Notes Day 1:
Rotier’s: Jason orders the meat and two, roast beef, thick hunks of
tender meat in thick gravy, tastes brown and beefy, coleslaw, very
crunch in sweet sour cream, and hashbrown casserole, a recipe out of
Fanny Farmer or a spiral bound church cookbook, iced tea, grilled
buttery French bread. Emily orders fried chicken, green beans, hashbrown
casserole. Beck orders steak dinner, fries, beer-battered cheese
sticks. The interior is dark, smoky as though viewed through crackled
microfilm, booths, a tv showing the LeBron, college kids bound in coats
drinking beer, a waitress with a tired chubby face and a tired smile,
thin brown hair, pay at the register to a gristly man graybearded. Neon
signs outside read STEAK, SEAFOOD, it looks like a pit but is a friendly
cavern.
A car packed with suitcases packed with printed articles, new news
magazines, text books, Krugman, Nye, Okun top the shelf, boxes and boxes
of granola bars, bottled water, clementines. We make pit stops at
Love’s gas station, drink coke and watch the Tennessee sunset, listen to
the Black Keys’ El Camino and Nirvana’s In Utero
taking highway 24 down south. Then we cross into Nashville a great city
of glittering light in the dark south (you can see the motherfucking
constellations out the car window). Beck and Emily chat about television
shows (Gossip Girl, Project Runway) and gossip about debaters on the
national circuit. I sag in the backseat, trying to reach that nirvana of
half-wakefulness rocking into the seatbelt and sleeping to the Black
Keys’ “Sister.”
We’re staying at the Holiday Inn Vanderbilt, which is really almost
swallowed into the campus. There is a towel folded in the shape of a
swan on each bed. Debaters stroll the lobby lugging big suitcases
overstuffed and carrying plastic tubs. There is a discrete taxonomy of
debaters. It is easy to identify the policy debaters by their masculine
affect, square jaws, tousled hair, cigarette stained teeth, beanies, fat
cheeks, laptop dazed donut glazed look, and coffee swilling slump
across lobby couches just chilling and shooting shit. The extempers by
their careful grooming and intense walk. Extempers walk fast and with a
purpose. They are pointy, driven, intense, aware of their intention and
ready to fulfill it. There are less of them and they all know each
other, so it’s like a perverse family. The LDers are the most
attractive, impeccable, smooth and sly, genuinely nice or just plain
slimey, and always white toothed and scrubbed nosehair plucked Gillette
Max or whatever shaved smooth close to the cheekbones, giving their blue
steel looks and ready for rebuttals. And then there are the debate
coaches. The men have bottlebrush gray mustaches and craggy blue eyes,
carry battered leather briefcases, smoke cigarillos. The women are
either homemakers of the 1950s stereotype gotten old with platinum
blonde hair and excess makeup around the lips, rouged and tanned
cosmetically, or young women who are looking for or escaping from
likewise boyfriends.
It is 10:30 and Emily has begun to file. In the connecting room I
hear the punctuated click click click of a stapler sampling hundreds and
hundreds of newspaper articles. Continue reading →
