9:00 at night in East Biloxi might as well be 3:00 in the morning, and I was hungry. Walking back dejectedly from a shuttered Lucky House, I ran into Iesha and asked if anything was still open.
“Go to Miss Inez’s. Get yourself a steak and fries,” she suggested, pointing down the street at a high-roofed building so spare it looked like it broke off of something else.
“That place? I thought that was a church,” I said.
Iesha laughed. “Boy, that ain’t no church.”
Still, the inside did look a bit like a church basement—hard and cold, all right angles, harsh fluorescent lights. I sat at the counter and waited as Miss Mae, the lone cook and server, trudged about, dealing with a handful of young toughs ordering fried fish plates and cheeseburgers. They drawled and drew from their cigarettes.
One of these dudes came up to me and asked about my tattoo. “What’s that mean?”
I explained it to him.
“Is that Chinese?”
It is.
“I’m down with the Chinese, son,” he said. “I’m down with the history and all that.” Then he started showing me his tattoos, telling me that he’s in the Black Mafia. His boys wanted to leave, and I didn’t get a chance to ask him what the Black Mafia had to do with Chinese history.
Twenty minutes later I finally caught Miss Mae’s attention, who shuffled over to say, “Hurry up and order, baby. My feet hurt. Fuck this.”
After she trundled off, a young man shouted over to an older woman with a suspicious hairdo, “Miss Inez! Remember, Miss Inez? Remember you used to take care a me? You used to rock me to sleep! You used to gimme cheeburgas for free. I still good for one a dem free cheeburgas?”
She looked at him, cracked a wicked smile, and spat out, “Oh, you callin’ yo’self grown now?”
With flavor like that, I couldn’t care less about the fact that I was eating the greasiest, gristliest steak I’ve ever had.
After my second or third visit, Miss Mae warmed up to me. “How you know my name is Mae?” she asked me when I said, “Hello.” Then: “Oh, yeah. I seen you come around, I remember your face. What’s your name, baby?”
Rodney is a regular. He sat at the end of the counter, reading a newspaper and occasionally glancing up at the pro-wrestling on the TV at the other end of the bar. “Ask her if she’ll change the TV for y’all. She won’t do it if I ask. Watch.” He called out to the cook, who, it turned out, was Miss Mae’s daughter. She threw him a look and pursed her lips.
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