Tale

Spokane, 6:30 p.m.  So much snow on the ground you’d swear asphalt was white, and more on the way.  I’m going on my 37th sleepless hour, unless you count the few minutes of intermittent slumber I pocketed on the bus (and I sure as fuck don‘t), face plastered against the canine-adorned upholstery.  I’ve been ferried in the wrong direction; north, along one of the main commercial streets, an unwilling tourist of one of the most unpleasant districts of one of the most unpleasant cities in the northwestern United States.  My destination?  A goddamn Golden Corral.

So, to say this is the very last place on this miserable planet I wanted to be right at the moment would be perhaps an understatement.

The hell of it is, the party responsible for this outrage considers this a kindness.  Apparently this slophouse is her favorite “restaurant” chain and she’s taking us there as a family Christmas gift.  My mother and brother are holding their tongues, and my frazzled conscience whispers I should do so as well from whatever dark recesses of my brain to whence it has retreated.  “It’s the thought that counts” is perhaps the most shopworn of holiday clichés, but I’ll admit it’s by and large accurate.  After all, my own efforts this year at showing appreciation to my friends and loved ones have been somewhat lacking, both in generosity and effort.  So it follows I should shut up and make a show of enjoying my fried stodge, right?

No.  Fuck that.  I might be technically awake, but the diplomatic and gracious part of me, a weak and sickly thing at the best of times, passed out somewhere around Pasco.  For a moment it rouses, just long enough to counsel me I’m obliged to direct my vitriol at the locale itself, rather than towards this friend of the family.  This I accept; all else, however, is venom, brewed in cultural revulsion and distilled by sleep deprivation.  Hold it in much longer and I’ll be poisoned.  Where better to direct it but at the very enshrinement of entitled American gluttony?

Where better, indeed.  Fuck me, if you could see this place!  As I said, Spokane’s roads are nothing short of nightmarish--a night wholly unfit for traveling any further than the bathroom (and here I am expecting to be chauffeured 70 more miles, but my unrelenting selfish hypocrisy isn’t the subject here.  This time.)  And yet, this place is packed!  To the proverbial gills!  You can’t swing your foot forward to take a step without getting it stuck in some ham beast’s folds.  In fact, I’m not certain this place is all that crowded--it may be just ten or twenty really fat people.  Golden Corral is well festooned with the obese, straining the chairs to the razor’s edge of their load-limits, knees near to buckling as they waddle from one heating table to another.

Jesus, what kind of cultural decline is this?  The United States’ idea of decadence seems to be “drink clarified butter from a gravy boat until your heart explodes”.  Somehow the math doesn’t add up.  Having a bunch of meaningless sex, smoking dope and/or being openly gay makes you a slut, criminal, and/or pervert respectively.  But cramming tens of thousands of calories down your gullet every day and turning into a flesh zeppelin while 36 million people die of malnutrition every year--that‘s fine!  Hell, it’s damn near mandatory.  At least the Romans had orgies.  All we get is the privilege of eating our way into an early grave, buried in a nigh-cubical casket.

And that not even with good food!  Golden Corral specializes in the finest comfort food (sounds better than “I-wanna-die-of-something-painful food”) straight from the American heartland!  They use only the choicest cuts from stray dogs, rats and late-term abortions, deep-fried in engine oil and battered with week-old phlegm!  Yes, at Golden Corral their motto is “All Must Be Fried”.  And all will be fried.  Even the vegetables.  Especially the vegetables.  When the shitting, shitting, shitting shit are people going to learn that you must never fry a vegetable?  Because it is an act of perfect nihilism.  Frying a vegetable does not simply ruin the vegetable--it makes said vegetable disappear.  In its place remains a grotesque, slimy changeling, somewhat resembling the original foodstuff but showing its true nature with its bitter flavor and viscous texture.  The Brussels sprouts I had tasted like slippery, moldering testicles, harvested from a corpse left to rot in the fetid waters of a BP-despoiled Louisiana bayou for several months.

And yet, somehow I managed to choke some of this shit down--not as much as my flabby fellow patrons, perhaps, but some.  Somehow I lacked their enthusiasm for blunting my profile.  Sheer sloth no doubt--I’ve never been what you’d call dedicated.  That, and I needed to get something down my neck.  Each hour on Greyhound somehow becomes the equivalent of one unprovisioned day in the desert, after which you’ll gladly lap from a muddy puddle or eat black licorice.

