SANDWICH BULLY

   Let me tell you about white women from the Midwest.    That got your attention, didn’t it?    There are a few things you should know. Such as all white women born between the Appalachians and the Rockies in the years from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty four know all the words to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”. Don’t believe me? Do you have a white woman in your life? Go over to her right now and say, “Oh, my god, Becky, look at her butt,” and then stand back because shit’s about to pop off. Trust me. I know lots of white women born between the Appalachians and the Rockies in the years from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty four and I have been trapped in the car with two sometimes three of them for hours at a time. Sometimes, they break into it totally unprovoked.    The women I know born in, say, California? No idea what I’m talking about.    Women born in London? No idea what I’m talking about.    But you pull some forty year old HR senior coordinator aside, find out she was born in Chillicothe? And I’m talking Chillicothe, Illinois; Chillicothe, Iowa; Chillicothe, Missouri; Chillicothe, Ohio (represent); or even Chillicothe, Texas. You tell her you like big butts and you cannot lie and she’ll finish the fucking song for you.    AAAnnnddd another thing about white women that is absolutely one hundred percent true and not at all a stereotype - As though I would ever dream about casting stereotypes! - is that they all, at some point, make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem New Orleans, Louisiana to visit the Wailing Wall French Quarter. And then all these white women come back home and something is different about them, something you can’t quite put your finger on, something that’s first exhibited when you ask said white woman, “How was New Orleans?”    And she answers with, “Uh, no, it’s pronounced ‘Nawlins’.”    And she’ll go on and on about the architecture there and how cool it was to drink in the streets and yeah yeah yeah, the whatever of the depth of humanity and warmness or whatever but (here it comes), oh, my god, the po’ boys.    This is where life and conversation as you know it have each officially twisted into something altogether different from their original forms because now everything is tied to chiding you for having never had a po’ boy.    “Oh, my gawd, how have you never had a po’ boy!?” exclaims the white woman who had one for only the first time last week.    “I can’t believe you’ve never had a po’ boy!”    “You have got to try a po’ boy!”    “Oh, my god, I would literally kill for a shrimp po’ boy!”    “The best shrimp po’ boy I ever had was in Nawlins!”    “It’s not a real po’ boy unless you get it in Nawlins, you know. I mean, that’s just my opinion but still. Just saying.”    A white woman goes to New Orleans one time and comes back changed forever. That forty year old from one of five possible Chillicothes? She went to New Orleans when she was nineteen and she will, to this day, insist that you are an amoral dilettante brute because you’ve not had a po’ boy specifically from a place pronounced Nawlins.    And if you’re one of my white woman friends and you think I’m singling you out, I’m singling you out with at least five other white women. You are indeed not the only white woman I know who has this thing about po’ boys from Nawlins.*    Well, today, I wasn’t in Nawli- shit, now they got me doing it. I wasn’t in New Orleans but I figured I would give Cajun Boiling a try because it’s almost forty degrees out, still warm enough to ride two blocks to grab - wait for it - a catfish po’ boy. Which isn’t a real po’ boy, keep in mind, because it’s not from Nawlins.    Whatever, I just needed lunch.    So with 60mL of CBD oil in me, I headed down to Cajun Boiling, in the space that used to be home to the Reverie and, before that, the Acadia.** I walked in and the place was dead. Two servers both on their phones, one kid working the counter, one guy in the kitchen, and I was literally the only customer. OK, I know it’s chilly out today but it’s Saturday. It’s going to get to almost forty (4.4°C), guaranteed over thirty five (1.7°C), this isn’t cold at all except you won’t find me biking recreationally in this.***    And I look over the joint and, yep, we got our misogyny out of the way, make wwwaaayyy for the racism: It’s staffed completely by... Asian... people. At a Cajun restaurant. Which, yeah, sounds racist but, no, no, it just, no, yeah, it, it just sounds racist. That’s my bad.    Nothing says Asian folks can’t make Cajun food but... Well, if you were to walk into an Indian joint and you saw it was staffed by me and all my white women friends, wouldn’t you be like, “Huh.” Nothing says our little alabaster coalition can’t make tandoori chicken and palak paneer but aren’t you going to be a little more critical of it? I mean, face it, you’re racist, too.    [I have just been informed that New Orleans has a large Vietnamese community, thus it proves I am ignorant.]    The nice kid at the counter took my order - catfish† po’ boy to go - and I take a seat and blow through all my lives in Toon Blast and then I kind of wait and wonder what’s taking so long. I am, after all, the literal only customer.

   Anyway, I get my sandwich after another couple minutes and bring it home. I am in the middle of doing laundry during this.    Well, serving size? I guess it seemed a little skimpy for ten dollars but then not every po’ boy can be the Google Images Po’ Boy Model, which, now that I’m looking at it, I can see, no, this was the right size.    Cajun Boiling’s po’ boy comes fixed with lettuce, mayo, mustard, pickle, and tomato. None of those things were particularly stand-out-ish save for that the pickle was sweet rather than dill but that was noticeable, not stand-out-ish.    The catfish could have been cod for all I know. I liked the crispiness of the breading but the fish could have used some seasoning. This probably falls on me, though. See, I grew up on smoked catfish and that’s still what I have a taste for to this day. I like the taste of smoked catfish, that’s the draw for me and, unfortunately, my expectation. I can’t knock Cajun Boiling for their breaded and deep fried catfish not tasting like smoked catfish. However, some seasoning might have been nice.

