Fun and Danger at Denny's

When in my early 20's, I hung out with a group of friends who were a mix of co-workers & extended friends from those co-workers. We would get off work at around 10:30 in the evening, and go find ways to create general mayhem and chaos throughout the city for the rest of the night. Whether it was gathering to watch a Jazz game at "Momma Fuzzy's", hiking up to the giant concrete "Y" on the mountain, hiking to the hot springs, playing pool at my apartment, playing mario kart or renting out the local lazer tag arena for an hour, it was almost always in the middle of the night and it often involved a trip to one of the few 24 hour sit-down restaurants in the area.

Really, we were pretty much limited to Denny's and the truck stop over in Springville.

Now I know that lots of people have "Denny's" stories, because wherever you are, there is a Denny's nearby and it's one of the few nationwide chains that are open 24 hours. (IHOP is another in this same vein, but we didn't have one in our area at the time) Our Denny's stories are probably just a little different due to the crazy things that seemed to happen to us.

We admittedly weren't the best customers. Dipping sugar packets into a glass of water before throwing them on the big picture windows to have sugar races, while fun, was one of the things which caused us to be asked to leave. Another time, our waitress (and the night manager for the night) was none other than a woman I had arrested for employee theft from the store we both worked at. (We declined to order anything that night - didn't want the 'manager special'...) She was far from the last person we encountered that either my friend Rob or I had arrested at some point.

For some reason, my friend Jeremy attracted more than his share of attention. Once, while everyone was chatting like normal, some guys outside threw huge hunks of ice from the ground outside at the window right next to us. They had apparently felt like Jeremy had somehow offended them, and wanted him to come out and fight them.

The most memorable of all the incidents has to be the Ikkaka incident. At the time, Beavis and Butthead were pretty new on MTV. Jeremy did a great Beavis impersonation, specifically when Beavis was being Cornholio.
Jeremy was in full Cornholio when we walked into Denny's, and were greeted by the host who was wearing a name tag which had been made with one of those old school label makers, and read "IKKAKA". Jeremy, still doing the Cornholio, spots that and starts repeating it. "IKKAKA! EEE KA KA! EYE KA KA! Are you threatening me?!?!"

Ikkaka got really upset, saying "You need to knock that off!", to which Jeremy/Cornholio replied "Are you threatening me???" Ikkaka yelled back "Look, I don't care if I lose my job tonight!" He started to try to get to Jeremy, but some of us had stepped between them. Cornholio is still going full steam ahead. "I need TP for my bunghole! AAAAAaaaaAAAAHHHhhh!" This sets Ikkaka off completely. He was trying to get past us, but we got Cornholio pushed back out of the restaurant while some other restaurant employees were trying to hold him back.

We ate at the truck stop that night.