The great Hooters road trip
January, 2009
mERICfl EHTinG NOUJHERE BUT
HOOTERS
Since the dawn of time stouthearted souls have set out on adventures that had little chance of leading to glory but unlimited potential for disgrace, financial ruin or death. Marco Polo braved the fiendish cruelty of the Mongols to reach Kublai Khan's court. Christopher Columbus risked falling off the edge of the earth to find that elusive passage to India. Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the globe in a ship the size of a Honda Civic to prove the earth was round. In the same spirit, I recently completed a 4,700-mile trip across the United States, eating only at Hooters.
Cynics may suggest that my Hooters-only pilgrimage was a self-indulgent excuse to spend two weeks in the company of voluptuous vixens with cantaloupe-size breasts and derrieres resembling overinflated basketballs exploding out of preposterously skimpy gym shorts, with strapping legs clad both in panty hose and white ankle socks, as if one set of provocative hosiery were not enough to get the customers' attention. Here they would be mistaken. My decision to eat only at Hooters derived from two entirely legitimate motives: first, the need to establish a "theme" for my trip; second, the guarantee that wherever and whenever I turned up, I knew I would be greeted by bubbly, effervescent, convivial young women who would at least pretend to be happy to see me and not by surly refugees from the slacker chain gang, moping teens or the hatchet-faced lifers who staff most dining establishments out in the hinterland.
Moreover, by eating only at Hooters I could assure myself of being served exclusively by perky girls named Danielle, Heather, Erika, Samantha and Lobo and never by the dreaded, slightly pierced, starter-mustached Todd of "Hi! I'm Todd. Or Skyler. And I'm going to be your waiter
for the evening" fame. That alone made it worth doing.
The cross-country trip is a cornerstone of American mythology. Lewis and Clark did it. Jack Kerouac did it. Salt-of-the-earth types addicted to those odysseys on which they visit every state capital, including Juneau, have done it. Yuppies return home bursting with pride because they have visited every base-
ball stadium in America.
Personally I find these themes idiotic. If you cannot unearth the meaning of life in New g York or Los Aneeles. it is -^
unlikely you will find it in Busch Stadium. I have no burning desire ever to visit Pierre, South Dakota, and I certainly won't drive hundreds of miles out of my way just to fulfill some fetishistic fool's errand by motoring all the way to Sacramento. In sharp contrast,
by driving across America eating only at Hooters, I could lay claim to thematic legitimacy on a number of levels. For starters, it would be a voyage of discovery to find out if Hooters Girls are consistently effervescent and gorgeous and well-endowed all across the country or if certain regions are so starved for local talent that they are forced to hire pouty, pimple-breasted urchins, cadaverous, mean-spirited waifs, bony-assed harridans or the aforementioned chainsmoking, hatchet-faced lifers. Second, it would be an expedition of culinary adventure on which I would discover the effect of the Hooters menu on the nervous system. Third, it would be a voyage of self-discovery, testing my resourcefulness by thrusting me into situations in which I would perhaps be forced to live off roots and shrubs on the days when there was not a Hooters within hundreds of miles. In short, the melon-size breasts exploding out of T-shirts eight sizes too small and the medicine-ball backsides stretching the microscopic hot pants and taupe panty hose to the very limit of polyester flexibility had nothing to do with my decision to embark on this epic adventure. At least that's what I told my wife.
The first thing I noticed on my trip was that Hooters guys acted as if Hooters Girls were not wearing preposterous outfits. In Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania it was Schoolgirl Night the evening I showed up, the waitresses clad in kneesocks and postage-stamp-size plaid skirts. In Albuquerque one of the girls was wearing shorts so skimpy it looked as if she had converted a tangerine peel into a thong. In Roanoke the girls were decked out in tiny black shorts, taut
black halter tops, black sneakers and black ankle socks that made a couple of the beefier gals look like Teutonic phys-ed teachers who had read far too much De Sade. lisa, She-Bitch of Hooters. Or Amelie Mauresmo. But the locals never seemed to be checking out the merchandise, not even stealing sideways glances, instead adhering to
some vague Dukes of Hazzard honor
code stipulating that you are not supposed to ogle the girl who is waiting on you even though she's bending over to show off both her breasts and her panties, because to do so would be unspeakably gauche. Hooters etiquette is in the wholesomely naughty tradition of Daisy Duke, Betty Boop, Suzanne Somers, Li'l Abner, The Beverly Hillbillies and Benny Hill. The girls repeatedly told me the chivalrous regulars protect them from fondlers, pinchers, oglers and lechers, acting as if the girls were their cash-strapped sisters or daughters who, for reasons they were not at liberty to divulge, were currently in their underpants, serving quesadillas.
