Tiny's: A Story of Eating

Below an excerpt my journal, written in late May, 1997, the second summer of my three-summer cross-country bike ride. It was written as I was sitting in an all-you-can-eat buffet outside of Marshfield, Missouri. Last evening I returned to Marshfield and stayed at the same hotel (actually called the Plaza). The price $36.00 and better taken care of but still a place that would scare many people away. They had bulletproof glass separating me from the receptionist/owner. Oh, not so good an omen, huh? But all was fine.  But much to my surprise, Tiny's All You Can Eat Buffet was gone. "The daughter took over when Tiny died but she didn't put her heart into it" said the owner of the motel. 

 

This was Andrew from Vermont. Just graduated from American U in DC and was riding across country. 

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May 28, 1997

It’s been one of those days of questioning my sanity about bicycling. Seventy miles of rain, that’s what I’ve been through today. What was drizzle in the middle of the night turned into downpours in the morning, and continued off and on throughout the day. Add this to the fact that I’ve been riding through rain for the past eight of twelve days and I am feeling a bit daffy as well as soggy. On days like this I have to keep my goal in mind: to complete my solo cross-country bike trip across the United States that started in San Francisco and will end in Yorktown, Virginia, 3,450 miles down the road.

I’m half way there....I’m half way there...I’m... ---Wow, I sound a little like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, only she was talking about there being no place like home. The truth is, when riding in the rain for days you have to think that there is no place like home, right?

The saving grace today? No camping out. Instead, I have a dry bed and hot food coming my way. Tonight I’m bunking down in a cheap motel called The Daze Rest Inn recommended by a cyclist I met on the road earlier in the day. He gave me a water gun that looked more like a ray gun from an old Flash Gordon movie, saying he wouldn’t need it anymore as he had passed through the difficult dog country of rural Kentucky and Virginia. I could only wonder after we parted ways, what “difficult dog country” could be like. Maybe I should have asked him if he had a real ray gun.

The Daze Inn is right behind Tiny’s Café and Truck Stop and is a cheap $19.95 a night bargain not to be passed up by cyclists, especially on rainy days. The Daze, as the thin bald-headed clerk with sunken eyes and cheeks called it, has a parking lot larger than the motel itself and looking like the beginning of one of the great deserts of the west.

“How long are you staying in the Daze?”

“Just the night,” I responded in a tired, soggy voice. Can one’s voice ever sound soggy?

“Okay, sir. One night.” He took my credit card. “You know we had a guy here last night just like you. Going west he said. Kind of a strange guy, had a water gun in his belt because he said the dogs were bad and he was shooting them with water if they chased after him.”

“Yep, I met him.” I pulled the Flash Gordon water gun from my shirt pocket and squirted it into the air.

“Well, I’ll be...” he said, shaking his head as he finished with my credit card. He probably thought I was as strange as the previous cyclist.

“How come the big parking lot?” I asked.

“Gotta have a place big enough for truckers to turn their rigs around or UPS guys pulling a double.” I know what a rig is but “pulling a double?” Well, he probably doesn’t know the language of bicyclers; like panniers (the equivalent of a back pack only attached to bikes) or drafting (not something connected to the military or beer but riding a hand length behind the wheel of the cyclist in front of you, out of the wind and in his/her slip stream. This is especially good when you are riding against the wind.)

            He continued. “Those truckers, they see our big gravel lot and it draws ‘em in like flies to flypaper. Makes it convenient. That and Tiny’s All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet over there across the lot. It brings ‘em in.”

I looked over my shoulder at the empty lot; either the flypaper hadn’t been put out yet or the flies hadn’t found it yet.

The innkeeper gave me the key with a heavy steel nut attached to it and I walked under a porch roof with my bike to the end of the building. Room 119 had the last numeral, the nine, hanging by a single nail, upside down, looking like 116.

I put the key into the doorknob lock and noticed a boot print near the knob. “Hm-m-m, that’s a fast way to get in,” I said aloud noting that the double lock was broken.

The bed cover was a yellowed-white and dotted with cigarette burn holes. The gladiolus printed on the bedcover, washed out.

I shook my head. I didn’t want to guess what went on in this room before my arrival but I’ve slept in worse places and was grateful for a roof over my head on this rainy night. And, because I “don’t want the bedbugs to get me,” I unrolled my sleeping bag on the bed. It would be better than the ground but not as good as my bed at home.

You’re probably wondering why I didn’t get a different room.  I guess it has to do with seventy miles of riding in the wind and rain, being tired and the desire to get out my wet stuff and get into a hot shower.

Someday I will write more about the motels I do not recommend. This will be one of them.

I changed out of my wet clothes, took a quick hot shower, and lay down on the bag for a short nap.

