At their usual Waffle House table, “How many times have you done it?” Nick asks.

“Just three,” Travis replies. “And honestly, I think this will be the last time… for a while anyway.”

The warmth from the grill, the sizzling of grease, and Johnny Cash singing low from the juke box, greet the boys easy, with a peppy southern waitress to boot. “Mornin’ boys!” She sets out silverware and napkins, but there’s plenty of time to take orders in a minute. Both Nick and Travis nod politely, fiddle with their silverware. The whole cherub yellow room smells like bacon.

“Why’s that?”

Travis shakes his head. “I’m gettin’ too old for this.”

Nick rolls his eyes.

“Naw, seriously. I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to push my luck. I’ve had some really fun times.”

“Everything in moderation.”

Travis makes a little bow of recognition with his hand, “Thank you Mr. Aristotle.”

“Wasn’t that Plato who first said that?”

Travis thinks about it, catching his reflection in the glass, his own face surprising him.

“Socrates,” he says nodding.

“Yeah. Socrates. That’s the dude.”

A waitress leaps to the boys’ side—a different one than the greeter—an older, matronly woman, forty or so. She cocks her hip and stands on one leg as she writes furiously on her yellow pad, talking way fast at the same time with a truck-stop southern accent. “Whatch’all boys havin’?”

“Cup o’ coffee, please,” Nick says, letting his own repressed southern accent out.

Travis notices and laughs to himself, but does the same. “Same for me.”

“Ya’ll need a minute to order?”

“Nah,” Nick replies, “I’ll have a plain waffle and a side of toast, pretty please.”

When the waitress looks to Travis he says, “Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich—side of grits.”

“You want a fork with that?” the waitress says.

They all laugh, and Travis gives a look like she’s got to know better. “But I would like some honey, please.”

The waitress notes the honey on her pad and then finishes with, “Back in a sec’ with the coffees.”

Lighting a cigarette, Travis glances over at the breakfast counter where a short, bald man with glasses is prattling on in frustration. The waitress, the young one that had greeted Travis and Nick, is smiling and sympathizing at whatever Foghorn Leghorn—not taking a breath—was complaining about. She’s looks tired though, like she’d just come in for her shift.

“How ’bout that!?” Nick says, holding up a piece of paper he’d rediscovered in his pocket.

Travis looks at the scrap. It had a number and the name ‘Scarlet’ scrawled on it. “Yep,” he replies nonchalantly. “You done good, boy.”

“I don’t really know how I got this,” Nick says, examining the intricacies of the handwriting, holding it up in the light, always a stickler for handwriting. “I was bein’ such a freak.”

“Hey, man, she dug you—what more do you need? You were just showing off one of your more interesting sides.”

“My drugged side?”

Travis dismisses the comment. “Lesser men have not gotten numbers while drugged.”

Nick shakes his head. “She must have seen something, ’cause I wasn’t tryin’ to impress at all.”

“Yeah but that’s the thing about E—how much more you you become. Boring people become more boring. Energized people get more energy. Thoughtful people get more thoughtful.”

After a moment, he adds, “Fear of John is magnified tenfold.”

Nick huffs in agreement and then, squinting his eyes, Nick intones the voice of an ancient Chinese instructor, “You must be you, and the wind must be the wind.”

Travis plays along, looking around the room with newfound mystery. “It is all around us. Within us.”

“The rock… the tree…”

“The grill… the bacon.”

Nick laughs and nods.

“And you must always remember: the Buddha is hash browns at Waffle House.”

Nick leans into Travis and whispers, holding up his hand to his face. “I’m the Buddha.”

Surprised, Travis sits back in the booth, a look of awe coming over him. “You are the Buddha.”

Nick shushes Travis and looks around nervously.

“Wait a minute,” Travis says in sudden disbelief, “If you’re the Buddha, then tell me: is it 43 or 37?”

Nick shrugs as though the answer were obvious. “37.”

But Travis just waves him off. “You’re not the Buddha.”

“I am too the Buddha!” Nick proclaims loudly—and during the quiet bridge of the song on the juke box.

Old Foghorn Leghorn at the counter pauses his diatribe to look over at the boys’ booth with a curious expression, wondering if he’d heard what he thought he’d heard. Nick and Travis just raise their eyebrows at each other as though nothing was out of the ordinary. Travis smiles at the old man as Nick says, “Steel belted radials. Nothin’ else,” with a decisive cutting motion of the hand.

