Tempe, Ariz.
Today we visit a greasy diner in this land that scenery forgot, a restaurant called the Heart Attack Grill with a menu of huge oil-dripping cheeseburgers, beer, French fries cooked in pure lard and, apparently for dessert, cigarettes.
The food is served by young women wearing naughty, unbelievably short nurse’s uniforms. Although, as the Arizona attorney general’s office pointed out in a strongly worded legal document, these women are not, in any accepted definition of the term, actual nurses.
From the document sent to the diner’s owner: “In Arizona Statute A.R.S. 32-1636, only a person who holds a valid and current license to practice professional nursing in this State pursuant to 32-1636 may use the title ‘Nurse.”‘
Which raises the obvious question: Can a person legally practice amateur nursing?
Anyway, even without the legal warning, you might suspect the waitresses aren’t actual nurses when you slip through the diner door in the mini-mall and notice that one of them has more tattoos than Mike Tyson and another has what appears to be a 5-inch rivet through her nose.
And despite the urge to make jokes, we will in this story conduct a mature and responsible discourse about the hamburger stand and its scantily clad legally not-nurses. Therefore we will not, under any circumstances, use words such as “buns.”
Oops.
Let’s meet the burgers. The Single Bypass Burger is one patty with a slab of cheese and a couple strips of bacon. Not the healthiest of lunches, but it probably won’t kill you. Not right away.
The Quadruple Bypass Burger, though, just might.
Just go easy on ketchup
Standing 10 inches tall, the aorta’s worst nightmare is made of four greasy half-pound beef patties, four slabs of cheese and 12 strips of thick bacon. It comes with fries cooked in lard and should also come with a paramedic who starts beating on your chest midway through the meal.
The Quadruple Bypass contains 8,000 calories. The fries have about 4,000 calories.
“I had a guy,” said fake nurse Megan, “who got the quad with fries and then he got a Diet Coke.”
Megan, who is 20 and came to this area a few months ago from a tiny Arizona town, laughed so hard you could almost see the inspirational words tattooed on the inside of her bottom lip.
Huh?
“It says, ‘Let it go!”‘ said Megan the not-a-nurse waitress, who was crouched behind the counter now, showing a customer the tattoo by pulling her bottom lip down to reveal the words.
Even if you didn’t want to, you just had to look.
But the words didn’t say “Let it go!” The letters, well, they didn’t appear to spell out anything.
“They’re tattooed backward, so I can pull down my lip and read it in the mirror,” Megan explained, pulling the lip down with the thumbs and index fingers of both hands, which made her a little hard to understand.
“I stand in front of the mirror and do that every morning.”
OK then.
Nursing a bit of a grudge
The Heart Attack Grill, which cranks out about 150 burgers a day according to manager Dave Nichols, opened last year and was immediately attacked by the Arizona Board of Nursing and the Center for Nursing Advocacy. The complaints were complex and lengthy, but basically involved those darn uniforms.
Facing legal action in the wake of the warning letter from the attorney general’s office, diner owner Jon Basso relented. On the door and on the diner’s website is this disclaimer: “The use of the word ‘nurse’ is only intended as a parody. None of the women have any medical training nor do they attempt to provide any real medical services.”
The posted disclaimer is so funny it nearly made a customer last week blow a handful of lard-fries out his nose.
“Gee,” said trucker Bob Thompsen of Dallas, who said he visits about once a month. “I thought they were real nurses. How disappointing.”
Not-a-nurse Megan and her recent diner work partner Athena, 24, each take home about $100 in tips for a four-hour shift. That’s $25 an hour.
According to salary.com, the average pay for a registered nurse in an intensive- care unit in an American hospital is about $30 an hour.
You could make a joke about that. But it’s probably best – and here we paraphrase Megan’s bottom lip in a mirror – to just let it go.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
