Cathy was wrong. The best breakfast place in the western United States is in Holbrook, Arizona, on one of the old snippets of the original Route 66 near the cross street that is either Navajo Boulevard or Apache Boulevard, depending on whether you turn north onto it, or south. You only know it’s there because of a sign standing on the sidewalk at the building entrance, with painted black lettering facing each direction, on white painted plywood – a distant cousin of the Object That Has No Name. It says BREAKFAST in large letters, then below that in smaller letters it says INSIDE, just in case anyone driving by were to think that someone is merely advocating for the most important meal of the day rather than actually offering it to prepare it for you.

The building itself was constructed some time in the nineteen aughts, two stories of offices over retail space on the street. When you walk in, you go down a narrow passageway flanked on either side by empty glass display counters draped with dust cloths. Just as it occurs to you that horror films begin with a similar kind of scene you come out into the dining area. Small, well-lit and cozy. Maybe eight tables, chairs of all kinds. No two utensils or napkins of the same design. The kitchen is small but hung with the kinds of pots and pans that amateurs don’t use.

The restaurant has no name and there is no menu. The owner greets you and just asks what you’d like for breakfast. He quotes a price, asks if it’s fair, then he goes and makes it. The customers are a mix of regulars and travelers. From time to time the owner disappears for a few minutes. The regulars will explain that his wife is very ill and that he takes care of her upstairs while he runs the restaurant. No one eats alone.

The second best breakfast place in the western United States is Al’s Billiards, four doors further up NE Sandy from Three Sisters Comics and Sports Memorabilia. At Al’s the shooting goes on until 2am, then at 4:30 Gladys shows up, makes herself some coffee, fires up a Phillip Morris Commander and when that’s done starts to air out the place from yesterday’s cigarette smoke and the smell of stale beer. It originally opened the week of the invasion of Guadalcanal as the Hollywood Bar and Grill. There were never any billiards tables, just pool tables, and these weren’t added until the early 50’s, when the name was changed to Al’s Billiards because pool is low rent and billiards is classier and Al wanted people to feel comfortable bringing dates to spend money on his deluxe jukebox.

Eventually, Al was making so much selling beer to the shooters and so little selling Hamburgers and French fries that he gave up on the grief of running both a kitchen and bar and closed down the kitchen, putting a giant display case of Fritos products in front of the swinging doors leading into the kitchen at the end of the bar.

Then one night Gladys was one shot away from running the table when she carefully laid down bridge and cue and walked over to the display case, and peered over it through the double round windows at eye level on each of the swinging doors. She said, “Well, damn! I never knew he had a whole kitchen back there.”

She never knew why she chose that particular moment to notice the windows in the swinging doors, or what could have possessed her to walk away from a winning shot and a twenty dollar bill and look through those windows when she did notice, but there was something in the air that night besides the stuff that she’d eventually have to flush out of the place early each morning, because she went right up to Al with no more forethought than she would use to go to the ladies’ room and told him that it was just stupid for him to let his pool joint lie fallow in the mornings when she could be using it to make them both some money.

Unlike the competition in Holbrook, Al’s does use a menu in the form of a big black chalk board that stands up on the bar next to a framed poster that shows a frumpy looking woman wearing a house coat and one of those Lucy-or-Ethel head scarves. It says “Bad Coffee Is Grounds For Divorce.” The menu lists the two specials of the day in yellow chalk. Below that it says “Or Whatever You’d Like. Usually around $4.75”.

Gladys once had a waitress named Dolores who, true to her name, was as painful to watch waiting tables as she was otherwise pleasant to be with. Gladys tried everything she could think of to make Dolores a successful waitress of tables. She tried tough love and when that made things worse she tried smothering her with the warmest motherly love she could summon up. She tried taking and bringing out the orders herself so Dolores could watch her, and learn. Nothing worked. Gladys lost customers. But most of her business came from waves of regulars who showed up at intervals throughout the mornings – people getting off the late shift, then people on their way to the early shift, then people on their way to a regular shift and finally students and retirees – and most of them appeared willing to factor Dolores into the culinary equation.

An art student from Portland State rendered big charcoal caricatures of Gladys and Dolores that hung framed on the wall next to the kitchen doors. Gladys was shown dressed in a chef’s hat and grease-spattered apron, a cigarette dangling from her lips and a dozen dinner plates full of pancake stacks and waffles and fried eggs balanced on her arms and hands. Dolores was shown with her trademark smile and with musical notes inside a large speech bubble. Her eyes were gazing at the speech bubble above her head while she absent mindedly poured coffee onto a customer’s table while the coffee cup remained in her other hand.

Dolores had a beautiful singing voice. It was both soft and clear, the sort of voice that customers would stop their conversations to listen to while she was taking orders to the wrong table or forgetting to bring out one party’s order or taking a table’s order for the second time in five minutes.

One day Gladys decided that enough was enough and resolved to let go of Dolores. As soon as she made the decision she felt an enormous weight shift inside her. Unfortunately it was the weight of a crushing sense of guilt and shame dropping into place. Gladys ran back to the kitchen and started crying while Pester John the dish washer turned on the faucets in the sinks to full blast to mask all the sobbing. He put one wet soapy hand on her shoulder and with the other one, continued scrubbing the baking pans. A few moments later Gladys was back at the stove, Dolores came back to ask her which one again was table 8, and things went right back to normal.

