Editor’s Notes: On Diner Week

In the latest entry in our A+ Editor’s Notes series, I’m taking you into the kitchen of Diner Week to see how the sausage (or bacon or ham or vegan breakfast patty) was made.

I’m not sure what prompted it, but on Friday, June 10 2022, just after noon Eastern time, Autostraddle’s Director of Operations Laneia Jones popped into the main social channel of our Slack with a prompt:

So, Diner Week didn’t exactly start with diners. But Laneia opened up something with this simple request. People started sharing the places they’ve eaten at, sharing little pieces of themselves. We talked about salad bars for a long time. You might be thinking to yourself: How much is there to possibly say about salad bars? A lot. I probably could have planned Salad Bar Week and had a dozen different emotions-packed essays about fucking salad bars.

(For the record, Steak & Sea is definitely how I identify.)

Eventually, hometown grill/grille/buffet led us to hometown diners. Of course it did. We walked about chain diners, mountain diners, one-of-a-kind rural diners, the diners we wished we could hop in a car and go to right the fuck now but couldn’t because we lived in areas surging with Covid cases, but maybe we could get takeout, yeah, doesn’t that sound nice?

I threw the idea of Diner Week out as a joke (which, to be fair, is how most of my editorial ideas begin). It was met with great enthusiasm.

I started scheming.

Almost exactly a year ago, before I became a full-time editor here at Autostraddle, I curated a series of micro essays as a guest editor. The series was called Dinner Party, and I tapped four writers I admire to write about any food dish of their choice in 750 words or less. I love to read writing on food — because it’s never just about food, is it? Food touches so many things: place, bodies, relationships. Later, after I did go full-time here, I did a package of essays on time zones. While I loved helming Autostraddle’s Pride package a few months after that, Dinner Party and Time Zones Week and Diner Week are the editorial projects that best exemplify the kind of creative work I want to do and support here. There’s nothing obviously queer about dinner parties, time zones, diners. And yet, isn’t there?

Sometimes writers come to me saying they have an essay they want to pitch but can’t figure out the queer angle. I always reply with something along the lines of this: well, you’re queer and you care about it, right?

For Time Zones Week, I solicited work from writers on Autostraddle’s team and outside of it. For Diner Week, I knew I wanted to keep things in-house. We recently hired 14 new writers, and I wanted to give them a chance to contribute to a themed editorial package a little more abstract than the Pride package. By this point, I’d worked with all of these writers in some capacity but not on more creative-nonfiction-leaning essays. I saw this as an opportunity not only to work on a project I was excited about but to deepen my editor-writer relationships with some of our newbies as well as any veteran team writers who wanted to participate. I have a very hands-on approach to editing, and I often individually tailor the editing experience to fit the hopes, dreams, needs, and experience of whatever writer I’m working with. It makes for a special but intense relationship and process sometimes, but it’s worth it to me to go deep in revision and really help the writer get to where they wanna go.

I posted a call for pitches from our team. In it, I pointed them in the direction of some other food nonfiction I felt fit the scope of the series: my own Wild Cravings series, the Half Recipes series at Catapult, To All The Coffeeshops I’ve Called Home, Why I Take All My First Dates to Olive Garden, A Reemergence So Fragile a Restaurant Closure Can Undo Me, and To All the Pirate Bars Ayye’ve Loved Before. I thought maybe I’d get five or six pitches, and that was more than enough to fashion a themed week out of.

I got 12 pitches.

I got 12 pitches that excited, delighted, and surprised me. I got 12 pitches I knew immediately I’d take. My new challenge became figuring out how to pack 12 excellent sprawling essays into a single week, which is why we ran two pieces a day for most of Diner Week.

Shortly after the call went out, Nicole asked if I’d ever seen the Denny’s tumblr. I’m someone who has written extensively about the second life I lived on tumblr for most of my teens and early twenties, but I missed this particular internet moment somehow. If you don’t know, the official Denny’s tumblr is full of truly bizarre and occasionally disturbing gifs and images I’d describe as “diner surrealism.” The images recontextualize diner imagery in unexpected and intentionally incongruous ways like, for example, this image of a “masked” potato or this gif of fried eggs blinking like eyes. When I met with our Art Director Viv to talk visuals for Diner Week, I put forth the Denny’s tumblr as a mood board. They took it and fucking ran to the moon with it, transforming “diner surrealism” into something that feels distinctly them. The art Viv created is retro, strange, and immersive. Like, well, a diner.

Diners seem effortless, don’t they? When you’re the customer, they’re easy places to go to without the fuss of a reservation or much of a plan at all. You know what you’re getting. But to work at a diner is a different experience, of course. And I was so thrilled when Autostraddle’s A+ and Fundraising Director Nicole pitched an essay about their experience as a line cook in a touristy riverside joint. And when Yashwina made the workers at her go-to diner an indelible part of the story. When others wrote with affection for the servers who called them honey when refilling their coffees.

Nothing was casual or thoughtless about the making of Diner Week. Writers put so much intention and meaning behind every dish they described, every booth they slid into, every observation they made about the timelessness and comfort of diners that could have run the risk of coming off as cliche but didn’t, because these 12 writers wrote with specificity, heart, and flavor. Like coursing a meal, I was intentional about the order of these essays, the ways some were paired.

And I didn’t go into things with this plan per se, but I ended up having a very method actor approach to the editing process. I went with Yashwina to Stepping Stone twice on back-to-back weekends during a trip to Portland, got to see just how loved she is and how much love she gives there for myself. After a few failed attempts, I also finally got to go to Flanigan’s with Stef and their girlfriend. We had to wait literally an hour, which is wild for a South Florida seafood grill chain if you ask me! But was it worth it? Absolutely. I’m now the proud owner of a shamrock green Flanigan’s take-home cup, and I experienced an important Florida first when our pitcher of light beer was delivered to our booth with an accompanying knotted plastic bag of ice. I didn’t understand until Stef plopped it in the pitcher after pouring our first cups. It’s to keep it cold. Duh.

The details of all of these diners are amazing, aren’t they? Doesn’t a bag of ice plopped in a pitcher of beer say so much in and of itself about place? I’ve only been to a couple of the diners written about this week, but I still feel like all the writers invited me into someplace and some time in their lives, and for that, I’m lucky. Katie made me see New Jersey through her eyes, and Lily made me feel seen, and Darcy made me time travel, and Ro made me nostalgic for my past life in Chicago, and Sa’iyda made me call my grandma, and Dani made me think about the friends who saw me through so much, and Nicole taught me what Loganberry tastes like, and I met Stef at Flanigan’s for real, and A.Tony unlocked my own memories of Silver Diner, and Niko made it so I’ll never look at pineapple the same way again, and shea made my mouth water for prime rib, and Yash showed me a new way to order a bloody mary extra spicy the way I like it.

None of this would have been possible without our A+ members. Hell, I wouldn’t even have this job without you, our members who support us in all of our wildest, weirdest pursuits. Thank you for being here, and I hope you get to have your favorite meal at your favorite diner sometime soon.

If I’m being honest, I wish Diner Week had never ended. I want Diner Week to be 24/7 the way my favorite diner used to be.

But while Diner Week might be over, diners are forever.

This Diner Is Where My Relationships Begin — And End

My recent breakup the first week of June wasn’t one I wanted or expected, but it was one I had to initiate anyway. Boundaries, communication, reassurance, desperation — it was a mess. I’m learning, slowly, painfully, to get better at identifying points of no return. I wish I could see something happening as it’s happening to me and know when there isn’t a way to come back from it. I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that these points of no return, when I’m impacted by the actions or choices of others, aren’t up to me. Denial won’t make it go away, and I can’t just choose not to be hurt after all. Even if I personally want there to be a way to fix things or undo what has hurt me, even if I am desperate to imagine a way back to normal, that doesn’t mean the circumstances will change. Sometimes damage is irreparable. Shit happens.

This is hard for me. I’m a creature of routine, who finds stability deeply and profoundly romantic, who wants to keep a good thing going, and who often doesn’t understand why we can’t. Why can’t nice things last forever? Why can’t we keep what is good?

This is what keeps me coming back to my favorite diner.

This diner is the reason I can’t imagine moving out of my neighborhood. I’m across the river from many of my friends, living instead in an area that is equal parts old houses and new apartment buildings springing up where long-empty warehouses used to squat by the river. My diner has been here since these condos held lumber and since those houses were affordable for young families. It’s a beloved establishment; lines snake down the block at brunchtime every weekend, and people vy for tables and keep careful watch for openings on the stools at the counter. When the staff see me in line, they wave through the windows. I’ve been coming here regularly (and tipping heavily) since I moved here, and they’ve seen me through a lot.

The day of my breakup, I asked my friend who lives a few streets away to drive me. I don’t have a car, and I couldn’t face the bus ride back from my now-ex’s apartment alone. But when Eddie picked me up, what I first took for sleepiness in his voice I soon realized was something else. There’d been a sudden bereavement; he’d been crying on the phone with his family on the other side of the country. Neither of us were doing great, neither of us wanted to be alone. And so, we made a plan: I’d have an hour to pull myself through the conversation I was dreading, and if I wasn’t out in an hour-and-fifteen-minutes, he’d come get me. I couldn’t drag it out, he told me, it needed to be done. And then, we’d go get food after. Breakfast on me, I said. It was the least I could do, given the circumstances. (Neither of us had been able to eat.)

After, as he drove me back to our neighborhood, we chuckled about the bizarre catharsis of two people sitting companionably in a car, sobbing about two entirely separate things. We parked and waited in line with the last brunch stragglers, making jokes about the birdhouse we spotted across the street that had been designed to be a perfect miniature replica of the house it adorned. We made small talk with the folks in front of us and waved back through the glass when our favorite servers inside noticed us. We acted like we were fine, and if the lead server Denise wasn’t convinced as she took our tearful orders of pancakes and corned beef hash, she kept that to herself.

Their signature plate-sized “mancake” pancakes were what I’d had the first time I’d brought my ex there, too. They’d only come with me a couple of times, because they weren’t fond of my neighborhood. But they liked this place, and we held hands at the bar, bantering with servers Tyler and Matty about baseball and movies as they refilled our coffees. The first time I’d brought them, we had a table in the back room, a little further from the rush so we could hear each other better. They laughed when I made my usual joke asking Matty for a bloody mary spicy enough to hurt my feelings, and we held hands across the linoleum tabletop while sharing a blueberry pancake and chicken fried steak.

The chicken fried steak is my regular order: as a southerner raised by midwesterners, this counts as my ancestral cuisine. It’s a simple dish, sure (I joke about dishes where the name is the recipe; you take the steak and you fry it like chicken, ta-da!) but when it’s done right, it’s really right. Here, the coating is crispy and flavorful. The gravy is creamy without skewing bland and savory without skewing too salty. It’s a dish I brag about to the friends I know appreciate good comfort food, and the last time I brought a partner before this now-ex to the diner, that’s what I’d ordered then as well. I don’t bring everyone here, but I bring the ones who matter, because meeting my diner is more important than meeting my parents. My partners may typically meet my parents later than most, but if you can’t pass the diner vibe check, there will be no meeting the parents, and there will be no first anniversary.

The diner is a litmus test. When I bring a crush here, I am looking for signs in the way they order, their behavior, their reactions, that they are observant and appreciative of the right things.

• Are they impatient in line or do they understand how hard the team works to look after people at breakneck speed?
• Do they notice that, instead of a bell no one could hear, fishing-line snakes across the ceiling from the door, tied to KISS action figures that rise and fall every time the door opens?
• Do they see how protective Denise is of the other servers? Do they notice that Jordan isn’t just her coworker but her son, how he keeps an eye on her when things get hectic indoors and how she watches out for him when the line starts winding past the windows?
• Tyler may seem shy taking your order at first, but are they excited when he comes out of his shell when talking about movies? Do they understand how impressive his encyclopedic, informed-but-unpretentious film fluency is?
• Do they understand how skillfully Matty banters with people in a way designed to make them feel like insiders on the joke? Do they notice his instinct for a person’s perfect conversation topic?
• Do they understand that places this special don’t just happen?

And sometimes, disappointingly, the answer is no. I’ve brought people there who rolled their eyes at the wait, complaining about the popularity as if we weren’t just like every other customer. I’ve cut bites off my chicken fried steak for someone as the realization slowly dawned upon me that I would never come here with them again. Listening to someone I had fancied grimace and grumble at the things that make the diner charming and precious to me, a pit would form in my stomach and slowly sink, pulling my appetite away with it. There was nothing I could do to stop it; there was no way I could set my cutlery down and lean toward them to say against the din: I just want to eat a nice meal in my favorite place with someone I like, and I am begging you not to push me out of love with you when all I want is to be here.

But points of no return happen when I least want them. Sitting across from my friend, both of us still red around the eyes even as we laughed, my appetite abandoned me even though I wasn’t ready to go. I left my tip and asked for a box, and Jordan brought one without commenting on how little of my pancake I’d been able to manage. I thought about the obvious symbolism of packing up for later nourishment what was hard to stomach at the time. I thought about how if a diner named Stepping Stone turned up in this context in fiction, I’d find the writing heavy-handed.

Last week, my friend (and editor) Kayla was here in town, and I got the chance to take her with me to Stepping Stone twice. We waited our turn in line with easy Saturday-morning smiles, followed Tyler to a corner booth, and ordered more entrees than either of us could manage because we wanted to try all the specials, including a giant savory mancake. When the plate arrived, it looked naked without the usual sweet accoutrements of maple syrup or whipped cream, but from the first bite it dazzled, stuffed inside with gouda, bacon, jalapeños, and scallions. I was speechless (either from the size of the bite I’d taken, or from the lowkey religious experience that bite represented), so I savored my slice while Tyler caught me up on some awesome documentaries he’d seen and swapped takes with Kayla about Cronenberg and Crimes of the Future. In the background, Jordan and Matty zoomed about, refilling our coffees and adding olives to my bloody mary. When Matty came by to tease me about baseball season, I told him the news: “Yeah man, it’s been a crazy few weeks, I broke up with my partner, yeah, the one you met that time, yeah.”

“To better things!” he said, grinning. Kayla watched the two of us, and I could see this essay playing out before her.

“Yeah man,” I said, “y’know, I’m actually writing an essay about it, and about y’all —”

“Us?” Tyler had heard and paused beside us.

“Yeah — after I broke up with them, I came here immediately after. Denise must’ve seen, I was a weepy mess, but she didn’t say anything.” Behind them, Jordan looked up and smiled knowingly.