   Trust me, aside from the one time I used Dave and Laura’s Lemon Pepper Mrs. Dash, this is the only seasoning I used until I was like twenty nine.    But the real...    Wait, we might have used the best one yesterday when we thought that was the last one for the year.    Hm...    OK, let’s try...    But the real time travelling member of the Hashtag Resistance attempting to go back in time to “woke” baby Hitler instead of murdering him because “when they go low, we go high” was the bread.    I know I don’t often praise the bread which is funny because this is a sandwich blog. If it weren’t for bread, there would be no sandwich, I get that. But I think I take it for granted, even bitch about it sometimes, or I just give it fleeting praise. In this case, however, this was the component that gave me pause as I was eating the sandwich. It had a hint of fermented sour to it but not enough to be sourdough and had a similar gluten elasticity and a rich brown crust... I mean, this bread outshone all the other elements of this sandwich.    On the whole, rating this sandwich fairly, I liked this sandwich but it wasn’t a $9.99 sandwich. Like $6.99. And you can’t argue to me that it’s because catfish comes at a premium because the sandwich costs the same whether you get it with catfish, chicken strips (chicken strips), crab, or shrimp. (It’s an extra dollar if you want oysters, though.) The veggies were unremarkable and the catfish could have used some seasoning but, yeah, I know, it’s not from Nawlins so it doesn’t count anyway.    I’m looking at their takeout menu and I’m not seeing fish & chips, which I know is an entirely different animal that I shouldn’t expect to see on a Cajun menu but that’s my primary expectation for a seafood joint: To get some fish & chips. So that’s on me. This menu, however, does offer among its sides some of the fixings you’d find at a New England clambake.

   Corn on the cob, potatoes (no word on how they’re prepared), hushpuppies... You can even bundle these together into a combo meal with crawdads and crab legs and such and I think that that would be the way to go: Get a one pound crab leg meal or something. The po’boy, however, I wouldn’t recommend but I wouldn’t advise you against it. It’s not bad but I’m sure there are better. Like in Nawlins.

   “When people are hungry, you feed ‘em.”

   OK, so about three years ago, I was working at UCare - “UCare, health care that starts with denying you your oxygen!” - and it was a slow afternoon one afternoon. Most afternoons were slow and the mail room was overstaffed for what we needed, so I logged a lot of time on Facebook and I saw this joint, Sammy’s Avenue Eatery, and I thought their sandwiches looked pretty good, so I made it a point to go there.    ... aaannnddd I never did.    I was broke as shit at the time, working fourteen hours a day six days a week between two jobs (and still being broke all the time) and feeling like shit because I was a terrible letdown to my then-girlfriend (the one from this episode) because I was always tired and just wanted a goddamned beer and two cigarettes. Eventually things improved but not by much and yadda yadda yadda, a whole bunch of shit happens, and going up to Sammy’s Avenue Eatery has been low priority.    But I never forgot it. It kind of even nagged at me. And today, with it being almost fifty degrees for what is surely the last time this year if it isn’t the next to last time this year, I made it a point to go to what is likely going to be the final Sandwich Bully episode for 2018 - unless y’all want to come pick me up in your petite bourgeoisie automobile with “the heat” on in December and January.    So I rolled up on the corner of Emerson and Broadway and walked in and looked over the menu and waited for the nice lady to finish making a chai latte for this other lady and I asked her which she preferred, the Hot Roasted Chicken or the Turkey Bacon Club.    She said honestly that she preferred the chicken but they were out of that so turkey and bacon (I had to specify because I’ve had exactly one experience with turkey bacon and that shit is fucking gross and it’s so gross that I’m compelled to put up a picture of my first ex with a caption mocking her voice in which she chides me for having high blood pressure but that is seriously some SD&A shit and - Hm? Oh, Sound Design and Assembly. That was my old record review blog but I didn’t review records so much as I bitched about pop culture and waxed poetic on having picked up nookie the night before.)

   Wait. Where are we?

   OK, let’s start that over.    She said honestly that she preferred the chicken but they were out of that so turkey and bacon (I had to specify because I’ve had exactly one experience with turkey bacon and that shit is fucking gross) it was and I grabbed a cranberry ginger ale and I found myself engaged in a conversation with her. Lot of personal stuff that isn’t my business to put up here but I guess maybe I can talk about the political side of it and that part was refreshing because nobody was bringing out words with “-ism”s on the end, we were just on the same wavelength, talking about how Minneapolis government is mishandling or outright ignoring a bunch of problems and how there are easy - very easy solutions to them. The homeless encampment whom the city couldn’t decide to house in either a warehouse or a vacant fucking lot? Well, hell, how many boarded up houses are there in north Minneapolis? I figured put the homeless at least in the warehouse out of the elements. The woman I was talking to told me they had plenty of empty houses in this neighborhood. A solution I never thought of. And even thinking about it now, I realize that there’s a lot of red tape and the banks own those empty houses but why does the bank own an empty house? Why is it held by a private entity and not by the state? What are the escheat and adverse possession laws in Minnesota? (And that’s over thinking it but that’s because capitalism doesn’t provide for simple solutions without the transfer of liquid assets.)