Where they would have stayed if the next morning the Blue Crease Sorority had not been meeting at their usual table, which reminded Gladys that sorority sister Friend To Animals worked at the Pepsi bottling plant not a mile away where surely someone could earn more than they could waiting tables for four hours a day, and surely someone of earnest and even temperament with a good singing voice would be a valuable addition to the crew and please, Ann, she said after getting Friend To Animals outside on some pretext or other, couldn’t you ask around and really try to help out Dolores because I just know she’s barely scraping by on what she gets paid here, and yes, said Friend To Animals, as a matter of fact I think they are hiring if she wouldn’t mind working the swing shift, and oh no she wouldn’t mind at all, I think I can confidently say that.

And here, this morning, was Dolores sitting with the sisters of the Blue Crease Sorority, just like she owned the place and beaming from ear to ear as she gave her order to Gladys who beamed right back and her. It was now necessary to bring a second table and some more chairs to extend the booth. Because besides Cookie Crenshaw and Cathy Remy and Yolanda Potter, Friend To Animals and Dolores, there was now Apple Cobbler who had started wearing blue uniform pants at the Three Sisters, pants with ironed creases in them sharp enough to slice a finger if you weren’t careful, just so she could qualify for sorority membership. And, this morning, someone new who’d come in with Cathy, a … what? A really butch looking Oriental lesbian? A really butch looking Oriental lesbian paramedic, given that the individual had come in with Cathy Remy and was wearing navy blue uniform pants? In any event, surely not the young man it appeared to be, given the definition of “sorority”.

“Welcome, sister,” Gladys said to the individual as she walked up to the table.

Dumb Fuck Kid, studying the menu, smiled without looking up. “Special guest pass,” Cathy explained. Gladys nodded her head politely the way you do when you don’t quite understand and don’t quite care. Gladys poured coffee, took orders and disappeared.

“I didn’t get ‘blue crease’ until I saw everybody’s pants,” Dumb Fuck Kid said.

“That’s a part of it, honorary girlfriend,” said Yolanda, stirring her coffee.

“What’s the other part?”

“The other part,” drawled Cookie, “is just a little sex-you-all in-yer-window, don’tcha know.”

Apple said, “Ain’t no innuendo about my crease” and Dolores burst out laughing so hard that she knocked over her coffee cup. She dashed into the kitchen and brought back a towel and cleaned up the spill. Then she dropped the towel at her feet, sat down in front of her empty cup and looked at it disappointedly. Yolanda got up and fetched the coffee urn from on top of the bar and refreshed everyone.

On the wall that the booth was situated against was a small horizontal brass lamp of the sort that illuminate paintings in museums. Below the lamp a piece of red fabric was draped over something about the size of a small painting. Gladys walked to the neighboring empty booth and reached over and switched on the lamp. Yolanda clinked her coffee spoon against a glass of water and cleared her throat.

“Sisters,” she said solemnly, “some weeks back I dispatched two officers to the scene of a potential residential robbery in progress… “

Two days previously, at the presentation in the precinct squad room, this story had not been told, because it had already been told and told again many times. And the most surprising thing about it was that the story emerged on the other side of all the retelling pretty much the way it had gone in – there was virtually no embellishment, and the only reason for that was that this was a story that would become less fascinating, not more, by embellishment. It was just too good a story to mess with. And so at morning roll call, mysteriously attended by the entire precinct command structure in addition to all the day shift’s beat cops, when the precinct captain stepped up to make the presentation, he didn’t find it necessary to first scotch any rumors or supply any missing details. He just stood in front of the room full of cops and levelled his gaze at Cookie.

“Crenshaw! Front and center!”

Cookie got up from her folding metal chair, side stepped toward the aisle amidst smirks and whispered “uh oh’s,” and stood next to the captain. The shift supervisor was standing next to the captain, holding a large paper package tied with string. He cut the string with a pocket knife, tore off the paper and handed a large plaque to the captain, who held it up so everyone could see. It was bronze over wood. “Get ‘Em Any Way You Can” was engraved across the top in the sort of large preposterously ornate letters usually seen on diplomas. Below that was Cookie’s name and the year 1976. Scattered across the bottom of the plaque were a half dozen engraved spent cartridge casings. The center of the plaque was taken up with an engraving of a pair of boxing gloves, laces tied together, hanging from a nail.

“Patrol Officer Denise Crenshaw. As you know, our precinct awards an annual prize for the year’s most original instance of unconventional law enforcement. This year, far, far ahead of the normal cutoff date for nominations, the senior command and your fellow officers have elected you to be this year’s recipient. I would further add that the vote was unanimous, and I do believe that many voted twice.”

He held the plaque in one hand, motioned for Cookie to hold it as well, and then an officer took out a camera and snapped a shot of the bestowal. Then as Cookie held the trophy up, he took an envelope from his pocket. “The prize this year,” he said, “is a set of prepaid passes to a fine commercial target range in Troutdale where you may practice your marksmanship. I realize that the Bureau also maintains a very good target range, but many of the officers with small children and long careers ahead of them would prefer that you discharge your service weapon elsewhere.”

There were cheers, there were whistles, there was the stomping of boots on linoleum and laughter and applause. A few pretended to be shot and collapsed to the floor.

The captain had looked at Cookie and said softly “If you had any doubts about whether they accept you…”

“Thus do uptight males find ways to communicate approval and acceptance,” intoned Apple Cobbler as Gladys, with great ceremony, pulled the cover off the plaque and led the applause.