It was a little before 1 a.m. and Luca Opperman was in his car in the In-N-Out Burger drive-through with his girlfriend, Haley Williams.
This was in Lake Elsinore, a city outside Los Angeles that looks a lot like other parts of the Inland Empire, if maybe a little bleak. This was the In-N-Out near the Walmart, not the other one. Everything was normal. Until it wasn’t.
They were sitting in the car — a Toyota Avalon roughly as old as Luca, a million miles on it, paint peeling off the hood. But inside the restaurant, something weird was happening.
A woman was in there screaming and bashing the counter with a tree branch. Luca, 20, didn’t know what had set her off or whether she or the workers were OK, but they were running for cover in their little red and white outfits.
“Don’t do it,” Haley told Luca. She knew what he was thinking.
“Don’t!”
But then he was out of the car, and up through the sliver of a drive-through window.
“Whoa!” said Pamela Alvarado, the woman behind them in the drive-through. She couldn’t believe that someone could shoot through a window that fast. She immediately thought of a scene in the Jackie Chan movie “Rush Hour,” where Chan slides through the impossibly small slot that bank tellers use to hand their customers cash.
Haley and Pamela squinted to see what Luca had grabbed off the counter to confront the woman.
It was a spatula.
***
When she was pregnant with Luca two decades ago, Lize Willers sensed that this would be an unusually active child.
There were the kung fu moves that her son seemed to practice, in utero, against her belly.
“You see these feet come out. You see these little elbows.”
He started zooming around on scooters when he was 3. By the time he was 11, Luca had already picked up sponsorship for the scooter tricks he had mastered.
His parents let him run wild. Some mornings, when he was a boy, Luca would greet his mother in her second-floor bedroom by running past her bed and jumping off the balcony, into the void, then landing on the lawn one story below.
He managed to do these jumps without breaking bones. His friends called him marshmallow because he was so elastic. But also — OK, mostly — because he was pretty chubby.
Luca played rugby, trained in taekwondo, constantly climbed trees and excelled at parkour, the extreme sport that involves using perfectly ordinary urban fixtures like benches, staircase railings and rooftops and perilously launching your body across them instead of walking down the sidewalk in the normal way.
He deployed his skills at all hours and in unusual places.
“Did he tell you the story where he flipped over Hunter Biden?” his mother asked.
He had not, in fact, told me the story where he flipped over Hunter Biden.
***
The kitchen was completely empty except for Luca and the lady. They circled each other like wrestlers in a ring. Each time the woman smashed the countertops it sounded like cymbals smashing.
There are a lot of good weapons in a fast food kitchen. Chef’s knives, grill scrapers, fryer baskets.
The spatula has a limited history as a weapon. In the very first episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” the titular hero uses a “hydrodynamic spatula with port and starboard attachments and turbo drive” to fend off a swarm of anchovies. But it is not an obvious choice.
So why did Luca grab the spatula?
He wasn’t sure. It’s a slapstick weapon if ever there was one. Crap.
Too late. He was in too deep. An angry woman swinging a tree branch was headed right for him. So the spatula it was.
The In-N-Out cooking staff had bolted so fast that there were burgers still sizzling on the griddle.
To understand the moment better, it might be useful to point out that the Inland Empire is the cradle of American fast food. The original McDonald’s is only an hour’s drive away. And these sterile, neon-lit places are accustomed to a level of chaos.
In the 1993 movie “Falling Down,” the world bore down against the character played by Michael Douglas. His car’s air conditioning fails, there’s terrible traffic — and the fast-food restaurant where he wants to order breakfast has just switched to lunch. He rampages across Los Angeles.
So while there was no way of knowing in that moment what might have prompted the woman to begin smashing up an In-N-Out after midnight on a weekday … it happens.
When they had arrived at the drive-through, Luca had ordered two burgers with grilled onions, spread and pickles, and animal-style fries, no cheese.
Haley had ordered a cheeseburger with chopped chilies and a side of fries. They had also asked for a cup of pickles as a sort of appetizer.
