When the taste buds think for the big head.

Sadly, you don't see many of these restaurants in New England anymore.

Ever had that itch that you just can't scratch? I have for some time now.

I miss Arby's.

Yes, Arby's -- the fast-food restaurant that serves that paper-thin "roast beef" (and I will address the questions about the constitution of that meat product later in the post), and has of late expanded its offerings to several different types of sandwich filler to justify the use of Ving Rhames' booming voice proclaiming that "We have the MEATS!!" in television commercials.

I loved Arby's in my early days of personal mobility. When I first got my driver's license in 1970 and was given permission to drive our family's 1963 VW Beetle, I made many a trek to the Arby's restaurant located on US 1 in Dedham, beyond the long-since shuttered Lechmere Sales store and not far from the VFW Hospital in West Roxbury.

I've long been a carnivore and spent much of my early life gleefully devouring whatever red-meat products I could find, which probably led to some of my later-in-life health problems. And yes, I could tell the difference between a finely cooked New York strip sirloin or a delicious slab of medium-rare prime rib roast and the peculiar version of roast beef served by Arby's on a sesame-seed covered bulkie roll. But it didn't matter. Whether it was the strange texture of the "meat" or the wave of salty flavor that would hit your tongue like a sledgehammer, or that spicy concoction called "Arby's Sauce" in the foil packets that resembled no other flavoring sauce known to Western civilization, there was a guilty-pleasure irresistibility to an Arby's sandwich that I could not resist. 

I made those pilgrimages to the Arby's in Dedham for many years, well into young adulthood. Even into my career of covering the Patriots in far-flung cities across the nation, I would pick up my rental car and make a point of finding the nearest Arby's so I could stop and indulge, even before checking into my hotel. 

Finally, when an Arby's opened inside the food court at the Emerald Square mall in North Attleboro in the late 1980s, I was in hog heaven. I had the good sense not to stop there every day, but at least twice a month I would go to the mall for no reason other than to order the biggest sandwich I could buy and then slather Arby's Sauce all over it -- often grabbing multiple packets at the condiments bar and then emptying the full contents of one onto the sandwich every time I took a bite, so my taste buds wouldn't find an uneven coating of the seductive sauce.

Amanda Peet finds Arby's Sauce irresistible.

I didn't mess around with any of their other offerings. No curly fries for me, no "beef 'n' cheddar," and I passed on the Big Montana -- although if you recall the movie "Saving Silverman," the 2001 flick in which Jason Biggs plays the lead singer in a Neil Diamond tribute band that is going to quit because he's getting married, you remember that his buddies (played by Jack Black and Steve Zahn) kidnapped Biggs' fiancée as a means of preventing the band's breakup. She's played by actress Amanda Peet, and the scene of her chained to a chair and being fed a particularly messy Big Montana by Zahn was about the best product placement Arby's could get at the time.

But gradually, the restaurants started to disappear -- at least in this part of the world, although you wouldn't know it from their advertising budget. 

For the most part, Arby's has deserted the New England market. There aren't any at all in Maine, Vermont or Rhode Island, although Little Rhody has plenty of roast beef to tide itself over at places like Walt's and Miller's. There are six in Connecticut, but who wants to go there? 

Yet a day doesn't pass when you don't hear Ving Rhames touting the MEATS!! that Arby's sells. And every time I hear it, a little bit of muscle memory kicks in and my mouth starts watering at the prospect of tossing down a couple of roast beef sandwiches covered in Arby's Sauce.

For about a week now, I've been craving an Arby's sandwich. I've been eating less thanks to my work schedule (the benefit of that being much lower blood sugar numbers), so having paid the requisite penance for past sins, I decided that on one of my rare days off, I would embark on a quest for the MEATS!! -- or at least one specific one.

Earlier today, I made the commitment. It was a nice day, a little coolish, but a good time for me to haul my 2015 VW Beetle convertible out of the garage in which it spends most of its existence and put some miles on it. The Beetle is my "play" car, but I haven't played in it much lately -- it has only 36,000 miles on it, and I drove it less than 1,800 miles last year -- so the time was ripe for it to stretch its stubby little legs a little.

But where to go?

Google told me that there are only three Arby's restaurants left in all of Massachusetts. The Dedham and Emerald Square stores are long gone, leaving my only choices as Chicopee, Marlboro and Auburn. The latter, only 34 miles away as the crow flies, seemed the most logical choice.

So I hopped into the car, popped the top, cranked up the heat to compensate for the autumn coolness, and after an overly long wait in the local Starbucks drive-thru line (Seattle's gonna hear about that ...), I was off on a quest for the MEATS!!

The ride up I-495 to the Mass. Pike was relatively uneventful and pleasant, save for a few jackasses in giant SUVs and pickup trucks that think it's their God-given right to cut off a guy without any warning as he minds his own business driving his tiny Beetle convertible. I'm learning that it doesn't pay to leave a little more room than I used to between me and the car ahead of me, an accommodation to my 52 years of driving, because someone's going to see that extra half-car length as an invitation to insert his car's ass into my face.

