One morning I got a call at seven asking me to come in.
I said sure.
When I woke up all the way and realized what I’d done, I looked at my crumpled uniform on the floor. I started crying.
My mom called in for me, saying I was too sick to do it myself.
$
There were two regular bums at my McDonald’s. I couldn’t tell you either of their names.
One was a real bastard.
He would ask for a paper bag and fill it with jellies. Then he’d shower in the sink, leaving black droplets for whoever got lobby duty that day. After that, he’d sun himself at the outside tables, chatting up employees. Especially the ones who smoked.
His favorite story was about Maria, one of the managers, and the time he fucked her in the ball pit part of the Playplace.
The other was a guy who would come in and order two Big N’ Tastys. They were the most food you could get for the least money. When he got lucky, Diane would be working in the back. She wasn’t much for breaking the rules, but she always doubled up on the patties whenever he ordered.
After he got his food, he would take off.
$
Abel was the only person who was fired the entire time I was there. And that’s not an easy thing to do.
If you were calling for a reference, you would be told he was let go when he was caught eating in the back. And that’s true. But the whole story is that he was the slowest man I have ever seen. And I don’t mean he had some kind of handicap. I mean it was like he was slowed all the way down. Watching him wrap a burger was like watching someone do it under water, on mushrooms, blind, and stretching out the task like he was paying to do it and wanted to squeeze every dime. He would stare at the burger, his sleepy eyes taking the whole thing in like he was wondering if this was even worth the effort. Then he would curl up the left side of the wrapper. Then the right. Then fold. Then fold in the sides.
This is a company that was always mining for ways to speed everything up by a fraction of a fraction of units of time that didn’t even exist yet because they were too small to be measured by the technology of the time. After working there a few months, I came in to find a manager delighted by a phone call. The corporate HQ discovered that if the burger wrappers were reoriented in their drawers, we could flip them over as we pulled them out, saving precious granules of time on EACH burger.
So, we changed out the drawers, and meanwhile Abel stood with his jaw open, not saying a word, slowing up the works in a way that even the most extreme wrapper reorientation could not compensate for.
Maybe he was fired for eating a Chicken McNugget like they say. But maybe it wasn’t eating the McNugget so much as it was the fact that it took him three and a half hours to swallow.
$
Leading up to quitting, you start to do everything a little worse. Nothing horrible. In all my time, I can honestly say I never saw anyone piss in anything or jerk off on a batch of fries. But you start cutting little corners. Rather than letting the McMuffins toast all the way, you slide your hand in to pull them out faster. Your hand is scorched a little, and the tiny seeds falling from the McMuffins feel like ground glass, but you get everything done faster.
You start taking food. This may come as a surprise, but just as it is in the rest of the world, there are no free meals behind the counter either. At least, no sanctioned ones. That’s why most of the free meals are eaten in secret- by the dumpster, behind the walk-in freezer door, or, if you’re like me, halfway between work and home, running a little and jamming an aged Big Mac in your face.
$
Beanie Babies. Do you remember Beanie Babies? If you don’t, here’s a brief lesson:
Beanie Babies were dolls filled with beans, or bean bag material. They were small, the size of a gym sock maybe. There were bears, dogs, cats, and after they ran out of regular animals, they reverted to octopi, crabs, and other sea creatures that, even if tamed, would be nightmarish to wake up next to.
The thing that made Beanie Babies special was the fact that we were somehow tricked into thinking they were valuable. They were all created, probably in a Chinese warehouse, in limited quantities, and as collectors we bought into the bizarre idea that a limited amount of something means that it’s valuable. Like diamonds. Or weird cheeses.
If you’re not sure why they were popular, see: Pogs, Oilies Stickers, Trading Cards, and Commerative Cups of all stripes.
And, for a very limited time, Beanie Babies migrated from their normal sales racks at Hallmark to their greasy, stripmall neighbors at McDonald’s. They were smaller, they were in little plastic bags, and the marriage of white trash lunch with white trash collectibles was a corporate partnership not seen since KFC offered Precious Moments figurines in the bottoms of chicken buckets.
We sold the Beanie Babies over a couple weeks, but there was a one-day blitz wherein we sold four different varieties in one day. When one sold out, we moved onto the next. When we ran out of lobsters, we moved onto pandas.
This meant that when I came in, the lobby was packed with mother/daughter teams, hungry for the next plush, and hungry to a lesser extent for McDonald’s.
The limit was four per person, so there was a lot of middle aged women buying four, their daughters standing next in line with a crisp twenty in hand, held out in front like a carnival ride ticket.
Part of the deal was that in order to purchase Beanie Babies you had to buy something from McDonald’s first. We ran out of ice cream cones, the cheapest item at sixty-nine cents, within the first hour. There was a steady stream of employees waiting to use the machine, cones in hand. By this time, eight months in, it was hard to pretend that I didn’t know how to do things like refill the ice cream machine. All you had to do was open the top, slice open the bag of liquid mix, and dump it in the top. The tricky part was not making a mess of the cream, and not using shake mix instead of ice cream mix. They looked the same, but the size of plastic bladder holding the mix was different.