Travis nods casually. “Yeah. I could see that. Nothin’ else, really—not that time of year.” He takes a pull on his cigarette.

“Put those on, and you’ll be fine.”

“Could be the carburetor, though” Travis suggests.

Conspiratorially across the table, Nick hisses, “You’re gonna’ put him on to us, you fool!”

The old man looks back to the breakfast counter and continues his conversation with the young waitress. Travis smiles. “Good save,” out of the side of his mouth.

Nick just nods. “I don’t want anybody knowin’ who the Buddha is, except me.”

Travis opens the imaginary award show envelope that reveals the answer, “And the Buddha goes to…”

“Steel belted radials.”

“Cheesetoast!” Travis replies.

“That too,” Nick agrees. After a minute of toying with his spoon, Nick says, “It’s all about a bologna sandwich.”

“You can’t have one.”

“You never can,” Nick says seriously.

“It might be all you want—”

“But you can’t have it.” Nick waits, “This is Wafflé Mansíon!”

“Actually,” Travis says thoughtfully, “I think Kant put it best when he said: ‘it is the universal bologna sandwich that is truth. Particulate, individual bologna sandwiches are all boring.’ It’s The Bologna Sandwich that you can’t have.”

Nick looks annoyed. “I don’t buy that transcendental crap. It’s either a bologna sandwich or it’s not.”

Travis glances out the window to where the sky is growing steadily more blue. Some small clouds have taken pink fringes. They look like loaves of bread baking in the sky—he laughs—with the bologna hanging over the edges. He speaks to the window in a melancholy tone, “I am a transparent bologna sandwich left upon the infinite shores of wisdom; the tide slowly ebbing away my bread.”

Nick smiles genuinely and sits up as the waitress comes over to the table and sets their coffee down. She’d gotten busy. A crowd had begun to gather. “That’s beautiful,” Nick says as she sets his coffee down in front of him. “Did you think of that just now?” Turning to the waitress he says, “Thank you.”

“Thanks,” Travis says as he receives his cup, and then, to Nick, “Naw. I stole it—sort of.”

“From where?”

“Emerson? No idea, really.”

Nick looks up, trying to recall the phrase in its entirety. “I am a bologna sandwich—”

“Transparent—” Travis adds.

“Yeah. —transparent bologna sandwich left upon the shores of wisdom—”

“—infinite—”

“Right—infinite shores of wisdom; the tide slowly ebbing away my bread.”

Travis nods, putting cream and sugar in his coffee—a lot of both. “Something like that.” Nick chuckles and sips his coffee, the early morning light illuminating their table when he looks down. “I tried to explain the bologna sandwich thing to Vicky the other day.

“Did she get it?”

Nick rolls his eyes.

“Stupid question,” Travis replies.

“She kept rambling on about peanut butter and honey.”

“Philistine!”

“I think her whole idea of art is that if it’s not perfectly evident, then it’s stupid.”

“Stoopid.” Travis agrees.

Nick shakes his head.

“I don’t know. She means well,” Travis argues.

“No,” Nick says, “I really believe she doesn’t want to have to think about it.”

“Well,” Travis starts. He stops. “Well,” he says, clasping and unclasping his hands. Nick waits and Travis gives up thinking. “There ya’ go.”

“I like what Kandinsky said when someone asked him to explain one of his paintings: ‘You ask me to explain in five minutes what took me twenty years to understand.'”

Travis nods thoughtfully. “Very well put.”

“People ask you what your songs mean,” Nick offers.

“That they do.”

“What do you say?”

Travis just smiles for a few seconds, giving Nick a head start, “They’re all about wanting —”

“A bologna sandwich,” the pair finishes in unison.

“Oh yeah.” Nick sips his coffee and looks around, his brow furrowed in an attempt to remember. “How’d we ever get on that?”

“It’s from that old Buddhist story. The student asks the teacher what the Buddha is and the teacher answers that the Buddha’s three pounds of flan.”

“‘Cause the question’s absurd.”

“Yeah. Any answer would be ridiculous.”

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: Athens, Nick Vaughn, Travis Fleeting, Waffle House