Sarah Denaci
Sandwiches of My Life
My Barbie ran a hoagie shop. She stood behind a shiny red counter, and she wore a red nylon hat. The plastic hoagie she served measured three-quarters the length of her body and was pre-cut into individual sandwiches the size of her head. The sandwich was so thick, about the width of a child’s thumb, that there was no way any tiny Barbie hand could ever hold it. But all the layers—the green lettuce, the pink ham, the red tomato—were so beautiful to look at that I bet it’s all the little Barbie hands ever dreamed of.
“There is no way that is true,” Benson said. He was naked and in bed, the fleecy blanket covering almost all of his privates except the tip, which had somehow (I’m not so good at physics) floated up and poked itself out. It looked very cute, like it was attentively listening to everything we had to say. But Benson was adamant. “Unless you had like a Philly Barbie, which there is no way they ever made. They would also never have called it a hoagie, or have had a whole playset devoted exclusively to selling sandwiches.”
Later, I remembered the details of the set, and Benson was right. It was not a Hoagie Playset. It was a Pizza Hut Playset, consisting mostly of pizzas and soft drinks. The giant hoagie was an afterthought: something thrown carelessly in the background or handed over to the whiny girl your parents had forced you to invite over for a playdate. But at the time of this conversation, I thought it was Benson who was crazy. What little girl wouldn’t want her own hoagie-selling set? I wondered, outraged and uncomprehending.
“Why are you so into sandwiches, anyway?” Benson leaned forward a little, smirking. “Is it because they’re shaped like peens?”
Maybe. Probably. Sure. Who could rule that out? But there had to be something more to it. I just couldn’t put my finger on what.
The first sandwich I ever knew was cheap, shiny salami on dry, spongy bread. I was six years old. Everyday, I would sit down at lunch, open my lunch box, take out the sandwich, and throw it into the enormous garbage can in the center of the cafeteria.
The raw-meat-colored lunch tables were long, low, and separated by classroom. They smelled of lemon cleaner mixed with dirty water. There was always one table that had a laminated sign with a picture of a peanut with a big red X over the peanut picture and the words, “PEANUT FREE.” I always wished I were at this table because I hated peanut butter and its putrid, dusty smell.
The lunch aides had various rules they tried to impose upon us, like no trading lunches, no yelling, and no throwing food. I was pretty immune to these rules because I wasn’t obviously bad or obviously popular. The clearly bad kids, in the lunchroom aides’ estimation, were the ones who smelled or had stupid haircuts. The popular kids, again in the lunchroom aides’ estimation, were good at basketball or wore a lot of glitter gel on their cheeks. Even at the time, it seemed weird to me that the lunch aides were so classist against children—the “bad” kids always happened to be poor; the “popular” kids always happened to be rich—but ultimately I didn’t mind because, as I said, it meant the lunch aides pretty much ignored me. So I knew I was safe to do what I was about to do.
Slowly and stealthily, I walked to the other end of the table and sat next to Sarah Q-S, the other Sarah in my class. She was even quieter than I was and had greenish-white skin and long brown hair that she wore in a thick braid. She was eating Newman’s Own Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Knockoff Things. (I did like peanut butter if it had sugar and chocolate in it.)
“Hey Sarah,” I said.
“Hi . . . Sarah.” Her voice was thin and shaky. I had never heard it before.
I got right to the point. “Do you like salami?”
“No. I’m a vegetarian,” she explained, a thread of pride now audible in her voice. “Someday I’m going to be a vegan. My parents say not yet.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what a vegan was. It sounded like a kind of alien, but one that I could understand from context did not want salami. “I was going to ask to trade you a salami sandwich for your peanut butter candies. But I have nothing else to trade.” I made the pitiful face I made whenever my dad came home from a business trip without a local stuffed animal or a hotel cookie.
“You can have one anyway,” she said, and unwrapped the package.
My sandwich looked on, alone and forlorn.
Once, when Kira and I were thirteen, my dad had just parked in a garage on South Street because that was near the Trocadero, and the Trocadero was where The Libertines concert was going to be. Our dude friends, Chris, Brendan, and John were also in a separate car with Chris’ dad. I think I had a crush on all three of them. Brendan was the one who was having sex already (with a fifteen-year-old!), and he was kind of goth, so my crush on him was both the most intense and the most fantastical. I was also in a band with Chris and John, but it was frustrating because neither of them tried that hard to date me.
