1978. I am 21 years old.
I shuffle, with my sleepy group, in a loose circle. This feels like the vivid scene in "Midnight Express" where the imprisoned men walk around and around the round pillar. This particular morning, the men and women around me look somewhat more alert than the prisoners in Turkish jail, but not much. It's 6:45 a.m. and we're all inside a one-room food shack, built of concrete blocks painted white, and it's so quiet in the place that the buzz of the fluorescent fixtures seems loud.
Like the people in the movie, we move slowly but steadily, clockwise, following the person ahead. The line must not stop. We all have to be clocked in at work at 7 a.m., exactly. Almost all my fellow shufflers have jobs at the RCA color television plant at the corner of Grimes Lane and South Rogers Street in Bloomington, Indiana. I work up the road at the Campus Bus Service, on Grimes Lane, just past the railroad tracks.
Nobody else from my job is at the food shack with me. Back at the bus garage, the men were all standing around the gray metal time clock near the break room door, waiting to put their long yellow time cards into the top slot of the wall-mounted box. I know that, as usual, all the guys I work with are well-fed, and sipping their second cups of coffee. They’ve gotten up at six; their wives have gotten up an hour earlier to pack lunches, fry eggs, and perk coffee.
There is no one at my house to make anything for me. I am unwilling to get up at five o'clock to be my own wife. So here I am, with all the factory workers, grabbing a quick cheap breakfast to wolf down as I walk up Grimes Lane to the garage. Today, as on most weekdays, I'd left the house at 6:30 and I have just enough time to stop in at the nameless café where breakfast can be had for a dollar, lunch for two bucks.
"Café" is too grand a word for the place; it is a lunch stand, a shack really. One large room with two soft-drink coolers and a formica counter along the east wall, a cash-register counter along the west wall, and a sizzling breakfast grill at the back. The rustic place is flat-roofed and resembles the outbuilding of a gasket manufacturer. Or maybe it's like the small-town home office of a farm insurance firm specializing in protection against corn must. But it's not a repurposed property. In fact the tiny cafe has been built in order to feed lots of people in a short amount of time. The place has, I swear, the exact square footage to the inch to allow three hundred people to come in between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m., get breakfast or lunch, and leave.
The tightly-wound spring of the screened front door is exactly long enough for efficient closing without a single slam. This is important, for each of us is only in the building for three or four minutes. The screen door opens and closes constantly, as sleepy customers trickle in and out. I can't imagine what it would be like in this room if the door banged and banged and banged as we all enter and exit.
Inside the shack, a wide-bladed industrial fan whirls inside its custom-built opening in the cement blocks, high above the grill. Below the fan, a shiny grill top takes up the full length of the back wall. The whirr of the fan blades pulling hot air and greasy sausage vapor out of the shack, plus the hum of the fluorescent light ballasts are practically the only sounds except for the scrape of the cooks’ metal flippers along the grill as they rake bacon crumbs and specks of hard-cooked egg into the deep narrow stainless-steel gutter along the front of the grill.
I'm a veteran now, having learned the breakfast drill from months ago by mimicking the actions of the people in front of me. I totally know where to go and what to do. The morning ritual begins at long left wall was a long formica counter and behind this a young woman is busy, busy, busy. She is, I have learned, the daughter of the family who owns the cafe. She's about my age, in her early 20s, and she manages the baked goods and beverages, She also restocks the stack of thin, cheap brown lunch sacks which sit at the end of the chipped, white-speckled formica counter, ready for us to pick up as we pass. Next to these are two large white pasteboard bakery boxes, lids laid open. The first box holds iced doughnuts, and the second is filled with sweet rolls and cinnamon buns.
The first stop for each of us hungry folk is to decide about pastries. Those who are exhausted, hung over, or both grab a sheet of waxed paper from a flat industrial-size box next to the sweet rolls, and load up on carbohydrates and sugar. Those who don't want a sugar crash at 10:30 am wait to get real food from the grill.
