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.
So there I was, waiting for my cheeburga, asking Rodney to tell me about these dudes throwing each other around the mat. Suddenly, someone came in and started hollerin’ about fish and grits and making loud cat sounds. People looked up at him, said, “Hello,” slapped his hand. “Fish and grits, son! Fish and grits! MEEEOOOW!” He left.
Rodney looked at me and said, “He crazy. And I ain’t never heard a no damn fish and grits.”
We started talking about wrestling from back when we were kids, when stars had names like Superfly Jimmy Snooka and the Junk Yard Dog. “Yeah!” Rodney said. “Junk Yard Dog and them used to come over to the Coliseum!” Then he looked out the window and he added, “This—Main Street—used to be hot back then.” He started walking down the street in his mind, telling us about the Blue Note club on the left side, the King’s Palace here, and going on down the line. I thought of the dark, quiet street I walked to get here, the emptiness of it, and the image of his memory seems distant.
We looked back towards the TV. Huge were men tossing around a midget dressed as a leprechaun. I got ready to go, and Rodney dug around in his newspaper until he found a sheet of paper. He handed it to me. “You seen this yet? Take one a these.” It was a menu, and I think, in all the decades that Miss Inez’s has been around, the first printed menu they’ve ever had. “They open every day but Sunday,” Rodney said. “I’ll see you back here.”
I don’t know if I’ll see Rodney again. I’m leaving Biloxi soon, and am in the stage of departure where you take stock of all the things you’ll miss when you’re gone. My friends already threw me a going-away party. Of course, that was when I left for good the last time.