Breakfast with Veggie Man
That metaphysical shakedown known in some social circles as “high strangeness” never knocks or announces its presence. It simply swerves off the road and Luke Dukes its way out of the car and runs up to you and bops you on the brain with an attack dose of chunky-style brand new information.
I mean, one minute you’re sitting in some nowhere diner at some slender hour of the night, troubleshooting with ketchup bottles and performing surgery on your six-dollar tuna melt (extracting those little wafers of yesteryear’s celery is not for the weak of spirit) and the next minute you’re having a juiced-up conversation with notable cryptic critter Veggie Man about maritime warfare and the Beach Boys.
I can tell you with confidence that that’s how the whole thing goes down because that’s precisely what happened to me. Last night, in fact, while dripping down the top left side of the state of West Virginia. And, yeah, now my up is my down and my left is my right and all my periods and exclamations points have morphed into big fat question marks.
Okie doke, amigos, here goes... I’ll let you scooch into my brain for a little bit and show you what happened. Bienvenue au le Ciné Van Hillard…
To begin, close your eyes and picture the state of West Virginia. Harder than you thought, eh? Behold, a lifeline: the state of West Virginia is shaped like Slimer the ghost (yeah, from Ghostbusters), but imagine Slimer lying on his back, stargazing. Got all that pictured? Now imagine where Slimer’s bottom lip would be. That’s about the part of West Virginia where all this happened.
And, yeah, you can believe me or you can believe me to be crazier than a sprayed roach, but here goes… (as I switch over to the present tense to prop you up right there next to me)…
11:45pm, northwest West Virginia. I pull my jaundice yellow rental Corvette (why skimp when your imagination is footing the bill?) off Interstate 77 and idle into a roadside parking lot where gravel goes to die. I do so because there’s a big brawny neon sign screaming BEST BREAKFASTinto the night, thus catching the attention of my desolate belly (who always really pilots these little leftfield sorties of mine)…
I am travelling from Marietta, Ohio to Mineral Wells, West Virginia, partaking solo in a late-night recreation of regional celebrity Woody Derenberger’s own fender bender with some especially wild child high strangeness (but, yeah, that there is another story). Though I now live in Mexico City, Mexico, I seemingly spend more time in West Virginia than Chief Cornstalk’s personal hairdresser...
The reason is simple:
I am a UFO/cryptid guy, and West Virginia is the Valhalla of all things kooky. I’m also field investigator for a civilian agency that I shalt not mention here, as well as an independent investigator for my own little acronym, and I was technically in West Virginia to investigate a report involving a black triangular craft and its occupants—a bunch of meter-high humanoids who had besieged the witness’s trampoline. So far all I had written on my report was: Witness so cross-eyed she can sit on the front porch and count the chickens in the backyard... Maybe a little touched by the angels???
But, yeah, you’d need a sequoia’s worth of looseleaf paper and a gross of no. 2 pencils to document all the strange beasts of unknown origin that lay their creepy heads to bed every night in the sylvan hills of deep West Virginia. Never mind all the non-transponding air traffic that routinely recreates the last ten minutes of Firefox above the whole bug-eyed area.
Plus, I can shoot up to West Virginia from Mexico City (see: planes, trains, automobiles) in about six episodes of The Rifleman and one especially powerful power nap.
But, okay, cryptic critters. The whole galaxy knows about Mothman and the Sheepsquatch and the Grafton Monster and the Flatwoods Monster and the Snarly Yow and every other critter on the planet not acknowledged by spellcheck, yuk-yuk-yuk…
But, yeah, then there’s Veggie Man, a sort of Dr. Seussian man-shrub bloke that I will introduce to you here shortly...
I get out of my Vette and make it chime three times and enter this BEST BREAKFAST joint. Immediately I’m blasted in the face with the smell of burning butter and the Beach Boys’ Kokomo, petering out of a juke box as big as a submersible. A stag wooden sign says SEAT YOURSELF, so I seat myself by jumping into a little booth where a 50,000 word count menu awaits me.
