McBeautiful

My high school drama teacher was fabulous; she was vibrant, eccentric and ginger-haired. Although she worked in Windsor, she and her husband lived in a posh Detroit suburb and she believed this gave her the authority to claim that Windsor was “the armpit of the world.” I didn’t spite her for this, though, because the truth was, I agreed: any way you looked at it, Windsor was a cultural black hole.

This notion became painstakingly lucid when I was seventeen and working at the McDonald’s restaurant across from Windsor’s largest shopping complex, the outdated and aesthetically repulsive Devonshire Mall. It was wintertime and I was working the late shift. Some asshole had missed the chrome bull’s-eye in the basin of the urinal and it was my turn to clean up.

Morale was low as I scrubbed the rancid tiles in the men's room and my teacher's shrill warning tore throuhgout my skull like a fire alarm. I buckled over and puked into the toilet bowl I had just polished after a sickening realization punched me right smack in the gut: I am living in an armpit and working in an asshole.

Everything about that workplace reeked of asshole. The patrons who left their half-masticated remains on the tables were assholes. The teenage boys who made it their Friday night ritual to break beer bottles in the bathroom were assholes. And my boss, Dom*, the man with the striped golf shirt and the golden name tag, was also an asshole; a corporate, all-powerful, capital A asshole. Dom wore this uniform to distinguish himself from the bunch of us lowlifes in our modest burgundy tees. Without speaking, Dom's fancy Oxford shirt proudly announced his superior ranking. He neglected the corporation’s teamwork policy and instead created a culture of tyranny in a fast food restaurant that epitomized American democracy and idealism.

So citizens of “the Armpit” came into “the Asshole” demanding food. It’s when they ordered this food and I worked my ass as fast as it would move to fetch it for them that I became a slut to society. I became, suddenly, a “Big Mac Combo” Hoe. I transformed into White “Vanilla Cone, please” Trash. You could tell from the burns on my forearms that I was a “French Fry” Wench. My plastic nametag insisted that I was a “Customer Care Specialist,” a clever corporate euphemism for “Cheap McDonald’s Whore.” I was the first to admit that’s exactly what I had become: I sold my body for $6.40 an hour and performed filthy, degrading acts for a man I'd never love - night after night after unholy night.

Let’s get something straight: I didn’t stick around that dump for long. My breaking point occurred at a staff meeting when Dom grunted at me after I politely inquired why we didn’t recycle the dozen newspapers that we daily threw into the garbage.

“Can’t.” His sentences were as stumpy as his figure.

“But isn’t it our social responsibility to respect the environment? If every McDonald’s restaurant is doing this, surely we’re causing harm to our planet?”

“Don’t care. Not gonna happen, sweetie.”

He glowered and swiftly moved on to the next topic (how to increase productivity by cutting down on the construction time of a Quarter Pounder with cheese by .03 percent) and I silently made (and seconded) my motion to submit my two-week notice of termination. I quit the habit, just like that, over newspapers and a guilty social conscience.

I don’t where that drama teacher is today, but I owe her for my salvation. She’s probably still fabulous and sashaying into drama classes across Windsor on an impassioned campaign to ensure that young Armpitonians are sensitive to beauty and don’t end up living and working in corporeal crevices for the rest of their lives.

*Names have been changed to protect the guilty.