The art of slinging hash, by GM Foy

Someday I’ll board a bus in winter and ride west. The highways will be blanched with salt. We’ll travel all day and night, stopping in towns where all we’ll see of life there will be shards: a woman in an ochre window touching her lip. Two men smoking in a doorway. A car crushed by snow in a parking lot. Red lick of stoplights. At sunup I will get off the bus in a town I don’t know, in the kind of wind that feels like someone stands behind you who knows where to put the shiv. I’ll order coffee in a diner where the waitress, Pam or Molly, or Sue maybe, tells me the night-shift cook is set to quit. And I’ll take his job—late, with only a trucker or two or the local hooker to serve, is as good a time as any to learn the art of slinging hash. I’ll be good at it, I think: I’ll learn to parse my time in microseconds, warming homefries first, then pre-fried bacon, starting eggs and after that the toast, the blade of my spatula cutting fast as pain till everything comes up hot at the same time. Plate and set it on the counter with the steaming Joe and slam the bell for Sue, or Mol or Pam to serve; with one hand sluice teawater on the grill and skim grease and crust steaming to the sump, while with the other flip oil on the cleaned-up part and crack on that three eggs; beside them drop two burger patties, one order of the turkey special. I’ll learn the lingo too: whisky down and eighty-six, burn the British, Adam ‘n Eve on a log. When it gets slow I’ll talk to customers, or flirt with Pam. I’ll never tell them where I’m from. Let them guess: the made-up tales are better anyway.

And one day, years from now, you’ll walk in. Not lost—no one gets lost these days, your gadget told you we served all night, it led you off the interstate that was taking you to LA, or Boulder, or Chicago, two rights then bear left past the grain elevator to this place. You’ll have a family by then, a toddler with a cold, a girl with hair like yours and your way of looking at things, calm, reserving judgment; a husband too, thin, losing his hair, wearing an expensive watch he never paid for with his do-gooder job. (My politics have changed some here, I still vote Democrat but it’s touch and go.) Pam will take your order which I’d know anyway: cheese omelette, egg whites only, hash browns, wheat toast. And from the burger rack I’ll add onions to the hash the way you liked. You won’t recognize me. I’ll have no hair at all by then, and years of diner food will have softened my edges to say the least. But Pam might see me looking and not smile. And maybe something will catch your eye as well: the way I tend to hold my head bent slightly to the left when I work; how I brush sweat from forehead with the leading edge of wrist. You’ll look but not look, stare inside, wondering what or who that reminded you of, what tricks the mind plays here, at sunup in the gut of nowhere—till the toddler drops a toy and bawls, and the husband, looking up from his gadget, says, Okay, let’s get the check.

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GM Foy is a novelist and essayist whose latest book, The Last Green Light, a novel about the forgotten working stiffs of The Great Gatsby, was just published (May 2024) by Guernica Editions. Thirteen other novels published by Viking, Bantam, HarperCollins, etc.; non-fiction books: three (Scribner, Macmillan). Short form essays and stories in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Notre Dame Review, Ep;phany Journal, Washington Square, etc. Education: LSE, Bennington. Teaches creative writing at NYU. Recipient of NEA fiction fellowship, other awards. Other employment: director of inter-departmental cream-pastry transport in North London biscuit factory.

© 2024, GM Foy