The Wrong Guy
June 17, 2004
"Wanna go on a road trip?" my friend Fee asked.
"Sure thing, Captain."
The offer is to ride shotgun in a minivan for eight or nine hours to a southern State Recreational Area in the Carolina backwoods to watch Fee lose a sailboat race. The reason I know he will lose is that he told me so. His boat is a vintage wooden Fireball, which he knows from experience is no match for the sleek, modern fiberglass boats he’ll be racing against. But he has fun doing it, and that’s the name of the game. I expect to have fun too, but more importantly, I'll be doing something long overdue: hitting the road without a computer.
It's only for a few days — I'll be back on Sunday -- but I'm sure I'll go into internet withdrawals at some point in the journey. I'll probably start obsessively sending text messages from my cell phone as a cheap substitute. But I'm told the place is too remote to get cell service. So instead, I'll have to look to the trees and the water, to the sunshine and the stars. I've been ignoring them for so long, I hope they're still talking to me.
June 21, 2004
During our stay in North Carolina, we ate a breakfast of warm grease every day at Cracker Barrel. It was right next door to the hotel, and the only game in town.
If you don’t know, Cracker Barrel is a greasy chain restaurant attached to a crappy souvenir shop. In front, they sell T-shirts, hats, assorted jellies, candies, books, mugs, et cetera, much of it emblazoned with their unmistakable yellow and brown logo, while in back, they serve scrambled eggs to busloads of tourists. The waitresses wear brown aprons embroidered with gold stars. Fee noticed that some of the waitresses had two stars, and others three. One woman even had four. So when our waitress came around to refill our coffees, Fee asked her: "What's the meaning of the stars?"
"The more stars we have," she said, as she poured, "the better rate we get on our health insurance."
"Oh, come on."
"Really. Cracker Barrel is one of the only restaurants that offers its wait staff health insurance."
"So how do you accumulate the stars?"
"They test us on Cracker Barrel trivia."
Apparently, if you fill your head with frivolous minutiae about the Cracker Barrel chain, you get a better rate on your health insurance. Weird.
A little while later, our waitress came around again with the coffee pot. "Y'all want a top off?"
"Sure," I said, “Hit me.”
"Y'know, some people get awfully mad if ya mess with their blend."
Fee was still marveling over the health insurance/trivia connection and decided to quiz the waitress. "So when was the first Cracker Barrel opened?" he asked.
"Oh no!” She got embarrassed and put down the pot. "Don't quiz me." But she answered anyway. “The first Cracker Barrel opened in 1969, in Lebanon, Tennessee.”
Turns out it was founded by a representative of the Shell Oil Company as a way to boost gasoline sales along the interstate, but I learned that later.
Fee asked our waitress a few more things before she began to ask us questions. Like, what the hell are a couple of New York City-slickers doing in bumfuck North Carolina? It turned out that our waitress was from Texas and didn't have anything nice to say about the area. When she walked away, Fee wondered how a girl like her wound up in that town.
"She married the wrong guy," I said.
"You think so?"
"I know so."
When she brought us our check, Fee continued to small talk with her. She spoke wistfully about the Texas town she grew up in.
"How'd you wind up here?' Fee finally asked.
"Got married," she said. Then sighed and continued, "Not married anymore, though."
A tale as old as time.
The road to the reservoir was dotted with tobacco farms and shotgun shacks —crooked little boxes flaking white paint chips in the breeze. A few of the porches had worn-out upholstered easy chairs on them. Chairs so big that the porches sloped under their weight. There were a few stores here and there that looked like they'd been out of business for years, except in the late afternoons when small groups of people would sit out front on milk crates and shoot the shit. I kept thinking, "That would make a good picture." But I never bothered to take any.
While Fee was racing his sailboat on Saturday, I took his minivan and drove back along Tobacco Road into Raleigh to see Jerry, a friend I've literally known my entire life. He's married to a yoga instructor, and they drive a hybrid car. They both radiate a serene energy, and their house feels so pure that as soon as I stepped through the front door, I felt like a slug with bad karma contaminating their sanctuary with a trail of slime. But they seem to have it together, so I'm sure their natural resistance has already eradicated anything I may have left behind.
Jerry has a nine-year-old son. As I tried to come up with a good story to tell him about his dad, I couldn't help swearing. So the two of them told me about replacement words that the kids use at school. I tried to pepper my language with those phrases instead:
"Firetruck! "Shitake mushrooms!"
It felt silly. But it made me realize how silly and unnecessary the swear words were to begin with.
"It’s the summer solstice,” said Fee on our way home. “The longest day of the year.”
"It sure feels like it,” I said. Nine hours on the road will do that.
The air was invisible as we approached the city, which isn’t always the case, but when it's clear, it sparkles. After those few days in the woods, seeing the New York skyline is surreal. I tried to understand it — tried to imagine how it all came to be — but it sent my thoughts into a tailspin. The only way out was to simply accept it as beautiful.
We'd passed cities like Richmond, Baltimore, and DC, and cruised through their weak gravity with ease. But our little car was powerless against the pull of the big apple. Once New York was in our sights, I don't think Fee even had to touch the accelerator. We were simply sucked in like a helpless satellite.
I often wonder why I live in this dirty town, but when we finally stopped driving, and I stepped unsteadily out of the car and onto the solid earth, I nearly understood.
June 24, 2004
Over breakfast today, I talked to a disgruntled employee who served my food. I jokingly asked if she was going to unionize. She laughed, but then she showed me a story in the New York Post about a group of restaurant workers who were trying to do just that. I began telling her about my recent trip to North Carolina.
"We ate at Cracker Barrel, and it turns out that Cracker Barrel employees get health insurance."
She already knew all about it.
"My mom works at Cracker Barrel," she said.
"No kidding. Honestly, the food wasn't half bad."
She nodded, then said, "Did you know that there's a class action suit against Cracker Barrel right now?"
"No," I said. "Over what?"
“What do you think? Discrimination. Sexual and racial.”
She told me Cracker Barrel has been accused of keeping all the black employees in the kitchen. “They even refer to it as The Ghetto,” she said. " A group of black workers has gotten together to sue."
"Huh. When my friend and I ate there, we had a black waitress."
"Yeah, well, apparently they keep one black waitress on the floor to serve the black customers…"
I interrupted her. "But my friend and I weren't black…"
"Or…" she continued, "to serve the freaky Northern interlopers like you."
