The Road to Nowhere Diner
The air inside the stainless-steel and Formica box was thick with the smell of cheap frying oil and stale coffee. Mark slid into the sticky red booth, the vinyl sighing beneath him. It was ’73 or ’74, and outside, the late morning sun glared off the two-lane strip of Route 222—the ‘Triple Deuces’ the truckers called it on the CB, the very one that led to the ‘Road to Nowhere’ Diner. The place was a Kullman-manufactured classic, new enough to gleam faintly, old enough to feel forgotten already.
Mark had pulled up in his ’63 Falcon Coupe; David had arrived moments later in the lumbering, practical shadow of his ’68 Oldsmobile station wagon. They were two of nine unmarried souls living shoulder-to-shoulder in the Allentown row house, a drab box with cheap roof shingles stapled to the siding. The fellowship house existed on the razor’s edge of communal poverty, where a new set of tires was an extravagance that had to wait for the next day’s temporary job—if one appeared. No work meant more time for The Word, and more time for self-suspicion.
They both wore the uniform: stiff, ill-fitting jeans and the plain green t-shirts, a subtle, desperate attempt to mimic Stewart, the only man who mattered. But the true badge was the leather-look Bible pouch strapped to their hips. It held the baby Zondervain New Testament, thin onion-skin pages precise enough to fit the pouch’s exact specifications. No room for wallets, no room for anything but the sacred text and the handful of colored Flair pens—some of the brothers even copied Stewart’s habit of color-coding verses, a silent, competitive performance of devotion.
Their order was deliberate: a cheap meal. Mark got the hamburger, fries, and a Coke. David, the cheeseburger. They talked, their voices low, trying to contain the conversation within the sticky perimeter of the booth. They paused frequently, their eyes dropping to their hips, where they would ceremoniously pull out the tiny leather-bound texts. The conversation was less an exchange of ideas and more a recitation, a slow-motion playback of what Stewart said about marriage, about centering everything in Jesus. They were repeating a lesson, not exploring a feeling.
When they finished, they sat back, the grease congealing on the plates before them. David gave a thumbs-up, a practiced gesture of mutual assurance: We are centered. We are safe. The cheap, ritualistic meal was done, the doctrine affirmed, the shame of idleness momentarily silenced by the performance of piety. They were brothers-in-arms, but mostly, they were two teenagers in a cheap diner, trading pre-approved verses to cover the yawning emptiness of a life that wasn’t their own.
That’s what sixteen years of conditioning does. It wires you to suspect yourself before anything else. To assume guilt before you even know the charge. To hear accusation in every note.