Mary was a writer, young and fledgling but with obvious talent. We’d met at the Nation and talked in an easy way from the moment I showed interest in her work. She had introduced me to the poetry of Theodore Roethke, a good thing to have in a dark time. I sensed early on that Mary wanted to be more than friends. She only made this clearer as time passed, and with each manic flutter of her eyelids I wondered: What could be so wrong with her that she found me attractive? I didn’t want to be Mary’s boyfriend. I wanted to be Mary’s friend. She’d been kind to me when no one else had; she was among the few people who’d taken an interest in me in that lonely city.
On my computer at work I could enter any street address in America and retrieve census tract data in a couple of clicks—one of the many slick tools available to editorial employees of the Journal. I typed the number and the street name I’d been given, and onto my screen came a statistical snapshot of the neighborhood. A median family income barely half the national average. More than a third of residents with incomes below the poverty line. A population quantified like this:
American Indian—0
Asian—0
Black—4,294
Hispanic—162
White—13
At first I thought there’d been a misprint. Thirteen of my hue in a sample of almost 4,500? A minority population of 99.71 percent? The numbers didn’t seem plausible. Then again, almost everywhere I’d ever lived—Iowa, Minnesota, Montana—the ratio of white to black had been reversed. If I was as broad-minded as I thought I was, what did I care if I was in the minority for once?
As I considered the merits of a move to Bedford-Stuyvesant, I sensed an opportunity to achieve, among other things, a kind of experiential compensation for my job. Every day my employer published a record of the news that was about the length of a short novel, and the version of reality contained in those pages, while interesting and even sometimes useful to the degree you had money lying around—and often most enlightening for the unspoken assumptions undergirding its conventional wisdom—bore almost no resemblance to the world I confronted day-to-day, and left out most of what interested me. It aimed to be the indispensable read for the rich and the reactionary, of which I was neither. The saying about the place was that you got two papers for the price of one: a respectable, often hard-hitting news section that glorified and scrutinized titans of commerce and empire, and a piss-and-vinegar editorial page that acted as the bullhorn for the interests of the moneyed class and the Republican Party. Some reporters I knew refused to read the editorials on principle, as if to acknowledge their existence was to admit that they tainted the integrity of the paper’s reporting. Merely to mention the editorial page in the newsroom was to elicit a chuckle or a grimace, as if you’d audibly passed gas. My own embarrassment was intensified by the fact of my peonage. My duties were unrelated to any notion of integrity. I was a fax ferrier, a nobody, the guy whose most important task was to ensure that the water cooler didn’t run dry in the middle of the day. To say I worked in news was only accurate to the extent that I worked in a newsroom; I had nothing to do with the pursuit of news.
One morning I showed up at work to find a message on my telephone from a man named Peter Brinch. He said he was a friend of Frank Allen’s and was calling because he had a tip he wanted to share with a journalist. Frank Allen had kindly told him to call me.
I immediately called him back. I didn’t tell Brinch that I wasn’t a practicing journalist. Nor did I tell him that what the public thinks of as a good tip is often not news at all. There was a hint of sophistication in his voice that made me think he might tell me something extraordinary, something that would change the flat-line trajectory of my so-called career.
Brinch told me that he knew a man with an obsession for McDonald’s.
That didn’t sound promising. People obsessed about all sorts of things, and their obsessions were not news. They were just obsessions, some of them mildly intriguing, most of them pointless or creepy or sad.
Brinch continued: This guy has made it his life’s goal to eat at as many McDonald’s restaurants as possible. So far he’s eaten at more than ten thousand of them, most in the United States, a few in Canada and the Caribbean. He’s been to many that no longer exist. He started eating at McDonald’s in the 1970s. Name any town or city in the U.S., and this guy can tell you whether it has a McDonald’s, and if so how many, and where they’re located. He has a photographic memory. He takes all his vacations in places where he hasn’t eaten at the McDonald’s yet. He considers his visits to new McDonald’s a form of collecting. Collecting the McDonald’s experience, he calls it. He makes notes on every restaurant he visits. He’s never told his story to anyone. But I think he might be ready to talk.
Brinch told me the guy’s name, which was Peter as well—Peter Holden—and he passed along Holden’s phone number.
I thanked him for the tip.
I think it would make a good A-hed story, I really do, Brinch said before hanging up.
An A-hed was a story that ran in column four on the front page of the Wall Street Journal every weekday—a light-hearted, often humorous story that readers loved because it represented an island of levity within a sea of more serious news. Editors called it the A-hed because the box around the two-deck headline above it was shaped like a square-topped A.
It occurred to me, after I hung up with Brinch, that the A-hed was often about someone’s weird obsession.
During my lunch break I called Peter Holden. He told me he worked for a data-imaging company in Virginia. He explained that his firm scanned documents and compiled them in databases that people could peruse with computers. This eliminated the need to replicate documents in paper form, and therefore saved a lot of trees.