"We treat the customers with respect, and they treat us with respect," volunteered Jacqueline, a tall, vivacious, thoroughly lovely marketing major working in Knoxville. This was on Bike Night, when the restaurant was filled with wannabe tough guys of all descriptions, seemingly each of them a direct descendent of Sirs Parsifal and Galahad who adhered to a knightly code of treating women with the utmost respect and were in turn being treated with the utmost respect themselves. Even though they were riding Kawasakis, and it looked as if their do-rags had just come back from the organic dry cleaners, and they did not seem as though they had earned that much in the way of respect on their two-wheeled quest for the Holy Grail.
The second thing I noticed about Hooters is that, in the eyes of the girls, there is no such thing as a loser. That first night in Mechanicsburg the crowd was the usual mixture of workingmen, frat boys and college nerds using a trip to Hooters as a dry run for a trip to a strip joint. There were also a handful of women. But over there, sitting all by
himself, was a fat, bespectacled young man reading a science-fiction novel.
"That guy didn't get the playbook," my 31-year-old nephew, Frank, a resident of nearby Camp Hill, chuckled as two Hooters gals sashayed past.
"No, he's the serial killer," I noted, feeling inexplicable pity for a man so bereft of humanity that he would visit a Hooters on Schoolgirl Night and snenrl
the entire time reading a novel about sorcerers, f demiurges and wraiths, all under the aegis of the Fifth Protocol of Xanadu, Scion of Rom-dec. But wouldn't you know it! He was a local, and before long a couple of the scantily clad waitresses came over to talk to him.
I could not imagine any other dining establishment in America where a fat man reading a book about fierce extraterrestrial gnomes battling albino druids for control of the planet Hextra—and all the pseudotitanium hidden in the pangalactic mines of its murky parallel universe—would get the personal touch from the waitstaff. It certainly wouldn't happen at Long John Silver's. I don't care how much those girls were working for that extra tip; they were really nice and really sweet in a society where niceness and sweetness are fast disappearing. They also had great racks.
People who have never experienced the mythical transcontinental trip cannot imagine how uplifting it is at the end of the day to walk into a restaurant where comely young women greet you with a smile on their face and a song in their heart. Hooters is Hot Pants Cheers: one continuously friendly saloon stretching straight across the fruited plain to those purple mountain majesties. Maybe you've just been ticketed for driving 83 miles an hour in a 65 mph stretch of the southern Virginia interstate and threatened with a $556 fine even though everyone who didn't have an out-of-state plate was flying by at 90 mph. After that, those bouncy Hooters Girls would be a sight for sore eyes. Maybe you've just been tailgated for eight miles on a deserted stretch of highway 30 miles from Paducah, Kentucky at 10 in the evening by an enigmatic state trooper who pulled you over and announced that a car matching your description had been reported for a "suspicious and erratic driving pattern." After that, those Hooters gals in St. Louis would look mighty damn pleasing
Or maybe you've just pulled into the Holiday Inn outside Knoxville and been overcharged to stay the night in Room 216, the one whose interior has been gutted, its plumbing ripped out, and is right next door to the room where the talent coordinator (continued on page 149)
HOOTERS
(continued from page 110)
for the Cali Cartel, Smoky Mountain Division, is staying the night. After you've finished bellyaching to the indifferent clerks at the front desk, those beaming, cheerful, accommodating Hooters gals would look awfully darned appealing.
