By Anthony R. Windle
Photo by Any Jazz

With every step, my limbs grow heavier. The black dogs are howling and I need a place to rest. I lumber down the street to an old diner, where the bright lights inside push away the grayness of the day. I head directly to the back and sit on a counter stool.

The diner is in a corner of town nobody cares about, a leftover from the depression of the Dirty Thirties. Its bulky red neon sign, like a lighthouse beacon, guides the city’s castaways into her harbour.

Across town, the latte-sipping crowd would likely describe this diner’s architecture as vintage retro with an eastside charm. Fuhgeddaboudit. This is ‘retro un-renovated.’ A down-and- out skid road dive, its charming heyday long past.

Sure, it has all the nitty-gritty of the art deco-crazy period: formica surfaces, chrome, stainless steel, checkered tile floors, stools and gallery seats covered with red naugahyde. The whole interior though, is on its last legs—scarred and weathered down to bare bone from years of neglect.

The business survives on customers in similar shape, or worse. Their grinding poverty has freed them from normal behavior. They are an underclass community of drug addicts, prostitutes, rogues and the wandering mentally ill. To them, the diner is just a cheap hole-in-the-wall, a sort of thieves’ kitchen.

Gazing around the diner, memories of another time and place flood my mind. I remember sitting with my grandfather, who raised me. He was a tall man, always quick to laugh, with a shock of thick, wavy salt-and-pepper hair. In his youth, he was an amateur boxer. During my grandfather’s service in World War II, he represented his regiment using his quick, powerful hands to become champion of his weight class. Wounded in action in Normandy, he carried shrapnel around in his body for the rest of his life. By trade, he was a truck driver who worked longer than he should have, retiring just shy of his 80th birthday.

During summer breaks from school, he would take me along on deliveries. We would stop for breakfast or lunch at various diners. They were different ones depending on the route that day, but his favourite stop (and mine) was the Riverview – a classic roadside diner. Granddad loved their blue-plate special.

The waitress, with her sultry voice and friendly smile, always greeted him by name.

“Hello Reg, I see you have a handsome little helper with you today...” Her nametag said Diane. She was a green-eyed lady with long black lashes, high forehead and pronounced nose along with full red lips that could poach an egg. Her dirty blonde hair flowed onto a Vargas pin-up girl figure.

Yeah, sure, diner girl Diane could make me blush and fidget in my stool from boyhood curiosity. When she crouched down behind the counter for something, I peeked at her creamy gartered thighs. What really seduced me, though, was learning the lingo she used to call out orders to the cook-an amusing, slinging slang that gave the diner its soul. I was always excited to order my meal using the slang. Grand- dad would smile.

Honky-tonk music from the jukebox wakes me from my daydream. A stale, musky odor mixed with grease molests my nose. I’m alone in the diner deserted, except for the waiter at the front by the cash register. The lunch crowd has drifted on. The waiter is taking his time and I’m not in a particular hurry.

The waiter looks like he should be working a gas station off Route 66 in the 1950’s: cowboy boots for tire kicking, turned up cuffs on his Levis and a pompadour haircut with a high spike.

A rounder, no doubt, who looks like he has wasted time with a smoke behind his ear and heavyweight biceps covered in ink. He flips a Zippo, sparks a Lucy, and begins blowing perfect circles of smoke that float through the air and crash into the paint-peeling walls.

The whole act is like a protest against the city’s no-smoking bylaws. In outward defiance there are still some butt-filled ashtrays scattered along the cracked counter and in some of the booths. Obeying the letter of the law doesn’t hold much weight in this part of town, anyway. This is the Wild, Wild West, where the sheriff and his deputies don’t give a damn about the country’s poorest postal code, the notorious hunting ground for a pig farming serial butcher.

I reach for a menu from the rusted chrome holder in front of me. To help lighten the mood from the devil blues, I start converting the items into diner lingo.

While I translate the menu in a slight whisper, the waiter finishes his smoke and begins walking down the long, old-style counter. When he reaches my stool, a deep husky voice says, “So, what’s on the menu today?”

I look up and rap off, “A hockey puck, take it through the garden and pin a rose on it. Frog sticks in the alley and a blonde with sand.”

There’s a slight pause as a smirk crosses his face. Without missing a beat, he says, “So that’ll be a hamburger well done with lettuce, tomato and onion with a side of fries and a coffee with cream and sugar.”

We look each other square in the eye and both bust out into laughter. The code is cracked. “So, where’d you pick up that slang?” he asks when the laughter finally trails off.

“Ah, you know, hanging around the old timers when I was a kid.”

He puts my coffee cup on the counter with a nod.

“You should use it in this joint,” I say.

“The cook barely understands what I tell him in English, let alone diner slang,” he says, rolling his eyes.

He pours my coffee, and goes through the double swinging doors to the kitchen, yelling out my order in lingo. The man brings a rare smile to my face and it feels good.

I notice a newspaper scattered on the end of the counter, a three-day-old Province.

While flipping through the rag, a sudden cold wind kicks up and stirs the pages with a rustling sound. Out of the corner of my eye, I see two hard-boiled figures enter through the front door. They’re wearing black leather jackets and vests with kick-ass boots. One is tall and bearded with a proud beer belly hanging over his belt. The other is a short, pumped-up steroid freak sporting a goatee, his bull neck covered in tattoos. These boys are without a doubt bad to the bone, patched outlaws, bad like Jesse James.

