SANDWICH ARTIST (MATT DUBE)
It’s hard not to notice how hopeful a recipe is. My mother had this box of recipes that I used to pore over, staring at the pictures and struggling to read the words to describe these wonderful processes you would go through to prepare the food in the pictures: braise, blanche, slow cook in a dutch oven. My friend Greg, all he ever wanted was play cards with the recipes, fanning them out in his hand and snapping them back into a solid stack. He had this game, it was like go fish, based on which protein the meal used, but I never wanted to give up anything. I just wanted to savor the possibilities.
When you hold the recipe in your hand, no one can tell you that you don’t hold the secret to a perfect meal, to a perfect life. There are all the ingredients, lined up neatly with all the weights and measures, all the strategies and transformations they should undertake. And always, and this is maybe the most important part, there is the picture of what will result at the end, this wonderful dish, all colorful and plated just right, it’d charm the pants off a parole officer or a group home mother just to look at it. You served a dish like that, and there’s not a person in the world to refuse you anything you wanted.
But anyone who’s cooked will tell you: those recipe cards and their photogenic feasts are all lies and liars. What worked once, in the test kitchen of some bitchy Manhattan food stylist twenty years ago when you were still a kid, no physics will explain why that won’t ever happen again, but it won’t just the same. You follow the recipe, and what to do you get? Soggy heels of risotto, rice burned into the bottom of the pan that no amount of soaking will lift away, and so many servings of beans that you’ll be sprinkling them in your salad for a month. Take it from me: these promises are for suckers. Recipes are just stories, make-believe for hungry people who want to think that they’ll someday be full and happy, happy and full.
My mother tells this story about when I was just a little man, four or five years old. She was dealing some then, exclusively small, misdemeanor weights; there were times when she had to leave the house and couldn’t quite take me along, but just the same couldn’t leave me at home alone. My Uncle Mike was practically a kid himself, just out of high school and trying to make a living. He was a giant, even before his last growth and to me he seemed huge, but he was just a young guy. He worked at the Subway where the main road split, and my mom would drop me off there when she went to take care of her business. My Uncle Mike, he wore one of those buttons on his polyester polo shirt that said “I’m a Sandwich Artist!” Mike would come around the counter with a bag of chips for him and a little cookie on a napkin for me, and we’d talk sandwiches. That was all I wanted to do; I’d ask him to tell me about the different kind of sandwiches he could make, and he’d go through the whole thing for me: wheat or white bread, six inch or foot long, the different kinds of cheese. He told me this stuff for hours, it felt like, and there was no end to the kinds of sandwiches he could make. It was better than any lame prince trying to kind a gold ball or a singing sword.
One time my mom dropped me off there, and Mike came around the counter with my cookie and his bag of chips, but he wasn’t wearing his pin. “Are you still a sandwich artist” I can remember asking him.
“Sure,” he told me, ready to play along with me.
“Then where’s your pin?” I asked. I guess this was about the time that particular promotion ended. Maybe right then, in some other town in America Jared was almost done with his year eating only subway; I don’t know, but I hated it, because I was still explaining it to me mother lately after she’d picked me up. We were back in the kitchen, my mother and her friend Sheena and me. I said, “Did you know that Uncle Mike is a sandwich artist?”
“Maybe a knuckle sandwich artist,” my mother said, and for punctuation she tapped her cigarette against the edge of the gold rimmed saucer she kept beside the stove for when she was cooking. Sheena laughed, but then seeing my face she tried to stifle her laughter.
