A Happy Meal

A HAPPY MEAL

Ronald McDonald was feeling particularly glum one day as he stood, fake
persona pushed to the point of absurdity, handing out silly gifts to
innocent maddening children on a busy afternoon on Grafton Street. What
an awful job, he thought, face painted fixed happy by cheap make up
artists. Publicity for McDonald's. Not exactly his ideal work and the
pay was pretty feeble too. What could be worse, he often wondered, than
filling out a form for the World's Most Famous People Society and
listing your own claim to fame as based on the fact of being Ronald
McDonald? Ronald McDonald! It was degrading beyond belief, it was worse
than that even, it was morally sick, to be circus master of the
celebrity sewerage compartment. It made being Mickey Mouse look like
the Messiah.
Just before the strangest thing happened, feeling glum as could be, a
group of adolescent boys walked past, all full of themselves and
frivolous and full of daring teenage life, and called out, 'Hey
Ronald!' He couldn't help but respond to the verbal address, after all
he'd had it up to here with the tiny faces of little kids caught half
between wonder, fear and (even at their age!) mockery, so around he
turned, to the direction of the voice, and he caught sight of the
perpetrator's face just in time to see him call out, sure of Mr.
McDonald's attention, 'Yeah, love the hair ya bleedin' faggot!' It was
awful, the air of absolutely undoubted mastery, the mastery of
unashamed stupidity over the only thing worse, but so much worse,
public humiliation. Mr. McDonald thought with abject shame of the crop
of curly red affro hair perched on top of his head by uncaring
money-driven suit-wearing perverts without the slightest concern for
how silly it made him look to anyone with even a modicum of
sensibility. Their laughter seemed to echo all around him and seemed to
pierce right through to the centre of the crowded street. How stupid
everyone must have thought him!
It was within the continuing reverberations of this humiliating
incident - Fucking cunts, Ronald thought as he turned back, fixed happy
grin and face blushing red beneath white face paint to pander to yet
another idiotic child (pander for fuck's sake!), I'd kill the little
bastards if I got half the chance - that suddenly our friend was
accosted by a man who came up to him and interrupted his shamed haze
with a most puposeful air of intent.
'Yes?' Ronald asked, voice blank, mouth locked in happy grin,
pantaloons sagging like out-sized Hitler pants around his lower thighs
and knees, feeling like a complete idiot.
'I know what this is like, I know that you're having a hard time,' the
man said in a low gruff voice. He was about thirty-five years old, his
face was unshaven with dark narrow eyes in a chiselled skull and he was
quite small, about five-foot-eight. Ronald glanced two, three times
into the his countenance during this brief address. He waited, slightly
stunned, for him to continue. Hastily he did:
'If you want - if you need to - if you can't deal with this, then come
with me. I know what this is like. I know what you're going through. I
can help you. Now come, follow me.'
Swept up in the strange enigmatic way of the man's talk, Ronald decided
to follow. Succumbing first to the disinterested hands of the probably
four-year-old boy whose mother was awkwardly, falsely, pretending he
really wanted it, instilling the urge to take without questioning why,
holding out for him those arms by propping her big hands beneath his
slackened elbows, Ronald parted with a tiny plastic truck ridden by
some idiot figure dressed in black-and-white striped burglar's outfit
and Zoroesque eye wrap-around cloth (Hamburgler, he believed he was
called), and without an explanation to anyone, least of all his
employers in the McDonald's Corporation, strode across Grafton Street
after the man, hideous big red shoes with bubble toe pacing about one
foot ahead of him all the time and it was an absolute
humiliation.
He followed the small covert figure as he walked with steady paces down
Wicklow Street, catching in his ears as he strode past the ridicule of
two smart-ass giggly pubescent girls, one saying to the other, 'Hey,
what about Ronald McDonald, can you think of an unsexier bed partner?'
and their knowing giggles fading off behind him as he walked ever
faster, close on the trail of his mystery accomplice as he finally
turned off into a quiet but by no means secretive lane nearly half way
down the street.
They came to a halt just several feet down the entrance to the laneway.
It was dark but dry, no dank squalor or anything that would arouse too
much suspicion if Ronald had been anything other than a garish,
over-emphasised clown dressed in one of the most ugly assembly of
colours ever to be put together who just happened to have left his
station of employment for no apparent reason to follow a strange man
whom he'd met only fifteen seconds earlier.
