Fast Food Addict in the St. Louis Fringe

How much fast food I ate varied depending on what was going on in my life. The years I lived in St. Louis with small children were probably the worst. Staying home with children can be isolating. In some way the rich food was my way of filling the void or emptiness I felt emotionally. Although I really loved my children, and liked being a mom, I was struggling to fit in with the women at my church and with being part of a new community. Having given up my job to stay home, I’d lost that working-woman identity that I had clung to.

I went through a Wendy’s single with cheese phase in St. Louis that lasted for quite awhile. My cravings for the single with cheese took my car through the Page Boulevard drive through. My 1988 Toyota Corolla had seen better days and was now sporting a “girl dent” as my husband called it. The car wasn’t pretty, but it ran really well, and for the area it would have been considered a really good car. Although it was a reasonably safe area, a lot of white people really didn’t like going up there. I became “drive-thru friends” with the guy who worked the window. He had a huge smile with a few gold teeth. “How you doin baby?” he would say as we chatted and waited for my order to come up. It wasn’t the fastest drive through. I really liked ketchup with my French fries and he remembered, which I thought was both sweet and hilarious at the same time. He would turn around to make sure his boss wasn’t watching and proceed to hand me unusually large numbers of ketchup packets. More ketchup packets than one little white woman could really use. I would take them all because it gave him such pleasure to give them to me. His smile would engulf his entire face. I saw the Spirit in him, this wild guy working the drive through. His sense of humor and love of life was getting him through the day. His attitude was, if I have to be here I might as well have fun.

Closer to my apartment was a McDonald’s. It was run entirely by African Americans except for the little nerdy white guy with glasses who seemed to be either the owner or top manager. It appeared that no one paid any attention to him or what he said. Mutiny at the U-City McDonald’s was underfoot, and the little guy didn’t seem to have any idea how to fix it. If you wanted to drive through the U-City McDonalds, you had better have had at least 10 minutes, and to be safe, more like 15 minutes. If you chose to sit in the drive through for 10 or more minutes, you were rewarded with the freshest, hottest McDonald’s sandwich ever experienced. It was made after you ordered it. They didn’t seem to like making them ahead of time and letting them sit as Corporate requested.

I imagined white guys somewhere having meetings about the McDonalds in U-City: Suit #1: “What is wrong in U-City, and what do we do about it?” Suit #2: “The drive-through times are out of control!” The thing was that no one would run around like crazy in U-City as you are expected to when working for a McDonalds. Another issue was the Special Sauce. Sauce was King in U-City. You needed sauce on your sandwich, and you needed lots of it. McDonald’s has rules about how much sauce employees are supposed to put on the sandwiches. These rules were not followed. You had to open your sandwich carefully and keep the wrapper underneath to catch the globs, not drips, of special sauce. Just like at Wendy’s, Ketchup was also an issue. Ketchup packets were tossed out of the drive-through window with unabashed enthusiasm and a complete lack of respect for the corporate rules. Again, I’m sure there were meetings about this. Suit#3: “Why are the ketchup packet numbers so much higher in U-City?”

The building actually had three windows for the drive-through, but the little manager had given up on it and only used the one at the end. Just inside the second window was a whiteboard with a message scrawled in red ink, “drive through times, drive through times, drive through times!!!” It was underlined three times. Un-expecting white people with foreign cars and college stickers would pull off the freeway to go through this McDonalds and go ballistic. “I’ve been sitting in the drive-through for 10 minutes, what the hell is going on around here?” What I learned from this was that many white people needed to calm down, myself included. I’d put my kids in their car seats and drive around awhile until they fell asleep. Then I’d head for the drive-through, place my order, and kick back and relax listening to the Who. After 10 to 15 minutes, I’d relish the piping hot Quarter Pounder with lots of extra ketchup packets.