Anyway, Uncle Mike didn’t work at Subway too much longer. There were other restaurants, places with plastic lamp covers hanging over the tables and windows treated to keep out the light, but none of them were regular gigs or that required him to be an artist when he was cooking or show any real pride at all in the work. Things had picked up for my mom, though; the paper factory was having a good year, and they hired her to fold and stack those accordion streams of dot-matrix printer paper ten and sometimes twelve hours a day, making more money than she did from dealing and cutting hair or whatever other scam she’d get into when the economy was in a downturn. Uncle Mike came over to the semi-detached house we rented then to watch me because he hardly ever worked during the day, and he’d entertain me in the kitchen because that was the only room she allowed anyone to smoke in. He’d sit at the kitchen table with an ashtray at one elbow and a bowl of soggy cereal in the other, and every now and then he’d stop spooning cereal in his mouth long enough to give me another lesson about how to fight.
“Tell me about sandwiches,” I’d pester him. “Tell me a recipe for a sandwich.”
“I’ll tell you a recipe,” he said. “I’ll tell you how to make a knuckle sandwich. First, you take a hand, only it’s got to be a good one. Strong muscles, and lines inside that make an “M” for Michael. Do you have a hand like that.” I chuckled and placed my hand in his open palm, let him trace the letter the folds in my palm made. “That’ll work,” he said. “Now, you need to add four fingers. You need to fold them into the mix.” I curled my fingers inward so that my nails kissed the skin of my palm. “Good,” he said. “Now just one more ingredient. Is there a thumb you can add? It goes across the top, kind of like a garnish.” I brought my thumb inward to cross the fingers. “Now that’s a knuckle sandwich. You’ve got to be careful,” my uncle told me. “Never tuck the thumb inside. That’s like adding the sprig of parsley into your mashed potatoes, and no one wants that.” At that point, I don’t think I’d ever eaten at a restaurant that put a sprig of parsley, or any garnish for that matter, on the plate. He could tell I was confused, and digging deep into his well of baby sitting techniques, he changed the subject.
“Give me what you got,” he said, and I’d give him everything I had in me, windmilling lefts and rights all in a flurry till he was doubled over laughing.
“But you can’t eat it,” I said when I was winded and tired of laughing, and he said, “Want to bet?” He took my fist in his hand and guided it into his mouth. He probably could have swallowed both my fists at once, but instead he settled for just slobbering on the one. I wanted to fall down, it tickled that much that I was out of control laughing.
Mr. Muller, the rat-faced cheese-eater and culinary arts instructor at my Juvie School likes to say that cooking is just the application of heat and time to ingredients, as if that’s all it takes. And that’s why only part of me loves it here—there was nothing like a cooking class in my town, at least not one a boy could take without catching stares, for example—but then, someone will say something stupid like that and it pushes me right up against the edge of anger and getting into exactly the kind of trouble that brought me here in the first place. It’s like cooking, but it’s not: apply heat, sure, and then you’ll see me explode. That’s something you can bank on; you can look at my background, and maybe to you it appears like the kind of thing that’s as simple as a chemical reaction, as simple as the cooking teacher tells it. But it’s not that simple: there’s always room for technique to play a role in how things turn out, always times when something happens and the simplest of materials can become something amazing (have you ever whipped heavy cream, all lumps and heaviness, into the lightest filigree that practically transforms a wire whisk into a magic wand?) or else a total disaster that you wouldn’t serve to your worst enemy.
After he left Subway, my Uncle Mike cooked for Paul Costello, either in one of Paul’s restaurants or one of these places where Paul was owed a favor but that was just a front: Paul had most of whatever rackets there were in town, and Uncle Mike was there to make sure that people didn’t try to get too far ahead of their debts or whatever. The kitchen stuff was just to give him something to do nights, someplace to be where Paul could find him if he needed to. It was a pretty good plan, but like any other recipe, sometimes something went wrong; a few times Uncle Mike spent a weekend in the jug because of it, and this one time when the paper business was good, my uncle stepped across some line and ended up doing a couple months in county. They had a big fight about it, Mike and my mother, because she couldn’t understand why he had to do what Paul said whenever Paul asked him to, and Uncle Mike tried all the excuses: he was a friend, he looked out for Mike, Paul needed the favor, Mike needed the work and the money, but my mom wasn’t having any of it. That time when he went in, moms had to leave the paper mill because there was no other child care at a time when she had hoped to get together enough money for a car. She was hot at Mike when he got out, and she wouldn’t let him come around for a year or more.