   And enough of that.    Anyway, at one point, this dude comes in and says he doesn’t have time to stop in and eat at the moment but he was just wondering what the soup of the day was for when he came back later and the woman said it was alright if he didn’t have time to eat, she’d fix him a “little” to-go cup (it was more like an eight ounce cup and I don’t know how metric people measure soup; by volume - 237mL - or by mass - 227g) and she handed it to him and told him to have a good day and he said thank you and he walked out the door and she stared out the window and she said, “When people are hungry, you feed ‘em.”    No conditions, no clauses, just simple straight to the point action and solution.    And she told me about how she wanted to start a homeless shelter, not like the ones downtown where you have to "tell ‘em everything about your life just to get in the door”, she wanted to start one where if you were tired, you could sleep, and if you got caught fucking up, you got kicked out. Simple as that.    And my brain goes to how dangerous that would be because what about all the rapists and murderers and then my privilege checks itself and I got to remember that homeless folks aren’t homeless because they’re murderers and they do just want a warm place to sleep and a little something to eat.    She told me she wanted to open a soup kitchen, too, and told me that one place downtown was in such a great location because it was centralized and somebody could even walk for forty blocks to get there, and they would, too, because, as she put it, “hunger travels”. I know that. I remember the time, it was like ten years ago or so, that I was with Georgie and we were starving and I walked two miles in a snowstorm to the food shelf and I lied on the paperwork and told them our twenty eight year old roommate was our four year old son because I thought I could get us more food that way (and, hey, there were three people in the house). I remember being dismayed at what we got and dutifully trundled it back home. I remember all that.    Maybe it was meant to be that I didn’t get to Sammy’s until today to have this conversation. Maybe as a (timely) reminder to be thankful for what I do have, maybe as a reaffirmation of my beliefs, maybe to just talk to somebody over lunch, which I never get to do because I live alone and work alone.

ANYWAY!    How was the sandwich!? How was the fucking sandwich, Charlie!? Remember how this blog is called Sandwich Bully? And it’s about sandwiches? And how it’s not a place for you to peddle your bleeding heart commie* beliefs or pontificate on how we need to be good and charitable toward our brothers and sisters!? HOW THIS PLACE IS MEANT FOR SANDWICHES!?!?!? TALK ABOUT THE FUCKING SANDWICH, CHARLIE!!!    It was good. As I was grabbing a pop, the woman (I know her name I just don’t know how she spells it) told me that if I wanted to bundle the sandwich and drink into a combo, that she had chips and I told her nah, I had to watch my salt and she said she knew that was right. I watched her slice my tomato right out of a whole fresh tomato which I’ve seen maybe only Trieste do - slice fresh to order. And she asked if I liked onions and I said I did and she asked if I liked pickles and I said I did and then she held the pickle slices over the container and gave them a little wiggle and told me, “Getting the salt off them for you,” which was cool. Aint ever had anybody do that for me before. And then we set to talking while I ate at the counter and you read about all that.    Well, let’s start with the size issue. I ordered a half sandwich (around seven dollars) and it was big enough that I feared what I might have gotten if I had gotten a whole one (around eleven dollars). Trust me, I beg of you, please trust me, I am on my knees begging you to trust me: Order the half sandwich. That is the reasonable human serving size.    The tomato was crisp (natch) and the pickles and onions added necessary sour and bite. The cheese, I don’t know what it was but it was white and it was creamy and, tag-teamed with the bacon, it kind of overpowered the turkey but the bacon-cheese combo overpowers most things. The mayo on the sandwich was applied to the bread pre-grilling which, a few years ago, I would have said “ew” to but recently I had the revelation that mayo is just eggs and oil (no, not that part) which are both things that are perfectly alright to be applied to direct heat (that part) and I’ve been waiting to try frying my grilled cheese with mayo on the outside but I never buy bread and I never buy mayonnaise - Why buy mayo when you can make aioli? - so I finally got to try this technique at Sammy’s and I have to admit I didn’t notice anything inherently distinguishable about it but, again, bacon-cheese combo. Overpowers everything but...    OK, probably the last time we get to do this this year unless somebody wants to drive me somewhere during December and January so we have to make this one good.    Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see...    [clears throat] But the real blackout drunk correspondent of Armenia Decides, 2018... No no no.    [clears throat again] But the real evil twin unplugging the good twin’s life support so she can assume her identity and run off with her husband... No. Come on, man, you got this. You have literally nothing else.    OK, I think I got it.    But the real guest star in the dangers-of-huffing-gas-as-a-pregnant-teen episode of this highly rated Saturday morning teen show never to be seen again as, metafictionally, her character had been shipped off to an island of misfit one-off characters, each themselves never to be seen again, turned cannibal after the last hunt didn’t yield the boar’s head required to appease the god behind the sun, he who in-turn took his great veil from the white ball in the sky and scorched their crops in anger and now, teen pot dealer and teen wheelchair basketball player and teen army brat and teen with an eating disorder and all the rest, none of whom were ever seen again, are forced to turn on each other for survival, their malevolence a dance for the god behind the sun’s enjoyment, for when enough blood is spilled he veils his white ball and grants them rest from the heat, but now, a new arrival - The Pregnant Teen Gas Huffer... is the house sauce, which I suspect is a honey dijon vinaigrette. It was sweet, a little complex but not so complex that I couldn’t guess what it was while I was eating it. It stood out and balanced the savory fattiness of the bacon-cheese combo.    The lettuce?    We don’t have to do the lettuce thing, do we?

