I get a message on my machine from this woman collecting poems for McDonald’s. She got my name from a friend. The tape is staticky and I have to play it back twice to figure out the friend’s name. I call back. The woman’s voice is throaty, laughy. She’s a poet who’s collecting poems for McDonald’s, and she knows it sounds funny. But McDonald’s is big on the arts, she tells me. The company has a big art collection, she says. An artist friend told her about it originally. And the CEO of McDonald’s, she says, is a poet. He worked his way up from the mail room to the top, she says.
I have no recollections of eating at McDonald’s. Maybe I got a milk shake once on a highway oasis in the middle of the night. Once I stood in a McDonald’s parking lot on Cape Cod because that was the drop-off point for car pools to an antiwar protest in Boston. Or maybe it was Burger King. When I was growing up in Houston my mother cooked for us nearly every night–chicken every Friday, Mexican food midweek, and the other nights London broil, hamburgers, steak, lamb chops, salmon patties. Just about the only franchises we went to were Kentucky Fried Chicken and a local place, Broiler Burger, for Saturday lunch, after synagogue. If we went to KFC we’d take the food home and eat it in the utility room. We couldn’t bring it in the kitchen because it wasn’t kosher. Some Sunday nights we’d go as a family to Cellar Door, which is now gone, I hear, but had a few locations in town then. You’d get plastic baskets of barbecued-beef sandwiches and fries. Years later, in college, I heard it said that the most beautiful word in the English language, as pure sound sound, was “cellar door.” I could never disassociate it from the sandwiches and Sunday and the brown plastic baskets. (Or were they red? The memory merging in my mind with other plastic baskets from myriad other informal meals?)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I was thinking of a conversation I had with somebody about the McDonald’s in Prague, I say.
So I try to write a poem about the conversation I had with my friend Tony about the McDonald’s in Prague. Tony is a German and film professor at Berkeley, but our conversation took place in the student cafeteria of the Freie Universitat Berlin in mid-1992. I’d been in then-Czechoslovakia a few weeks before and was telling Tony about the commentary I’d read in Prognosis, I think (yes, that’s the name of an English-language paper in Prague), arguing that McDonald’s is the apotheosis of socialism, because it provides sustenance equally for all the people. (At the time, I didn’t realize that the glitziness of the new McDonald’s in Prague made it hard for the average person to eat there.) He agreed. That’s in the poem, and it continues–moving logically, I swear–to describe martyrs in the 1960s in Czechoslovakia and Vietnam who immolated themselves for a cause. It ends with Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and writer, who killed himself in despair and ill health after he tried to escape from France into Spain in 1940. At the foot of the Pyrenees, the Spanish border guards told him his papers weren’t in order and prepared to send him back to France. “How happy he would have been to see the golden arches of unoccupied Spain” is one line, and I’m not exactly sure how I mean it or if I like it. At one point I have the less ambiguous “corporate capitalism with a clown face,” a takeoff on Alexander Dubcek’s line about socialism with a human face during the Prague Spring of 1968, before the Soviet tanks barreled in.
I don’t know, I say.
At Sharon’s house the next night, her husband Barry says, Go for it. It’s McDonald’s, it’s bucks. He tells about a mutual friend, a fiction writer, who used to be flown around the country to critique the short stories of some CEO of a soft-drink firm. He was paid a lot.
