“Oh,” I said, recognizing the restaurant, “I just came from there.”
“Yeah,” said Reyes, smiling. “I know.”
* * *
But sometimes there are hiccups in the McDonald’s machine. One afternoon, 32-year-old Marleney Ramirez was cleaning a small device that dispenses cold milk for McDonald’s oatmeal. The vessel containing the milk was stuck inside it; no one could dislodge it. Ramirez had to chip the ice around it with the handle end of a long metal spoon. I watched as a publicist from Golin Harris watched me. (Golin, which contracts with McDonald’s, would shadow me during my week at the restaurant: five days, five minders, each one a sharp-dressing young woman who took copious notes on my motions.)
After a half-hour, Ramirez began working the machine’s most obstinate crevices with a bent-in-half plastic coffee stirring straw. The publicist, Kim Persad, was effervescent as she looked on. “McDonald’s makes it oatmeal with milk,” she exclaimed. “That’s what makes it so good! That’s why I like it so much! Starbucks uses water.”
Ramirez wasn’t listening — like most of the workers at I Street, she understands little English. Seven years ago, in her Salvadoran village, she was making roughly $1 an hour washing clothes in a river. She had done the same work since age 14, and the money she earned was not enough to support her two sons, then 8 and 7. She was a single mother.
So she did some hard reckoning: If she immigrated to the United States, leaving her children with her parents, she could support them by sending home tuition money and American clothing. “Sometimes I lay awake in bed until 1 or 2 in the morning, worrying over what was the right thing to do,” she said. She arrived here in 2004 and at first she did janitorial work at a bank. The cleaning chemicals made her sick. “At McDonald’s, I feel happy,” she said. “I am busy all day long, and I like that. It makes the time go by fast.”
Ramirez has not seen her children in seven years. Like most I Street workers, she has temporary resident status; if she goes back to El Salvador, she cannot return to the United States. “Of course, I would love to bring my children here,” she said. “One day. But only God knows when. I talk to them every day, but they don’t like to send me photos.” She giggled. “They are afraid I will think they are too skinny.”
* * *
The kitchen kept cranking out Chicken McNuggets and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. The cashiers kept asking, “Would you like to add an apple pie to that order?” And the masses streamed in the door, hungry.
What you see, on a typical day at I Street, is the disparate American public in unrehearsed form, slouching toward a quick and forgettable meal. Here are the guys from the Splash Car Wash next door; here are Air Force soldiers in full bulletproof camo. Here are police officers and security guards. Here is a uniformed Otis Elevator repairman, and here is a family of weary tourists about to hit the on ramp to Interstate 395, right out front. From behind the counter, you see the underside of their necks, as they all look up at the menu board.
The clientele is African American and white, largely, so their fleeting exchanges with the Latino staff are melting-pot moments, usually happy ones. One afternoon, a flabby middle-age white guy with a telephone headset latched to his skull wove toward the counter to fetch his to-go order from a young Latina. “Gracias, señora. Ciao,” he said with warm linguistic confusion. Later, Thayne Currie, a 31-year-old astrophysicist, wandered in from his condo next door and paid for his iced coffee, $2.41, with exact change. As he plucked the coins from his palm, he wore a broad, otherwordly grin. I asked him what he found so amusing. “Oh, I don’t know,” Currie said. “Whenever I come here, I see the same people working. It’s nice.”
Sometimes there are dazzling moments at 2 I St. They happen, usually, at the drive-through window, which is the personal domain of the star employee Marvin Mateos, from Honduras. Mateos is 27. Back home, he played soccer for a farm team linked to Honduras’s national squad. Today he is still lean and graceful — and possessed of a lady-killing charm worthy of Lord Byron himself. When a co-worker recently taught him the phrase “For sure,” he turned it into a lascivious cry rife with rolling r’s and a cock-a-doodle-doo lilt — something like “forrrr shore-oooo” — and unleashed it on every female who rolled toward his window. One woman, Terry Keyes, responded with sharp peals of laughter as she wriggled appreciatively in her driver’s seat. “He made me shimmy!” she shrieked. “He’s so funny!”
“Marvin and I go way back,” gushed Rachel Semmel, an aide to Indiana Rep. Mike Pence. “Way back.”
Mateos, who has been at 2 I St. for three years, is the fastest worker there, according to Reyes, and the only one able to turn a task known as HBO — for Hand Bag Out — into theater. Almost invariably, he has food ready early, when the customer is 30 feet away. He holds the to-go bag, which is white, crisp and neatly top-folded, far out the window, with his arm stiff. Then he gently shakes the bag, as if to say, “Come ’n’ get it” as the car surges toward the grub and its visceral joys.
He sang to himself as he worked the iced tea machine and handled McMuffins. Under his breath, he taught himself English, chirping, “Coffee! Coffee! I am making coffee!” The job did not own him — he owned the job.
Still, Mateos acted unimpressed with life in the States. “In Honduras,” he said, “I had six girlfriends at the same time, and I could be lazy. I lived with my family, and I only had to work when I felt like it. Here, you have to pay rent. You have bills. I have to work all the time, and I am still poor. People tell you that when you come to the U.S., you’re going to have a car and make lots of money. But that’s not true — it’s all lies.” He spoke with swagger, but here and there a youthful unsureness shone through, as well. He kept gazing into my eyes, imploringly, to see if I was cool with his sourness. When I smiled, he high-fived me. “Party, buddy!” he said. “Party!”
