Seven Oaks Magazine.

It was the second time in a matter of days that the East Van intersection of Commercial Drive and Broadway had been the scene of a short exchange about the nature of the bourgeois family in which I was involved. Earlier in the week, anti-choice picketers hoisting placards gaily festooned with images of the Holocaust (sickly bemoaning the “Changing Face of Choice”) had feigned surprised bewilderment as my friend and I had retorted with middle fingers from our passing car. The fact of our motorization set us up for the barbs of Commercial Drive hippy indignation – “You support women’s rights while burning fossil fuels? How ironic.” – from which we were thankfully spared.

And now, just fifteen meters from where perhaps the worst of all post-modern analogies was drawn – Remember the forced labour of the zygotes? Remember how they made lampshades and soap from the unborn? – I sat with the two dear friends with whom I am couch-surfing, deconstructing the nuclear-family structure recently rediscovered by marketing-types working for A&W in the Mama Burger, the Teen Burger, the Baby Burger. Sandwiches that, just recently, were known as “Double Burgers” and “Triple Burgers” (ambivalently referring to either patty-number or else the nature of the bypass surgery that their consumption might warrant) have been re-Christened “Papa Burgers” and “Grandpa Burgers.” And given the contemporary furor around the nature of the family, I think that “re-Christened” is certainly the appropriate term.

The rediscovery of A&W’s traditional burger names is part of the company’s efforts to re-brand in line with a new spirit of nostalgianna – a term waiting to be coined, I think, in reference to the carefully-constructed industry devoted to the creation of fuzzy feelings and fake memories. Their television spots are now paeans to the era of the car-hops, marking perhaps the first time that a company has built an ad campaign highlighting a service that they no longer offer (as my teenage cousin Alex lucidly pointed out in protest).

This celebration of the past has swept the hamburger dealers right down to the throwaway tray-liners; mine captured my imagination to such a degree that I folded it up, grease spots and all, and put it in my pocket for safe-keeping. It featured the “handwritten” story of “Jim Holmes,” a marketing composite looking back fondly on “this one Saturday night cruisin’ the ‘Dub in Winnipeg ” with a “tricked out car with red flames painted on the side” that he had taken “out of the garage without permission. According to Dad, I’m still grounded,” he concludes wistfully, “And I’m 55.”

What really piqued my interest, though, was the small invitation extended by the company at the bottom of the place-mat: “We’d love you to share your A&W memories and pictures with us. E-mail us at memories@aw.ca …” See, I learned late in life, while dating a young woman from west of Granville street that there are two kinds of high schools in the Lower Mainland: Ones where the kids ask each other “Where are you going over the break?” and ones where the kids ask each other “Where are you working over the break?” I went to one of the latter, and at fifteen years of age, in the fall of 1995, I got my first non-paper route job at the A&W in the Metrotown Centre food court, just in time for the Christmas rush. Years later Alexander’s older sister, my cousin Samantha, got her first job at the A&W next to Coquitlam Centre. So here’s the text of the e-mail that I’m sending to memories@aw.ca:

When I think back on A&W, there are nearly as many memories in my heart as there are potentially deadly murmurs. It’s hard to choose my favourite from amongst the veritable pastiche of Kevin Arnold-esque scrapbook remembrances: The cruelty of my supervisors; the angry faces of the customers lucky enough to have noticed the small patches of mold on their only half-eaten sandwiches; the nauseating, overpowering bad-onion smell of the fridge; wiping the excess root beer off the sides of paper cups with the same rags used to clean the food chutes with chemicals at the end of each shift; the open smoking of cigarettes next to the food preparation; the sick stench that hung like a vengeful spirit to the puffy, Charlottetown Hornets Starter Jacket that was the pride and joy of my fifteen-year-old life.

But I do have two especially important A&W memories that I’d like to share.

Both my cousin Samantha and I worked our first jobs at A&W and, to be expected, we worked them for minimum wage. Despite this confluence in life experience, Samantha and I are separated in age by a five-year gulf that led to my only very recently stopping referring to her as my “little cousin.” Given that she started working years after me, and given that her duties included – unlike mine – the cleaning of the bathroom, and the fishing out of used syringes therein, one could expect a difference in the rates of our minimal compensation. There was.

In 1995, I slaved under the Root Bear for $6.25 an hour. Years later, in 2002-2003, after the turn of the much-vaunted millenium and the passing of the less-vaunted B.C. Liberal training wage, Samantha got $6. Finding out that, despite the increase in cost-of-living and the onset of the much-heralded “New Era,” Sammy would be working a harder job for $0.25 an hour less even on paper is truly one of my most salient A&W memories.

The other was finding out that John Nuraney, the Liberal MLA for the Burnaby riding in which I spent my adolescent years, was the owner of five A&Ws. I remember, upon reading this – and thinking of Sammy and I – lapsing in to an hallucinatory hysteria, seeing, before my eyes, the spirit of Karl Marx, the man who had written the thundering words of the Communist Manifesto “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”, outlining that the government – rather than being a neutral arbiter or even bulky ally of the workingman – acted in its own business interests. Looking at me, and stroking his famous beard, Marx finally quipped, with reference to Nuraney, and my working history: “The whole thing’s sort of lacking in subtlety, no?”