Perched above the diner’s counter, the old TV shows images with no sound: some 60-Minutes-style news magazine. Most of the eyes of the men in here are fixed on it. Only at a couple tables are people having conversations. Ours, for example, and one at the back where two waitresses eat dinner.

Right now it’s a human-interest piece on soldiers. Soldiers shipping out, soldiers coming home, soldiers missing limbs. Even with the sound off, the tone is celebratory. These boys were selected for their wholesome good looks, their muscular builds, their whiteness, the love for country so strong it makes their eyes misty. Even a boy with no legs, and a deep scar down his cheek that’s not quite enough to make him hideous, shows the cameras through the tiny squalid rooms of his house, and US flags drape absolutely everything. No one here has doubts, or criticisms, or sadness. We can tell that even without their voices.

“What do you think the chances are she’ll change the channel?” Greg asks.

“You crazy? They’ll throw us out if you even ask. Call us communists.” Kevin’s eyes jump around the room, scanning the faces of the men for signs of violence.

Now that Greg’s brought our attention to it, none of us can keep our eyes off the screen. I assume we’re all watching for different reasons. Greg’s building up his outrage, and putting together the speech he’ll give the waitress. Gary’s thinking of his cousin, shipped out two months ago, who he hates. Kevin’s like a little kid: he’ll watch anything and not think too deeply about it. Me—well, that’s easy. I’m watching because these boys are hot. I’m watching because where else, except in pornography and times of war, do handsome young men in good shape with no particular skills or education or smarts get the royal treatment from a camera? One broken-backed boy sweats shirtless through a session of physical therapy, and I’m hard as a rock.

“Iraq is only one of dozens of sites of US military occupation,” Greg says. “Why don’t they talk about that? Palestine? Colombia?” He stirs sugar into his coffee, but not milk. He and his bandmates are vegans. I follow his lead trying to fool them into thinking I’m one of them, even though black coffee makes my stomach hurt.

Two tables down, a just-past-cute bearded man is staring at us. It makes me nervous, but Greg gets off on confrontation. Or does this guy’s attention means he agrees with us? I can’t read his expression because he doesn’t have one.

“These kids are just a couple years older than us, if that,” says Greg. “Can you imagine? Somebody handing you a gun and saying, remember all that stuff we’ve always taught you about not hurting other people? Well, really, we were just kind of kidding.”

“I think that would be fun,” Kevin says, and then looks ashamed.

“Miss?” Greg calls, and holds up his cup. The waitress comes from across the room, bearing the jug of coffee, but Greg’s cup is full. It was a trick to get her over here. “Is there any way we can get the channel changed?”

She smiles. “I’m sorry, no, honey. We try not to change the channel based on customer requests. We’ve had too many fights get started because of that. You can imagine.”

I can, but Greg can’t. Kevin gulps half his coffee, holds the cup out, catches her eye. She’s cute, her name is Nikki, she’s a year older than me, graduated already, clearly not interested in Kevin. Greg and Gary and I stare at a pair of men in a desert oiling their machine guns, grinning at each other, looking sheepish and shy when a pert journalist starts asking them questions.

“Look at these jerks,” Greg says, when she’s gone, meaning the blank-faced men we share the diner with. “They think this war is a wonderful thing.”

The Columbia Diner stretches back to the fifties. My dad used to eat here with his hoodlum friends. I imagine the place has had the same boys-club feel to it all along. The last three times I’ve been here, the only women in the place have been the ones pouring the coffee. Its outside hasn’t changed a bit—shiny metal, period neon—but the inside must have gotten a touch-up sometime in the eighties. The walls and tabletops are drab pastels, with paintings of ducks and dogs at the occasional table. The jerks Greg spoke of are all working-class guys, getting on in years, their waistlines doubled in size since they were my age.

Looking at us, they’d see: four friends, rambunctious 17-year-olds staying out too late on a school night. Four confident, comradely young men, equals, their lives simple, not cluttered with deep dark secrets. Handsome guys with promising futures. All of which is as silly as Greg’s assumption that these guys are gung-ho kill-the-Arabs patriots.

“Simon, what do you think about the war?” It’s the first time tonight Gary’s spoken to me, and I’m worried.

“Um… I think it’s… another example of racist Western imperialism?”

Gary smirks. Gary hates me. Gary makes minimal attempts to hide it. In his zeal to convert me to straight-edge veganism, Greg keeps inviting me to band practice, encouraging me to write songs for them, pretending to respect me. Which irks Gary, who has sniffed out something faggy in my fawning on them. Kevin, on the other hand, is perfectly civil, and perfectly happy to fuck my face for me from time to time when his moralizing bandmates aren’t around.

I go on. I will dig myself out. I point to the screen. “I think it’s really sad these poor guys have to get blown up so big business can make money.” Now the two boys are done with their guns, for the moment, and are tossing a football back and forth in the desert in camouflage shorts and nothing else, and the scene’s identical to a boot-camp-based dirty movie buried in dirty clothes under my bed at home. Any minute now they’ll head into one of the tents in the background, to “interrogate” a prisoner. Mixed in with my lust is a sick sort of glee, thinking of these soldier boys, so identical in beefiness and patriotism and WASPy good looks to the boys who beat me up in gym class, getting their guts ripped open a million miles from home.

“If you were an Iraqi villager, you wouldn’t be feeling sorry for these arrogant white-boy cowboys,” Greg says, and then goes on and on. I gave the wrong answer.

Gary jumps in, and then Greg retorts. Things get heated; I’m glad of the disruption. It means I can trance out again on the sight of a lovely boy, the night before he leaves, getting burgers with his friends. Everyone’s joking, drinking beers, but the camera starts a very slow zoom in until his face fills the frame, he’s laughing, he’s sad, and then the zoom continues until all we see are his eyes, dark and wide and interested in what a more charismatic friend is doing, and then we fade to a commercial.

 

© 2005 Sam J. Miller - Contributor's Bio