I Fell in Love at Waffle House

I usually order the gayest breakfast food at a diner - this time, with a side of drama.

My desire for a good cheap diner breakfast can lead to excess carbs and cholesterol, and sometimes, heartbreak.

As a New Yorker visiting Florida, the temptation of a Waffle House down the road from the hotel was impossible to resist. How could you visit the South without going to a Waffle House? How could you visit Manhattan without a slice of pizza? Montreal sans poutine?

For diner breakfast, I always order the gayest food on the menu. The waitress at Bob’s in Hudson knows my order - egg-white omelette with broccoli and spinach, feta and mozzarella cheese - no meat - and rye toast (dry! no butter). If I’m feeling decadent, I order hash browns; if not, it’s a slice of tomato or fruit on the side.

Is there a gayer breakfast? Of course! It’s called ‘brunch’, and includes mimosas and stories of last night’s sexcapades at the club. However, a classic diner rarely has arugula salad with pear, goat cheese and caramelized pecans, and today, we are not in an episode of Sex and the City.

Waffle House had neither the mimosas nor the panache.

I walked into the Waffle House in central Florida, by myself, and they told me to sit at the counter. My server, LaPorsha, greeted me. I told her, “I’ll have a cup of coffee and a glass of water.”

She interrupted me, “I’ll take your drink and food order at the same time. When you’re ready.”

I had to place my entire order, food and drinks, at once - such strange customs they have south of the Mason-Dixon. Within the first few moments, I was reminded that I was not at a Greek diner in Astoria, nor Café Florent in the Meat Packing District, nor a newly-restored Art Deco diner run as a vanity project by multi-millionaires in the Hudson Valley. I was in central Florida, and LaPorsha will take my drink and food order at the same time. Thank you Hon, and bless your heart.

Coffeeless, I looked over the one-page double-sided laminated menu. My menu options were limited. This was not a usual diner booklet with pages of food.

My gay egg-white broccoli, spinach and cheese omelette was not a possibility at Waffle House. There were no vegetables listed on the menu - ANYWHERE! I checked twice. The only vegetables on the breakfast and lunch menus were French fries/hash browns and a leaf of lettuce and slice of tomato on a hamburger. There was not even a side dish of canned mixed beans or a dollop of coleslaw.

I ordered coffee, two eggs scrambled, white bread toast, grits, a side of “city” ham, and of course, a waffle. I had to order a waffle, it was in the eatery’s appellation.

Waiting for my order, I looked around the room of the Waffle House. Half the staff and the patrons looked as if someone had beat them up last week, and they came back for more last night.

Then he walked into the Waffle House, for his training shift, and everything changed.

He was in his mid-twenties, Latino-ish, with a full sleeve tattoo, a goatee surrounding soft, full pouty lips, and an ass so high, round, tight, and hard you could break a 50-cent-surcharge egg on it.

I thought, ‘Why are you, beautiful man, here at a Waffle House in central Florida?’

My Waffle House waiter-in-training gave an order to the chef, but LaPorsha scolded him, “He didn’t hear you. Yell LOUDER!”

I wanted to yell at him, too. I wanted to yell, “Why are you here? Leave Waffle House and come back to the Hudson Valley with me!”

Leave Waffle House and come back to the Hudson Valley with me. I’ll make a few phone calls. I’ll help you get a job waiting tables at a very pleasant farm-to-table restaurant. You’ll meet the chickens laying the eggs. The tab for one breakfast of four Manhattan tourists will equal your entire morning shift at the Waffle House. You’ll make an insane amount in tips. People will throw money at you.

Leave Waffle House and come back to the Hudson Valley with me. We do not have to have sex, just walk around in your ill-fitting and baggy Hanes mens bikini briefs and clean my house. I’ll give you light errands and chores in lieu of rent. Help me hang pictures on my wall - pictures from half a lifetime gone by, pictures older than you. Walk around nearly-naked and dust the cobwebs from the corners of my jaded soul.

Leave Waffle House and come back to the Hudson Valley with me. Then, I can dress in kaftans, lay all day on my divan, and write long missives about freshly-baked croissants and community theater. I’ll be an eccentric writer and you can be my young live-in houseman. We will be together, in a gilded birdcage.

Leave Waffle House and come back to the Hudson Valley with me. Bring your youth and vigor into my 200-year-old non-waffle house.

LaPorsha refilled my cup of coffee and I smiled widely. I wanted her to like me. I wanted her to put in a good word for me with her trainee.

Over a cup of coffee and a waffle, I pondered a future with the trainee.

He’d adjust to life upstate, and the cold. Everyone will love his quiet, polite personality. He will never have to yell an order again.

We’ll go on fall foliage picnics along the water and I’ll explain to him the Hudson River School of landscape painting. We’ll watch long, obscure “artistic” European movies in mismatched thrift-store furniture and uncomfortable folding chairs. We’ll go to art gallery openings and drink wine and bemoan the current state of everything.

Then one day, even though we sleep in the same bed, I’ll feel a distance between us. Other middle-aged gay men of the Hudson Valley, both singles and couples, have been hovering over him like vultures. He is fresh meat, unspoiled.

We’ll become two ships passing in the night. He cleans less, and the cobwebs in the corners of my mind return.

Then one day, he takes me aside, “I’m leaving you,” he says, “I’m going to live with Jim and Tim and take care of their mid-century modern interior design business at their house in Sag Harbor.”

“Sag Harbor!?!” I exclaim.

“Yes,” and with his new locked-jaw Westchester accent he tells me, “it’s on the north shore of the south fork.”

I scream. “I KNOW WHERE SAG HARBOR IS, JAVIER!”

“I’m part of a trouple now,” he continues, “I have to go. We’re getting ready for the White Party in the Pines next weekend.”

Javier looks around my living room and tells me, “I can’t believe I lived in this place with you. That armchair isn’t even a real Eames.”

I cried, “I got it because I like the way it looked, not because it’s authentic!”

I bought the chair online at Wayfair, but I cannot tell him that now, and leave myself so open and vulnerable. He can be so cruel. “How dare you critique my living room furniture! When I met you, three months ago, you were in training at a Waffle House in central Florida!”

“Those days are long gone,” says Javier as he looks past me.

Angry and hurt, I yell, “Let me tell you something, Javier, like a Chippendale armoire, you’ll go out of style one day, too! You better keep that ass of yours TIGHT because there will always be someone younger, someone prettier, and someone who costs LESS!”

Javier smacks me across the face. I hold my reddened cheek and fall to the floor, sobbing into my faux-Eames chair’s pleather upholstery.

“Just go.” I plead, “Just go to Sag Harbor!”

Thankfully, at that moment, LaPorsha handed me my check and brought me back to reality. I left Waffle House, with no new love and even less hope. Like the others, I came for the waffles, but stuck around for the pathos.