My Life in Hamburgers
My long, obsessive, and (too) deep relationship with hamburgers goes back to the earliest moments of consciousness—my plump little fingers clenching madly at tiny Royal Castle burgers, digging into the cloud-light buns with the same animal glee with which I plunged my face into the frosting of my first birthday cake. There was never a time when I didn’t love hamburgers and overthink them. For this I blame, or rather credit, my childhood in the groovy South Miami of the 1970s, where my parents led an unwholesome life and were only too ready to accede to my constant demands for Burger King. The house was always dark, and it seems in retrospect that they didn’t move around much. They always seemed sleepy. This was before cable TV, the internet, or friendship or love, you understand. I was bored and lonely, and only one thing gave me any real pleasure. I whined and wheedled, and I always got my way. I had an unwholesome lifestyle of my own, taking pleasure in thick slices of fried salami, and cold knishes, and Old London Garlic Rounds taken four at a time and topped with a quartered Kraft single.
But hamburgers were my great love, the only one that has stayed with me all these years.
When, in 1974, Burger King introduced the Big Plain, a Whopper with no toppings, I was taken there as a reward by my father, who generally detested the place. “Oh, look,” he said. “They have a hat with an airplane on top. Because it’s the ‘big plane.’” His sarcasm was lost on me, and seemed simply perverse grousing, likely to delay my getting a Big Plain of my own. When I did get it, I put french fries on it. Other times, at other Burger Kings, I ate it untopped. Our apartment in the Kendall section of Miami was blocks from the Burger King, Inc.’s world headquarters, and the Dadeland Mall unit a kind of test lab for new concepts. Dark and moist, with fake stained glass and the perfume of the deep fryers never far away, this was the sanctuary to which I fled as often as possible. It inspired the first flights of my independence, the first of many solo excited walks out of the apartment, and towards a waiting hamburger. That crusted edge, its craggy brown surface painted by the corners of a melted orange cheese slice, nestled into its pillow bun: It had then and has now the power to mute and dampen any potential stirrings of unhappiness.
A few years later, a few blocks away (Kendall had a lot of apartment buildings), I found myself living with my mother, who was vivacious and witty and adoring, but also weirdly unpredictable, often falling into mysterious naps or inexplicably slurring nonsense words. My father was in Atlantic City, working as a stagehand at the first of the big casino hotels to open there; we were to follow him, but it wasn’t clear exactly when – nor did I think about it. The Mansions, as that last Kendall complex was laughably called, was even duller than the one before —emptier, its white stucco more featureless, its brown doors and brown railings even more depressing. But it had a big upside: there was a convenience store across the street, right off the Dixie Highway, and it had a wonderful microwave cheeseburger. Much later in life, I would be taught that its distinctive salty-sour taste was called umami and likely the result of some kind of weird soy protein in one of the burger’s fillers. Or maybe it was just freezer burn. But it had a squishy white unseeded bun that would get even squishier as steam billowed around it inside the microwave. The cheese would liquefy and the weird, pastel-green pickles become searing discs of pain if you cooked the burger for the full recommended minute. Who could wait that long anyway? I would lose my patience at the thirty-five second mark, enjoying the contrast of the hot puffy unnatural bun with the dense, floppy beef patty as tepid as bathwater. I would consume it hungrily outside, in the merciless Miami sunshine, standing next to the red plastic trash can, ready to drop the wrapper and find some other, less delicious, distraction.
My teenage years only led to more dangerous habits of hamburger self-medication. There were the Quarter Pounders that rewarded rowing practice in Atlantic City’s salty, foul back bay; there were bleary-eyed visits to White Castle late at night, the double cheeseburgers as soft and sumptuous as meat petit-fours. There were, for the first time, burgers made at home, of supermarket ground chuck, fried in lumps and clumps in a burning hot pan and then flipped on their sides to receive torn pieces of yellow “square cheese” as the locals called it; and then, with the old familiar impatience, scooped up onto a waiting slice of Wonder Bread and gulped down with a quart of Old Milwaukee. The best, and worse, and most damaging, and most enjoyable, hamburger of my life was handed to me one morning while still reeling — in shock, really — from my mother’s sudden demise. “I’m going to go to McDonald’s,” my aunt told me, in a solemn whisper. “Do you want anything?” Did I ever! I had been hiding inside hamburgers for most of my life; this one swallowed me whole, and it took me years to get out. Maybe I never did.
Later in life, I would become a successful food writer, known especially for grandiloquent panegyrics on the hamburger’s greatness, its history, its inner life and triumphant future, and much more. I am still writing about it today; here’s a listicle I wrote for CNN not two months ago. I even wrote a book on the subject. Had I been a better, or at least a healthier, person, I might have not known, or cared, so much about a sandwich that hardly thought of me at all. It’s doubtful, at the very least, that I would have such an emotional attachment. I was well aware how ludicrous my red-faced diatribes against Five Guys were, and how silly it was to dilate, in such an orotund way, on sandwiches that even their makers barely bother to think about half the time.
I don’t care. The hamburger was there for me in hard times, in a near-feral childhood marked by solitude and near-constant anxiety. It was there in my excruciating adolescence after my mother OD’d. It was my companion and my comfort through my squalid twenties, through a bad marriage and many subsequent travails. It will always be there for me. I plan on getting one right now. The hamburger, at least, never lets you down.
