The Waysider

We were told we had to eat there. It was the cheese grits, the kitten-shaped pancakes for children, the fluffy biscuits, the red-eye gravy and center-cut ham steaks crowding out the dish of poached eggs, the bottomless cups of strong coffee and tall, beaded glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

In the fall of that year, I wasn't so sure that waiting on line for nearly an hour just to enter the Waysider for its locally famous breakfast was worth the hooey. We stood outside as the brutal morning sun, already yanking the thermometer on the side of the bank building into the hundreds, beat down on us.

The place was on Greensboro Avenue, a family-run diner opened in 1951 in a converted Victorian house butting against the busy rails of the Southern railroad line, where the Crescent took Yankees through Tuscaloosa, over the rolling countryside to Memphis on the river, down to the city of New Orleans. You could drive past the Waysider any number of times without seeing the small Alabama-crimson-and-white sign or the sudden turn to the driveway where hackberries jut into narrow parking lanes. (At the end of your breakfast, there would be leaves and bird droppings all over your car).

Word is that coach Bear Bryant himself was once a frequent diner, helping himself to the endless refils of coffee and plate after plate of hot, feather-light biscuits. Certainly the walls surrounding the two dining areas that held the 15 tables were covered with Bamabilia, photos of the football team, of white Southern families of local note, pictures of Tuscaloosa when cotton wagons and horse buggies rolled along the dusty streets.

And so you stood for upwards of two hours on some Sunday mornings to take one of the 15 tables, browsing through The New York Times or The Tuscaloosa News, depending on your cultural bandwidth, mopping up the sweat that trickled down your neck, wondering if the wait was worth the worry. Southerners lined up in their Sunday best, just arriving from services, men in light-colored summer suits and women with flowers in their bonnets, bibles in hand, and their youngsters squirming in the heat.

Once inside, you sighed in the sudden chill and the heady swirl of fresh coffee and bacon in air. You could take your newspaper with you, but it made the tiny space on your table even more challenging, with the immediate arrivals of iced water, orange juice, and coffee, and the first round platter of biscuits. When a writer like Margaret Atwood or Tobias Wolff came to town, you took them to the Waysider during the week, when the wait was brief. But the food somehow tasted better on Sunday morning, with reverent people chattering at the tables and dabbing napkins into the glass of ice water to pat away morsels of biscuits or grits from their lips.

The biscuits had no specific density and went down like buttery puffs of joy, until you realized you had eaten too many of them. Still, the waitress, frenzied between the packed tables, came back with a bright smile, a pot of coffee, and a fresh plate of biscuits seconds from the oven. You could dip them in your red eye gravy, in your coffee, or smear them with fresh strawberry preserves, put one up your nose, another under an armpit, and a half dozen in your purse or backpack for later. You had sex with them at the table, toasting your triumph with another cup of coffee before rolling into them again.

And on such a Sunday in the fall, days before Ronald Reagan was to make his only campaign visit to an American college campus--choosing Tuscaloosa for its ardent reborn conservatism and Saturday church of football--we were talking about him. I blamed him for all the resurgent woes of neanderthal behavior: the burning of a cross on campus to protest a Black sorority, the dangling of the Stars and Bars from a house on Bryant Drive, the huge American flags flown from masts erected in the beds of passing pickup trucks--all responsible somehow for the moronic utterances by the students in my Introduction to American Literature class.

My girlfriend Diana was giving me The Look. Self-justified, I rolled right through the red light; on I went, egged ever into my glory by too much coffee, pent-up vitriol from centuries of pogroms and disenfranchisement, and in the midst of my tirade I had said something along the lines of "That Fuckdog Reagan" with the delight and amperage that a Bama cheerleader might have uttered, "We're gonna beat the hell out of you!"

The waitress stopped filling my bottomless cup and went on to more deserving tables. My sweetheart looked down at the grits hardening in her plate. All about us the room fell silent as the congregation eyed the brute Yankee at his bloody hate pulpit, spewing negativity in what had moments ago been a sanctuary of gentility and well-intentioned words measured out in spoonfulls from a sugar bowl.

"Guess breakfast's over," I said.

"Guess so," said Diana.

It was not the first time I had diminished her by my outbursts, but it was nearing the last. I could see that now she had moved into new territory where she had unalterably decided on something that did not include my company. We left the Waysider, giving room to people who had waited as long as we had for the opportunity to come in out of the sun, and then, driving home in the ruthless, animal heat of the afternoon, I had become a Yankee writer who had temporarily run out of bright things to say.

