Adam Shaw Archives - Farewell Transmission

By Adam Shaw

The day the McDonald’s Diner opened in my hometown, Dad came home from his shift at the factory with his head shimmering and the pits of his shirt soaked and sagging. Isaac and I looked up from the TV; Sum 41’s video for “Fat Lip” had landed in the top spot on Total Request Live, and Deryck Whibley sang about lower-middle class brats while a girl I wanted to marry shaved her head in the middle of a halfpipe. Dad spoke over the music, said we were going to the new McDonald’s. I almost quipped it’s not new, just lipstick on a pig like I’d heard Nick Morgan say in the cafeteria that day, but Dad tossed his lunch box toward the sink, disappeared into his room to shower and change clothes.

Dad had been talking about the McDonald’s Diner for months. Our town had been selected for a pilot alongside a few others, an upscale renovation to the location by our mall complete with new signage, a dedicated hostess, phones at each table for ordering food and requesting refills. He’d come home from work only to load us into his Jeep so he could drive by it, monitor its progress, tell Isaac and me about the tiling, painting, repaving that had been done. He was the type of guy who could strip a house to its studs, rebuild it. I was the kind of kid who built a life in The Sims, locked myself in the family computer room and ate Doritos while it grew.

Isaac and I wore gym shorts that draped past our knees, Hawaiian shirts baggy enough to cover the ballooning of our waists that had started when we’d quit football the year before. Dad returned from his shower in a polo tucked into slacks and told us to stand up, get into church clothes, so we did.

A hostess greeted us at the McDonald’s Diner. Behind her, red pleather booths sat pristine, taut. The place was empty except for a man in a bleached Appetite for Destruction shirt dipping McNuggets into a sauce cup. Dad asked for a booth and we were taken to one, handed plastic-coated menus that read, It’s McDonald’s with a diner inside! Two classic restaurants in one great place. A bottle of ketchup rested in its carrier at the far end of the table, a thickened spurt sticking out from under the cap like a skin tag. Above it, mounted to the wall, hung a phone that the hostess said we could use to order straight from the kitchen.

Watch this, I told Isaac, and I picked up the phone, shouted whassuuuuuup? like the Budweiser commercials I’d seen on TV. Stuck my tongue out and everything. Dad grabbed the phone from my hand, muttered an apology into the receiver and hung up.

What’s wrong with you, he said. I wiped spit off my chin with the side of my hand, shrugged.

Dad asked what we wanted. My brother asked for a Big Mac and I said the same, but Dad said, no no no, that we were eating off the diner menu. Behind him, the man in the Appetite for Destruction shirt scraped a half-eaten McNugget around the edges of his sauce cup, popped it in his mouth.

But it’s the same menu, I said. Two classic restaurants in one great place.

Dad lowered his head, ran his thumbs across the cover of his menu. His tongue slipped out from between his lips, wet them, and he said, fine. He picked up the phone, ordered Big Macs for my brother and me, meatloaf with gravy for him, and when he hung up he exhaled and relaxed into the booth. It squeaked against his back in a way that reminded me of the beatboxing at the start of the Sum 41 video, and I exhaled, too, turned and stared out the window at girls walking into and out of the mall on the other side of the parking lot.

The food arrived slowly for McDonald’s but quickly for a diner. Our Big Macs were boxed, fries nestled into brown and red cartons, but Dad’s meatloaf had been plated, gravy cascading over its side, mushrooms shimmery. He said let’s eat and picked up his fork, cut into the meatloaf. There was a spurt of grease, maybe gravy, the clatter of his fork hitting the plate, and he took a bite, chewed, said, it is one great place. I flipped open my Big Mac box, slid my thumb underneath the sandwich to wedge it free. The back end fell limp and spilled lettuce, a pickle, some onion onto the table. I looked up at Dad. He cut another piece of meatloaf with the side of his fork, pierced it and slid it across the gravy pooled in the bottom of his plate.

My sandwich tasted as sweaty and tangy as I expected, and I pictured us coming back, back again, maybe after visits to the Circuit City that anchored the west side of the mall, an afternoon of arcade games at Aladdin’s Castle. I pictured us walking into the McDonald’s Diner with our arms around each other’s shoulders afterward, laughing with my brother about the aliens we’d picked up by the hair, punched into space in Battletoads, Dad slugging us on the shoulder, saying, you gave ’em a run for their money. The hostess would greet us and we’d sink into our booth, this booth, and Dad would pick up the phone to order us ice cream sundaes, caramel and hot fudge both. I pictured telling him about bands, showing him made-up logos I’d sketched between class notes even though the only instrument I’d ever played was the trombone. I pictured him nodding, smiling ear-to-ear, asking how’d you come up with that? and me shrugging while I ripped open a packet of peanuts, shook them onto my ice cream, shoveled a spoonful of it and caramel and fudge all into my mouth.