I look around the place, checking it all out as the as the Beach Boys serenade me, giving me an audio tour of every banana republic in the history of humanity... The BEST BREAKFAST, it appears, is a preposterously lit diner that seemed older than time itself. The whole place is all wood and semi-opaque mirrors and neon lights, peppered with a variety of gnawed-on taxidermied varmints. No greenery whatsoever, save a flimsy, creepy looking plant slightly swaying by way of some mystery breeze. The plant appears to be jutting out of a nearby booth, like it’s there to eat eggs and bacon and do a crossword puzzle...
The whole place is the kind of endearingly anachronistic joint in which you might find Rod Serling puffing on endless Chesterfields.
And it is crowded.
Truckers, rogue drunkies, a gaggle of rustic teens, all at the mercy of trio or so of haggard waitresses, each of them done up like a dollar store flight attendant.
One of them, a cryptid herself (Doris, reads her nametag, in some extinct font), decked out in half an acre of bug-bite red rouge and gumball lipstick, threatens me into ordering “while she’s in the vicinity” so I ask for a hot coffee and my pointer finger engages the words tuna and melt right there on their sheet panel of menu and then I spend the next ten minutes mumbling into my hand while Doris and company clamber around the joint’s innards, lips moving the whole time, spewing diner-centric esoterica at each other…
Eventually somebody deposits a cup of coffee in front of me, along with an armada of condiments. A few minutes later my tuna melt arrives, flanked by alpine range of fries and a pickle big enough to ride on roller coasters.
I start doing that thing I do with food where I play with it before I put it out of its misery when I hear this peculiar voice behind me ask one of the waitresses for a side of mayo. The voice sounds like when people get their throats slit in movies (see: Rambo, Puppet Master, et cetera, et cetera)… Sort of gargled, underwater sounding, but with actual words mixed in. This particular voice pronounced “mayo” by squeezing the max out of its duo of anorexic syllables. (“Mayyy-ohhh”)
Curious now, I swivel around and it takes me a stretched-out second to realize what I’m looking at. . . that weird flimsy plant thing, thin, wispy, slightly animated, and now cloaked in a makeshift bib and holding up its cutlery like they do in cartoons, about to plunge into a plate of yellow and brown breakfast food.. .
Veggie Man.
...And I most have said it aloud because Veggie Man looks at me like I’m covered in Pepto-Bismol and say, “Don’t call me that, Ace.” His voice was still gargled sounding, but clear enough to make out the malice behind it. “Every time some bubba in a goofy hat dorks out on me and calls me that dipstick moniker, an angel gets thwacked across the face with a rubber hose.”
“But it is you, right?” I ask, turning around to fully face him, wide-eyed with manic curiosity. “You’re Veggie Man.”
“I’m neither veggie nor man but if you wanna call me that, okay, sure, knock yourself out,” he said, dipping a sausage link into a little lagoon of apple butter. “Veggie Man and his sidekick, Cap’n Goofy Hat.”
He was referring to the Sterkowski leather motorcycle cap I wear daily to make bartenders’ lives easier and keep them from confusing me with some other bald-as-a-baby-rat bloke.
Okay, reader, I hear you clamoring for more information about this Veggie Man. So, the story of the West Virginia cryptid known in some social circles as, yeah, Veggie Man requires you not to suspend your disbelief, but maybe take your disbelief, put it into a little plastic Ziploc baggie and toss it into a muddy river. It’s a story that has been covered at length by the many cryptidheads that find refuge in the state of West Virginia, so I will simply supply you with the skinny of it here: a fella named Jennings Frederick went hunting wood chucks with his bow & arrows and ended up having himself a most unusual day back in 1968, involving telepathy, a plant-like alien critter the height of an NBA point guard, and an unsolicited bloodletting… If you feel like weirding yourself out some sunny afternoon, look to contemporary comrades and gentlemen deluxe the Mothboys or the work of the long deceased proto-gonzo kookster scribe and serial hoaxer Gray Barker for all the luscious details, yeah?