Day after day, night after night. Hooters of America bailed me out of tight situations and lifted my spirits when I thought I could not go on. After I was nearly killed by a tour bus in Washington, D.C. those ponytailed cuties in Fairfax, Virginia were just what the doctor ordered. After I drove through miles and miles of slums in D.C).. Roanoke and St. Louis, those bodacious babes made me feel like the cat's meow. After my 800-mile drive from Wichita to Albuquerque, a stretch during which I did not eat a bite of food for 50 hours and was so weak 1 didn't have the strength to react when a Taos, New Mexico wigger jostled me, you simply have no idea how reassuring it was to see Danielle's winning smile and warm demeanor.
The only problem with an all-Hooters itinerary is the food. Technically speaking, there is nothing wrong with the food. It is fun food; it is (lame of the Week cuisine. But it is not food intended to be eaten two or three times a day, every day, for two weeks straight. This put me in a bit of a pickle. Committed to eating only at Hooters, I realized I was now endangering my health by limiting myself to a regimen of party-animal food never designed to be eaten on a daily basis, no matter how drunk you are.
"You've got to get to Whole Foods or Wild Oats and get yourself some spirulina," cautioned a very nice New Agey woman whose engine I jumped in an Albuquerque parking lot. "It's important for the balance of your clarity and cognitive functioning. If you don't get some amino acids into your system, you're going to die."
Alas, consuming amino acids purchased anywhere but Hooters would have violated the spirit of my undertaking. How did I deal with this problem, knowing full well that my clarity and cognitive functioning, never that solid in the first place, hung in the balance? After the first week, I cut back to one big meal a day. which gave me plenty of time for sightseeing but still left 23 hours for my body to recover from the previous thermonuclear repast. Second, for the last week of my trip, I avoided the curly fries, onion rings and buffalo wings. This was a decision at least partially triggered by a call I got from my doctor as I was sitting in Gallup. New Mexico eating a takeout pulled-pork sandwich I'd picked up at the Albuquerque Hooters a few hundred miles back, five hours earlier. Christ, was that little sucker ripe.
"We got the results of your cholesterol test, and you need to go on a statin," my doctor informed me.
"Okay, let's start next week."
"It'd be better to start right away."
"1 can't. I'm in Gallup, New Mexico."
"What are you doing out there?"
"You don't want to know."
Were there times when I deliberately blew past a Hooters without eating because I wanted to enhance my chances of reaching the West Coast without an angioplasty? No. If I reached a town that had a Hooters, I dined there. Mechanicsburg. D.C. Fairfax. Roanoke. Charlotte (twice). Columbia, South Carolina (twice). Knoxville. Nashville (twice). St. Louis (twice). Kansas City. Wichita. Albuquerque (twice). Las Vegas (twice). Santa Monica. But Hooters are hard to find west of the Mississippi. I never would have found the one in Wichita were it not for an enthusiastic bus driver who escorted me there. In his bus. So on the odd days when my travels carried me so far into the wilderness that I found myself literally hundreds of miles from my next meal, I was perfectly okay with it.
From the time I left Wichita, the friendliest Hooters, with the cutest, perkiest girls, until I reached Albuquerque two nights later. I did not have a bite to eat. In order to ease my growling stomach thai second Sunday night of the trek, I would have had to hook 80 miles north to Colorado Springs to eat at the nearest Hooters. Earlier in the trip I would have been up there in the twinkling of an eye. But now, 10 days out on the road, nothing on the Hooters menu could get me back into that car. Certainly not the grouper sandwich. Instead. I went to bed, famished but still breathing.
Balanced-diet aficionados will doubtless ask, What about breakfast, arguably the most important meal of the day? The sad macrobiotic truth is. 1 didn't have breakfast for 15 days. Hooters doesn't have a breakfast menu and doesn't even open until 1 1, most likely because orange hot pants give customers vertigo before lunchtime. Hooters also doesn't have any fruit on the menu; worrying that I might be succumbing to scurvy by the time I hit Cairo. Illinois, I began drinking freshly squeezed orange juice several times a day. But for the entire trip I never had a bite to eat at breakfast.
When I reached Santa Monica, I honestly felt I had achieved a sort of immortality by becoming the first man to cross America while eating only at Hooters. Yet there, as at many other Hooters I visited along the way, I was disappointed that my breathtaking accomplishment was not accorded the respect it was due.
"How are we doing today? " asked the pigtailed waitress at the Hooters in Fairfax, the third stop on my trip.
