There's a lot of time to think when you're in waiting in a drive-thru. I was at the Bryan Station White Castle, on a mission to try their rather frugally-priced cheesecake. I was sitting there for maybe 10 minutes waiting on my dollar order, but such dysfunction is simply a hallmark of working fast food. I spent 2 years working in a drive thru. When we weren't busy, I would gaze out the window, at the sunrise if I was working a morning shift, at a blemishless blue sky if it was midday, or sometimes at whorls of clouds and the vivid colors of sunset. Working fast food is an American Experience. There is the cult-like language of family that corporate encourages between its employees, the stress of your managers barking at you to keep shaving minutes and seconds off ticket times, the whirlwind of rushes. Working at any restaurant, really, is a sisyphean task. You open, you put all your little boxes of ingredients in order, you curse whoever the fuck closed last night 'cause they forgot to stock thisorthat, you work breathlessly through the rushes. When the last car in line pulls away from the window you look around at the havoc wreaked. Fallen utensils and food and crumbs and paper lie everywhere, amongst spills of sauce or drinks or soup. You tidy up the disarray or close and wait for it to begin again. And over and over.
Someone behind me honked and I realized an employee at the next window had stuck his arm out and was waving at me to pull forward. We transacted and he said have a nice day with warm eyes. I wondered if he was living paycheck-to-paycheck, if he had kids he was worried about, if there was love in his life. Maybe I am a creep to wonder about the lives of other people. But I feel like anyone working in a drive-thru has dreams or passions they feel are being crushed under the panic of the rushes and drowned by mopwater. What else do you have to think about when it's slow? Musicians and artists and writers who are too tired after a double to create. Students whose grades are slipping as they pull full-time workweeks to make ends meet, smoking a blunt in the parking lot every night after they clock out to clock into another state of mind.
Once I was eighteen and lonely and I'd dropped out of school for the spring semester and my life was working in a drive-thru 40 hours a week. I got of a particularly raucous morning shift where the stress had made my cry (I am very sensitive) and came out to this side of town to get to Hisle Farm Park, just down the road from the White Castle. I was drawn to a field of high grasses, and I danced in a downpour with my earbuds in. The cloud cover broke. Sunlight burst and blue poked through, though the rain was falling still. A rainbow born of the storm unfurled before me.
I had shit all to do this morning, so I took a right out of the White Castle parking lot and found myself heading out of town on Bryan Station Rd, the road to Hisle Farm park, tenderly unwrapping the baby cheesecake slice from its crinkly cellophane at a red light.
The fudge coating cracked into rich little shards as I bit into it, disturbing the flawless deep brown surface. It felt like cheekily taking the first footstep into a blanket of fresh snowfall in a big yard, or smearing your finger into the perfectly smooth surface of a new tub of vaseline. The substrate beneath had a creamy mouthfeel and appealing taste, evoking the joy of being enveloped by a lake whose waters the sun has warmed all day. I nibbled a bit of the graham cracker crust just to try it on its own and found it lacking, but who would judge a home simply on the discount $15 Target rug its owner has placed in the living room? Nay, it is simply one part of a whole, a team that feeds off of each others' energy, the rich chocolate that plays with the subtle tanginess of the simple cream cheese body, and the graham crust grounding these bolder elements.
When it's over you feel like you've just said goodbye to a dear friend who's about to clock into work, but you wish you could spend the whole rest of the afternoon together. I was so deep in the throes of the cheesecake I missed the turn-off to Hisle Farm Park. I made a u-turn at Windy Corner Market having finished my funny little snack, and headed back to town. It was a foggy morning, and the Kentucky countryside splayed out all around, lightly cloaked by mist. It loaned a mystique to the farmland, the barns, the quintessential black wood fencing and the stone dykes along the road that spoke to the bluegrass' rich history.
Life is full of beautiful silly little things, like White Castle's Fudge-Dipped Cheesecake On-a-Stick.
