 Taco Bell #4510
While on the way back to LA from the Sequoia National Forest, my
traveling companions and I decided to stop in Bakersfield for a "real meal"
after "roughing it" in "nature" for "days." I was excited to stop in
Bakersfield because of the "Bakersfield sound" which typified much of country
music in the 60s and is best represented by Buck Owens, who has a restaurant
here. I'm not sure whether I imagined that the "Bakersfield sound" would be
recognizable immediately upon leaving the car or something, with the fancy
guitar pickin' ringing through the air? Well, whatever it was I thought, I found
that Bakersfield is, in fact, a pisshole piece of shit place that doesn't
deserve Buck Owens's good name. We couldn't find any good restaurants within
10 minutes of the interstate exit, and when we finally did, they were all
closed … we finally found one that looked perfect but its kitchen was closed
due to remodeling. The town itself was completely limp in every way, though they
did have a movie theater that was showing The Ten Commandments … my companion's theory on that was that the theater has just been running that film
since it came out, and the townfolk are too stupid to notice or care.
So after a futile search around town for a suitable meal, we ended up at
Taco Bell, which is usually kind of a disappointment to begin with, much less
once your expectations have been raised for real food. This particular Taco
Bell must have been in a parallel universe, because it was incredibly bad,
yet also quite satisfying. Almost everything was wrong with it, but for
everything wrong there was something strangely right. For example, the
dining room was absolutely filthy, with papers strewn everywhere and no
tables cleaned off … yet the 7-layer burrito I ordered was probably the most
precisely, perfectly wrapped burrito I have ever encountered. And the
employees were the most incompetent, embittered idiots I've seen in a long
time … yet there was soothing classical music playing in the dining room.
Baffling. Anyway, I had my usual, a 7-layer burrito no cheese, no sour
cream, and a bean burrito no cheese. My "camping buddy" had a couple of hardshell
chicken tacos (that concept was very painstakingly communicated to the moron
that served us) and a couple of 39-cent regular tacos. The fellow we picked up at the state park bathroom had
some tacos. I had an Orange Slice, but was no charged for it … another
positive trade-off for the horrendous service.
The employees here clearly hated themselves and each other, to say
nothing of their workplace, which they visibly loathed. One particularly postal worker
was seen cramming hot sauce into a pan with his fist as nastily as he
probably had crammed 15 tacos into his fat stomach for lunch. The cashier seemed palpably uncomfortable with the work atmosphere … a great confidence-booster for the customer. At one point I went to go use
the restroom and was mortified to find it demonstrating about the same level
of cleanliness as the one in Trainspotting …and when I went back to my
table to register my disgust with my friends, the cashier, who was
half-assedly wiping off tables, expressed her lack of surprise by saying "Oh,
is it real nasty in there?" As though the situation was beyond the
employees' control. In fact, when she went to her coworkers to inform them
of the hideousness in the bathrooms, she was made to go clean them, which she
did not do very well. The self-hating fat guy even said, "Oh yeah, they're
always like that," as though he was resigned to accept the bathroom
conditions with stoic passivity. Yuck.
It's difficult to rate the unpleasantness of this Taco Bell with any
accuracy. As I said, for every terrifyingly awful thing here, something else
was pleasantly surprising. But the overall feeling was of a boyfriend who
smashes your face in then sends you flowers. Admittedly, both actions can be
romantic in the appropriate context, but one does not justify the other.
Review by La Fée, September 1999 |
