by Matt Weiland
The Eatery buffet included orange juice dispensed from a large plastic container and sometimes the spigot would clog up with pulp. Billy Ray would take the container into the kitchen, set it down on the stainless steel counter, and say to me in a high-pitched Southern accent, “Now normally you suck, Josh, you suck, but for this little problem you have to blow, you have to BLOW!” He’d bend and put his lips over the spigot and blow hard into the container to dislodge the pulp and his breath would bubble up through the juice. Then he’d walk back out into the dining room and return the orange juice to its place beside the dry cereal.
To watch the three of them pull their massive wads of cash from their aprons and Ball jars after their shifts died down and stack them upon the two-tops was to consider them the wealthiest people in the world, just filthy with cold hard cash, when in reality they had rent and debt and bills and kids and who knows what periodic addictions, and they had all these things in a paradise of free living where they could never afford to buy a piece of land. I worked for spending money and came home to a fridge full of groceries and a free bedroom. They worked to see themselves into next week.
Working the dishes at The Eatery there were always two of us, me and a second dishwasher, usually a drifter, a drunk, or an addict momentarily collected, precariously employed, and looking like hell, looking craven or used or dying. One of us took the bin dishes coming in from the dining room and the other the pots and pans. The pots and pans were a dog’s life, man, really shit work for how the grits would fry like an epoxy to the bottoms and the peach cobbler on the buffet table would harden around the edges under the heat lamps and everything needed a Brillo pad. Everything needed to soak for twelve hours, but the line cook was screaming for it all after only half an hour and I’d have to put the bin dishes on hold and join the drunk at the industrial sinks and we’d work side by side while the bins kept coming from the two bus-boys, both named Richard, both forty and on parole, screaming at me because the buffet plates were running low and there were no more forks and the line of tourists waiting to be seated was out the door. So then I’d return to the bin dishes and try to bury myself out. Each bin was a cold coffee soup of plates and silverware and buffet foods—scrambled eggs and sausage ends and soggy napkins and biscuit mush. I’d run a load of just forks and then a load of just plates and then just forks again while the bins continued to stream in, the line cook continued to holler, the tourists continued to line up, and life, already winning, beat the drunk at the pots and pans down another notch, strengthening his conviction that his lot was all misery and his place in the workforce a folly of destiny he was better to deny. There was never any guarantee that any dishwasher on staff would still be on staff when I came in the following weekend.
I learned the word jailbait from the first of many line cooks employed by The Eatery, a middle-aged man I knew for so short a period of time all his features have turned foggy. I remember only his eager, creepy smile. I thought jailbait a magical word. I knew what “jail” meant and I knew what “bait” meant but that you could combine the two to form a compound word with an elusive meaning made language a dynamic and mysterious thing. The line cook had written the word on a napkin and placed it in one of the bins and when the bin made its way back to me I read the note. It said, “You know what jailbait is?” I was naïve enough to think I was getting a vocabulary lesson. “What’s jailbait?” I asked him. “You are,” he said. Over the next couple of weekends there were other notes on other napkins.
This was not Billy Ray’s innocuous flamboyance. This was something sinister and uncomfortable. Dennis drove down with me and we sat with Bill and when I came in the next weekend the line cook was gone. I had not meant for anyone to get fired.
“Don’t feel bad,” said David, the breakfast cook. “It’s not the first thing he’s done.”
Later, when I started cooking lunch for The Eatery, David and I spent time together over the enormous grill. He spoke gently. While I prepared lunch he scrambled huge quantities of eggs for the breakfast buffet. Gradually a drop of sweat appeared at the tip of his pointy nose, and as the eggs turned curdy in consistency, the drop quivered and fell.
