February 7, 2021 – Song Of Ajax

Pope and I drove to the National Championship game in New Orleans between VT and Florida State that magical year when Michael Vick was our quarterback and the team went undefeated.

I had just finished grad school at VCU and was waiting for my application with the DEA to process (I’d be waiting another three years and they still couldn’t get their shit together) and was working a crappy minimum wage job for an industrial supply company called Fastenal where I spent the day in an unheated, un-air conditioned warehouse in a strip mall off of Staples Mill Road in RVA literally lifting 250 lb. kegs of galvanized structural bolts and counting nuts and washers.

I took the job as a part time gig right after I got out of the Army to help me make my car payments while I went to school on the G.I. Bill, but because the application process was taking so long, I kept working there for years after because I thought some federal agency might call me at any moment and I didn’t want to go out seeking more permanent employment in case I’d have to quit it at any moment to take my dream job (such was my convoluted thinking in those essentially pre-Internet days).

I’d end up working for Fastenal from 1997 to 2001. Over four years. Then, when it became clear nobody was calling me anytime soon, I busted out the Help Wanted section of my local newspaper (remember those?) and began applying to other better paying jobs.

I went to work for a paralegal company called The Lex Group that was dominated by females who all smoked.

I was the odd man out. Quite literally.

The pay was only marginally better than Fastenal, and I had to work in a shirt and tie as a glorified copy boy.

Part of the job was providing legal briefs to the Virginia Supreme Court and other nearby courts, and I’d be in a shirt and tie in the middle of summer sweating profusely through it as I huffed and puffed pushing a dolly full of legal documents up to the front door of the courts wondering to myself how someone with good grades, a degree from VT, and an honorable discharge from the 82nd Airborne Infantry had ended up in such a lowly and pathetic circumstance?

I was working for that company when 9/11 happened, but that’s a story for another time.

So, here I am in Biloxi and Pope is taking my picture.

We’d tried to drive the entire way but we still had several hours to go when we decided to pull off the highway and try to find a hotel room.

We had to cross several small bridges over the bayou and it was dark and a fog was rising off the swamp.

We found a cheap hotel, whereupon we immediately began drinking heavily.

There were lots of casinos nearby and we stumbled into one where Keith did an amazing karaoke version of some Elvis song. Or maybe it was Clarence Carter. (Ir)regardless, I know he brought the house down. And then we stumbled out and hit the Waffle House next to our hotel.

That’s why I’m wearing a Waffle House hat on my head in this picture.

We thought it was so funny that I even wore it to the game.

As incongruous as it was in the New Orleans Superdome with rabid Hokie and Seminole fans, we got a surprising number of high fives and comments of, “Waffle House! Fuck YEAH!”