Don't feel so all alone, it happens to alot of people after they eat at Taco Bell. This toot shall pass!
Wow, the twenty-first century’s version of Ralphie’s Ovaltine Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring.
The song was called "Gone Hollywood" and it was the opening track on the blockbuster album "Breakfast in America."
Lyrics go something like this:
So many creeps in Hollywood
I'm in this dumb hotel
by the Taco Bell
without a hope in hell
I can't believe that I'm still around
So that was my first exposure to Taco Bell. I spent many warm muggy nights that summer listening to that album (I had it on vinyl!) as a 16-year-old kid getting ready to start my senior year in high school and having not yet been to California, it seemed like a heartless place of broken dreams, run-down hotels and these "taco bells" of which I then knew not.
I first went to eat in a Taco Bell sometime in the early 1980s, when I was in the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Pendleton, CA. It was actually my first exposure to "Mexican" food of any kind. Up to that point I had never had a taco before and didn't even know how to pronounce words like enchilada and burrito (which I originally thought was a donkey but later learned that was a burro).
I didn't have too much culture growing up. I came from a strict "meat and potatos" kind of family. Once in a great while, we'd order takeout from some chinese joint down the street and that was super exotic to us. Egg rolls, fried rice, grilled meat on sticks. For us, that was really venturing outside the culinary comfort zone.
However, being in Southern California at last, I was slowly and gradually introduced to genuine, spicy Mexican food and Taco Bell food began to seem bland in comparison. Especially when I started drinking margaritas with 100% agave tequila and Cointreau. They don't serve margaritas at the Taco Bell but if they did, they would probably serve a nasty concoction of cheap tequila and sugary lime-flavored water that would come out of a machine.