I knew only one thing about David: Both of his parents had died in a plane crash when he was very young. He was rumored to be gay but because it never came up it didn’t matter any more or less than the brute fact of my raging puberty. He got annoyed at others from time to time, but with me he was infinitely patient. I remember him cracking an egg in each hand into a five-gallon bucket. He had to fill three five-gallon buckets, fifteen pounds of yokes and whites, every afternoon in anticipation of the following morning’s buffet. He wore his hair in a Mohawk and sometimes I would arrive after a week of school to find the Mohawk dyed some shocking Pantone. He had crooked teeth and smoked with the timid poise of a teenage girl. When something tickled him, he laughed, but his laugh was soundless.
When I wasn’t working, I attended middle school. Sugarloaf Middle School is home of the Hammerhead Sharks, and with friends I got up to the usual mischief. I also started to take school seriously. One day we were given the assignment to write an essay on the importance of environmental protection. The topic was “Why We Should Save the Salt Ponds.” I didn’t know what a salt pond was. I began my essay by asking, “Does Key West really need another T-shirt shop?”
I thought I was being punished when some time later I was called down to the principal’s office. Instead, Principal Martinez told me I had won the contest. I didn’t remember the essay and never knew it was part of any contest. My prize was a canoe trip through the salt ponds with Jimmy Buffett, mayor of Margaritaville and the contest sponsor.
I was driven to Jimmy Buffett’s house by one of his handlers in a circuitous manner, as if I were a journalist and Jimmy a terrorist in deep cover. Jimmy’s exact residence was a closely held secret on the island and it didn’t matter that I didn’t know the man from Luciano Pavarotti. When I arrived, Jimmy was exceptionally warm and kind. We went out back to his canal and stepped down into the canoe. A Jamaican with dreadlocks sat in back and paddled. Jimmy explained what I was about to see and why it was important to preserve it. And the salt ponds were exquisitely beautiful: essentially a series of winding mangrove rivulets, dark as secret tunnels, barely wider than the canoe and overhung with lush vegetation. It was like my own private Goonies. Jimmy and the Jamaican took turns naming plants and birds and cracking jokes.
For all the beauty of the salt ponds, however, the most exciting part of the boat ride was over before we left Jimmy’s canal. We had canoed past beautiful house after beautiful house with elaborate docks and boats up on lifts. I was watching them go by when I noticed her sunbathing on her deck. She was nineteen or twenty-five or thirty. It didn’t matter. She had removed her bikini top to let the sun worship her. This was a much more priceless thing for me to see than a stupid old salt pond. I clamped my eyes down on her and didn’t let go. She didn’t flinch as we floated by—too quickly, too quickly! When she was out of sight I turned to Jimmy, who had spotted her too. I blushed at being caught, but he put me right at my ease. In the middle of a body of water, drifting down a canal on a canoe, he said, “I have to get out in this neighborhood more often.”
Soon after that they filled in the salt ponds and put up condominiums and a mall.
Early Jimmy Buffett could have easily sung the story of one of the dishwashers I split duties with at The Eatery. He was a wiry drunk named Snake, presumably on account of the coat of tattoos he wore like a second skin. His arms were thin as flagpoles and when he scrubbed at a pot the biceps came out like lanyard rope. We got along, probably because he was willing to answer my questions. I wanted to know about girls, jail, tattoos, and anything he could tell me that might clue me in on how a life could come to be his. What he wanted to talk about, in the same spirit and tone I now hear friends talk about their newborns, was rum.
I convinced Snake to (1) buy rum for the two of us, (2) shelter me in his apartment while
I drank it, and (3) do #1 and #2 despite my age (twelve), his prior convictions (many), and his awareness of what my parents did for a living. How I did this rested entirely on my willingness to put up the money for the rum.
“How much does rum cost?” I asked.
“The rum I like costs three bucks.”
After work, I gave Snake five dollars and we met up on a street corner and walked to his apartment. It was a one-room efficiency with no TV, sofa, chairs, pictures, or coffee table. It was decorated exclusively with camel-colored carpet. His only possession was a sink full of dirty dishes. He cleaned two glasses and brought out the ice and poured us two rum and Cokes and we sat drinking against the wall under a window with a beat-up blind.
“Where do you sleep, Snake?”
