October 20, 2007 - Receipt #2 - Working Late at McDonald's

October 20, 2007 - Receipt #2 - Working Late at McDonald's

I’m recounting a four-day vacation in Manhattan through the receipts I’ve accumulated during the stay. Yesterday I covered my first receipt and today, I describe my second, one from the McDonald’s on 57th Street near the corner of 6th Avenue. As I walked out of the Buckingham lobby and onto 57th Street I was struck by a sense of déjà vu. The last time IM and I came to Manhattan, we stayed at the Parker Meridian across 57th and a half block west of the Buckingham. We had come in the spring of 2001 when New York still possessed a sense of innocence and invincibility, before the terror of September 11th put an end to both and the city joined Pearl Harbor as the second place in the United States to be attacked by a foreign enemy. The street didn’t feel any different as a result of that horrific event—time having a way of dulling the emotions that had once been a sharp unrelenting pain. Time has a way of burying misery and suffering. It has a way of burying everything.

As I waited for the signal to change, at the intersection of 57th and 6th Avenue, I looked left and saw the entrance to Central Park and on the right corner of Central Park South and 6th what once was the St. Moritz Hotel. During the 1980s IM and our two daughters stayed there nearly every time we visited the city. Back then, the place was own by Leona Helmsley, the “Queen of Mean”. We liked it because of it being near the Park and away from the crowds surrounding the hotels within and around Times Square. It’s now the Ritz Carlton. Gone or at least less obvious are the ladies of the night that once graced the sidewalk across 6th from the Café de la Paix, the bistro on the ground floor of the St. Moritz with its outdoor patio tables. From our room on the 6th Avenue side of the St Moritz, IM and I spent the evenings after dinner or the theater watching the ladies ply their trade on the pedestrians and motorists along the block between 58th and Central Park South: reality TV without the electronic medium.

I recalled one evening after taking the girls to the theater during a trip in the summer of 1984, we were all a bit hungry and I decided to pop down to the convenience story on the St Moritz side of 6th a half block south of the hotel and pick up sodas and chips. As I was returning from my errand, one of the ladies decided to follow me back into the hotel and to pretend she was with me as I entered the elevator. The house detective watching the entire scene unfold blocked the lady’s way and politely asked if she were a guest of the hotel. As she made eye contact with me to appeal for help, the elevator doors closed and I was spirited away—Deus ex machina.

The desk clerk at the Buckingham had said I’d find the McDonalds just across 6th Avenue east on 57th and he was right on the money. Neither IM nor I have eaten a McDonald’s hamburger in so long I can’t remember when nor how the food tasted, but the smell of deep fried potatoes and hamburger patties sizzling on the kitchen griddle brought it all back to me as if it were yesterday. When IM and I first got married, we moved to Landover, Maryland where I had a day job at Bendix Field Engineering located at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. All we had to our names was a brand new Buick Regal—GMAC owned most of it; which we had brought before leaving El Paso, where we had just gotten married; our clothes; and a radio. IM was pregnant and we didn’t have medical insurance. I took a second job to pay the doctor and hospital bills. The first of my evening jobs was at a McDonald’s competitor called Hot Shoppes, owned by the Marriott Corporation. The place was right across the street from the Landover Garden Apartments, at 7254 Landover Road, apartment D, where we lived. I would come home from my day job ten miles north and west of Landover, go across Landover Road to the hamburger restaurant and put in six hours before coming home with a bag of leftover hamburgers and French fries. That lasted a month before I got a much better paying job fixing television sets. The money I made during that month though paid the doctor’s initial fees and the leftover hamburgers and fries saved us money on food. Standing at the counter of the McDonald’s waiting to order, I knew what it was like to be working in a hamburger restaurant at 47 W 57th St. an hour and fifteen minutes before midnight serving the last die-hard customer before shutting the place down for the night at 11:00 o’clock.

Having flown coach and gone without anything to eat all day, IM and I were starving. I ordered a cheeseburger for me and a hamburger for IM each with an order of fries and a large orange juice. Paying the bill and picking up my order I returned to the hotel suppressing the urge to eat the fries as I walked. Back in our room I opened the bag and to our surprise we find two hamburgers and two cheeseburgers, which turned out great since each individual burger was so small. We gulped down the burgers and fries washing them down with orange juice. Surprisingly our hunger was sated and neither of us felt so stuffed we couldn’t sleep. However, being the first day of a vacation and only 7:00 PM by our biological clock, we opted to stay up and watch the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to give the burgers time to settle. The monologue turned out to be quite funny, though none of the jokes were noteworthy enough to remember.