The thing about being a “regular” is that the watching goes both ways; however much I see about their dynamics and their interests, they see mine too. These folks don’t miss a thing, whether it’s a cooling cup of coffee or a tearful sniffle mid-order. The next time I bring someone there, the team will know what it means. They’ll know, and I’ll know, what we’re both watching for, and we’ll know what any subsequent absence or presence indicates. At the bottom of their laminated menus, it reads: “We, in our infinite wisdom, reserve the right to include automatic gratuity. During peak business hours, we are unable to split checks more than two ways. We reside in a quiet neighborhood. We like our neighbors. Please respect our neighbors!”

The diner’s slogan follows: “You eat here because we let you.” And I do. It’s the home of my heart and the healthiest boundary I know.

Always End Cuts

It was easy to miss her if you didn’t look hard enough. She — white, speckled, and rough around the edges — was quaint and pretty like those girls in white boys’ country songs. Graveled rocks and a wood patio welcomed you up to her, to the restaurant that will not change your life. In her vestibule, she bore reminders of those who she calls hers: baseball teams, farmers’ markets, local politicians for whom she is just another spot on the campaign trail. She was unremarkably reliable in the best of ways, like my socks I just happen to wear on Tuesdays, like the guy I always see at the park who loves to chat but never tells me his name, like sitting down and just trusting the chair will be there. She was always there, too, The Road House.

***The Road House sat approximately 50 yards from the road halfway between the town and the ski resort. It, like so many other restaurants and businesses in those mountains, was overshadowed by the nature that surrounded it. We drove past the sign three times before we stopped, and when we finally did, it wasn’t for The Road House. At six on a Saturday night, the lot was full of 4x4s, station wagons, and pickup trucks. I counted 12 as we sat in the ice cream line across the lot, a drive-thru Creemee Stand that promised the best ice cream in Vermont. Based on my extensive pandemic research of ice cream in the mountains, I would say this small frozen trailer and kids working for “college tuition tips” were lying (but only a bit). It is quite hard to compete with Ben & Jerry. We got Saturday ice creams twice before we finally made it through the doors of The Road House. It was the Prime Rib that made us do it. Outside of the building, the owners hung a bright red and white sign that reminded every person driving by that Saturday was not only the weekend but also “PRIME RIB SPECIAL” day.

Our first Prime Rib Saturday came just a month after we moved to the mountains. My wife and I were speeding through the hills of southern Vermont when I proposed a special date night. “Numbers are low here,” I reminded her. This was part of how we ended up in the mountains in the first place. She, a teacher in Boston, was teaching remotely for a year. I, a student and researcher, could work anywhere and needed to breathe without fear of dying every day. The mountains offered that reprieve. Fewer people and fresh air had brought us here; low transmission rates helped me feel better about masking up and doing the things necessary for living, like grocery shopping, getting gas, picking up medicine, and, yes, date night. “What about that prime rib place?” I asked. “It seems fancy, and you deserve it.”

I don’t know anything about red meat. I stopped eating it years before I met my wife and haven’t looked back, but I know that menu prices don’t lie. I know that prime means of the best possible quality, and I know that Adam gave a rib to make Eve, so that means it must be the best. At least, that’s how my brain justified the cost of a piece of meat when dialing the restaurant’s number.

“No service,” I said, looking helplessly at my phone. There was never any service in the mountains unless we were at home — a trait I mostly loved but hated in moments like these.

“We’re almost at the clearing,” my wife responded and floored the Forester up the hill. We parked at the top next to the gift shop owned by two cranky sisters who liked me more than my wife and charged me a little bit less for their apple cider donuts.

I held my phone outside of the car window, waving it around, grasping for service. Until I heard a ring. A gruff voice answered. It was 4:30 p.m. They didn’t open until five, but the voice on the other end of the line already seemed exhausted. “I can’t hear you,” he croaked. I have bad service, I tried to say.

No service. One bar. Redial.

“You there?” the voice yelled. I handed the phone to my wife and mouthed YOU DO IT. This is how we usually make calls. I determine a call needs to be made. I dial the number. The person answers the phone. I briefly consider talking before silently handing the phone to my wife.

“Yes, I’m here,” she replied. She made a reservation for 5:30. Reservations were required at all places in the mountains that dared let you breathe and eat inside. “Martin,” the voice yelled back, and I gasped. How did he know? Was there talk of us in the town — the fat, interracial couple who had moved into the spot across from the river just south of town? “We got a caller ID,” the voice clarified before hanging up.

We sped back down the mountain into the valley to change into our best date-night attire. My wife, a tunic and leggings. I threw on my green corduroy button-up that felt like a snuggie. It was the best I could muster for a pandemic date night in small-town Vermont. When we’d decided to move into the apartment by the river, we rented a storage unit in a New Hampshire town halfway between Boston and Vermont. We boxed and stacked our nicest clothes, family heirlooms, and furniture into the five-by-five unit that smelled like forgotten memories and mothballs. Our little place in the mountains had no dressers — and no room for dressers — so I brought only the necessary. Flannels, jeans, joggers, boots, and a few button-up oxfords for special occasions like graduate school interviews, date nights to nowhere, and, eventually, Prime Rib Saturdays.

The parking lot betrayed The Road House dining room. In the September warmth, the insides of the building met us with just enough cool to stop my wife from sweating under her mask.

The host looked like our waitress who looked like the bartender who looked like the other waitress. As they passed, they all looked at me, and I looked back and smiled. I had taken to smiling and waving to white folks in the mountains. In their wave and smiles, I heard “Black Lives Matter,” so my response was partly niceties and mostly please don’t kill me. I am just trying to breathe.

Above our table, a landscape painting lay in a wood frame that matched the wood table, wood furniture, wood paneling. Should I pour one out for the trees who we lost in the making of this place? I sipped my Diet Coke instead.

The bread arrived first. “Baked fresh today,” the waitress said as she put the basket of sliced white bread in between us on the table. “Well-baked, lightly seasoned,” I announced to my wife. She almost choked on her piece and chuckled. “Stop it, shea!” she whispered and loaded unsalted butter on the unseasoned bread, saying a prayer to the flavor gods above.

“How was the bread? What’ll it be?” the waitress said when she returned a few moments later. I ignored her first question because Black folks can’t be honest about white folks’ food when ain’t no more of us around to back us up. I ordered the blackened salmon, emphasizing the Black because it is 2020, and I want to make sure she can see me through the flick of the candlelight.

“Prime Rib!” my wife exclaimed. “An end piece, please!”

“Oof, we just sold out of end pieces a few minutes ago,” the waitress replied. Behind her in the bar area, a middle-aged man-boy played covers of soft rock songs just a little slower than one might expect, “Wagon Wheel” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” becoming soft lullabies for our table and the few others around us.

I looked at my phone. 5:35. Just 35 minutes into dinner service, and the ends were gone. I knew this would be the last time this would happen, the last time my wife would ask for an end piece and be told there were none left, bested by grey-haired gentlemen thirty years her elder. I knew we would show up early next time.

Dejected she accepted “whatever you’ve got then” and pouted the rest of the way through dinner and dessert of homemade carrot cake and brownie a la mode.

When we left, the sun promised to wait until we made it to the mountaintop to watch her set for the evening. So we drove to the peak, like we did on most evenings, and watched her. I sanitized my hands more than I wanted, checked the Covid rates for the tenth time that day, and we promised ourselves we’d do more things that made us feel safe in a world that felt more unpredictable every day, like Prime Rib Saturdays with unflavored bread, early end cuts, and bad live music.

And we did.

We went back every Saturday. We learned one hostess was our neighbor. She’d just put her house on the market but would still stay in town. We learned that most people from the town stayed and those who weren’t from here didn’t stay long. We learned our waitresses were teachers on weekdays and Road House warriors on the weekend, working second jobs through the pandemic. We met Twitter followers and were reminded of the world we had desperately tried to escape. We found out the hard way that end cuts and fish don’t travel well down the road to our own kitchen. We found predictability and safety in the people, place, and food waiting for us.

***Always at 5 p.m.
Always end cuts.
Always Black(end) salmon.
Always dessert, add the ice cream.
Always that table, that painting, that music — too slow and too loud.
Always just us, them, and her — The Road House.
Always just us, them, and her, until we left the valley and she stayed because her prime rib tastes better in that house, atop a gravel lot, on the side of the road, behind a sign proclaiming the news of Prime Rib Saturday to those who might miss it if they aren’t looking hard enough.

At Diners, You Don’t Have To Grow Up

“What do you want to eat?” is one of the meanest questions you could ask me.

Well, without a menu or something in mind, it’s just an easier way to tell me you don’t like me. There is a certain amount of space I reserve just for the anxiety I get nearly every family night where we say we’re hungry and what should we eat? I’ll suggest old favorites and am scoffed off nearly every time. My anxiety builds as no one can agree on anything. I just want chicken tenders and fries. I just want french toast. I get the same five things, but it does not matter. I want to eat but I don’t but I need to or else my brain will get worse and I cannot do that here or anywhere and we were fine ten minutes ago and I do not have an appetite but my stomach says, no, demands otherwise.

When I was younger, the answer to what I wanted to eat was easy. This is because I didn’t have a choice. To an extent, of course I did. Did I want nuggets or a Big Mac? Did I want link sausage or patty? There were choices but none that could prepare me for the utter chaos and uncertainty of adulthood.

When I was a kid and a teenager and maybe a little older than that, what I ate was what was put in front of me, generally. I had choices when we went to restaurants, to diners especially. I know how to cook, and to cook well, but I freeze every time I have to make something. It’s not the food that scares me; it’s the audience.

My sister was a picky eater, but we couldn’t leave the table until the food was gone, and my granddad, he yelled a lot, and I hate yelling, so, when he would turn to talk to my grandma, I’d just put her food on my plate and eat it. When we had our version of the Last Supper in second grade, we were given lamb, and no one but me liked it, so everyone gave me theirs. I yelled “I’m the garbage disposal!” and laughed. My other grandparents, who I’d see at least five times a year, two months in summer, let me and my sister pick out whatever we wanted to eat on our first grocery run. We came back, and I was so big, the next time we came down, I wasn’t allowed to pick just anything anymore. My cousins, aunts, really everyone in my family made fun of my eating habits. Food went from being exciting to being necessary to being a chore, and I’m still stuck in the last one. People stopped asking me what I wanted because I would just “want chicken tenders and fries,” which was true, but was the laugh and eye roll afterwards really necessary? I already felt so far behind in so much — school, friendships, growing up, being human — that I felt like food was the one area I could control, that I could force myself to grow up in. I’ve regretted every burger, every fancy ass cuisine outside my comfort zone ever since.

Diners are some of my favorite places. There is not an expectation to grow up. Actually, there’s an agreed upon belief that time freezes as soon as you walk through the door.

Every diner is like a show. The kitchen and behind the bar as writers’ table and director’s notes, the workers as sound and lighting design, prop masters, and actors all rolled into one. It’s fitting, because my first memories of diners are after theatre shows.

After one of the first shows I did in sophomore or junior year (the years run together), I got into someone’s car and we drove to Silver Diner. It wasn’t super late to an adult, but it was late to me as a high schooler with no parents calling me asking when I’d come home. I smushed in with a couple of friends, and we drove not even ten minutes up the road to the diner. When you have a crush, no matter how much you want to tell yourself you don’t care, your body will always know where they are. Between bites of bacon cheese fries, pushing quarters into the jukebox machines at our tables willing our song to play next, I kept looking back over at her. We had three tables, almost a corner of the restaurant to ourselves, and I was amazed we were allowed to be annoying as fuck without being kicked out. We all paid with whatever lunch money we had left over and lingered outside the restaurant, telling dumb stories until we got into each other’s cars to go home.

It was one of the first times I felt like I existed outside of my family. That I could sneak glances (I wasn’t sneaking; I was incredibly obvious) at the girl(s) I liked, that since I could pay for my own food, I could choose what I wanted to eat. No one ever explicitly said I didn’t have a choice when it came to food, but it always felt easier to let food happen to me rather than be an active participant in it. Here, I could be an active participant. There’s nothing spectacularly amazing about diners, and that’s one of the reasons I love them so much. The food, though delicious to me, is not exciting. The atmosphere of jukeboxes and smiles against checkerboard tiles blend into unreality as I see black people at the counter unbothered, as white people smile at me even when all my white friends are yelling their hearts out despite needing to be on vocal rest.

No answers are too wrong in a diner. My best friend and I had met with other friends for some diner outing or another. One of her triggers can seem silly to others, and when one of them reared its head through song, I felt her tense next to me in the fake leather booth. I tapped her hand, and she looked at me, and it felt like her anxiety was building. I pulled my iPod nano out of my skirt pocket and handed her an earphone while our friends kept speaking. I let her pick whatever song she could  find to tune out the radio above. After two to three minutes, the song changed, and I felt her body relax just a little. She handed me my iPod nano back and whispered thank you before grinning back at whatever our friends were saying. Nowhere else would I have felt safe enough to offer the only comfort I know how. In other places, I was always worried about being too obvious, too gay, too black, too everything. But in that moment, I could move my hand to meet hers underneath the table without worrying anyone was watching. I could help her and not be ridiculed in the attempt.

Diners are places of unreality where I can get my food and not worry about being stared at or made fun of while selecting my entree or while eating, where I can safely look out the window while people talk instead of forcing myself to make eye contact, and where I am guaranteed to enjoy whipped cream at whatever capacity I want. There are rules here, but they make sense. You come in. You sit down, you eat or sit with people for a certain amount of time, and the atmosphere tries its best to stay the same, giving just enough space for longer laughter than the last time, room for a misplaced glance without the repercussion of violence just a small shrug and glance away, enough air that the music feels different each time it plays, even though the singers can only share their songs from below our feet if they ever choose to sing again. After trying to make the waiter smile, moving your plates into two stacks so it’s easier for the person cleaning up behind you, and paying the check, you’re going to have to remember how to fit your incorrect body into a world that does not want you. But in the diner, you can pretend you fit. In the diner, nothing makes sense and so, it’s the perfect place for you.

Meet Me at Flanigan’s

Flanigan’s Seafood Bar and Grill isn’t technically a diner. I know what people think of when they think of diners because I think it, too. We think of converted rail cars and open concept kitchens with flat top grills, counters with puffy stools, and quaint little booths flanking the rest of the interior. We think of waitresses with gravelly voices, milkshakes, drip coffee, greasy smashburgers, and the best damn pie you’ll ever eat in your life. I’m not trying to redefine what a diner is or isn’t, but when I think of what the diner experience is in South Florida, I think of Flanigan’s.