“Right here,” he said.
I took my first sip. I was expecting what came in a Coppertone bottle, if Coppertone tasted good—something buttery and summery and as delicious as he described. It was more like something to lubricate a metallic squeak.
“I don’t like it.”
“I can tell by your face.”
“How can you like this?”
“It’s an acquired taste.”
“I think I’m going to go now.”
“You promised, now,” he said.
“They’ll never know,” I reassured him for the fifth or sixth time. “I’ll never tell.”
I left Snake sitting on the carpet with his feet crossed, holding an icy tumbler full of very weak Coke.
I’m surprised you weren’t kidnapped and raped,” my mother said to me recently.
“But you were the one who got me the jobs,” I said. “You made them possible.”
“I don’t think I’d let you do it today.”
“Why did you let me then?”
“He was law enforcement, I was probation. We knew everybody. What was going to happen to you? It was Key West. Nobody cared.”
“Why did I want to work?” I asked her.
“You wanted things. We couldn’t afford them, so you went out and got them yourself.”
At twelve, I wanted cologne and a waterbed.
“Are you going to write about this?” she asked.
“Do you remember coming into The Eatery on Sunday mornings after church, when I’d be working?”
“Yeah. I remember.”
“What did you think of that?”
“I guess I thought it was neat. You were learning about life,” she said. “I probably should have been arrested.”
For most people, Florida is the place of spring break and white-sand beaches and the promise of sunshine. It evokes visions of cottonheads throwing bocce balls in retirement communities and airboats skating across six inches of water in the Everglades. In Miami, the parties; in Orlando, the theme parks.
But few know about the Flora-Bama bar, located on the border between Florida and Alabama, an area known as the Redneck Riviera. The Flora-Bama sponsors a yearly mullet toss. For a fifteen-dollar entry fee, you have the chance to stand in a ten-foot circle in Alabama and throw a dead mullet across the state line into Florida, no sand on the mullet allowed. Throwing the mullet the farthest wins you a specially designed mullet trophy.
In Naples, Florida, where the gators and panthers of Alligator Alley live just beyond the ever-multiplying strip malls and big box retailers, you can shop at both Master Bait and Tackle and Not Just Futons and Barstools.
In Casselberry, you can watch a naked production of Macbeth at Club Juana.
You can experience ersatz nostalgia in Seaside and manufactured happiness in Celebration.
In Pensacola, I have witnessed the charismatics floundering on the floor and speaking in tongues during the popular Brownstone Revival, where ex-felons travel all the way from Canada and Alaska to feel the living spirit of Christ in sweaty ceremonies that last till dawn.
In Estero, I have visited the Koreshan State Historic Site, where Cyrus Teed founded a New Jerusalem in 1894, promoting the celibacy that would eventually doom his followers and positing that the universe hangs inside the hollow sphere of the earth.
But for all that, this will always be Florida to me:
One night at The Eatery, I put the chairs up on the tables and swept and mopped the floor and then I gave the bathrooms a scrub down, a hellish job, and when I came out, everyone else had finished for the night. Billy Ray and Rhonda and I walked out together. I don’t know why I was working the night shift except to say that it was probably summer and I took any shift they would give me, and I can’t say why Rhonda and Billy Ray were working the same shift unless they were pulling doubles because they needed the money, and I can’t say why they had agreed to drive me home.