Holden told me he was coming to New York on business the following week. We agreed to meet for lunch at a McDonald’s near the newspaper’s office in Lower Manhattan. He said he had red hair and a brown briefcase. He offered no other particulars about his appearance, but I made the natural assumption. When I arrived at the restaurant, I looked for the fattest man in the place, but the fattest man in the place did not have red hair or a brown briefcase. The only man with red hair and a brown briefcase was tall, trim, and looked about forty-five years old. Holden had told me he was fifty-three.
We shook hands, ordered lunch. He was friendly, a little bit shy of his achievement, and a little bit proud beneath the shyness, prouder as the lunch wore on. He ate two Quarter Pounders with cheese—no onions—and drank a large Coke. I ate a Big Mac Value Meal with fries, drank a Hi-C Orange. He said that when I’d first called, he couldn’t believe a reporter would have interest in a story such as his. Then he realized that if The Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for solo visits to McDonald’s, he would almost certainly own it. As a token of thanks for my interest, he wanted to pay for both of our meals. I told him he couldn’t do that; I would have to pay for both meals. At first he resisted, but I told him it was journalistic protocol. A reporter could never accept gifts from potential sources or subjects, even if the gift was only a Big Mac Value Meal: Journalism Ethics 101, avoiding the appearance of a quid pro quo.
Holden showed me several folders full of notes about his visits to McDonald’s. I looked at the number for the most recent entry: 10,892.
That’s not even all of the ones I’ve visited, he said. For years I went to McDonald’s without taking notes. Only after I’d been to a thousand or so did I start.
I asked him to tell me how many McDonald’s there were in Fargo, North Dakota, and he did. I asked him how many McDonald’s there were in Missoula, Montana, and he listed them by the names of the streets they were on.
I asked him why he started doing this—collecting the McDonald’s experience. He said that by the 1970s he’d visited every state capital and national park in the U.S. of A. He’d collected them all, from Montpelier and Cheyenne to Montgomery and Santa Fe, Glacier, Zion, Gettysburg, the Everglades. I wondered what else there was to do,
he said. So I thought I’d try to eat at every McDonald’s. But they built them faster than I could get to them all.
He said his one-day record for visits to McDonald’s was forty-five. He’d accomplished this in the suburbs of Detroit. Partway through that epic day he bought cookies for the road, since a visit didn’t count unless he ate something from the restaurant, although the actual eating didn’t have to happen in the restaurant.
At the conclusion of our lunch, I invited him up for a tour of the newspaper. He seemed delighted by the fact that I could wave a little pass card with my picture on it, and doors in the hallways of the Wall Street Journal would open for me. He asked me what subjects I covered for the paper. I was ashamed to admit I sorted faxes and replenished water coolers, so I told him I was a special research assistant to reporters who wrote about law, telecommunications, and the various health care industries. As we circulated through the maze of cubicles in the newsroom, I made sure to avoid the wing of the tenth floor where people knew me.
I told him his story was fascinating, a kind of quest story of a uniquely American kind. If my editor gave the go-ahead, perhaps I’d visit him where he lived, in Virginia, and we’d try to find a McDonald’s somewhere in the vicinity, ideally a McDonald’s he hadn’t visited yet, although that seemed unlikely.
I first saw Bed-Stuy after dark, so I hardly saw it at all. The C train carried me from the glassy chill of the Financial District to the Kingston–Throop stop on Fulton Street, and from there I walked the dozen blocks to Monroe Street, just off Marcus Garvey Boulevard. It was raining when I got off the train. Everyone hurried along the sidewalks hunched with umbrellas and newspapers over their heads, their knees bent in semi-crouch. With our hands up and our heads down, we looked like we were fleeing the wrath of something horrible come down from heaven.
The walk was long, fifteen minutes from the subway. The neighborhood was mostly residential, street after street of beautiful old brownstones, bodegas here and there on the avenues, an occasional barbershop or storefront church. The landlord answered the door when I rang. He introduced himself as Ben. He was a sharp-looking man, bald-headed, thirtyish, from Trinidad, with a suave but laid-back British Island accent. He lived on the top floor of his three-story brownstone. A lesbian couple lived on the ground floor, and the middle floor was open. The place was lovely: high ceilings, decorative molding, a claw-footed tub, two bedrooms and a decent-sized kitchen. I looked the place over. Ben looked me over. I’d come straight from work wearing a blue dress shirt, a red tie, and a black corduroy overcoat. I tried hard to appear a gay-friendly dude who’d pay his rent on time.
Mary tells me you work at the Wall Street Journal, he said.
It’s true. I’m pretty sure I’m the only socialist there.
So you don’t mind situations in which you’re the outsider, he said.
I think that’s safe to say, I said.
He gave me an application to fill out, told me he’d check my references and get back to me afterward.
You come as a friend of a friend of a friend, he said. It’s probably yours if you want it, but let me do my due diligence.
When I told Francine Schwadel about Peter Holden, she thought I was kidding. She asked if I could verify his claim to have visited 10,892 McDonald’s. I said, No, not exactly, but he showed me some of the notes he took about them and he seems pretty trustworthy.
That’s not good enough, she said. We need absolute proof. If you can prove it, I think we’ve got a story.
