Red Meat Cures Cancer (4 page)

CANANDAIGUA, NEW YORK

Every year, shortly after the shareholder’s meeting, the Link held a retreat for the entire board of directors. In a waterfront inn on Canandaigua Lake, a sixteen-mile-long Finger Lake southeast of Rochester, we spent two days discussing the upcoming fiscal year. Mostly, it was an opportunity for the ten of us to listen to our leader rant and rave about the hundreds of things that were wrong with Tailburger and the two or three that were right.

Though a few of us, including me, could voice our honest opinion without eliciting an uncontrollable tirade by our CEO, the Link had assured himself of a predominantly yes-man environment by appointing his triplets Ned, Ted and Fred to the board. Ned, Ted and Fred, who looked, laughed, walked and talked alike, each had a thick thatch of dark black hair on their arms, legs, chest and head, where it was worn in a tightly ringletted perm. They were a husky bunch with slightly protruding paunches and the obnoxious habit of perpetually chewing gum. In all my years with the company, I’d never seen any of the brothers wear anything but golf attire. They came to all meetings in loud slacks, louder shirts and white spiked shoes.

Better qualified and more appropriately attired individuals filled out the remainder of the board’s slate. Biff Dilworth, a wiry academic type partial to bifocals and three-piece suits, was president of Rochester State University. Chad Hemmingbone, a Brooks Brothers mannequin and fatuous blowhard if truth be told, was president of First Union, the area’s largest bank, and could arrange personal loans for me when the need arose. Annette McNabnay, the city’s first female mayor and our “token chick,” as the Link referred to her, was always the smartest person in the room. Tim Truheart, the owner of three area carpet stores, wasn’t good for much other than the occasional rug sample. The rest of the board was comprised of a rotating assortment of Kodak and Xerox executives who, because of the Link’s short fuse, rarely lasted long enough for me to learn their names. The Link’s patience was tested the most, however, by his own progeny.

“Ned, will you take off that damned visor? You look ridiculous. Ted, you and Fred, too. Just take the things off.” The Link was displeased.

“Dad, there’s a glare coming in off the lake. It’s blinding,” Ned whined.

“It is awful bright in here,” Ted added as Fred nodded his head.

“Just take ’em off or I’ll rip ’em off,” the Link boomed.

“All right, all right. Don’t have a coronary, Dad.”

“Yeah, Dad. It’s just a visor.”

As soon as the visors came off, Ned, Ted and Fred put on sunglasses. Even the Link, who usually insisted on getting his way, gave up at this point and started the meeting. It began, like all others, with a troubleshooting exercise intended to protect the company from areas of potential exposure. Everyone was supposed to throw out issues for consideration, but, as usual, most of our time was spent trying to shoot down the Link’s bad ideas. I’ll give him this: he was a contrarian thinker. When everybody was screaming right, the Link yelled, “up.”

“We need to arm our drive-thru people.”

“What?” I asked in shock.

“There’ve been some holdups at our drive-thru windows. I want our people prepared.”

“I think that’s a great idea,” Ned piped up.

“Me, too,” added Ted.

“I have to agree. Hell of an idea, Dad,” Fred chimed in.

I was certain it
wasn’t
a great idea.

“Frank, we can’t put weapons in the hands of the teenagers who man our pickup windows.”

“Why the hell not? There’s no problem in the world that can’t be solved by an AK-47 automatic machine gun.”

“Well, for one thing, you need to be eighteen years old for a gun permit, and most of our employees are still in high school.”

The Link was not dissuaded easily.

“Fine. From now on, we’re only hiring those lonely senior-citizen types, the kind in the McDonald’s ads who spend every waking hour of their lives wishing they had a job swabbing out toilet bowls. And I want ’em all armed.”

Biff Dilworth, the most refined member of the board, attempted to denounce the proposed new policy in his own way.

“Frank, as a man dedicated to the higher education of this country’s young people for the past forty years, I fear that such a step will only contribute to the further demise of the thin line of civility currently separating man from beast. For the sake of humanity and the future of our kind as a people, I urge the reconsideration of this arming business.”

The Link was clearly moved by such an impassioned plea. His soft side lurked just below the surface.

“You’re right, Professor. Maybe I was a little hasty. I’ll tell you what. We’ll start with a military-strength pepper spray, and if that doesn’t work, then we go to guns.”

