Accompanying Songs:
• Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell
“How much would someone have to pay you to road trip across America and visit all 13,000 McDonald’s locations in the country for an entire year?”
On a drive back home to Texas from a weekend trip in Nashville, Tennessee in late March of 2023, this question was the beginning of an hours-long heated debate with two of my best friends, Sam and Denver.
Hypotheticals, especially outlandish, farfetched, and psychologically damaging hypotheticals, are not uncommon in car rides with the three of us—the especially unconscionable, belly-laugh-inducing hypotheticals that usually involve several tacked-on caveats and conditions that amount to nonsense, but will be sure to alter our dollar amounts.
Let’s be clear on the math: visiting 13,000 McDonald’s locations across an entire year means visiting roughly 35 McDonald’s locations a day. Name your price.
“How much if you had to visit all 13,000 McDonald’s over the course of an entire year, but you also had to eat there for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day?”
“... And what if you had no off days?”
“... And what if you couldn’t call your friends or family?”
Of course, the greater physical, mental and emotional turmoil, the more our dollar amounts skyrocketed. And the more we giggled in the car.
“How much if you capped it at visiting only 20 McDonald’s a day?”
To visit all 13,000 McDonald’s, visiting 20 locations a day now meant that your road trip would be extended to roughly two years.
“300,000 dollars,” Denver offered. Sam and I yelled emphatically.
“Denver, that’s low as hell,” we said.
We debated more, then another torturous prospect crossed my mind.
“Okay, I have one,” I said.
“How much would someone have to pay you to live inside of the Bass Pro Shops pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee for an entire year?”
I didn’t allow either of them time to answer before the first caveat popped into my head.
“Actually, how much to live inside of the Bass Pro Shops pyramid for an entire year, but you also have to start a church plant inside of it?”
The prospect of the first question alone makes me laugh, but the second question was nearly the hardest I laughed the whole weekend.
“You can’t leave the pyramid, not even to go outside. Friends and family can visit you, but not more than once a month. You can’t go on vacations. You can talk to the patrons inside, but you can’t disrupt business and you can’t disclose your situation. You have to have at least 100 regularly attending congregants in your church to leave. You have to preach every Sunday. How much?”
Start a church plant inside of the Bass Pro Shops pyramid, as a prisoner. How does that sound? Name your price.
In between our giggling, which was always elicited by the relief that we will likely never have to endure these harsh conditions, we fiercely debated the lowest amount we would accept.
“250,000 dollars,” Denver said. Sam and I gasped again incredulously.
“Boys, I’ve got a wife at home,” Sam noted. “At least 500,000 dollars.” Totally fair.
“Den, I think I’m with you,” I said, “but maybe closer to 300,000 dollars?”
In retrospect, I am haunted by how little I offered, and for the record, it should go without saying—nobody should ever have to withstand yearlong entrapment inside a steel pyramid in Memphis, let alone for any less than at least 10 million dollars.
“Okay, I’ve got another one,” Denver said.
“How much money to go missing for an entire week?”
“You can’t call anybody or tell anyone. You’re off the grid entirely, and your family likely files a missing person report, but it’s just a week. You can’t pick up phone calls or answer texts.”
Within each of these hypotheticals is a real question at the heart of it. The real question at the heart of this one: how much are you willing to be paid to fully isolate yourself and allow your loved ones, who you would touch base with regularly, to experience severe discomfort, fear, anxiety, and/or isolation by ghosting them for an entire week?
For the first time, the hypothetical shifts from being a psychologically courageous display of self-determination to a conscious agreement for your loved ones to experience emotional pain. We acknowledged how much worse it is to deflect the cost and cast it upon someone else, especially someone near and dear. Accepting money for this makes one a terrible son, brother, and husband. Knowing we would never willingly choose to go missing and put our families through this, we also giggled at the prospect of this one.
This kind of conversation, the kind founded on imagination, absurdity, and boundlessness, is the heart and soul of traveling with your best friends. And like all of our trips together, we returned with a library of inside jokes from the weekend.
On the way to Tennessee, we heard a woman at a gas station call her nephew “Biscuit Boy,” who then grabbed Sam aside as he was walking to check out and began sharing lore about her nephew Biscuit Boy for ten minutes. Allegedly, Biscuit Boy was named after his habit of eating lots and lots of biscuits. Checks out. For the rest of the trip, Sam was bestowed the name Biscuit Boy.
Weeks before the trip, I was roasted by Biscuit Boy for suggesting that we buy tickets online in advance to the Glen Campbell Museum in downtown Nashville, on the off chance that it would be sold out. Yes, that Glen Campbell, the legendary country singer and songwriter whose heyday was nearly fifty years ago.
“Bro,” Sam died laughing. “Buying tickets months in advance? They’re going to look at us and say ‘Thank God you’re here, we haven’t seen a single person in weeks.’”
Denver and I nearly gave out wheezing. It was like booking a reservation for a public library a year in advance.
