The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  As Butch and I joined the dancing, I thought about Donna and Joan and all of the women I had known on K.I. Sawyer AFB. Our war was over, another one had begun, and while the men would fight in a desert instead of a jungle, would fly newer and faster planes, the meaning of the label Waiting Wife was still the same.

  *

  I had intended to end this essay with the above paragraph, but before I printed the page, I received an email from my friend Tammy. She thought I would want to know that an old friend from K.I. Sawyer had stopped by her home, and as they reminisced, she’d found out that Donna’s fifth child was a girl, just as she and Eric had hoped. Donna’s daughter had joined the Guard in Louisiana and was on her way to Iraq. Donna would be a Waiting Mother now.

  I have a daughter, too, but she’ll never be sent to Iraq. She’s a teacher and lives just through the woods, walking distance to my house. She has a son named Chess. He’s not old enough to go to war, but someday he will be, and I pray that when he’s grown into his manhood, he’ll fall in love with a wonderful woman who will never become a Waiting Wife.

  FISHTRAPS

  by Joe Formichella

  Welcome to the Waffle House, the Phils call, as they do to anyone who enters the establishment.

  At every other Waffle House in the entire country, some 1,400 other franchises, the staff is required to greet customers, calling out Hello as they’re flipping sausage patties or filling coffee cups, wiping down tables, whatever. There have been dismissals over the failure to do so, it’s taken so seriously. That seriousness bleeds a little bit of the sincerity out of the practice, so that at some Waffle Houses, the greeting feels more like, What are you doing here? Not the Waffle House in Penelope, Alabama. There you’re greeted, Welcome to the Waffle House!≠ – genuinely, and not by the staff.

  Not too many folks react to their customized greeting anymore. They did at first. They stopped, if only briefly, to look over and nod, say Thanks before continuing on with their routine, whatever it was.

  You’re welcome, the Phils always, always answered. That’s part of the theory.

  Not enough people say You’re welcome anymore, they decided some time ago. They would know. They were constant recipients of gifts large and small, As are all of us, really, they would argue, and so were constantly expressing their gratitude.

  But not many people acknowledge that gratitude anymore.

  Not enough people welcome it.

  So they are certain to acknowledge any appreciation directed their way. The Phils aren’t appreciated much, though they try as best they can, try to make whatever difference they can in the lives they encounter.

  Welcome to the Waffle House, they always say, and have started to add, Welcome home!

  Now that gives folks pause. A Waffle House, any Waffle House, is probably the last place someone would want to call home. And they clearly didn’t look like owners of the establishment. They didn’t look like owners of anything, except the bundled articles stuffed into the plastic grocery bags stashed under the seats of their booth. So at regular intervals some customer, having heard the greeting a few times during their brief visit, will ask one of the workers behind the counter, over the cash register, Say, this really their home?

  The only answer anyone gives anymore is, The Phils? They’re here every time I’m here.

  Thanks for coming by, the Phils usually call to that person on their way out, as if they really had made some kind of house call, which the Phils would argue they had.

  But that’s another story.

  Yes, yes.…

  Thanks for coming by, they say, so their visitor feels appreciated, and then they wait in vain for an acknowledgment.

  The Phils are four older gentlemen who sit in the booth in the northwest corner of the Penelope, Alabama, Waffle House, always. They are very rarely absent from that booth, which they call home. No one knows where they go or what they do when they’re not in the booth, except around Halloween. They pretty clearly don’t have jobs or families. They keep themselves mostly clean, even if their clothes are ragged and ill-fitting. They don’t cause any trouble, don’t bother anyone really, except to welcome them, which is a nice thing, to be welcomed at a fast-food establishment.

  They don’t take credit for the practice though.

  Wish we could, one of the Phils always says.

  But it wasn’t us.

  Nope, that was all Big Bob’s.

  Big Bob from Boise.

  That’s the story they like to tell the most. The Big Bob from Boise story: a retired life-time employee for Hewlett-Packard, who just couldn’t help but be successful in life. He’d been one of the earliest employees for the Boise Consumer Management office when HP started branching out from their origins in California in the early ‘60s. He’d been with them for almost twenty years when the company started to hit the jackpot in the personal computer and printer business, and Big Bob just hung on for another fifteen years.

  And they almost always prefaced the story by telling their listener, You would have really liked Big Bob.

  Bob wasn’t an engineer or programmer. Originally, he was a mimeograph technician. A reproducer, at best, he always said.

  You boys remember mimeographs? I used to fix the dang drums. Then one day, bam, company goes public, I’m a stock-holder with dividends I don’t know what to do with and a sweet-as-apple-pie parachute. Can you beat that?

  He always made it sound like it could have happened to anyone, that any one of them could have been just as unqualified for success and yet benefited as much as he had. He made it sound like success could still find them, at any time, could still just fall into their laps as it had his thirty-some years ago. They liked him for that.

  They first met Big Bob when he pulled his RV into the parking lot of the Waffle House early one Sunday morning and got stuck trying to turn around. It wasn’t just any Sunday, though. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, maybe the second or third busiest travel day of the entire year. It was a jubilee kind of day.