Next, each of us chooses coffee or orange juice, each pre-poured into a squadron of styrofoam cups, lined up and ready for take-off at the end of the white-speckled counter. Since each of us carries a brown lunch sack (empty or with doughnuts in it), we can choose coffee or we can pick orange juice but we can't carry both. We each make a choice and move on.
There isn’t long to decide about anything, either, because the shufflers before and behind me are about to move me into a soft right turn to face the grill at the back of the shack. Two more busy family members are hard at work. The gray-haired father and the adult son, both wearing long white aprons over sleeveless v-neck tee shirts and jean shorts, have white paper hot dog vendor hats on their heads. The son never looks up from the left side of the grill. His father, on the right, turns his head about toward each of us as we approach.
He needs nouns from each customer. He and his silent son each have a stack of plastic bakery trays, piled hip high, close at hand. Every tray is filled with hamburger buns. I can see that someone (probably the daughter) has opened each bag of eight soft white buns. The cooks find the bread by touch, reach into the open clear plastic bags without taking their eyes off the sizzling eggs and meat. What is needed from each of us is a short clear description of what we want on our hamburger bun: Egg. Bacon. Sausage. Cheese. Egg sausage. Egg cheese. Egg bacon cheese. The father turns his head so that his left ear is pointed our way. After I say "Egg sausage cheese," the father turns to the grill which means he heard me. Somehow he communicates with his son, though I can't see how that's done. The sandwiches always match the spoken requests.
Yesterday was a payday, so today most of us are splurging on two or three nouns per order. The egg sandwich is a dollar and then each add-on costs a quarter. I will owe a dollar fifty for my food and if I take a snack cake from the rack near the register too, the total will be two dollars and my coffee will be free. So of course, that's what I'm going to do. But first I need to collect my egg, sausage, and cheese sandwich.
The finished breakfast sandwiches are placed, one by one, on sheets of the same type of waxed paper squares we use to pick up our sweet rolls. The finished orders are lined up in rows on brown plastic lunch trays, the kind used in school cafeterias. Each tray slightly glitters under the fluorescent ceiling lights, shimmered by the ever-turning ceiling fan; a slightly holographic diamond pattern is pressed into the top surface of each plastic tray.
Several of these trays were laid, edge to edge, along the high narrow stainless-steel counter between us customers and the men working at the grill top. My responsibility, if I want to eat, is to recognize my own hot sandwich, grab it and put it into my thin brown paper sack. I have have ordered Egg Sausage Cheese, so I must not grab someone else’s Egg Bacon by not paying attention. This will bring the production line to a halt, and the people who build color televisions at the RCA plant can told you what a disaster that can be. It would be as bad as Billy Haves walking the wrong way around the pillar in the Turkish prison.
Since I have said my nouns, found the correct sandwich and put it in my sack, the no-talk rule is back on. The shuffling line works its way toward the wife of the family, who stands behind the counter where an old-fashioned cash register sits. This antique’s typewriter-style keys are marked with prices like .29 and .49. The total .79 has popped up on a plastic tab which shows in a glass viewing panel at the top. The ancient cash register may actually have stopped working in 1959, for all I know. The drawer stays open, and the cashier, always calm and unsmiling, takes our ones and fives and makes change from the open till. In the nearly-silent room, I can hear the sharp down-clacks of the U-shaped metal bars in the wooden compartments as the cashier lifts them and lets them drop to hold down on the two crinkled greenbacks I have just given her.
I drop my Honey Bun into the brown lunch sack on top of my sandwich, grab my coffee, and I am done with the café and it is done with me. Until tomorrow.
*****
When, fifteen years later, the last worker at the RCA television plant goes on unemployment, the tiny white food shack will sell its last egg sandwich and the screen door will be latched permanently. But for decades to come, when I have a leftover hamburger bun, I make myself an Egg Cheese, with cheddar instead of American. I think about the people in the one-room cement block building on Grimes Lane – not the people who owned it, but the men and women with whom I shuffled around in a circle, learning patience, the value of order and clarity, and the simple joy of shared experience.
Oh, and a nice hot egg sandwich.
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