Anyway, back to the BEST BREAKFAST… Nobody else in the diner seemed to notice Veggie Man, or maybe they had already run through this whole little meet and greet charade.
I ask Veggie Man a few dull questions about what he was doing here at this time of night and he mumbles a few curt answers before acquiescing to the fact I’m gonna bombard him with a thousand inquiries about this and that and everything else, so he waves me on over to his booth. I grab my tuna melt and my coffee and get up and walk over to his booth and slide in across from him.
“How’s your tuna melt?” he asks in that gargled voice.
“It’s okay. A little soggy and totally infested with those little cucumber chunks, but that’s life.”
“I mean, what did you do? You went to a place called the Best Breakfast and you ordered the tuna melt. You pull a bonehead maneuver like that and expect the gods of food and nourishment to shine upon thee?”
Good point. I decided to drop the tuna melt business. Veggie Man, using his long sci-fi b-movie suckerfingers, takes his white toast and a scoop of scrambled egg and begans assembling a little makeshift breakfast sandwich. He completes the task and takes a big bite and stares at me. His eyes, vacillating between yellow and red and every hue of orange in between, were eerily people-like.
“Pretty hip tune, eh?” he says. I had been in this dang diner for over twenty minutes and only now noticed that Kokomo was still playing.
“It’s okay, yeah.”
“Everything’s just okay to you, huh.”
“No, it’s a neat song. Real catchy chorus, dreamy verses.”
“Tuna melt’s okay. Numero uno song in the galaxy in 1988 is okay…”
“It’s a good song. I don’t remember it being this damn long though. Is this the director’s cut or what?”
“Ha, director’s cut, I like that. I’m gonna swipe that and use it if one of these greasers asks me why I play Kokomo the whole time I’m here.” Veggie Man chins toward the gargantuan jukebox. “Bermuda, Jamaica, ooooh, I wanna take ya... Count how many fake Splendas there are there,” Veggie Man says, directing my attention to a convoy of little yellow fake Splenda packs (ingeniously labeled Splendor) he had lined up where the table met the wall...
“Sixteen.”
“Okay, that’s sixteen times we’ve heard Kokomo tonight… Bodies in the saaand… Haha, if you squint your ears, this song could easily be about D Day, am I right?... Shit, I’m gonna have to switch over to Equal soon,” he says, suspiciously eyeballing the sugar caddy and his little wall of fake Splenda packs.
I gesture at the dining room in general. “Nobody ever gets mad? I can’t imagine this bunch to be in accord with your zeal for Kokomo. Besides, I thought those machines had little governor switches on them to prevent people from playing the same song over and over.”
“The new machines do have that feature, yeah.” Veggie Man points a long, honeysuckle-looking finger at the jukebox. “But look at that thing. That ain’t a new machine. And the staff here doesn’t care because I tip the shit out of them. The customers, well, I don’t care whether the other customers care or not. They probably don’t even notice. But yeah, perk of being a regular here. Or an irregular regular, if you will.”
More people come in, a few off-duty cops and some guys that look like they spent the day hunting and fishing.
“Why do you like it so much? I mean, it’s pretty good song but it’s not sixteen times on the damn jukebox good.”
Veggie Man sighs real big and wipes his weird little mouth with a paper napkin and crumbles up the napkin and places it on top of his empty plate and pushes the plate off to the side. “1989. Martinique—you know where that is?—little poolside bar, joint’s all tiki’d up, you know?—next to this little oblong pool, with those little fake rock formations and all that. This was at a hotel. A hotel bar, you know. Hotel was called the Blue Max. Weird name for a hotel, right? Especially some coconutty beachy joint down in Martinique...”
