Ever been in one of those public restrooms with so much writing in the stalls that you can trace a solid plotline? A slanted political remark turns into a heated 8-man debate, written in sharpie or carved into the wall with a convenient pocketknife. This in turn gives way to a racial slur, which is followed up with a series of counter-racial remarks and/or personal attacks directed at the alleged racist's mother. That sort of thing.
In the K-Mart in East Ridge, TN, just off the highway, in three different places you're likely to notice the message: "Ooltewah Hardees, 8 to 11 every morning, come for blowjob."
I want to meet the guy who's giving out oral sex in the kitchen between dipping batches of fries in molten grease. I want to ask him how he goes into work every day and waits to see if he can spot his prospective partner.
I've eaten at that Hardees. I know there's nothing wrong with the food. I can get my sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit and it will be refreshingly devoid of the dull aftertaste of anonymous homosexual encounters. Nonetheless, something feels weird. Maybe it's the fact that all of this isn't going on behind closed doors, where one might expect it, but in public restrooms and fast-food chains. The dark secrets of a generation are seeping out of the cracks of stall doors and into our symbols of economic prevalence.
Let's be realistic, here: Everyone is like this, to some degree. We're dying to find the way in which we can tell people our real desires, free of the stigma that might come along with it. It sucks that the only way that guy at Hardees feels free to admit what he wants is if he scribbles it on the wall of a bathroom.
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