   I mean, it’s probably the last time this year.

   Overall, not a bad bike ride, it was a pretty decent sandwich - it was good but I’m not falling over stupid for it. I mean, hey, it filled me up and I ordered the half sandwich. If there was a quarter sandwich option, I’d go for that. It tasted good, too. She asked me how it was and I told her it was wonderful and she said she was glad I liked it and I told her I was glad she made it.    I guess that there was a sense of openness, of community to the place, which we’ve been over before: I prefer to go to places that feel worn in and homey. Places like Band Box and Ideal where the proprietors and the patrons are literally neighbors, where people have been going for years, people who are eating there now worked there in high school because their parents knew the manager. Sammy’s has that vibe.    It’s kind of like Nye’s.    I liked Nye’s (yes, past tense) when you could walk in and say hi to Phil, sit down, and have an ice cold Żywiec and there was a college football game on you could ignore and it was red Corinthian leather booths and tacky martini murals on the walls and mirrors behind the bar to make the liquor selection look more impressive (or whatever the mirrors are back there for) and it was locals in there.    Last time I was in Nye’s, there was no Phil, the new guy didn’t know what Żywiec was, the interior designer clearly got all their ideas from IKEA (still love you, IKEA, but you are not meant for a bar), and the only patronage in there were literally tourists asking about the history of the Mississippi River.    I can’t fuck with that scene because it doesn’t feel like it’s a part of the community that supported it through the years. Ownership changed and nobody gave a fuck about preserving the community aspect of the place, it’s clearly a cash grab more cynical and distasteful than when they made Game of Death with B-roll of Bruce Lee and two actors who looked nothing like him.    Sammy’s, on the other hand, feels like it’s part of its community. Established in Near North, playing a role in Near North, employing Near North, feeding Near North.    GO.    GIVE.    THEM.    YOUR.    MONEY.

Anthony Bourdain on the Impossible Burger. Hope he got to try one because I was skeptical and got converted but, yeah, a regular no frills cheeseburger at My Burger is $6.95* and a regular no frills Impossible Burger was $11-something. Sold at a premium indeed. Welcome to the soylent future, where the proles are priced out of eating themselves!

The Impossible Burger has come to the Midwest. Vegans rejoice!

   That lopsided thing you spy there is the Meat Mountain.    Bottom to top, we’re talking about:

   Chicken Tenders

   Turkey

   Ham

   Swiss

   Corned Beef

   Brisket

   Steak

   Cheddar

   Roast Beef

   Bacon

   And I like a spot of horsey sauce on mine. They were out of star cut buns so I took mine on a sesame seed bun.    What did it taste like? Salt. Like all you really get out of it is salt. My old doctor would give me a dirty look for eating this thing this one time. (I had to, they’re closing and Tiffany asked me if I was coming in and - What? Oh, Tiffany is the one who makes my sandwiches. Clarinda is the one who takes my orders.) So I guess it’s good that my doctor’s appointment Monday is with a whole different doctor. I mean, I’m not looking to eat just straight meat, that’s not healthy no matter what your health is like.    One time, Cassie sent me an article - What? Look, I’m not going to explain to you who people are every time I say a name. You have control issues that you need to address. Now, Cassie sent me this article about these people on this whackadoo all-meat diet and they just seemed like psychopaths. And I’m pretty sure they were libertarian, too. And not the good kind of libertarian, either. I’m saying they were like those fucked up Randian libertarians who hide all their money in the Bahamas.    Hm? You’re wondering what the difference is between good and bad libertarians are?    Well, if you’re too lazy to Wikipedia it: Good:   “Traditionally, libertarianism was a term for a form of left-wing politics; such left-libertarian ideologies seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production, or else to restrict their purview or effects, in favor of common or cooperative ownership and management, viewing private property as a barrier to freedom and liberty.” Bad:   “In the United States, modern right-libertarian ideologies, such as minarchism and anarcho-capitalism, co-opted the term in the mid-20th century to instead advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights, such as in land, infrastructure, and natural resources.”    Man, this has really gone off road so far.    Look, you can’t seriously expect me to review Arby’s. It’s just a place I went for a cheap lunch made cheaper by coupons I would get in the Red Plum and, in the course of going there as frequently as I did, I got to know a few of the staff there (who, by the way, are transferring to other locations).    But it is a sandwich place and this is a sandwich blog and I thought that there’s no way I can have a sandwich blog and not have a picture of the Meat Mountain. That would be silly. And since today was my absolute last chance to get the Meat Mountain... I mean, you can see where I’m going with this.    Anyway, you know about Arby’s. I’m not going to sit here and tell you about Arby’s. Even if you don’t know about Arby’s, I’m not going to sit here and tell you about Arby’s. It’s Arby’s. They make sandwiches. And magical romance apparently.

   I don’t remember what movie that’s from.    Hold on, I’ve got to IMDb Burt Ward.    What? Yeah, the guy who played Robin in the sixties. You really have to get over your control shit.    OK, scrolling. Scrolling.    Virgin High, 1991.    Why did I watch a movie called Virgin High?    Scrolling... AAnndd...    [claps hands] Yeap! That’s it right there! Linnea Quigley’s in it.    What? You think I don’t know about Linnea Quigley? I know about Linnea Quigley. I’m not even going to hit you with her Return of the Living Dead dance. I’m going for that deep cut.

