A Cafe Named "Eats"

A true short story.

A Café Named “Eats”

 

By Elton Camp

 

            It was 1962 and I was a newly-graduated student undertaking his first job as a biology teacher at Columbus High School in Georgia.  Looking back, it is hard to understand why a job paying $3800 a year and located in an unfamiliar city hundreds of miles from where I had grown up held any attraction.  But I was young and foolish and had undertaken it anyway. 

 

            Until I went away to college, I had always been at home where everything I needed somehow magically appeared.  Then came the undergraduate years spent in the sheltered environment of college dorms and dining halls.  I had heard vague rumors of the “real world,” but had little concept of its meaning. 

 

            At my meager rate of pay, I was forced to take a single room in a run-down old house and so was faced with the need to find food on my own.  I was far from a gourmet, so I generally ate anything placed before me.  But there was one inflexible requirement.  It must be inexpensive.  My take-home pay was $280 a month and $55 a month came off immediately for rent.  After other necessary expenses that I had never before had to consider, the amount remaining for food didn’t allow for deluxe dining. 

 

            In walking distance of my room was a small cluster of businesses, among them the Linwood Lunchroom.  It was just barely wide enough to allow for a row of booths on the left side and the cooking area on the right.  The menu consisted of a board on the wall with plastic letters that could be rearranged to reflect the current day’s offerings.  Open except for Sundays, it offered a plate of meat and three vegetables for the affordable charge of sixty cents.  Even adding the customary dime tip for the waitress, it was an incredible bargain and quite good also. 

 

The family operation provided delicious meals in a clean environment and I found that I could occasionally afford the seventy-five cents the special of the house, a hamburger steak with potatoes, gravy, and onions.  Never before or since have I found a better prepared or more tasty meal and I have learned that I am unable to duplicate it even now no matter how hard I try. 

 

So the truly detestable meals at the high school combined with the Linwood Lunchroom proved a reasonably satisfactory way to meet basic nutritional needs.  But there was the problem of what to do on Sunday.  I decided that one decent meal could be supplemented with snacks and candy, but I knew virtually nothing about Columbus and barely had a way of getting around other than walking.  Asking older teachers resulted in unaffordable suggestions so I decided to try a bit of modern “hunting and gathering” on my own, making certain to stay with a distance from which I could walk home if my 1938 Chevrolet, a family discard, failed to start. 

 

            Armed with a vague awareness of the location of the downtown area, I scouted the possibilities, but found the pickings slim.  Spots that appeared to fit my budget were closed due to church pressure to “keep the Sabbath.”  Eventually I saw a place near the railroad tracks that was open as shown by the bright, neon sign that got right to the point with the single word, “Eats.”  There was no other name for the establishment in so far as I could see.  The small, brick structure had scaling paint precariously hanging from its walls.  The shingle roof appeared to have needed replacement a decade ago.  But it was getting late and my stomach was growling.  Three other cars in the parking lot suggested that food poisoning hadn’t taken all their customers�"not yet anyway.  So with considerable trepidation, I went inside. 

 

            There were booths along the outside walls and several tables at the center.  Green vinyl upholstery was split so as to reveal the dirty cotton padding everywhere I looked.  An inexpensive grade of linoleum covered the floor, its pattern long ago worn off the entrance and where chairs sat around the tables.  The kitchen was in full view at the rear and emitted some aromas that I had to admit were enticing.  I slid into one of the booths and hoped for the best. 

 

            If nothing else, the service was prompt.  An overweight, middle-aged waitress whose hair was blonde with dark brown roots stalked over to the table.  I imagined that she had once been beautiful.  Her face was deeply-lined and the stench of tobacco reached the booth even before she did.  Instead of a uniform, she wore a faded dress with what had to be splatters of the offerings for the day across the front. 

 

            “What can I get for you, honey?” she asked, not unpleasantly. 

 

            I glanced around for a wall menu along the lines of the Linwood Lunch room, but none was in view. 

 

            “Uh, don’t you have a menu?” I asked. 

 

            Partly I wanted to see what the place had available, but mostly I needed assurance on the prices.  It was not to be. 

 

            “Our customers know what we have,” was her reply given with a note of finality that made me certain there was no need to explain that I’d never been in the place before. 

 

            “Okay then, I’ll take a cheeseburger with fries” seemed a safe response.  After all, how bad could anybody mess up an order like that. 

 

            On the table were the obligatory salt and pepper shakers, a dispenser of paper napkins packed so tightly as to make taking one a task, and a glass container of sugar with a metal top and spout with a lid.  Crawling around inside the container was a housefly, enjoying a sweet treat courtesy of the house.  I wasn’t all that squeamish, but that was a bit much. 

 

            When the waitress returned with my order, I whispered, “There’s a fly in the sugar,” certain that she would react in horror. 

 

            “Yep, sure is,” she said as she picked up the container and walked back to the serving counter. 

 

            In full view of the scattered patrons, she merely opened the top and allowed the fly to escape before she added more sugar over the insect’s stomping and feeding ground.  She brought it back to my booth and set it down without any comment. 

 

            Since my precarious finances didn’t make it wise not to eat the food for which I would have to pay, I took a couple of tentative bites of my cheeseburger.  Something was missing.  I opened it to find lettuce, a couple of flabby pickle slices, an overripe piece of tomato, but no meat.  I took it to the waitress who was sitting in a booth near the front read a romance novel. 

 

            “Excuse me, but isn’t a cheeseburger supposed to have meat in it?”

 

            She lifted the bread to confirm the deficiency and called out to the older man who was the cook, “Jake, this fellow would like some meat on his burger.” 

 

            “Sorry about that, Mazel, I have it right here…just forgot to put it on.”  He brought the overcooked patty over to the counter and plopped it onto my plate. 

 

            “Sorry about that, honey,” the waitress said as I retreated to continue my meal. 

 

            I finished eating as quickly as possible and from that day to this have been very careful not to dine in a café bearing the name “Eats.”