At dinnertime, I headed to the restaurant, falling in step with other buffet-seeking traveling pilgrims making their way beneath Tiny’s arched neon sign. It was the biggest flashing sign this side of Texas and with each flash ofTiny’s $7.95 BUFFET: All You Can EAT (flash)...EAT (flash)... EAT (flash) people’s faces emitted an iridescent glow as they moved towards the door. Food here was God, I was to found out, and Tiny’s was like the mecca of buffets for those in this part of southern Missouri.

One of the benefits of this cross-country bike odyssey was being able to eat all I wanted because I could ride it off the next day. Consequently, when I came upon a place like Tiny’s, I didn’t pass it up. I came from a large family where some food groups were in short supply, and you didn’t pass anything up if there were seconds. At places like Tiny’s, there’s always seconds. Judging by the size of the people filling the booths, there were others who also came from large families.... And I mean large.

Once seated at a table, I did the daily routine of writing in my journal and recording my mileage along with the highlights of the day. Country music played loud from ceiling speakers and not a song was familiar to me. Tonight, I was a jukebox foreigner in my own country.

As I wrote, two large shadows darkened my table. Startled, I looked up. Two men looking to be a father and son and wearing identical cowboy hats, boots, shirts and nylon sweatpants, with a Texas A & M logo imprinted across their backsides, passed by. They took a booth behind me.  

            Most in the booths surrounding me looked to be passing-through types: truck drivers, welders, mechanic and moving van types. Many seemed to be Harley-Davidson T-shirt type of men who talked rough and tough and had deep throaty smokers laughs. Some had one or two teeth missing, and most were unshaven or bearded. Their women all seemed to be large, with breasts that floated out in front of them like dirigibles, guiding them to and from the buffet.

            These couples sat men across from one another and ate in silence. Maybe listening to the music; maybe thinking of more food; or maybe thinking of later, of sinking deeply into their waterbeds, lost in dirigibles, torpedoes, and folds of skin gained from years of buffet stops.

            My waitress, a bleached blond woman who looked to be in her seventies and was as big as the dirigible women, came to my table and I fell in line with most and ordered the buffet.

            “Good choice,” she said, and reminded me, in a drill sergeant’s voice, that I was to get a new plate every time I went back for more food.

“State regulations!” she barked. “I don’t make ‘em, I just enforce ‘em.” I cowered instinctively. She reminded me of my fifth grade teacher, a nun, who, rumor had it, flunked out of boot camp and decided to become a good Sister instead. Last time I heard, she had left the convent, married an old bachelor farmer nicknamed Porky, and settled down on a farm raising sows and kids.

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            Before moving to the buffet table, I scoped it out. I’ve made a study of these buffets as I’ve crossed the country on my bike and have come to understand that evening buffets are different from those at noontime. 

            Noon buffeters approached the serving table like a football linemen’s charge to the goal line in the last seconds of a game, arms flailing and hands clawing as they dug into the food. The evening buffet was like the dance after the game where one does a lot of observing before the choosing. Noon buffet eaters are scarred and callused, dirt-under-the-fingernails type of men who take their rightful place at the table to conduct the serious business of refueling.

I’ve observed that the window tables are most often filled with young bucks. They wear cutoff sleeveless shirts with muscles bulging from arm to chest to arm, and Levis and cowboy boots below that. Baseball caps with logos advertise hog or cattle feeds, the local farmer’s co-op, or a favorite sports teams. The caps sit tilted back on close-shaven heads. Some, depending on what part of the country you’re in, wear straw cowboy hats. No one bothers to take them off.

These young men sucked in the food like vacuum cleaners as they talked quietly and kept an eye out for local girls driving by. They’d catch their buddy’s eye and nod with a grunt or pointing of a fork as a car passed.

At the noon buffets, the middle aged men sat at tables in the middle of the room, their once granite-strong chests having slid into their stomachs, now looking more like gunny-sack swings hanging over their belts. In the back corner tables, farthest from the entrance and observing it all, sat the old retired farmers. They weren’t in a hurry like the young and middle-aged eaters. These retired men, who had the old men’s names of Herman, Irving, Clarence or Henry seemed poured into their spanking clean bib overalls and work shirts. Like the rest of the men, their caps were tilted back, a permanent line separating their leathery tanned faces from the whiteness of their hairless heads. Most had expansive stomachs where they rested their catcher’s mitt-sized hands.

The few women at the noon buffets were attached to the retired men and were as solid and broad as their husbands. Silver-blue tinted hairdos in short, tight curls sat on top of their bespectacled heads. Most wore variations of cotton flowered-print dresses with thin white sweaters to keep away the chill of the air conditioning. They, too, filled their plates, the only difference being there were no second trips through the line.

            At the noontime buffets, young men filled two or three plates, somehow balancing them from their hand up their arm as they walked back to the window table. Speed and quantity guided the noon buffet and manners were forgotten or put on hold for the evening meal.

