At the Fin de Siecle, Looking for a Real Breakfast, Part 1

It was Kyle's idea. Over late night inebriation back in the hazy mid-1990s, Kyle suggested that we had been going about things in entirely the wrong way. The proper way to get over a hangover, he contended, was at a diner: two hamburgers and coffee. A simple formula, or so it seemed. I was willing to take him at his word, but Kyle, with the important seriousness of someone who had thought carefully about these matters, insisted that the hypothesis be examined scientifically. To really discover the veracity of Kyle's claim, we would need to test it. The following morning, we would need to rise dutifully early, and make our way to a real dive diner, and presented with meat and caffeine, the truth would be revealed. The trick, however, (as an aside, Kyle begins to speak very loudly when something of high emotional content was to be said, and here the volume was rising rapidly - this was important!) was to find a real diner. A genuine greasy spoon. No half measures would be tolerated. Perkins? Dennys? No, these will only exacerbate the drunkard's condition. It would have to be a dive. Kyle's proposal was that we tour, over as many days and weeks necessary, all the dive diners in striking distance until hitting upon perfection. An excellent plan, without any doubt; I agreed immediately.

Finding a diner seems simple enough. They're easily identified. Certainly its even true that most diners want to be identified, but we weren't after just a diner - we were after a dive, and here we involve ourselves with complicated and mysterious criteria. Put simply, we were after an authentic experience, and we knew (or at least we thought at the time) that this could never be had at a chain. For, even though we could procure hamburgers and coffee at the place with the arches and the clown, this would never, never do. So, we were presented with questions: what does it mean for a meal, a restaurant, a dining experience, a hangover cure, to be authentic?

First, the existence of an authenticity implies its opposite: inauthenticity. The fake, the unreal, the phony, the imitative. The fact that Kyle sought an authentic diner suggested that he had already experienced the inauthentic, or something something of that name, and found it wanting. So, our experience of the world was this: The everyday is a mock-up. Its not real. We eat breakfast in a pretender, and it does not satiate us. But if a person is clever, if she keeps her eyes open and her wits about her, she just might discover a little secret: the real thing is still out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered. A dark continent of eggs and coffee, beyond the suburban dead zone, waiting, waiting, waiting... or at least, that's what we expected.

Looking back, its easy to see that we had oversimplified matters. Kyle set out a small set of criteria that we would need to adhere to: (1) We would need to endure a night of drinking before taking in the diner cure, the specifics of which would be at our discretion. (2) We would need to depart for the diner early in the morning, not at a pre-determined time, but with an unstated awareness of what constituted failure to adhere to the spirit of the rule. This would necessitate a certain quantity of endurance on our parts, such that we would require ourselves to be still suffering the effects of the previous night's consumption. (3) We would order two hamburgers apiece, accompanied by coffee. Altering this order would skew the results, and thus render the findings unreliable. A potential sticking point was finding a place that would serve burgers in the A.M., or at least early enough that we wouldn't be violating the intent of criterion (2).

The importance of the hamburgers was that Kyle had determined this to be the ideal prescription for a hangover. I can't recall if he had tried this before or if he had invented the remedy. There exists this popular strategy for countering a hangover by which one ingests, essentially, grease. You see this wisdom at play in those remedies involving the eating of intimidating soups like menudo. Its something akin to hair of the dog, and it doesn't seem to make any sense, except out of a kind of stubborn refusal to be ill. At the time, I did not anticipate this being an effective antidote to the drinker's ailments. Nevertheless, it seemed like a perfectly agreeable way to spend a Saturday morning.
Mostly though, I enjoyed, if even in a trivial way, the romantic notion that we would find some thing real, something tangible, something we could rely on, which had gone unnoticed by the rest of the naive world.