Veggie Man pauses his story to wave at one of the waitresses. Can I get some more coffee?, he mouths to her and she kinda spazzes and speeds by and refills his coffee. Veggie Man continues his story…
“You know that term? The Blue Max?”
I did in fact know that term, but I play dumbo and nod no.
“Long story short, the Blue Max was what Germany gave its flying aces in World War One. Named after Max Immelman. Fighter pilot, in a Fokker eindecker. A one decker, no double deckers yet. Anyway, this Immelman shot up half the sky a zillion years ago before getting knocked out of the sky himself.” Veggie Man engages his coffee, putting sugar and cream in it and stirring it until a little whirlpool formed. “So, weirdly I knew all that. I’m what in the old days they would call a history buff. You a history buff? I knew about the Blue Max and those early dogfights. Those first fighter pilots were royalty back then. At least they treated them as such.”
All the lights in the restaurant go off, save a little localized lighting here and there. Everybody whoops. Lights come back on...
“Dadgum Middle Ages out here sometimes,” Veggie Man says. “So, yeah, I’m sitting there at the little bar in this old hotel, the Blue Max, like I said, and this old guy walks in. And when I say old, I mean older than gunpowder. Like, inching up on triple digits old. And he’s talking to the hostess or whatever and then talking to the little waiter and then the bartender and so on… Clearly the guy’s associated with the place, right? He’s the owner. I find that out later but, yeah, he owns the place...”
Veggie Man pauses for effect. I say something like huh or wow and he continues…
“I’ll give you everything in my wallet if you can tell me that man’s name.”
I look at him, feigning perplexment.
“I’m serious, the cash—however the hell much there is—the Best Buy card, the Amex, the little Nintendo Fun Club card or whatever, every bit of it is yours if you can tell me his name.”
He never let me answer his question about me being a history buff or not and now him and his wallet were about to regret it.
I look at him flatly and say, “Manfred von Richthofen.”
I don’t know what he expected me to say but it wasn’t that. Veggie Man leans back real quick like he’d hit Mach 3 and then looks at me like I was pointing a crossbow at his you-know-what-sack. He stays like that for a few long seconds, mouth agape, incredulous.
“Well, honk my hooter. I’ve told that stupid story a hundred thousand times and nobody’s ever gotten it right. Manfred von Richthofen AKA the Red Baron.” Veggie Man shakes his head back and forth, like he’s amidst a potent epiphany and says, “Well, shit.” He unfurls a patch of kudzu-looking greenery and pulls out an honest-to-God eelskin wallet and slides it at me. “As promised.”
“No,” I say, sliding it back over at him. “No way.”
He picks it up with those weird ectomorphic fingers of his and says, “Tell you what, let me keep my social security card,”—he pulls out a little thin blue cardboard card—“but the rest is yours, my friend.”
It seems to occur to both of us simultaneously that we had not exchanged names (assuming he had a real name other than the one he’d been bestowed with by the natives), though neither of us does anything about it.
“Nope,” I say, waving off his wallet. “I’m not taking it.” This seems to upset him. Some people, I knew, got real weird with this sort of stuff, so I say, “Okay, how about this, we do double or nothing.”
“Double what? This wallet’s all I got, Ace. Besides, it’s your wallet now.”
One of the waitresses interrupts us to check on us, yeah, yeah, we’re fine, we’re fine, she stacks our empty plates on top of each other and picks them up, Kokomo comes on again, Veggieman pulls an Equal out of the little sugar caddy and places it next to the sixteen packets of fake Splenda…
“I got an idea,” I say, placing the sugar caddy in the center of the table and then placing the pepper shaker about six inches off to the side and the salt shaker about four inches off to the other side. “You said you’re a history buff, eh?”
“I am, indeed,” Veggie Man says, debuting a hokey tone within his gargling-sounding voice. “Basically like calling yourself a white rhino or California condor these days. Extinct and such, you know.”
I did know and it mussed my mane a bit to think he’d think his goofy quip would elude me.