Peering over the paper's pages, I see the waiter suddenly push through the double swing doors as if he’s entering an old western saloon. He looks concerned as his dark eyes squint, but not nervous. He just stands there with his long yellow-stained fingers adjusting his belt buckle engraved with a bucking horse. Then he tightens his lips and begins the slow gunslinger’s walk to the front. Tension bleeds into the air like an open wound. Besides being too tired to move, I feel compelled to stay for my new friend.

An eerie silence lingers. Then a slight squeak makes me look up. The bearded biker moves and cautiously opens the kitchen door a little. With a hard look, he checks out the back. It’s then I notice the 1% patch on his vest and a Walther semi-automatic pistol sticking out from his waist under his jacket. Any second now, I’m expecting all hell to unleash.

He turns toward the front door and nods his head. Then the sound of boot heels kicks up as he walks past, his big leather elbow brushing against my back. I just take a sip of my coffee.

A police siren pierces my ears. But the rider guarding the door barely stirs in his boots; his brother-in-arms doesn’t even blink an eye. On this street, police sirens are a regular part of the neighbourhood soundtrack. What- ever the case, the heat is close outside so these boys will not want to take needless chances. With angry blood now pumping into his neck and distorting his face with ‘roid rage, the bull slams his big fist down onto the counter. Its force rattles my cup as he roars, “I’LL SEE YOU LATER, HILLBILLY.”

Then, like the wind they came in with, the violent villains vanish.

The kitchen doors swing open again. The cook, in his greasy whites, stands looking at the waiter. He’s a small, thin Chinese man. Shaking his head, he disappears back into the kitchen and returns with my order. I’ve lost my appetite and I push the plate aside. I stand up, reach into my back pocket, and throw a sawbuck down onthe counter. I plod my way to the front where the waiter gives me a wink and says, “I’ll see you on the flipside.”

Six weeks later, this rain-swept town still damp and grey. I wander on back to the diner. To my surprise, the joint is packed. All the booths are bursting with people and the stools at the counter all occupied except, amazingly, the one at the back. I drift through the smoky haze and sit down. As I scope the crowd looking to spot the waiter, I realize why the place is jam-packed. It’s that time of the month: Welfare Wednesday.

The regulars, some of them straight out of detox, are now knocking back cheap glasses of creep. Most of them live in bug-infested hotel rooms that litter this neighbourhood, many owned and operated by the same infamous slumlord family.

There’s no sign of the waiter. It’s too bad. I was really looking forward to the chance to sling some slang. I grab a newspaper stuffed in the menu holder in front of me. I’m not surprised to find a three-day-old Province with the front page missing. I leaf through the paper and notice a picture on page six. It looks like a mug shot. The face I recognize immediately. The waiter. Underneath the picture is a short article:

By Cheri Levine - March 15th 2009
Staff reporter

Vancouver - Walter Scott, also known as Spike, was found dead from a gunshot wound in a room at the Cobalt Hotel yesterday. The police suspect it was a targeted shooting. Mr. Scott was once a well-known leader and guitar player for the rockabilly band, Spike and the Railcars. They had a top 10 hit on the early ‘80s billboard charts with the single, “Diner Girl Boogie.” The band eventually broke up. Spike left the music business and ended up riding for prize money in various rodeo tours before drifting into drugs and crime. Police are asking anyone with information to come forward or call Crime Stoppers at (1-800 555-TIPS).

I feel a cold shiver run down my spine as images of that last day in the diner flash in my mind. Spike obviously got into deep muddy water with the wrong crowd and that murky under- world was a dangerous business. In fact, this city is prime time when it comes to organized crime, and controlling the gates are the notorious red and white riders-a brotherhood that has success- fully stretched its wings with chapters all over the globe. Some say the sun never sets on this rebel empire.

I sit and brood on the dark thought that Spike became collateral damage in this enterprise. I take a deep breath then, out of respect, amid the racket of the diner, I put my head down in a lone vigil to the rockabilly cowboy. Eventually, every lost soul washes up on the shore out here only to drown in the seedy eastside streets of Lotusland. Shaking my head, I slowly look up knowing I couldn’t drop the dime. Like an aging boxer on the ropes, it’s not about winning or losing, it’s about going the distance, taking the hard hits and not going down.

Spike would’ve understood that.

Outside, the sound of drumbeats and angry voices shouting slogans march down the street. The anti poverty committee is staging another of their many street protests. The activists and their sup- porters are outraged over the mounting debt the city is accumulating in exchange for a two-week winter circus. Many of the regulars, now drunk with cheap draft, make their way out the door to lend their voice to the chorus. The waitress looks relieved as she lights up a smoke and watches from the front.

Gazing out the window to the passing crowd, my mind drifts. I can see my grandfather sitting at a counter stool. He’s laughing and nodding his head while the aromas of a busy kitchen linger in the air. In the background, the song “Diner Girl Boogie” plays from a jukebox. Then I hear that sweet, sultry voice from the past.

“So, what would you like from the menu today, handsome?” I look up, smile at her friendly face and say, “A hockey puck, take it through the garden and pin a rose on it. Frog sticks in the alley and a blonde with sand.”

A sudden cold wind kicks up.