There are times in life when you arrive at a place and know?in some inexplicable yet unimpeachable way?that you have come to exactly where you are meant to be at that moment.
Denny's restaurant was not one of those places. Portland, Maine, at 3:00 a.m. one Sunday morning last November was not one of those times.
Four of my friends?two girls and two guys?and I had intended to make an early-morning trip to L.L. Bean in quiet, safe Freeport. We had a change of heart so we kept driving down Interstate 295.
On the outskirts of the city of Portland, we came to the consensus that hot food was in order. Since Denny's was the only place open at 2:40 a.m., we drove there.
As we walked in, a sign in the half-filled restaurant informed us to "Please wait to be seated." And wait we did. Twenty minutes elapsed before we were brought to a table. Luckily, they were an eventful 20 minutes.
At the booth nearest to where we were standing, a group of four men?incredibly muscular by any objective standard?joked with each other in Spanish over endless cups of coffee. They only seemed to take notice of us when our drunk friend began to teeter back and forth. Swaying precipitously close to a point where gravity would take over, one of the large men spoke: "Take care of your friend, man. He's going to fa..." It wasn't so much a fall as a quick sit-down.
I helped my friend off the ground and walked him outside. He decided to sit in the car and sleep. I promised him we would come out and check to make sure everything was okay every few minutes.
When I got back inside we had still not been seated. The coffee drinkers appeared to be joking about us in Spanish. It didn't really bother us, but their constant laughter in our direction really pissed off a guy, no older than 17, who had been waiting in line behind us.
"What the [hell] is your problem? I mean what's so damn funny?" he demanded. Suddenly their laughter stopped. They exchanged quick glances and one of the men, mustachioed wearing black jeans and a blue t-shirt, put his coffee cup down and stood up menacingly.
"Don't," one of his compatriots said softly but powerfully. After a moment of contemplation the man sat down. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
The waiter who seemed to finally take pity on us and bring us to a table actually had no pity at all; I suspect he had used up his compassion sometime earlier in his shift. Of all the empty tables in the restaurant, he chose to seat us at the next to a destructively dysfunctional family?a daughter, her mother, and her aunt.
It was if the mother had been flown in on the red eye from Hollywood; she was a caricature of herself, direct from central casting. Reeking of booze with unkempt salt-and-pepper hair, she shoveled a Paul Bunyon-sized platter of eggs over easy into her mouth with the accuracy of Shaq at the free throw line in 1996: below 50 percent. Some of her food came to rest on the table or on the floor, but most landed in her lap and on her shirt. She was wearing a grey sweater that showed the errant specks of fried yolk with particular clarity. Although she could have been 40 or 50, she looked much older. Wrinkles crisscrossed her face. After yelling out some incomprehensible string of words that soundly vaguely obscene and threatening at the same time, she smiled, which brought the wrinkles into exceptionally stark relief. It was not her age nor her eating habits that seemed to worry the restaurant management, but rather her loud proclamations about the inferior quality of the eggs.
"M'am," a male Denny's employee said, "this is the last time I'm going to ask you to quiet down. You are disturbing the other customers." He stood next to her table waiting for her response.
"Said the eggs were I, the end of the grunk stunk," she retorted. "That's obvious," she added. Her daughter and sister continued to eat their meals as if oblivious to what was going on. The waiter apologized to us for her behavior and took our orders. The crazed mother grumbled loudly but then quieted down. It was too late, however. A Denny's waitress had already made the call.
My friends and I had little to talk about with all the commotion in the restaurant, although the specter of flying egg white was certainly mentioned a few times. Every few minutes I got up to check on my inebriated friend. He was soundly asleep. And there wasn't a soul in the parking lot.
Our food arrived just as the cops pulled up outside, their blue and red lights peaking the attention of everyone in the restaurant, for various reasons.
"Portland's Finest," someone from another table said.
Except it wasn't. Four gun-toting officers, employees of some security company, walked in the door and directly to our table.
After being pointed in the direction of the egg-woman by a Denny's employee, all four of them cleared their throats and glared at her.
"You're gonna' have to come with us, lady."
"Not again!" she moaned. The restaurant fell silent as she was escorted out, unintentionally dibbling a trail of fried egg particles from her table to the door that would have made Hansel and Gretel proud. The pseudo-cops put her in a taxi.
"Denny's has a police force?" someone asked.
"Learn something new everyday," a person at another table responded.
Given the wide variety of people in the restaurant and the early hour, the sense of camaraderie that had developed in Denny's was truly bizarre. The young man who had almost been pummeled by the mustachioed Spanish-speaker asked us where we were from and we conversed for a few moments. Eventually everyone went back to their food which was tasty if a little harsh on the stomach.
At this point, the daughter, suddenly drawn out of her silence by forces unseen, burst into tears. After a moment, her aunt comforted her and she calmed down.
We paid the bill. As we were leaving, the daughter ran outside with her mother's unfinished plate of eggs. As we pulled out of the parking lot, she was still standing there. Just her and the unfinished platter of eggs.