Old’n Arches

It is two in the morning I am standing in a rather long line at McDonald’s and nobody is happy.

I must admit I’m experiencing some cognitive dissonance, as all my memories of McDonald’s as a child are happy ones. My grandma used to take me to McDonald’s every Monday after I got out of fencing practice. McDonald’s was my lunch when I visited my mom at work. McDonald’s was open at 2 AM when I was drunk and needy. McDonald’s is the longest lasting relationship I have outside of my immediate family, and this makes me impossibly sad.

I think of Johnny Kruger. To call him my “friend” would cheapen the meaning of the word so I’ll just call him a kid I knew in middle school. He was nice from what I remember. He didn’t have to be, he just was. But the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Johnny Kruger is his Bar Mitzvah and its location: the McDonald’s in Times Square. Johnny’s grandfather opened the first McDonald’s franchise in New York and so celebrating Johnny’s passage into manhood at a McDonald’s made perfect sense. The sight of Johnny riding around a McDonald’s on a Segway will never leave me. I was incredibly excited about the possibility of eating free McDonald’s food until the buttons popped off my ill-fitting Brooks Brother’s jacket and was dismayed to find that the party was catered. I stood beside a cardboard display of Ronald McDonald, staring at my plate of sushi and Challah, and wondered, “Is that all there is?” But lo, the benevolent St. Ronald of McDonald smiled upon me when after the sushi supply had been depleted, the McDonald’s kitchen opened up for us. So why is it now, in this McDonald’s at 2 AM, that I want nothing more than to slit my wrists?

This McDonald’s has been through many transformations since I began giving it my patronage in 2000. When I first moved to the neighborhood the walls were plastered with black and white posters of old New York circa 1945, the only blips of color could be found in the colorized McDonald’s bags photoshopped into the hands of pedestrians who were almost certainly dead. The lighting was harsh and fluorescent, accented by ugly neon tubes of orange and blue criss-crossed along the perimeter of the room. The aesthetic fit: cheap and uncomplicated. Now the walls are fitted with flatscreen TVs showing looped footage of fruit falling in a white vacuum. The McDonald’s has also adopted post-modern furniture; low to the ground ottomans and diffused light fixtures that cast a warmer shadow. This is what McDonald’s thinks is cool now. I feel betrayed. I feel as though McDonald’s thinks it’s better than me. McDonalds didn’t used to be this concerned about its image. It was generally accepted that to work at McDonalds was the worst thing ever and so was their food. Sometime during the summer before high school McDonald’s decided it didn’t want to be that fat kid anymore who could laugh at himself and now wanted to drink smoothies and hang out with the cool kids in Soho.

The one thing this McDonald’s hasn’t overhauled is the logo, the famous golden arches. In the 1960s McDonald’s tried to change its image entirely and wanted to do away with its trademark M. They brought in a design consultant who also happened to be a psychologist and asked him what they should do. He told them to keep the golden arches. His logic: the arches held Freudian power in that they looked breasts. It has yet to hurt their business. There is something infantilizing about McDonald’s and it’s not just Mother McDonald’s breasts. Order an apple and it is given to you pre-sliced and peeled with instructions detailing just how to dunk your slice into one of McDonald’s’ many sauces. The smallest size (and arguably the healthiest portion) is labeled not as “small” but “kiddie.” This to me represents McDonald’s attitudes toward the consumers that have grown up with their product. Kids want nothing more than to be taken seriously, to not be seen as a baby but an individual with thought and agency. Though they must go to bed at 8 PM they would rather do so with dignity than be tucked in like a child. As a child you eat the kiddie portions, but if you wish to continue eating at McDonald’s past the age of 5, you have to graduate to bigger and bigger sizes and leave the Happy Meal behind.

“The Happy Meal” is really the closest thing McDonald’s has to a balanced meal. The portion is modest: four chicken nuggets, some apple slices, a small fries, but it really is meant for children. This is not to say that an adult couldn’t order one but McDonald’s shrewdly operates under the assumption that no adult of sound mind and body would willingly enter a McDonald’s, wait on line, and then order a meal intended for a child. Only I am not of sound mind and body. I am in a McDonald’s at 2 AM and I am here because I am fucked up.

