Not Even Not Zen 417: Biomythography - Note 131: The Great McFamine

The Great McFamine of 1981

I am not saying that the human body contains a sophisticated alert system designed to warn you when you're about to do something stupid with your finances. However, I am saying if such a system exists, mine wasn't functional in 1981.

This was the year I attended the University of Maryland full time while working at fast food restaurants, which is kind of like saying I decided to go on a hike and then strapped a refrigerator to my back. And then I met a couple other hikers carrying refrigerators, too. 

I was paying for my classes out of savings. I was paying for my rent out of savings. I was doing the opposite of responsible living. My financial masterstroke was something later generations won't or can't understand. I ran up a monumental phone bill. Yes, this was a phone bill that cost approximately eight months' worth of rent.

You might reasonably ask: "What could you possibly have been doing on the phone that would cost that much?" The answer is: I was listening to my girlfriend break up with me. And I was hard of listening, so she had to repeat herself a lot. It cost me money. But of course I paid the bill, because that's what responsible adults do. A much, much more responsible adult would have bought a decent used car instead but I don't remember thinking about it. 

I paid my tuition, paid my bills, bought a textbook, paid my rent in cash, and hiked to the bank to see how I'd done.

I had five dollars left.

This was not five dollars in spending money. Not five dollars until payday. I had five dollars and twenty-five cents TOTAL when five dollars was the absolute minimum the bank would allow before they closed the account and presumably repossessed my shoelaces. 

Okay, so I was seventeen when I got myself into this situation. But I wasn't clueless. At least, I wasn't totally clueless for someone at the age of seventeen, when the bar is low. I had a plan. Two weeks before, I'd ditched my Roy Rogers gig where the managers were stingy with food. Instead, I picked up extra burger flipping duties at McDonald's. During my shifts there, I could eat and drink for free. It was a foolproof plan.

Life can be very, very foolish, though, more than we budget for in foolproof plans. 

First, the McDonald's payroll system broke down.

This was not the entire payroll system for all McDonald's restaurants everywhere, which would would be a failure with a certain dramatic grandeur to it. No, just the area payroll system broke and about a third of us didn't get our checks. Naturally, I was in the problem third. 

My manager reassured me the check would be coming by 'the middle of the week' and anyway, he knew I'd already paid rent so I'd be fine. I nodded and said yeah, because admitting I had no money for food seemed like a humiliating detail. 

The main thing was, I had my McDonald's shifts. I didn't have to admit anything to anybody, yet.

Here's where I should mention I had experience with fasting. At twelve, I'd fasted for a day (that's twenty-four hours for you cheaters, not dawn to dusk). Later, I'd made it two whole days with just drinking water. Then I succeeded at three days, although I got shivering cold at around the 70-hour mark. Finally, at sixteen, I'd conducted a four-day fast that left me not only shivering but feeling vaguely nauseous, as if my body was trying to express something profound but only had a limited emotional vocabulary.

The previous fasts had been formative experiences. I thought I was good at fasting. I thought I understood it. Fasting and I had reached a gentleman's agreement about how things worked.

Oh, but I was wrong.

On Friday after my shift, I looked in the fridge. My remaining food supply consisted of: one tangerine, two slices of white bread, and the dregs of a jar of mayonnaise that my roommates considered empty but which I, in my creative approach to defining the word "food," did not.

By Saturday night, I would be eating my last meal, a mayonnaise sandwich. This is the kind of stuff that should make you reflect on the choices that brought you to this point, although in my case, many of the relevant choices involved listening to lengthy phone calls about feelings while someone in the AT&T offices gently but firmly kept track of my time.

When I rose on Saturday morning, I ate my tangerine and walked to work. There, I checked our posted schedule and discovered my manager had removed me from the first half of the week. Well, this was new information. I had no shifts on Sunday through Wednesday. Therefore, I would have no food after my Saturday morning double.

On Saturday night, I ate my mayonnaise sandwich, knowing there would be no more food until Thursday at the earliest, or until my paycheck arrived, whichever came first. 

Sunday: didn't eat. There was no point in calling about the paychecks because no one would try to start fixing the problem until Monday. I spent the day trying to achieve the right frame of mind for my fast. (A little late, since I'd already started.)

Monday: didn't eat. After a couple of calls, I got a manager who told me the payroll office was cutting checks and they would probably come in on Wednesday. The management didn't need more staff today. I thanked him and did not mention I was currently conducting an unplanned experiment. When I finished it, I would discover the difference between fasting and simply going hungry.

Tuesday: didn't eat. I couldn't resist calling McDonald's to see if they needed help or if the paychecks had arrived. They didn't and they hadn't. I began to understand why my previous fasting experiences, conducted with planning and purpose, had felt so different from this one. This was not a spiritual journey, really. This one was more of a hostage situation conducted by a broken printer and a courier service.

Wednesday: I dropped by my restaurant and the manager was surprised to see me. However, the paychecks had just come in. This coincidence was due to me thinking hard about the pay couriers' schedule.

"We're in a rush right now," my manager said, stating the obvious. He was running a pack of fries and two rolls of register receipt paper between the kitchen and the front counter when I caught him. "I can't get your paycheck out of the envelope until we hit a slow spot."

I waited like a person who has not eaten for four days waits, which is to say with calm, energy-conserving focus at a table where I could see the size of the customer lines. After a while, the lines diminished. The manager noticed me and invited me to the back of the restaurant. In his office, he rifled through the contents of the pay envelope. He found mine in the bag, to my relief. When he  handed it over, the clock on the wall told me it was at four in the afternoon.

I had plenty of time to hike to a bank. Inside, the branch office smelled of stale air and dust but I knew I reeked of cooking grease, which was worse. The teller frowned at my request but his bank had promised up front to cash paychecks, so he had to do it. He doled out a partial cashback for me, deposited the rest of my trivial money, and handed me my transaction statement. He did everything with a slight air of disgust. He could smell the fast food air on me. Then, with the wad of green bills in my hand, I hiked a mile up the road to the Safeway.

Since I was feeling budget conscious, I bought soup and bread. Those were the cheapest things I could get plus I knew I was breaking a fast and had to do it carefully. For dinner that night, after waiting half an hour to pass so I would make it to four full days of fasting, I ate tomato soup with toast. It was a ceremony I planned with care and conducted with reverence. I suspected it might be the first time in my life I liked tomato soup.

I was right. It was.

EPILOGUE: Were there any life lessons here? Maybe.

I told myself I should fast, under the circumstances. And I fooled myself into it pretty well. Still, it is hard to fool yourself completely. Every morning, I woke up wishing I had food. I would take a half hour or so to get into the mindset of going without. I've done single-day fasts since but I've never decided to go three or four days, not anymore.

Even food you hate will taste amazing after you go without any for long enough. That makes sense to everyone, I suspect, but there's a difference when you actually do it. 

In theory, I was taking college classes. I probably attended my Creative Writing sessions. I may have skipped French. At any rate, I mostly don't remember my classes for the week except for my hour of singing. The Chapel Chorus class was my least important one. But for me, it was the most welcome.

Also, as an obvious lesson, you should probably not spend eight months' rent listening to someone break up with you over the phone. It's not the stupidest decision a teenager ever made but I had to learn from it that running out of money has real consequences. Paying for classes up front and paying the rest of my bills did more to wipe me out than the phone company did.