So, no, Flanigan’s isn’t technically a diner, but it’s difficult to explain exactly what Flanigan’s is. The various locations all have the same look, and I know most outsiders assume it’s a sports bar hangout for white South Florida dirt bags. The exteriors are painted white with shamrock green accents or stripes and feature the famous sign with the chain’s characteristic plywood-board-style typeface and a giant black and white caricature of the chain’s founder, Joe “Big Daddy” Flanigan, looking like he’s about to tell you his favorite joke. The interiors of the restaurants are floor-to-ceiling hardwood, and the walls are heavily decorated with taxidermied sea life and pictures of Big Daddy and his family on their many fishing and scuba adventures in the water around South Florida and the northern Caribbean. There’s a long bar at the center of every location, of course, and lots of TVs playing mostly Florida professional and college sports games (or, if there’s a lot of old people around, some golf). All of the locations also have TouchTunes jukeboxes that become some of the hottest spots in all of Broward and Miami-Dade County on Friday and Saturday nights around 10 p.m.

Flanigan’s serves mostly American food (whatever that means), and even though the full name features the word “seafood,” the  most popular dishes don’t feature anything you’d ever find in the ocean: their “famous” and award-winning baby back ribs, Rockin’ Rib Rolls, tumbleweed onions, Buffalo chicken wings, and loaded nachos. Every night of the week, you can get a rotating free appetizer with the order of a pitcher of soda or beer, and they have tons of meal deals that make it accessible to anyone who can afford to spend a little money on a meal out.

On top of that, a close friend of mine and I joke that everything at Flanigan’s is always a B-minus, a solid 80%. You’re not going to have the most stellar meal of your life there, but no matter which location you go to or when, it’ll be consistent and satisfying. Sure, it is pretty popular among the white South Florida dirt bags, but the weird thing about Flanigan’s is that it’s just popular in general. On any given day — and I mean any given day — you can walk into any Flanigan’s location and see it packed with people of all races and backgrounds, ages and incomes. And you’ll see queer people there, too. There’s always families with loud children, people celebrating their birthdays or graduations or promotions, people coming in right after a rock show, people watching the Dolphins or Heat games, and college-aged kids trying to get as obliterated as they possibly can. And everyone is just there together, eating and drinking and minding their business. Flanigan’s restaurants are so often some of the most harmoniously diverse spots in all of South Florida that it kind of feels like there’s a weird agreement between everyone who goes there…like whatever shit you’re holding on to, you better leave it at the door before you go in.

***I’ve been going to Flanigan’s since I was little, but my clearest memories of going are from after my parents got divorced when I was seven. Even though my dad makes the best grilled cheeses in the world, he’s never been much of a cook. For the first several years after the divorce, he juggled multiple low-paying jobs at a time, and we only got to see him one or two weekends a month and on holidays. Grocery shopping and spending time in the kitchen planning and preparing meals take time, and my dad didn’t have much time for us or himself.

We spent those weekends trying to squeeze a lot in — my and my brother’s little league games and art classes, my dad’s adult intramural softball games or bowling league matches, time with my paternal grandma and extended family, and something fun we could all do together. That’s a lot for a 72-hour period, so aside from Sunday dinners at my Nana’s, we mostly ended up spending our meal times circulating through some of the restaurants closest to the places we needed to be. There was the wing place with the sweet potato fries that came with marshmallow dip, the pizza spot one of my dad’s closest friends owned, a couple of places on the Hollywood Beach Broadwalk famous for fried seafood dishes and ice cream, the bowling alley concession stand. And there was a Flanigan’s in almost every part of the county we live(d) in.

Most of the other places he took us had small arcades or sticker dispensers or other built-in kid entertainment, but not Flanigan’s. Flanigan’s is just a restaurant and bar, no extra frills for children who can’t stand to be confined to a table. That’s why I feel such a fondness for the place. When we’d walk into Flanigan’s, my brother and I knew we’d have to sit at the table and actually hang out with my dad. We’d have to tell him about our school projects and sports practices, explain who the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys and No Doubt were, and listen to his stories without a single distraction except the possibility of coloring in the illustrations on the paper kids’ menu pack.

Since my dad often lived in apartments or small houses he shared with friends, sit-down meals at the kitchen table were pretty much nonexistent. Going to Flanigan’s filled that gap. We’d pile into our little booth, order what we always got — Flanigan’s famous ribs for my dad, dolphin (mahi mahi) fingers and fries for me, and hot chicken wings and curly fries for my brother — and get our sodas in their famous 32 oz. take-home green cups that also feature Big Daddy’s face, then start talking about whatever was on our minds. Often, there’d be other members of what my friends and I now refer to as the “Divorced Dad’s Club,” other kids and their dads without wedding bands eating and enjoying (or sometimes not enjoying) each other’s company. We never talked to them or joined their tables or anything, but there was a weird sense of unspoken camaraderie there. It wasn’t just my brother and me who had a dad who couldn’t really cook and didn’t have a lot of time. Other kids did, too, and that was ok. There was nothing to be ashamed of. It was such a relief to know my brother and I weren’t the only ones experiencing the impacts of how our parents’ divorce restructured our lives.

Funnily enough, Flanigan’s has always been — from its founding by Big Daddy and his son to the decorations on the wall to the atmosphere — a place that was focused on the importance of family, and going there during that time in our lives is part of what helped me reorient what being part of a family looked and felt like. By the time I got to high school, I was already very firmly a big fan (or should I say Fanigan??) of Flanigan’s. At that point, it wasn’t just the place where my dad took us to fill up on food and take some time to catch up with one another before we rushed off to the next place or event. It was becoming an integral part of my social life as a teenager because, as I’d come to find out when I got to high school, almost everyone I knew grew up loving and going to Flanigan’s.

***The restaurant part of the Flanigan’s dynasty didn’t open until 1985, but Big Daddy’s Liquors has been a mainstay on the South Florida scene since Big Daddy himself got down here in the late 1950s. Many people don’t know that most of the development in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties has happened within mine and my parents’ lifetimes. In the context of the rest of the country, South Florida as a whole isn’t very old. It’s not hard to notice this. There are only a few places in these counties where you can see things older than my parents, who were born in the 1960s, and most of them are in Coral Gables and South Miami. In my whole life in South Florida, I’ve only met two people who grew up and lived in a home that was built before 1950. In other states, I’ve been to restaurants and diners that were over 100 years old. There’s only one place like that still open in South Florida, the very fancy Joe’s Stone Crab, and that certainly wasn’t a place my family would’ve patronized in my youth. Growing up down here in the 1990s and early 2000s always felt a little disorienting in a way that would’ve been hard for me to describe back then. Because nothing feels old, it’s hard to feel the history of the place in the ways we’re taught to feel it. There isn’t a supposed distinct culture here that connects people in the way New Yorkers and Bostonians have their accents, how Midwesterners and Baltimoreans have their slang, or how different Southerners have their cuisines.

In a weird way, Flanigan’s always kind of subconsciously filled that gap for me and for, I think, many of the people I was friends with as a young person, which is why I so often think of it in the same way many people do about their local diners. When we all started to drive and finally had the freedom to decide what we’d do with our time before and after the shows and organizing meetings we were frequently attending, Flanigan’s quickly became one of our go-to spots. I’ll be honest and say that because we all thought we were so cool, we started going to Flanigan’s with an enormous degree of irony. I’ve already described it in detail, so I think it’s easy to see why it might be tempting to treat a place like Flanigan’s with a certain level of ironic detachment. It’s kitschy. It’s kitschy as hell, actually. And it’s gimmicky. You walk in there, and you can see all the parts of South Florida that drove us crazy as “interesting” and “creative” teenagers: Big Daddy’s face plastered all over everything, the gaudy aquatic decorations and saltwater aquariums, and the fish, so many dead fish with their dead, glass-marble eyes. It was almost annoying, actually, as if this was what South Florida culture was all about, this is what we were good for. It felt funny to go see bands like Against Me! and The Blood Brothers, then go to Flanigan’s to eat tumbleweed onions and fries and talk shit about whatever happened at the show that night.

Most of my friends ended up choosing to go away for college and a couple of us, including me, had to stay and attend local universities. This was an especially tough transition for me because it felt scary to not have my queer little friend-family around all the time. These were the people who felt safe when nothing else did, the people I did homework with, the people I struggled with, and the people who helped me learn how to harness the power of community and use that power to do work out in the world. I wasn’t really interested in the process of making other friends, and I didn’t think I’d ever make ones who understood me as much as they did. We spent that last, pre-college summer doing everything we could together, and we found ourselves at Flanigan’s a lot. Our relationship with the place started to shift at the same time our relationships with each other had already started to change. That summer, we didn’t spend a lot of time at the restaurant talking shit and goofing off. We spent a lot of time talking about our fears, our desires, our hopes and dreams. We imagined what our lives might look like in a year or two years or five or ten. We made plans to keep in touch and to see each other but also promised not to get in the way of new connections and new friendships. We even used our final visit before everything changed to order each other’s favorite meals by ordering for the friend who was sitting to the right of each of us. I ordered those famous Rockin’ Rib Rolls and a Caesar salad for my friend to the right of me, and my friend to the left ordered a grilled dolphin sandwich with curly fries for me —  still my go-to order to this day. Then, that night, we said our “goodbyes” there.

For a while, I didn’t go to Flanigan’s, and I didn’t insist that any of the acquaintances I made in my college courses or at my jobs go there with me either. I just kind of passed by it all the time and tried to remember why I didn’t like places like Flanigan’s in the first place, which was a lot easier to do than deal with the anger I had around being a kid who couldn’t afford to go away to school. During that first semester, I spent every moment I could trying to get out of South Florida to see my friends who left, and many of them obliged me by staying at their colleges during some of their long weekend breaks. I’d sleep on their floors, and they’d show me around their college towns, take me to parties, introduce me to their new friends. We’d go see a show or just hang out at their favorite coffee shops. I was getting to know other places and getting to be with my old friends, but we never talked about how much they missed being home. When everyone was finally back during that first winter after we started college, it wasn’t even a question where we’d be having our first meal together. After that, this was what we always did until we grew apart entirely. Flanigan’s became the place we’d go to try to reconnect and to reminisce and to pretend we weren’t all changing as rapidly as we were.

As we got older, we grew further and further apart from one another. One of the hardest truths about being alive is that not every relationship you have in life ends for a distinct reason. Not all of them end dramatically or abruptly or because you decided to end them. Sometimes, you just grow up and grow out of some of the friendships that helped make you who you are. Sometimes, the people you grew up with join sororities or become Finance Bros™ out of nowhere or get into romantic situations that require all their time and attention for one reason or another. You change, too. You want different kinds of relationships, friends who are interested in investing in the communities where you came from, people who match your enthusiasm and optimism about the possibilities of the future but also check you when you’re not treating yourself or others as well as you should. The distance that was growing between us pushed me to build connections with people who were closer to me in both geography and the values that were becoming more and more important to me.

***
Years passed, and by the time I was out of college and into my first years of teaching, I constructed a new web of close friends who, like me, grew up in South Florida and also began their adult lives here. They didn’t all know and hang out with each other like the kids I grew up with did, but they suited me a lot better and made sense for the person I was growing into. It’s hard to remember exactly what events conspired to make this possible, but at 25, I started going to Flanigan’s with friends again. As far I can remember, my friend Liz, a real Miami head with ties to Flanigan’s that are even deeper and stronger than mine, would tell stories and make jokes about the place all the time until one weekend day when we were day-drinking, we just decided to “pop-in” for a couple of beers and some fish dip.

When we got there, we sat down at the bar and ordered our Bud Lights and smoked fish dip, a Florida specialty with cream cheese, lemon, and lime that Flanigan’s really seems to have mastered. By the time we finished both, we worked up an even larger appetite. So, we ordered five hot wings to share, a couple of dolphin sandwiches with curly fries, and more BLs, of course — an order we recently named “The Big Daddy” after her last trip home. For some reason, our trip there that day opened up so many new and exciting conversations between us about growing up in South Florida, about our lives before we knew each other, about our families, about which people at work we disliked the most. At some point, we put a few bucks in the jukebox and played the kind of shit our dads probably listened to with their friends at bars when they were young: KC & the Sunshine Band, The Rolling Stones, and Fleetwood Mac. We ended up staying a lot longer than I thought we would, and all of my warm feelings for the place came rushing back to me in the days following. After that, I went back to all my other friends asking “Hey, how come we never go to Flanigan’s??” Suddenly, Flanigan’s was back in the rotation again.

South Florida has historically been a very transient space, and in the last nine years, many of the friends I’ve made as an adult have moved on and moved out of here to pursue different career opportunities or relationships or just because they were tired of it. Unlike the very first time I watched my friends move away, I feel like a professional at it now. Maturity and being able to juggle multiple responsibilities at a time makes it so much easier to handle the changes that naturally occur in our relationships as we get older. Luckily, the friendships you make in adulthood are also generally more likely to stick, and these ones have regardless of the many hundreds of miles between us. Now, when my friends come home for a visit, we often treat Flanigan’s like our own personal meetinghouse. We go because it’s always the same and it’s always consistent, because we’ve never had a terrible meal or a warm beer there, and because no matter how many people are there, it always feels comfortable. It’s an easy place for us to gather to spend quality time together and revel in the South Florida bullshit of it all, those particular idiosyncrasies they can’t and don’t get in the places where they live now.

Of course, not all of my friends have gone, and through teaching and organizing and attending literary events, I’ve continued to make connections with people who have moved here over the years. I go to Flanigan’s with them (or I have plans to take them in the near future) specifically because they don’t have those same connections to the place as many born-and-bred South Floridians do. It’s a place I can take them to help expose a piece of me that’s always been a little challenging to explain — the piece that feels shameless about kitsch and tackiness and things being ridiculous and bizarre in aspects that are specific to this wild and weird ass region of the country. It’s a little key to a part of me that deeply, deeply respects how absurd and incredible it is that Flanigan’s is one of the longest-running establishments in the three counties that make up this region and that one of the most recognizable symbols in all of South Florida is Big Daddy’s face adorning the Flanigan’s logo. I know my friends who moved here from other places will learn to love it in their own ways, too.

Burgers, Bodies, and Off-Menu Bisexual Swagger

This is about a high school job.

It’s also about accidental cannibalism.

It’s about having your internal clock attuned to the time it takes to cook a burger. Your body — ears, nose, and whatever part of you counts your own heartbeats banging out the passage of time — tracking the time until the patty cooks to the desired done-ness. It’s a matter of heartbeats, some near-imperceptible change in the tenor of the sizzle that signals it’s time to flip.

