Burger King's creepy mascot |
That's obvious. Every bite wrapped in taste and memory, smell and perception. Satisfying a craving older than language, older than fire, broader than humanity, felt by every creature, from flea to vole, hawk to whale.
Which is odd for several reasons. The food at McDonald's is crap, generally, but I nevertheless have fond feelings toward the chain, despite its way creepy mascot, Ronald. A bond stretching back to the red and white tile buildings that had nowhere to sit (okay, a small alcove, if 50 year old memory series, that people never actually used). I have complex associations with the yellow paper that wraps McDonald's cheeseburgers, and every year or three I find myself wanting one—the way you taste that pickle when you bite into it. Somehow the pickle is key, the ketchup. The cheeseburger itself is just the vehicle.
Burger King is far better, food-wise. Flame-broiled. Real lettuce. Its own even more horrifying mascot. Yet Burger King is an eternal also-ran, Pepsi to McDonald's Coke. I might have to bat away temptation to patronize McDonald's every few years, but I never, ever think: "We should go to Burger King." It never crosses my mind, and were it to vanish, I would never notice it was gone, the way you typically never wonder what happened to Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips. The last Burger King I ate in was seven years ago, because I happened to be in a car with someone who stopped at Burger King to eat as we were driving to the UP.
Even stranger. I have very specific memories of that Burger King in Evanston, closed permanently due to the pandemic after 44 years in business. "The BK Lounge" we called it, an undergraduate stab at ... what? Hipness I suppose.
Here's the memory: we get our food—burgers, fries, soft drinks, not much else you could get there back then. Whoppers, I suppose. And my little brother is fussing with his ketchup packet, for the fries, and both squeezes and tears it at the same moment, projecting a splurt of red ketchup across my sternum.
And I remember looking down at the splash, with dumb bovine incomprehension, then up at him, and then off to the side, as if looking for the studio audience. I wasn't mad. I wasn't even particularly surprised. It was almost as if I had expected this, or something like it, and now it had occurred. The reaction was more a "So this is how it's going to be, eh?" resignation. Which was apt, because that was indeed about how it went.