Abdill here, reporting from Durham, North Carolina — the city of medicine. Really, that’s what the signs, all of them, say when you get into town. I came here with photographer and part-time cabinet maker Jackie Borowski to report on tonight’s men’s soccer game against No. 14 Duke (and maybe make some cabinets), but, to distract you lovely readers from the sordid tale on The Diamondback’s site, I offer up the tale of the journey as well. It was a long trip.
I should preface this by explaining that I don’t get out much. The scenery in Durham isn’t anything to blog about — it looks the same as the rest of the eastern seaboard. If you drove up and down Campus Drive for five and half hours, you’d be seeing the same sorts of trees and buildings and people would be speaking the same language as they do down here. But the culture is different in the near-South. You can smoke inside. People drive with their mouths hanging open. To my great relief, though, the water spins in the same direction when you flush the toilet.
We got off on a fabulous foot by actually leaving on time, something I do not have the reputation for doing all that often. I’m a nervous fellow, though, and little things tend to make me uncomfortable; like when, driving down Baltimore Avenue, we passed a man with a lanyard tied tightly across the middle of his face. Or when, after driving for half an hour, we passed a “Welcome to Maryland” sign. I still do not understand.
Things turned a little hostile after a while, too — Jackie and I were getting along fine, but it didn’t take long for the Garmin GPS system to adopt an extremely condescending tone, and I started to get mighty suspicious of the thing when we made a wrong turn and I suddenly lost cell phone reception. I later concluded that I had lost reception because we were in the middle of Virginia at the time, and, from the looks of things, cell phones haven’t quite made it to their neck of the woods yet. Still, though. Bad omens.
After about 90 minutes of driving, it occurs to me that it would be polite to offer to lend a hand. ”If you want to switch up driving at all, just let me know,” I say. ”I’m fully qualified. I haven’t killed anything, at least to my knowledge.”
“I killed a coyote,” Jackie responded. I had not anticipated this. Apparently the woman saw one in the road one day and thought that “swerving might not be the safest for me” and just hit the thing.
It must be pointed out, though, that Jackie grew up in a canyon in California. She has long-standing animosity towards canis latrans, and understandably so — 12 months a year, they would gather on the rim of the canyon and howl at the moon in the middle of the night. And, in real life, a coyote howl does not sound like the mournful baying of a dark, misunderstood creature. It sounds like a woman screaming bloody murder, and it’s not a soothing thing for a 6-year-old girl to fall asleep to.
Either way, I let her keep driving.
—
More driving, more talking. I only ask to pull over once, at the Virginia Holocaust Museum. Jackie refuses, despite the fact that I know very little about the Virginia Holocaust. We have work to do, she says, but she placates my whines by taking me to Waffle House.
I don’t know how many of you Long Island and Chicago Terps fans have been to a Waffle House, but it’s the kind of place that, when a reporter goes to eat there, he cannot help but bring his notebook.
First, there is a giant poster on the door that boasts that there are 14 meals under $5, including beverages. This signals that we have either entered A Perfect Place or A Place That I Absolutely Do Not Want To Be. Turns out to be a little of both.
At first I was charmed by the place, taken back to late nights in Jersey diners. It was downhill from here. Though it first appeared to be a quaint greasy spoon, I soon realized that this particular Waffle House was some weird cross between a Denny’s and a state prison work yard. The food was being cooked by strange people with nervous eyes — the woman running the register was the most peculiar. She was… lumpy. Just a person without a definite shape. I’ve only seen it one other time, and it was on the losing side of the 2008 presidential election.
The girl tried, much to the waitress’s chagrin, to order pancakes. At the Waffle House.
So she got the waffles, and I got a pile of eggs. It looked delicious, but it needed seasoning. I inventoried the situation:
- Original TABASCO brand Pepper Sauce
- Lea & Perring Steak Sauce
- Heinz Yellow Mustard
- Lea & Perring Worcestershire Sauce
- Heinz 57 Sauce (“add ZEST to chicken, steak & pork!”)
- Señora Jackie’s Casa de Waffle Picante Sauce (“packaged exclusively for Waffle House”)
- Heinz Tomato Ketchup
No salt at all. My nervous condition started acting up again, and for the first time I started really seeing the place: a strange, ambiguous pile of something sat unattended on the flat-top. A small fire was going continuously on the grill. A woman with gigantic glasses was staring out of the window in the kitchen door and burning a hole in Jackie’s face with her death glare. A gigantic man walked in with a creature I presume to be his wife, yelled something unintelligible, and drummed on his stomach before wandering off into the bathroom.
We ate our meal and left.
It was going to be an interesting trip.
All this reporter needs to write a proper gamer is a quart of orange juice and a special green lamp.
Rich Abdill is certainly not the men’s soccer beat reporter, but he did cover the Maryland-Duke game. He can be reached at rabdill at umdbk dot com, and, if you really want, you can follow him on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/rabdill.
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