I called Holden. I told him I needed to see copies of his notes from all 10,892 of his visits to McDonald’s.
He said that would be impossible. Each collection of notes ranged from a few sentences to half a page or more. It would take him forever to make copies.
I asked if he could use his company’s technology, scan the notes, and create for me a searchable database.
He said he didn’t think he could use the company’s technology for personal business.
I reminded him I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. We needed solid sources. We verified facts before putting them in the paper.
He said, Why don’t I send the last three thousand entries or so, and you can look through them and send them back? They’re all numbered. I didn’t start at five thousand. Come to think of it, I’ll send you some from the beginning and some from the middle and some from the end.
I ran this by Francine Schwadel.
Tell him we’ll pay to have them shipped, she said.
When they arrived, I took them home and spent an evening with them. Their banal repetition had a strange poetry to it, a kind of Whitmanesque list-making for the end of the millennium; in almost every instance he’d noted what he’d eaten, and the thought of all those empty calories, millions and millions of them, staggered me. All that ground-up cow flesh. All that corn syrup. All that time spent breathing the oleaginous air of the nation’s McDonald’s franchises.
The next morning I showed the notes to Francine Schwadel. I told her about my idea to visit Holden where he lived and take him to a McDonald’s he’d not yet seen. I’d discovered the existence of a new one not far from his home, just across the state line in Maryland.
That way, I said, I’ll be there for breaking news.
Very clever, she said, grimacing. Write me a proposal and I’ll send it on to the page-one desk. I’ll see if they’ll let you travel. Don’t get your hopes up. And tell your guy not to talk to any other reporter, anywhere, until your story runs.
After approval came down from page one, I was instructed to book a Friday evening train to Washington with my own credit card. I was needed at the fax machines during regular work hours, and as a greenhorn I would not be allowed to report on company time, though all my expenses would be reimbursed. For someone of my position, reporting was an extracurricular activity.
I’d learned some tricks about the various strategies one could employ from listening to the reporters around me. The guy in the cubicle to my left had the manner of a no-nonsense dentist. He was blunt and demanding, all business, insisting that he didn’t want to waste anyone’s time, so why beat around the bush, just tell me what I want to know and I won’t bother you again—and people did. The woman in the cubicle across from me adopted the pose of a hopeless neophyte, confused, in over her head. She asked for things she pretended not to understand to be repeated, slower this time, like you’re talking to your adolescent niece—and people did. Sometimes she laughed to herself after hanging up, amused by her own performance. She ought to have been. She broke news on all sorts of sophisticated Wall Street shenanigans and she got a lot of her leads by sounding like a complete ditz on the telephone.
With Holden I simply shut up and listened, nodded and ah-hummed a lot, and took page after page of notes as he extemporized. On a muggy Saturday morning we drove to a new McDonald’s in College Park, Maryland. From the moment we stepped inside he smiled with childlike enthusiasm, his head swiveling as he tried to take it all in. The seating area had plastic tabletops laminated with the University of Maryland shield, and the walls were emblazoned with the words MARYLAND TERRAPINS.
Look at this, Holden exclaimed. I love this stuff!
He told me his greatest excitement in life came from finding a McDonald’s restaurant with something slightly different about it, since most were carbon copies. He thanked me profusely for leading him to a version that was one of a kind, and for sharing in the joy of the discovery. We stayed no more than half an hour; the place was jammed with customers, and it didn’t feel right to linger merely to admire the tabletops, the walls.
That afternoon he showed me around his home in suburban Virginia. Each room contained a different collection of some object: African masks in the living room, Russian nesting dolls in the dining room, and so on, dozens and dozens of each particular thing. In its museumlike tidiness, it looked like the kind of place a fastidious serial killer might call home. I couldn’t stop myself from picturing a collection of severed body par
ts somewhere in the attic—thumbs, ears.
Are you a collector of anything? he asked.
About to say no, I thought of the commonplace book I’d been keeping. If I’d wanted to disturb him even more than he’d disturbed me, I could have quoted some of the entries. Pavese: No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. Jong: It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. . . . It was harder to do nothing. Freud: No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself. Nietzsche: The thought of suicide is a great consolation: with the help of it, one has got through many a bad night. Pliny the Elder: Amid the miseries of our life on earth, suicide is God’s gift to man. Artaud: If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. And so on. I assumed that counted as collecting, but it wasn’t the sort of collection you shared with anyone.
Baseball cards, I told him. As a kid.
In my spare time at work I continued reporting. I called Holden’s boss at the data-imaging company, who told me that he did his best to accommodate Peter Holden’s urge to go out of his way on his business travels and collect the McDonald’s experience.
If you can handle his mysterious routes from point A to point B, he said, he’s the best employee you could have.
I called Holden’s ex-girlfriend. She told me that at first she couldn’t understand why Holden stopped so often for snacks on their vacations, always at McDonald’s. After about a year, she said, I finally confronted him. Why stop at McDonald’s six times a day? Why not Burger King? I wasn’t hungry or thirsty, so I’d sit in the car. I’d see him inside taking notes. I’m a psychotherapist, and I could never figure him out.
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Page 4