Nothing is Hidden, part two

or, Would You Like ____ with That?

Working at McDonald’s was in many ways an explicit initiation to Zen practice: the rigorous timing of activities, the rotation of roles, adherence to a schedule, the repetition, the elaborated rituals; the emphasis on service; the mid-lunchrush blur of self and other, registers all ringing up multiple sales, each clerk turning in sequence to the trays of burgers and fries, the crisp snap of five white paper bags opening at once.

The whole notion of fast food might sound anathema to even the most mass-market account of Zen, a system that emphasizes, if nothing else, paying attention to what you’re doing. What could be less “Zen” than scarfing down a burger at 45 mph on the onramp to the Dulles Access Road?

But to prepare this fast food, to assemble, ring up, and present it in a bag at this speed actually requires close attention; letting your mind drift is a quick way to get a basketweave burn on your arm from the fry basket or to get clocked by box of frozen patties.

It the rare person who, when I utter the declarative statement that my first job was as hostess at McDonald’s, does not volley the predicate back to me as an interrogative. A hostess, at McDonald’s? If this question has arisen in your mind, I will tell you what you might not have realized: you can take a tour of your local McDonald’s, though I wonder if there is much call for that now, and you can enlist McDonald’s to host your next birthday party. Both of these services fall under the purview of the hostess, as does attending to customer problems. Cold fries. Limp fries. Too few fries. Too many fries: never.

Giving a McDonald’s birthday party involves assembling trays of burgers and fries and pre-filling courtesy cups with an orange liquid formulated to trigger a memory of juice. Also, we had a stock of frozen birthday cakes– chocolate with vanilla frosting with Ronald McDonald holding some balloons depicted in gel. There was a helium tank on the premises solely for the purpose of blowing up balloons for the parties, but on a slow afternoon, it was often pressed into service for the amusement value of speaking like a duck, especially appreciated when someone ventured to operate the drive-thru speaker in that voice.

The kids lined up along the long banquettes and each took the three items and arranged them in front of themselves as I passed before them, not unlike serving oryoki now. Offering a tray of burgers to a child, you are bowing whether you intend to or not. Isn’t oriyoki, with everything you need wrapped up in a neat package, a form of a Happy Meal?

Along with these hospitality functions, if someone failed to show for a shift, I was also fully trained in running the register and working the grill, recharging the soft-serv dispenser, whatever was needed.

On the register, the range of what you could do if you were actually there, rather than letting your mind wander quickly impressed me. Yes, our job was to move the line quickly, but these were actual people standing in line! And these people were subject to moods and they had wishes and needs and their wishes were articulated along a relatively finite continuum of combinations of burgers, fries, and fountain drinks, and simulacra of desserts. Their tenderness was vast, but the forms they sought were finite and you could meet at least their explicit requests.

In these quick encounters, I could feel the palpable difference between seeing the person before me and just looking through them to the next transaction; I learned the trick that paying attention doesn’t take extra time, it actually gives you more time.

My manager sent me to a daylong training seminar on customer service at Hamburger University, in Silver Spring, Maryland. It is this turn of autobiography that is so startling to my friend Stephen and brings on in him what I would call nostalgia by proxy, a longing to look back on someone else’s past, imagining how his life could have been different had he attended Hamburger University. To be able to say I went to Hamburger University!

You think you have a general handle on the roster of things you could regret and then someone tells you she attended Hamburger University. How could you know to aspire to something without knowing it existed?

At Hamburger University, whether the carousel slide talk was about the proprietary excellence of the Russet potatoes used for McDonald’s fries, or how to pack an order so as to keep those fries upright and unhindered, the one basic message was this: customer service, like the bodhisattva vow, is composed of a vast array–-menu!–- of possible gestures and responses; it is a posture of being. What I carried away from this training, and from the vow alike is this: there will always be more you can imagine doing, but you do what you can.

Okay, so with the former, this mostly translated into hyperfunctioning, selling customers things they didn’t yet know they wanted: Selling Up. Fries. A Shake. A Pie. Already ordered regular fries? Would you like a large fries? Already ordered large fries? Supersize it.

At its heart, working at McDonald’s was an early and thoroughgoing acquaintance with the power of repetition and form. Asking May I take your order? over and over was a constant invitation to notice how form invites expansion within that form. The complexion of my mind at that time was often astir in registering the sensation of the subtle and tremendous distinctions within uniformity, as in Catholic school, marvelling at how each person wore their plaid uniform differently, noting where on my friends’ thighs their skirts come to an end, how the pleats on, say Janet’s (or Rona’s!) skirt, moved in a way that was impossible to turn away from, while others simply hung there.

The Egg McMuffin rings required practice so that the crack of the egg took on the iconic circular form, each one distinct, each one perfect, an ovular Enso. There was the fry basket, and there was a timer, but still, everyone’s fries were slightly different. So many opportunities for the wholehearted attention Dogen espouses in the Tenzo kyokun, or Instructions for the Cook. For example, wrapping the burgers in their translucent waxy papers: do so less than wholeheartedly, which is to say, half-assedly, and watch the tray of burgers come unwrapped slowly under the heatlamps. A basic tenet of Zen kitchen practice holds forth a kind of finesse that isn’t about decoration, or something being extra, it is the simple full expression of something that works well because you give it your full(est) attention.

