Pretentious Chap
On the night of March 21st, I realized that I had yet to visit McDonald’s over Spring Break. I had yet, with a purchase of a Big Mac or McChicken, to put my hands on a lovely McWaist and smother the restaurant with my red-lipstick affections. I resolved to visit my muse on the 22nd.
I had to sneak out of the house. Like most people, my parents agree that my obsession with McDonald’s is unhealthy. But my bed-sheet rope and my father’s car keys do not know any better, and, at the midnight hour, from the second-story window I dropped and onto Route 20 I turned. A quick ten-minute drive later, the arches were in sight. But then I felt it — a pain somewhere in my stomach where love should have been roasting, desire brewing. I did not park; instead, I entered the drive-thru and ordered an impersonal sweet tea.
Anyone who has spoken to me knows that I am an employee of my hometown McDonald’s. Perhaps you have passed it on Interstate 90. Perhaps you have even allowed me the honor of taking your order while you were on your way to Buffalo or Cleveland. If you had walked into our lobby or passed through our drive-thru and you saw a cashier wagging a saucy finger or heard the effeminate chiming of a homosexual lisp, then it was I who would soon be processing your order for four extra-value meals. If you looked closely — if you looked into my eyes when I took your twenty-dollar bill or told you to slide your card through the reader — then you would see something sparkling in my eyes as I told you that your food would be up in “just a moment.”
It was that moment, when your smile was as genuine as mine, that my job at McDonald’s became something other than a bi-weekly paycheck. When you looked at me like an individual instead of an anonymous body behind the counter in an ever-expanding population of anonymous bodies and nondescript counters, I pushed a middle-school note to the restaurant to ask it to go steady with me, and it blushed and checked “Yes.”
That night, I saw the store again, the lover I had left in bed so that I could attend college somewhere in a neighboring state. But he was different.
Maybe because the parking lot was empty; because the store was remodeled last summer; because I am not too familiar with the third-shift employees — regardless, the curves of his body did not seem to be the same curves I had felt while working through high school. I determined that to satisfy myself with this tryst, to order a Big Mac or McChicken, would be mutually unfulfilling. I felt something like guilt, as if I was about to mar the memory of a store that had for two blissful years been my Big McFlurry-Spoon when I had felt particularly small. In a desperate attempt to save my lover the betrayal, I entered the drive-thru. And when the cashier asked for my $1.06, I did not look into her eyes or smile or say hello. I turned myself into a bill and six cents so that no one would recognize me. And then, driving away, I drank a delicious sweet tea and shed a tear.
The point is that sometimes we and our lives peak during the high school years. We need to start accepting that.