Fast Food

I realize that fast food is 20 percent sodium, 30 percent fat, 30 percent fecal matter, and 20 percent polymers, and that the chains are ruinous to individuals and communities in any number of ways.

But still I go, once or twice a month.

I go even though I realize the youthful workers in these places are prone to effecting all sorts of malice and tomfoolery. Matter of fact, I always just assume the fry cooks are going to “make hay” with my order. Twenty-five years ago, a college friend told a tale of his fry-cook days that continues to reserve a place in my daily thoughts. With salacious delight, he described all the things he had done to a cheeseburger that was destined for a cop who’d given him a ticket.

My earliest memories of fast food involve a Smaks restaurant about a half-mile west of home. It predated the McDonald’s that was later built a half-mile east of home and which later became my home away from home.

Smaks was a lot like McDonald’s, and in some ways superior. Unlike McDonald’s, the chain offered onion rings, tenderloins, ice-cream cones, and something called a Smakaroo, which was either a souped-up burger or some fashioning of an Italian steak. The advertising mascot was Smakky the Seal, a rather erudite sea lion in beret, bifocals, and ascot—or, perhaps I’m confusing Smakky with Sir Laurence Olivier.

Of course, there were several other fast-food joints nearby. Like Smaks, many were situated along Troost Avenue. There was the short-lived Jim Dandy’s Fried Chicken, an enterprise that soon surrendered to Church’s Fried Chicken, which sat two blocks from it. In the early seventies it was rumored that a lady had bitten into a Church’s drumstick and come away with a mouthful of dead rat. News of this unusual incident, which my older brothers swore had happened at “our Church’s on Troost,” somehow scandalized all four corners of the globe, even into those countries where rat is a delicacy.

Across from Church’s stood an Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips, which we forever confused with H. Salt Fish & Chips. Now suddenly, as I’m typing these words, I’m wondering if it really was a Treachers. Maybe it was a Salt after all. At any rate, the Treacher/Salt divide has always been a bitter one. Just as there are Munsters families and Addams Family families, there are also Treacher families and Salt families. For the record, we were—and remain—proud supporters of the Munsters and the Treachers.

When I was small, getting dinner at Smaks or any place like it was a rare and wonderful adventure. An older sister would round up everyone and then go from kid to kid, compiling a list of orders. Each order had its own conditions and footnotes and disclaimers to the point that her pencil had to be resharpened before the list was complete. Some of us liked onions and mustard and ketchup and pickles. Others hated onions and mustard and could tolerate pickles at gunpoint only, if it were to come to that. Others hated onions and loved ketchup but could not conceive how any human being with a shred of dignity and good sense could eat something as sick as mustard. And still others wanted cheese on their patties. In those days you had to make a special request for cheese on your burger, whereas today you have to make a special request to omit the cheese.

But it was the topic of onions that fueled the greatest turmoil. Onions were to our household what the Gaza Strip is to the Middle East.

Generally speaking, the girls were fond of onions and the boys were not. And these complications played out daily, whether the subject was Smaks, meatloaf, fried potatoes, or spaghetti sauce.

“Gross! You’re using onions!” one boy would say, his thumb and forefinger pinching his nostrils shut.

“But you can't even hardly taste them!” the offending sister would protest as she continued slicing the bulb.

“Good! Then let’s do without!” came the inevitable reply.

Most of the younger boys insisted their fast-food burgers be plain. The opposite of plain, at least in our house, was “loaded.” My sisters got their burgers loaded.

When I was finally old enough to place my own order at a Smaks or McDonald’s, I’d ask the clerk for a loaded hamburger, which always made the clerk scowl a little from irritation and confusion. Those days, I also referred to any kind of ice cream as a Dairy Queen and to any kind of soda pop as a Coke. One time at Smaks I ordered the following: a loaded hamburger, a Dairy Queen, and an orange coke. My sister had to translate the order: a burger with everything, an ice cream cone, and an orange soda.

By the mid-seventies, the nearby McDonald’s had begun to clobber Smaks, and if I could’ve, I would’ve dined on the former every day. It so happened there was a morbidly obese student a few grades older than I whose mother picked him up at lunchtime every day and drove him to McDonald’s. He was the luckiest kid alive.

For the longest time, hamburgers at McDonald’s were just twenty cents each, as were the fries and small soft drinks. In fact, an ad campaign touted how you could order a complete meal—two burgers, fries, and a cola—and receive change from your dollar! One Saturday, a couple of my fellow fifth-graders and I helped a nun re-paint the four-square lines on our playground. For recompense, she treated us to McDonald’s. When I asked if I could order two hamburgers, she reared back and distorted her lips and tightened her manly brows. So I withdrew the request. Our parish was going through tough enough times as it was.

Some twenty years later, one of those same fifth-grade painters must have gone through a tough stretch of his own. One day from a McDonald’s drive-up window he greeted me with the conventional “long time no see” type of remarks, and when he handed me the sack he said, “Dang, if I’d have known it was you, I’d have loaded you up with extra fries.”

He’d always been a good guy, nice looking, well behaved. And there he was, in his early thirties and working the drive-up window. It made me so sad I could scarcely complete my Filet-O-Fish.

I considered a fast-food meal to be something special and luxurious up through my high-school years, though by then multinational-chain pizza was rapidly becoming the dish of choice. The McDonald’s nearest my high school was where the popular kids hung out—at least, that’s what I’ve been told. I do know the cool guys often sneaked away for a stealthy McDonald’s breakfast, perhaps hoping to be caught and punished by the school authorities so everyone would know they had sneaked away for a McDonald’s breakfast.

In addition to all the belly aches, the fast-food industry has given me a lot of belly laughs over the years. When Mark Twain said “everybody talks about the lousy service at fast-food chains, but nobody does anything about it,” he was on to something.

And when it comes to lousy service, one of my favorite series of anecdotes involves an old friend and an old Hardee’s that was situated near the university in the late 1980s, when these events took place. One day, as the counter girl rang up my friend’s order, she could not resist the urge to nibble on a few of his fries.

Another time, he ordered a fish sandwich, prompting the counter girl—possibly the same girl who’d poached his fries—to reflect on how good a fish sounded. She soon turned and called to the fry cook: “Drop a fish for me, too, but put mine in the clean grease!”

Americans are a forgiving lot, and so this fellow made yet another visit to this illustrious Hardee’s. In the drive-up lane, he ordered a burger but requested the tomato be omitted. What apparently followed was a long series of miscommunications that played over the subpar speakers and microphones between a skeptical customer and a distracted employee who had probably just received his paycheck and was crunching numbers in his head and finding the results unsatisfactory. When my friend finally made it to the window and opened his bag, he noted not a burger without tomato but instead a plain biscuit with a large slice of tomato.

If that’s not bad enough, on three occasions my wife has been on the receiving end of unsolicited McDonald’s McRibs. She would never order a McRib—that’s why I married her— yet three times one has ended up in her paper sack.

I suppose my strangest fast-food moment occurred at a Wendy’s near downtown that an obit colleague and I frequented, for reasons that twenty years later remain unclear to me. Had there been plaques awarded for filthiness, discourtesy, and inefficiency, the store’s walls would have glittered with them. Yet there we were, at least once a week, paying our money and taking our chance. At one particular dinner hour, as we fossilized in line, a certain comment reached our ears. A clerk there told a customer “we’re outta meat tonight.”

My colleague looked at me and I at him, and after a while one of us said, “Hmm, I guess we’ll have to try back tomorrow night then.”