All weekend, our anticipation built as we approached closer to visiting the museum, awaiting the verdict. To my dismay and to Sam and Denver’s delight, we walked in on a Saturday afternoon with less than five people in the entire museum. I will never hear the end of it.
Visiting the Glen Campbell Museum was a small step toward my mission of converting Sam into a Glen Campbell fan, which I’m proud to share that I accomplished by the end of our trip after repeated listens of “Wichita Lineman” and “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” in the car at full volume. No one is able to hear the strings section on either of those singles and not feel transfixed by astonishment and emotion.
Unfortunately, on the night before we visited the museum, our boyish instincts laid claim yet again and someone posed the question, “What if we walk in and the museum is full of purposeful misinformation about Glen Campbell’s life?”
Oh no.
“Like, what if he was falsely presented as a war criminal? And what if the museum was a five-hour long immersive experience exploring his war crimes during World War II ... and all of his lyrics were adjusted to express deep regret for his actions...”
To the tune of Wichita Lineman, Sam sang in an old-timey voice, “I am remorseful for my actions...”
Denver and I couldn’t breathe.
Poor Glen Campbell, the beloved singer-songwriter, whose immeasurable impact and legacy would be tarnished completely in the heart of downtown Nashville.
~
A good deal of enduring trip insiders, for some reason, happen to occur in service industry settings. At this point, I feel that it might be appropriate to give each of us a Nobel Prize for keeping it together while ordering.
When Sam, Denver and I were inside of a family style restaurant in British Columbia, Canada, I asked for a Dr. Pepper to go before we checked out. The waitress brought me an empty 8-ounce paper cup to pour the rest of my original cup of Dr. Pepper into, containing an ounce of soda and a mountain of ice. Not a cup full of Dr. Pepper to go, like one might expect, but an empty paper cup ready for transfer.
Within those walls, asking for a refill must have been sin. I hadn’t the gall to ask again. Walking out with my 8-ounce paper cup of ice was humiliating.
At a seafood restaurant in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the three of us were delivered what our waitress called “fixins” the minute we sat down—hushpuppies, coleslaw, green tomato relish and dill pickle spears, on the house. We crush the fixins, grateful that the restaurant would prepare all of these mouthwatering appetizers for us free of charge. Our check arrives, and we are charged $5 each for the fixins.
We’re shaking in the booth laughing at the check. This was not on the house. We did not ask for the fixins, and we were not asked if we wanted the fixins, yet we demolished the fixins as though it was our last meal. To this day, the infamous fixins incident of 2016 lives on in our memory.
On a trip to Carlsbad, New Mexico with Denver and one of my best friends Christian, we stopped at a steakhouse in Ozona, Texas. On the menu, we found two distinct items that raised an eyebrow—a chicken fried steak, and a gourmet chicken fried steak for $8 more.
“What the hell is a gourmet chicken fried steak?” we asked each other. “What makes it $8 more?”
“Do they, like, cook it differently? For the gourmet ones, do they cook it in the center of the grill, and the regular ones are cooked on the sides of the grill?”
“If you get the regular one, do they just rip the breading off of it and bring it out on a separate plate so you have to put it together like a sandwich? And then the gourmet ones have the breading still intact?”
“For the gourmet one, they just bring out a grill on wheels to the restaurant floor with a USB cord to plug it into the wall and cook it in the middle of the grill right in front of you ...”
We verbally imagined our waiter saying, “Sir, at that price point, we legally cannot cook the regular chicken fried steak on the center of the grill, only the sides.”
Cooped up after hours of driving, this dinner had us off our rocker. I had tears down my face.
The waitress comes to take our order, and Denver asks, “Yeah, so what’s the difference between the regular chicken fried steak and the gourmet chicken fried steak?”
Christian and I exchange a quick glance at each other and we have to look away immediately.
“It’s tenderized and hand-breaded ... top choice beef,” she explains.
The waitress breaks into a two-minute-long explanation of how the cooks treat the preparation of the gourmet chicken fried steak differently. I cupped my face in my hands, head down, and closed my eyes for what felt like an hour. I couldn’t burst.
None of what she detailed in the process was even remotely close to what we spent the last twenty minutes riffing about. No mention of deliberately tearing off the breading on the regular ones, or a small USB grill pushed out on wheels, or a legal obligation to cook the regular chicken fried steak not on the middle of the grill, but only the sides.
The last thing I wanted was for this waitress to feel like her explanation of the difference between the regular chicken fried steak and gourmet chicken fried steak was not important to us. Regrettably, at this stage I was rolling in my chair. Where did Denver source the audacity to ask her the difference? We didn’t care.
Denver nods his head, retaining his composure, and she finally finishes.
“Okay, cool, thanks,” he says, long after asking his question. “Yeah, I’m going to get the grilled chicken.”
We fully lost control. Fully unable to look at each other. The entire remainder of our time inside that restaurant was spent trying to have regular conversation, or at least to resemble normal customers, and not being able to. No Nobel Prize for us.
This dinner was years ago, and Denver and Christian and I bring it up with each other at least once a month.
“For the gourmet one, an actual chicken fries it,” Christian texted us this week.