It was a five hour drive from Madison, Wisconsin to Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I spent nearly all of it loitering in the shallow purgatory that separates awake and asleep. There is little roadside stimulation along the highways that connect the two cities, mostly just rolling hills and large billboards advertising cheese; I had seen it all before, a handful of times actually, and felt no desire to watch the rerun. The view of America one typically gets from a van on its highways is rarely spectacular, you have to go off the main roads to see much of anything worthwhile, and so I felt no remorse when I ignored the passing world entirely, laid down, listened to my Ipod, and succumbed to the lethargy induced by hours of un-stimulated idleness.
I normally wake up when the van slows down to pull off the highway, I sit up and inspect my surroundings, try to figure out if we’ve pulled off because we’re “there” or if it is just a food or bathroom based pit stop, but this time I didn’t get up until we had stopped in front of the venue. It was on one of those busy four lane roads that connects the more desirable parts of town with a speed limit set to make the periphery comfortably ignored. Everything seemed forgotten. Old cement and brick buildings selling liquor and pawned goods were mixed in with the newer but equally as depressing fast food chains. A drive-in sold BBQ next door from a building unpainted since the Carter administration. It wasn’t that it was all that bad of a place really, I could imagine many of the same block in Richmond, it’s just that it was all that I had seen. I had no frame of reference. I had not eased into Saint Paul. I had not first seen it as a skyline from the highway and then unwound it’s tangled streets one by one. I felt like my waiter had just slipped a joke in right after telling me the night’s specials. Though not unfunny, it was unexpected. It came unattached to the prior conversation and my brain couldn’t shift gears quick enough to muster anything but a blank expression. Later I’d get it and feel like a moron when he returned to refill drinks, or, in this case, when we drove away later that night.
I wasn’t really all that hungry—the calories from my late lunch untouched by the afternoon’s nap—but I needed to walk somewhere and food was as good of an excuse as any. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. After we loaded our gear in, Freddy, Jon, and I walked to a nearby Wendy’s and ordered off the dollar menu. Still all recovering from the drive we talked quietly and sporadically in between bites. I chewed my food, lost deep in thoughts about absolutely nothing. I would have stayed this way through the entirety of my meal if my absentmindedness had not soon been interrupted by a quiet, but persistent whimpering coming from somewhere to the left of me. I looked up across the mostly empty dining room at an old man, mostly bald with a halo of gray hair, large nose and ears, sitting by himself, hunched over an empty table save a cup of a soda, crying. His eyes were closed and he sobbed in a quiet, tearless way that made me question more than once if he was crying at all. It was heartbreaking to look at, and, well, I tried my best not to.
There is a certain disconnect required when one enters a Wendy’s and eats off the dollar menu. It’s not a moment to celebrate community. It’s mechanical. It’s a time to eat cheap, barely food on hard, brightly colored seats designed to make you leave quickly. It’s unemotional if not anit-emotional, and I really just couldn’t deal with some stranger’s sobs in that setting, in my aforementioned state of mind. Does this make me a bad person? I worried this very thing. So just to be sure I made sure to assume that the old man was probably crazy. That helped.
What helped take my mind off the crying man even more was a sudden, violent outburst of angry screaming coming from the door.
At this time I’d eaten about fifty cents worth of my chicken sandwich.
The yelling went on between two people for what seemed like a half minute and was taken in shocking stride by pretty much everyone in the Wendy’s. Apparently, in Saint Paul, it’s customary to yell at someone like you want to disembowel them, then re-embowel them but only to light their barely living flesh on fire, put it out, pour acid on the wounds, and then, oddly, immediately reconcile the whole thing and stand in line next to that person in Wendy’s like nothing happened. I was not aware of this, neither was Freddy or Jon, and we sat, foolishly, tense and quiet for the duration of the yelling. I thought for sure that there would be a shooting or stabbing or at least a bad fight at the door, and instead there was eventually a mild mannered discussion as to whether the number one or number three combo was best. I. Don’t. Get. It.
And I didn’t get a chance to get it because once the yelling died down, the crying old guy, now done crying, started dealing with the momentous mass of snot now clogging all organs olfactory. He dealt with this by repeatedly snorting the snot. Snorting the snot, it turns out, is as loud as it is ineffective. But he was dedicated to this technique and valiantly refused to abandon it. So he snorted while I eat and desperately try not to think of his snorting, which, of course, meant that I can think of nothing but snot and snorting. This made Wendy’s taste worse. Worse! I have long been aware of the roll smell plays in the taste of food, but this was the first time when sound has overpowered both the nose and the tongue. My fries tasted like snot dipped in snot. My chicken sandwich had, suddenly, a mucussy texture, and I’m sure that if I had eaten actual snot in that moment, my first comment would have been, “tastes like chicken.”
I crammed the rest of my fries in my mouth out of obligation to food, but completely unable to enjoy them. Jon and Freddy took their food to go. We walked back to the venue completely unsatisfied, kinda creeped out, on the sidewalks that passed the Walgreens, the liquor store, next to the cars that zoomed by unaware of the snot sucking old man, of the screaming, of our long disorientating drive, or of our show later that night which we were all unaware would go, astonishingly, really well.
- Brett