"Well, I'm driving all the way across America eating only at Hooters," I replied, "so I guess I'm feeling pretty good."
"That's awesome," she said. "Do you need extra creamers with your coffee?"
"How y'all doing?" asked the waitress in Charlotte, the fifth stop on my trip.
"Well, I'm driving all the way across America, eating only at Hooters," I replied, "so I guess I'm feeling pretty good."
"That's awesome." she said. "Do you need extra creamers with your coffee?"
"How are we doing today?" asked the pert waitress in Santa Monica at the very last Hooters on my list.
"Well, pretty good because I've just driven 4,700 miles across the United States and have eaten only at Hooters the whole way."
"That's awesome,' she said. "Let me get you some extra creamers."
While it was generally deemed awesome that I was driving across the United States eating only at Hooters, I was miffed that my epic undertaking was greeted with such nonchalance. The girls thought it was nice that I was doing a Hooters tour of America, but my exploits, which I viewed as tantamount to Cortes's conquest of Mexico, did not seem to take their breath away. This cut me to the quick, as in a certain sense 1 was doing it all for them.
"Are you eating at every Hooters in .America?" asked one girl in South Carolina.
"No, I"d be out here for the rest of my life."
"Oh. So you're just visiting some Hooters but not all of them?"
"That's right."
"Are you eating your way through the entire menu?"
"No, I hate fish. Especially the grouper."
"Well, if you need any extra creamers, let me know."
Or, "You must really like the food if you're only eating at Hooters," one girl suggested.
"Actually, it's not about the food. I'm just trying to prove this can be done."
"Why?"
"Because no one has ever done it before."
"What's your next stop?"
"Nashville."
"Well, while you're in Nashville, you should go up to Montana. That's where I'm from."
1 wasn't sure there were any Hooters in Montana, and Montana wasn't anywhere near Nashville. But I thanked her for the suggestion.
An uncharacteristically jaded Nashville Hooters Girl put the whole thing in perspective when she noted, "Lots of guys come in here with portfolios full of pictures of all the Hooters Girls they've met. So lots of other people have done what you're doing. It's just that they've never written about it. "
"No, that's not true." I fired back. "Other guys might eat only at Hooters but haven't gone all the way across America eating only at Hooters. This is a first. This is definitely a first."
"I'll get you some extra creamers for your cofl'ee."
Putting things in perspective. 1 recalled that Columbus was viewed as a failure by his contemporaries, that Cortes ended his life embroiled in a bunch of nasty lawsuits, that nobody thought Pizarro's or Coronado's or even Ponce de Leon's discoveries were all that big a deal at the time. On the other hand, none of the conquistadors had to listen to "My Sharona, " "Sweet Home Alabama " and "Ramblin' Man" every night for two weeks; otherwise they might have thrown in the towel and gone back to Spain. The fact that my courageous Hooters-only
trek across America did not culminate in a ticker-tape parade when I reached Santa Monica is less a reflection on me than it is on a society that lakes everything and everybody for granted.
Still, the memory of that expedition is burned into my heart, just as it will one day be burned into the annals of history.
Not all the Hooters Girls I encountered were stunners. Some were scrawny, puffy or plain-looking. More than a few looked as if they'd been overdosing on the curly fries. But they were almost all unbelievably outgoing girls who were more than happy to lay out the welcome mat when the lonesome wayfarer straggled in from Paducah after a macabre encounter with a state trooper. If it hadn't been for them, there was no way I could have survived two weeks of Hooters cuisine, much less two weeks of "My my my my Sharona."
The truth is, anyone could have driven across America eating only at McDonald's. Anyone could have driven from the Atlantic to the Pacific eating only at I HOP. But it wouldn't have been any fun, and it wouldn't have proved anything because those establishments oiler a breakfast menu and plenty of low-fat entrees, whereas Hooters purveys nothing but high-octane fun food intended to be eaten by halftime. Just as Lewis and Clark could not have made it without Sacagawea, I could not have made it without Heather, Danielle, Jacqueline, Torri and l.obo. The only difference between that adventure and mine? They got buffalo meat; 1 got buffalo wings. And Sacagawea never wore ankle socks over her panty hose. If she had, Lewis and Clark might still be out there.
SWOULD BE,
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