I imagine that one of the most universal but least discussed rites

of passage is the discovery that the house you grew up in has a very

distinct smell, and that it wasn’t just everyone else’s house that

smelled peculiar. Recognized only on return from your first long time

away, this is typically not the romantic smell of baking pies or pipe

tobacco, but neither is it anything foul, like a backed-up septic tank

or mildew. It’s instead something that defies description, a complex

olfactoral web that is unique to the group living under one roof. Like

snowflakes, no two are ever alike.

It is for this reason that I never plan to start a family where I

currently reside. I live next to a Wendy’s fast food restaurant, and

the smell of my home is very describable: It’s the smell of Wendy’s

food cooking. The last thing I want is to have my future kids return

from college one day only to realize that their childhood home smells

like something called a Baconator.

Fast food restaurants like Wendy’s have become easy visual shorthand

for the homogeneity of American culture. Yet because they tend to sit on

large expanses of asphalt, few Americans actually live as close as I do

to one. This is probably for the better, because living next to a fast

food restaurant is a strange experience and, if the modern residential

landscape is any indication, people do not seem to want a home life

that they could describe as a strange experience.

I moved into my current apartment at a very particular moment in

Wendy’s history — two years after founder Dave Thomas’ death but less

than a year before a California woman would claim that she found a

finger in the restaurant’s chili. These were heady Wendy’s times, to

say the least. Before moving in, I had considered Wendy’s my favorite

fast food chain. Its ingredients always seemed the freshest and the

least fast-foody, and I found Dave Thomas very likable. (When I was

about 12, my parents laughed when I asked them if they thought Thomas

visited every Wendy’s franchise. I still don’t think it’s such an odd

question — I would if I were him.)

It didn’t take long, however, before the idea of eating Wendy’s

became difficult to stomach. It wasn’t the food — that hadn’t changed

at all. It was, instead, the smell of the food, and how its fried-ness

could creep into my apartment at any hour of the day. Unlike the only

other Wendy’s in downtown Philadelphia, the one next to my apartment

isn’t on the ground floor of a larger building. Instead, whatever

structure had previously been on the site was torn down and a one-story

Wendy’s was built in its place, almost as if one had been airlifted

from the suburbs and tucked snuggly into the tiny space between older,

traditional Philadelphia buildings of first-floor businesses with two

or three apartments above. The distance between the Wendy’s kitchen

vents and the back of my third-floor apartment next door, then, is very

short.

There is, to be sure, lemonade to be made of living next to Wendy’s.

Because this one was built in the classic Wendy’s architectural style,

and not in any way that acknowledged its dense urban surroundings, it

has one of those greenhouse-like dining rooms with windows that look

out over two streets. I’ve always found the Wendy’s solarium to be a

nice touch for diners, but, against a sidewalk, it means that

pedestrians have the pleasure of an up-close look at what people are

eating. I like seeing what people eat. I also get to see how people

treat a space like a Wendy’s dining room, which can be equally

interesting. Some will sit there for a while after eating, reading or

doing crossword puzzles below plastic ivy in hanging baskets. I’ve seen

some who sit there for hours and just stare out the window. A lot of

these people are recurring characters in the Wendy’s tableau.

At the same time, there are a bunch of bars in the area, plus a

methadone clinic down the street, so sometimes you get more than the

crossword-puzzle crowd. It’s not uncommon for people to use the small

alcove on the building’s side as a bathroom. Last week I saw a guy

passed out in the solarium, his face held up by a small Frosty cup.

Sleeping at this Wendy’s is, in fact, neither rare nor (judging from

the amount of people who do) discouraged.

That there’s only a tiny undrivable alley behind Wendy’s and my

apartment presents additional problems. This means that trash trucks

can’t collect from the rear, so the restaurant must store its garbage

in a room that opens to the street. When it’s time to clean that room,

the dirty water runs all over the sidewalk. This leaves behind a greasy

film, a slippery layer of fat that makes you wish you were walking

through the urine instead. And about once a week, not too long after

the restaurant’s 1 a.m. close, a loud tractor trailer parks on one

street, lowers a metal ramp down into the store, and a delivery man

unloads cases of hamburger meat, French fries, and chicken nuggets. If

you’re asleep, you wake up; if you’re trying to get home to sleep, you

have to climb over a metal ramp.

For four years, nothing but the menu changed at this Wendy’s. Then,

a few months ago, they installed a game called Stacker on the wall next

to the condiment counter. In Stacker, a square slides across a row on a

video screen until you stop it by hitting a button, at which point a

new square will start sliding across the next row. Successfully sack

the squares and you can win anything from fake teeth to an iPod. I’ve

never seen Stacker in a fast food restaurant before, and I’ve yet to

see anyone in Wendy’s play it. Random, right?

And yet… For all the nuisance its brings to the neighborhood, for

its effrontery to smart urban design, for all its weirdness and

smells, the Wendy’s works in some strange way. Maybe it’s the nature of

living in a city, where relationships are as complex, as give and take,

as any family’s. Sure there are people who pee on the side of the

Wendy’s, but some people have pets who pee on their furniture, and that

actually seems worse. Wendy’s does leave the sidewalk greasy, but other

people have neighbors that they can only speak to through Dr. Phil. At

the Border’s around the corner from me, employees wake you if they find

you asleep in one of those oversized chairs tucked into bends in

bookshelves (I know this first-hand), but nobody will wake you up at

Wendy’s. And on rare occasions, say once a year, I’ve found that a

soft-boiled egg broken over a Wendy’s baked potato makes for an OK

dinner when the refrigerator is empty.

At the end of the day, I guess it’s better than living in one of

those weird ghost towns of foreclosured McMansions. You can’t win an

iPod there. • 10 December 2008