Of Madness, In the Mouth. Or, the KFC Double-Down Sandwich: A Review.

I am writing this under an appreciable intestinal strain, since by tonight I shall dine no more. Penniless, at the end of my supply of the grease which alone makes life digestible, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this drive-through window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to calories that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realize, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

Before Colonel Sanders’s marketing team used the term to describe a pair of fried chicken fillets compressing two strips of bacon, a slab of Monterey jack cheese, and some sinister mayonnaise-based mystery pudding, “double down” was a process in the game of blackjack that afforded players the opportunity to double the wager on one or, if split, two promising sets of cards. The three implications for naming a breadless sandwich “Double Down” are that: A) the ingredients without bread seem safe enough on their own to risk ingesting without surrendering too enormous an advantage to the “house”; B) there is a stronger possibility of enormous fortune in eating this breadless chicken sandwich as opposed to other breaded chicken sandwiches; and C) it is now appropriate to name a product with a verb.

Those odds delighted an undiscovered curiosity in me, conjured from some morbid recess in the thickest shadows of my heart, to such a point that I put on pants, and drove six miles northward the barren California highway to its baking exit on 24 th street in Paso Robles. The heat burnt all life away from a dry river until the concrete highways and overpasses and the dense parades of iron trucks on black rubber wheels seemed more at nature here than the squinting and sweating men by whose mortal hands such monoliths found craft. I couldn’t know if my steering wheel was slick from a humid frustration, my trembling tequila withdrawals, or the nervous anticipation of my gambit into the greasy unknown. At the exit, a young man with a tangled blonde beard stood on the curb of the left-hand lane and thrust a cardboard sign at my window. My eyes darted from his, I could only manage a glimpse of the words “RANDOM ACTS OF KINDESS [sic]” before the rest of his hastily scrawled message revolted from legibility in ever-shrinking marks squeezed into ever-shrinking cardboard space. I had precious little time for “kindess,” precious little time not to gamble against a Confederate with my guts and my sanity.

The combination Kentucky Fried Chicken and A&W Classic American Hamburgers franchise was as I left it five years prior: plastic black curtains drawn to excise daylight from its dusty innards, the tables absconded by all but a pulsing sheen left by foul dinners from antiquity. Searching the menus for my quarry proved vain and I thought my journey’s purpose lost until I spotted a thick plastic advertisement, vague and almost camouflaged upon on the tile counter by either the shame or dread of its progenitors. It was the grim visage of a sandwich forged entirely of processed meat, with promise of potato wedges or French fries at locations wont of potato wedges, and a soda for six dollars and ninety nine cents, not including sales tax.

The Negro behind the counter intuited my familiar smile at the discovery of the placard and scowled. “What I can get for you?” he asked.

“I’d like the Double Down sandwich,” I replied. “And not just the sandwich but the entire meal.”

The Negro vaulted his hopeless exasperation for our doomed humanity by throwing his arms up toward the heavens and resigning himself to the break room with a sigh. His Mexican companion, Moises, however, took no compunction with exchanging my money for my life. “That’ll be $7.81,” he said. “Out of ten,” and folded my offerings into a machine.

The Negro returned with the quaking concern of the horrified in his voice. “We’re out of potato wedges! Are French fries alright?”

“French fries are fine,” I replied. I was too far, too close now to turn back – the secret I sought was of the sandwich itself, and the trivial detail of its true potato side dish could be uncovered later.

Moises performed the ritual out of sight, and its dark processes, the flurry of his hands across ingredients and wiping of sweat from his brow with a forearm, had to be discerned beyond the stainless steel edges of a cavernous food warmer. When he had completed all the stages of his grim task, an Asian woman, between instructions toward invisible forces, her face and belt weighted by the coils and protrusions of a microphone headpiece and radio receiver, stowed an unassuming box into a brown bag, then froze in her tracks.

“Would you like ketchup with… this?” she managed to speak through halting whispers.

“Yes,” I said. “Lots.”

She threw a handful of ketchup packets into the bag, pinching its edges with as little of her fingers as possible, carrying the unlabeled object of her transport as far from her body and any conceivable harm as her arms could allow.

I filled my cup with as much Mountain Dew as my return journey might necessitate and took my leave of that place. The fates of the crew of the combination Kentucky Fried Chicken and A&W Classic American Hamburgers franchise exist now only as rumors.

The lure of the sandwich and its secrets, now only a paper bag away from my senses, waited no further than the driver’s seat of my vehicle. I untangled the box from a conflated mass of French fry and ketchup packet. The Colonel’s smirking vision on the face of the small box was the last barrier in my path. I opened the box and beheld the Double Down.

It was smaller than speculated in the fever dreams of prophecy, a humble realization of its symbols, but my senses were drowned in a cold fear upon its true presence. The texture of the fried fillets and oozing mayonnaise-base had been merely peripheral in their forewarning, but now they engulfed my focus and all that was thought to be sun and earth and reality receded into the blackness of a tunnel pinpointing a distant and certain end.

I bit what I could chew and the salt shriveled my tongue like a slug. Chicken and bacon coiled between my teeth as the oily tendrils of a madness that cannot be comprehended or flossed. I was helpless to prevent a second or third bite and no matter how profound my revulsion I could no more command my own body than rearrange a tide. A legion of voices, tangible only to the edges of my consciousness, began chanting in my ear, in tongues hoarse and wicked, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” and with each bite a new and more horrid legion joined them.

Sounding a desperate dirge like an animal I managed to wrest the thing from my mouth and restore it to its container, setting it to the passenger seat. I peeled out of the combination Kentucky Fried Chicken and A&W Classic American Hamburgers franchise, desperate for any lesser level of damnation.

I could find no respite in any corner or gutter of the barren city. The Double Down played my bones like a marionette and would not tolerate banishment to any public trash can or recycling bin. Almost consigned to this terror alone, I rounded a corner at my vehicle’s wildest threshold and nearly fell upon the young transient as he neared the crosswalk.

His cardboard sign was set at his side, his stride and his gaze were despondent, but when I stopped my vehicle in his path and levered my window into its grave he lit up with a renewed hope.

“Boy!” I cried. “Are the pangs of starvation yet your companion?!”

“Yes, yes, they are!” he responded.

“Then I think we can make a mutual solution of each other!” I said. “Hold out your hands and hunger no further!”

He obeyed without hesitation, but the feeble brightness in his eyes spread to an ever-increasingly stupefied horror as I held out the Double-Down in two open palms. The fillets glistened, the mayonnaise oozed, the bacon dangled in the suddenly vicious breeze. His head shook as violently as his spine could permit and he squeaked through trembling chapped lips, “No,” and then repeated in crying whispers then screams: “No no no NOOO!”

The transient tore his tangled blonde hair from his scalp, seized his face in dirty fingers and his breaths became rapid enough to strangle. He could scarcely fathom what depth in the abyss of human cruelty had unleashed my offering, and with a mad laughing scream he plunged himself into the path of an oncoming semi.

I finished the Double Down, weeping behind double-locked doors and huddled in the corner of my apartment. It’s a little better than a Big Mac. 6/10.