The Rainbow Diner Part I, Breakfast

The Rainbow Diner

Part I, Breakfast

by Harry Buschman

With no expectation that the day would be better than yesterday he reluctantly threw the tangled bedcovers aside and sat up. He could see his breath before him In the dim light of his bedroom window and he judged the temperature to be just above freezing. His feet, as if they had eyes of their own, groped on the floor for his slippers.

He was gratified to find his lumbago was no worse this morning than it was yesterday, yet he stood up tentatively in a semi-crouch just to be sure. Then he made his way stiffly to the window. There was a dull yellowish brown light in the east giving the promise of snow later in the day.

He shivered, scratched and yawned. The yawn almost consumed him. He blew on his hands to warm them and shuffled an erratic path to the kitchen. His teapot had been sitting on the back burner of the coal stove all night. He poured a cup of it –– thick and viscous, black as iodine. He put two heaping teaspoons of sugar in it and began drinking as he made his way to the bathroom. He stared critically at his face in the cloudy mirror and decided he could make it through the day without shaving.

He worked out his lower plate and rinsed it in the icy water from the tap. Before replacing it, he looked at his upper teeth in the mirror and decided to brush them, then remembered he had thrown the toothbrush away after using it to clean the bottom of the teapot. He squirted a dab of toothpaste on his index finger and rubbed it briskly across his few remaining upper teeth. There ... that would have to do. He set the lower plate back in place and bared his teeth in the mirror –– “That you Gordon Sharkey? Why the hell did you get out of bed this morning?”

He would have washed up, but to do that he needed hot water and he didn’t have any. If he put a pot of water on the stove last night, as he should have, he would have hot water this morning. He consoled himself by saying, “Dammit Jossie! I can’t think of everything! Why did you leave me here alone?”

Gordon was 63 years old, and for the past three years he was a widower. His wife never taught him to cook or wash or mop a floor while she was alive, and even now his tiny apartment on the third deck of the big old Christian place would have been too much for him if it wasn’t for Mady Christian. Mady was his landlady and for five dollars more she did his laundry. He didn’t have much in the way of clothes –– a pair of drop seats, two pairs of socks, a shirt, a towel and a sheet. “He must be pretty ripe by the end of the week,” Mady often said to herself as she gingerly dropped his dirty clothes in her washing machine. She came up to his apartment while he was at work to dust –– sometimes she’d mop his kitchen floor if he had been messy. She would also check his refrigerator... well, her refrigerator actually... it came with the apartment. It was usually empty, or at the most she would find one or two peculiar looking take-outs from a diner. She would sniff at them warily and, often as not, throw them in the trash.

Mady was a widow. Her husband died six years ago in a train accident at the freight yards a month before his retirement. A lot of people say it was carelessness on the railroad’s part ... but on the other hand, there had always been a lot of drinking down at the marshaling yards.

Like most railroad wives, she took the tragedy in stride and found comfort in the remembrance of nearly thirty years of a tolerably happy married life and a paid up mortgage. She was in fact, a contented widow with a rosy sunset ahead of her due to a generous settlement from the railroad union. She could look back on a childless marriage with no regrets. She was in good health, nursed a crush on the church organist, and attended a never ending round of afternoon teas and evening bridge games with her girl friends where she was known to play with the shrewdness of a Mississippi riverboat gambler. A lot of her girl friends thought Gordon Sharkey would make a nice match, but of course they didn’t know Gordon Sharkey like Mady did. Besides, Mady was a born widow.

Gordon finished his morning wash-up. He looked at the kitchen clock and decided he had enough time to make himself something to eat before starting off to the shoe factory. Mornings always seemed to go better with something in his stomach. He checked the refrigerator and found two strips of fat Canadian bacon which he spread neatly in a crusty black frying pan, shook down the ashes in the stove and added some coal. Then he hunted through the top of the refrigerator for two brown eggs he remembered putting there last week. He cut off a stale slice of bread and laid it on the stove top next to the frying pan. Before long the bacon was reduced to a bubbling puddle of fat, and into this he broke his two eggs and turned the slice of bread. By this time the under side of the bread had burned black and the top was hard and dry. No sense toasting that side, he thought. He looked into the pan of eggs and smoking fat and his stomach churned. After three years he hadn’t mastered the basics of cooking. Swearing under his breath he slid the contents of the frying pan into a brown paper bag that stood in a corner of the kitchen and decided to get something to eat downtown.

He shook himself into his old leather coat and swigged down the lukewarm dregs of the tea. He fished the stub of last night’s cigar out of the ash tray on the windowsill, lit it and walked into the bedroom. He pulled the sheet off his bed and stuffed it into a laundry bag along with his dirty long johns, shirt, socks, pants and towel. He slung the bag over his shoulder, looked around the shabby apartment, shook his head sadly and let himself out the kitchen door. “What a hell of a life for a man to live,” he thought. He limped down the stairs and left his bundle of dirty laundry at Mady Christian’s door.

Before leaving, he momentarily considered the possibility of returning to his apartment and going back to bed. He did not however, instead, he stared at his reflection in the polished glass of Mady Christian’s front door. He saw a man utterly incapable of caring for himself –– an elderly child.

“The widow Christian is getting along fine,” he grumbled, “how does she do it? Why can’t I do it?” He could hear her radio playing downstairs every night –– and her damn bridge club! He watched her bridge ladies arrive in the evening –– laughter and loud talk until all hours. “Every one of them widows,” he reminded himself. “Not something a man would do. A man will sit home pitying himself and wondering what the hell happened to him.” Convinced that widowers were not meant to be, he buttoned his old leather jacket and headed off to work.