   That’s right. Fucked around and did it to ya. Went deep diving for them oysters, pulled out this pearl from Night of the Demons. What do you got to tell me about Linnea Quigley now?

   Uh, Charlie?    Yeah, Charlie.    This review ended, like, whole paragraphs ago. You’re just rambling now which I know is something you’re good at but now you’re just kind of going off on this tangent where you’re accusing the reader of thinking you don’t know about certain specific aspects of eighties B-cinema. I mean, if you want to get technical about, right now you’re actually having a metafictional conversation with yourself about how what you were just doing was going off on a tangent where you’re accusing the reader of thinking you don’t know about certain specific aspects of eighties B-cinema.    Well, not really the eighties. Virgin High came out in ninety one.    Yeah but you’re not talking about Virgin High anymore. You’re talking about Night of the Demons and that happened in eighty eight. The eighties. Where eighty eight would be.    You’ve just got to nitpick, don’t you?    It’s not nitpicking. It’s a significant difference! Eighty eight’s over here in the eighties. Ninety one’s over here in the nineties. There’s no crossover. This isn’t a Venn diagram.    You’re submitting to hysterics. Could you please stop?    Fine.    Are you quite through?    Thank you.

   There’s the traditional way of doing things and then there’s the Lucé way of doing things, also known as the wrong way of doing things, because what you’re looking at there is Lucé’s Italian Beef.    You know, an Italian Beef. That thing taking a slab of beef that’s been soaking in its own jus for the last three years, piling it on a hoagie roll, burying it under a bunch of giardiniera, putting it on a plate with a cup of the aforementioned au jus for dipping, and then throwing it all in the trash in favor of roast beef and provolone with giardiniera, banana peppers, lettuce, tomato, onion, mayo, and Italian dressing on your choice of white, whole grain, or rosemary focaccia!    ...    Hold on, I have an old picture somewhere that’s right for this.    ...    Hold - It’s not on my - Well, did I upload it?    ...    Picasa is now Google Photos. I thought I heard something about that.    ...    OK... Ah, here it is! So, let’s rewind the tape...    ... roast beef and provolone with giardiniera, banana peppers, lettuce, tomato, onion, mayo, and Italian dressing on your choice of white, whole grain, or rosemary focaccia!

   That’s not what an Italian Beef is. Even if on their menu they thought they were getting around some shit by calling it the Beef Italiano, they went on to say:

For those of us who don’t speak Italian, Beef Italiano roughly translates to “Italian Beef”...

   Turns out that I don’t even know what my own avatar is because, for the longest time, I thought it was the Reuben from Northbound, but that’s only because how small the pic usually is. (And I did just take an hour to find the full size one.)    Whatever this is, labeled “20170619″ (so, 19 June 2017), it’s never been reviewed here. I was at Marino’s on 3 June and Broder’s on 24 June, but where was I on Monday, 19 June 2017 and what was it that I ordered because, at first glance, this looks like a messy Reuben until I spy the tomato chilling up top and the traces of mustard between the cheese and bread but is that lettuce?

   One time, Soft Kathryn called me Pasta Boi, a title I cannot deny, as I am, indeed, a pasta boi. Used to be I was a Pasta Slut but the word slut has been contentious for a while and only lately it’s starting to be OK to self-identify as a slut for certain things, like you’re a Train Slut if you fuck with some Amtrak or a Cathedral Slut if you’re down with the Vatican. I don’t know, I say fuck it, play it safe, don’t piss off the SJWs; Soft Kathryn calls me a Pasta Boi, I’m a Pasta Boi.    Everybody on board with that? Anybody feel like calling me out for some shit? I’m a Pasta Boi, goddamnit. What problems could you possibly have with the Pasta Boi?    ANYhoo, seeing as how I am - Wait. Am I a pasta boi or the pasta boi?    We’ll figure that out later. Look, I was out of pasta and it’s 19° Fahrenheit (that’s -7° Celsius for my metric fanbase) and I figured that was a good enough excuse to go back to the Wedge and get that last sandwich.    The tuna melt.