I was used to the rhythms of the river by the time I started work on its US shore. We were located at a narrow, smuggling-heavy crossing at a point where you could see Canadians on the other side, wave to them. Sometimes you could shout and they’d call back. In spring, the Coast Guard releases the ice from the boom that keep the frozen river contained above the falls. Ice tumbles through water and churns it up to gray peaks in the early spring, while snow still rests on the ground, while unthawed snowmen with windworn bodies stand like ancient statues in yards. The fish in season go from smelt in April to salmon in September and colder months and on and on. The power plant churns out electricity below the falls, and the water sometimes emerges, frothy from its tumbling through the rapids, with bubbles on rapids that’re toilet-bowl-cleaner too-blue from some chemical dump up stream. On hot summer days, it smells of dead fish. The odor creeps up the streets like a mist, and I cover my nose and think that there were reasons the people who lived close to the water used to be called “river rats” before tourism and “waterfront dining” were a thing.

I got the job by walking up to this casual burgers-kind-of restaurant on the edge of the river and asking if they were hiring. That’s it. The owner — a tall, skinny white guy who favored baseball caps and whose dad owned half the commercial property in the town — was always hiring fresh meat, but I didn’t know that yet. He told me to come back tomorrow. I texted my dad, who was living in his saddest divorced dad apartment. He wouldn’t get off my back until I got a real job as soon as it became legal for me to work. We were both happy.

When I showed up, the boss had me fill out my W-2 and set me up at the ice cream station. The boss was snobby about his offerings, insisted on Hershey’s, told us it had less air, fewer bubbles. The ice cream station sat across from the kitchen, and each was an opposing semi-circle with a walkway in between.

The restaurant was in an old coal silo, the interior walls streaked with old black stains that bloomed like mold across the walls and couldn’t be scrubbed away. The basement level held a bait shop, down on the docks. This was where we also stored our extra ice cream in the back, in a freezer. I’d have to go past the tanks of fish breeding to be fed to other fish to haul the ice cream out. Around the top of the concrete cylinder, where the restaurant was, was a near-complete circle of a deck that hovered out over the docks and had a clear view onto the water. That was where customers ate after they ordered inside.

I scooped and rang out ice cream customers, kept the till in order and the peanuts stocked. I cleaned the bathrooms, which was mostly fine, and finally, after my first paycheck, I had the money to buy clothes I actually wanted. I bought tight shirts in blacks and neons, low-rise jeans, obscene thongs, and bulbous scene kid baubles in plastic (and stole a few things, too). I upped my penciled racoon eyeliner game with liquid I drew into huge cat eyes.

On busy days, two people worked the ice cream area. That’s where I met A. She was fired after two weeks. It didn’t really surprise me. She barely worked. Her absolute resistance to laboring hard for an employer was so foreign to me, but it was also respectable. We remained friends and became inseparable after we were assigned the same home room that fall.

One night, I was working ice cream with another person, a girl. Ice cream wasn’t all “girls,” it was just reserved for people without kitchen experience. This was an oddly egalitarian business. Men and women, boys and girls — and whatever I was — occupied roles irrespective of our assigned genders, which would not be true when I worked elsewhere. Ever after, I’ve held a pretty low but simple standard: I expect to see gender diversity in a kitchen. And barely any place delivers. The girl I was working with lasted a week or two. The night we worked together was a hot, humid, muggy night — unusual at that time when evenings, even in the height of summer, got cold enough up there to warrant a jacket. We had propped the doors of the restaurant open, hoping to capture a breeze, fanning ourselves with pieces of cardboard while we prepared for close. A cloud of insects swarmed in. Before we could shut the doors, they’d coated the inside of the freezers. Their delicate, tiny bodies and wings were no match for the ice cream. They drowned. They covered the inside of the glass and the tops of the gallons.

We had to clean it up. The girl freaked out and gave up, so I wiped down the interior. I scraped away the insects and a couple inches of ice cream out of each flavor and threw it away for good measure. While I was cleaning, alone, J, a guy who’d come from Brooklyn to live with his girlfriend and who worked the kitchen, leaned over the pick up area and said, “She’s made you her bitch.” Which was rude, really none of his business. He was a muscular, short king with a shaved head who said chocolate like chawk-laht. The rest of us just had Buffalo accents.

“I don’t mind.” I reflected on the shameful and specific teenage bisexual predicament of being a person who girls my age could get to do just about anything for them — no matter if they were straight, no matter if they were mean, basically no matter what. I reminded myself to try and be better about that while I scraped bugs out of the freezer and the girl got ready to leave for the night.

There was something about having my own wages that took my bisexuality out of the woods, out of unused school stairwells and into the public sphere. The economic freedom and the adult-adjacent responsibility of having a job, having my own schedule, lent itself easily to breaking out of the secret places in schools and into the rest of the world. My kind-of girlfriend had gone off to a military academy and was in her first year, where they didn’t allow any communication but letters. No phone, no Facebook, no email; they could only send and receive paper missives. It was still Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the academy opened all of the freshman letters and read them before passing them off. In those letters, we wrote around our desires. It seemed too easy for her to conform. I struggled, wanting to burst out of the page, scream about loving her, to write “FUCK GEORGE BUSH” in huge letters. I never did that, though, because, mostly, I didn’t want her to get into trouble. If the cadets got in trouble, they had to do things like spend all night scrubbing toilets, which, look, it’s fine when you’re scrubbing one or two restaurant toilets…but a dormitory’s worth? More?

When she came into town, she told me blithely about boys she’d hooked up with and a girl from her squad who’d hit on her the moment they’d gotten drunk. I traded my own stories, admired her cadet muscles. I bought a skirt from Hot Topic, and she took me to a Korn concert [she LOVED Korn] where we made out on the grass. We ran through mosh pits, and I lied about my age while we accepted Smirnoff Ices from strangers. We finished one night together by having sex in the back of her parents’ minivan while parked on some dark sidestreet in Buffalo’s gayborhood.

She left, and I resumed my usual solitary summer movements, going to work, going for long walks, and cajoling the older girls at the restaurant into buying me cigarettes. One day, J called across from the kitchen where he worked alone. He asked if I wanted to learn to prep. It was me at ice cream, C, the girl who usually bought me cigarettes, at the register, and him running the kitchen alone. C usually had her brown hair slicked back in a tight, high ponytail and wore sparkling eyeshadow, penciled liner all around her eyes. She reapplied lip gloss at an alarming frequency. J asked C if she wanted to learn, too, but she said, no, she liked doing register and only the register. She went to the pop machine to get herself one of our favored mixed drinks — Loganberry [a raspberry/blackberry-ish flavored, thick and syrupy, tart and sweet juice only available regionally] and Sprite.

He showed me how to make the salads. It was a lot like making a salad. Then, J demonstrated the various sandwich preps and how to operate the fryer. No one came in. C sipped on her drink and watched us. He took me over to the grill, got out a piece of chicken, a patty, and a pile of beef and showed me how to make one of our grilled chicken sandwiches, a burger, and our signature sandwich which featured shredded beef, onion strings and mayo on a French roll — which, I realize, is a little strange but the owner made it up, okay?

“We’ll split them,” he said and C nodded. It sounded good to her.

J was actually a good teacher. He didn’t just rush through in front of me and expect me to learn by watching. He asked me to try to do the things myself, pointed me toward the recipe book, and offered helpful tips as we went — only flip the burgers once, never put the anvil on them, when the chicken’s done it looks like this, and this is how you shred the beef and clean the griddle and the grill between orders. He showed me the fryer, the heat lamp, and the ticketing system. We were a baskets kind-of-place. I spent some time prepping red plastic mesh containers with their little wax paper liners. While J was explaining more stuff about the kitchen to me — where the Gardenburgers were in the freezer and the refrigerated drawers where the chicken thawed — the boss came in to grab J. He needed help unloading a truckful of supplies he’d brought in.

“If an order comes through, just take care of it,” he waved at the grill. The place was still dead. I looked through the recipe book and chatted with C.

A person came in. My stomach dropped. C raised her pencil thin eyebrows at me. I nodded, like, ‘yes, I will cook this man’s food’ and waited for the ticket to come through. I took the ticket, stuck it in the holder above the grill, and made my first order.

Then, something happened. When I looked up, there was a line out the door, people engaged in that eternal struggle of trying to figure out whose job it is to be holding the door open for the other people standing in line. C looked at me. I shrugged. She started taking the orders. The tickets printed all heat ink and hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken fingers, roast beef, fries and fish fries, onion rings and sweet potatoes and steak and chicken and maybe a veggie burger. I dove into the sizzles and spurts and grease. I dropped fries and laid bacon out on the griddle and prepared buns with our special seed mixture for beef on weck. It became ticket-grill-griddle-prep-serve-call while I moved back and forth through the narrow kitchen. I’m not sure if I breathed. It might have gone on an hour or more. C dropped behind the counter and started making side salads for me whenever she could, but people just kept coming, wanting food, staring at me like who-the-fuck-was-I but not minding once they got their stuff.

I instinctively reached for the next ticket and grasped only air. I looked at C who gave me a smile. It was over. The rush had slowed back down to nothing.

“You’re alright.”

I looked behind me. Out the back door of the kitchen, which opened up onto the river and Canada beyond that, my boss stood, watching me, arms folded.

“What?” I’d really lost the ability to comprehend language at this moment. It was like when I used to draw. Your brain switches to a different mode, and you can’t actually hear what anyone’s saying anymore.

“He says you’re alright. You did good. That’s what he means.”

My boss nodded.

When I checked the next schedule that came out, I was entirely in the kitchen. My ice cream shifts went to someone else.

I took to the dry erase markers and would illustrate the day’s specials. When we served “Steak in the Grass” I drew a snake slithering through grass below it. It led to more than a few people ordering “the snake.”

To understand this place, you have to also understand that we were a big tourist spot. We could have also been a great breakfast spot, except the boss hated breakfast, and if anyone brought it up he shut them down and hard. Fishermen would often be at the door when I went to open at 10 a.m., blowing into wind-chapped hands and asking why we hadn’t been open at 6 or even 7 a.m., and if there was coffee on, and yes, if there was breakfast. All to which I’d think, sir, I would not want to be without coffee for five hours so I get it but as you can see we are literally putting the key in the door here.

Bikers were my favorite customers. This was before I’d learned to look for signs of white supremacist affiliations on bikers and when I was easily wooed by their appreciation for the simple food and their big tips and patience, likely a matter of working class solidarity. They’d swarm the parking area with their bikes and come in covered in leather and tattoos, with long beards and ponytails like my grandpa’s, order something un-fussy like a medium cheeseburger and fries, and stuff big bills into the tip jar.

If you were a tourist who made it to that part of the river, you likely went through that restaurant. It was easy, cheap, satisfying, and the most general, familiar American fare, except for our beef on weck and Loganberry. You could get a beer and watch the water. You could get ice cream for your kids. I heard the deepest southern accents and helped tourists whose languages I didn’t speak to communicate their order by pointing at things I held up from the kitchen. Locals made it in occasionally, too, sometimes kids from school. We’d say ‘hey’ and I’d sneak them in some extras if we were friends.

There were a lot of people I got to know while working there. There was K with a regional accent so strong that she said coffee like calf-eeh with the hardest A-sound you can imagine. She’d come in at the crack of dawn, do hours of prep, then pour herself a cup of coffee and with satisfaction say “a caffee and a cack, that’s all I need in the mornings.” There was the guy who was a senior at the school I was going to go to. He took my dropping my bisexuality to him in stride and gave me rides home in his ridiculous vintage Mustang, roaring well above the speed limit while I smoked a cigarette out the passenger window.

He was also a scuba diver who swam to the depths of the river. One day, he told me about the worst thing he’d ever seen. It was a man who’d gone missing weeks before, trapped under some rocks at the bottom of the river. He was swimming through seaweed, didn’t see it coming until he was face to face with the man.

When he saw him, he screamed so hard it dislodged his scuba gear. The man was partially eaten by fish. Whoever’s job it is to surface underwater bodies recovered the man’s corpse. The guy I worked with said he’d woken up sweating, wailing for months.

The rapids there are strong and, beyond that, they’re a winding, interconnected maze of underground water currents that can pull a body under and take it miles down river without ever once letting it surface. A body might never surface.

It took me ages to get used to helicopters after I left. There, helicopters almost always meant that someone had fallen in, that they were looking for someone. The longer you could hear the helicopters, the less hope there was. I thought about the fishermen and the fish they were catching.

That boy also told me about the sturgeon, fish that can get up to nine feet long and live to be 150 years old. The sturgeon in the river then could have been alive in the 1850s. They know how to survive the rapids. They’d eat what they found.

There’s never been a day the river didn’t remind me of death. Not that my coworkers and their hidings would ever let me forget. There was the slow day everyone raced down the paved hill to the docks on push carts. There were all the times we were too lazy to drag the trash down the hill and would try to aim it off the edge of the deck, hovering over certain death, the railing pressed into our bellies, swinging the garbage bags under and toward the dumpster.

My friends and I would climb down the gorge, down the edge that tumbled stories upon stories above the river that looked like less than a hand’s width below, the power plant just a building in the distance up river. We’d duck down into a cave, on the very edge of the US, and smoke weed while staring across the border, our backs to the entire country. One time, one of the boys showed off by hanging off the ledge by one arm. I had to crawl my way out of the cave from the second-hand vertigo.

My hands developed heat resistance as I worked. Nerve endings acclimated to the grill. I became acquainted with our boss’s mercurial personality. The same man who promoted me screamed in rage when I accidentally served a veggie burger he wanted for his lunch. I thought he had to be joking until he started pelting me with frozen veggie burgers as hard as hockey pucks, barely able to yell “You have enough veggie burgers NOW!?!?” through his raw throat, veins popping out on the side of his head.

It was nothing compared to what other people told me he’d done. One day, the pop machine leaked downstairs and destroyed his computer. So, he came upstairs and smashed all of the computers onto the ground. When the cash register was off once, he’d torn it out of the counter and hurled it across the room at the woman who’d been on it that night. She said it hit the wall just above her head. He was clearly, frequently on cocaine. At night, he’d count the register. More and more often, he started to scream up the stairs, to throw fits about missing cash. He’d interrogate me. I’d throw up my hands. I hadn’t touched the register. I was in the kitchen, I’d tell him, and he’d back off. He installed a camera above the register. We made fun of him, swapped stories. Still, he paid a few dollars more per hour than anyone else, so we ultimately didn’t do anything about it, whether out of some perverted sense of loyalty or just that’s-the-way-it-is-ness. The woman who said ‘caffee’ had worked there for years and was one of the few people who’d yell back at him if he got out of line. She’d brag about it, how he could never run his restaurant without her.

Some people might have felt like dealing with a person as unstable as he was would have reduced my confidence. If anything, it heightened it. I was surrounded by nothing but unpredictable people. I was steadier than him, but at the same time, I knew how I was perceived. I was constantly on trial for my untrustworthiness, my sexuality, my greed. When someone told me bisexuals were greedy, I’d reply that, absolutely, I was. Because I was, because I was greedy for knowing other people, for connection, for drugs and love — and I didn’t care who knew it.

