Full Moon At The Varsity
The Naked Dog No One Ordered
“What’ll ya have?” The cashier asked the scripted question to seemingly no one in particular, looking right past my dad, Will and me and instead to the back of the growing line behind us.
It was the service I could always expect at The Varsity — seemingly annoyed at your very presence and unhurried no matter the circumstance. Their constant lack of emotion starkly contradicts the frivolousness of the red paper hats and the southern charm of their opening line, and yet I wouldn’t have it any other way.
We’d been eating there irregularly for years. I remember stopping by as a kid and fighting a sea of gold and white in order to get chili dogs and onion rings before venturing across I-85 to attend a Georgia Tech football game, and I also remember dropping in for a quick dinner and seeing the place almost deserted as my family travelled back to Columbus from my grandparent’s North Georgia home.
In all my 23 years, I can’t name one aspect of The Varsity that has changed from my first experience there however many years ago. The florescent-lit dining rooms have always had an intentionally-retro charm that, to me, seem nostalgic for a bygone era of the southern capital. However, I know it to be a survivor instead of an homage — a functioning fossil that somehow resisted any major alterations since the 1970's.
The space leading up to the counter is littered with evidence of the restaurant’s (and, by extension, the city’s) history. Photos of U.S. presidents ranging from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama point toward the establishment’s far-reaching fame, while pictures of Frank Gordy, Flossie May and Erbie Walker inform about how it came to be so.
I’m not sure what any of the aforementioned would think about the events that were to take place on the night of November 17, 2017, but I can’t imagine they would be proud.
On this night, the restaurant was serving as a meeting point for Will, my dad and me. I drove the hour and a half southwest from Athens to recieve Will, who was coming to stay with me for the weekend before we both would drive up to our grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving. My dad wasn’t trusting enough to let Will drive himself yet, but he was nice enough to give him a ride to this halfway point (although I’d be naive to overlook the fact that he got a couple chili dogs out of it, too).
The cashier took our order — chili dogs and onion rings for my Dad and me, a naked dog (plain hot dog) and fries for Will — and we waited at the register until our food was ready. I watched the slinging of fried food into different containers and onto different plates through the small opening that separates the kitchen from the counter, trying to determine which blob of grease and chili was going to be mine.
When eating before or after a Georgia Tech game, making your way from the register to your seat is such an ordeal that, by the time you emerge from the bustling hive of customers and reach your table, you’ve earned every bite you’re about to eat and then some. It often seemed as though everyone from Bobby Dodd Stadium (which I’ll smugly admit is not saying much, especially in recent years) made their way to stand in line in the large-but-not-large-enough waiting area, and it seemed as though they were hellbent on not letting you escape the crowd with your tray intact without you earning it with focus and acrobatics. You’d turn the tray sideways as you inched through a slight gap in a line (with little to no help from the people in line), then you’d raise the tray over someone’s head so as not to disturb them as you danced between tables to get to your own.
Once, after Georgia Tech beat Miami in 2014, I carried a tray that was holding a mountain of food and four drinks through the jungle of hungry customers. I raised the tray up to my chin and lowered it down to near my knees when necessary, exhibiting a level of focus and control that I believe has eluded me ever since. I emerged from the mob of gold and white and found my friend Matt, who had reserved a table. As I began to share my triumph with him, the weight of two drinks placed next to each other caused one corner of the tray to dip from my unsuspecting grasp. I caught the tray before it toppled over completely, but not before two large drinks plunged onto the table and emptied their contents into Matt’s lap.
On this night, though, customers were few and far between. We selected our table based on the fact that it was exactly the one we wanted, not because it was the only one momentarily unoccupied. The only other people in the room were a large, middle-aged man and what I assumed to be his small, middle-aged wife.
Will, my dad and I ate our food in a booth that overlooked Spring St., although the combination of the outside’s darkness and the inside’s flourescent glow made it difficult to notice anything more than a few feet away. I hadn’t seen the two of them for some months, and Will was eager to catch me up on how things were going at home from the perspective of the Boyd child left behind.
“You know what dad did the other day?” he asked before stuffing his mouth with a fistfull of fries. I looked at my dad.
“What?”
Will grinned, and then also turned toward my dad.
“Mom was upset about something, and in the middle of her explaining it he told her to calm down.”
Will laughed as he told me how my dad’s suggestion had been received, and how he had been sitting there in observance of the entire scene. My dad laughed also, but his conveyed a relieved feeling, as though he only now discovered that his misstep might be comical.
“Mom wasn’t even upset with anything having to do with dad,” he continued. “He just offered up that ‘calm down’ for no reason. That was the wildest part. I heard it and I was just like what are you thinking?”
My dad, somewhat eager to change the subject, asked what the upcoming weekend might look like. Will wasn’t the first Boyd kid to visit Athens while firmly clutching onto his Georgia Tech fandom, as I had been in the same position only three years earlier when I went to visit my older sister at UGA. From my experience, exchanging Georgia Tech fandom for UGA fandom was easier than I ever could have imagined, and I wanted to be the force that brought Will over to my side of the state’s rivalry.
“I’m going to do the same thing Kendall did for me,” I said. “I’m going to show him why Athens is better than any other place he’s going to look at.”
Just as Will started to make some futile attempt at disagreeing with me, a shirtless man who couldn’t have been older than 20 burst around the corner in a full sprint and stopped only a few feet from our table, and it was immediately evident that he was in a hurry. He was holding something tightly to his waist, but everything was happening so quickly that my attention couldn’t afford to focus on any one detail for too long. He looked down the hallway to his right, which was toward the registers in the middle of the restaurant. Then he looked sharply to his left at the exit that stood at the far end of the room we were in, his dreadlocks floating in midair as his head snapped around. Having seemingly found what he was looking for with his second look, he turned his head to the three of us and held up two fingers.
“Peace, y’all,” he said.
Then, he turned to his left and took off as quickly as he had arrived. It was only as he was running from our table that it became evident why he might be in such a hurry — he was completely naked.
The door flew open and we could hear tires screetching in the parking lot outside. We all watched on, somehow too dumbfounded to look away as his bare ass disappeared into the Atlanta night. Then the Varsity door closed gently behind him, enclosing us once again in a room with other strangers who bore witness to the same scene. Only now it was completely silent as we all stared at the door in quiet disbelief.
It remained silent for a few seconds, until our confusion was disrupted by the large man sitting a few tables away.
“Get outta here! Boy I KNEW he was crazy! I seen him over there earlier — TWIRLIN’!”
At this, we all erupted into laughter at how absurd everything was. Then we went right back to eating our dinners.
Here’s the thing though: The farther I get from this encounter, I realize the part that confuses me the most isn’t where the streaker came from or where he went. I never stopped to wonder why he did what he did, nor did I ever wonder why he was so nonchalant with his peace sign to the three of us as he left (or why he felt as though he owed us a farewell in the first place, for that matter). I think I chalked all of that up as insane the moment it happened.
Instead, what haunts me to this day is the last part of the story: what that man said after the streaker left.
I seen him over there earlier — twirlin’.
I mean what in the hell does that mean?