And within that realm of form and attention, my first job at Mcdonald’s offered another first, a most exquisite opportunity for exploration, right there in the breakroom. Greg B. I’ll leave it at that, though his name is so generic, it is perhaps possible to use it without violating his privacy.

We had recently started requesting the same shifts. For good measure, I could change his surname slightly the way names are transparently masked in some fiction: Brennan. Okay. Throw in another G: Gregg.

Let him be Gregg Brennan. After all, would he want anyone now to read that he leaned back on the basement breakroom couch, blue polyester uniform retaining in the web of its molecular structure a faint sheen from the fry vat, his legs parted enough to make space for me where I knelt before his lap, his hips rising as my head lowered onto what was assuming in my mouth a conformation, the proportions and fluctuant densities of which I would later determine, in consultation with my friend Meredith, to be of a textbook perfection, the textbook being the copy of Playgirl she had just given me for my 16th birthday?

At Meredith’s slumber party that weekend, we passed the magazine around, kneeling over it head to head, turning the pages from above–-Wait turn back, I like this one–-comparing what we found in the magazine to what we were seeing “in the field.” Gregg’s looked like the centerfold, I decided. That this centerfold was British made it seem that much more personal. He had a golden quality. He’s so beautiful, You could sleep with him and still be a virgin! I posited. Something about this formulation pleased my friend Nancy, the only one among us having regular sex, and I felt she looked at me differently from then on.

Could Gregg–can I–withstand being reminded now that before and after, we both wore those paper hats? Yes. We did. We took the hats off and then afterward we put them back on. Just as is fitting for any ceremony.

Gregg was one of the people who actually looked, if I can say this, hot in his uniform, the blue cap with its striped band and slightly cocked brim, like an admiral’s. In Provincetown, there is a theme week dedicated to “Leather, Latex, and Uniforms,” but I don’t remember seeing anyone walking around in a fast food uniform; the predilection tilts more toward protective services but still, anything can become erotic, given the right constraints and freedoms.

What is it to look hot in a blue polyester tunic with a striped yoke and matching pants, the stripe going down the side? It comes down to this: some people wear their uniforms and some are worn by their uniforms. Need I say, Gregg wore his uniform, which is to say that you sense the living breathing body uncompromised by the inertia of the fabric. Perhaps how Gregg’s long muscled torso undid all that was standard his uniform is what Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was pointing to when he said, When you are all in your robes I can see your individuality.

I wanted to unbutton that uniform shirt; it didn’t matter that the buttons had golden arches embossed on them or that the pockets were just squares of fabric sewn shut. Of course the timed nature of the operation heightened the proceedings. We had twenty minutes for our break. This is something any Zen practitioner knows, the value of a “container” for focusing the mind.

We banked on the stairs’ creak giving us ample notice of anyone coming down for a break. But the stairs were silent for as long as we needed them to be. Which, given the fact that it had been, by then, almost ten minutes since we had clocked out, and that Gregg was 16 years old, was, say, from zipper (down) to zipper (up), say, three minutes–four max.

Only three or four minutes.

Being Time.

Three or four minutes probably passed in typing the last few lines, but I doubt I will be writing about them a few decades from now.

That sense of total absorption. A prime teaching: in mindfulness, in bowing, in following the breath, my attention drifting to the sleeves of soda cup lids stored behind the couch, remembering that I had to stock them after break, returning to the breath, his breath.

In his breath, I read: that, yes. What happens if I vary the pressure slightly? Yes. What’s this? The underside. I’d been studying the frenulum, as much for the word as for what it promised. And here it was. Who needs the word when the tip of your tongue is on the delicate referent?

Attention to detail. But not too much. Come back to the breath.

What is the appropriate response? More of this. Less of that.

So much to be learned in silence.

Functional silence: only such speech as is necessary.

Slower. Faster.

Faster.

The relief that comes from not talking.

As Mark Doty asks in his gorgeous poem, “Bootblack,” “What can be said of this happiness?”

All this was so much fine-tuned and robust training for the doan ryo, where slight variations in pressure and timing in striking a bell or drum can mean the difference between a settled assembly and one where each person feels just slightly off and thinks it’s that they didn’t sleep well, or that the person in front of them is personally out to annoy them, and all that maybe so, but it’s also that the bell was too shrill, or the timing uneven.

We went back upstairs and still had time for a snack, one of those apple pies that rotated along glowing coils, making a quarter turn. The heat the filling retained always exceeded my patience in letting it cool and burned my tongue. But that didn’t matter. Now, we had invested the break room with some needed history, a bit of triumph to savor every time I took that tight turn at the foot of the narrow carpeted stairs, to restock the bags, or sit on the couch to watch a training video. We clocked back in with a few seconds to spare.