Speaking of dysfunctional bands, my bedroom wall was covered with pictures of Carl Barât, the handsomer frontman of The Libertines. Most of Kira’s and my conversations at school or after school or before school or during the summer revolved around all of the intense, fantastical, and unmentionable things we would do to Carl if we met him and were allowed to have the sex with him that we felt we were owed.
I don’t remember how we convinced my dad to drive us. It was very kind of him, and he would do it for many more concerts over the years, but he didn’t exactly fit in. At a Sonic Youth concert a year after this one, for example, someone called him a narc and threw up on his shoe. So, it was kind of unexpected that he would play the pivotal role he was about to in this whole concert story by suggesting the restaurant that would change my notion of sandwiches forever.
“The Troc is right across the street from Jim’s!” my dad said as we stepped out of the parking garage onto the sidewalk.
One of us, I can’t remember who, asked what Jim’s was. Kira and I were really one entity at that point in our lives, sharing crushes on the same people, all our gossip, and even our first three boyfriends, so when one of us spoke, anything we said could have just as easily come out of the other one.
“The cheesesteak place!” my dad answered. Seeing the dubious looks on our faces, he elaborated, “People say Pat’s or Gino’s are the best, but they’re just tourist places. You’re going to love Jim’s!”
Neither Kira nor I had ever had a cheesesteak. Kira was born in Ukraine and had her meals prepared by what seemed like nine sets of grandparents, so there wasn’t really time or space for cheesesteaks. My food was cooked or chosen for me by my Italian-American mom, who was very health-conscious except in the case of Italian food. Anyway, cheesesteaks definitely didn’t make the cut. Unhealthy food definitely was not something that bothered my dad, though. He shepherded us into Jim’s.
Jim’s was grayish inside and smelled like meat grease. You waited in a horizontal line that snaked from outside the door, past the grill, and up to the cash register. The grill was manned by muscular, tattooed men of various ethnicities who flipped long, shiny folds of dingy meat as they smiled down at Kira and me.
My dad told us if we didn’t order “wiz wit,” they would laugh at us. We assumed he meant the friendly meat-flipping men.
“OK!” we said, and ordered that.
We sat down at a table and began to eat our cheesesteaks. They were so good, and the cheese (“cheese”) and the onions and the meat drippings spilled everywhere.
Then, four men walked past us. I remember them as if they were walking on a cloud or the physical manifestation of a drug haze. They wore leather jackets and slouched. Who knows what their hair was like, but one supposes it was really cool. We inhaled the cigarette smoke. We looked down at their scuffy British boots. They had their paper plates of cheesesteak in their hand, as if they were just anybody instead of who they were.
“It’s them! It’s The Libertines!” Kira or I gasped. They floated right by us on their cloud.
“Wow! That one guy’s really handsome! He could be some kind of movie star!” My dad was referring, obviously, to Carl. I agreed. It was all very exciting, but the excitement only made me hungrier. I turned my rapturous gaze toward my sandwich.
Joe’s car was a giant, old burgundy Mercedes, the kind with the big Benz symbol that sticks up from whatever is the actual name for what I call the car’s snout. Inside, it was soft and people-smelly like a living room. It also felt like the size of a living room. I know I was sitting in the front seat. Maybe Jeff was sitting in the back seat, but I don’t remember because I only remembered he was even involved in this story after thinking hard about it for a long time and the somewhat key role he played. It’s equally possible that he was riding in Tyler’s low black Toyota, a car I would come to know very well a few months later.
Joe was swerving his car along the curvy, rural road that led to Princeton because Tyler’s car was also swerving along the road. They were playing a game they called Jackrabbit. It seemed like a very bad idea to me, but I kept quiet because the whole thing also seemed pretty erotic in light of what had happened in AP English the day before.
What happened was that I was walking around the classroom to return a chalkboard eraser, or hand in a worksheet, or borrow a pen from another student, or whatever it was I did there. Ms. Cherron was out of the room, probably in the bathroom. I was near the front wall, close to her desk, looking at the school calendar. Suddenly, my universe shifted: Tyler walked up directly behind me, stopping only an inch or two away. It was like I could feel his crotch energy near my butt energy.