At the time, I wrapped any and all gender feelings under bisexuality. When someone commented that I sat like a boy or acted like a boy or liked things that boys liked — I chalked it up to bisexuality. My boss and my coworkers never questioned and also never judged how much I could carry. They never cut my legs off before I could run like everyone else had. They just let me handle the kitchen, smoke my cigarettes, make my off-menu items. It’s also true that this paid off for them as much as it did for my confidence. In my tenure as a line cook, I only remember truly fucking up two orders. This is shockingly few considering the slew of tickets I saw every day.

The way I wish I could still hold one of those receipt-thin tickets in my hands, leave a fingerprint of grease, call out an order. I loved all of it, even taking apart the pop machine and extracting the dead bodies of wasps that had contorted themselves up toward the source of the sweetness, even the yelling and the worst, most unending rushes and the longest, dullest rainy days.

*My boss also blew my mind by outfitting his car with an engine modification that allowed him to run it on the used soy oil. J told me he’d ridden with him in that car, and that it smelled like French fries.

***It was somewhere between showing up to work high, dodging random things hurled at my head, and doing a damn good job that I developed a level of line cook energy that wound together seamlessly with an emerging bisexual swagger that people would point out to me as I got older. It bubbled to the surface as a supreme disrespect for authority that followed me throughout my school days and into my nights roaming our town with my friends. We smoked and drank and vandalized, climbed and invaded, trespassed and fucked, and it was all I ever wanted. My bisexuality was part and parcel to my deviance and my freedom, linked to lawlessness and enabled by having money, an excuse — and the adulthood in my family that came not at a specific age, but with having a paying job.

Until it all came tumbling down. It was my second summer at the restaurant, and a girl I’d hooked up with only once in a threesome came in with some friends. I really wanted something like an actual date. We flirted. They ordered and then went outside to wait for their food. I did the prep for the next order, added a patty to the grill.

My foot slid on some grease. I couldn’t get purchase on the mat. My face was headed for the hot iron lines of the grill.

I swung my right arm around and hit the hot grill with my forearm instead of my face. All my weight pressed my bare arm into the grill while I ran in place in grease. Before my arm could cook any more, I made the decision to put my left hand flat down on the hot griddle and use that leverage to get myself up, to pull my sizzling forearm off the grill.

I burned my palm, but not nearly as bad as I’d cooked my arm.

A whole lot of my skin stayed on that grill.

I was on my knees on the floor trying not to scream. C ran to get the boss.

He took me back down into the basement, which did not seem like the direction we should be going. He put my arm under the faucet of the slop sink and ran the cold water. There, he opened up this massive first aid kit and told me stories about how bad someone else once got burned when the fryer overflowed.

“He was standing in that sink while I was hosing his skin off his legs. It just sloughed off into the sink.” I looked at that dirty, scratched up slop sink, “It was way worse than this.”

He bandaged me up and, honestly, I went back to work. By the time I got back up there, someone else had fulfilled the orders for my one-time-hookup and her friends. Months later, I’d offhandedly mention to her that I hoped they cleaned the grill after so much of my skin came off on it.

She just widened her eyes and nodded, slowly. [Insert joke about the fact that she’d already eaten the same thing anyway.]

If we’re being honest, too, we’ve all probably eaten something we didn’t want to from a place like this, from a diner, a dive. That kind of chaos is the spice that gives the food that irreplaceable quality. It might not be high art, but your heart still knows it when you’re eating it. It’s food for people.

That night, my dad picked me up for Divorced Dad Thursday. He asked me what the fuck happened to my arms and then was out of the car and pinning my boss to the outside of his own restaurant before I knew what was happening. I cringed until my dad’s screaming ended. Though, to be clear, I wasn’t super surprised, and my boss deserved it.

My dad got back in the car. “He should have taken you to a fucking hospital.” At home, he re-dressed my wounds with the actual expertise he had from being a nurse, and one for the Army at that. I’d already developed a peculiar comfort with having a dad who would just, like, do what they’d do at a hospital but at home and for free.

I quit after that. I wore burn salve and bandages on my arms for well over a month, changing them out several times a day. I chased my friend’s [remember the one who got fired after a week?] little brother and sister around her house pretending to be a mummy while they giggle-screeched.

Remember the camera and the cash register and my boss hollering from the basement? Well, turns out J was stealing from him the whole time. I stopped by one time when the boss’s car wasn’t in the lot for some gossip from old coworkers. Turns out, after I quit, he filed an official accident report. He wasn’t going to, but he got scared when I quit. He’d never required the no-slip shoes of us that would have helped prevent the accident. I’d never heard of such a thing at the time, not until I had to wear them when working future restaurant gigs.

That work experience followed me wherever I went. People wondered why I was so calm when talking an Exacto knife pointed at me out of someone’s hand or how I was able to filter through noise and just concentrate on what needed to be done in a classroom. I tolerated my bosses to a certain extent, and then, just existed kind of separately from them in my own bubble whenever they got too shitty. I was disdainful at every nonprofit job where the men couldn’t even find the level of respect for women that a coked-out capitalist like my old boss could manage. I found my bisexuality in practice and the power in my independence, and I clung to it.

I miss that job, and I’ve filled that hole with cooking for other people, for my whole life, as much as I can. My off-menu item experiments have become a kitchen filled with jars of different colored liquids, none of them labeled, each of them a different cold brew or syrup or kombucha, a spread of vessels with things growing and fermenting, a stash of homemade jam. I’ve laid down commercial anti-fatigue mats because I stand so much in the kitchen.

And when I’m lucky enough to dig into a pile of burn-your-mouth piping hot fries that some other soul made, I tip my heart out. Flesh and blood went into those fries, and I’ll never forget it.

The Place for Smiles

When you’re drunk and high late nights in Pittsburgh, there aren’t a lot of places you can go.

It’s a running joke: If you’re hungry late in Pittsburgh, you have to fight for your life. Most places are only open until 10 p.m. at the very latest. I heard from my older brother that Ritter’s Diner used to be open super late. It was the place he went after a night of drinking. He’d fill up on breakfast and lunch items, then walk home in the cold dark.

For me, that place was Eat n Park. Eat n Park was founded in 1949 by Larry Hatch and Bill Peters. It’s kind of an institution in the city. As a kid, we would go to the one close to Walmart and eat from the salad bar. It wasn’t super impressive like the Hoss’s we also frequented, but it got the job done. I ate the chili and a salad and maybe something kid-friendly, like chicken tenders, with my brothers and niece.

At the end of the meal, you could get one of their famous Smiley Cookies. A basic, hard sugar cookie topped with white royal icing, colored icing in the shape of a smile.

What I remember about eating at this spot as a kid was the times I went alone with my mom. She would tell me about her marital problems, her friend drama, and anything she had on her mind that day. I listened to anything and everything she said. Word for word, desperate to be her confidante.

***Going to Eat n Park as a drunk adult was a different story. I’d spend most of the night drinking at 5801, There, and other gay bars around town with my best friend, her ex, and their friends. Back in those days, I thought drinking was the most interesting thing about me. My favorite cocktail was a vodka cranberry. I liked the tartness of the cranberry and the stark pink of the mixed drink, it made me feel feminine and classy, even when I was the opposite.

If I wasn’t having a cocktail, I drank wine and whiskey alone in my apartment, waiting for the next party.

When I wasn’t hanging out with my best friend, I was running in a crowd of lesbians I had been introduced to by an old high school acquaintance. She added me on Facebook one day after I graduated from college and confidently messaged me: “I always knew you were gay.”

This woman reintroduced me to The L Word, and it wasn’t long before I began to wonder what the hell we were doing with each other. Were we going to hook up? My mind was governed by the thought of adding another notch to my bedpost.

We never did hook up, but she did introduce me to her crew of lesbians that were entrenched in the melodrama of who was fucking who in the group.

I grew close with the most charismatic of the group and watched as another woman became increasingly attached to her. Once, when they were giving me a ride home after I had too much to drink, I lay woozy and hot in the back of the car as they argued about how the butch was into the charismatic one, but the charismatic one paid her no attention.

They assumed I was blacked out, but I was conscious enough to be saddened by this, because I had a thing for the butch. She was stocky and looked like her lips were soft.

We’d sometimes end up at the Eat n Park in Squirrel Hill. By this time, I was vegan and was keen on eating sides like french fries and salads without dressing. I didn’t want to be the obnoxious one that had the waiter run down the ingredients of other dishes, so I stuck to things I knew couldn’t be made with animal products.

***Eat n Park is a chain throughout Pennsylvania and West Virginia with the feel of a one-off homey diner. The waiters and waitresses were either teenagers with their first jobs or 20-year veterans that called you hun when filling up your coffee.

The color scheme is green and red, with an off-white to balance the two. When you enter, you are met with the hostess and a large display case of pies; the classics meet more inventive ones like chocolate peanut butter pie.

When you’re seated, you first get your drinks. I was partial to strawberry lemonade or the slightly decent coffee. After a night of drinking, I thought “sobering up” meant black coffee and fried foods.

The salad bar used to be $7.99 for one person, so you could fill up on greens, macaroni or potato salad, soups, chili, and stews with rolls and biscuits on the side for a pretty decent price.

***It didn’t take long for me in my addiction journey to start mixing drugs with alcohol. I got into pills, mostly Xanax, but really whatever anybody gave me. Before I would head out drinking, I’d pop a pill and steady myself in the mirror, determined to have a good time and be somewhat charming.

I don’t always remember what I took, but one day I took too much of it. And with a side of too much drinking, I was soon slumped and drooling in a booth at Eat n Park, my friends trying to shove fries and fried zucchini into my mouth to help me come back to myself.

I remember the hard glass against my forehead, how I must have looked to the waitress, hell, to my friends. To teenagers and early twenties folks heading in to do the same thing we had set out to do.

I drank pretty regularly from age 11 to 25, with a break around the age of 17 before heading off to college. On my 18th birthday, I relapsed and didn’t look back for seven years.

***When I did finally get sober, Eat n Park and I met again. I hadn’t been for a while, and a group of sober people I had started to hang out with suggested we go there after a hangout for coffee and food.

I immediately had a flashback to the night I spent slumped in the booth with my eyes glazed over and cringed. I didn’t want to go. But trying to be cordial with my new friend group led me to sliding into one of the chairs at an Eat n Park table long enough to fit our huge party.

From the beginning of those sober trips to Eat n Park, we had a great waitress who was definitely in high school or college, just trying to make a few bucks to support herself. She was a rockstar. No matter how many people were seated with us, she always remembered who had what and what we wanted to be added to or removed from a dish, what side of mayonnaise somebody else needed, everything.

When I was new to this sober group, I always felt like the focus was on me, which I hated, because as much as I wanted to be kind, I also did not want to talk to anyone. My desire to remain sober led me to hang out with these people, but I wasn’t interested in them actually getting to know me.

Being sober for an extended period of time was a new venture for me. Since I was 11, I hadn’t been sober for more than six months at a time, so when I reached that milestone in a new group of friends, I was met with cheers and congratulations. It was a good feeling. I had accomplished something I didn’t think was possible for me anymore.

Then I got a year, then two, then three, then four. I was slowly doing what I said I couldn’t. We’d head to Eat n Park before a hang with just a couple of us, talk about our problems, our triumphs, our personal projects. I didn’t have to be embarrassed or apologetic about my actions anymore. A place I was once afraid to show my face in became a sign of good fortune and a changed life for me.

I grew to love the people around me, those I once was so averse to, those I thought I could never let know me. They know me now, and they haven’t run away.

The Eat n Park in Squirrel Hill is shut down now. The chain has slowly been scaling back on its restaurants around the state. I’ll always remember it as the place where I built a community, one that liked me for me and not because we were intoxicated. I’m different now, but I still cling to the image of drunk and slobbering me so that I know that is a place I can go back to. It keeps me on the right path to recall the past and steer clear of it. It keeps me whole and humble to strive toward who I want to be today.

No Matter How Much Changes, These Diners Stay The Same

I grew up in Staten Island, NY. Of the five boroughs of New York City, it is easily the shittiest — between the lack of exciting things to do and the Republicans, I can’t say it’s my favorite place on Earth. But it’s my hometown, and there are some things I do love about it. If Staten Island has anything, it’s an abundance of delicious diners, and so many have left their mark on my heart.

New York City diners are unmatched in my not-so-humble, completely biased opinion. Staten Island diners are among the top tier; they have everything a diner should. Formica tables, vinyl seats where your bare legs stick in the summer, TVs mounted in the corner playing the local news, horrible lighting. Just thinking of them brings an ache to my chest and a hankering for curly fries or a homemade cherry Coke.

As a kid, there were a handful of diners on Staten Island that were part of our regular rotation. There was the King’s Arms, the Colonnade Diner, and one long-gone that no one in my family can remember the name of (I called both of my parents to ask!). As a kid, my usual diner dinner companions were my grandmother, who I called Gram, and her best friend, Ms. Betty. The two of them took me on a host of local adventures when I was in elementary school. We’d go to community theatre shows and have dinner at the diner before. Whenever it was my turn to decide on where we were going to eat, I always chose a diner. It got to the point where they didn’t even ask me anymore; we’d just go to whatever diner was closest.

The exterior of the Colonnade was black with a pink and blue neon sign. Inside, there were lots of windows and reflective surfaces, pink neon lighting, jukeboxes at every table. I liked flipping through the song options, even though I rarely wanted to hear anything specific. But when I did, my Gram or Ms. Betty would hand me a coin, and I would carefully make my selection. It was usually some 80s song, because that’s always been my brand.

The one I couldn’t remember (The Country Club Diner! My dad remembered and called me back) was the fanciest. It had tablecloths, and the waitstaff wore crisp white shirts with black vests.

When I worked in Union Square in my early twenties, I occasionally ran into one of my friends from middle school on the late-night ferry back to the island. On those nights, we almost always ended up at Mike’s Greek Diner for a quick order of potato skins or chicken tenders before going home to crash. Once, a guy I had hooked up with in college wanted to come “hang out” with me, and I took him to the King’s Arms for a milkshake and fries before sending him back to New Jersey with a hug and a thanks for paying that ridiculous toll price.

I went to The King’s Arms the most often. In middle school, that was the place to go to after our shows. There was a pizzeria across the street, Pal Joey’s, that we also went to, and we’d flit back and forth between the two like the obnoxious tweens we were. The boys my friends liked thought it would be funny to roll under the bushes out front to hide, and I stood on one side, judging my friends for liking boys who seemed so immature.

Memories like these always come up when I think of my favorite Staten Island diners. It’s kind of funny how memories work — these are just random glimpses into my time there, but they’re always there. I left Staten Island for the final time five years ago, but I do go back and visit my family and friends who are still there. Last summer, my son, partner and I visited, and it was my partner’s first time really exploring the island. “I want to see the places that you love,” she told me.

