It's not what you know is in the "special sauce" that gets you, it's what you don't...

You learn this lesson the hard way when you've just completed the last bite of a Double Whopper with Cheese and suddenly... the rumble is unmistakable, like a whole other beast contained within your body is trying desperately to make its way from out your innards.  You can't breath, you can barely lift yourself from the booth where you were not so long ago pleasantly seated to discuss the matters of the day with your friends, and you stumble on the uneven floor tiles as you desperately hope and pray you can make it in time.  Why'd I have the extra fries, you ask as you open the bathroom door, where the stand-up toilet has had a "out of order" sign (crudely done in black magic marker and faded to simply read "ou f r de") for months.  The stall with your salvation is seconds away, and you lock the door behind with the knowledge that soon, soon, it will all be okay.  You take your place on the toilet and feel the first rush of relief that comes from, well, you know, when suddenly you realize "there's no fucking toilet paper!"

This scenario gets played out at several fast food restaurants throughout the country, but I happen to think the frequency of just such an event is higher at the local establishment of Burger King.  The BK, as you may know, has tried to reign over the burger-eating land for eons, but it has regularly had to contend with the encroachments of McDonald's, Hardee's, Jack in the Box, etc., and its reign has been troubled as of late.  But in the wide scheme of things we will not find our story in the national crisis that is Burger-gate; instead, I choose to focus on the local home of "the Whopper" with my tale.

Sure, it seemed like a good idea at the time to start up a Burger King in our little redneck of the woods; diversity helps a capitalistic society.  But the first flurry of joy and rebirth promised by the new burger-doodle proved short lived when rumors began to spread that certain "secret sauces" were little more than the collected jizz of employees both male and female, in various states of disease.  This was not particularly far-fetched on the surface of it, as the people who were employed there to a large extent were the dregs of society: the unwed mothers just out of high school, the retardos, the mental ward escapees, the white "hip-hop" kids, the redneck unclean.  Various elements combined to make up the staff of our little Burger King, and what we knew right away was that, with a crowd like this, you were asking for trouble if you ordered anything more exotic than your basic Whopper or cheeseburger.

The "Italian chicken sandwich" was little more than a questionably meat-like substance, lathered with a thin layer of generic brand "tomato paste", with stale loaves encircling it.  The "Whopper Jr." was usually made up of the meat dropped on the floor by accident, which was too expensive to simply throw away.  The soda machine usually produced carbonated water (with all the taste that implies, I assure you), the "hot sauce" was terribly mild, and the complimentary ketchup packages required a chain saw to open.  Rest assured many in their twilight years succumbed to whatever form of airborne bacteria festered itself into the coffee pots.

The employees themselves weren't exactly the fresh-faced, eager-to-serve youngsters that the commercials portray all fast-food workers as being.  To be fair, their malaise was understandable, even tolerable: They were working at Burger King, after all.  But any such pity on the customer's part ended when a careful examination of the kitchen staff revealed more potential carriers of herpes than one would ever want gathered together save for a "Surviving STDs" conference at the local Holiday Inn.  Their collective disease was sanitary negligence: dirty fingernails and wiping snot on the side of your shirt (or better yet, all over the hamburger you just handed to an unwary customer) was the order of the day.  Some people are not lucky enough to have running water in our little redneck of the woods; unfortunately, they all found employment at the store.  If cleanliness truly is next to Godliness, then these poor souls had more in common with the Dark Prince Satan.

But what about this "food" they served, which was supposed to be "good"?  Nothing could be further from the truth: the food at best resembled hastily assembled droppings of cow intestine in various states of disease and general unpleasantness.  There was nothing hearty about the buns, either.  If you found only one patch of green mold or a corner of staleness upon close inspection, you considered yourself lucky.  If there can be anything worse than a stale-breaded "Whopper," I don't know what that could be... actually, I forgot about the French fries.

The fries, or "thick, unappealing blocks of substandard potato product," made one sick to the stomach just thinking about them.  But the hamburgers left so little remaining in your stomach (after the aforementioned "trip to the stall" of the first paragraph) that you had to have SOMETHING to justify your trek.  And so, reluctantly, you ate the fries.  If they weren't stale already, they were greasy and uncomforting.  Some would rather go to fight an unjust war in Iraq than have to eat these blasphemous concoctions again...

The "special one-time meals" were invariably left-over products of cow feces that the wise men in charge of the King's empire obviously wanted to be rid of.  Beware the "Southwest Chicken Extravaganza"; it was last month's chicken sandwich that proved too deadly for the bowel systems of young children out on the playground.  Don't sweat the "Authentic Burger Wrap"; ever wonder why the bread is so "crunchy?"

If the food wasn't bad enough, you had the playground, which contributed more to the infant morality rate than any other landmark in our sleepy little town.  I don't mean to suggest that falls from this structure meant death, necessarily; the stupidity that arises from such a fall is a death in and of itself for the hopes of the public education system.  No child was safe from the "thing with ropes" suddenly coming loose, or "the slide" trailing off into oncoming traffic rather than the comparatively more "preferred" landing area of hard gravel and concrete underneath.  Some say the "ball room", with brightly colored spheres of various hues making a virtual ocean for the children to plunge into, might have been responsible for several fatalities itself, but no bodies have yet to surface as of this writing.

Suffice it to say, in the years since its establishment the King of Burgers has somehow managed to stay alive despite these faults.  Some say it's the addictive quality of the Whoppers, which after all aren't too bad if you've got a nice roll of paper towels handy.  Others point to its location, right between the ends of the earth and the fiery pits of Hades.  Me, I think it's something to do with that mystery sauce, I know I can't stop myself from adding more "mayo" to my sandwich and trying the Herculean challenge of opening a ketchup packet.  Any way you look at it, the one inescapable conclusion is thus: there isn't any shit better to eat in our little redneck of the woods.

- Trevor