  A jubilee kind of day? Bob had challenged them the first time he heard the story told. What the hell is that?

  It’s an anniversary, Bob, for goodness sakes. And stop swearing, Constance, his wife, had said, so that they might continue. She already knew the story, of course. But there was a particular part she was anticipating.

  Hell, Connie, I know that. I remember the big bash HP had for their fiftieth.

  And then he hinted that he had something special planned for their fiftieth wedding anniversary, which was coming up in a few years.

  She would not be mollified so easily: Stop swearing.

  I’m sorry. But what’s a jubilee kind of day? And what’s a Jubilee Parkway? A fifty-year-old road?

  U.S. 98, south of I-10, in Penelope, Alabama, is also called the Jubilee Parkway. The Waffle House is about half a mile south of I-10 and sits up on a hill east of the roadway and actually has a pretty nice view of Mobile Bay to the west. The road wasn’t named to commemorate any kind of anniversary.

  Penelope hadn’t been incorporated for fifty years yet, in fact. It was a young town, due to celebrate its jubilee anniversary about the same time as Bob and Constance. Just a former village along the eastern shore of the bay, Penelope grew into a city as a collection of fast-food restaurants and gas stations and cheap hotels clustered along the Jubilee Parkway to capture the business traveling both east and west along the newly built interstate, which also provided easier access south toward Fairhope, Alabama, and the Gulf of Mexico beaches.

  The city planners, who didn’t give too much consideration to the aesthetics of such a cluster, nor the nightmarish traffic it created, were already busy planning the city’s fiftieth anniversary, just as Bob. Their plans included getting as much milage as they could out of the dual meaning the milestone would hold for their Jubilee City. “Jubilee’s Jubilee,” they were billing it, already wearing lapel pins with 50th on them, and devising contests based on the number. The local newspaper, in a displ
ay of forethought never otherwise exhibited in the city, started its daily 2,500 reasons to live in Penelope almost seven years before the event! And schools were going to sponsor student essays on what they loved about Penelope, in 2,500 words or less.

  In two places in the entire world, jubilee had a different meaning: Mobile Bay and Tokyo Bay. In only those places, a jubilee is a marine phenomenon where fish and seafood will beach themselves if the conditions are just right. Exactly what combination of conditions is required is something of a mystery, even for locals, even after a lifetime of studying the event. That is why it has become a social event as much as an ecological one. There are certain seasoned veterans who have a pretty good track record of predicting jubilees. Part science, part instinct, not unlike picking horses, pretty good is being right 50, 60 percent of the time. What spawns the beaching is pretty clear: The fish are seeking oxygen. Exactly what causes the migration of oxygen toward the shoreline is a curious mix of salinity, tide, wind speed and direction, as well as other not so measurable factors, they say. Adding to the mystery, of course, is the fact that jubilees usually only happen at night, and most of them will only last for an hour or so.

  All those who are as inept at reading race forms as they are at tasting the bay water or wetting a thumb to gauge wind direction hope to get on a telephone list of the proven handicappers. And on those evenings when the possibility of a jubilee whispers through town, they sleep very lightly and partially dressed, so that if the call does come, they are ready to spring out of bed, gather their gear, and head for the beach, so that they might gather up all the flounder and shrimp and crabs that they can carry away with them. Of course, in Tokyo Bay, everyone along Mobile Bay’s eastern shore would be quick to add, you can’t eat the fish, because of the heavy metal pollutants, for one. Not in Penelope. In Penelope you can take your catch home and have a crabmeat omelet that morning, a shrimp po-boy for lunch, and stuffed flounder that evening.

  Now that’s eating, Big Bob always said at the end of his version of the explanation. Bob loved to eat, and he loved the American idealism of man trying to outwit nature that the phenomenon encapsulated. It was a story he loved telling back home in Boise.

  By his second or third year of passing through Penelope, he’d managed to get himself on one of the call lists, providing even his Boise number, just so he could know there was a jubilee happening, so he could run through his neighborhood more than a thousand miles away, in his flannel nightshirt, hollering, Jubilee! Jubilee!

  He’d also managed to get himself one of the coveted 50th lapel pins, both designed to elicit the necessary questions so he’d have yet another chance to tell the whole story.

  It was a jubilee Sunday morning that first time Bob and Constance pulled their Super-Coach up the inclined driveway of the Waffle House along U.S. 98, not because there had been a jubilee that morning (although in point of fact there had been one only three weeks prior). It was a jubilee Sunday morning because of all the travelers that were hitting the road for long drives home or to the airport, after the four-or five-day weekend most of them had spent around Thanksgiving. It was a getaway morning, and on getaway days, no one likes to cook for themselves. There’s usually no time allotted for preparing and eating a meal at any kind of leisure, much less cleaning up afterwards. So if you were going to eat in a hurry anyway, why not fast food? Any of the franchises along Penelope’s Jubilee Parkway were designed for quick and painless meals, at any time of the day. On getaway days especially, motorists flocked to the McDonald’s or the Hardees or the IHOP or the Waffle House like fish chasing oxygen up onto the beaches of Mobile and Tokyo Bays.