   Goddamn, that is a blurry-assed photo.    Anyway, I know I could’ve picked up a box of spaghetti from Hark’s across the street or even just gone down to the CVS for a box of spaghetti, but it was lunch time and neither of those places have a full-service deli with a limited line of seasonal signature sandwiches. And!? This is tuna melt weather.    So I go in there and this time I’m greeted by a bespectacled young woman and I tell her I just need a tuna melt to go, she says sure, hands me my ticket, and I go off to get lost in the (two) racks of food trying to find pasta because, while I am a pasta boi, I’m not seeing the pasta I’m used to: The red and white boxes of Essential Everyday, the green boxes of Creamette, the blue boxes of Buy Any Other Brand But This Homophobic Shit; I’m having that classist crisis again, feeling out of my element, too working class and dumb to figure out how to navigate a co-op, here he is, everybody! Charlie from the Trailer Park! Can’t find his way through the tiniest co-op and doesn’t listen to Vampire Weekend!    And then I nut up because, yeah, motherfucker, I am Charlie from Southeast Toledo and guess what: I like Black Sabbath, suck my dick. Where the fuck is the - Oh, here it is.    It comes in... bags? Why the fuck - I thought these motherfuckers were supposed to be earth friendly, why is the pasta in plastic bags instead of recyclable cardboard boxes? What the fuck sense does this make?    I pick up the pack of spaghetti and I look on the back. Under directions, it says to bring 5oz (150mL and I did that conversion, you’re welcome) to a boil and add 16oz (455g, again, I’m doing the heavy lifting) of pasta and I mutter, “What kind of maniac cooks a whole pack of pasta in one go?”    Hell, even as one of a family of four, I don’t think I ever saw my mom cook a whole box of pasta in one go. I mean, maybe she did, it would make sense, there’s fucking four of us but does this manufacturer assume... I mean, who the fuck cooks a whole thing of pasta in one go? Jesus Jehosaphat. Maniacs. Absolute maniacs.    So I got the fusili since I’ll be making a simple tomato and garlic sauce tonight that will love those little nooks and crannies to cling to.    Yes, I have studied up on pairing my pastas and my sauces because I am a pasta boi, outed and confirmed.    Then I grab a blood orange Hi-Ball and go over to the register and some old fart is just standing there with his back to it, not getting the point that I’m trying to get in line, thus a woman just walks around him up to the register and he looks at her and looks at me and looks annoyed - don’t give me that look, motherfucker, I have Aerosmith on vinyl, good Aerosmith, drugged up Aerosmith, I will knock you out in the parking lot.    Anyway, nobody’s paying attention to the woman at the register and a line is forming and then one of the guys from the deli says he can get me on the other register and I turn to follow him but then my name is called and I grab my sandwich and I get rung up and I get outside, and I load my bag and I come home.

You and me, we’ve been on an adventure together, haven’t we? A real emotional roller coaster? We've had to deal with inwardly-directed class shame as manufactured by capitalism; we’ve talked about putting our money in the right places, like not certain pasta brands that come in blue boxes; we’ve discussed identity issues as prescribed by a person who identifies herself as an oven but uses she/her pronouns. We have been all over the map so far and I’m sure all you’ve wanted this whole time was to know how the fucking sandwich tasted. You want to know if you should give your money to these people. You want to know how tough of a call it is between Get Your Wings and Toys In The Attic because even though the track listing on Toys... has the obvious bangers, ... Wings has some definite sleeper agents that will fuck you up.    For your patience, for your companionship on this journey, mon frer, I will now answer all these questions.

   Holy shit, this is the best thing I’ve put in my mouth this week.    Now, I didn’t look at the menu too close so, disclaimer, up front, I don’t know what kind of cheese they used. Swiss would be the obvious choice but I looked at the cheese itself and the holes were tinier and not round. I’m guessing, and I’d be surprised if I were wrong, this is havarti. It didn’t have the high-pitched notes of Swiss, either, which would have definitely stood out because, here’s the deal:    You could taste everything individually on the sandwich.    The tuna salad was creamy and I’m guessing they used an organic mayo because of course they would use organic and 1) this didn’t taste like Hellman’s and I’m a slut for Hellman’s so I would know, 2) this didn’t taste like Kraft, and 3) it didn’t taste like aioli because I detected no hint of extra virgin olive oil. Thus, organic mayo is my guess and it played nicely with the tuna, probably because the mayo to tuna ratio greatly favored the fish, so while I could detect the presence of mayo, what I was tasting primarily in that concoction was the tuna.    Appearance-wise, the tuna salad looked like exactly every other tuna salad you’ve ever had: Somebody opened a can, emptied it into a bowl, threw in a dollop of mayo, and beat the shit out of it with a fork until it stopped looking like it was once a thing of flesh and now just shreds of unidentifiable protein. I get it: There aren’t that many ways to make tuna salad, so I’m not going to dock points for the look of the thing.    The aforementioned maybe-havarti was smooth and creamy, which is how havarti ought to taste. I thought it could have stood to be a bit more melty, this is a tuna melt after all, and despite my visual inspection and my self-assuredness that this is havarti, the doubt still lingers because while it didn’t taste like Swiss, it didn’t melt like havarti, and we all know that Swiss is a bit obstinate when it comes to melting. It will do it but it takes a bit more cajoling than your softer cheeses like your jacks, your colbies, and, of course, your havartis. Again, probably not Swiss, but there will always be the doubt in my mind.    Fuck it. I just looked at the menu. The answer we were looking for was gruyere. Gruyere. Just proving to you, once again, that I am capable of being wrong. I am human and I am just like you.    So, yeah, the gruyere was good, even if I didn’t know until just now that’s what it was. It was smooth and creamy, just like havarti. But the important part is that I could taste it separately from and in concert with the other ingredients (even if I couldn’t identify what kind of cheese it was).    But the real child star of this made-for-TV adaptation of a beloved series of child detective novels grown up to appear ironically on the convention circuit and still say their cutesy catch phrase thirty years later before snapping and mowing down a gaggle of parents with a hedge trimmer at a Chuck E. Cheese would be the pickled onions, sharp and sour at the same time, balancing out the low creaminess of the tuna salad and the cheese and the midrange of the whole grain bread with high notes in brassy timbres, maybe even acrylic timbres would be more fitting, like Ornette Coleman’s saxophone. It provided what other tuna melts are missing: A full spectrum of notes. This tuna melt was like the Italians at Broder’s and Kramarczuk’s and the Reubens at Colossal Cafe and Tiny Diner: It was perfectly balanced, minimally fucked with.    And I know you’re probably rolling your eyes at me raving about a tuna melt and comparing it to some of the best sandwiches in the city but it’s like this: The reason you (and even me) think tuna melts suck is because all we’ve ever been handed is shitty tuna melts. The most creative we’ve ever gotten with them is using Swiss instead of American. Maybe we tried fancifying it by adding capers or putting tarragon in the tuna salad and it just didn’t happen right. And then we’ve walked into the greasy spoon and we see the tuna melt on the menu and we wonder how fresh is that tuna salad and we skip it and if we do order it (with every nervous caution in the world), what we get is a grilled cheese with tuna salad in it. We’ve had nothing but shitty tuna melts our whole lives so it never occurred to us that if we just treated them differently, if we just treated them like they could be good, if we just took a step back and considered the core components and asked what was too much and what was missing and saw this was meant to be different from a grilled cheese with tuna salad in it, we could have a good one.    There’s a reason that this sandwich has its own name and isn’t just “grilled cheese with tuna salad” and it’s the same reason we don’t call a Reuben a “corned beef and sauerkraut” or an Italian a “three meat and banana peppers” or a Club “turkey BLT triangles”. It’s a distinct and established entity and, unfortunately, people have stopped treating it like one and instead started treating it like a grilled cheese with tuna salad in it.    Not saying the Wedgetable has brought back the sandwich like it’s the fucking messiah, I’m saying that they’ve treated it right. They’ve done right by it. It was a damned good sandwich and I don’t regret paying the eight bucks for it. And what it lacks in size, it more than makes up for in flavor. You can taste everything individually and everything compliments everything else. It’s worth at least one visit in the Wedgetable’s direction, I would encourage you to give them your money.    Also, this is, I believe, our first tag for “tuna melt”.    Oh and Toys In The Attack has for sure three radio hits but Get Your Wings has “Lord of the Thighs” which is just a thousand percent of your daily recommended dose of raunch, nast, and sweat pressed into wax, so that’s a winner.