But she let him back in eventually, and it was like everything had gone back to the way it was before he went in. I was glad of it: there was no one I missed more, no one I looked up more than him. I had started getting into trouble on my own, but now that he was back, I thought maybe he could help me, with tips on knowing when you needed to break someone’s nose and when just the threat of doing that would be enough. If my mother knew I was following him around and pestering him like that, she would have freaked, because Mike wasn’t supposed to be getting in anymore trouble. The last time he was sentenced, the judge said he’d send Mike away out of State if he came before his bench again (all of this communicated by my mom when she was in her cups shortly after his sentencing when she was trying to explain to Sheena why she didn’t have the heart to go out dancing.) I was sneaky, though, and he wasn’t supposed to know I was there, just like he wasn’t supposed to be doing that kind of work anymore. He let me see him going into bars that Paul owned, and then made sure to lose me when he was going someplace where what happened was likely to turn ugly or illegal. I think in his mind he was protecting me, trying to stop me from turning out like him.
I was at that age, though, and I’d had it with the way he seemed to be able to step into a car and leave me behind whenever he wanted to. My friend Greg, he’d grown into a little hoodrat like me. His specialty was boosting rides and I’d set him to scout out something in the parking lot of this gin mill where serious drinkers got done so that before Uncle Mike got around the corner in this pokey Dodge Neon he drove, Greg and I were right behind him in some poor son-of-a-bitch’s Monte Carlo. A short trip along the business loop to a fancy restaurant that would’ve made my mom, and we were parked as far away from the parking lot lights as we could. I watched Mike shake his shoulders under his leather jacket so that the lights got caught and winked back at us like oil slicks as he walked inside. Greg was all for sitting there and waiting for him to come back out, but I wouldn’t have it. Around back, we found a door to the kitchen wide open while one of the cooks was smoking a joint and trying to convince a waitresses to let him give her a backrub; we could’ve been a medium sized army unit and not been seen as we slipped into the kitchen. I looked for the way to the front of the house, thinking whatever action was to take place would take place near the bar, like it did on our side of town. But as I was walking through the kitchen, I saw Uncle Mike, marching a guy in a button-up shirt beside him. I stopped Greg from slamming into me, and we scrambled, ass over tea kettle, to the salad station where we ducked down to watch. I wasn’t sure if Uncle Mike saw us or not, but I was hoping not; even with him shielding me from the worst, I’d seen enough to imagine how he’d punish me if he did see us.
Mike and this guy walked up to the line, and the guy in the button-up shirt said something so the other cook, the one who was watching things while the guy outside worked his magic, this second cook disappeared. “I’m running a business here, Mr. Cristo,” he said, and spread his hands to take in the burners and pans, the brushed steel tubs of onion and olive and cut chickens. “And your Mr. Costello,” (that was Paul’s name) “he’s running a business, too, but we can certainly find an equitable way to resolve this. Can’t we?”
“I used to work in a place like this,” Mike said, looking around the kitchen without letting his hand off the other man’s shoulder. It was hard to be sure, but I don’t think he saw us crouched behind the stainless steel mixing bowls the salad went into. “I like to think I know something about how to run a business. Restaurant business, it’s tricky and you wouldn’t be doing it if you didn’t have a love for it, ain’t that right?” The other man opened his mouth to answer, but before he could say anything, Mike had started up again. “I worked in some restaurants in my time, I had this one thing I made, called it the Cold Pizza Sandwich. It wasn’t ever on any menu, but people who knew me, they’d ask for it. They knew me and they knew it, because it was kind of like my specialty.”
I thought back on all those days in my mother’s kitchen with Uncle Mike, those days sitting in the molded booths of the Subway where the road through town split, and I couldn’t remember him coming up with anything you might call a cold pizza sandwich. I leaned forward to hear better.