I finished the Big Mac, closed the box, said, can we get ice cream?

Dad set his utensils in what was left of his gravy. He grabbed his menu, and I stared at the cover as he flipped through it, two classic restaurants in one great place, and for a second, I believed it. He picked up the phone and I scooted forward, realized that my mouth had fallen open, that the drool had started to pool in the space beneath my tongue, and I searched his face for a sign that we would eat our desserts and talk and laugh even though our mouths were full and we’d have to press our palms against our temples to fight back brain freeze, but he asked for the check and I closed it, collapsed back into my seat.

I caught Dad’s eyes as he hung up the phone, set down the menu. Nobody brought our check, so Dad pulled a handful of bills out of his wallet and pinned them under the ketchup bottle. He grabbed a napkin and wiped at the glob that had been under the lid, tossed it on his plate and nodded toward the mall, said let’s go. Everything rushed forward like a kiss to the forehead, arms wrapping around my shoulders and pulling me close. But then a swell of adrenaline like that moment just before the razor meets your skin and shaves off your hair, that half-second of flight when you don’t know if you’ll stick the landing or crumble down the halfpipe: the world old but new, fresh and full of possibility.

Adam Shaw‘s work has previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, Autofocus, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Louisville, Kentucky, and can be found online at theshawspot.com.

My dad, my brother, and I watched TV for five days after Mom’s funeral before Dad finally snapped. He turned off the semifinal of an axe-throwing tournament mid-throw, set the remote next to the half-empty Chardonnay Mom had been drinking before she died, and told us we were going to the Cozy for a beer. My brother had never heard of the place, asked if it was new. I dismissed it as a relic, something up there with the house on 27^th Street that he stripped to the studs, rebuilt, still drove by thirty years after moving. The Corvette he sold when he found out Mom was pregnant. My half-brother Mike.

We agreed, though, and Dad drove us. Said he’d do it if one of us promised to drive home.

The Cozy had no indication of open or closed, hours or dress code, just a front door decal stating It’s cozy time! in yellow swooping script, something you’d expect out of a family-owned diner, an antique store. Places your grandparents take you on a Sunday afternoon out.

Isaac asked Dad if he used to drink there, and he laughed, grabbed the doorknob and pulled it open. A hanger jingled from the other side, green suede, bells and tinsel, dead lights. The inside of the building was red leather booths and mirrored walls, a pool table in back with a cigarette machine I didn’t think was legal but probably didn’t matter. Dad shuffled up to the bar, sunk into a stool and sighed like he sighed into his recliner at home. A rip in the side pulled open under his weight, the stuffing white like bared teeth. I snarled at it. My brother hit me on the arm, asked what was wrong with me.

Dad ordered a Budweiser. Stopped the waitress before she could open it, asked for a Bud Light. “Because of my blood sugar,” he added. Isaac and I ordered the same.

Above the bar, a TV showed baseball highlights. I pointed out the Cubs, my granddaddy’s team. Mom’s dad. Dad raised a hand to catch the waitress’s attention, asked if she could turn on axe throwing instead. “To see how it ends,” he told us.

***

Dad asked us back to the Cozy a few weeks later to celebrate my birthday, that fall to watch Indiana Pacers basketball, that winter to eat holiday dinners. We told him one day that we wanted to meet up with our friend Brad, grab a bite to eat, and he invited himself along, told us to change our plans and send Brad to the Cozy. We agreed every time, ordered Bud Lights, nursed them and watched TV.

***

The Cozy offered a breakfast special for a while, maybe just a week or two. I didn’t come around enough to know for sure, but Dad invited Isaac and me a year or so after Mom’s funeral. He announced it the way one might announce a relative getting married, eyes wide with such excitement that it stood him up taller, loosened a couple strands of his combover.

The door creaked when we entered, its bells and garland in a heap on a nearby table. The tinted windows let in more light than I thought they would, highlighted creased menus, names carved into walls, booths that sunk in the middle from drunks falling into them, sucking down beers, sucking face. Dad hustled to the bathroom for a piss and a guy stumbled up to my brother and me, shook our hands and told us what a good guy our dad was, thanked us for his service in Vietnam as if we had anything to do with it. As if we didn’t show up two wives, two divorces, two dead children later. He apologized for the loss of our mom, said Dad spoke little but highly of her. Asked us what happened. I opened my mouth to rattle off a summary of the autopsy, but Isaac cut me off. Put an arm across my chest and everything.

“She was sick,” he said.

Dad came back and we settled in at the bar, ordered a round of Bud Lights. He introduced us to Davey, who told him we’d just met. “My boy’s a doctor,” Dad said. Grabbed my brother by the shoulder and shook him the way one might a kid after his first home run. “You believe that?”