A few minutes later, Reyes summoned Mateos to the break room to begin studying for a new, elevated position, as a kitchen staff trainer. He sat in front of a computer taking a multiple-choice Spanish-language quiz about McDonald’s sales volumes: “How many pounds of fish did McDonald’s buy in 2007?” (Correct answer: 110,231,131.) Mateos gazed toward the ceiling, pensively. How many french fries sold in 2007? The number 5,400,000,000 appeared on the screen and, along with it, a little diagram showing that, placed end to end, the fries would stretch all the way to the moon and halfway back. He stared at the screen in guileless astonishment, with his mouth agape.
* * *
One afternoon, when I was sitting in the break room listening to a single mom lament how she had to pay a babysitter $20 to spell her during each shift at McDonald’s, Reyes called the woman sharply from the kitchen. She was two minutes late punching in. “Raul es malo,” the woman hissed as she tugged on her work hat. “Raul is bad.” Likewise, a cashier complained, “With Raul, it’s always hurry, hurry, hurry.”
A certain tautness pervades I Street. The social contracts — between McDonald’s and its employees, and between the restaurant and its customers — are kept to the letter. One afternoon at the drive-through, I came across a man who had been short-changed by a cashier. I asked how much he was owed. “Forty-five cents,” he said contemptuously as he awaited his due, which came quickly, with an apology.
The same day, Tracee Taylor, an emergency medical aide for the D.C. Fire Department, appeared at the counter, alleging that an I Street kitchen error had thrown her into anaphylactic shock that morning. “I’m allergic to sea salt,” Taylor said, “and so I asked not to put salt on my Steak, Egg and Cheese Bagel. But they did anyway.”
McDonald’s doesn’t use sea salt. Still, Taylor had just come from the hospital bearing a doctor’s prescription on which she’d scrawled the phone number of a lawyer.
Later, I asked Reyes if he was worried about a lawsuit. We were sitting at his dinner table, eating Salvadoran dishes that his wife, Zonia, had prepared for us, and he just shrugged. “People sue McDonald’s all the time,” he said. “It’s no big deal. You want another pupusa?”
* * *
Amid the constant activity at I Street, there was only one person who always seemed calm. Saunder Field, 50, works the cash register for the drive-through window, usually. He is a reticent African American of medium build, and he is the only remaining crew member who predates Raul Reyes’s 2004 arrival. Field is not quite sure when he began on I Street. He knows only that he got there before his daughter, Tameka, was born 18 years ago.
I became aware of Field one day when a pair of Mormon missionaries dropped by for lunch, intimating that they’d made frequent visits to Field’s home. “He gained a testimony,” said a young man whose lapel badge read Elder Kunzle. “He was baptized in March.”
“They’ve got a comfortable place,” Field told me, describing his visits to a local tabernacle. “They make me feel like family.”
Field lives with his disabled mother and his sister. In the early 1990s, he began taking classes at the University of the District of Columbia. But he had to work two jobs then to come up with enough money for tuition. “I worked til 10 every night, cleaning at the Australian Embassy, and then I was here starting at 5 in the morning.” He took classes in the middle of the day. “It was all too stressful,” he says.
When Tameka was born, Field quit both school and his embassy job. He says that he raised Tameka himself on his McDonald’s salary. “I’d buy her books or pay whenever she wanted to get pizza or whatever,” he told me. “My brother’s a teacher, and he worked closely with her on her schoolwork.”
Tameka Gongs just graduated from the SEED School of Washington. She was the class salutatorian and is now a freshman at Louisiana State University. Field told me this with pride. “I wish that school wasn’t so far away,” he said. “It’s so far away. And what I am gonna do now that she ain’t here? I just don’t know.”
* * *
That Friday at 2:30 p.m., the lunch rush was still on. There were 15 or so people gazing up at the menu board. The mango pineapple smoothie had been a hit all week long. “We sold 350 yesterday,” Reyes told me, “and they haven’t even started the TV ads yet. Pretty soon, we’ll be selling 1,000 a day. We’ll have to hire someone just to make mango pineapple smoothies.”
A boy of 12 or 13 ambled by our table, fresh from nearby Randall Pool, and still dripping and bare-chested. “My friend,” Reyes said, “you gotta put your shirt on.” His manner was genial, almost apologetic. It was as if Reyes remembered being a kid himself, swimming on hot, humid days in the river that snaked through his village back in Guatemala. I thought about how far he had come, wading across the border, then living with 16 other Guatemalans in a one-bedroom apartment, then dancing and holding the phone as he bragged to his mom about his new job at McDonald’s.
“It’s going to get busy here this summer,” he told me. “Summer is always our biggest season, and they’ll want to make more money this year, I’m sure. But that’s okay. That’s good. That’s the American way. That’s the American way. And I won’t leave this place,” Reyes said, gesturing at the restaurant around him. “When I walk in here, I can do whatever I want. It’s like home.”
Eventually, Reyes’s cellphone rang and he excused himself, the phone pressed to his ear with a bent shoulder. He swept past the fryer vats, inspecting the grease. He looked over the coffee and the oatmeal and the soft drink machines. He cupped his hand over the receiver and had a rapid-fire exchange with the woman working the drive-through window. He made sure everything was in order. It was hot outside. The customers would keep coming all night long.
Bill Donahue is a writer living in Portland, Ore. His last story for the Magazine chronicled his debut as a cross-country ski racer. He can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.
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