In-N-Out

He's like ":)" and his colon is like ":(".

I leave Los Angeles for Oregon on Tuesday morning. Accordingly, I’ve been trying to pack all the Southern California that I can into these last few days so that I have some mementos when I return to far superior state to the North. Accordingly, in the past few days I’ve bought vodka at an Albertson’s, spent hours driving around with the air conditioning on at full blast, and had multiple animated conversations with people about traffic.*

*Everywhere else, people talk about the weather, but since Los Angeles doesn’t have weather in the conventional sense, people talk at great length about traffic. “God, I tell you what, the 101 was ten different kinds of fucked up today – it took me like 20 minutes to go two miles! But then as soon as I got on the 405 it was totally clear and easy for a change, right up until about a mile before the off ramp for the 90, when it got fucked up again. Hell of crazy, dogg!”

More than anything else, though, I’ve been partaking of a good amount of In-N-Out. I’m hoping to one day have ‘enough’ In-N-Out, but I get the idea that In-N-Out Burger, like money and Firefly, is something you can never quite get enough of.

You have to admire the relatively large balls it takes for In-N-Out, in an era where the McDonald’s menu features coffee and frappes and Jack In The Box serves quesadillas, to continue to diligently serve only three things – burgers, fries, and shakes, of which there are only three flavors. There’s never been a chicken sandwich, or a special peppermint shake at Christmas – hell, they don’t even put bacon on their burgers, which is really saying something in this day and age when bacon has started showing up in mayonnaise, chocolate ice cream, and probably income tax returns.

They don’t even do sizes. On one of my first trips to In-N-Out down here I asked the girl taking my order for a burger and a small side of fries, to which she shifted her weight nervously and said, “Sir, uh… We don’t have sizes.”

Idiot. I could hear her thinking. You can either eat fries or you can not eat fries. Make up your mind. You can’t split the difference.

In-N-Out has been serving the exact same food for something like half a century with virtually no changes. Since when has staying firmly rooted in the past like this ever actually worked out well for anyone? As we all remember from Drumline, the moral parable for our times, that one marching band didn’t play hip hop music like all the other bands, preferring to stick to songs from its heydey in the 1970s, but then thanks to Nick Cannon they started playing modern music and won the competition, and everybody learns a valuable lesson about teamwork.

The generally held idea is that if you want to be successful you need to evolve and adapt, but on any given night there’s a line of cars around the block at In-N-Out, the evolutionary dead end, while McDonald’s is, as ever, filled with worn out parents too tired to resist their children’s demands any longer.*

*Given that In-N-Out prints Bible verses on their cups and bags, maybe they’re not big fans of evolution in the first place.

People who live in an In-N-Out state don’t know how good they have it, and I’ve seen conversations like this happen many a time at work:

“Hey, what did you do for lunch?”
“I went to In-N-Out.”
“Oh. Hey, how about that traffic, huh?”

If an Oregonian were part of the conversation, it would look more like this:

“Hey, what did you do for lunch?”
“I went to In-N-Out.”
“[Eyes pop out of head, jaw inexplicably lengthens and crashes onto the floor, person levitates and begins hitting self in head with frying pan. For reference, see all cartoons ever.]”

To Oregonians, saying you had In-N-Out for lunch is a lot like saying that you boned Megan Fox for lunch, or beat Indiana Jones at air hockey for lunch. No longer is it small talk; it’s you intricately describing a religious experience. Hell, even after being down here for two months I still get the urge to elbow the guy next to me in line at In-N-Out and go, “Hey! Do you see this shit? In-N-Out Burger, man! It’s really happening!”

Of course, nobody here cares, because nobody here knows the pain of watching In-N-Out expand to Utah and Texas while casually snubbing their home state. It’s like the prettiest girl at the dance only wants to dance with the insensitive and morbidly obese kids.

A lot of my friends argue that Burgerville, the Pacific Northwest only fast food chain with the menu full of seasonal all natural ingredients, trumps In-N-Out. While I love Burgerville, I’m reluctant to say that it’s better. Of course, that may well just be because I’ve been going to Burgerville my whole life – stopping at the Burgerville in Centralia on family road trips to Northern Washington or having celebratory onion rings after the Solo and Ensemble competition in Monmouth. The food it just as good, but it doesn’t have that sultry, forbidden allure of In-N-Out.*

*Oh, Jesus, I just sexualized fast food. This is a new low.

Maybe California people go to Burgerville and feel the urge to elbow strangers and say, “Look at us, man! Fucking Burgerville!” On second thought, they probably don’t – they’re too busy talking about how smooth traffic was on I-5.

Truman Capps found it a lot easier to openly mock California when he didn’t live there also.