'Okay. Here, listen, I want you to take this.' Speaking urgently but in
measured tones, the stranger reached inside his pocket and pulled out a
small pistol and before Ronald even knew what he was doing the man had
grabbed his hands and wrapped the gun snugly inside them. Then he was
no longer looking at Ronald as he spoke, as if his forthcoming words
were too painful to admit frank eye-contact. 'Do with it what you will.
I understand what you're going through. I was also once . . . was also
once in a similar situation. I cannot prevent you from turning it upon
yourself, I take the risk in knowing already that the urge will be
strong, but please think twice before you do. It can' - he coughed -
'it can be put to better use. I lacked the courage to do so and have
always regretted it - you know what I'm talking about - but I hope you,
if you feel it's the right time . . . well, trust your own judgment.
But now I must go. You have never seen me and you have never spoken to
me. You have no idea who I am. Okay?'
The man gathered his jacket around him and with a taut mouth and face
walked rapidly away, back out onto the street and from there who knows
where. Ronald remained standing in the laneway for a few seconds,
feeling the hard steel pressed against his outer thigh in the pocket of
those inflated pants he was forced to wear. He gulped, nearly choking,
his heart beating furiously. Taking deep breaths, he at last exited the
lane, feet well ahead of him, wig emerging extreme dull red in the
sunlight, and slowly, pensively, the face still locked in the trademark
Ronald McDonald inane happy grin, walked back towards Grafton
Street.
Standing on the street he felt surreal and even queasy. How can
somebody who has never experienced it understand the temptation facing
a man with a gun in his pocket who has recently been listed in a
prominent national newspaper as one of the ten most annoying public
figures in the world?
'Say hello to Ronald McDonald. Come on, Stephen . . '
Oh Holy God. A stupid woman with her stupid fucking kid - yet another,
how many more would he have to deal with this day? - looking for a free
toy and he was employed to provide it because it would give the child
the notion that McDonald's was a caring giving institution and probably
encourage it, a faint memory of this but not articulated urging the
child, the next time it passed by feeling a bit peckish with a doting
parent on its arm, to say, 'Mummy, can we go to McDonald's? I'm
hungry.'
The child looked up at Ronald (Ronald McDonald, oh my God I'm Ronald
McDonald, Ronald McDonald said to himself, and how often he had said it
but never before like he did now, with that sense of urgency, that
intensity of revulsion) and its eyes were full of stupefecation, like
it had just been pumped full of some drug, like Ronald's face with its
inane grin and large bulbous gaze exerted a hypnotic nausea on the soul
of the poor child, which was nevertheless so goddam annoying that he
could quite easily have throttled it with his bare hands and not suffer
the faintest pang of conscience.
'Hello!' Ronald said, stupid voice emerging in the air, knees bending
to bring him closer to the child's height, 'what would you like? Hm?
What do you want from me?'
The child stared back uncomprehending, nothing to say. His eyes
radiated awe, confusion, he could not really adjust to this clown in
front of him because it contravened the fundamental belief of a child:
that adults are grown-up.
'Tell Ronald what you would like, my little friend . . .'
Glancing quickly up, Ronald could see by the mother's slightly hesitant
face that she was already sensing that something wasn't quite right.
His words were, in their own devious way, already gone beyond the pale,
because he was not paid to say words like this, he was paid to say
things like, 'Hello young man. Do you know who I am? You do? Who am I?
Yes, that's right, Ronald McDonald. You did what? Hm? Oh - you saw me
on the television? And do you like eating in McDonald's? You do? That's
good. And me? Do I? Ha, ha! Why of course!' But he was not saying words
like this, and the mother, without probably knowing what was wrong,
could see it.
'So . . .'
Ronald had reached the point where he was supposed to slip his hand
into the little pouch he carried at the bottom of his clown's shirt and
pull out a toy and give it to the child. But instead, even at the very
moment he could glimpse from the periphery of his vision some people,
maybe even American tourists (Oh God, the thought of it!), smiling
condescendingly at him, he found that his hand actually delved into his
trouser pocket and felt for the cold hard steel of the pistol in its
place.
'Here you are, my friend, here is a gift for you from Ronald McDonald.
I hope you fucking enjoy it.'
He carefully wrapped his finger around the trigger, still holding the
gun in his pocket. Then, when he brought the weapon out into the open,
he thought for a moment that he was going to shoot not the child first
but its mother, because the child was too easy a target and it was
really she and not he that was to blame for him being like this, but he
remembered how he had so often been the victim of easy targets and so
he reverted to his former plan and ignoring the mother and her screams
pointed the pistol at the child and blew its fucking head off. It felt
so good.