[Note: Buckle up and fix a cocktail, meine spezielle kleine rabauke-jugend, we’re about to go off road in a very long preamble.]    Back in the day, when I was a Caffrey’s man and the whole gang* would order Caffrey’s on the reg, often times at one in the morning, a combination of drunk and high**, watching True Blood, Georgie would order the grilled cheese, her rationale being that it was worth the seven dollars because it had three cheeses and had a slice of tomato in it.    I would insist it was just a grilled cheese but Georgie’s counter argument was that it was just so yummy.    OK, so I have to shrug this shit off and get my Italian Philly, which was a Caffrey’s bland-as-fuck cheesesteak with marinara and pepperoni on it.    Time went on and Caffrey’s prices kept going up. At least twice in one year, the prices went up fifty cents at a time and the portions started looking smaller and then I started hearing rumors from my cats in the food industry like Lee and Kendra’s Old Man Whose Name I Never Caught and randos at the Forest and, well, for reasons I can’t put in here because I don’t want a libel suit, I had to stop giving my money to Caffrey’s.    And then Caffrey’s closed.    And then they reopened and one of the food writers at City Pages lost her fucking nut over the reopening of Caffrey’s because it was the only place open until three in the morning. Nothing about the consistently shrinking overpriced portions (which, game recognize game, that’s thee strategy: stay open past bar close and charge ten dollars for a sandwich and charge two dollars for a thimble of potato salad and a dollar fifty for a twelve ounce Coke), nothing about the employees who were constantly unpaid (for rumored reasons I can’t divulge), nothing about whether it tasted good; it was just that they were open late.    Anyway, away from that world, we all moved on. Like really seriously. I moved two blocks away, Georgie moved to Seattle. I reckon I’ve ordered Caffrey’s as many times as she has since then. Sorry, I just found better sandwiches like literally everywhere else. Better clubs, better Italians, better cheesesteaks, better Reubens... I’m looking over the menu right now and I’m not seeing anything that - I mean, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be insulting but I’m really not seeing anything that they do superior to anybody else.    And even on their original sandwiches, Kafe Nasty will vouch for this because we had the Three Pepper Chicken while we were good and fucked up and, holy shit, it was the best thing ever but, man, I had that sandwich sober and it was bland as fuck.    Trust me on this, Georgie and Kafe Nasty saw the menu that I kept on me, marked in red ink, I made it a point to have every Caffrey sandwich and I took notes on them. This is not a tall tale, this is not an exaggeration, this is a confession.   And I worked through that menu until there was only one sandwich left: The Grilled Cheese. (Still seven dollars, by the way.)    As a completist, I had no choice, and for lunch one day, in dignified solitude, I spent seven dollars on a grilled cheese sandwich. I can’t really remark on it because it was five years ago but I remember that slice of tomato was nice. Didn’t justify the seven dollars but it was nice.    Fast forward to today, when I took a half day and then I had nothing to do and I was going to stop at Mickey D’s for a pair of cheeseburgers but then I looked over at the Wedgetable and I thought that that turkey apple bagel wasn’t bad. Let’s see what else they got.    Go inside and check the menu board. I’m cautious about my options because everything appetizing has cheese and I’m lactose intolerant. I can still have cheese, just not cream cheese, sour cream, ice cream, whipping cream, milk, half & half, smoothies, milkshakes...

