Sketches from Vacation
Vacations are great because they are an excuse to do things that would not otherwise be considered okay. When you go on vacation, you are leaving behind more than your house- you are leaving car payments and utility bills and angry, bad-smelling neighbors and things like etiquette and hygiene and laws. To go on vacation is to start a fresh new life, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, only to be forced back into the cold, cramped darkness a week later. “What about those girls on the beach?” you think irritably and accidentally-out-loud. “They don’t have jobs!”
“Honey,” your wife says, “they have tits.
Anyway, if you drive straight out in any one direction, you wind up in the real countryside, with the leaning route markers and awkward folk hanging around awkwardly in front of the dingy, squatting “Bob’s Big-M Supermarkets”. Things are different here. There is a type of restaurant that can be found littering the roadsides of these lonely areas, forgotten in time by all people other than the few unfortunate souls who live in town and have had their driving licenses suspended, and lost tourists who are desperately hailing passersby for directions (you can see the terror in their eyes), which presents itself in a very distinct way. It is always painted in the Pepsi national colors of red and white and always has some sort of “to-go” strategy via walk-up or drive-thru and will always feature the same class of menu. The foods offered at the American diner are high in fat and low in food. There is always a hamburger. There are usually three different varieties of hot dog. There are french fries and onion rings and my God, if it can be fried, it will come with pickles and slaw. The noble bastards who operate these establishments are masters of the fryer. I like to fantasize about a bizarre Cold War situation in which hydrogenated oils are somehow the Enemy’s only weakness and how the men in the black suits will roll up to the Country Drive-In and recruit the smiling, elderly lady working the grill to come and put on a superhero outfit and defeat the Reds using laser-targeted orbital precision french fry strikes.
The other kind of employee you find in these places is the Young Girl, which is the most awful kind of all, because Young Girl is always of that Abstract, Undetermined Age and is almost always completely lacking in shame when it comes to clothing herself. There should be but never is a small paragraph on the back of the menu with instructions on how to treat Young Girl. For example, anyone might appreciate: “The Young Girl you see serving the ice cream is our own local variety. Do not make eye contact with Young Girl or offer to feed her. She is being raised for a quiet life of apple pies and child-rearing. Please do not ask if she is on the menu or how much she costs.” This is just some basic honesty. I actually feel sorry for Young Girl most of the time; she is being groomed for a culture that still counts livestock as dowries and there really are no opportunities for career advancement maintaining the Slushee machine and it is not like you can just have sex with the owner in the back room in exchange for a meager pay raise because his wife is The Devil and always gives you dirty looks and knows where you live anyway.