Tuscaloosa

The Druid City lies along the shoals of the Black Warrior River at the convergence of 19th Century trails used by Muscogean-speaking tribes led by Chief Tuskaloosa. When I arrived in the fall of 1983 the city had become home to 80,000 frenzied members of the Bryant tribe, typified by packs of crimson and white-painted devotees of the Church of Saturday Football. They arrived by recreation vehicles in the middle of the week, posted up revelry headquarters in the parking lots astride Bryant-Denny Stadium, and got their barbecue on.

For the rest of us--yankees and interlopers of confounded cultural identities--the pilgrimage resembled a tent meeting of elders from stratified sects as disparate as Birmingham (decked out in duck-head pants and expensive loafers) and Cottondale (casually attired in blue bib overalls, huntin' boots, and bright red ballcaps). Sunday you went to church. Saturday you prayed at the Shrine of the Everlasting Bear.

To fully attend a football game at Bryant-Denny you had to drink the Coach Bear Bryant kool-aid amidst a horde that doubled the city population for an afternoon. Not everyone was liquored-up to their Dixie gills, but most were. Certainly the sorority goddesses in their pastel formal gowns despite the raging heat and bone-melting humidity had a little bourbon at breakfast. By halftime, many would sport patches of sudden vomit at their breast. Fraternity lads, dressed in Sunday go-to-preachin' finery, would leap across sections of rooting fans to rip the dress tie off a real or imagined foe. And locals would craft clever stadium totems, such as the red and yellow box of detergent and toilet paper mounted on a staff of wood, a tale told by an idiot signifying: Roll Tide!

Along University Boulevard at dawn the merchants had already set out tables of iced beer and red and white pennants, the crackling loudspeakers playing "rama-jama, yellowhammer, give em hell, Alabama". You could dine from plates of biscuits in red-eye gravy (a tincture of ham fat and coffee), breakfast slices of pepperoni Bamabino pizza, trays of iced donuts, quadruple-shot tumblers of Long Island iced teas, throat-cauterizing delicacies from Wings n' Things, or purchase celebratory Bear Bryant effigies on coke-cola bottles and license-plate frames that read: "American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God". Say, hallelujah!

At kickoff time, you could drive 80 miles an hour down the deserted city streets, hearing only the sound of squealing tires and a cresting roar from the stadium. Tables were deserted with Bryant relics and platters of ribs still sitting on them, the merchants departed for their own stadium seat or tucked back into their shops where they listened to the game on the radio. Rag-pickers walked along under the hot fall sun in near solitude, plucking up recyclable cans, or sitting on the curbs under the hackberry trees with their scavenger's bounty.

We writers, out-of-towners, grad students with portfolio typically met up for cheese grits and eggs, then strapped plastic flasks of bourbon to our calves with duct tape, pulled down our cuffs, and walked undisturbed past distracted guards into the brilliant sunlight of the stadium, heat shimmering from the grass, all in a blur of crimson bunting and plastic pompoms. Loudspeakers blared "Sweet Home Alabama" as wave upon wave of footballers took their drills across the turf.

It is simply impossible to over-write the splendor, the fanaticism, the crowd rising as one to the kickoff with a growl that began in your belly and rose like the scream of some freshly pole-axed hog as the ball was struck. Roll-Tide-Roll. Stand up, my brothers, rise up sistern, feel the recollection of the blood of the lamb, see the bright parallax of angels guiding you skywards, light-headed in the blood-red sauce of barbecue and sweet nectar of warm bourbon in God's own humidor of fun, the smiting of foes, the crushing of heathens, the urpage of slight cheese-grit bouquet on the back palate of a scream, waves of helmeted seraphim a-flow across the turf where the ghastly visage of Barry Krause is forever staunching the goal-line plunge of Penn State, where the shadow of the Bear, dearly departed, still prowls the sidelines, frowning Gibraltar in his houndstooth hat...

... and in the end, you had a brutal headache.

You walked with friends in silence--no matter the outcome--having tithed more than you earned. Cars began to stir again along Bryant Drive, then the Tuscaloosa bars and cafes once again swelled to life and patrons burst out onto the sidewalks. But along Hackberry Lane or 10th Avenue there was just the sound of fall leaves crunching underfoot and the pulse of your heart pounding into your temples, and the hope of cool weather someday coming to the South. And that night, if you stayed awake, the line of lights from vans and campers still streamed toward the interstate en-route to Thomasville, Demopolis, Alabaster, and Selma. You could hear car horns blaring the Bama fight song, then the final whoops of desperate revelers and, much later, just the sound of cockroaches as they marched beneath the dried up leaves in the windless night. But you would have to sleep soon enough, dreamless toward Sunday, when the chimes rang from the steeples of Tuscaloosa and the rest of the world was deep in prayer.