I wanted to take her to a favorite Mexican restaurant of mine. It’s inside an old house and, frankly, is way cooler than an old diner. But the restaurant was unexpectedly closed. When I stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out next moves, the giant sign from the King’s Arms stood there like a beacon, calling me home.

“Do you want to go to a diner? They make the best burger and chocolate shake I’ve ever had,” I said. We walked the couple blocks and were greeted by the familiar green booths. Even the menus were the same.

As we sat in the booth pretending to browse the menu, I told my partner about sitting at one of the tables with my Gram and Ms. Betty before seeing a play or for a special occasion. My Gram died when I was 15 — at this point, she’s been gone longer than I had her. But when I see those tables, I can still feel her. She really was one of my favorite people when I was a little kid. The memories I have of her aren’t specific, they’re just feelings and glimpses of places. Looking at those tables remind me of late nights watching It’s Showtime at the Apollo or pushing her around in her wheelchair. The pang is dull, but it’s still there. I hope that when I talk about her, especially in one of our favorite places, my partner can feel her just like I can.

While we eat our burgers and curly fries, I tell her that the King’s Arms is a big part of my life as a writer. When I was working on my first novel, it was where I’d work after the coffee shop closed for the night. As I scarfed down a cheeseburger, I would type with one hand. Because of this, I wrote the diner into my next novel.

This year during our family trip to New York, we brought my son for his first trip to the King’s Arms. Like a little kid, he studied the room around him: the green booths, the tables, the TVs playing the local news, even the plastic cups that looked like glass. When we decided to get breakfast for dinner, he admonished us for not getting hamburgers, even though I’ve told him no one makes better breakfast food than a diner. He marveled at the fact that he got 12 chicken nuggets with his kids meal instead of six, declaring there was no way he could eat them all. When his ice cream sundae came out in a fancy glass, he dove in while trying to answer the questions on Jeopardy!

“You know Bub, I used to come here with my Gram when I was your age,” I said to him, grabbing a mint from the cashier like I did back then.

“No way! Really?” He smiled with his big brown eyes, and I ruffled his hair and nodded.

Waiting for the bus, I looked around at the neighborhood. The King’s Arms added an outdoor patio area during the pandemic. Pal Joey’s across the street is long gone. The Italian speciality store that replaced it is gone, too. I haven’t been to the Colonnade in at least 20 years, and every time I’m in the area, the stores are always different. The Country Club Diner became a Walgreens, and then a Key Food, and now I think it’s a bank. Despite that, whenever I see that corner, it’s what I always think of.

Diners are my default place because I’m a creature of habit. I seek comfort in familiarity. That’s the thing about Staten Island, too: It’s comforting, no matter how much I dislike it. I know that I will see the ghost of the girl I used to be standing on a bus stop, an old friend in a street sign, or my Gram in a green diner booth, smiling at me from her wheelchair.

No matter which diner I go to, I know that the challah french toast is going to be delicious. I know that getting a roast beef club sandwich with curly fries and the aforementioned homemade cherry Coke from my favorite diner in the East Village will fill my stomach and my heart at the same time. But most importantly, I know that no matter how many years I’m away from New York City, no matter how many chocolate chip pancakes I eat in LA, those places will always be there. No matter how much changes, these diners stay the same (even when they’re gone).

Take Me Back to Standee’s

I’m going to tell you about a diner, but first I have to tell you who I was at nineteen.

In 2009, Eliot shaved off swaths of my hair while I hung my head over his balcony. Afterwards, I considered myself reborn. I paired my fucked up haircut with cargo shorts I’d stenciled with Emma Goldman’s face, plus thrifted boys’ flannels, lots of bandanas, and a chest binder I made out of pantyhose. I couldn’t get into my own college library for months (“You’re a guy and you’re trying to use a girl’s, ID!”), but as far as I was concerned I was living; and sometimes living requires you to make wild choices, like accepting a ride to Camp Trans from a total stranger.

The total stranger turned out to be Kate Sosin, the co-founder of a new peer-led support group called Genderqueer Chicago. That was the word then — genderqueer — our catch-all term for weirdos like us whose identities short-circuited the boxes we’d been shoved in. That word and that group were exactly what I needed. After Camp Trans — which gave me my first electric taste of queer community — I started attending Genderqueer Chicago meetings, and eventually, I became a co-facilitator.

Genderqueer Chicago met on Wednesday evenings in a tiny, fluorescent-lit room at the Gerber/Hart Library. The meetings attracted a promenade of pink-haired, pierced and denim-clad mischief-makers to a vital, if somewhat stuffy, LGBTQ+ archive. We were asked to “pipe down” more than once, but the library volunteers quietly loved our moxie.

After most meetings, a handful of members would walk a few doors down to a 24-hour diner with a short counter, a handful of booths and a charmingly outdated jukebox. Its official name was “Standee’s Snack ‘n’ Dine,” but the fluorescent sign read, “Standee’s – Coffee Shop – Restaurant – Fountain.” On any given evening, only the “Stan” or the “dee’s” would be lit.

Located under the ever-rumbling red line tracks, Standee’s smelled like smoke long after Chicago’s indoor smoking ban. The stained glass lamps told us to, “Enjoy Coca Cola,” and the sign on the single-user bathroom read, “Customers” — not “Customers ONLY” — just “Customers,” because the vibe at Standee’s was unassuming, and according to some Standee’s servers, a “customer” was anyone who walked in off the street and had to pee.

The menu’s most popular items were “Three Deuces” — two pancakes, two bacon strips, two eggs; or “Four Deuces” — two pancakes, two sausages, two bacon strips, two eggs. I usually just got two eggs with a side of toast. They never came out at the same time, but I didn’t care. Nobody did — not even when some of us heard rumors of past health code violations — because what true Chicago diner hasn’t briefly shut down due to health code violations?

The food and service at Standee’s had its critics, whose complaints are preserved on the diner’s old Yelp page. One Standee’s regular responded to the haters: “It’s a greasy, 24-hr diner, and it does what it says on the label. What the hell else do you want? This isn’t a Steak-n-Shake, it’s the real deal!” I never thought I’d agree with a guy named Kyle on Yelp, but here we are.

Of course, going to Standee’s was not about the food. For many of us, Standee’s was one of the first public spaces where we could openly and comfortably share our most authentic gender expression. In our daytime lives, we were getting kicked out of gendered bathrooms, our workplaces, our families. But on Wednesday nights at Standee’s, we could show off our nail polish, our partners, our new names. We could get amped up on watered-down coffee, choose ‘90s boy band music on the jukebox and perform expertly choreographed dance routines without fearing for our lives. Nobody seemed bothered by us, because whoever was in the next booth was probably just as weird as we were — or at least they knew to mind their business. And if a patron had taken issue with our joyous genderfuckery? There was a tough-as-nails server named Tinker Bell who probably would have drop-kicked them into the sun.

Standee’s closed in 2010 after operating for 60 years. I heard some guy in Indiana bought the sign for 500 bucks. That was over a decade ago, and even though I stayed in Chicago, I still don’t know what’s taken Standee’s place. I don’t want to find out.

These days, the people in these photos are writers, actors, artists and activists. Some of us identify the same way we did back then; others don’t. Some of us found new pronouns, new gender expressions, bodies that feel more right. Some of us moved across the country. I bet if you looked hard enough in whatever rehabbed storefront has taken Standee’s place, you’d find evidence of us — a smudge of hair dye, a speck of glitter. Or maybe you’d just sense our presence. If you’re one of us, you’ll know we were there.

High School and Everything After

Names have been changed.

You can’t be gay in 1999. But I’m not, so that’s just fine.

1999: Sophomore year. Sitting in my car, my dad’s car really, the one I drive to school now, listening to the Counting Crows, feeling something tear open inside me, feelings too big to be encased in a body, especially this body, which keeps changing in ways I don’t want. Adam Duritz wails step out the front door like a ghost into the fog, where no one notices the contrast of white on white and I think, it’s true, I’m disappearing, I’ve disappeared.

To be a teenager is to be suspended in between. In between bodies, in between states of being, in between actual, physical places. The permanence of childhood has been torn away. Where I once had a single classroom, I now have seven. Where I used to feel like the center of my family, family now feels like — well, as a six year-old, I tried on one of my toddler cousin’s t-shirts, and then I couldn’t get it off. I couldn’t even move my arms. My breath felt hot and tight. A soft cotton t-shirt, magicked into a hard-seamed straightjacket. That’s how family feels now. At home, my room is still mine, but the rest of the house is my parents’. And so I inhabit a parade of liminal spaces, one stacked upon the next, curling my heart and my body into little spots that feel like home. My locker. The places my friends hang out. The driver’s seat of my car. And the diner.

In my hometown, it’s called Jack’s, but it could be any diner, anywhere. That’s the point, isn’t it?

When we can’t go home again, like Demi Moore said, quoting Thomas Wolfe in the nineties classic Now & Then, we go to Jack’s. Sometimes we go there after school, but mostly we go in the middle of the night, a space I’ve only recently been allowed to claim for myself. Every time we open the doors, the same rusty old bells jump and jingle. The A/C hits our faces like a wall. We ask for a booth, always. The booths are done up in some sort of sparkling rubber that will stick to our legs when we go to leave, but we slide in, one person against the next, the outsides of our legs touching in the casual intimacy of youth, our faded formica table a temporary living room. We order eggs and bacon, fries with ranch, diet cokes that come with cherries and perfect crushed ice from some ancient machine. We order chocolate shakes. We pool our money. I don’t know what we talk about.

Here’s what we don’t talk about: the diary entry I make sometime that year: Whoa. Had a dream last night I was kissing Lindsay. Weird! In real life, I’ll stick to guys, thank you very much.

1999: It’s the year of Boys Don’t Cry and But I’m a Cheerleader. I never see the former, but on a wild kick of courage while picking out movies for a sleepover with a friend, I grab the bright pink cover of But I’m a Cheerleader from the video store, and we watch it on the tiny TV with no remote in my dad’s den late that night. As the credits roll, far too quickly, I say “wow, that was great!” My friend looks at me. “That was weird,” she says.

You can’t be gay in high school, but if you’re a boy, if you have to be, you can. I know this because Corey is. Corey bleaches his hair and sings with me in choir and, by senior year, his family will have kicked him out because of his sexuality. Corey will live with the family of boyfriends and with friends and then he’ll have his own apartment, where I will first watch Queer As Folk, watch Justin walk into Babylon in an explosion of lube and confetti, an angel, a child, right into the arms of Brian Kinney. The queerness that I understand in high school is Justin’s: a gay kid fast becoming a man, a boy who sleeps with men, part angel, part fallen, not quite tragic. To be out in 1999 is to be a sort of luminous other, as sure of oneself as a lark when it sings, almost supernaturally buoyant and beautiful, even in the stormiest of seas.

Corey knows all about liminal spaces. Corey is the one who first takes me to Jack’s.

Jack’s is two downtown blocks from the church steps where I’ll kiss a girl — a woman, really — for the first time at age 31. It’s three blocks from the Stonewall offices where I’ll sit crying during week after week of therapy, six months of appointments before I can say the word gay out loud, at 30. And it’s about 670 miles from Seattle, where I’ll move at 28, the furthest (but not only) place I’ll ever run on the eventually disproven theory that I might be able to say that word without crying if I’m among strangers in a strange land. I move to Seattle thinking either I’ll come out, or I’ll just keep disappearing.

But what I couldn’t know at 16, what I still didn’t know at 28, was that disappearance isn’t an end. It’s a beginning. What’s that poem, the one about the end of the world for the caterpillar, when they climb into their chrysalis and dissolve, never knowing the butterfly they’re about to become?

***

I don’t go to Jack’s with my closest friends. Those friendships are too complicated. There’s too much I can’t talk about, too many ways I’m trying to mask a difference I can’t even name. Like the time I meet my best friend for a movie and she’s wearing lipstick, and she looks…and I feel…and in another world, in a different decade, wouldn’t that be a date? Like how we’re all supposed to have a Senior Crush, so I pick a guy with shoulder-length hair whose band plays Sweet Home Alabama, and try to perform my admiration well enough that I fool myself as well as my friends. Like the corrosive, baffling jealousy I feel when my friends date boys who don’t deserve them. “You’ll understand when you start dating,” one of them tells me, not unkindly. Will I?

I go to Jack’s with Corey and his Drama friends. There are no explanations needed, nothing to bury deep in my stomach. There are just fries and cokes and gossip from the Drama Club, people I mostly know from my yearbook. When night falls, time begins to stretch, the hours slowing, and it feels as though they might go on forever. I’m giddy with all of it — the caffeine, the sugar, being allowed to belong without any spotlights on me. I’m young and away from my bed and my parents and the things I can’t understand or can’t name fall away until all that’s left is a lightness, a fullness, a certainty. Sometimes, I don’t have to worry, I write later in my diary. Someone will love this heart, as it beats against the cage of my young skin. For who can help but love a bird in flight?

Here’s the thing about liminal spaces: I never once question my right to exist in them.

***

If there wasn’t a pandemic, I’d be writing this essay at Jack’s. I’d be sitting alone in a corner with my laptop, lingering over a club sandwich or a piece of pie, putting off leaving because of how much it will hurt to unstick my legs from the rubber of my chair at the counter. The waitress would ask if I was “ok, hon?” and I’d tell her yes, and thank you. There would be a group of high school kids at a booth in the corner, chattering and touching digits and counting their cash on the table, ordering plates of pancakes, going to the bathroom in twos and threes. They’d glimmer with all of it — the need, the hunger, the things they can’t yet name, but also that inexplicable, intermittent certainty that somehow, somewhere, their lives will be everything they never even dared to want and more, and that every single moment of it will be well deserved.

What would I tell that scared, stubborn kid sitting in Jack’s in 1999, if I could?

Would I tell her all the things something in her already knows, the things Justin taught her before she even knew she needed the lesson? No, you’re not broken. Yes, you will have to be very, very brave. Yes, you’ll have to wait a very long time, spend many years away, but one day, not far from here, on the steps of that old church on Third, after a really good second date, someone named Sarah will say hey, and pull you in close, and kiss you, and kiss you, and kiss you, and you’ll drop the bag from your shoulder so you can wrap your hands around her back, up into her hair, and she’ll let out a little sound that means yes, and yes, Darcy, it will be everything you ever wanted, and yes, you will know forever after that there is nothing wrong with your desires, nothing twisted in your heart.

Or would I just say: oh, my darling. You don’t have to worry. You got it right the first time. You deserve the world.

Pass the fries?

