Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'A pork tenderloin and onion rings,' you would repeat apologetically. 'Please, Shirley. If it's not too
much trouble. When you get a minute.'
Shirley would stare at you for up to five minutes, as if memorizing your features for the police report,
then scrawl your order on a pad and shout out to the cook in that curious dopey lingo they always used in
diners, 'Two loose stools and a dead dog's schlong,' or whatever.
In a Hollywood movie Shirley would have been played by Marjorie Main. She would have been gruff and
bossy, but you would have seen in an instant that inside her ample bosom there beat a heart of pure gold. If
you unexpectedly gave her a birthday present she would blush and say, 'Aw, ya shouldana oughtana done it,
ya big palooka.' If you gave Shirley a birthday present she would just say, 'What the fuck's this?' Shirley,
alas, didn't have a heart of gold. I don't think she had a heart at all, or indeed any redeeming features. She
couldn't even put her lipstick on straight.
Yet the Y Not had its virtues. For one thing, it was open all night, which meant that it was always there if
you found yourself having a grease crisis or just wanted to be among other people in the small hours. It was
a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper's
painting 'The Nighthawks'.
The Y Not is long gone, alas. The owner, it was said, ate some of his own food and died. But even now
I can see it: the steam on the windows, the huddled clusters of night workers, Shirley lifting a passed-out
customer's head up by his hair to give the counter a wipe with a damp cloth, a lone man in a cowboy hat lost
in daydreams with a cup of coffee and an untipped Camel. And I still think of it from time to time, especially
in places like southern Belgium, when it's dark and chilly and an empty railway line stretches out to the
horizon in two directions.
