West Virginia is coal- mining country. Its hills are steep and identical, smothered in that species of tree, eternally half-dead and fraying, that Hollywood uses as a backdrop whenever an act of cannibalism or chainsaw-accompanied incest is taking place. In summer everything drips with condensation, and the faded pink asbestos flamingos outside the rows of mobile homes have a greasy look to them.
In a fold of the Appalachians lies Bluefield. Its main exports are lung cancer and depression. But it has a McDonalds. The golden arches sweat in the hot mist just off the pitted and pocked main road. And it was here that I found the worst fast-food outlet on the planet.
The person who served me had no chin and it seemed that some terrible pressure was building behind his watery eyes, so dramatically did they bulge out of his acne-napalmed cheeks. I ordered a packet of fries.
‘Jew luck frahs witcher frahs,†he said. ‘I supposed I’m a lapsed Anglican,†I said, gambling on a syllable’s worth of comprehension. The creature rolled his eyes — for one awful moment I thought I was about to see the optical nerve — and jabbed a grubby finger at the board behind him.
‘No,†he said, and repeated the sentence more slowly. ‘Would you like fries with your fries?†It had actually happened, the old East Coast parody of hillbilly service. I gaped, and then said yes.
Bluefield is only two days away from Washington as the Chevy pickup drives, and yet this McDonalds was on the frontier of America’s commercial empire; a gloomy fort serving McVarmints, surrounded by dark wooded hills where savage natives whooped and chanted and threw empty moonshine bottles at each other and shot cats for the pot. What hope was there for outposts flung even further?
And yet, as a decade passed and I became entirely addicted to the substances produced by McDonalds, it seemed that the colonial branch in South Africa was holding its own.
Arriving for my fix of whatever it is they put in Big Macs, my pusher would be polite and neatly dressed. Used trays and hypodermics were efficiently cleared from tables, the effluent from overdoses quickly mopped from the tiles. When I would stagger in late at night, shakily proffering a handful of coins gleaned from smashing open the little blonde fiberglass girl in a splint with a half-brick, they would tell me what I could afford: a gram of cheese-substitute here, half a gram of meat-compound there. Mostly I’d sit down and eat. Sometimes I couldn’t wait and would simply press a Big Mac to my eye (it gets absorbed through the membranes and travels to the brain much more quickly than via the stomach).
And then it turned sour. Perhaps the telegrams stopped coming from Atlanta. Perhaps a scheduled delivery of McDough for the McBuns didn’t arrive, fuelling rumours of attacks on the lorry-trains by fat bandits; a report of a Ronald McDonald clown in Nebraska being run down and scalped by diabetics. Suddenly that familiar gloom had settled over my local. The dust whipped up by the Southeaster off the racecourse was left to frost the windows. One of the drive-through windows closed for good. The manageress, a harridan whose idea of management is to cuff her staff and yell fishwife abuse at them in front of customers, fell silent and now spends her days writing a journal in the meat-locker. If he comes back I will call him Two Sock.
But the greatest change in my pushers is the numbness with which they deal with crises. Colonisation brought them aprons and caps, but robbed them of their resourcefulness, their innate cunning. Ten-minute waits at the drive-through are the norm, but where once we were spun yarns featuring narcoleptic patty-flippers and chip-fryers bursting into flames, today’s response is as dull as the eyes that meet one at the solitary functioning window.
‘Why are fries taking so long?†‘We’re waiting on fries.†‘Why am I still waiting for my milkshake?†‘We’re waiting on milkshakes.â€
Protest is useless. The opium-fiend knows he cannot complain about a lack of ventilation in some dark Calcutta room dedicated to the arts of the Black Smoke. Miserable, depressed, abandoned service comes with the golden arches. I wait, and shake, and sweat —