“We are going to play a little game called Name That Battle,” I say, elongating each word for emphasis while tinkering with all the stuff in front of me. “Alright?”
“I love it. Try me, Ace.”
“You name that battle, you keep your wallet. You don’t name that battle, I keep your wallet and you by me a slice of huckleberry pie.”
Veggie Man nods in enthusiastic accord.
“Abracadabra,” I say, thumping the side of the little sugar caddy, which, thanks to Kokomo, had all sorts of vacancy in it. “This is now the USS Congress…”
Veggie Man’s disposition changes. Something like optimism bubbles about him. He knows that I know that he’s onto me already. I continue anyway, “And you can’t tell but the Congress is on fire.” I hold my hands over it as if warming them over a flame. “Most of its crew has already abandoned ship and they’re rowing their little lifeboats toward the shore here, where your little wall of fake Splenda is… That’s the shore, okay? And you can’t see it here, but underneath the USS Congress is the USS Cumberland. Why’s it underneath it? Because it just got sunk.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“Hocus Pocus,” I say. “Your little wall of fake Splenda here is now a bunch of Confederate soldiers, all lined up along the beach, watching this whole big mess go do, hooting and hollering and firing off at the USS Congress...”
“You son of a bitch.” Veggie Man smiles at me proudly, like I just got straight A’s on my report card.
“Do I need to tell you who this is and who this is?” I say, thumping the salt shaker and then thumping the pepper shaker.
“Battle of Hampton Roads. March 8th and March 9th. 1962. You son of a bitch.”
“Damn, I didn’t know the dates. You really are a history buff.”
“The USS Monitor and the Merrimack AKA the CSS Virginia. I am impressed, young man.”
I was born on the first day of the last week of the first half of the 1970s but, sure, Veggie Man can call me a young man if he wants to and I told him as much.
“Adios, Union blockade,” I say, putting the sugar caddy and salt shaker and pepper shaker all back where they belong, over by the ketchup and mustard and various mystery condiments.
Veggie Man laughs an awful laugh. I say to him, “Speaking of young man, how the hell was the Red Baron still alive in 1989? I thought he got shot down by a Canadian?”
“He did get shot down by a Canadian, you’re right. But unlike what they tell you in the history books, the ol’ boy survived,” Veggie Man says, all twinkly eyed. “I’m impressed you knew he got shot down by a Canadian. A lot of people don’t know that. Roy Brown was his name. Roy of the Royal Air Force,” Veggie Man says, taking out a twenty dollar bill out of his wallet and sticking it under the pepper shaker. “Truth is, they now think he was shot down by some Australian bloke from and artillery unit on the ground. Forensics and such. The angle and all that. But, yeah, who the heck knows. Moot point, really, since ol’ Manny—can you believe that’s what the Red Baron called himself? Manny?—escaped his busted-up plane and slithered his way through western Europe and ended up scooting down to Martinique and opening up the Blue Max…”
Veggie Man stands up. Kokomo ends and the Doobie Brothers’ Minute by Minute begins bubbling out of the jukebox. “How in the hell did we get started on all this shit?”
“I asked you why you like Kokomo so much.”
“Ha. Right.”
I stand up, stretch, and gun down the last of my coffee.
“Truth is,” Veggie Man says, extending a gangly green arm and shaking my hand—it felt like groping a warm fuzzy carrot. “I’d never heard that song in my life before tonight.”
Veggie Man notices the confusion all over my face, so he continues, “I stopped listening to the Beach Boys right around when their drummer went splash. Dennis Wilson. Drank every bottle of booze with a handle on it in Marina del Ray and cannonballed into the Pacific and never came back up. Today’s drummers are tomorrow’s chum, as they say.”
Veggie Man did not know that I was a drummer, but I let his corny little aphorism slide.