The pickles were the only part of the order that had been delivered before the commotion. So while her boyfriend was bobbing and weaving and waving the spatula, Haley was watching from the car, eating pickles.
***
Along the sun-drenched coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, there’s a subset of kids like Luca. They meet at trampoline gyms and find cliffs and bridges to somersault from. They call themselves flippers.
One of Luca’s friends lives in a van with solar panels that keep the air conditioning going. Another ditched a plan to attend law school to compete in world championships of freestyle trampolining. They travel great distances to find the best cliffs. Ali-Sina Khashimi, who works for AAA doing roadside assistance, has been to the North Shore of Oahu a couple of times with Luca.
Ali, as his friends call him, was sitting at home one morning when he saw a video on his social media feed of someone in an In-N-Out holding a spatula and squaring off against a lady holding a stick. He called Luca.
“I was laughing my ass off,” Ali said. “First Hunter Biden and now this.”
***
OK, the Hunter Biden thing.
In April, Luca and his younger brother, Alec, went to a show in San Diego put on by the journalist and documentary filmmaker Andrew Callaghan.
Callaghan’s events typically feature screenings, talent shows and a special guest. Hunter Biden was the guest.
During the talent show portion, a woman got strong applause for tying her shoelaces really fast. Then Luca stepped up.
“What’s your talent today, man?” Callaghan asked.
“I do flips.”
Someone in the audience laughed mockingly. “He does flips.”
Luca did a first round of flips across the stage, and his phone popped out of his pocket midair and hit him in the head. Awkward.
The audience gave him lukewarm cheers and applause. When Callaghan asked him to do another round, Luca leaned into the microphone.
“Can I flip over Hunter Biden?”
The crowd went wild, standing up from their seats and egging on Biden to come center stage.
Luca took a running start and launched over the former president’s son, flipping sideways.
The hundreds of people in attendance descended into pandemonium. Hunter Biden lifted his arms in the air and high-fived Luca.
When the show was over, Luca typed out an Instagram post with a clip. “Literally just sideflipped Hunter Biden.”
“Exactly what I expected you to be doing,” a friend responded in the comments.
***
The lady was still swinging the stick. Luca didn’t know what had set her off. It also wasn’t clear where she got the branch — the trees outside the In-N-Out there are all palms.
Haley was getting worried that her boyfriend was going to get smacked. Also she was running out of pickles.
Luca was still wielding his spatula, grease glinting on the edges of his meat-flecked, makeshift broadsword.
Then the woman turned around and started yelling at a couple of customers watching the standoff. Luca saw that distraction as his opportunity to strike.
He took a tilted stance like a defensive end before the snap, and then bolted toward her.
Lowering his shoulder, he rammed into her midsection. She fell to the ground and dropped the branch.
A shoulder check, Luca called it. He said it was inspired by his days playing rugby.
Pamela, in the car behind them, was relieved to see that the woman was not hurt, just disarmed.
The spatula had been a decoy.
***
Not long after, deputies from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office arrived.
They arrested the woman and cited her for felony vandalism and brandishing a weapon, booked her into the county jail and released her.
What was she so angry about? the deputies asked the In-N-Out staff.
Her burger was cold, Luca heard one employee answering.
They had called her order number repeatedly but she didn’t come to get it. She had asked them to make a new one, Luca heard the employee say, but they declined. Next thing you know, she was back with the branch.
Few details have emerged about the woman, who public records indicate was 53, and neighbors say is a mother — part of a friendly family.
To the public, she’s one-dimensional — the lady who lost it at the In-N-Out. But of course it is more complicated than just a cold burger. A relative reached by phone said the family wants to maintain privacy, but that she is finally getting the help they wished she had received weeks earlier.
After the deputies left, the staff cooked up a fresh order of burgers and fries for Luca and Haley.
They got back in the beat-up Toyota, unaware that Pamela in the car behind them had filmed the confrontation and that the video would soon go viral.
