Check your papers

Back home in Seattle, the hip joint for fast food is Dick’s Drive-In, with five convenient Seattle locations all conveniently located very far from my house. The equivalent burger joint down in California is the infamous In-and-Out burger, which is fortunately (for my colon et. al), far from the USC campus, and whose claim to fame is making things animal style, which, if our dear Dick’s back in Seattle did, would result in far more crude jokes involving the male member and the term "animal style," and variants thereof.

But a ten-minute drive from USC yields a suitable, heart-stopping alternative for cheap, fast eats. I am referring to the Original Tommy’s and his World Famous Burgers on Beverley and Rampart, the first of the Tommy’s locations, opened back in 1946.

This place is a little shack on an intersection stuffed with Mexican workers who barely speak English, and cook up a mean burger. Tommy’s particular claim to fame is slopping chili and cheese on every single menu item, instantly increasing your risk for colon cancer or heart attack by a factor of fifty in one fell swoop. I’m talking chili cheese fries, chili cheese dogs, chiliburgers, the excessive double chili cheeseburger, and the simply suicidal triple chili cheeseburger.

For those with a history of heart disease, ordering the last menu item is tantamount to ordering up a fresh plate of grisly, greasy suicide. If you asked them to, I bet you could take a soda from the fridges by the counter and they’d melt some cheese, heat up some chili, pop open the can, and stuff it full of chili cheese too. When it comes to chili and/or cheese, Tommy is a man who refuses to dick around. Rumor has it that when he died in 1992, he requested to be chopped up and introduced piece-by-piece back into the chili that made him famous, but those are just rumors.

That guy is dressed in uniform. His job consists of directing cars into parking spaces around the Tommy’s shack

Tommy Koulax, the founder of this chain of fast food joint, was truly a giant among men. Back in 1946, he basically proclaimed to the world “Screw this Greek opopopopolous gyro stuffing bullshit! I’m making burgers 24/7! And I’m making them good and cheap!” This he did, expanding to twenty-seven locations throughout Southern California. The website is stuffed with people begging for Tommy’s to be opened up in San Fransisco, Las Vegas, and San Jose, with the stern moderator simply replying "We’ll expand when we damn well feel like it."

The entire process of ordering and receiving your food has been honed and streamlined like a military jet fighter, and the average wait during peak hours for your food is fifteen seconds. Most people can’t even decide what they want in fifteen seconds. The Beverley and Rampart location we USC students frequent serves fifteen-thousand customers a week. It is unknown how many customers they “lose” every week from cardiac arrest, however.

Tommy’s website is a cagey piece of work. Under “Nutritional facts,” they only list the facts for their chiliburger. That’s it. They sell a multitude of other items, but you can only know how badly you’re killing yourself with the chiliburger. That bad boy has whopping 490 calories and 22 grams of fat. Despite all the stuff they load on it, it’s still healthier than a McDonalds Big Mac, as well as having 60 g more for its serving size. You can eat your way to an early grave with a clear conscience at Tommy’s.

Of course, after a meal you sit in your seat and survey the damage before you, wondering what the hell were you thinking when you bought all that grease and consumed it. The feeling post-Tommy’s is among the worst of all the fast foods, but among the best while you’re actually eating it, which makes it an ideal last meal for death row inmates. Part of the problem comes from the fact that you are downing what is basically solidified grease with ice-cold soda beverage, which results in internal coagulation and your stomach sending signals back up to your brain demanding to secede from the rest of your body. Tommy’s is enigmatic like that – you at once want to throw up everything you just ate, and at once want to order some more because it was so good. This is the mark of a great fast food joint.

Human beings and their notoriously short memories easily forget discomfort like that, so we line up night after night. When several floor mates made the journey a few weeks ago, the line curved around the shack, back along the sidewalk, and reached the intersection. Across the street, there’s a Taco Bell drive-thru chain that is lucky to get any business at all, considering what they’re up against. The decision between food where you add water to make it a solid versus the greatest, greasiest affair since that movie with John Travolta is no decision at all. And the decision between on-campus mashed potatoes and meatloaf four days a week and a fat Tommy’s stomach nuking chiliburger is no decision at all.

So when I go home for Thanksgiving in a few days, I’m going to recommend my parents take out a life insurance policy on my self, in light of my newfound eating habits. If these off-campus grease joints don’t get to me, the on-campus food certainly will, and if it sudden cardiac arrest is inevitable, somebody might as well profit off of it, right?

I’ll probably be too huge to fit into a standard coffin by then.

-f.w.

Short post this week because I’m still working on the India travelog. If you’re interested in getting the first look at it, in exchange for going through the whole thing and proofreading it for me, please let me know.