The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [129]
I went into what looked to be the best of them, a large café, consisting of a gift shop, restaurant, casino and bar. The casino was small, just a room with a couple of dozen slot-machines, mostly nickel ones, and the gift shop was about the size of a closet. The café was crowded and dense with smoke and chatter. Steel-guitar music drifted out of the juke-box. I was the only person in the room who didn’t have a cowboy hat on, apart from a couple of the women.
I sat in a booth and ordered fried chicken. The waitress was real friendly, but she had little open sores all over her hands and arms and only about three teeth, and her apron looked as if she had spent the afternoon butchering piglets. This put me off my dinner a bit, to tell you the truth, and then she brought my dinner and that put me off eating altogether.
It was absolutely the worst food I have ever had in America, at any time, under any circumstances, and that includes hospital food, gas station food and airport coffee shop food. It even includes Greyhound Bus Station food and Woolworth’s luncheon counter food. It was even worse than the pastries they used to put in the food-dispensing machines at the Register and Tribune Building in Des Moines and those tasted like somebody had been sick on them. This food was just plain terrible, and yet everybody in the room was shovelling it away as if there were no tomorrow. I picked at it for a while – bristly fried chicken, lettuce with blackened veins, French fries that had the appearance and appeal of albino slugs – and gave up, despondent. I pushed the plate away and wished that I still smoked. The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggie bag.
‘No thank you,’ I said through a thin smile, ‘I don’t believe I could find a dog that would eat it.’
On reflection, I can think of one eating experience even more dispiriting than dining at that café and that was the lunch-room at Callanan Junior High School in Des Moines. The lunch-room at Callanan was like something out of a prison movie. You would shuffle forward in a long, silent line and have lumpen, shapeless food dolloped on to your tray by lumpen, shapeless women – women who looked as if they were on day release from a mental institution, possibly for having poisoned food in public places. The food wasn’t merely unappealing, it was unidentifiable. Adding to the displeasure was the presence of the deputy principal, Mr Snoyd, who was always stalking around behind you, ready to grab you by the neck and march you off to his office if you made gagging noises or were overheard inquiring of the person across from you, ‘Say, what is this shit?’ Eating at Callanan was like having your stomach pumped in reverse.
I went back to the motel feeling deeply hungry and unsatisfied. I watched some TV and read a book, and then slept that fitful sleep you get when all of your body is still and resting except your stomach, which is saying, ‘WHERE THE FUCK IS MY DINNER? HEY, BILL, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME? WHERE THE F-U-C-K IS MY EVENING SUSTENANCE?’
Chapter twenty-six
HERE, APROPOS OF nothing at all, is a true story. In 1958, my grandmother got cancer of the colon and came to our house to die. At this time my mother employed a cleaning lady named Mrs Goodman, who didn’t have a whole lot upstairs but was possessed of a good Catholic heart. After my grandmother’s arrival, Mrs Goodman grew uncharacteristically sullen. Then one afternoon at finishing time she told my mother that she would have to quit because she didn’t want to catch cancer from my grandmother. My mother soothingly reassured Mrs Goodman that you cannot ‘catch cancer’, and gave her a small pay increase