Beyond the Slats
When I was little, fast-food restaurants felt like rival kingdoms.
Every household seemed to belong to one side or the other: Burger King or McDonald’s. Like Coke and Pepsi, the choice went beyond taste. It was an allegiance, absorbed so early that it felt inherited.
We were a Burger King family.
On our side of the border, everything felt familiar. I knew the paper crowns, the crackle of the drive-thru speaker, the smoky smell of flame-broiled Whoppers, the promise of having it “Your Way”—the whole ritual of it all.
McDonald’s belonged to another world. I knew it only from television commercials, where the strange mythology of McDonaldland unfolded in thirty-second installments. Stepping inside an actual McDonald’s felt like crossing into foreign territory.
I only remember going there once as a child, for a birthday party.
A McDonald’s birthday party was a major occasion. You did not simply gather there to eat hamburgers. You entered the world of Ronald McDonald, Grimace, the Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese, and all the other characters who inhabited the strange land McDonald’s had cheerfully ripped off from Sid and Marty Krofft.
Naturally, I expected Ronald McDonald to attend.
He did not.
Instead, a woman dressed as some kind of clown appeared.
She wore a black-and-white striped costume, a brightly colored wig, and white face paint. She looked more like a mime than a clown. Looking back, the stripes suggest the Hamburglar, while the wig and white face suggest that someone had started painting her as Ronald McDonald and stopped after the first coat.
I clearly remember a small McDonald’s logo near one shoulder, which suggested she had not simply assembled the costume from whatever the local thrift store had surrendered. McDonald’s had approved her in some capacity.
Near the Playland, the restaurant had an open section of floor without tables. The woman instructed all of us to sit there, cross-legged, directly on the tile.
At the time, this was perfectly normal. It was the 1980s. Fast-food chains used clowns, toys, and playgrounds to market artery-clogging grub to kids, packaging it in plastic and foam destined for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, while adults smoked cigarettes beside those same kids. Against that backdrop, no parent worried about seating a child on tile marinated in greasy detritus and whatever thousands of shoes had dragged in.
The adults stood near the entrance and watched. From where we sat, they formed a forest of legs, while coats, handbags, and folded arms crowded the canopy above us. Every so often they laughed—not always because the joke deserved it, but because adults at children’s parties understood that laughter worked like an instruction. It told the kids: This is the funny part. Now you laugh too.
Taking their cues, we laughed and watched as the woman worked through the usual children’s-birthday-party repertoire: sight gags, balloon animals, simple magic tricks, and games that pulled us into the performance. She handed out little prizes, each retrieved from a closet.
That closet soon became the only part of the party that mattered to me.
It was built into a large square pillar near a wall. On the other side of the pillar rose a giant slide, one piece of the larger Playland structure. The side of the pillar had been painted to match the Playland, forming its end cap and making the closet seem like part of the attraction itself.
The woman opened it several times during the performance. Its key hung from a retractable cord attached to her belt. Whenever she needed something, she walked to the pillar, unlocked the door, reached inside, withdrew the next prop or prize, and locked the closet again.
Each time the door opened, I tried to look past her. I remember glimpses of shelves, stacks of flat food cartons, columns of paper cups, a yellow wet-floor sign, and other mysterious objects that revealed the hidden process behind the restaurant. But the door always closed before I could absorb it all.
Every opening produced what the show required next, as though the closet itself had planned the performance. The clown seemed less like the source of the entertainment than its delivery system. The balloons came from the closet. The games came from the closet. Most importantly, the prizes came from the closet.
I wanted one of those prizes. But I was an introverted kid, and every call for a volunteer filled me with dread. I did not want to stand in front of everyone, misunderstand the game, fail at some simple task, and get laughed at.
The arrangement struck me as deeply unfair. Within minutes, the tile floor had developed its own class structure: kids with toys and kids without them. I belonged to the empty-handed class, watching the winners examine their plastic treasures.
Then the performance ended, and the other children rushed toward the Playland. They climbed the jungle gym, crawled through plastic tunnels, disappeared into the ball pit, and slid down the giant slide—some of them still clutching the prizes they had won.
I had no interest in joining them.
I went directly to the closet and tried the handle.
Locked.
Its door had horizontal wooden slats, like the door of a linen closet. I pressed my face against them and tried to see through the gaps.
Darkness filled the other side.
I ran my fingers along the slats and tried to reach through.