  Of course in Tokyo, or so the refrain goes, you can’t eat the fish, which is why the safest bet in town, for the jubilee diviners, the precious people on their phone lists, and all the other residents who have never shared in the bounty, is that jubilee is the Penelope Register’s number one reason for living in the Jubilee City.

  Big Bob and Constance weren’t looking for fish or waffles that morning, though. They were looking for historic Marlow, Alabama. Bob pulled the Super-Coach all the way into the parking area north of the building and then proceeded to try and turn the thing around with a three-point turn like it was a nimble family station wagon. It wasn’t, of course, and Bob got himself stuck between the porch of the Waffle House and the bluff that sloped down into the McDonald’s drive-through lane below. He put the Super-Coach into park and climbed out with his AAA Triptik unfolding before him like family photos from a wallet. He stood there peering into the darkness south, then west, then back at the interstate, rejecting the Triptik and relying on his senses in hopes of finding his way before entering the Waffle House to ask for directions, to Constance’s astonishment. She’d been suggesting he stop for directions, or stop for some rest so that they might continue their trip in the daylight, for hours.

  It’s supposed to be right near here, Bob kept saying, driving back and forth across the bay before stopping in Penelope.

  The Phils were the only ones inside the Waffle House, besides the cook, even on the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving. It was only two in the morning. The getaway travelers weren’t expected for at least another couple of hours. At two in the morning on any day of the year, even Mother’s Day (the number one busiest day for the Waffle House, but only the 2,000th reason to live in Penelope: the city workers install folksy-looking placards depicting storks carrying babies wrapped in swaddling cloth proclaiming Happy Mother’s Day at the head of the medians at most intersections along Jubilee Parkway), the only other people likely to be found in the Waffle House were the policeman or EMTs or volunteer firemen. The four gentlemen seated at the booth in the farthest northeast corner of the restaurant≠ – with the best view of the driveway, Jubilee Parkway, and the bay, the booth nearest the pay phone on the other side of the window, which they used as their contact number in the case of a jubilee or some other opportunity≠ – were there almost any morning. They were known collectively by the police and the EMTs and the fire department and the management of the Waffle House as the Phils. They were stationed at their booth when Bob finally relented to Constance’s suggestions and pulled up into the parking lot and got himself stuck, in a display of agitation he would attribute to the number of hours he’d been driving and the number of times Constance had asked him, Why do you have to be so stubborn?

  He blames me! Constance says at this part of the story, every time.

  Oh, Connie, Bob answers, wagging his head like the old family Labrador that’s been caught leaking on the carpet.

  Can anyone tell me how to get to historic Marlowe? he asked when he got inside.

  Everyone inside had been watching Bob inch the Super-Coach forward and backward in his attempts to turn the thing around, resulting in his being thoroughly stuck.

  You can’t leave that thing there, Chester the cook told him.

  I won’t, I won’t, Bob promised, if you could just help me…

  Look pretty stuck, Phil said.

  Real stuck, another Phil added.

  I got a big crowd coming in today, Chester said, nervously pacing behind the counter.

  Bob turned to look out the window at the Super-Coach, blocking not only 75 percent of the parking lot but one of the entrance doors. He seemed to fully assess the situation for the first time, and kind of collapsed onto a stool at the counter.

  You can’t leave that thing there, Chester told him again.

  If you had backed all the way out here, Phil motioned, to the sliver of asphalt along the front of the building, You might have been able to get turned around.

  As is, another Phil told him, standing and moving to the spot where the Super-Coach sat a few feet from the window, You’re stuck.

  About that time everyone migrated first toward the blocked entryway to comment on how that would discourage business this morning, and then out the unobstructed door so they might collectively think of a solution.

  First they had Bob get back behind th
e wheel and see if they couldn’t gain a little more maneuverability with the help of all four Phils serving as spotters at the front and rear, left and right axes of the Super Coach. It had been so long since any of the Phils had driven though, that they probably only got Bob more stuck than he was, if that’s possible.

  You can’t leave that thing there, Chester said a third time.

  Then they decided to call for professional help.

  Tony’ll know how to get you out, Phil promised Constance, who had broken down and sat crying in the passenger seat of the Super-Coach.

  Tony’s Towing, though, was having something of a jubilee morning himself, as he would have told them, had they been able to reach him. Think about it, he would have said. All those people getting in their cars for their trip home, after driving cross-country and pretty much living in them for four or five days, hell, some of them got to break down. If only 10 percent of ‘em do, he would explain, being a pretty fair handicapper himself, having been to his share of jubilees, I’m going to have one busy winch. All Phil could do was leave a message on Tony’s answering service, try the beeper number, and hope for the best.

  But it got worse before Tony returned any of their calls. When the daytime staff of the Waffle House showed up about four, all six of them, 50 percent more than would be there on any other Sunday morning, except Mother’s Day, they were forced to take most of the unblocked parking spaces instead of parking back behind the building next to the Dumpster, at management’s insistence. When the first carload of getaway diners showed up not too much later, pretty pleased with themselves for having gotten up and loaded and on the way so timely, they took one look at the situation at the top of the driveway to the Waffle House, turned around and went next door for some Egg McMuffins instead.