“Well, I don’t know, Frank . . .”

“Look, I do know. This’ll make us more money. I guarantee it. I just read a
Wall Street Journal
article about drive-thru times. For every ten seconds you shave off your average customer’s visit from menu board to departure, the store makes an extra fifty thousand dollars per year. Do you know who has the fastest time from the menu board to departure? (Pause) Wendy’s. One hundred fifty point three seconds. One hundred fifty point three fucking seconds. They’ve got high-tech timers and a greeting that takes less than one second. ‘HowmayIhelpyou?’ Less than one second. Do you know how long our average time is? Six hundred forty-three seconds. It’s pathetic. Slowest time in the business. That’s why we’ve got to arm our people. If the customer knows the shaky pre-Parkinson’s fry guy living on a fixed income in a shithole studio apartment in Bakersfield is packing something, he’s gonna think twice about returning a screwed-up order. Am I right? That right there will save us a few seconds.”

“Maybe we should just shorten our greeting,” I offered, hopeful to avoid arming everyone with pepper spray.

“That’s good, Thorne. I don’t know why we spend so much time with the friendly chitchat. From now on there’ll be no more, ‘Welcome to Tailburger, the burger of choice for the downtrodden, disabled and incarcerated. Whatever you decide to eat, don’t forget to wash it all down with a Tailfrap.’ Way too wordy. From now on out, we keep it simple. ‘Order, asshole.’ That’s it. Plain and simple. We’re the burger of abuse. It’s time we started acting like it. People don’t drive in for the fresh-faced, seventeen-year-old gal with the brace-filled smile anyway. They come by to see people like themselves—aging, regret-filled losers who are ready to be crapped on just like they’ve been crapped on for their entire lives. Now enough about that. Have we settled with Mother Teresa yet?”

Mother Teresa was the Link’s nickname for Sister Ancilla Satter, a nun from Rochester’s Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother convent. In a horrifying accident, Sister Ancilla’s face had been burned by a blast of steaming hot microwaved air that escaped from the corner of one of our Fanny Packs, a sack of fried pork products which we marketed as ideal for those with an active lifestyle. According to eyewitnesses, after Sister Ancilla picked up her food at our window in the church’s meals-on-wheels van, recognizable by the baby lamb painted on the side, she tried to peek in the pack to make sure her fried rib tips were accompanied by our secret sauce. Upon doing so, trapped heat rushed out, overwhelmed the sister and caused third-degree burns to her holy visage. Fortunately, her habit had protected her neck and part of her face.

“Her lawyers want more money,” I informed the Link.

“Those cocksuckers. Fuck ’em! I say we blackmail her.” The Link was livid now, his head the color of a ripe tomato. “What kind of dirt do we have on the old hag?”

The Link’s belief in military intelligence, his extreme paranoia and his genuine concerns over the employability of his own children led him to initiate KGB-type activities within Tailburger. As the owners of three local spy shops called Who’s Nailing Your Wife?, Ned, Ted and Fred profited greatly from this arrangement. So did the paterfamilias. While the boys got thousands of dollars selling nothing but surveillance equipment and paramilitary gear to Tailburger, the Link got information he could use against his enemies and allies.

Although Operation Tenderize was never officially discussed in board meetings or acknowledged to exist in the corporate minutes, its ongoing purpose was to gather incriminating bribe-worthy data—photographic, electronic or otherwise—about anyone or anything that got in Tailburger’s way. It also allowed Ned, Ted and Fred to get rich and abuse their power without impediment.

Not surprisingly, with the use of a police radio, a few bugs and a well-placed wiretap, Ned, Ted and Fred’s flunkies, reminiscent of Nixon’s plumbers, had discovered the only available skinny on Sister Ancilla. She had given up Tailburger for Lent, a considerable sacrifice, given her fondness for the Fanny Pack. Coincidentally, her decision came at a time when the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother convent, overweight and out of shape, had been ordered by the mother superior to slim down. Unfortunately, with the donation of a remote-controlled television and the advent of fat-free cookies, too many evenings were being spent watching reruns of Notre Dame football games and scarfing down Snack Well’s. To combat this trend, the sisters had convened and committed themselves to diet and discipline in the name of God. Collectively, they served as one enormous support group and took a firm vow of caloric obedience that was not to be broken by anyone. In order to provide additional incentive, the mother superior had each nun solicit sponsors to pledge $10 per week to be donated to the Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children, so long as the sponsored sister continued to meet specific weight-loss goals.