“God damn,” Davey said. “And the other one?”

Dad opened his mouth, stopped. He thought about it, ran his tongue in and out of holes where teeth used to be. You can both want someone to know something about you and soak in their discomfort when they don’t, slide into it and let it soothe you, quiet the noise between your ears. Mom had died not knowing my job; I wondered if Dad would do the same.

I told Davey, my dad, and my brother what I did. The bartender asked for our order, saved them from having to respond, saved me from having to explain it to them. Dad asked for biscuits and gravy, Isaac the same. I went with eggs and toast. We sipped our beers while we waited for the food, and Dad told us about a woman who’d reached out to him on Facebook, young with a name he couldn’t pronounce. Said she’d seen that he’d lost his wife. The bartender offered us shots, something with orange juice, and told my dad that any woman would be lucky to have him. I wondered if the Facebook friend was a catfish, whether it mattered if it made him feel good.

Dad declined the shot. “Because of my blood sugar,” he told her.

Our food came not long after. I took two bites of eggs, ate half a piece of toast. My dad cleaned his plate, the rest of Isaac’s too.

‘“That was terrible,” he said as Isaac drove us home. “It’s good to see ‘em try, though.”

***

At some point the bartenders started calling me “Richard’s boy.” They cracked Bud Lights for me without asking, slid them across the bar and asked if I wanted fried pickles, anything on the TV. Dad and I talked the Corvette, red, 1972. The time off he took from the factory before Mike died of leukemia. The house on 27^th, how he tried to finish it before I was born but couldn’t, gated off rooms to keep me safe until he could.

***

Dad died a couple years later. The night after the funeral, I told my brother that we needed to go to the Cozy. For him, I said. We’d spent the last week getting drunk for ourselves. Visiting old college bars. The brewery down the road from the city jail, the Wrigley-themed sports bar with three buck mugs of Old Style. The piano bar with two-dollar wells. Nothing but Keystone Light on draft.

Isaac told me the Cozy had closed, and I told him to fuck off. He thumbed around on his phone, held it front of my face to prove it. I dialed the number, listened to three chimes that preceded a message that it had been disconnected. Isaac tracked down the website, something like cozytime.biz, but the domain was for sale with an ad that you could buy it for twelve bucks. We searched on Facebook, tried to find a girl we used to work with who’d posted that she’d dated the owner, but they were gone. Isaac talked me into DT Kirby’s instead, then the Knickerbocker, then the place that used to be Hunter’s Down Under but had become something else even though everyone still called it Hunter’s Down Under. We ordered Bud Lights at every stop, toasted to Dad, perused the food menu for something new, maybe a breakfast schedule, but nothing stuck out. The settings became a blur of creaking bar stools, flickering neons, whiffs of cigarette smoke or fried food. We talked about the time I drove through the garage door, the time my brother kicked in the front door, the way we both came out of our doorway transgressions with nothing more than a “damnit boys.” We ordered another round because we could have been better, should have been better, would have been worse if our kids did the same.

***

I was on my way out of town a couple days later when I made a last-minute turn across two lanes of traffic to take the long way up South Street to US-52. It earned me the blare of a horn, a middle finger out the window. I drove a few miles up the road to the Cozy, lot empty save for burger wrappers, empty forties. Through a window I spotted a glimpse of movement, the craning of a neck as someone took a swig. I parked across two spots by the door, turned off my car and tossed my keys into a box of photos we’d displayed at the funeral.

A closed sign hung on the door, the word “permanently” scratched across its top in black ink. I went to the window, pressed my forehead against the glass. Inside, a pair of shoulders hunkered over the bar. Atop them, a sliver of light shone from a patch of skin a combover couldn’t reach. I went back to the door, grabbed the handle, pulled. A deadbolt rattled in the frame. I tried again, punched it when nothing happened. Shook the door and screamed until I couldn’t, put my head against the cold wood and sobbed out what I had in me. Fog formed on the door in a shape that reminded me of a dragon breathing fire, and I wondered what it would mean to be a dragon breathing fire, to incinerate the door, tuck my wings, walk inside. I stepped back, wiped the fog with the soft edge of a fist and spotted the edges of a decal in its wake. It’s cozy time!

I went back to the car, flipped through some photos while the heat of my tears melted from my cheeks. Found one of Dad on the couch spooning my brother and me when we were little, maybe five years old or so. Our eyes wide, focused forward. In his glasses, I caught the reflection of the TV, a speck of light I couldn’t decipher. I ran my thumb over it, imagined Dad’s arm around my body, the warmth of it, the smell of his factory, of aluminum, sweat. The firmness of his bicep under my head, the tickle of his beard on the back on my neck. Pulling my brother into me and me into him.

Adam Shaw lives with his wife and daughter in Louisville, Kentucky. His work has previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, HAD, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @adamshaw502.