Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,30

of the store with his coworkers, who were other boys his age. Khan finished high school and got the equivalent of an associate’s degree. He ended up in the capital, where, after being rejected from a college, he saw a listing for a coveted job at the US Embassy Club as a waiter and a bartender. Daunted by the long line of fellow applicants, Khan dramatically stretched out of his chair across the desk of his interviewer and said from close up, “I need this job so much I can’t afford to miss a single word.” The gambit worked and he was hired.

The grounds of the embassy were a berth through which Khan saw the West, learned its diplomatic protocols, and, for eight years, pondered his American Dream. Within a country whose political system was being engulfed by a rigid religious wave, the club was also a cultural oasis. After alcohol was banned in 1977, the US Embassy Club became one of the few gathering places in Pakistan where one could have a drink. The dynamic Khan was at the center of the hospitality, eventually rising to manager. Less than three weeks after Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran, igniting the infamous hostage crisis in 1979, the American embassy in Islamabad was torched. The club moved to a large residence and carried on; Khan remained charismatic and determined. He befriended diplomats, secured the favor of a green card, and eventually flew to America.

The first place Khan walked into for a job in the United States was a Church’s district office, where he applied for a manager position. He was immediately rejected. Apparently, references and several years of experience from an embassy club in Pakistan had failed to impress the area manager of a fried-chicken chain in 1980s California. “At the door I stopped at the exit and I said, ‘Today is my first day in the United States. Could you kindly tell me where I screwed up so I can prepare for my next job interview?’ He said, ‘Get the fuck outta here, I don’t have the time.’” The manager then tapped his assistant to show Khan out. As he left, Khan told himself, “This is the company I’m going to work for and I’m going to teach them civility.”

He changed out of his dress clothes, threw on a pair of jeans, and headed to a Church’s store, where he applied for a job as a crew member. They started him as a dishwasher at $3.25 an hour. He told himself, “I’ll try because I believe that it’s not going to take me very long once I get into any system.” A few weeks later, his manager pulled him aside and promoted him. Within three months, Khan was a store manager. “I went from there to area manager, marketing manager, marketing director, vice president of operations, chief operating officer,” he added, before founding his own company and securing his empire with the purchase of ninety-seven Church’s outlets.

But before all that, he did continue to encounter that old manager who had turned him away on his first day in the States. “He was my boss,” Khan explains. “They put me as a manager under him. I did really well under him and then kept on working, kept on working. Now I’m in the office with him, now I’m assisting him. Every Tuesday, he used to meet his boss and so I used to make all of his reports. I said, ‘Sir, I have two hours in my time, is there anything I can do for you?’ He used to give me all of his dirty work. I said, ‘Fine.’ I was learning so I did it really well, and each time he would get stuck on a follow-up question he can’t answer because I’m the one who’s building [the reports]. One day his boss got upset and he said, ‘Might as well call Aslam and give him the job because each time I ask you something, you call him.’ So I got the job and became his boss. Then every morning he used to pass my office to go to his office and he said, ‘Good morning, sir.’ I said, ‘Get the fuck outta here!’”

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Not far from where Khan lived when he first arrived in the States stands the world’s oldest-operating McDonald’s, in Downey, California. This relic of the drive-in era is just down the road from the birthplace of the Apollo program, which blasted man to