“When I got here, what, five damn hours ago, the first thing I did was peel over to the jukebox and dump about fifty quarters into it and then get set to sit here and listen Kool & the Gang’s Cherish ‘til the sun falls into the see when I see the word Kokomo on the machine, sitting there next to the words Beach Boys.”
I wave at Doris and take out my wallet.
“You’re good, brother,” Veggie Man says. “Already paid up.”
“Sneaky,” I say, putting a ten dollar bill on top of his twenty under the pepper shaker. “Thank you”
“Yeah, yeah. So, ol’ Manny had a daughter. Must have had her when he was damn sixty years old because she was in the prime of her life. Real pretty girl. Kinda Brooke Shieldsy look to her, you know? Wanna take a guess at what her name was?”
“Don’t say Kokomo.”
“Okay, I won’t. Her name was Gretchen. Hideous name, but that’s German for you. Gretchen had a little catamaran—you know, like in Jaws 2?—and written across the caboose of that catamaran were the letters K-O-K-O-M-O.”
“I’ll be darned,” I say, as we mosey our way through the diner, Veggie Man saying hi and bye to a few random folks here and there. We walk out the door into the parking lot. The air is cool and crisp and amplified by a late-night breeze. I take my keys out of my pocket and zap the Vette, making it beep.
“I figured she’d named her boat Kokomo after a dead doggie or first crush or something like that, but nope. Now I know. Thirty whatever years later.” Veggie Man looks to the sky, dreamily. “One night Gretchen and I took a little spin in that thing. Same kinda night as tonight. Cool breeze, that savory ocean air, and a sky so clear you could count every star in the galaxy.”
We stand in silence for a bit, occasional cars hissing down the nearby highway. Patches of haggard grass had snaked their way through the parking lot’s gravel.
“I learned how to play dominos that night,” Veggie Man says, with a toothy smile. “And I learned Supertramp and Kansas are two different bands, and I won’t tell you what else I learned.”
“I don’t wanna know, man.”
“I also learned to never trust a man who drives a yellow Corvette with DC tags. You win this on Press Your Luck or what?”
“It’s a rental,” I say. “I couldn’t afford one of these if I saved my allowance for a thousand years.”
We shake hands again. I dork out and take a selfie of us and immediately text it to my wife back in Mexico City, accompanied by a convoy of veggie emojis.
“Thank you, Veggie Man. This has been fun.”
“Thank you, Ace.”
Veggie Man gets in his little tan truck (Toyota) and I get in my Vette and make it light up and then I boogie on down the road. Vintage rockabilly teams up with the film noir roadscape and instills me with a wondrous glee.
I drum on the steering wheel and let my mind float around on its own...
I regret not swapping contact info with Veggie Man and I regret not asking him about Mothman and all the other West Virgina bugaboos, but I then I remember there’s no bigger bummer than a world without mystery. And unless you got a time machine and an Uzi, most things can’t be undone.
I think of the Twilight Zoney hotel I’ll be docking at in about fifteen minutes and I wonder what shadows await me and to whom they belong. I think of my lovely wife back in Mexico City and our upcoming voyage to the Galapagos Islands. I think of Woody Derenberger and the most unusual evening he had all those years ago.
I stop thinking and roll down my window and half-smile into the ever-encroaching dark expanse of deep night West Virginia.
Way up ahead of me, beyond the reach of my headlights, two tight round red lights debut in the darkness. They are getting larger.
God save you, reader, from unsolicited pleas for dinero but-but-but if what you just read made you pee your pants a little, please consider poppin’ over to the DONATE phylum of this here webpage.
Writing this particular strain of kooked-out fiction is not for the weak of spirit and requires gobs of time and energy that could have otherwise been spent shooting at rats or drinking cold beer.
All donations will go to the publishing of my two new books: Indrid Cold is Dead: Dispatches from the Kooky Corner of the Galaxy (a pseudo-fictional romp) and VESSELS (collection of short stories) . . .
Paz y amor, amigos - VJH
