There are still a few places in this country where innocence and honesty prevail. Where hard work is expected and accepted. Where family and freedom go hand in hand. There are still places in this quasi-socialist, marketing plan of a country where people still respect the ten commandments, where they never shirk from their responsibilities and where they have more schools than bars. These places are very boring.
My parents both hail from a small, farming community in northwest Iowa. Now, when I say that this place is small, I mean to say that there are maybe three stoplights within ten miles of my grandpa's house. When I say this place is small I mean to say that they have maybe five restaurants in a twenty mile radius. This town has more churches than stores. This is the kind of place where kids walk beans (I don't know what that means either but it sounds like work), where dinner is lunch and supper is dinner and lunch is tea, and where it's hard to feel comfortable and drunk at the same time. To borrow a phrase from the great Lew Welch, in a land like this there can be no God but Yahweh.
And in this small town, where the groundwork for my Dutch Protestant roots were laid, there is also an A&W koala coffee cup that I should own. But honesty and sincerity conspired to fuck up my purchase. Honesty and sincerity are some punk bitches.
For those of you who don't know, A&W is a restaurant that specializes in hamburgers, hotdogs, root beer, root beer floats and French fries. Every time I visit this area (I say “this area” because the A&W is not technically in the town from which my parents hailed, but is close enough to drive to for lunch or dinner), I stop in at the A&W and I order the broasted chicken. Now, I don't know what broasted even means, but to me, this is some of the best fried chicken in the world. Also, it takes twenty minutes to prepare (unlike everything else in the A&W), so every time I eat there, well, those with whom I eat get pissed about the wait. However, as I have pointed out time and time again, they can all fuck off. This is the only place I can get the broasted chicken. So I take advantage of it.
Now, back when I was on break from college, I was up in Iowa for a wedding. My sister and I stopped in at the old A&W and I ordered the broasted chicken. While I drank my coffee and she bitched about how long it would take until my chicken was ready, I noticed something strange about my coffee cup: next to the A&W logo on the cup, was a picture of a koala bear hanging from a eucalyptus tree. For some reason, this intrigued me. I had never seen a coffee cup like this before. The koala had never been the animal logo of the A&W in my lifetime. Clearly, this cup was some kind of rarity and I had to have it. There was only one problem.
In St. Louis or Tampa, if I wanted to steal a cup from a restaurant, well, I just did it. But well, in Small Town, Iowa, that was a bad move. You see, my family represents roughly three percent of the local population, so if people started talking about some DeGraaf kid stealing a cup, well, let's just say I'd never hear the end of it. So, I decided to see if I could purchase the cup.
When the sixteen year old waitress came up to me to refill my coffee, I said to her, “Hey, I'll give you $20 if you let me have this coffee cup.”
To which she replied, “No. That's not mine to sell.”
And I was floored.
So then, the waitress said she'd get the manager for me. But the manager wasn't there. So, unbeknownst to me, while I ate my delicious broasted chicken (think: crunchy and fried with a piping hot inside), the waitress called the manager who informed her that the A&W could only sell coffee cups from the gift shop, which, unfortunately, had no koala coffee cups. After the waitress relayed this piece of unnecessarily stupid policy to me, I shrugged happily (I was still eating the chicken so I was pretty happy).
“You know,” said my sister. “I can just put that cup in my purse.”
And before I could tell her how I felt about her comment (again, I had a mouthful of chicken), she said, “But? I guess that's just not right here.”
And I nodded, content with the realization that it's perfectly okay to steal coffee cups from one of a million restaurants in a huge and bustling city, where crime runs like snot from the noses of sick children. But in a small, God-fearing town, even victimless crimes feel like grand larceny.
“I just can't believe that waitress wouldn't take a twenty just to look the other way for a few minutes,” I told my sister.
“Yeah,” she said. “Things are fucked up around here.”
What a country.