  Every time I end up in a Denny's, I vow never to go there again. Somehow I always keep forgetting this vow. It's obvious I would never make a good brooding, lonesome antihero seeking vengeance. I'd just forget after a few months, what I was seeking vengeance for, and what I'd ever planned to do about it. My name is Inigo Montoya -- I'll have the Moons Over My Hammy. Now, my reasons for vowing never to set foot into another Denny's as long as I live -- well, they barely need mentioning.
The greasy, horrific food; the terrible service; the cloyingly generic decor -- Denny's is a good place for loaded nineteen-year-old girls to go at four in the morning and write FUCK THIS in black crayon all over the comment cards, but if you don't fall into this admittedly narrow demographic, you basically have no business there. Yet, somehow, mysteriously, and often without warning, I find myself there. Why? Frankenstein anti-sex rays from space? I don"t know. I just know that it keeps happening . Everything I am about to tell you is true, though much of it has now attained the status of legend. The first vow came many years ago, when I was still in college and the Denny's was rather freshly minted in our little dive.
Aaron and I go to breakfast. Unwisely, we choose Denny's. The morning started inauspiciously enough -- I ordered something vile and artery-clooging; Aaron ordered something with eggs on the side. It didn't take long before we noticed the Terrible Old Man across the aisle from us. I never actually got a good eyeful of the Terrible Old Man. Aaron saw him as plain as day: an old man in flannel and a fluffy white crown of hair, sitting across from a pair of pretty young teenaged girls, both paralyzed in fear. Both paralyzed in fear because the Terrible Old Man was making intermittent wet, hawking, blowing, choking, gurgling, regurgitating noises and spitting up some manner of greenish goo.
The sounds that came from this man's throat, I cannot really describe, although I have done my best to imitate them on my many attempts to gross the hell out of people at the dinner table. The best way to imagine it would be to envision Wilford Brimley drowning slowly beneath a non-stop trickle of pea soup. And it continued throughout our meal. I dared to look back a couple of times, and was profoundly sorry I did so. The good news is, it drew our attention away from the usual crappy service and bad food. The waitress, in addition to being pokey, forgot Aaron's eggs. She realized this only after the fact. "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't bring your eggs," she said, laying down his plate.
"Forget the eggs," Aaron said with the level, no-bullshit gaze he reserves specifically for service industry folk who have wronged him and friends who have taken a joke too far. "But I can bring --" "NO EGGS. " We finished our meal and left. As we were driving away, me behind the wheel and Aaron sitting limply in the passenger seat, he slowly began to unravel before my very eyes.
"Those poor girls," he began, shaking his head in disbelief, recounting in choking sobs the horrible sounds and green drippings and horrified pretty girls, and by the end he was leaning forward, banging his fists on the dashboard, literally screaming, " Never again, never again, never again! " Thus came the first ever no-Denny's vow. Not a solemn pact between brothers, but a screaming oath shouted into the uncaring void of some mid-90s summer day.
I love that story. The second vow (that I can remember) came when Greg and I stopped in late one night for some sandwiches and perhaps some dessert. So, on a night when it was not particularly busy, and the wait staff far from overworked, we stopped in at the infamous Denny's. This story is not nearly so epic nor interesting. The waitress merely took our order, delivered our food, and was never seen again by any living man.
(Cue organ music. ) Okay, she was seen again, but only after we were back at the front of the restaurant, trying in vain to get our check from the host. "Aw, I was just coming to see if you guys wanted dessert! " our elusive server said cheerily, fishing the bill out of her apron. Evidently she smelled the decaying corpse of her tip and was angling for a last-minute reprieve. "We did," Greg said drily, "Forty minutes ago. " Upon exiting the restaurant, we asked each other why we'd gone to Denny's.
Neither of us could come up with a good reason. And so we decided we'd never go there again. The third vow was only a few weeks ago, when the girlfriend and I went to get breakfast. Again, this is something short of a saga. We ordered breakfast: bacon, eggs, biscuits, orange juice, coffee. You'd think that would be simple enough. You'd be so wrong. Now, a bit of a side note about the coffee.
Denny's coffee is, without doubt, the worst God damned swill on the planet. We have a local chain, 4B's, which is pretty tolerable, even palatable on a good day. Perkins is fairly acceptable, as diner-dive fare goes. Nothing to compare with real coffee-shop coffee, but passable stuff. Denny's brings to mind the old Dagwood-era chestnut about a dirty sock tied inside a giant urn. Sure, it's black, it's in liquid form, you could even drink it. But it's not coffee. I need so much sugar and creamer to get through that mess that I have to ask for seconds of each before the meal is through.
And given the track record on service, you can probably guess how well that goes. Anyway, so we're sitting there for 40 minutes, and I'm trying to drink the thoroughly terrible coffee, while we wait for the biscuits we ordered with our meal. "Those biscuits will be right up," the waitress says, putting on her Contrite Face -- the one you wear when someone, not necessarily you, has royally fucked up somewhere on the assembly line, and you have to be the one to face the irate customer.
Now, the biscuits were not that big a deal. At least they didn't seem to be, at first. I mean, we've got our crappy, plastic-looking mass of eggs, these limp and greasy strips of what might conceivably be bacon, several triangles of tasteless white toast that manage to be both stale and soggy due to a margarine-application process known only to Denny's waitresses and certain upper-level Masons -- with such an embarrassment of riches, what do we need with biscuits for Christ's sake? But then the waitress came by a second time, to let us know those biscuits would be right up, guys, I'm so sorry, and it started to seem like a big deal.
Well, shit, these biscuits must be some manner of big deal, to be so thoroughly apologized for. So we waited -- something like forty minutes, in total -- for these biscuits. And when they finally arrived, they were horrifying, underdone pieces of shit. Not just, you know, mildly underdone -- these were like someone's idea of a bad grade-school joke; slightly crispy biscuit exteriors filled with Elmer's glue. The kind of thing you bite into and instantly regret, for the rest of your miserable life. "Well, they're kind of like biscuits, on the outside," the girlfriend remarked, picking at hers listlessly. And so comes another vow. And thus begins the latest tale. 
