The Diner Next Door — Part 1

I didn’t even mean to come here this place I call home. My apartment is loosely attached by a white wooden staircase to The Diner Next Door. I live at the top of the building, above the gigantic stone cylinder painted white where food is stored, my space also gigantic is all windows which makes the building look like a glass of milk, half full or half empty it’s your choice.

But like I said I never intended to stay.

The restaurant is also a bus stop on the Trans Canada Highway pretty much smack between Dryden and Kenora, it started out as a gas station, everybody needed gas whether traveling east or west and Carl told me everybody needed to pee by then, too, and wanted, in the winter months, coffee, and in the summer he said what do you think they wanted? and I answered lemonade and he said no, that they wanted coffee all summer, too, for that stretch of road was difficult due to its straightness, its see-foreverness, its never-ending mirages regularly delivering disappointment.

Carl invented his own rewards system. He had a stamp and ink pad and each fill-up he’d add a star to the back of his business card, the front of which barely contained a remarkably accurate doodle of Carl himself beneath the words Carl’s Got Gas the little cartoon Carl impishly watching a fart bloom behind him. Drivers chuckled and kids howled, the card tucked in their visors and when there were fifteen stars, five across and three down, the card would be confiscated and thumb-tacked to a wall heavy with others, fifty free cents of gas awarded, and a new card would be issued, a single star in the upper left corner only fourteen to go he’d say see you soon, friend.

Carl would eventually have Gracey Hilborne from Happy Ad Print in the nearest town – Vermillion Bay at the time although several resorts have since made town distinction due to their post offices – but he had Gracey make a new stamp which approximated the fart but not quite, it looked more like a cartoon brawl like the ones between Popeye and Brutus.

Anyway Carl eventually opened a diner what with all the opportunity driving through and he called it Restaurant In The Pines & Cedars which of course was ridiculously long for such a small place, and too fancy-sounding for a diner, but he wanted a long name, his plan was to make the name into a landmark light-show but for reasons known only to the electrician or God the lights never worked properly, only a select few managed to light up consistently and brightly while the rest fainted, so the huge sign read RESTAURANT IN THE PINES & CEDARS and before long The Diner Next Door was known as Rest In Pieces which stuck for years until the aging sign deteriorated further into RESTAURANT IN & PINES AND CEDARS, and when I first saw the place it was known as Rip’s Diner as it is today, some poeple said it as an acronym, are eye peas others said it like the word as we did, and if you’d like a T-shirt they’re $15.99 and a hoody is $29.99, the forest green two-sided XL with Carl farting on the back is our best seller and we got tons stored in the milk.

Way up here in all the extreme Canadian climate the sign eventually was dismantled by the elements, and finally removed by Carl. I salvaged from the heap my initials which I dragged up the shared stairs into my glass and plopped against the wall where they remain today.

The diner’s mine now, but it’ll always be Rip’s, Carl comes by every day sometimes he sits in his car and honks until I go out and help him, his entrance is always ceremonious, the crowd goes wild, and he has the chicken pot pie no matter what time it is, takes him forever to eat it, I always have one ready to put in the oven, served with love and rosemary, which happens to be my name, Rosemary Love, and if you’ve been paying attention you’d know there was no L for Love but I made it out of the E in RESTAURANT, just sliced away the upper two parallels.

Come closer I’ll tell you how I got to my big glass of milk in the first place, and started working at The Diner Next Door.

The bus between midnight and dawn swirling along the road under the northern lights you can’t see but only feel the horizon same level as your heart like a slice and you feel something hot, maybe not joy maybe not panic but they’re in the cocktail alright, and you just want to keep with the steadfast night because in the morning you start wondering in a By The Time I Get To Phoenix kind of way about almost everything.