If a man were to do this to me now, I would think he’s creepy and gross; at that time, though, I found Tyler’s behavior dangerous and hot. I told no one, even though someone must have seen it. I was confused about why I enjoyed the weird genital energy, seeing as Tyler was a chubby punk who used many words incorrectly. This wasn’t the kind of guy I considered my type.
“I hear you are coming with us to Hoagie Haven,” he kind of whisper-breathed-said.
“Uh . . . yeah,” I answered in my own kind of whisper-breath, overcome with how my blood pumped quickly to exciting new places. “I love hoagies, and Chris says this place rules.”
“It does. I think you’re going to really, really, really like it,” he said in another weird whisper-breath, a little louder this time. Then he pivoted away, dramatically shattering the crotch-butt energy linkage. I stood there, stunned. Now, in Joe’s car, I wondered what Tyler and Chris were talking about as they zipped alternately in front of and behind us. I vaguely hoped they were talking about me, although I didn’t have a good idea of what I wanted them to be saying.
Finally, we got to Princeton, and Joe parked on a side street a few blocks away from the restaurant. He was my best dude friend, and always really wanted the best for me. “I’m so excited for you to eat this, Denaci,” he said and smiled as we walked over to the restaurant. “You have no idea what you’re in for.” I nodded and smiled back, trying to play it cool.
Hoagie Haven is a tiny, boxy place that smells like a shoe. Their sandwiches are principally cheesesteaks with other junkfood heaped on top. For example, the Heart Stopper, which was what I ordered, is a cheesesteak with mozzarella sticks, french fries, and Frank’s RedHot sauce on top. We split ourselves between the two benches outside to eat, with Tyler sitting next to me. The hoagie was very, very delicious, and Tyler’s presence made me very, very agitated, so I ate all twelve inches.
Afterward, with my stomach gurgling and heavy, we walked to a record store that was famous in the entire tri-state area for its selection of new and used CDs, tapes, vinyl, and DVDs. At that point in my life, I took a pompous pride at keeping up on the latest underground music of various genres, but the combination of my greasy satiation and my vague erotic fears cleared my mind of all the records I had planned to purchase.
I stood dumbly in the DVD section. Jeff, the person I had forgotten was in this memory, was a short, muscular athlete on some team I can’t remember. I now recollect him as a person who, a few months in the future from this memory, would insist that all vaginas tasted like old coins. He walked up to me and pointed authoritatively at a DVD on the shelf in front of us.
“This is my favorite movie,” he told me. It was The Fountain. “It’s directed by Darren Aronofsky. I highly recommend that you buy it.”
I stared at it. I had no idea who Darren Aronofsky was, or if I was supposed to know. The cover was, overall, the comforting burgundy color of Joe’s car. The DVD was priced at $7.99. I looked across the store at Tyler, who was buying some Philly punk vinyls that I already owned (I noted, pompously, to myself).
“OK,” I said to Jeff. “I’ll buy it.” I noticed Tyler watching us.
The next week in English class (Ms. Cherron was out of the room again? Was she ever in the room? What was she doing?), Tyler suggested we watch the movie together in his basement over the weekend. I told him that sounded good and that I’d see him on Saturday.
I had my mom drop me off at the appointed time and place, lying about whom I was seeing and what I would be doing (although, to be fair, despite my pervish assumptions, Tyler and I never explicitly specified what exactly we would be doing). I rang the doorbell, and a stout man with a mustache and a stout woman in an ugly dress answered.
“Hello,” I said, “I’m here to see Tyler.”
“Tyler’s out,” they told me. They looked very sad for me, whomever I was. “We don’t know when he’ll be back.” They apologized and quickly shut the door.
Not wanting to call my mom and make up another lie, I called up Kira, who lived nearby, and asked her if I could come over. On the shortish walk there, Tyler called. He was crying.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I forgot today was today. I was really looking forward to hooking up with you. I was really wanting to. I’m so, so sorry.”
I stared solemnly ahead at the soccer field in front of me. Tyler cried some more. The whole thing was sweet and sad, but it was also insulting. I had been looking forward to hooking up with him, too. But now that he had made that so explicit but also forgot about it, I wasn’t sure if I was still interested.
