Burger King John is dead Dec. 29, 2024

  

Burger King John is dead – I think

How long ago, I don’t know.

My last conversation with him was about a month ago; He was in too big a hurry to get his meal at the nursing home to speak for more than a moment.

From a previous call a month or so previously to that, I learned about his dire circumstances. He and his common-law wife, Elaine, had settled into separate nursing homes after John became too ill to continue caring for her.

She had a debilitating disease that caused her to blow up like a balloon. In the end, she could not leave her bed and John attended to her needs as if a nurse until diabetes caused him to lose one of his legs.

During that conversation, he told me they were outfitting him with an artificial limb, although he also indicated his overall health was failing, forcing him into a less-than-adequate nursing home, while Elaine, a former teacher in Newark, had ended up in an upscale facility elsewhere. The two continued to communicate via cellphone.

I learned of his possible death when I tried to call him just after Christmas and discovered his phone – which he’d had since the mid-1990s – had been discontinued, something he would never do if still alive since it served as his life line to the rest of the world.

I met John in the mid-1980s at a time when I worked at the night baker for the Willowbrook Dunkin, and he worked as the night manager for the Burger King next door.

He was the ultimate procrastinator, and instead of doing his paper work, he paid me visits, sometimes helping me bake odd things such as dinosaur-shaped donuts.

He was a staunch conservative, loved Ronald Reagan and capitalism that often resulted in heated discussions – which we continued for many years afterwards, an odd rivalry . He became something of a touch stone for me during those days when I dated a stripper named Peggy, who was also a conservative who loved Reagan.

The two also had something else in common, addiction to cocaine.

 

In a journal entry from June 11, 1986, I wrote about John:

Burger King John isn’t the first follower I met of the capitalist cult. He is simply the latest in a long line of lonely men, strung out on the free enterprise fad, another person, who if born in my generation, might have been among the countless fringe people caught up with the image of being hip, but instead of wearing sandals, a Nehru shirt and bellbottom jeans, he wears a suit and tie.

But he lacks the harder edge that such a role requires on the extreme left or right, but a particularly needed feature for how he envisions himself.

He looks older than he really is.

He is short (five foot seven), slightly overweight, dressing in grays or black with a thin moustache he thinks makes him look more conservative.

But he is incomplete, not externally, but something inside him, a weakness that has already begun to dent his image. He is an extreme procrastinator when it comes to his responsibilities as a manager.

He spends hours – sometimes five nights a week – hanging out in my store instead of doing what he is supposed to do in his own, spouting on every subject from current events to JRR Tolkien (whom we both love).

He is a romantic, drawn to Hobbits and Goblins in the exact same way 1960s people were. He has it down, too, quoting Middle Earth history better than he could ever quote real history, which makes any conversation with him extremely unreliable.

While he likes to paint himself as to the extreme right, it is largely an act, although there are times when I think he really believes Middle Earth exists somewhere deep in our unconscious minds.

John lacks the ability to delegate authority, which makes him a poor manager, and, in fact, he often seems more sympathetic to people on the other side, such as those more ordinary people who work under him, than he is to management.

He recently adopted a drifter named Bill because Bill reminds him of himself. John lets Bill sleep in his car. There is definitely a homosexual feel to John, though he does not act overtly gay.

He lived alone until lack of finances drove him out of the rooming house where he lived (the landlord overcharged him, John claims).

“I think the man has been stealing my receipts,” John told me, although John’s carelessness in handling paperwork suggests he may have failed to keep track of what he paid in the first place.

This doesn’t stop John from dreaming big. He claims he wants to become president someday, not of Burger King, but of the country. Not right away, but eventually.

During our second marathon conversation, he made it clear he’s willing to wait.

“I’m perfectly willing to work my way up,” he said, though it is unclear whether he meant he’d be willing to start at vice president first or a city clerk.

He isn’t stupid – which is refreshing after all of the duds that fill the mall’s night shift.

John is simply a dreamer. He would make a better hippie than a Donald Trump. But if I dared tell him that, he would laugh in my face.

 

I did not know at the time, but John had already fallen under the spell of cocaine, and had become – like Peggy – an alcoholic as well. He later told me booze and cocaine got together.

“Booze is the clutch that revs up the cocaine engine,” he said.

