(This is from my weekly column 'Monday Moanin'. Below you can find how to subscribe. You can also follow a link to order my book, Hope This Finds You, a collection of these essays.)
January 18, 2021
Greetings from the third space,
The headlights splashed across the side of the building and for a second flickered on the glass, reflecting the black 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air easing into the lot. The doors creaked open and five of us spilled out into the night. We scuffed across the wet parking lot, laughing too loudly.
We pushed open the glass door of Angelo’s Coney Island, swaggered in, our eyes blinking in the ghastly fluorescent lights. We were denim and leather and long hair and whatever badassery comes with being young and foolish. It was almost one in the morning. Inside, as we made our unforgettable entrance, no one looked up.
Angelo’s was a hub of activity on the east side of Flint for decades after it opened in 1949.
It was a classic diner from that era, focused on short-order menu. Over time, places like this became ‘coneys’, named after the various hot dog iterations that became Coney Dogs. In Detroit they added chili and onions, in Flint it was a seasoned beef, onions, mustard. Everything else on the menu was designed to showcase the coney. The rest of the diner experience was ambience.
We wove through the front half of the narrow diner, past the round counter seats, the small booths where other night owls sat, squeezed around a small table toward the back. As we walked in the waitress, already serving a dozen people, nodded at us and shouted, “You’uns want coffee?” Which we did.
Throughout the day the coney served a variety of clientele. Families stopped in after church, or after sledding at Kearsley Park, just a ten minute walk from there. People from the surrounding neighborhoods were drawn in for a burger, or pushed the small tables together and swapped news or argued sports, devoured coneys, dipped fries in pools of ketchup out of real glass bottles. Homeless guys sat in the booths, out of the weather, and nursed coffee.
But the biggest impact in every day was the line workers that came to Angelo’s. At shift change, or at whatever was lunchtime, there would be dozens of shop workers from the AC plant lined up at the take-out counter, snaking through into the parking lot. Sometimes the crew from the Buick factory would show up, but it was the AC gang, just half a mile away, that mattered.
The waitress stood at the register, a few feet from the cooks, three or four men crowded around open grills, flipping hamburgers, rolling the dogs into rows, then layering them in buns, ladling coney sauce onto hot dogs, slathering them with onions. The cooks wore paper hats and enormous white aprons, stained and damp from their work. The waitresses hollered their orders at the grill; “Two up without, cheeseburger, western omelet.” If the men on the grill acknowledged this, I never knew.
The cash register was always open, I never saw anyone ring up an order. “Six twenny two, Hun.” the waitress would say. And then looking to the next in line: “Hey Benny, same? You wanna coffee?” She scooped change for the first customer and he left it for a tip. “Thanks Hun. Hey Marvin, long time, I got yours here, baby.” And to the grill: “Two up with heavy.”
Grease-stained sacks loaded with burgers and coneys and fries were passed to the next person and they shuffled back along the line they left, threaded out the door, and headed to their car, and back to wherever they would eat before they went on the line again. Seven days a week, three shifts a day, hungry factory workers who couldn’t face whatever was in their lunch buckets.
In the dim morning hour, my friends and I huddled over the table. Napkins in a dispenser, ketchup bottle, sugar shaker. If you sprinkled salt on table, you could balance the pepper shaker on its edge. Ash tray on every table that said ‘Stolen From Angelo’s’ on them. There was no need to look at menus or think about what we wanted. The waitress appeared with five diner mugs in her hands, the spoons already in them. “You’s know what your havin’, Huns?”
Angelo’s was nested against a grid of neighborhoods called the State Streets. Kansas, Nebraska, Kentucky, Missouri, and a few more blocks you were at a big enough intersection for a streetlight, and the coney. Every chunk of the town had churches and coneys.
The coney was a kaleidoscope of humanity, a constantly flowing international party, no one noticing, simply the ebb of this urban oasis. The sharp Macedonian accent from behind the grill, the twang of Kentucky or Arkansas from the customers. The blocks surrounding Angelo’s held tiny, neat houses, and some not so neat, homes to Hispanics, Blacks, Whites. The red vinyl upholstered booths filled with friends leaning over coffee or food, the air filled with smoke and the clatter of silverware and cheap dishes and short order fare.
I sat across from the Perrine brothers, they of the ’57 Bel Air, and Pedro and Tom. We drank our coffee, launched into one of countless conversations held over scarred Formica tops like this. We had left Contos or Nino’s or Doobie’s, wherever the urge had taken us, and we were hungry and not tired enough to end the night, and we went to Angelo’s.
We ordered coneys, burgers, french fries with gravy, Cokes. Maybe an omelet, grilled in so much butter it slid on the plate, next to the hash browns. The waitress layered plates on top of plates, up her forearm, and brought our whole order at once, dealt it like a Vegas dealer onto the table. She circled back and filled our coffee and the slip from her order book was left unceremoniously amidst the clutter. She danced between the other tables, after hours people, shop workers, cops. The white collars, the blue collars, the dirty collars, the no collars.
We joked and philosophized, and misquoted wise people, scribbled ideas on napkins. We talked about women and politics and songs and movies. We argued about lyrics, and made plans for the summer. We teased each other, told awful jokes, laughed so hard we laughed at our laughing. Everything we said mattered, little of it would be remembered.
Angelo’s was tough, a little rough in the corners, and the feel was of working people resting between things. The food was cheap and filling, with flavor but not pretense. The coney was like a dozen others around our town, Starlite, American, Palace, Capitol, Atlas, Colonial. They each had their specialty, their personality, but their purpose was the same; feed these people, without a lot of fuss, give them a place that fits them, where they’ll go after church, after their shift, or after the bar.
We ate until the plates were empty, talked until all the words were spoken, and then paid our bill at the counter and pushed back into the night. “Nkay, Huns, thanks now.” said the waitress at the register, and then to the grill; “Cheeseburger, two up with everything and American fries.”
Hope this finds you ordering one with everything,
David
Copyright © 2021 David Smith
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