Thus when Sister Ancilla quietly drove the convent’s lamb van up to the Tailburger window on that warm spring night, just days before the Easter Bunny would arrive, she was letting many people, both ordinary and supernatural, down. The source of her burns and her subsequent lawsuit, however, had somehow been kept a secret. How? She lied. Wanting to surprise the mother superior by contributing the settlement money to the Shriner’s Fund in order to absolve her of her sins, Sister Ancilla said she had a cooking accident.

Whatever the cause of Sister Ancilla’s burns, however, she remained an unsympathetic actor to the Link.

“I say we blow her in to the mother superior.”

“Frank, this could be bad publicity for the company,” Mayor McNabnay observed.

Annette McNabnay wore her honey-blond hair pulled back and dressed only in DKNY. She was well-spoken and intelligent, and her sophisticated good looks, distinguished by wonderful bone structure and fine features, lent a certain elegance to any gathering she graced. Picture Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct,
but add underwear. Elected to Rochester’s top office two years earlier, her honor possessed both a J.D. and an M.B.A. For her, putting up with the Link’s shit was nothing more than savvy political posturing.

“Annette, in case you haven’t noticed, the clergy isn’t one of our big demographics. Do you think I care what that fat penguin Ancilla Satter has to say? Let’s go to the papers and tell them what a phony she is and all about this Shriner’s Hospital scam.”

“Dad’s right. I say we blow her in,” said Ned.

“I agree. Blow her in,” added Ted.

“Blow her,” Fred followed. “The whole thing is a scam.”

Annette didn’t give up.

“Frank, with all due respect, I don’t think we should blow Sister Ancilla in to the mother superior or the press. Ever since she came up with the idea for Palm Funday, she’s been a very popular figure in the local community. Plus, the Shriner’s Hospital weight-loss drive is not a scam. They’re raising thousands of dollars to make these kids’ lives a little more pleasant. Just because they don’t fit into our demographic doesn’t mean we want to alienate them. It’s too big a risk.”

Discomfort crept across the main sitting room of the Kerfoot Inn, where we had gathered for the afternoon’s meeting. The wooden duck decoys and scaled schooner replicas that surrounded us were pretty to look at but held no answers. Biff Dilworth, our resident academic, and Chad Hemmingbone, our resident banker, sat silently while Tim Truheart, king of the carpet sample, stared out the window at
Bastard Boy,
the Link’s sixty-five-foot cabin cruiser. Truheart had a good mind, but was unable to put it to use in our meetings. Through Operation Tenderize, the Link had obtained compromising photos of him with the seventeen-year-old French au pair Truheart’s wife hired to look after their three kids. According to Ned, the pictures represented some of the “raunchiest shit” he’d ever seen, and rivaled anything in his silver-anniversary issue of
Swank.
In this version of the Mexican standoff, Truheart supported all of the Link’s positions, and the Link let him continue to collect $40,000 annually in director’s fees. One bit of insurrection, and Truheart knew that a less than flattering picture of his tongue wrapped around someone other than his wife would find its way into the
Democrat & Chronicle,
Rochester’s major daily.

Finally, the Link interrupted our solitude to ask me a question.

“How much are Sister Ancilla’s lawyers asking for?”

“Nine hundred and sixty thousand dollars.”

“You’re shitting me, Sky! That’s outrageous!”

“The money will go primarily to charity,” I reminded him.

“My ass. Those bloodthirsty lawyers will be shoving their noses in the trough for at least a third.”

“That’s true, Frank, but there’s no getting around it.”

The Link gazed off into the distance and rubbed his hands together. In moments like this, I realized how sick and tired I was of waiting for this fat ball of pus to make decisions.

“Okay, fuck it. Settle with the sister, Sky. But here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna build a gym at the convent for the sisters to work off all that flab. There’s nothing more disturbing than a fat nun. It really creeps me out.”

Talk about the blimp calling the balloon overinflated. The Link paused for a minute before adding more.

“And, Thorne, get the gym named after me. I want some positive publicity out of this fiasco. You know the drill. Give the press the whole ‘Tailburger has a heart’ routine, and send some burgers to the crippled kids.”