On Wednesday night, while working a shift at the Community Service Desk (i.e. the place residents go to for everything from lost keys to cooking supplies), it dawned on me that I had never been to a Waffle House.
This was a problem for a few reasons:
1. I have lived in North Carolina for more than a decade, which I think makes me qualified to call myself a Southerner. BUT…
2. I cannot call myself a Southerner without having eaten at a Waffle House.
You see, Waffle House is not just a food establishment. It’s a quintessentially Southern experience, per the Urban Dictionary definition.
Waffle House is the place you go to with your friends at 3 a.m. after a high school football game. It’s where you bond with strangers over life’s miseries (because there are oh-so-many of them 🙂.) It’s where you go for greasy Southern staples that may or may not give you either food poisoning or a heart attack.
Maybe it was because I wasn’t cool enough to hang out at a Waffle House in high school. Maybe it was because my high school years were marred by the pandemic. Point being, the fact that I’d never experienced a Waffle House was a really big fucking deal.
Luckily, with me in the office when I got my epiphany were my two co-RAs, Ike and Danny.
Ike and Danny are both wonderful human beings, and the three of us were anyway stuck on campus since we were assigned Fall Break duty shifts. The only problem was that UNC is not located anywhere near a Waffle House.
What we have, instead, is Time Out.
I wouldn’t call Time Out a fake Waffle House exactly — Time Out is somewhat of a UNC-legend in itself. But Time Out is probably the closest thing UNC has to a Waffle House, and I was determined to make things work. (I could be wrong, but the nearest Waffle House is unfortunately situated close to the N.C. State campus in Raleigh. Go Heels.)
Plus, I’d never been to Time Out, either. Danny said I’d remember if I had a Time Out experience, because it’s supposedly where one hits up “after a night heavy with debauchery.”
The three of us decided to (read: I forced them to) go to Time Out at precisely midnight on Friday.
I was hyped and totally dressed the part. Sleep deprived and clad in a black sweatshirt, shorts, a puffer jacket and some well-worn sneakers, I looked 100% college-student-in-need-of-mac-n-cheese. I was very proud of myself.
We arrived at Time Out plus/minus a few minutes at 12:00 a.m. It was practically deserted aside from a few stray wanderers and the kind folks behind the counter; the walls were painted Carolina blue and the floor was somewhat dirtied tile. I stood behind a glass counter as a woman ladled my order of well-fried chicken tenders, mac-n-cheese, extra cold potato salad and baked¹ corn bread into a styrofoam to-go box.
¹Danny alerted me to the fact that there is apparently such a thing as fried corn bread. Allegedly, it is far better than baked corn bread.
During our meal, I discovered that Danny was from a locale with one of the highest crime rates in the state. He’d been to a real Waffle House before. He said that every Waffle House had a staff member behind the counter with three missing teeth, because that’s how standardized Waffle Houses are.
Danny is a true Southern man. He has a thick Carolinian accent (which is different from a country accent), eats well and likes the gym. He has a mullet, which in my opinion is earth-shatteringly cool, and has seen and experienced far more crazy things than I ever have or hope to.
Which is why when he texted Ike and I “Let’s head out”, Ike immediately stood up.
“What?” I said, confused. The conversation had been flowing well up until that point, and Danny’s text had come out of the blue.
“Uma,” Ike said as we hurriedly made our way out the door. “You don’t question it when a guy like Danny says it’s time to go.”
Suddenly I heard what sounded like a crash from behind us. In the distance, a man shouted “FUCK YOU!” loudly.
“What was that?” I looked at Ike and Danny.
Apparently, Danny had sensed trouble after a man came up to our table as the three of us were eating — the man wanted to let us know that he was a good guy who liked to say hi. Ike and I didn’t notice it, but the man was rubbed the wrong way by another guy behind our booth and muttered something “…motherfucker”.
Danny picked up on this, though, and by the time I heard the crash I was across the street, back on the dimly lit grassy fields of McCorkle Place.
In the end, I really did get my Waffle House experience, even if it wasn’t at an actual Waffle House. And I got a great laugh out of the conversation Ike, Danny and I shared on the trek back to our residence halls under the twinkling stars.