   Nope.    But cheese? I should be fine.    I go up to the counter and I ask homie if he recommends the tuna melt or the pesto grilled cheese. He was briefly stymied and he said the grilled cheese. I told him let’s do that, he said it’d be ready in about five minutes, I grabbed a black cherry Hi-Ball and took my ticket to the register and I, for the first time in five years, purchased a seven dollar grilled cheese - smoked gouda and cheddar with tomato, carmelized onions, and pesto on whole grain bread.    So, you rode with me this long. You’ve had to sit through eleven paragraphs about a completely unrelated eatery. I bet you’re wondering how this thing was.    Well, let’s get the hot take out of the way: No matter what you do, no matter who you are, you melt multiple cheeses together, it just tastes like dairy. That’s all. Cheese is a wonderful and complex thing. It is an art. Its manufacture is a method of perfecting rot and mold. Don’t believe me? Check out bree. Bleu cheese for god’s sake. All cheese is basically milk so curdled it turned into a solid. And ancient people figured out that if you steered the fermentation process in one direction, you got pecorino, steer it another way and you get Swiss, yet another way gets you oaxaca... They each have distinct flavors that are meant to stand out and perform on their own. But put them together, melt them together, and you lose those individual notes. So this smoked gouda and cheddar the Wedgetable melts together? Just tasted like dairy. But I get it: You gotta justify seven dollars, you put two cheeses on this thing.    The carmelized onions? I couldn’t see them or taste them.    The pesto spread? It was OK. I mean, everything was overpowered by the cheese so the complexity of the pesto was lost. I could tell it was there.    The tomato? It was nice. I guess that’s the hot tip for you, kids: Put a slice of tomato on your grilled cheese sandwich. It’s nice. If you walk away with nothing else from this, keep close to your heart that a slice of tomato on a grilled cheese is nice.    Oh and the whole grain bread was fine.    I mean, I just can’t get excited about grilled cheese. It’s something I don’t even make at home unless you count quesadillas and I haven’t made quesadillas since I swore off flour tortillas because the calorie count on one of those is a day’s recommended caloric intake.    Well, actually, I stopped making those when I stopped getting shitfaced and passing out by four in the afternoon and waking up at eight at night hungry... and then trying to drink my sad, plateau’d ass back to bed so I could get some sleep before work in the morning. You know, when I was thirty four.    So the sandwich was fine. I guess it’s OK. I mean, it’s fucking grilled cheese. It has a tomato slice in it. That’s nice.    Just make this one at home.

   I don’t go to the Wedge because when I go there, I feel intimidated, out of my element. I grew up eating out of boxes and cans (just clap your hands) and learning about budgeting because there were my parents, me, my brother, and whatever animal had to be fed. I also have never been hip, my hair has never been shaved on one side, I don’t own a keffiyeh, and the frames of my glasses aren’t neon. I am very clearly of a working class background and I feel kind of looked down upon when I go in there.    So there was some resentment, I guess, a few years ago when the Wedge opened up the Wedge Table where Hai Nguyen (I always called it High Noon), my favorite Asian grocer, used to be. Which is half a block from my apartment. I feared more snobby IPA swillers in my hood then tried to put that stereotype out of my head, seeing as how I didn’t like feeling stereotyped, especially since it was always internalized. In all honesty, the Wedge staff are nothing but friendly. And Wedge customers, I’m sure, could sell me some grass.    Anyway, I went there to day because I’ve been up since a quarter to six and I still haven’t eaten and I’m going to see Suspiria in about an hour and I need to eat something but Jimmie John’s is fucking gross and I’m sick of everything on the strip (not really) but then I realize I’ve never eaten at the Wedgetable.    So I stop in there and I’m all, “Wha?” at the sandwich board because nothing looks - I mean, is this is Aramaic? Where’s ham & cheese? Where’s... They have a tuna melt but the description is from another planet entirely. I feel so very very out of my element.    I ask the guy behind the counter, “How’s the turkey apple bagel?”    He says, “It’s really good. I like the pickled apple.”    “OK, let’s do that.”    “Do you want chips & salsa?”    “Nah, I’m good on that.”    “Well, it comes with it.”    “OK, yeah, cool.”    He hands me my ticket and tells me it’ll be right up and I walk over to the cooler for a Coke and, no, this is the Wedgetable. No Coke. No Pepsi. Not even my beloved RC.    I get a cranberry pomegranate sparkling Yerba Mate instead.    Jesus fuck.    This is not my world.    So I take my Yerba and my ticket to the register. The young woman rings me up, misreading TAB on my ticket as TPB so instead of ten dollars (fuck) for my sandwich, I pay seven dollars for this imagined bowl.    Oh, and I should mention that Jewel, the nineties chick that lived in her van, was playing this entire time.    I’m beginning to think that maybe if they stocked Mexican Coke, fuck, some Jarritos and played some old school thrash metal, I could handle going in there.    I brought my food home, opened the sandwich and had to break out the bread knife to cut it in half.    So, I got it on “discount” but would I say it was worth ten dollars?    Yeah, actually.    The turkey was oven roasted and sliced medium, the gouda came in irregularly shaped pieces, the rosemary bagel was just right amount of savory, the arugula was arugula, I mean, it’s lettuce...