First Stop: The Wagon Wheel Cafe

At the time we were living in Mankato, Minnesota, the kind of mid-sized, middlebrow, Midwestern locale that would seem ideal for our pursuit. We were enjoying that post-college directionless haze of happy-go-lucky job dissatisfaction without any real commitments. Looking back, I remember it now as an extended summer: lazy days drifted by without anything terribly important going on: getting up late, trolling coffee shops and Chinese restaurants, playing chess and backgammon, cooking, drinking, and watching movies late into the night at the house of another friend, Shelley. She was the one person in the social circle with her life organized enough to actually own a house, and it became the defacto nerve center for hatching all the summer's grandiose plans.

It was during a late night at Shelley's house that Kyle unveiled the hangover diner equation, and of course we all agreed to go. There would be four of us: Kyle, Shelley, Eve (my wife), and myself. I can't recall whether Shelley and Eve were particularly interested in scientific merits of our line of inquiry, but being of agreeable disposition, they assented to come too. Kyle's first criterion necessitated that we imbibe the night before our experiment, and Kyle, at least, dutifully did so. I, on the other hand, have never been much of a drinker. I sipped a couple of home-brewed beers, but not an amount adequate to produce a state of altered mood or next-morning rumbling. Eve and Shelley likewise. So only Kyle, with his gin and tonic, drank adequately to grant the hypothesis the justice it deserved. So, before we'd even really begun I had already failed to set up the proper conditions to discover, according to Kyle's criterion, the ideal diner.

The Wagon Wheel Cafe in downtown Mankato has all the trappings of a proper diner. It's found in a small brick storefront which its occupied for many years. We arrived late in the morning, squinting in the sun of a beautiful Saturday. We had the place to ourselves, so we chose the best booth in the establishment, located in the storefront window, but still with a view of the cook working a fourtop behind the counter. We relaxed into our seats, gazing out the window at the casual activity of downtown Mankato. It was empty, except for the cook and ourselves, so we had that peculiar feeling of owning a place. It should be said here that we had already violated the rules we had set forth. We got up too late. For whatever reason, the inertia of the hangover (in Kyle's case) , or just the inertia of Saturday (for Eve, Shelley and myself), compelled us to stay snug in our beds a little longer than we intended. This meant that even for Kyle, by the time we lit on the booths at the Wagon Wheel, the hangover had basically evaporated through a combination of sleep and sunshine. However, we did arrive just just before 10 bells, which made for a little comedy.

Our cook was a short and slim mustachioed gentleman, probably in his early fifties (was this Mr. Wagon Wheel?) attentively involved with some business behind the counter. He kept his back to us, and didn't glance up when we entered, but continued with his task for several minutes. We were very comfortable in our booth, and so didn't see any need to rush things along. But eventually I began to wonder if wasn't aware that we had come in. How long would we sit there? It seemed he was transfixed on some organizational plan concerning the coffee cups, stacked upside down in regular rows on a cafeteria style tray. Just as I began to feel that we ought to attract his attention, maybe with some loud coughing or a dropped spoon, Mr. Wagon Wheel abruptly turned, walked out from behind the counter, and proceeded the length of the restaurant to stand in front of our table. He didn't speak. He stood in front of us, with arms folded, in a manner that would almost be confrontational if it wasn't at the same time disinterested. We were not offered menus. Shelley broke the ice: pancakes and coffee. Eve: two eggs over easy, bacon, toast, coffee. Kyle and I: hamburgers and coffee. At this, Del spoke: "lunch begins at ten".

A glance at the clock on the wall behind the four-top revealed that it was five minutes before ten. After some awkward verbal fumbling (in which our host remained completely silent), Kyle and I agreed that we were capable of waiting another five minutes until the appointed hour. Del selected coffee cups from his carefully arranged pyramid, and stoically returned behind the counter to start eggs, bacon and pancakes. It should be said, he didn't start the hamburgers until the proper five minutes had elapsed.

Now, in my mind, things were going very well indeed. Mr. Wagon provided just the kind of unhelpful, surly,