“Uhhhhhm,” I said.
“Look.” He stopped crying for a minute. “I’m coming back from Princeton right now. I was going to go to Hoagie Haven. Do you want me to pick you up something?”
* * *
I wish I could choose a single sandwich that defined my college experience. But there are just too many options. There was a panini I made once with shredded chicken and hot sauce and some salad bar vegetables that earned me the sandwichal respect of a dude who would later really hurt my feelings. There was this other guy whom I saw on a brick wall eating an egg sandwich so furiously that the sight of it filled me with a lust that would spur me to change work-study positions so that I could watch him eat more sandwiches, closer up, for longer periods of time. And although it wasn’t technically a sandwich, there was the burrito from Bagel Gourmet Olé that my friends and I ate after an exercise class we took, and also the breakfast burrito that we ate before the Saturday morning exercise class that we taught.
East Side Pockets on Thayer Street had a falafel wrap that I would eat once a week. The pita was thick, chewy, and toasted; there was a lot of hot sauce, heaps of tomatoes, the falafel itself was crispy yet soft at the same time, and the lady behind the counter normally gave me a piece of baklava for free. There, Lacy Sweeney showed me her favorite astrology book, and Jacob Chason recommended some film theory books to me in between long stretches of silence. It makes me sad that for a sandwich that good, I don’t have a better story.
The thing is, none of these sandwiches truly changed me or the course of my inner life. They were only sandwiches that tasted great. It was an aimless, messy time, without any strong sandwich to guide me.
It was a few years later. I sat on the curb of Paisaje Dr. Jose Modesta Giuffra, the one-block-long street in Buenos Aires that contained the Fundación Universdad de Cine’s five buildings, a vintage clothing store, and a gay coffee shop. Sitting there, I felt sort of like an adult, but there was also the feeling that that was certainly a lie.
Around me the FUC’s skinny, vaguely punkish students gathered in groups of five to seven, talking about things students talk about: sex, new music, where to go out and see new music and have sex, and also the inherent voids of language. (Too many Beckett fans). They stood in the middle of the street. When a lone car would turn down the paisaje, the clumps of students would sluggishly step to the side. As soon as it passed by, they would return to their places in the middle of the street.
Many of the girls were beautiful. Waifish, pale, and passionately disinterested, they looked like miniature willow trees emerging gracefully from their Doc Martens pots. Other girls who were not as beautiful just looked way punker than me, which I was also jealous of. Others just looked average, but at least they fit in and spoke Spanish with a native accent. I didn’t know any of these particular students because I had only attended the FUC for a single semester two and a half years before.
It was late summer, the time when the Buenos Aires air would emit a pleasant, deep yellow heat that feels like it’s about to crack at any moment and let autumn in. On this particular day, I wore a black and white floral minidress and my own Doc Martens. My hair had been very carefully straightened. I grasped a steak sandwich joyfully in my hands. Then, I looked at it more closely and suddenly became afraid that the chimichurri sauce would slide off the sandwich and onto my dress, leaving a weird stain in an awkward location. I clutched the sandwich tighter.
Felipe finally emerged from the main building’s lobby and walked over to me. Some of the nearby girls peered over curiously.
“Sarah!” he exclaimed my name in surprise, as if we hadn’t been planning this rendezvous for weeks. Felipe contrasted sharply with the crowd of punks around us. He was tall, dark-haired, and wore a purple Lacoste polo shirt. His face was handsome and angular and bearded, and his body was the well-proportioned athletic sort of someone whose family has been rich for at least four generations. He was thirty-six, a fact I was very aware of because I was twenty-two.
“Felipe!” I exclaimed, looking up at him from my seat on the curb. I remember feeling an odd mixture of irritation at his tardiness and pride in his general desirability. He swayed awkwardly from side to side. I looked at his crotch. Directionally, it was pointed at mine, but, because he remained standing and I remained sitting, the crotches persisted on two separate parallel planes that could never meet. I hoped this was not a metaphor for anything else, but I had a sinking feeling that it definitely was.
He grimaced apologetically. “I just have a few more things to do. I’ll be out in a few minutes. Then we can go.” He looked down at me and noticed the sandwich. “AH! From Des Nivel! The sandwich de lomo!”