The openings were too narrow.
I changed angles, stood on my toes, crouched down, and cupped my hands around my eyes to block the restaurant lights.
Nothing.
I moved from gap to gap, convinced that one might reveal more than the rest.
None did.
Eventually, an adult called us back. Playtime was over.
While the other children spent theirs enjoying slides, tunnels, jungle gyms, and a ball pit, I spent mine conducting a failed investigation into a locked supply closet.
I did not feel that I had chosen badly. I needed to know what was inside.
Red and yellow helium balloons swayed on their strings as we gathered around the table where the birthday boy sat before a white rectangular slab—a McDonald’s cake covered in frosting, yellow piping, and edible flat figures of Ronald, Grimace, the Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese, and the other residents of McDonaldland. Candles burned among them like torches carried by a tiny invading army setting out to hunt down the Burger King Kids Club Gang. Their flames lit the birthday boy’s face and the wrapped gifts crowding the rest of the table.
Someone handed out tall, pointed paper hats decorated with McDonaldland characters. Standing together, we looked like a box of Crayolas.
Then we sang “Happy Birthday.” The birthday boy leaned forward, took a breath, and blew out the candles.
The adults carried the cake away.
In its place, they handed out Happy Meals.
We returned to the floor and arranged our food around us: cheeseburgers, fries, cookies, and McNuggets. Happy Meal boxes and paper cups filled with Coke covered the tile. We ate cross-legged, balancing what we could in our laps.
The floor became our table.
Several kids treated it as a plate as well. A fry would fall, a cookie would roll away, or a McNugget would land directly on the tile. That was no reason not to eat it.
Eventually, the cake returned in slices on paper plates. Small cups of vanilla ice cream came with it, filled from the machine and already softening around the edges.
We ate the cake and ice cream on the floor too. Frosting, crumbs, and melted ice cream migrated onto fingers, sleeves, and faces. Gooey handprints accumulated across the tiles.
No one seemed troubled by any of this.
While we ate, the birthday boy began opening his presents.
Several children gathered around the table to watch. A Transformer. A He-Man figure. A G.I. Joe. Star Wars figures. Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars. A LEGO set. With each package, he tore away the paper and held up another toy while the audience supplied the required oohs and aahs.
Present-opening intensified the class system that had formed during the clown’s games. At the top sat the birthday boy, surrounded by real toys. Below him were the few children who had won plastic prizes. The rest of us remained the empty-handed masses, watching from the floor with cake plates in our laps.
You were expected to admire each new toy enthusiastically while understanding that it would leave with the birthday boy. That was a lot for a five-year-old to process: the arrival of something wonderful coinciding with a permanent exclusion from it.
Fortunately, each Happy Meal contained a toy. Eventually, every child held some small piece of McDonald’s plastic. The classes, at least for a little while, collapsed into one.
Throughout the meal, I kept watching the closet, waiting for it to open again.
Perhaps the performer would return. Perhaps an employee would need more cups or napkins. Perhaps goodie bags were still waiting inside.
Each new stage of the party gave the closet another reason to open.
It never did.
Eventually, the adults collected their children. Coats were pulled on. Happy Meal boxes, cake plates, ice-cream cups, and shredded wrapping paper disappeared into trash cans. The birthday presents were gathered into bags and carried toward the exit. We passed through the restaurant and out into the parking lot.
The closet stayed behind, closed and locked.
That became my clearest childhood memory of McDonald’s.
Not Ronald McDonald.
Not the Hamburglar.
Not cheeseburgers, fries, McNuggets, Happy Meal toys, cake, ice cream, presents, slides, tunnels, or the ball pit.
Just a closet built into a support pillar.
It still exists in my mind as it did then: partly open, mostly dark, and crowded with objects I could not quite identify.
I still try to visualize what lay farther inside.
I still wonder what rested on the shelves beyond my narrow field of view.
I do not know if that restaurant still exists. I do not even know where it was. Even if I somehow tracked it down and found the closet intact, its contents would have changed countless times over. Whatever answer waited inside that afternoon disappeared long ago.
There can be no return visit.
No final inspection.
No inventory.
No explanation.
The mystery itself is trivial.
The incompleteness is not.
It remains an unfinished task, assigned to my childhood self and abandoned before I could complete it.
Part of me never left that McDonald’s floor.
The door closed that afternoon.
The question stayed open.