Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  I successfully made it through the morning hours, ringing people up, refilling coffees, and serving folks croissants and muffins that I coveted mind, body, and soul. In anticipation of the lunchtime hour, Will talked me through the slicing of all the various meats, cheeses, and vegetables that needed to be replenished. The first few folks trickled in, Will took their orders and handed me the tickets, and I started making the sandwiches, spending too much time on each one, but eventually gaining my footing as the tickets lined up on the cutting board. I made roast beef and provolones on wheat; veggie cheeses on sunflower; turkey, tomato, and cucumber with vinaigrettes on sourdough; and even a few odd Reubens (and by odd, I mean strange/soggy/unrecognizable as Reubens).

  Will critiqued my sandwich-making skills as we went along during the rush (“too much mayo, the turkey is swimming”; “try not to burn every Reuben”; “what is this supposed to be?”), and I started feeling more comfortable at the sandwich stand. As the early rush started dying down, Will took off his apron and went to hang it up.

  “OK,” he said. “I’m off.”

  You’re what? I thought.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yep, time to tee up.”

  Turned out Will had stayed late that day in order to break me in, but he usually came in early to bake and then left by midmorning to go play golf. So he was leaving me here on my first day to handle whatever lunch stragglers came in, to preside over the small afternoon tea crowd, and to close the shop at five p.m. I would be left to my own devices, large and in charge of a café full of food and drink that I’d been craving all morning. Albacore tuna salad? All mine. Cheesy potato soup? Es mío. Enough cookie dough to put me to death twenty times over?

  A few minutes later, Will was gone, and a few minutes after that Leslie was out the door and the Chip ’n’ Dale sheet cake was ready for pickup. By the end of Car Talk on NPR, I was alone. A few customers remained chatting at their tables, and as things quieted down I took the opportunity to leave the space behind the counter and survey the bookshelves of this, my new kingdom. There was row after row after row of science fiction, horror, classics of literature, pulp titles—a kitchen-sink collision of both sophisticated and vulgar prose on delectable display: Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Collins, King, Dick, Straub, Barker, Woolf, Hubbard—an endless supply of other worlds, other rooms, other voices, other options, both high and low. I picked a few titles off the shelf—Floating Dragon by Peter Straub and Wifey by Judy Blume—then walked over to get a Village Voice. I returned to the prep table behind the counter, opened the Voice, and started paging through it.

  I immediately latched on to the Life in Hell comic strip by Matt Groening on one of the first pages. In a strange, subterranean way, I identified, immediately and profoundly, with Binky, the self-loathing, self-doubting, and anxiety-ridden rabbit gazing at me desperately from inside each panel, whispering “I am you.” It was the first comic I’d seen outside of the Sunday paper or Parade magazine, and I marveled at how much existential dread could be contained in one quarter-page of an alternative weekly. This was no Hi and Lois or Hagar the Horrible. This comic vibrated with agitated longing, just like me.

  It was the photo on the next page that made me want to run away from home and hitch a ride to Chelsea. The picture was illustrating Michael Musto’s nightlife column, and it featured a go-go boy standing on a bar in a see-through Speedo receiving a sweaty dollar bill from a patron into his waistband. The sight of such a wonderfully smutty picture right there in front of me in black and white altered forever my understanding of what could be distributed into the great state of North Carolina and sold at a classy café. Something about the fact that this alluring scene was rendered in newsprint and not in glossy full-color photos made the existence of this go-go boy and his dollar-wielding friend even more real. Their world seemed closer to mine—reachable. How I wanted these worlds to converge, to manically undress, to hump in a spastic fashion. Sure, the guy in the Speedo had kind of dead eyes and probably a monstrous cocaine monkey on his back. But in another respect he was living the dream!

  The sound of someone clearing his or her throat snapped me out of my tawdry reverie. I turned around to the front counter to see a small line of folks waiting to order. I whipped my head back to my Voice to close it, hoping nobody had seen what article I’d been lost in.

  I zipped up to the counter, stretching my bangs across my forehead and hooking them around my ear once again before taking up paper and pen to take sandwich orders. I decided to collect all the new orders and then migrate over to the sandwich counter to get to work. The first few orders were pretty standard fare that posed absolutely no complications whatsoever. Then up stepped a woman in a fur coat with dyed auburn hair, her face powdered white, her lips painted crimson red, and ’50s secretary glasses on her nose, through which her dark brown eyes looked at me with complete and utter bafflement.

