After scouting southern Maine all day I got a cup of Starbuck’s in Portland and headed north, pleased with myself for being on the road. Then I got to Bangor and drove around for 45 minutes trying to find an empty hotel or a motel in that rat ass ex-paper mill town. Learned later there was only one. I guess I missed it. Settled on the Main St. Motel, just outside town, $35/night. Had me a bourbon or two.
Went out and hunted for dinner a while later. No way I was getting back in the car, so I walked up the road and down, and there was nothing, unless I wanted to hike the mile back into Bangor, and it was raining. Cold Maine-in-April rain. So I went across the street from my motel to a rather scary-looking place called Miller’s Buffet, a huge room with 100 feet of buffet trays arranged in a big U and a smaller island and a special roast beef stand and custom stir fry station. The beef was bad, as bad as everything else including the decor, with wallpaper printed to look like bookshelves. The same shelf moronically repeated every 18 inches, like they’d gotten a deal on that one strip and had done the whole place in it.
As I sat there munching I looked at the reflections of my fellow diners in the big front window and realized, “These are the people who don’t object to George Bush. He doesn’t talk to their heads. It’s all about how they feel. He makes things clear for them and they like that. It’s comforting.” Several families with young children, an old couple, a younger couple, and a solitary, like me, seated across the aisle. He grunted and sighed while he ate. He was my son’s age, overweight, reading one of those papers that promise you jobs. Most of the people in there were overweight, except for a black family and the two old people who were skeletal Maine types.
Sitting there regarding my fellow beings I was able, for a moment, to imagine a resolution to this awful problem I’ve been having with my countrymen, who support Bush and approve of him. In this imagining I could feel how he made life simple for them, and how they needed that ease, their lives being hard enough.
There was no joy for them in that buffet brimming with food. The food was shit. But they couldn’t tell, consciously, because there was nothing to measure it against. Everything was shit. And they knew, somehow, deep inside them, that the story of their lives was that they had shit on their plates. Eating at Miller’s Buffet was no celebration of abundance. They were putting it away cheap, and even then it was as much as they could afford.
The redeeming thing about these people, in my imagining, was that they were so manifestly not full of themselves. It wasn’t at all like eating in a fancy place in NY or DC or LA, where real empowered Americans eat real food. Here, there was no attitude and there was no self-consciousness. There were no agendas. These people were just eating. 9/11 pissed them off and now by God we’re doing something about it. Bush is doing something about it. Maybe he’s wrong but their lives are filled with wrongnesses and there’s no keeping score.
Consider the buffet, I thought, staring at the reflections in that window.
Methinks this is the kind of stuff which gives a bad name to judgmental folk on either coast: its attitude tends toward a bit of smugness, Greg, &
a tendency toward wholesale indictments of an entire people. I’d eaten
there at Miller’s Red Lion many a time when on trip up to Bill Lippincott’s, or to a collection up in smelly Lincoln. The food wasn’t nearly as bad as you made it out to be, and, yes, it was cheap, much as was the food at a host of notable Maine diners. The place closed long ago. Its memory is a portion American restaurant history – ordinary & oddly singular & decidedly without pretense. Democratic, even.