A note: I submitted this a while back to Taco Bell Quarterly, a fast food fanzine and if I bounced back from being rejected by that then I’m pretty sure I can do anything.
I partially grew up in a Taco Bell. Actually, I was a bit too old to still really be considered “growing up” when our tiny hamlet of Oneonta, New York, finally got a Taco Bell in the 90s, but saying “I became a man in Taco Bell” has other implications I choose not to explore. My best friend, Dan Gomiller, worked at a Taco Bell Express that was inside a gas station owned by influential Oneonta family the Bettiols, eventually working his way up to becoming Assistant Manager. The Taco Bell Express would occasionally be patronized by the Bettiol children, including Carleigh Bettiol, who would later rise to prominence as part of the Broadway cast of Hamilton; our brushes with future fame may have been few and far between, back then, but in the interim, I lived the sweet life, courtesy of Dan’s Taco Bell job.
None of this – because Dan, who had to start working at sixteen to pay rent to his dad, had been a grown-up for years – involved any impropriety on Dan’s part. The statute of limitations would have more than passed by now but, as it turns out, Dan was a veritable angel – he wouldn’t even fork over leftovers they were legally required to trash. The sweet life did involve, however, breaking the Taco Bell menu with the “Special Burrito.” Special because, of course, this was off-menu. There is zero doubt in my mind that there were people in Los Angeles my age at the time who were debauching themselves and getting free hundred-thousand-dollar items because of who they knew, but getting no greater thrill than I was when Dan, as my brain pictures it, took off his Taco Bell visor, looked me dead in the eyes and said, “It’s time.”
He would then step to the other side of the counter and place that oh, so heavenly order: two scoops of chicken, rice, two squirts of nacho cheese, two squirts of sour cream, lettuce, tomato and three-cheese blend. It was, as Dan reminds me, a “very gushy burrito.” Well, let’s just say that it had competition, in the gushing department. Emotionally, I mean. I couldn’t stop thinking about this burrito, or talking about it when Dan and I were hanging out, not at Taco Bell. Thinking about it now, as a years-long vegetarian, my hippocampus is nonetheless aflame with the undying need to shove that delicious burrito in my face. I often have difficulty sitting still, or appreciating what’s in front of me, but my memories surrounding this burrito are nothing but in-the-moment happiness. Sitting down across from Dan, us each with our Special Burrito, life felt absolutely fucking in place.
And we both needed it. By the time Dan was Assistant Manager, I was closing out my teens and Dan had just turned twenty. It was 1999, and my parents would soon divorce and Dan would much sooner be living on his own. We were fortunate to have one another as friends, but we were still where a lot of people are at that age: not quite lost, not quite sure what the path is. Little moments – like eating a goddamned custom-made chicken burrito at a Taco Bell Express, were things you could count on. Consistency – especially when it came from your best friend or the people he trained like a damn pro, was essential, and Taco Bell was the place to get it.
Dan and I would then spend part of the evening walking off the calories, back to his Dad’s house, or eventually Dan’s first apartment, usually quoting Monty Python sketches to each other on the way, or planning out our future in entertainment as we talked about our banal, cold, damp, Upstate New York existences. Back at Dan’s, he’d play a video game and I’d use his computer to edit or write or basically just have access to high speed internet. I’d usually fall asleep watching Dan play video games, or we’d fall asleep watching TV, like Sifl ‘N’ Olly, or NewsRadio. NewsRadio gave me weekly access to my personal god, Phil Hartman (even if I couldn’t be sure what weeknight to find him there), and the world had just lost him the year before. Still, I remained dedicated to the show, even during its tense, weird, and often underrated fifth and final season.
On the other side of the country, at that exact moment, as though I were just describing a specific day and time, sat Paul Simms, in his car. He was coming off the heels of season four of NewsRadio and was, understandably, I think, involved in another project that took up most of his creative faculties. His new pilot, Overseas, starred NewsRadio’s Joe Rogan and involved a seemingly massive set for a three-camera sitcom, including an indoor lake. The show was set in a fictional foreign land where Rogan’s character, Jack, works in agricultural technology and gets in over his head due to his act-first-think-later personality. It was a huge undertaking. Along for some of the ride was author David Wild, writing a book about that year’s pilot season, where TV creators compete for the attentions of TV sellers and buyers.
The book, entitled “Showrunners,” would be released in October of 1999, giving people with no clue what the pilot season or entertainment business are like a strong glimpse into the sheer anxiety-sponge you have to be to even attempt to get a TV show made. No stranger to wringing out that sponge, in front of journalists or not, Paul Simms made it clear he was a man possessed. This should be no surprise, as I’ve been told his office at whichever studio NewsRadio was being shot at at the time would fairly double as his residence when things got crazy.
Knee-deep in “Overseas,” hands predominantly off of NewsRadio, Simms was, I think, a man in need of consistency. If he weren’t, David Wild wouldn’t have made it a point to keep bringing up how often Paul found himself at Taco Bell to sustain himself. Seriously, it comes up a lot in this book, and this guy has to lay the groundwork of a tragic loss of a friend and co-star, the anxious writing against the expectations of everyone in charge of the guillotine, and how far into the process “Overseas” gets before becoming the lowest-rated pilot in NBC history, and still, he doesn’t skimp on the gastronomy – Taco Bell was that important to the story he wanted to tell.
Not important enough, though, to tell us exactly what Paul was eating on these seemingly endless trips sort of south of the sort-of-border. This kind of information, while it might mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, does give you a tiny glimpse into how a moment, or a period of time, felt. I only told you all the super-secret ingredients to my holy burrito so that you could be there with me, even if you’ll never quite understand what growing up with me was like. It’s like when a docent lets you touch something in a museum – maybe Thomas Edison held this wrench, maybe not, but the mind makes up stories and connections of a mythical transference of energy and unspoken information. The idea that he could have had his hands on the wrench gives you a spark of something that at least gives you a moment of appreciation, if nothing else, even if the constant touching and rubbing has ironically polished the relic to a like-new finish.
I hadn’t yet booked Paul Simms on my podcast about NewsRadio when I read through (the Simms parts of) “Showrunners,” but for some reason I thought I’d ask him anyway, to sate my curiosity: I needed to know his regular Taco Bell meal. On August 12, 2017, I got an unexpected spike of serotonin when I saw that Paul Simms had responded to my tweet (because, yes, making this request on a public forum did feel less creepy) and, as plainly as Dan had relayed the Special Burrito’s component ingredients to me when I asked mere hours ago, so did Simms respond as to his go-to: “Bean and cheese burrito, Crunchy Taco Supreme, large Sierra Mist with extra ice.”
You can probably guess where this is going. I touched the wrench. I immediately went out and got that exact same meal (sans beef), something that normally would’ve caused me to question why I live my life the way I do. Instead, on that day, I took a moment. I’ve been given a lot of great opportunities in my life, and too often I take them, then let them pass by, not appreciating them as they happen. This time, because I knew my hero had once eaten this exact same meal, I was there, in some small way. I’ll never know what it was like to be on the set of NewsRadio, but I continue to try and suss out small sparks of information that give me the ingredients to that otherwise unattainable, unique life experience.
Paul later kindly sat down with my podcast co-hosts and I for three hours to talk about NewsRadio. He answered any and all questions we had about the show – nothing was off the table. Neither he nor I ever brought up the Taco Bell tweets. Good thing, too. I was so busy living in the moment for once that I would’ve been marinating in that shame for the rest of it, and crying every time I saw a chalupa.