            Now, the evening buffet line at Tiny’s All You Can Eat restaurant was a different story. Folks conducted themselves as guests. They took their time. They were dressed up more; faces scrubbed clean, boots shined. Levis  on the newer side and not yet relegated to everyday use. There was no charging of the buffet line as if to make a tackle; and no hay-baling, straw-sucking farmers in dirty bibs approaching the line. Instead the guests moved towards it in a slow, almost shy but suave, sashaying fashion.

This was not unlike my high school dance days when my buddies and I strategized as to how to ask the best-looking cheerleader to dance the last song of the sock hop. We approached coolly and calmly. We couldn’t let on to her how much we wanted to take her home. So it was with the evening buffet; all calculated, calm and cool. No outright ogling or salivating allowed.

            I observed that most seemed to take in the whole buffet from a distance of ten feet or so, approaching it from the dessert end of the table, as if they were more interested in the sugary, light, fluffy stuff than the main event. This was the way it was done in the Missouri and Kansas buffets, and I was looking forward to seeing if it was done that way in the other states I would cycle through as I headed east.

As for me I was famished and broke the Missouri evening buffet rules of etiquette and hit the main course head on. I was a rule breaker as the food was more important than the possible shaming eyes of my fellow buffeters.

First, I loaded up on meatloaf. This has been my main staple most of this trip, and I’ve looked for it on every menu. On other trips, it was hot beef sandwiches or fried-egg sandwiches. Of course, following the bike trip and being back home, those most favored dishes became outcasts on the restaurant menu. But for now, meatloaf was the exquisite soul food of this bicycle trip, taking center plate as often as possible.

Rituals are important in life and so, on this trip, it was not any different: two chunks of meatloaf in the center of the plate with two large scoops of mashed potatoes on either side, each with matching deep crater-like cavities in the center for the gravy.

This night, besides the meatloaf and potatoes, chicken wings adorned the edge of my plate in a somewhat starred-design, decorative pattern. They too were smothered with gravy, the tips of the wings reaching out, as if wanting to be rescued from the deep sea of rich brown sauce.

Besides being tasty, the wings served a completely utilitarian task of holding back the brown sea of gravy that threatened to spill over the edge of the plate. In my other hand, I held a small lettuce salad with lots of carrots, a little dressing, and a few cucumbers on the side. I didn’t want my fellow buffeters to think I was just a main course man, another of those meat and potatoes type of guys. I had a health-food side I liked to show, especially when potential datable women were around. The salad proved that.

            With both hands full, I carefully walked back to my table to chow down. Head down and salivating, I took an almost meditative, Zen-like posture over my food.

I was at one with the food…I was fully in the present… “Ohm-m-m-m-m-m…. Ohm-m-m-m-m-m…Mm-m-m-m...”

I dug in…

            Shortly, I took a second trip to the buffet line, but I was careful. I didn’t want to overdo it. With a new clean plate, I took a small helping of meatloaf, a few select chicken wings, and a scoop of potatoes with gravy. I was a little wary about overeating because of an incident two days back at a Chinese All You Can Eat Buffet (no flashing sign). But that is another story.

            “Need any help?” the voice above me asked.

            It was my waitress watching as I attempted to stack a third plate and silverware on top of the other two.

            “Well, yes, maybe you could take these....” I said, pointing. “Yes. Thank you. As you see, I kind of got carried away eating.”           

“Well, you certainly made it into the Clean Plate Hall of Fame,” she announced with a smile. Then, pausing, she reverently announced the dreaded words that buffet devotees fear: “The buffet is closing in five minutes, deary.”

            I looked across the room to the buffet table. It stood quiet, ready and waiting. I was back at the high school sock hop. and it was the last dance. What should I pick now? The Harley-Davidson men and their dirigible-breasted women had left for waterbed heaven. The sweatpants father and son, with TEXAS A & M printed across the expanse of their bottoms, had departed.

            I was alone at Tiny’s.

            I stood and walked casually past the buffet table, my fingers tapping on the edge of the counter as I passed and didn’t look back.

            At the counter, I paid my $7.95 and bought two post cards; both identical pictures of Tiny’s big-as-Texas neon sign advertising the $7.95 Buffet: All You Can. .EAT (flash)...EAT (flash)...EAT (flash).... One postcard was a keepsake; I wanted to remember the conquering of Tiny’s. The other was for a biking friend back in Minnesota who also thinks highly of ALL YOU CAN EAT Buffets.

            I walked through the automatic sliding doors, hands patting my stomach with the contentment of retired farmers at noontime buffets. I was going back to my $19.95 Daze Inn. I was full and would be out of the rain, dry and warm. For tonight, all was well in the world.