All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found by Philip Connors Read Free Book Online

above it was shaped like a square-topped A.
    It occurred to me, after I hung up with Brinch, that the A-hed was often about someone’s weird obsession.
    During my lunch break I called Peter Holden. He told me he worked for a data-imaging company in Virginia. He explained that his firm scanned documents and compiled them in databases that people could peruse with computers. This eliminated the need to replicate documents in paper form, and therefore saved a lot of trees.
    Holden told me he was coming to New York on business the following week. We agreed to meet for lunch at a McDonald’s near the newspaper’s office in Lower Manhattan. He said he had red hair and a brown briefcase. He offered no other particulars about his appearance, but I made the natural assumption. When I arrived at the restaurant, I looked for the fattest man in the place, but the fattest man in the place did not have red hair or a brown briefcase. The only man with red hair and a brown briefcase was tall, trim, and looked about forty-five years old. Holden had told me he was fifty-three.
    We shook hands, ordered lunch. He was friendly, a little bit shy of his achievement, and a little bit proud beneath the shyness, prouder as the lunch wore on. He ate two Quarter Pounders with cheese—no onions—and drank a large Coke. I ate a Big Mac Value Meal with fries, drank a Hi-C Orange. He said that when I’d first called, he couldn’t believe a reporter would have interest in a story such as his. Then he realized that if The Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for solo visits to McDonald’s, he would almost certainly own it. As a token of thanks for my interest, he wanted to pay for both of our meals. I told him he couldn’t do that; I would have to pay for both meals. At first he resisted, but I told him it was journalistic protocol. A reporter could never accept gifts from potential sources or subjects, even if the gift was only a Big Mac Value Meal: Journalism Ethics 101, avoiding the appearance of a quid pro quo.
    Holden showed me several folders full of notes about his visits to McDonald’s. I looked at the number for the most recent entry: 10,892.
    That’s not even all of the ones I’ve visited, he said. For years I went to McDonald’s without taking notes. Only after I’d been to a thousand or so did I start.
    I asked him to tell me how many McDonald’s there were in Fargo, North Dakota, and he did. I asked him how many McDonald’s there were in Missoula, Montana, and he listed them by the names of the streets they were on.
    I asked him why he started doing this—collecting the McDonald’s experience. He said that by the 1970s he’d visited every state capital and national park in the U.S. of A. He’d collected them all, from Montpelier and Cheyenne to Montgomery and Santa Fe, Glacier, Zion, Gettysburg, the Everglades. I wondered what else there was to do, he said. So I thought I’d try to eat at every McDonald’s. But they built them faster than I could get to them all.
    He said his one-day record for visits to McDonald’s was forty-five. He’d accomplished this in the suburbs of Detroit. Partway through that epic day he bought cookies for the road, since a visit didn’t count unless he ate something from the restaurant, although the actual eating didn’t have to happen in the restaurant.
    At the conclusion of our lunch, I invited him up for a tour of the newspaper. He seemed delighted by the fact that I could wave a little pass card with my picture on it, and doors in the hallways of the Wall Street Journal would open for me. He asked me what subjects I covered for the paper. I was ashamed to admit I sorted faxes and replenished water coolers, so I told him I was a special research assistant to reporters who wrote about law, telecommunications, and the various health care industries. As we circulated through the maze of cubicles in the newsroom, I made sure to avoid the wing of the tenth floor where people knew me.
    I