While I may have learned about his upbringing (and jotted them down in other later journal entries), I can’t recall the details all these years later., although I recall he had a brother somewhere who didn’t like John. What happened to their parents, I don’t’ recall. John was living in his grandmother’s house when I met him, a woman who apparently raised him. He must have graduated high school in order to qualify for a management position at Burger King, though I have yet to find a record of it.

Most likely born in 1961, he was two years younger than Peggy, sharing the 1970s as his formative years, a decade of decadence he could not overcome, yet became a key advisor as to who I might deal with Peggy’s addiction.

The cost of addition was more than his salary could beat and more than once he borrowed money from me and others, violating every conservative premise he breached about, becoming a scofflaw despite his law and order mantra, and later lost his license and insurance due to unpaid tickets. He continued to drive even then, though he used public transportation when he got reassigned from the Burger King in Willowbrook to another Burger King in Elizabeth, In order to reduce the cost of his addiction, he switched from cocaine to crack, yet this did nothing to keep him out of the crosshairs of dealers to whom he owed money. He took to carrying a gun when traveling to Elizabeth through Newark by train.

When the drug dealers found out where he worked, they surrounded the place. I just happened to be there at the time, so, they did not come in guns blazing. But they were patient and eventually, John took money from the company receipts to pay them of, then asked me to give him a personal check to cover it, something I considered, and then refused, knowing it would only feed his habit.

How much worse became clear when he later told me that he copped crack and did it in phone booths and dark alleys. He said he was constantly getting drunk and several times took me to a local bar a block or so from his grandmother’s house, and later asked me to accompany him to McSorley’s in the East Village where he consumed glass after glass of their green beer. On that trip, he tried to cop dope (he said pot but I knew better) in Washington Square Park, asking me to wait on the far side of the park claiming I looked too much like a narc. He took so long, I went looking for him only to find him surrounded by drug dealers who had made him dump the contents of his pockets on a park bench to prove to them he wasn’t a cop.

His whole life took a turn for the better when while driving a car in his hometown, he rearended a car driven by a judge. Instead of throwing John in nail, the judge got him into a drunk treatment program, found him a sponsor for a 12-step program, and became a reference for a job at a Bergen County sewerage treatment facility – to which John had to bicycle daily.

Despite our political differences, John and I became very close, so close, I asked him to serve as best man at my second wedding, where he got upset about my getting married wearing a pair of sneakers and offered to give me his show. At the reception, he kept hitting on my new bride’s therapist.

A short time later, he met Elaine, and they moved in together in an apartment in Bellville. When I started working at a newspaper in Secaucus, I used him for background whenever I wrote about the sewerage authority there.

His grandmother lived long enough to see John move in with Elaine. But as with most deaths, there was a squabble over the inheritance between him and his brother including ownership of her home, which they eventually sold off and split the profit.

But when he fell back into addiction, he squandered his share, pretending to still be on the wagon, even when he was not.

He had moved onto a new job with another sewerage authority in West Jersey, a job he eventually lost due to his habit.

He never fully recovered. When he could not afford his drug of choice, he sometimes went to the local supermarket to inhale fumes from whip cream cans. He frequently sniffed glue and other questionable activities, drinking to even more excess.

He also came up with a number of get rich quick schemes, none of which ever panned out, and he resorted to a number of odd jobs. We hired him to paint the interior of our house when we bought it in 1998.

After this, we heard from him infrequently, and generally when he had come up with a new scheme to propose.

By this time, he and Elaine had moved into new digs in Totowa where he became a night time character, wandering around at odd hours, one very familiar to the local police. In one call, he tried to explain why he had wandered into the kitchen of a restaurant after hours while wearing a pair of rubber gloves.

While he still professed to be a conservative, John fully embraced the social welfare system, which helped pay his rent and medical bills. By this time, Elaine’s medical condition had deteriorated to a point where she could not get out of bed, and he served as nurse and guardian, until his own illness crippled him and each ended up in a different nursing home, from which he would call me from time to time.

The loss of his phone makes me believe his condition had worsened, even if I have yet to find an obit about him. There may never be one, since no one is left to write one for him. He will likely wind up buried in pauper’s grave, perhaps sharing his grandmothers, which hope to eventually find and I can properly mourn him.

 

 

email to Al Sullivan