Opening Up at a North Country Diner

December 5, 2021 – Plattsburgh, NY

Afternoon

I never got used to the cold, North Country weather. Winters started as early as October, and they were always brutal and unforgiving. I thought this as I stepped outside of my friend’s car, bracing myself for the sharp air with nothing but a t-shirt, flannel, leggings, and Converse. Granted, I didn’t know I was going out until ten minutes prior when two friends stormed my dorm and told me the three of us were going to The Hungry Bear for brunch. Still, I could’ve been smarter about the shit-ton of snow on the ground.

Hungry Bear (nobody says the “the” in the name) was located in the middle of the Military Turnpike. I passed by it so many times on the way to Walmart throughout my college career but never noticed. The diner is small and average, a huge image of a bear about to eat a stack of pancakes at the entrance is its only distinct trait. Its outside appearance reminded me of a wood cabin. Hungry Bear’s opening in 2010 was probably one of the most exciting things to happen in Plattsburgh that year — rarely did anything major happen in the town. Still, it had an old-school energy to it.

Should I tell my friends I was freaking out and had a mental breakdown in my dorm just a couple of hours ago? How am I supposed to bring something like that up?

I didn’t know how to settle the thoughts in my head, I was out of it, and it was obvious to my friends that something was up. I regretted going as soon as I got in the car, but my friends were persistent. And I couldn’t say no to diner food (what can I say, I’m American). Fuck.

Morning

It was 13 days before graduation. Sleep was rare, and while I had insomnia for years by that point, it was worse during those last days of undergrad. Someone would think I wasn’t sleeping because, duh, I was about to graduate. It makes sense to spend your last nights of college getting lit and making lifetime memories.

Most of my last days were actually spent alone in my dorm. I was depressed that I still had nothing lined up post-graduation while my friends were graduating in May 2022 and already had jobs secured. The future was daunting and unknown. I spent most of my college years trying to be perfect, staying indoors on a Friday night instead of going out. I was graduating a virgin, and the closest I got to fucking was when I was in a situationship with another student who told me she was tired of men and interested in sexually exploring women. My neurodivergent brain made it difficult to create and maintain a lot of friendships, because there was always a wall, always the feeling of inadequacy and not belonging. Those feelings were amplified during these last few weeks.

So I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I was tired. I can’t recall the exact start of that morning, but I probably went over what I’d do that day. Finish that essay. Clean. Attend the weekly staff meeting with the other RAs in the building and our RD. Continue watching You on Netflix.

Afternoon

Each step incited a soft, creaking sound. Classic rock like Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynyrd played in the background. It was chilly inside, but everywhere in Plattsburgh was cold.

The diner, I soon discovered, represented Plattsburgh as a whole. Everything there moved slowly. Everything felt like a low-budget indie film. It was quiet, somehow soft. Simple. Also, white people were everywhere. It was nothing like The Bronx. Nothing like home.

Two old white dudes in biker gear sat near us and couldn’t hide their staring and prying, but we let them get away with it, because it’s Plattsburgh. Shit like that always happens. You learn to deal with it, just like learning how to deal with Confederate flags and Trump posters all over town or University Police officers harassing students of color. A group of frat boys from our school was also at Hungry Bear, but they sat far away from us.

My friends couldn’t stop bugging me, and I knew I couldn’t hide any longer. The flow of the conversation could no longer make space for trivial ramblings on finals and what everyone did last night.

It would be okay if I just opened up. It would’ve made things a lot easier too. But there’s comfort in silence. You grow used to it. Communication and expressing my feelings have been problems since I was a toddler. I sat in my chair with my eyes glued to the menu, unable to make eye contact with my friends.

Morning

One of the best post-college decisions I made was deleting Snapchat. I never really liked it, but I had friends who used it, so I did too. Rotating through different social media apps in my twin XL bed, I opened Snapchat expecting nothing spectacular. I clicked on my friends’ stories and saw the usual weekend shenanigans. Flashing lights, liquor, shaking ass to Bad Bunny with a whole bunch of people. The flashing lights were from Retro, the only club in Plattsburgh and a club I’ve been to multiple times but never enjoyed that much.

But viewing those snaps triggered an onslaught of intrusive thoughts. They came in waves, each one forcing its way to occupy space in my mind, each one as loud as sirens.

You’re pathetic.
Your friends have more fun going out than spending time with you.
Even if you went, you wouldn’t have fit in.
You’re wasting your youth.
Why can’t you just be a normal young adult and go out?
What’s wrong with you?

Afternoon

Saved by the waitress, I kept deflecting and ordered french toast with bacon and berries on the side. This is my go-to at any diner. French toast because it reminds me of making it with my mom as a kid, bacon for protein, and berries for extra sweetness. I stuck with the complimentary water given to us instead of ordering a coffee or juice out of habit. When I used to go out to eat with family, none of us asked for a beverage that wasn’t water due to the extra cost. It was already a big expense to sit down and be served food. Ordering a drink that wasn’t water was a privilege. And while I could’ve spent a few more bucks and gotten something to drink, I always have that lingering fear of losing all my money and being left with nothing. At least diners are more affordable than a lot of restaurants. That’s a big reason why I love them so much.

As the waitress finished writing our orders on her notepad and left our table, deflecting was no longer an option. I mustered up the courage and spoke.

Morning

I don’t think I could put this part in pretty words. It wasn’t pretty when I spoke about it out loud to friends — there were a lot of stuttering and awkward pauses — so why should it be pretty written down?

After pacing on the hard floor with my thoughts, I grabbed the first thing I saw and threw it against the wall. It was a glass skull I got from a gift shop years ago on a family vacation to Mexico. I started throwing things when I’m upset at a young age, because articulating how I felt was a skill I lacked. I threw the fake skull as if it held all my emotions inside and breaking it would release them. But breaking something was not enough. The thoughts wouldn’t go away, and I just wanted my mind to calm down. I grabbed hand sanitizer, removed its top, and attempted to drink it. The taste was so unbearable that I spat it all out.

I Googled Greyhound trips to New York City. It felt too dangerous to be by myself in my dorm for 13 more days, and I thought things would be easier if I went home. Sure, I had to work shifts at the library, check out residents for winter break, finish my finals, and pack up my dorm. But I was scared I’d hurt myself if I stayed any longer. That fear eventually subsided, and I can’t recall any other details from that morning.
I do remember the hard knock on the door by my friends just a few hours later.

Afternoon

There it was. The eradication of silence. The discomfort. All of what happened out there was like an open cut. Funny enough, I was saved again by the waitress when our food came not long after I shared my story. She said hope you enjoy your food in a high-pitched voice and gave us a smile she probably used countless times on the job. Meanwhile, our faces were all too serious. Not much can kill the immaculate vibes of a diner, but mental illness can.

My friends offered comforting words as we stuffed our faces. It was almost embarrassing, having my cognitive distortions shut down by the power of friendship. One thing stuck out to me the most.

“You’re allowed to enjoy life.”

The words didn’t solve everything. I had a long way to go after our talk. They were also simple words, easy to find in a social media post. But I needed those words, because I didn’t think I deserved to enjoy life (looking back, that’s also some colonizer mentality bullshit). I needed to allow myself to enjoy life on my own terms, rather than trying to fit some mold.

What better place to start than in a diner?

I soaked my french toast in syrup, bit juice out of the ripeness of my berries, and savored bacon on my taste buds. The fruit was fresh, and the bacon was just a tad bit burnt. Just how I like it. Every bite of my french toast came with a side of memories of my mother and me in the kitchen — the stove on medium heat, our hands sticky with egg and ground cinnamon, and smiles on our faces.

Quiz: What Diner From Pop Culture Are You?

Ah, the humble diner: It’s a cultural institution, a home away from home, a place where the eggs always look on the sunny side of life. It’s the one restaurant in every town where you can order up a side of friendship or anonymity, and extra syrup too. This week, you’ll be reading so many astounding, heartfelt essays about our close personal connection to the diners in our lives, but today, we’re here to ask perhaps the most profound question of all: What famous cinematic diner are you?

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Scenes From a Jersey Diner

It’s 2 a.m. on Saturday, but the neon lights outside still shine, proudly proclaiming The Diner is open. It offers meandering conversations over perfect milkshakes, served with a little extra in a silver metal cup. At 4 p.m. on a weekday, grandparents enjoy the early bird specials of roasted Thanksgiving-style turkey with all the fixings. On Tuesday, pot pie night, the staff serves hundreds of ramekins brimming with flaky pastry, chicken, and veggies. On the weekend, people come dressed up for a baby shower, birthday, or after-church lunch.

No matter the hour, someone will always be there to open the lobby’s glass doors. The floors, sticky with that specific mix of grease and industrial cleaning products, squeak slightly under shoes. Pleather-covered benches always sit next to vending machines that offer to trade your quarters for a temporary sparkle butterfly tattoo or a tiny Spongebob figurine. Photos of community kids’ softball and soccer teams line the walls, a thank you for the diner’s sponsorship.

When I come to the diner, someone who knows me, my mom, or my mom’s friend, will greet me at the register and ask how my family is doing, while the intoxicating scent of coffee, with notes of sweet pastries and salty fried potatoes, welcomes me home.

***Every diner is unique, but so many are also nearly identical. There’s the neon sign, the doors in the center leading to a register and a dazzling display of desserts, booths lining the walls to the left and the right with an old-fashioned jukebox that may or may not still take quarters. Most diners were pre-fabricated and shipped along rail lines across the country, arriving ready to serve. New Jersey truly created the iconic look of diners. It’s not just because Jersey is home to more than 600 diners, but 95 percent of pre-fab-style diners around the U.S. were made in New Jersey.

The Jersey Diner is timeless, a staple of my blue-collar upbringing in the Diner Capital of the World. Each small town has at least one family-owned diner. They all have a ten-page menu covering everything from all-day breakfast to gyros, seafood, fajitas, Philly cheesesteaks, salads, goulash, pork roll, disco fries, hummus, French onion soup, pasta, roast beef, veggie burgers, fried chicken, a rotating display case of freshly made desserts, and handspun milkshakes. Everyone knows your name, but it feels more like a Bruce Springsteen song and less like the theme from Cheers.

***The Diner was as ever-present as a member of my family, but it took on a life of its own when I joined the marching band in junior high. We spent summer break and weeknights rehearsing. We gave up our weekends to win trophies for something the rest of the school openly mocked. But on Saturdays, on the crisp fall nights when it all came together to choreographed perfection, we celebrated with a late-night trip to The Diner. We took over an entire back room, one that had been added to the pre-fab frame. We ordered dozens of milkshakes, sang, laughed, and counted our pennies to pay for a shared order of fries and tips for the waitresses who either knew our first names or called us sweeties.

These nights now blend into a blur of late-night sleepy giggles, black and white milkshakes, important debates over whether to order mozzarella sticks or chicken fingers, and drama over the latest school news and gossip. One queer couple was out, and a dozen of us would eventually come out. Outside of this group, there was name-calling and judgment. We were the nerds, misfits, weirdos, the effeminate boys who were called the f-word, and girls called dykes. But this was our safe space, and it was the first time I felt pride in being the outsider, even if I didn’t fully understand why I was an outsider.

The first time I kissed a girl, it was a secret under the guise of “practicing.” But we kept practicing. Over time, our friendship started to fall apart as boyfriends and heteronormativity got in the way of something that didn’t fit into the definitions of relationship or friendship. Sometimes we went to church together, where they preached subtly concealed hate about sin and the importance of the traditional family. I liked boys, so I knew I wasn’t a lesbian. But the only person I knew who was bisexual had been called a slut at school, and I didn’t want to be that. I didn’t even consider whether I had romantic feelings for her. It wasn’t an option. We never talked about it. We just moved on as if nothing had happened. Slowly, the time spent together became less focused on hiding behind closed doors and more focused on driving around town and going to diners. We sat in the pleather booths, doodling on placemats, eating the salads we thought teen girls should eat, and talked about boys, music, and school dances. The more time we spent talking about and doing what teenage girls are supposed to do, the more we drifted apart. Until there was nothing left to talk about.

I struggled a lot throughout high school and early adulthood with what I now understand to be disabilities, chronic illnesses, and the ableism that comes with them. I was always in and out of braces, crutches, and wheelchairs, recovering from something. Students and teachers regularly accused me of lying about my joint issues. When I seriously damaged my knee at the high school musical rehearsal, I had to yell before anyone would call an ambulance. The adult staff had simply let a few of the boys drag me off to the side of the stage so rehearsal could continue. Several adults and students told me to walk it off. I couldn’t walk for four more months, and I had to learn how to do everything from standing to driving all over again. During that time, a parent of another child asked me if my doctor knew I was in a wheelchair as if I had just decided it would be fun to try it out for a bit. As if someone would subject themselves to exclusion, bullying, harassment, and inaccessibility just for kicks. One of my teachers tried to have me expelled, and I had to spend several hours arguing with her and the guidance counselor. Not because I’d done anything wrong, but because the teacher decided I wasn’t making enough effort to thank the people who helped me get around the school in my wheelchair. I desperately relied on other forms of ableism to defend myself: I may need help to get around the school, but my GPA, SAT scores, and class rank are great. You wouldn’t want to expel someone like me, I’m a good disabled person.

The Diner had ramps, so I could find a way to sit at the table, often taking up an entire booth or a second chair to support an injured leg. I spent many meals there crying and venting to my mom or friends, trying to make sense of it all. Even though it was a public space where my bullies could be in the booth next to me, the frosted glass partitions, the plush padding of the familiar booths, and the cheesy perfection of mozzarella sticks made it seem like my secrets would be safe. It was a place where I could start to process the harms of ableism for the first time.

***During the first winter break of freshman year, a dozen of my marching band classmates crammed into a few booths at The Diner to share stories of how we survived the first semester of college surrounded by the same milkshakes we ordered after band competitions. In our small town, it wasn’t common to go to college. Many of my classmates had gone from college to technical schools, the military, or service industry jobs. But some of us were told by guidance counselors that college was the only way for us to succeed. I thought it was my only way out of the town that had made me hate myself in ways I couldn’t yet understand. Now, here I was returning, only temporarily, in triumph. I made it. I got out. I had good grades and good friends, which signified success in college. I had had a boyfriend, so clearly, I was straight. I had a part-time job in the music industry, so now the thing that made me a loser suddenly made me cool. I thought I had my future figured out and had emerged victorious over my past. I thought this little group in that booth at the Diner would stay in touch forever.

I still had a lot to learn.

