Every writers’ meetup ended the same way. Some grad-school peacock in a scarf would flap his hands and say, “Let’s get ethnic food,” like he’d just caught a case of the white-liberal munchies, and we’d wind up at a Thai place. Every time. Pad Thai was the communion wafer in the Church of Bougie White Guilt.
I hated it. Still do.
But I knew my role. Couldn’t let them smell the country on me. Couldn’t let them catch the fried-bologna scent of a boy raised on Busch beer and gas-station pizza. Had to chew lemongrass like it was holy scripture.
There was always a loyalty test before the ritual began.
“You do like Thai food, don’t you?”
Not a question. A trapdoor.
“Hell,” I’d say. “I like food.”
They’d beam. Blood oath taken. Then the night went the way it always went: read your poem, hear their poems, critique the poem, critique the critique, feel briefly brilliant, Thai food.
We’d drive right past Frank’s All-Night Diner, past Sal’s deep-dish, past Joe Willy’s chicken-fried steak drowning in gravy thick enough to spackle drywall. Every time I said, “Why don’t we stop there?” some nose-ringed poet girl would giggle, “Oh, Billy, you’re so retro.”
God forbid you say you’d sell your soul for a slab of ribs and a side of slaw. That was heresy, like walking into Cracker Barrel with The Communist Manifesto under your arm.
Here’s the truth: I’d trade every Thai place in America for one blue plate of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans baptized in bacon grease. I came from a place where my grandmother could feed eight people on two pork chops and the grace of God, and no amount of lemongrass was ever going to fix what that left in me.
I dream of the day the bougie bastards discover Trans-Appalachia and haul their skinny asses to Bubba’s Biscuit Barn for chicken-and-dumplings.
When that day comes, I’ll be in the booth, sweet tea raised like a sword.
“You do like turnip greens, don’t you?”
William Matthew McCarter writes fiction rooted in the Ozarks and working-class Missouri, where bar bands, two-lane highways, and church lawns carry as much moral weight as any pulpit. His stories follow the people who get left behind in small towns and the ones who keep playing anyway. His short fiction has appeared in Reckon Review, Midwestern Gothic, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, among others, and his collection Cornbread Voodoo and Crawdaddy Gumbo is forthcoming from All Things That Matter Press. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he teaches college literature. His work draws on the same gritty, regional terrain mapped by Daniel Woodrell, Larry Brown, and Bonnie Jo Campbell.