Thus do I manage to choke down a plate, forcing myself to unsee the eatery’s cleanliness--or rather, the lack thereof.  Indeed, “Dust-Bunny Corral” would be far more apt.  But you can’t fault the staff for this!  The economy is bad, after all, and cleaning supplies are expensive!  This is triage, not sloth!  The employees know they must conserve their stocks for a “Code Splortch”--that is, when one of the corpulent patrons trips and falls over, whereupon impact with the floor causes them to explode like a water balloon, splashing the dining area with blood and lard.  This is the only reasonable explanation for those stains on the walls.  And floor.  And ceiling.  Probably happens at least once a month, judging from the tackiness.

Run-down though the décor may be, it is the Catherine Palace compared to our “waitress”.  You may ask, what purpose could a waitress serve in a buffet?  As it turns out, she wanders by once every couple of hours or so to refill your drinks and clear away your dirty plates.  Even pigs appreciate a clean trough once in a while, after all.  I judged our waitress (whose name I never learned, because fuck that) to be in her mid-twenties; however, she appeared to be attempting with more than a little success to appear two decades older.  I guessed her position at this fine establishment was not her only job.  Her eyes and gait bore the weight of countless long workdays, interrupted all too seldom by nights which should have been spent in slumber but doubtless were primarily occupied by night classes and the squalling fruits of teen motherhood.  Were I still capable of pity, she would have mine.

Or she would, were it not drowned in rising tides of derision.  This waitress, you see, is wearing a pin.  After a moment’s examination, I discern that this pin reads JESUS FIRST.  Why did it take me a moment to puzzle out these two meager words, so meaningless when placed side by side?  Because, well, she’s wearing the pin upside-down.  Yes.

I can’t figure this out.  Was it a mistake?  A conscious effort not to offend?  Is the typical clientele of Golden Corral such unrelenting shit-wits that they are unable to read upside-down words?  If so, would any of them even object to the message?  Would they not object instead to the message’s inversion?

Unless…no.  That can’t be it.  Can it?

It occurs to me that wearing a pin in such a manner would make it easy for the wearer to read.  All she would need to do is look down.

Fucketh me!  Christianity can’t even get proselytizing right anymore!  You’re not supposed to do that to yourself, you silly cow!  It defeats the entire purpose!  That‘s you people‘s primary objection to masturbation, is it not?  I suppose I should be happy you’re keeping it to yourself for once, but damn.  I just can’t stand to see anything done wrong, I guess.

But it all turns out well in the end.  When at long, long last we make ready to depart, the skank comes bearing gifts.  She brings us, of all things, a comment card!  Yes!  Do you realize what you’ve just done, you stupid bint?  You’ve just stuck your arm down the garbage disposal and flipped the switch!  God damn you!  Why the fuck does this world, this whole self-immolating species have to make this so easy?  I even ask to borrow your pen and you give it to me!  I’d laugh if I weren’t choking in fatigue poison and hate!

So, I flip the card over and there’s a row of 1-5 ratings.  Even from the depths of my ocean of bile I find it within me to be absolutely fair, though this still leads me to score “1” in the categories I feel qualified to comment on--I have no idea who or where the “drink station attendant” was, so I leave that blank.  I save my “1”s for the true sticking points--”cleanliness” and “food quality”.  Beneath this is printed the word “Comments”, trailed by several rows of ruled lines.  A preemptive Thank You! provides rear-guard to the proceedings.  Oh, don’t thank me yet.

My ranking completed, I set to the work of proffering my honest, no doubt highly-valued opinion.  As a token of diplomacy, I decide to throw in a personal touch--a bit of friendly advice to brighten the waitress’ day.  I write:

Your “restaurant” is cultural AIDS.  Also, your pin is upside down.

The missive complete, I return the card to the table, face down.  She sweeps it up along with the check, shoving it in her apron pocket without reading it.  I am not disappointed; indeed I had expected and hoped for this.  The time is not yet right--I don’t want her making a scene.  I’m no stranger to embarrassment, but getting kicked out of Golden Corral would be too much ignominy for even me to bear.  I know she’ll read it eventually, maybe even now as I flee into the cold, dark parking lot, insofar as a shuffling, balance-maintaining gait can be called “fleeing”.

Or maybe not.  Still, the point is, sooner or later I know that card will be read.  Truth is patient.  Truth waits.  Truth has all the time in the world.

And that is enough for me.