My parents and uncle randomly showed up at my college dorm a few months later. I knew it was bad. They took me into an empty common room for privacy and told me my grandmother had passed away suddenly. I went home for the funeral and spent most of the time sitting alone by the bathrooms, practically screaming in tears. I refused to go into the room with the body. After the funeral, we went to The Diner with my extended family: cousins, aunts, uncles, and my great-grandmother. I was grateful for warm bread and made-from-scratch chicken noodle soup that felt like a warm hug. I didn’t know it would be the last time my family, who had been close for most of my life, would be in the same room. I wouldn’t see my cousins, aunt, or uncle again because of a feud that had nothing to do with me. I spent years after this feeling like I wasn’t good enough, like I must have somehow deserved to be cast aside and shunned.

By junior year of college, I had made a tight-knit group of college friends from all over the country. Some made fun of New Jersey, calling it an armpit or joking about Snookie and The Situation. At one point in my life, I would have enthusiastically agreed that I hated New Jersey. I had wanted nothing more than to leave. Instead, I was fiercely protective and started rattling off facts about how great New Jersey is.

Plus, we have the best diners.

These friends had only been to chain diners like the Silver Diner or Denny’s, so I insisted we go to a real Jersey Diner. They were shocked by the menu size. A few people kept asking how one restaurant could make all these different styles of food. Is it actually good? They marveled at the massive trays the staff carried past our table every few minutes, towering with pasta dishes, sandwiches, breakfast, and desserts. When they finally tasted the food, they were even more enthusiastic, surprised that it was as good as it smelled and looked. A victory for my newfound New Jersey pride.

***Shortly after graduating, I collapsed on the floor of my apartment. It marked the start of two years of intense illness and nearly a decade of fighting with doctors, insurance, and general gaslighting to get a diagnosis. All I knew was that I had worked hard and done what I was told would get me out of this town and this state. Now, I was stuck with an expensive degree that felt meaningless in the face of a debilitating illness. I was too sick to do any job, and I spent most weekdays seeing two or three doctors daily, plus the occasional trip to the emergency room.

Again, The Diner became a therapist’s office where I could vent and process — with the help of 24-hour breakfast — what I still didn’t understand as a disability. But it also made me angry. I wasn’t supposed to be in the same damn pleather booths anymore. I refused to register for disability services because decades of harmful societal messaging had told me that it was for “takers” and “lazy” people who didn’t want to work. I lost friends who started to say things like I wish I could stay home all day, and I’d rather be sick than at work.
But slowly, through fighting with doctors and insurance companies, the years of self-hate were beginning to unravel. I started questioning the ableist comments thrown at me, even while I was still incredibly ableist. I learned I was worth fighting for and speaking up for, and I stopped accepting the mean or dismissive things people said to me.

So one day, when I was at The Diner, my grade school bully came to say hello. Something changed.
He had been a year behind in elementary school, whereas I was a year ahead. So he was much bigger and stronger than I was. When he shouted across the playground that I was fat, an elephant, or an earthquake, the entire class laughed with him. But the supervising staff at recess said boys will be boys, and he grew ever more confident. One day, he pushed me to the ground and pushed my head into the brick wall. I remember trying to protect my head with my arms. I remember him yelling. Kids laughing. Teachers told him to knock it off, but that was it. There was no punishment for assaulting me. He simply went back to playing kickball, and I spent years pretending I was always in on the joke.

At the diner, my mom and I were sitting in the window in the rectangular pre-fab section near the door. I saw him come in with his mom and sit a few booths away from us. He came to say hello, acting very friendly, as if we were old friends catching up and breaking the bubble from the safety of my diner booth and chicken croquettes. I had had enough after many months of doctors dismissing me. I wasn’t willing to play along anymore. I told him about the hell he had caused me and the trauma he had inflicted, and I stopped apologizing for simply existing. He looked shocked and told me he had no memory of this and thought, if anything, that we were always friendly. I didn’t care. After years of bullying and having doctors, classmates, and grown adults question and doubt my disabilities, I finally decided I was worth speaking up.

***Eventually, I became well enough to work and get a job as an activist in Washington, DC. Every time I came home to visit, I met up with a high school friend at The Diner. We picked up exactly where we left off and talked for hours about every detail of our lives. One time, he came out to me. Another time, I came out to him. Then we talked about growing up in our town, side-by-side but still feeling alone. We laughed about how we were too afraid to ever set foot in a Gay-Straight Alliance meeting because it was essentially seen as coming out, even if you said you were straight. When I got engaged, I showed him my ring at The Diner and asked him to be in the wedding party. We’ve been through so much in these booths together.

For Thanksgiving, sometime before the pandemic, my partner came to New Jersey to spend the holiday with my loud, boisterous family at a dinner of about 20 people. I am out and proud and beginning to understand my identity as a queer disabled woman. When we arrived in New Jersey, my parents and I took my partner to The Diner. The waitress spoke in a thick Jersey accent and alternated between making low-key threats — I’m gonna kill ‘im if your food’s not out here in a minute — and calling everyone honey. She talked excitedly to my parents about how great it was for me to visit from D.C. We ate chicken noodle soup and Philly cheesesteaks while I worried about the next day: Even though New Jersey is a blue state, some of my family voted for Trump. But my extended family doesn’t just welcome my partner, they do it in a true New Jersey fashion: loudly and with a lot of oversharing. I feel at home and nostalgic for a version of my hometown that doesn’t really exist.

This is what it means to be from New Jersey. The roughness around the edges isn’t hidden away or sugar-coated. It’s fried and served with a handspun milkshake at a Diner in a town that will welcome you home with the same enthusiasm with which it taught you to hate yourself.

Welcome to Diner Week — What Are You Having?

Legs sticking to pleather booths. Servers saying honey, hon, sweetie. Cups full of milkshakes or sodas, mugs full of strong coffee. Basket after basket of fries. Jukeboxes. Glass cases of pie, cakes. Feeling frozen in time, existing out of time. Home. Complicated feelings about home. Returning home. Building a new home. Greasy burgers and eggs the way you like them. These are some of the many recurring themes and images that appear in Diner Week, a series of 12 essays by the Autostraddle team all about memories and meanings of diners. From northern California in the 90s to a Montreal morning in 2015 to a Vermont mountaintop during the pandemic to a street in Chicago in 2009, Diner Week is a journey through time, space, previous selves, breakfast specials, forbidden fruit, cuts of meat, body parts, relationships, changes.

I don’t think I have to tell you that these essays are about much more than just diners. In them, diners become sites of personal discovery, connection, healing, and growth. When you walk through the doors of Diner Week, you’ll be greeted warmly of course, but know that you’re going to encounter real shit, the stuff of life. Mental health crises, fear, insecurity, addiction, fraught relationships, ableism, grief, and so many obstacles face the diner dwellers in these stories. But between the bites and burns, there’s tenderness, too. A warm piece of french toast, a gravy-slathered piece of chicken fried steak, a handspun milkshake to wash down the difficult parts.

***Let’s see what’s on the specials board for this week.

Today, we start in New Jersey, the state Katie calls home — sometimes reluctantly, sometimes with great pride. What better place to begin than in state dubbed the diner capital of the world?

Tomorrow, you get double scoops. Lily writes about french toast and friendship in a very cold college town, where she has been silent about her mental health but finally chooses to open up after a scary morning. Then, back to 1999 we go for Darcy’s winding coming-of-age tale that opens with Counting Crows lyrics.

On Tuesday, we jump a decade to 2009. Standee’s Snack ‘n’ Dine off the red line in Chicago may be long-closed, but Ro’s memories of coming here with friends who accessed their authentic gender expressions within the diner’s walls live on. Later, Sa’iyda returns home to Staten Island, where she encounters the ghost of the girl she used to be and reflects fondly on her relationship with her Gram.

Wednesday’s only got a single serving, but it’s one that’s gonna fill you up. Dani Janae writes about the regional chain Eat’n Park, which transforms from the place where she went after long nights of drinking to one where she connects with fellow sober folks.

Nicole is gonna tell you all about being a line cook at a touristy joint next to a river of death, just at the very edge of the country’s northern border. They were damn good at flipping burgers, and they’re damn good at telling this story, too. And then meet Stef at Flanigan’s, the South Florida seafood and grill chain that is an indelible piece of them. Both these essays mention divorced dads, so I’m calling Thursday the “Divorced Dad Special.”

On Friday, A.Tony finds safety and comfort in a diner where they don’t feel like they have to grow up, where they feel free to make the choices they want to make and steal glances at crushes. Then Diner Week goes international with Niko’s venture to a Montreal diner for breakfast after a hard night. She finds a surprise in a bowl of fruit that changes everything.

Saturday is for prime rib, and don’t you forget it. Follow shea up a mountain road to the place where they took their wife on weekly date nights punctuated by tender, juicy end cuts.

For the final day of Diner Week, step on over to Stepping Stone for an early brunch. It’s where Yashwina’s recent relationships begin and end, the perfect place to flirt with a babe you’ve just started seeing or to soak your broken heart with syrup and gravy.

***Let me tell you about the diners I’ve been to.

Working on this series and talking to folks about these beloved institutions, I’m struck by how many people have a home diner, the first diner they think of when they hear the word diner, a place that is theirs. I don’t have a home diner, but perhaps that’s because I’ve called too many places home. When I think of diners, I don’t think of one place. I don’t think of a generic diner either, one from television or movies. I think of a constellation of diners.

I think of chains like Friendly’s, where I always ordered the mozzarella sticks with applesauce, the fried clam boat with fries and cole slaw, and the “happy ending” sundae with marshmallow sauce. It was the first diner I ever went to without adults, the unofficial meeting place post-dress rehearsals when I was a musical theater kid at a performing arts high school. There are hardly any Friendly’s left, and I wish I’d known how quickly they’d disappear when I went to one for the last time on my birthday weekend in 2017, because maybe I’d have ordered ice cream instead of skipping it, and maybe I would have taken a picture.

I think of the DMV area chain, Silver Diner, where my mother brought my sister and I when we were little during her work trips in the northern part of the state. I was young enough the first few times to think I’d stepped through an actual time-travel portal, into the world of Grease, my favorite movie from ages five to twelve. Here, I could play out my fantasy of being Sandy.

I think of another regional chain, this one in Michigan. Leo’s with its perfect chicken fingers pita.

I think of the Galaxy Diner in the closest city to my hometown, which I don’t really consider home, but I suppose it is in some way. There was a guy I sort of dated at the end of high school, though I didn’t want to call it that, I thought because we were both heading off to college out of state soon but probably actually because I was gay. We went to the Galaxy Diner once, and he told the waitress he wanted a “regular burger,” but she heard “retro burger,” which was one of the various specialty burgers on their somewhat bizarre menu that always seemed a bit like an alien’s interpretation of what a diner was supposed to be — too on-the-nose in some ways, a little skewed in others. The retro burger came topped with mashed potatoes. My date thought it was disgusting, and I couldn’t stop laughing, truly, nothing was funnier than a burger covered in mashed potatoes for some reason, and why was it even called the retro burger? He didn’t think it was very funny, but to be fair, we weren’t on the same page about a lot of things.

I think of the Golden Apple in Chicago, down the street from the apartment where I slept in the living room on a blocky futon. I loved to open up my burgers and stuff the crinkle fries inside.

I think of Neptune Diner II in Brooklyn. I’ve never been to the original in Astoria, but my best friend lives there now and promises to take me one day. The last time I went to Neptune Diner II was with her and her husband. It was a goodbye on a few levels. They’d just helped me move my stuff for what I jokingly called a reverse-U-Haul situation (just another way of saying moving out of my ex’s). To thank them, I took them to the diner, and my best friend ordered the same way I often do in places like this, which is to say she ordered chaotically. This is my friend who is the only person I know who orders her Waffle House hashbrowns chunked and topped (with cubes of ham and covered in chili). I love her mind.

I think of the 101 Coffee Shop, now closed, and the time I convinced my friends to come with me late at night because I was craving a banana split.

I think of Tamber’s Nifty Fifties in Baltimore. I haven’t been in probably close to two decades, but it’s unlike any diner I’ve ever encountered. Inside looks like a 50s-style diner, and they’ve got the typical American fare on the menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but they’ve also got the full menu of an Indian restaurant. You can get a burger with a mango lassi. You can get saag paneer with a side of mashed potatoes and gravy. I don’t think there’s any other restaurant on the planet that feels so thoroughly like me, like all the parts of who I am. We started going to Tamber’s when my aunt and tío still lived in Baltimore, and eventually it became a tradition for us to go the night before Thanksgiving. They live in Nashville now, but we kept the tradition partially alive by ordering Indian take-out every year on the same night. Of course, it isn’t the same. It’s hard to recreate the magic of a combination retro Americana diner + Indian restaurant.

I think of the railcar diner in Biddeford, Maine and the ice cream shop nearby, run by former friends I’ll likely never see again.

I think of the Peppermill. Maybe the closest thing I’ve got to a home diner is the Peppermill, but that doesn’t seem right, because I’ve only been a few times, and because I now live 2,500 miles away from it. But when I close my eyes and think of a diner these days, I think of the Peppermill in Las Vegas with its neon lights and its bowling-alley-esque carpet and its lounge area with indoor fire pits. It exemplifies the out-of-time, out-of-place spirit of a diner better than any I’ve ever been to.

Kristen took me to the Peppermill for the first time in the fall of 2019, a few months before we were set to move to Vegas, before we would get stuck in Vegas during the hottest summer of my life. A woman floated around the main dining room taking photos, which you could purchase at the end of your meal. We got mozzarella sticks (really a recurring theme in my life) and shrimp cocktail, and I got an extra dirty martini, and she got a cocktail the size of her head. The woman asked if she could take our picture, and we said yes. When she left, we agreed we’d only be keeping the free postcard version and not buy a print.

When we saw the photo, we changed our minds. We looked so happy. We had, at the time, barely any photos together. We’d been dating for several months, but we were long distance. I followed her around on book tour for her debut novel, and we bounced from city to city, restaurant to restaurant, hotel to hotel. I especially didn’t have a city or town I called home at that time, but I knew I wanted to make a home with her. This trip to Vegas was a preview of our new life together. And there was something about the Peppermill that made it all feel real, like we were moving toward something.

For a while, the shot from the Peppermill was one of the only printed photographs we had together. She had it framed for our first Christmas, and every time I look at it, I smell, taste, and hear the Peppermill. I don’t know when we’ll be back. But that’s the thing about diners, isn’t it? They’re not usually places you plan to go to but rather places where you end up, sometimes over and over, sometimes only once. But I can’t say all the diners I’ve loved before blur together. No, they’re all so distinct, their own microcosms.

The Peppermill is the only diner on this list I’ve been to with Kristen. I wish I could collect pictures with her in every one of them, even though that’s impossible. Some have closed, some are in places far away, some are places with too many ghosts. A constellation of diners, all perfect in their own ways.

I hope you’ll end up at Diner Week in the coming days, and I hope you’ll keep coming back.