Serving fast food isn't much healthier than eating it.
I recently went to a Chicago Bulls game where every spectator was handed a card good for one free Big Mac if the Bulls won and scored 100 points or more. (“Are you Mac enough?” the card asked me.)
As it happens, both of those criteria were met, so the very next day, I headed to McDonald’s and cashed in. The two all-beef patties, special sauce, et cetera, sent a wave of contentment lapping through my body, and I realized how long it had been since my last burger.
I used to order a cheeseburger at every single restaurant my parents took me to, however inappropriate the choice was. (For what it’s worth, don’t ever order one at Red Lobster.) At some point, I just kind of drifted away from them. I eat a little healthier now than I did as a kid, and that has the bonus of making my infrequent burger indulgences even more satisfying.
But looking around that dining room, I also felt something akin to what WWII vets must feel upon returning to Iwo Jima. My first job was at a fast food restaurant – not a McDonald’s, but a little local place in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.
• • •
I think most high schoolers have donned the eye-repelling uniforms, the clothes so grease-stained that they retain the shape of your body. Most teens have done their time as the menial outcasts, the Polyester Prynnes who toil below the notice of polite society. For one year, I walked that road, my feet throbbing and my forearms lashed with burns.
The man who hired me was a shaggy-haired, bespectacled assistant manager named Rich. He wore a short-sleeved shirt with a tie, an outfit in which he looked slightly more comfortable than a chimp would. My first day, he announced with a big, friendly smile: “Just so you know, I might say something like, ‘What the fuck are you doing,’ or ‘What kind of bullshit is this, you fucking idiot,’ but it’s nothing personal, it’s just kind of how I am.”
At the other end of the spectrum was Carl. He was this very shy, awkward employee whose father came in on payday to make sure the restaurant wasn’t stiffing his son. Carl seemed a little old to be working this job, much less to have his dad look in on him. It was a disconcerting glimpse into his home life that inspired most of us to avert our eyes.
Once I saw Carl pull a bun off the toaster’s conveyor belt and promptly drop it to the floor. He picked it up and started making a burger with it.
“Carl,” I said, “you can’t use that!”
“No, no,” he entreated me, “I think it’s still good.”
I convinced him to throw it away, and tried to impart to him that when food hits the floor, it is by definition no longer “still good.” But I suspect that he thought I was overreacting.
Victor was another source of consternation. He was an Eastern European guy who occasionally tried to display some pizzazz in the kitchen. He had a trick where he’d flip and catch a toasted bun with the tongs. One time he spun one particularly high, and when he looked down again, his chin was slick with saliva. He quickly and bashfully wiped it away, but that snapshot was pretty much burned in my mind. I have no idea what exactly happened, biologically speaking, but there it was.
Eventually I made the decision to make my own burgers.
• • •
I hated working the drive-thru, because I couldn’t figure out the best way to remember the sum to charge the car at the window while tallying up the order for the next car at the speaker. I asked a manager named Susan if there was some way the cash register could track both amounts simultaneously.
She scoffed, “They don’t teach you kids addition and subtraction anymore?” My defense stuck in my throat as she walked away, shaking her head. “I guess it’s all calculators now, huh?”
One afternoon Susan plucked a French fry out from under the heat lamp and ate it. She was met with a knowing grin from Carl and a playful admonishment: “Ah-ah-ah! I caught you!”
“I’m testing them, Carl,” she said, sternly.
I thought she overreacted a bit, betraying some defensiveness, but I may have been projecting. I would regularly swipe fries myself, or hard little rectangles of bacon, or hash browns wrapped in slices of American cheese.
The restaurant was experimenting with a frozen dessert, essentially soft-serve ice cream topped with crushed chocolate sandwich cookies. They weren’t Oreos. These were those Hydrox faux-reos, and they arrived pre-crushed in plastic bags that we stored in the walk-in refrigerator. I soon learned to medicate myself by swiping a handful whenever I had to go back into the fridge. I thought I was pretty sly about it, but looking back I’m positive I had crumbs all over my face.
• • •
Cops got free coffee. I must have forgotten that one morning and charged a police officer for his. After he allowed a grimace of irritation to flutter across his face, he handed over the money, then mentioned the discount I had failed to offer him.
“Oh,” I said. “Um.” I looked down at the ocean of cash register buttons and tried to remember how to correct my mistake. I stammered an apology and offered to bring the manager forward to smooth things over.
The officer sneered at my nametag. “No, that’s fine, Dave,” he said. “It’s perfectly okay, Dave. Don’t worry about it, Dave.” I guess every so often it does a cop’s heart good to belittle a high school student making $3.35 an hour, and I was nearby to provide that service. “Really, it’s fine, Dave.” My acne-riddled face hardened into a hot, red mask of regret, and I waited for the moment to pass.
It’s one of those slights that I can draw up 17 years later and turn over and over in my mind, fantasizing about how I could have handled it differently. The scenario changes depending on which part of my psyche takes precedence; the 33-year-old cuts the cop down to size with witty retorts, and the 16-year-old watches him cross the street and get hit by a train.
But one day, I did feel appreciated. I received an order for two cheeseburgers, and I threw them together beautifully. Just the right amount of time in the microwave, perfect pickle placement, and the scientifically ideal ratio of ketchup to mustard.
“Those were excellent,” said a voice behind me.
I turned around and saw a heavy-set man with a clipboard. “Sorry?” I asked.
“Those were very excellent.”
“Oh! Thanks.”
Later, I heard that he was some kind of auditor from the central office, come to check on how well the place was running. And that generally, he was pretty disappointed. But in the midst of the chaos and destruction around me, I had created something beautiful, powerful, “excellent.” Those cheeseburgers were my Guernica.
• • •
Your first job is supposed to prepare you for the adult workforce, but I don’t see it. In a year of working fast food, all I was exposed to was petty thievery, backstabbing, slipshod co-workers, and condescending authority figures. Plus an irrational swelling of pride at the tiniest little bone of appreciation thrown to me. Nothing that resembled my first copywriting job, years later. Where, incidentally, I spent eight years writing marketing copy for McDonald’s.
By the way: “Are you Mac enough?” I wrote that. It’s my Sistine Chapel.
The Banquet of Life is a bi-weekly look at one man's life through the food he eats.
