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

told him his story was fascinating, a kind of quest story of a uniquely American kind. If my editor gave the go-ahead, perhaps I’d visit him where he lived, in Virginia, and we’d try to find a McDonald’s somewhere in the vicinity, ideally a McDonald’s he hadn’t visited yet, although that seemed unlikely.
    I first saw Bed-Stuy after dark, so I hardly saw it at all. The C train carried me from the glassy chill of the Financial District to the Kingston–Throop stop on Fulton Street, and from there I walked the dozen blocks to Monroe Street, just off Marcus Garvey Boulevard. It was raining when I got off the train. Everyone hurried along the sidewalks hunched with umbrellas and newspapers over their heads, their knees bent in semi-crouch. With our hands up and our heads down, we looked like we were fleeing the wrath of something horrible come down from heaven.
    The walk was long, fifteen minutes from the subway. The neighborhood was mostly residential, street after street of beautiful old brownstones, bodegas here and there on the avenues, an occasional barbershop or storefront church. The landlord answered the door when I rang. He introduced himself as Ben. He was a sharp-looking man, bald-headed, thirtyish, from Trinidad, with a suave but laid-back British Island accent. He lived on the top floor of his three-story brownstone. A lesbian couple lived on the ground floor, and the middle floor was open. The place was lovely: high ceilings, decorative molding, a claw-footed tub, two bedrooms and a decent-sized kitchen. I looked the place over. Ben looked me over. I’d come straight from work wearing a blue dress shirt, a red tie, and a black corduroy overcoat. I tried hard to appear a gay-friendly dude who’d pay his rent on time.
    Mary tells me you work at the Wall Street Journal , he said.
    It’s true. I’m pretty sure I’m the only socialist there.
    So you don’t mind situations in which you’re the outsider, he said.
    I think that’s safe to say, I said.
    He gave me an application to fill out, told me he’d check my references and get back to me afterward.
    You come as a friend of a friend of a friend, he said. It’s probably yours if you want it, but let me do my due diligence.
    When I told Francine Schwadel about Peter Holden, she thought I was kidding. She asked if I could verify his claim to have visited 10,892 McDonald’s. I said, No, not exactly, but he showed me some of the notes he took about them and he seems pretty trustworthy.
    That’s not good enough, she said. We need absolute proof. If you can prove it, I think we’ve got a story.
    I called Holden. I told him I needed to see copies of his notes from all 10,892 of his visits to McDonald’s.
    He said that would be impossible. Each collection of notes ranged from a few sentences to half a page or more. It would take him forever to make copies.
    I asked if he could use his company’s technology, scan the notes, and create for me a searchable database.
    He said he didn’t think he could use the company’s technology for personal business.
    I reminded him I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal . We needed solid sources. We verified facts before putting them in the paper.
    He said, Why don’t I send the last three thousand entries or so, and you can look through them and send them back? They’re all numbered. I didn’t start at five thousand. Come to think of it, I’ll send you some from the beginning and some from the middle and some from the end.
    I ran this by Francine Schwadel.
    Tell him we’ll pay to have them shipped, she said.
    When they arrived, I took them home and spent an evening with them. Their banal repetition had a strange poetry to it, a kind of Whitmanesque list-making for the end of the millennium; in almost every instance he’d noted what he’d eaten, and the thought of all those empty calories, millions and millions of them, staggered me. All that ground-up cow flesh. All that corn syrup. All that time spent