After that we ran out of apple pies. Then McDonaldLand cookies, which was a register button that I wasn’t even aware of. Then we ran out of small fry bags, and whenever someone bought a small fry the employee had to dump a small fry amount in a medium fry bag.
Hours went by, products ran out, and finally we ran out of Beanie Babies. Most of them sold, some pocketed by employees, tossed in the garbage, or thrown up into the ceiling tiles when nobody was looking just to end the stream of customers as soon as possible. There were customers through the day who would approach the register, find out the Beanie Babies were sold out, and then leave without ordering, angry that we were all out and that we coaxed them into our store with the promise of crap merchandise. This was often when they went with the worst threat of all time: I’m never coming back here again.
When you are working at a fast food joint, you make the same goddamn money if you make no burgers or a thousand. The 200 Big N’ Tasty day paid the same as the afternoon of the 4th of July, the only day I saw people let off work early because the traffic was so low. So when you threaten me that you will never come back, I will smile, say I’m sorry you felt that way, and imagine Ronald McDonald considering the loss of four bucks from his empire as he’s setting his yacht on a course for international waters while snorting a line of coke off a teenage hooker’s creamy thigh.
After the rush, a group of employees was sitting outside when Maria, manager Maria, came outside and approached me at the table. “Can I talk to you at the other table for a minute?” she said.
I stood, moved one table over, and sat down again. She mounted the bench side-saddle and tapped her long fingernails on the tabletop.
“Do you know how much your drawer made in on hour?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Fifteen-hundred dollars. Do you know how far off you were?”
“No,” I said. But I thought it must have been a lot to warrant a rare outdoor visit from a manager.
“Forty cents,” she said. “Congratulations. That is really amazing. The average for that much money is fifty dollars. And you were in a hurry.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a wooden coin. “Because you did such a good job, we want to give you a free meal. You can have it whenever you want. Do you want it now?”
“No. Thanks,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“I think I’ll save it,” I said.
She said, “Well, okay. We just wanted to say thanks and good job.”
She left the little wooden coin on the table. The maximum value of the coin was less than five dollars. I thought about the fifty bucks I could have in my pocket, fifty bucks that wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. I thought about Guillermo, the guy who went out in a blaze of glory when he pocketed two-hundred-fifty in one Friday night. He was fired, but they never go through the work of getting the money back. Two-hundred-fifty was more than a month of paychecks for me.
$
The manager I told I was quitting was Shawna. Shawna had a face that was scarred up one side. She was harsh, and the scar face made it easy to call her things. Lots of time was spent speculating what happened. Burned by the fryer? House fire where her husband died? The most believable story was one that involved her falling out of a car when she was a teenager. The road ripped away the skin on her face, and according to this theory, all down her body as well.
Sometimes, when I was on fries, I’d think about that face. The machine would beep and you would shake the fries and dip them back in the oil. If you ever had soggy fries, someone didn’t shake them halfway through cooking. The machine would beep and you would hang them to dry. The machine would beep and you would dump them in the tray under the heat lamps. When you dipped a new basket, little drips of oil would spatter your arms. Then you would feel the little circles of heat when you put your arms under the heat lamp.
On fries, it was easy to think about the easiest way to get out of work, maybe forever. All you’d have to do is plunge your hand in the oil. Just say you slipped on an improperly cleaned floor. It would only take a second of being brave to jam your hand in there. After that, all you had to do was survive, and if some bitch who spilled coffee on her thigh got rich, so would a fifteen-year old with an arm crippled by hot oil.
But something about Shawna’s face reminded you that maybe the lifetime of regular skin was worth a lot. Maybe more than you’d get from McDonald’s.
$
Most of the McDonald’s money went to joining Columbia House movie club. When you sign up, you get eleven movies for a penny apiece. After that you had to buy four movies at inflated prices, but the math still works in your favor. I think.
My movies showed up all in one box, eleven VHS tapes lined up side-by-side. In a final turn of bad luck, they showed up the same day we were leaving on a family trip to Yellowstone. A week without a TV.
My campaign to cancel the trip failed. As did the campaign to push the trip back two days, one day, and to continue the trip as normal while I stayed home alone with Snake Plissken, John Spartan, and 9 other action heroes.
$
My next job washing dishes had a lot less to learn. The best skills were carrying big stacks of plates, holding hot utensils straight out of the washer, and tolerating Mexican polka music for five-hour stretches.
They gave me a tour of the restaurant, the manager saying that if I stuck to the job I could move up to prep cook. He walked me towards the prep are, explaining that there might be a job opening up there soon. He leaned in to tell me a secret. The guy doing it now was okay, but he was so damn slow.
And there was Abel, slowest McDonald’s cook on record, shredding lettuce, tearing the leaves apart like he was opening a Christmas present surrounded by his family, and feeling the love in their eyes all trained on him, never wanting to have the moment end.