He stood at the bus stop shifting his weight from foot to foot. As the cold sidewalk worked its way through the thin sole of his left shoe he would put the right foot down and lift the left one. After two or three shifts, both feet were cold as ice, and he felt as if he had no feet at all.

The bus appeared in the distance –– a speck of light on the horizon and seemingly in no hurry to get to him at the bus stop. When it finally arrived it slowed down rather than stopped and he was forced to jump in and clutch the rail for support. He glared at the bus driver, who glared back belligerently. “Pick ‘em up old timer –– tryin’ t’keep on a schedule here.”

Gordon was too tired and chilled to argue, operating on an empty stomach too. He paid his fare and found a seat next to a fat woman with chin whiskers wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and balancing two shopping bags on her lap. She stared at him with barely concealed hostility, as though she, too, was trying to keep on a schedule and slowing down to pick him up was an intrusion in her schedule. They rode, swaying in unison from side to side in the wildly careening bus until suddenly the woman put one of her bags in Gordon’s lap and pulled the signal cord with her free hand. She made two or three preparatory lunges, then staggered to her feet. When the bus swung to the curb and stopped, Gordon got up and handed the woman her shopping bag. She snatched it from him as though he had attempted to steal it from her, then bulled her way to the exit.

“You getting’ out or what, lady?” The bus driver growled from up front.

“Hold yer Goddamn horses! Can’t cha see I’m loaded?”

It was a bad day for everybody in the bus, and he was almost at the shoe factory, looking vainly for a sign of improvement –– a patch of blue sky.

The “Rainbow Diner” stood just across the street from the employees entrance to the shoe factory, and with fifteen minutes before punch-in Gordon decided to finally put something in his stomach. Maybe things would look a little brighter, maybe the world would take a turn for the better.

It was lovely and warm in the diner; just about body temperature he thought, and the sweet smell of onions, ketchup, coffee and bacon fat made him think of Jossie again. How nice it would be to stay here in the Rainbow Diner all day, eating and thinking of her. Why couldn’t his kitchen feel this way? Why was his so cold and why did the faint aroma of mice and rotting vegetables always greet him when he got home?

“What can I gitcha, Hon?”

Such beautiful, warm, and friendly words, he thought. Before answering, Gordon played them back in his mind. “What kin y’git me,” he said aloud. “Let me see, two eggs over easy with bacon –– the thick Canadian kind. Two slices of white toast and tea... with two tea bags, okay? I like strong tea.”

The woman pulled a pencil out of her orange hair, licked the end of it and began to write. “No juice?”

“What’s your name?”

“Lois, why?”

“I don’t know,” Gordon shrugged. “It’s just that nobody knows my name any more. They say ‘hey you’ or ‘hon,’ or even ‘pick ‘em up old timer, I’m tryin’ t’keep on a schedule here.”

“You want juice or not?”

“My name is Gordon, Gordon Sharkey.”

“You don’t mind me sayin’ so, Mister, you’re only an old guy in a black leather coat and a wool cap sittin’ on stool number 4. It’s easier that way.”

“Gordon Sharkey would like orange juice.”

Lois added the orange juice to the order and shaking her head slowly, walked back to the kitchen. Gordon watched her carefully, she swung as she walked –– lazily, without haste –– as though she were a customer. ‘Lois’ was not a name that fitted her. He remembered reading somewhere that waitresses never gave their right names. Why was that, he wondered? She came back from the kitchen and walked up to the other end of the counter adding up checks. She put them in front of three other diners. She looked at Gordon, turned quickly and walked back into the kitchen and brought his juice.

“Eggs are comin’, want’cha tea now, Hon?”

“Yes, Lois. Gordon would like his tea.” The waitress looked at him critically, as though he might have been a visitor from another planet.

“Here y’go, Hon. Two bags y’said, right? Gotta charge y’for two cups’a tea, but’cha kin have all the water y’want.”

“Imagine,” Gordon thought. “All the water I want.” He drank his orange juice, savoring the puckering tang of it and as he tilted his head back he looked at the pastry display on the back counter, cheese and prune Danishes, snowy white sugar doughnuts. His eyes lingered lovingly on the specials of the day, the BBQ Meatball Platters, the Corn dog Nuggets, the Turkey Bacon Croissant. A man could live like a king in the Rainbow Diner forever, he thought. Orange haired women like Lois would smile and ask, “What kin I git’cha. hon?” There would never be a discouraging word, he could sit on this stool all day and eat when he was hungry –– drink when he was dry –– whatever he wanted would be brought to him with a smile, a clean knife, a fork, and a spoon.

“Yes,” he decided! “This is Paradise –– the Rainbow Diner is the place for me. I shall never leave here.” He finished his breakfast and sat back with a sigh. The waitress cleared away his dishes, wiped the counter vigorously and placed the check in front of him. “I shall tip Lois 100 percent,” he decided. “Maybe even more. I want her to remember me, I want everyone at the Rainbow Diner to remember me.”

He left the tip, and thinking he was paying the entire bill, Lois told him to pay at the register. “I will, Lois. I will. That’s for you.”

“Thanks –– Gordon.”

“Yes,” he thought, “the route to a man’s heart is by way of his stomach, and now I know the route to the heart of a waitress.” He tipped his wool cap to Lois, bought the largest cigar on display at the check-out counter, paid the girl at the register and stepped outside. The first flakes of the early spring snow had just begun to fall from a sodden sky, but looking back he could see the Rainbow Diner over his shoulder.

(end of part one)

©Harry Buschman