Des Nivel was a parilla on Calle Defensa, right where it ran into the Paisaje Giuffra. We could see it from where we were. As a sit-down restaurant, it was fairly mediocre. But, as Felipe had informed our documentary class of six American students two and a half years before, the sandwiches from the takeout window were excellent. Especially the sandwich de lomo, which is just a one-pound cut of lomo (tenderloin) on a fresh and oversized baguette, for two dollars. When you order it, you see the muscley guy pound the raw meat out with a wooden mallet on top of a wooden counter I’ve never seen him wipe off or clean. Then you see him throw it onto the grill behind him.
“Yes!” I exclaimed with pride, wondering if he remembered that he was the one who had recommended it. “The sandwich de lomo!” When I spoke to Felipe, I tended to emphasize my ridiculously stunted Spanish cadence, hoping I would come off like that tragic clown girl in La Strada, the one who everyone agrees the main guy should have treated way nicer.
He popped back inside without answering me. Then, two beautiful, hip girls in miniskirts and leather jackets walked in my direction. “You are going somewhere with Felipe? Somewhere away from here?” At that point, I was only latently aware of the extent to which the other students were as obsessed with Felipe as I was.
“Yes!” I exclaimed again, with a similar level of pride I had in my sandwich earlier.
“But how?” the other one asked, cocking her head to the side and frowning.
“You’re not even that pretty!”
I shrugged and agreed good-naturedly (what else could I do? They were right). “But I have a really good personality!” I said. I’m not sure the joke translated so well into Spanish, but it was the only thing I could think of at that moment. It can feel humiliating to speak a language badly. It can also feel humiliating to speak to people who are your own age and profession (in this case, “student dilettante”) but are way hotter than you. Taken together, this can be a lot of humiliation for one human brain to handle. I reflexively grasped at my sandwich, glad to rediscover I had more than half of it left. The girls shrugged and walked away.
It was midsummer three years ago, and the air heaved a dull blue heat. Benson and I were walking back from Steve’s C-Town, on 9th Street between 5th and 6th. We had bought a lot of bags of different staple foods, mostly rice and vegetables, and had enthusiastically packed them into the reusable grocery bags he had remembered to bring. Benson is auburn-haired and slimly muscular. He wears old T-shirts with weird things (piles of vegetables, peeing devil goats, synthesizer brand logos) printed on them with old shorts he patched in the crotch from too much bicycling. Benson is the handsomest person in the world, and I like looking at him and even remembering looking at him.
“What do you think about getting some sandwiches from Russo’s?” I asked hopefully. He knew what sandwiches I meant. He always ordered the roast beef and I always ordered the imported prosciutto and mozzarella, to which I added roasted red peppers for $1.50 extra. I knew it was sort of ridiculous to think about ordering prepared food with all the freshly bought ingredients we had in our bags and that I was incarnating American Food Waster, Bougie Edition. But then I remembered how much perfectly salted imported prosciutto and fresh mozzarella they put on that thing, and I decided I didn’t care.
“I think that’s a great idea!” He smiled at me, his eyes warm, deep and brown.
We called in the order and meandered the two blocks to Russo’s. Benson waited outside with the grocery bags while I went into the narrow wood-paneled store, took my place in line, and watched the awkward alt-dads hold their toddlers’ hands while they used their free arm to hurriedly indicate which fried artichoke they wanted.
Half an hour later in Det. Joseph Mayrose Park, the sun slanted into gilded droplets. We had deposited the groceries in our apartment across the street, and now we unwrapped the sandwiches’ white paper. A dozen feet away from us, we noticed two dogs humping intently while their slim, bespectacled owners casually exchanged pleasantries a few feet above their heads. We looked at each other, smiled (hornily? happily? smirkingly?) and began to eat.
Only a minute or two later, I noticed, with some regret, the owners disentangling their dogs’ limbs as they hastened to depart back to their respective somewheres.
Benson looked away from the dogs at the same time I did. He smiled at me, and then at my sandwich. “Is yours good?” he asked.
I looked at him, and at his sandwich. “Yeah,” I said and also smiled. Then I looked at him again and smiled even harder. Because, to me, Benson is a sandwich.