We walked out silent and tired and before we had stepped off the sandy flagstones onto Duval Street, Billy Ray had lit a joint and, without exchanging a word, passed it to Rhonda, who took a hit and passed it back. It was the first time I’d seen anyone smoke pot, and after all the household propaganda leveled against it by the narcotics agent and the probation officer—like “Smoke pot and you could be paralyzed for life” and “Smoke pot and the next thing you’ll be doing is crack cocaine. Is that what you want, to be a crackhead?”—Rhonda and Billy Ray were lucky I did not start screaming in the streets. Crime, crime! Pot smokers! Instead I went along. They were giving me a ride. We were quiet and tired. I watched them pass the joint again, a silent communion. We got in Billy Ray’s Chevy Nova with its rusted bodywork and shredded upholstery and only by some elaborate pedal voodoo did he manage to turn over the engine. We erupted in a cartoon of exhaust. He backed out just as Don McLean’s “American Pie” came on the radio. You will think, “I know that song. That song has been played on TV and in movies and on oldies stations ad nauseam.” And maybe you will think, “I would be fine never hearing that song again,” or maybe even “I hate that awful saccharine song,” but it was not like that. They turned up the radio the second the song came on and I remember the feeling of unbelievable good fortune that swept the car. “American Pie” was like some lost key to the kingdom. It was my first time hearing it. Why did the song sound so familiar, almost primal? By the end I was singing the chorus along with them.
Bye-Bye, Miss American Pie
drove my Chevy to the levee
but the levee was dry
I would soon leave Key West and never see them again. Snake was fired during the week for too many no-shows and I never got a chance to say goodbye. The night cook who I have not mentioned but who introduced me to jazz disappeared into the oblivion of addiction. Puberty came and went for me, as did high school and college and my twenties. Bill and Gail sold The Eatery. I recently made a few inquiries and learned they have divorced. The Eatery has changed hands many times since I worked there and is now called the Duval Street Beach Club, one more layer of commercial palimpsest on an island that had been all mangrove and sapodilla and tamarind. I returned for my wedding and had breakfast at the Duval Street Beach Club but there was no buffet, no line of tourists, no Rhonda or Hazel or Billy Ray and no soundless laugh from David. They are as gone as that Godfather’s franchise and the salt ponds.
The song lasted five minutes, just long enough for the drive down Flagler. The windows were open and the weather was pleasant and the two people sitting in front passed the joint back and forth as they sang along. They knew every word. It no longer mattered how tired the day had made them. We rumbled along. They sang out the window. Don McLean never sang his song like that. It has not been sung the same way since. I don’t think they would remember this now, if they are still alive. It was just a song and a ride and another night for them. But for me it was the beginning of life.
GEORGIA
CAPITAL Atlanta
ENTERED UNION 1788 (4th)
ORIGIN OF NAME In honor of George II of England
NICKNAMES Peach State or Empire State of the South
MOTTO “Wisdom, justice, and moderation”
RESIDENTS Georgian
U.S.
REPRESENTATIVES 13
STATE BIRD brown thrasher
STATE FLOWER Cherokee rose
STATE TREE live oak
STATE SONG “Georgia on My Mind”
LAND AREA 57,906 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Twiggs Co., 18 mi. SE of Macon
POPULATION 9,072,576
WHITE 65.1%
BLACK 28.7%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%
ASIAN 2.1%
HISPANIC/LATINO 5.3% UNDER 18 26.5%
65 AND OVER 9.6% MEDIAN AGE 33.4
GEORGIA
Ha Jin
I don’t have a hometown. I grew up a People’s Liberation Army brat, moving around with my father. I can say I am a northerner, since my first twenty-six years were spent in the northeast of China, but that is the most I can associate myself with a place.
For a long time I couldn’t understand why Alyosha, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers in Dostoevsky’s novel, speaks so passionately about the wholesomeness and sacredness of good childhood memories. I got into the habit of asking people I knew, especially middle-aged and older Chinese women, about their happy childhood memories. Some of them would shake their heads, unable to recall a single one. That made me wonder how anyone could love a place without any good memories of it, despite its being one’s hometown or native land.
I do have two or three happy childhood memories, which still bind me emotionally to northeastern China. But Georgia, for which I am full of affectionate memories, is different. It is the place where I had my first home, and learned how to live and work as a writer.
Many Chinese prefer Georgia to other parts of America because the climate is similar to that of their home provinces south of the Yangtze River. In the 1990s, so many Asian and other immigrants moved to the Atlanta area that new elementary and middle schools were built throughout the northeastern suburbs, and trailer classrooms were commonplace.