Up until I was seventeen I only ordered one item from the McDonald’s menu: McNuggets. Not chicken nuggets, McNuggets, because “chicken” would be a stretch. I didn’t always exclusively eat McNuggets, but after one fateful afternoon when my babysitter served me a McDonald’s hamburger with lettuce on it. The experience so repelled me that I only sought nourishment from the bite-sized nuggets that day forward. Since then I have become something of a sauce alchemist. I know when to mix ranch with honey mustard or chili with sweet and sour. I know the ratios, I know how deep to dunk my nugget, I am an adult. There was a period of time when I carried on an affair with the Big Mac (always without cheese). There is a dialogue being had currently about false advertising; how photoshopped images negatively affect our standards of beauty and humanity. This is a very real worry of our times, but right now I am more concerned with food photography and how it affects our standards of nutrition. Looking at the picture of the Big Mac behind the counter, it looks almost divine. The two beef patties have a greasy sheen that turns your mind to the sexy sizzle of the grill. The buns are perky and soft, as if they were made of foam, so delicate as to wilt under the touch of your greedy fingers. The corner of a half-melted slice of cheese sticks out playfully from between two dew-dappled leaves of lettuce, teasing you, inviting you. After bearing witness to the Big Mac as advertised, receiving a Big Mac over the counter is a life lesson in disappointment and compromise. You hoped to go home with the beauty queen, but you’re saddled with her lumpy, cock-eyed cousin who also happens to be a sloppy drunk, and you have to learn to be okay with that.

The Big Mac by itself was cheaper than my medium McNugget meal and seemed to be more filling. However after eating it I felt decidedly different than I did when I ate McNuggets. What I was feeling, I decided, was shame. On more than one occasion I induced vomiting to get the half-digested sandwich out of my system. After I felt I had been in an after-school special long enough, I made the transition back to McNuggets and haven’t looked back. I could order something else, try new things, but doing that would go against everything McDonald’s stands for. This is not about health; this is about convenience and routine.

“But Alex,” one of my friends will ask, “Why not try one of their salads? Or better yet, one of their yogurt parfaits?”

I tell them all the same thing: going to McDonald’s for a salad is like going to a prostitute for a hug.

It is almost my turn at the register. In front of me a visibly intoxicated young woman in a tight-fitting sequin dress leans over the counter to squint at the calories listed beside each of the sun-damaged menu items. Though a legal requirement of all restaurants in New York City, listing the calorie count for every item on the menu is not dissimilar to showing someone just how many extra bullets are in your gun before beginning a game of Russian roulette. The rules and specifics don’t matter; just make peace with the fact that you are never going to win. The woman in front of me is ordering for the six or seven members of her party and I distract myself with the McDonald’s commercial playing on one of the flatscreen TVs. The ad is for McDonald’s new low price for a box of 20 McNuggets and features a group of hip, young 20-somethings having a picnic of McNuggets in their backyard. This is wrong. For one thing, why go through the trouble of planning a party in your backyard, complete with fairy lights and a TV connected to the main house by a 30 foot long extension cord, only to eat food that you can procure from a drive-thru? Also, no hip, young, 20-somethings are gathering around McDonald’s anywhere in the tri-sate area unless they were previously gathered around a bong.

Suddenly it is my turn at the counter and I do my best to appear confident, mature, and sober. The weary counter girl sees me and recognizes me for what I am, a hungry drunk looking to get his sodium fix. This will be her moment of superiority for the week. She doesn’t even welcome me to McDonald’s; she just looks at me expectantly, waiting for my order.

“I’ll have a Happy Meal,” I say clearly and distinctively…in my head. What I actually said was something closer to, “[giggle] um yeah, I’ll hafa Hapy Meale pleash.”

“A what?”

“A….Hap-py Meal.”

“Are you sure?”

I’m taken aback by her question and immediately second-guess every decision I’ve made in my life up until this point. Shaken, I renege on my previous order.

“Ummmmmm, actu-ly….I’ll have a tenpiecenuggetmele.”

“A what?”

“Ten. Piece. Nuggetmeal.”

“A what?”

Nobody knows what it is to be powerless in this world until a McDonalds employee purposefully mishears you to make you slur your order a third and fourth time for their amusement. I eventually get my food and make the choice to eat it at home. I make this choice to convince myself that I haven’t been home this whole time, that I don’t really belong here, that these people aren’t my friends, that what we have isn’t all that special, that I am unlike every other miserable soul still standing in line. I might be, I just hope the only difference isn’t that I’ve been served.