But it was after exiting the turnpike in Auburn that the trip became the stuff of legend.

My Beetle has a Garmin GPS unit in it that's about five or six years old. I haven't updated the maps for a while, and it doesn't have the new exit numbers for Massachusetts highways, but that wasn't the problem. What I didn't know was that it inputted the wrong address for the Arby's when it calculated the route, and thus it kept directing me in circles and down roads that looked as if they had not been driven upon since covered wagons started heading west.

Once I reached a deserted recreational field that appeared to be guarded by a suspicious old man and his very hungry-looking German shepherd, I determined it was best to let the Waze app on my phone take me the rest of the way. In just a few more minutes, the familiar 10-gallon-hat logo of an Arby's restaurant was visible in the distance.

Seeing another long line at the drive-thru, I pulled into a parking space thinking it was smarter to order inside and maybe also take a bathroom break. But when I got to the door, there was a sign on it. It read:

"LOBBY CLOSING AT 5 P.M. BECAUSE OF STAFFING SHORTAGE. DRIVE-THRU REMAINS OPEN."

As I walked back to my car, another individual that had parked his Tesla in the next space over was about to get out of his car to do presumably the same thing. I told him the lobby was closed, and the drive-thru was still open. He thanked me, and we both pulled out of our parking spaces and settled into the line.

It didn't take long to get to the speaker, where I ordered two large roast beef sandwiches and a large Dr Pepper. I had taken a $20 bill from my wallet, thinking that was more than enough to cover the order. I was told that it was $26.80. After a wave of sticker-shock, I pulled out a $5 bill and plucked a couple of ones out from under the garage-door remotes that I usually hand to baristas at Starbucks for tips.

When I got to the window, the young man taking my cash didn't say a single word to me -- even when I asked him to put some extra Arby's Sauce packets into the bag. Not to make any judgments, but given the time it took him to take the four bills and figure out they added up to $27, and to deduce that he owed me two dimes in change -- well, I figured he just didn't have his heart in his job.

It took another four or five minutes at the window to get my order. I didn't see any packets of Arby's Sauce go into the bag, so when he handed it to me, I asked if the extra sauce packets were there. No response. As there was a big line behind me, I didn't want to be the guy holding up the show, so I took the bag and started to pull away. 

But before I reached the street, a thorough examination revealed that there were no sauce packets inside the bag. I wasn't going to stand for that, given that I had already driven about 50 miles in a quest for the MEATS!!

I pulled over next to one of the locked entrances of the restaurant and figured that the only thing I could do was to emulate Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock in "The Graduate," pounding on the glass windows separating the balcony of the church from where the love of his life was marrying another man. I didn't do it quite as dramatically, of course.

A young employee walked to the other side of the window. I held up the bag and said "I need Arby's Sauce" in a voice loud enough to penetrate the glass. Quickly, he returned to the door with six packets of the liquid gold, and I thanked him profusely.

Piled high, this beef awaits a sauce bath.

Back in the car and driving along Route 12 toward the Mass. Pike exit, I realized I couldn't wait any longer for my treat. I pulled into the parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse and set to the task to devouring one of my two large sandwiches, exhausting three of the six packets of Arby's Sauce so I could savor every bite -- probably for the first time in at least six years.

I mentioned earlier that I would explain something about Arby's meat product, so here we go. It's an urban legend that Arby's roast beef is not really roast beef, but instead some sort of reconstituted substance consisting of artificial proteins, gelatin, food colorings and God knows what else. The Arby's people vehemently deny that, and have for years. They claim that their product is indeed a real cut of roast beef, and those cuts are packed along with a preservative soup-like substance in cooking bags that are shipped to its restaurants, to be cooked on-site and sliced fresh with every order (which is why there's a little wait for each sandwich). Not being privy to the secrets of the fast-food industry, I'll take their word for it. 

Once my first sandwich was safely in my belly, I put the unused packets of sauce in the bag and began the drive home. Despite listening on the satellite radio to Wisconsin putting up a huge score over Northwestern's football team, it was still an enjoyable drive, quite pretty in the early dusk with a huge, almost-full moon rising above the tree line to the east as I navigated the rolling hills of the Mass. Pike on my way back to the old Exit 11A. It wasn't peak foliage time yet, but that doesn't do much for me, anyway -- just another reminder that it will be at least another seven months before I can feel warm again outdoors.

I was home by 7:30 p.m., and my first task was to stick the second sandwich in the microwave for about 30 seconds and to start the devouring process anew. Which I did, gleefully. That should tide me over for at least another six years -- although I'm sure the folks at Miller's Roast Beef in South Attleboro will see me long before then.

Was this quest a silly pursuit? A waste of time and gasoline? Probably so.

But if you have the gall to read this and tell me to my face that you've never done something similar in your lifetimes, I will laugh in your face. You've heard of something called "the pursuit of happiness," I presume? There is my definition of it.