“Yeah yeah yeah!” Tashi interrupts them. “Point proven! There are many commercial streets in OC. But they all are one.”
“I wonder,” Sandy says dreamily, “if you blindfolded someone and spun them around to disorient them, then took off the blindfold somewhere on one of the commercial streets, how long it would take them to identify it?”
“Forever,” Tash opines. “They’re indistinguishable. I think they made a one-mile unit and then just reproduced it five hundred times.”
“It would be a challenge,” Sandy muses. “A sort of game.”
“Not tonight,” Abe says.
“No?”
“No.”
“The third kind of street,” Tashi forges on, “is the residential street, class A. The suburban streets of the housing tracts. Please don’t start naming examples, there are ten zillion.”
“I like the cute curly ones in Mission Viejo,” Sandy says.
“Or the old cul-de-sac exclusive models,” Jim adds.
“And the fourth type?” says Abe.
“Residential street, class B. The urban ap streets, like down there in Santa Ana.”
“A lot of that’s original platting,” Jim says. “Now it’s as close to slums as we’ve got.”
“As close to slums?” Abe repeats. “Man, they’re there.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“There’s a fifth kind of street,” Sandy announces.
“You think so?” Tash asks, interested.
“Yeah. I guess you could call it the street-freeway. It’s a street, but there’s nothing facing it at all—it’s backed by housing-development walls, mostly, and there’s no shops, no pedestrians—”
“Well, none of them have pedestrians.”
“True, but I mean even less than usual. They’re just avenues for tracking fast where there aren’t freeways.”
“Negative numbers of pedestrians?”
“Yeah, we use those a lot,” Abe says. “Like Fairhaven, or Olive, or Edinger.”
“Exactly,” Sandy says.
“Okay,” Tash agrees. “We’ll make it five. There are five streets in OC.”
“Do you think it’s because of zoning laws?” Jim asks. “I mean, why is that?”
“More use habits than zoning, I’d bet,” Tash says. “Stores like to be together, housing developments are built in group lots, that kind of thing.”
“Each street has a history,” Jim says, staring out the window with his mouth hanging open. “My God!”
“Better get writing, Jim.…”
“Speaking of streets and history,” Sandy says, “I was driving east on the Garden Grove on a really clear morning a few weeks ago, first morning of a Santa Ana wind, you know? You could see Baldy and Arrowhead and everything. And the sun was just up, and I looked north to where the old Orange Plaza used to be—a little west of that, I’d guess. And I couldn’t believe my eyes! I mean, down there I suddenly saw this street that I’d never seen before, and it had really tall skinny palm trees on one side of it, and the street surface was like white concrete, wider than usual, and the houses on each side were solo houses with yards, little bungalows with enclosed porches and grass lawns, and sidewalks and everything! I mean it was like one of those old photos from the 1930s or something!”
Jim is bouncing in his seat with excitement, leaning over into the front. “Where, where, where, where!”
“Well, that’s the thing—I don’t know! I was so surprised that I got off at the next exit and tracked on over to take a look for it. I thought you’d be interested, and I even thought I might want to buy a house there if I could, it looked so… So I tracked around for about a half hour looking for it, and I couldn’t find it! Couldn’t even find the palm trees! Since then every time I drive that stretch I look for it, but it just isn’t there.”
“Whoah.”
“Heavy.”
“I know. I figure it had something to do with the light or something. Or maybe a time warp.…”
“Oh, man.” Jim hops up and down on his seat, thinking about it. “I want to find that.”
They track some more. In the cars around them other people live their lives. Occasionally they track by freeway parties, several cars hooked together, people passing things between them, music all the same from every car.
“Let’s fuel up,” Tashi says. “I’m hungry.”
“Let’s swing into one of the drive-thrus,” Sandy says, “so we don’t have to leave the loop. Which shall it be?”
“Jack-in-the-Box,” says Abe.
“McDonald’s,” says Jim.
“Burger King,” says Tashi.
“Which one?” Sandy shouts as they pass one of the drive-thru complex offramps. The others all shout their choices and Tash reaches over Sandy’s shoulder for the steering switch. Abe and Jim grab his arm and try to move it, and the struggle begins. Shouts, curses, wrestling holds, karate chops: finally Sandy cries, “Taste test! Taste test!” The others subside. “We’ll try all of them.”
And so he gets off at the Lincoln exit in Orange and they drive-thru the Burger King and the Jack’s, stopping briefly to order pay and collect from the little windows on the upper level; then around the bend to the Kraemer exit in Placentia, for Jim’s Big Macs.
“See, look. The Burger King Whopper has indisputably got the best meat. Check it out.”
“Isn’t that some kind of bug there, Tash?”
“No! Let’s look at yours if you dare, you know they make those Big Macs out of petroleum byproducts.”
“They do not! In fact they won the slander case in court on that!”
“Lawyers. Look at that meat, it’s sludge!”
“Well, it’s better than the double Jack Abe’s got, anyway.”
“Sure, but that’s saying nothing.”
“Hey,” says Abe. “The Jack’s are adequate, and look here at the malt and fries you get at Jack’s. Both absolutely unmatchable. Burger King malts are made of air, and McDonald’s malts are made of styrofoam. You only get a real ice-cream malt at Jack’s.”
“Malt? Malt? You don’t even know what malt tastes like! There hasn’t been malt in this country since before the millennium! Those are shakes, and the McShake is just fine. Orange-flavored, even.”
“Come on, Jim, we’re trying to eat here. Don’t make me puke.”
“And the McFries are also the best. Those Jackfries, you could inject drugs with those things.”
“Ho, Mr. Get Tough! Your fries are actually shot puts in disguise! Get serious!”
“I am serious! Here, Sandy, you be judge. Eat this, here.”
“No, Sandy, mine first! Eat this!”
“Mmff mmff mmff.”
“See, he likes mine better!”
“No, he just said Burger Whop, didn’t you hear him?”
Sandy swallows. “They taste the same.”
“What kind of a judge are you?”
Abe says, “Best malt—”
“Shake! Shake! No such thing as malt! Mythical substance!”
“Best malt, best fries, perfectly standard burger.”
“In other words the burger is disgusting,” Tashi says. “There’s no fighting it, the basis of the American body is the hamburger, the rest is just frills. And Burger King has the best burger by miles. And so there you have it.”
“All right,” Sandy says. “Tashi, give me the patty out of yours.”
“What? No way!”
“Yeah, come on. There’s only half left anyway, right? Give it to me. Now Abe, give me the bun with the secret sauce. Not the other one, that’s blank! Ahhh, hahahahahahaha, what a burger, Jesus, give me the secret sauce. Jim, hand over that smidgin of lettuce, right, okay, and the ketchup in its convenient poison-proofed pill-sized container. Fine, fine. Abe, hand over the malt. Yeah, you win! Hand it over. The fries, hmm, well, let’s just mess them all together here, on the seat here, that’s okay. Where’d that ketchup go? Slip down the straw, did it? Squirt it on there, Abe, and watch out you don’t get it all on one fry. Right. There we have it, bros. Le Grand Compromis, the greatest American meal of all time! Fantastic! Dig in!”