No one wants to kill you more than the guy you made. That’s the most common bit of wisdom you’ll hear around the clubhouse. The guy who says it may be playing cards with you. Or he may be changing his socks. But the moment you hear it, you know that your loyalty is being tested, which is very uncomfortable.
I never say it. I just know it. And it never fails to amaze me how true it is. So why state the obvious? You just act on it. If the guy you made is smart enough, he’ll say it to you, and show that he loves you enough to admit it. But if he’s an idiot, and overhears it, he’ll act like he dropped a quarter.
The real advice is: never get made. Make all you want, but let no one make you. It’s the maker, not the made, who decides. That’s why they want to kill you, because they want to have it their way.
Part one, I learned from my mother. I think she saw it in my eyes the first time she beat the shit out of me, something that defined our relationship for a while. The second part came from my Godfather. He told me over a Big Mac, among the first served in the greater Philadelphia area on the day it was introduced in 1967.
We’d driven to Conshohocken with my very beautiful cousin from Modesto, California, who had been sent back east to live with Uncle Joe and Aunt Mary, attend St. Maria Goretti High School for Girls and wear a uniform 2500 miles from home, due to some sexual hi-jinks in that profligate State.
I was determined to seem as cool as anybody from California. We all were, which explained the two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun, with more clothes. I was in an all boys’ school, though I had just given up my uniform. I could wear jeans and a T-shirt because I was up at Central, where all the brainiacs went, which was Uncle Joe’s alma mater. It was public and it was free. We had a cyclotron built by the students in the basement and my Godfather had his name on the Honor Roll and in the trophy case.
I wouldn’t be getting my name writ in either of those places, but all I knew at the time was that if I could be anything like my Godfather, which on this particular evening included a pleasant drive through the leafy suburbs, my first ever trip to McDonalds, and the chance to sit with the most beautiful girl I ever saw, who was even less inclined to cover-up since we were cousins, then I’d be doing all right.
When he told me: never get made, he was referring to the Big Mac. But I apprehended the broader meaning – about which he was not coy. Where’s the joy in it? What of creativity? Who can possibly be interested in eating anything that can be endlessly replicated? he asked. As rhetorical questions go, it went, but I always stuck with my Godfather’s point of view, and it’s served over a million customers.