“The cold pizza sandwich, it’s not a gourmet’s sandwich, but it’s better for that. After a hangover, or when you’re still drunk. When your girl’s left you, or after she’s just left, it hits the spot,” Mike said. “When someone needs a sandwich like that, you don’t want to make them wait. I’d make four at a time, totally cover the cutting board with eight pieces of bread, and then drag them through a bowl of egg whites, just like you’re making French toast on Mother’s Day. Skim the white off with the edge of a fork if it looks like it’s going to cling, and then lay the bread flat to sizzle on the fry pan. You add a layer of cheese; it’s cold pizza, so there’s gotta be mozzarella, but if you’re of a mind to, you can add romano, parmesan, whatever you like. You want to add spices, too, like on any good pizza: rosemary and basil I like a lot, maybe a pinch of garlic powder. This is one case where fresh garlic is most definitely not better. Take the cheese and layer it on the upside of that bread, and then add the pepperoni and another shirt layer of cheese.” Mike had taken his hand off the owner’s shoulder and his hands were moving like I used to love to see: little pinches here and strokes there, like those ultimate fighters when they were taking someone apart in the ring, methodically. Button-up shirt wasn’t saying anything; he was watching Mike, the same as us. “Of course, by this time, your bottom bread is cooked up pretty nice, so you bring down that top piece to cover the cheese and the pepperoni, and then it’s probably time to flip them. The bread on the bottom, it’ll have that golden color, with the darker brown mixed in. From there, it’s easy, you just wait for the cheese to melt, and you’ve got it. Pizza sandwiches. I liked to cut mine diagonal, from end to end, so that they looked like triangular slices of pie, then I’d line them up in a Tupperware container and keep it in the walk-in, separated by wax paper, till someone asked for one.”
“That’s quite a sandwich, Mr. Cristo.” Button-up was relaxed, like he was surprised that there was something the two of them had in common. The rat. He saw something and it made him smile. “Maybe I’ve misunderstood you. Maybe you’d like to come work for me. There’s room for a man of your talents.”
Mike laughed, and I thought if I was this guy in the button-up shirt, I’d be terrified about that laugh. “I don’t think so,” Mike said when he’d recovered himself; it was that kind of laugh. “Mr. Costello and I have a business that is really rewarding to both of us. But it’s nice to hear you offer, to know that if I wanted, there’s something in reserve. That’s really nice of you.” His hand fell back on the owner’s shoulder, and it was like an electric shock passed through him, the way that owner stood up straight. “It’s good to have something in reserve, just like it’s nice to have someone watching your back. Boys,” he said, and actually tipped his chin toward us where we crouched behind the salad station and walked out of the kitchen.
What happened next, it didn’t have to happen that way. It was no simple case of these ingredients, apply heat and time and I had no control over what happened next. There’s a reason why things turned out the way they did: I wanted them to. I wanted to taste it, this recipe that my life had supplied the ingredients for, and the directions and the heat. I wanted to taste it for myself and not just hear about it any longer.
I sprung up from behind the salad station and saw with a thrill the shock in the button-up’s eyes as I closed in on him. By the time Greg caught up with me, I had button-up in a headlock and all Greg could do was rabbit punch his soft middle. We dragged him by the neck out the door we came in, his fancy leather shoes scrambling and trying to catch some traction on the fancy no-slip floor. When I threw him against the dumpster, the his head rang the metal like the clapper on a bell. Greg stepped in with more of his rabbit punches till button-up was on his knees, covering his crying face with both hands. I pulled Greg off of him and stepped forward so that I could lift my knee, and sent his head snapping back into the dumpster. When he bounced back, it was to lie on his side and not even try to get up. I felt saliva rush up in my mouth, almost filling it. I could identify the taste as well as any blindfolded master chef: it tasted like fear, the future.