I’m currently sitting in a McDonald’s near
Warren, OH waiting for a load assignment and I’m missing the days when one
could sit in a restaurant, smoke, and drink coffee while contemplating the
state of the human condition and taking notes. Just thinking about it reminds
me of smells you can’t experience outside of Kansas, anymore. I say this
because smoking is still allowed in restaurants in Kansas.
For those under the age of thirty, this is
a journey back to the mid/late 1970’s to the mid/late 1980’s. Trust me when I tell you, the only things
that made it at all like The Fucking Breakfast Club, were the fashions and
women with hairy crotches (the good old days, when you had no doubt the girl
you were with was over the age of 13).
When I was in elementary school, a Pizza
Hut opened in my hometown of Oil City, PA.
It was the latest novelty in fast food coming into the area, McDonald’s
had opened a couple years earlier (it’s still the same, the only difference
between then and now is the absence of that walnut brown Formica with the fake
wood grain) and the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Center St. had closed amidst
rumours that someone wound up with a Kentucky Fried rat in their bucket of
chicken. Pizza Hut has turned out to be
one of my most vivid memories of dining in restaurants from my childhood.
Pizza Hut in the 1970’s embodies everything
I miss about that era. As soon as you
walked in several things happened at once, all the light from outside
disappeared, the room was filled with dim light emitted from about fifteen
Tiffany-esque lights hanging over around the room, a jukebox glowed in the
corner and a couple years later, a table top Pac Man game added to the whole
affair. Along with this was a soft, deep
red carpet which seemed to absorb any excess light and sound giving the whole
dining area the same kind of glow you now only see in big budget porno films
from that era. Your olfactory nerves
were then assaulted by a scent that is now as lost as the sound of a rotary
telephone, the scent of pizza mixed with cigarette smoke which hung like a haze
across the entire dining area. It
permeated everything, you got home that night and it clung to your clothes
until you washed them.
Later when I went to college at Clarion, I
found a good place to study and do homework, was the local Perkins. You could sit in there for a couple hours,
eat breakfast, drink coffee, and catch up on your reading assignments while
sitting in the smoking section and burning up the better half of a pack of
cigarettes. I still find that having a good
cigar or pipe full of tobacco, a cup of coffee or scotch on the rocks, and a
Dave Brubeck record are helpful in organizing my thoughts and loosening my
inhibitions when writing. Since I don’t
drink when I’m at work (and yes I am doing my day job) and I can’t smoke in
McDonald’s in Ohio, I’m relegated to some Brubeck on YouTube and a big enough
fit of boredom to write descriptively about something seemingly mundane that
has pretty much vanished without a trace and no one noticed.
It makes me wonder, though, if a smoker
friendly restaurant could survive in today’s climate. Even better, combine a couple of pet peeves
into one. Welcome to The Smoker’s
Lounge, no children under eighteen allowed.
Along with the menu, the waitress brings a list of cigars and cigarettes
available to accompany your meal. A
place where adults could enjoy each other’s company without all the noise and drama
that comes with kids.
It’s at this point that I realize I
should stop. This is about to get even
more disjointed and less cohesive than it already is.
Good night and may your god go with you.