  “Yes, hello,” she said in a husky voice. “I’d like an avocado jack sandwich on sunflower bread. Just sprouts and tomato.”

  I nodded and started writing those words on my notepad: avocado/jack, sunflower, sprouts, tomato. OK, great, I thought. Now, what’s an avocado?

  I had somehow not seen this particular sandwich on the list when I’d been studying it, probably because I was too busy trying to figure out how to make a Reuben. The ugly truth: Avocados were a totally new concept to me. Sure, I’d heard the word, and if asked by Alex Trebek if it was an animal, vegetable, or mineral, I would have been able to say with absolute certainty that it was not an animal. Beyond that, I was at a loss. I was just a humble boy from a meat-and-potatoes family. I knew spinach, squash, brussels sprouts, green beans, broccoli, English peas, and butter beans. But avocados? What kind of elitist bullshit tree did they grow on?

  I walked over to the sandwich table and started in on the first few orders, which mercifully just involved slapping meat on bread, adding some veggies, mayo, and mustard, and maybe salt and pepper. All the while, I was wracked with uncertainty about how exactly I was going to accomplish the construction of this mythical “avocado/jack sandwich.” I couldn’t very well ask this woman what it was; she was already looking at me like I was the village idiot, and I wasn’t about to give her confirmation.

  While I prepared the other sandwiches, I scanned the sandwich instructions for the “avocado jack” listing. I spotted it and hungrily gobbled up the step-by-step directions, written in Will’s loopy handwriting:

  SLICE ONE AVOCADO IN HALF AND PLACE ONE HALF OF IT ON THE BREAD. ADD JACK CHEESE AND WHATEVER VEGETABLES CUSTOMER ORDERS.

  Vaguer sandwich instructions have never been written. I could feel trembling tears ready to burst out of my eye sockets and gush forth onto the cutting table in a furious cascade. Then I thought, Hey, at least I now know that an avocado can be cut in half.

  I knelt down and opened the cooler under the counter to launch my avocado search. I moved around all the various stacks of Saran Wrapped cheeses and meats, as well as the plastic containers of sliced tomatoes, washed lettuce leaves, and sprouts. Then I saw two oval-shaped items that had the color and consistency of tree bark. I picked one up. Could this be what I was looking for?

  I stood up and placed what I was now hoping against hope was an avocado on the counter. The woman stood on the other side of the cookie case talking to her friend, and as I started wondering what would happen if I just ran out of the store and never came back, I suddenly had an idea: I would take the “avocado” in hand, turn around so she sees me holding it, and see what look she gives it. Maybe she would have a flash of recognition when she saw what I had in my hand and nod at me like Obi-Wan Kenobi?

  I pivoted and allowed her to see me with the rough-surfaced dark green thingamie in my hand. She looked at it briefly and then went back to her chat without giving away anything. Argh. I was feeling more like Blinky every second. Then another lightbulb flashed over my head, and I ran into the back where the larger cooler was. Maybe there would be a bag in there with a l
abel on it saying in bright red letters “These Are Avocados, Idiot!”

  I searched and searched and searched, rummaging furiously through the cooler as a choir of hell-demons floated above me singing Carmina Burana. I tossed aside containers of icing, sacks of tomatoes, and blocks of cheese, and, as I reached the back of the cooler, a heavenly light shone down and the hell-demons turned into angels and switched to Messiah. There, in the back corner of the cooler, was a sack on the shelf saying—yes, in red letters—AVOCADOS. Inside the sack was a bunch more of the tree-bark-covered egg-shaped objects that I already had sitting on the cutting board.

  Mystery solved. Now all I had to do was make the damn sandwich. I returned to the prep counter and looked again at the instructions:

  “Slice one avocado in half and place one half on the bread.”

  I took my knife and sliced the avocado open. Oh look, it has a big nut on the inside. I set aside the half with the nut and fixed my knife on the other half, which I had to “place on the bread.” How to place it? Good question.

  Chitter chatter filled the café, as did the now tedious sounds of NPR’s Car Talk, whose hosts, Click and Clack, couldn’t stop laughing. I knew my lady friend must be getting antsy about her sandwich, so I swallowed hard and started slicing the avocado further, cutting through the skin so that I ultimately ended up with a collection of avocado crescents, still attached to their reptilian epidermis, looking not terribly edible. I took the sunflower bread and started placing the crescents on one of the slices, attempting to arrange them in a way that suggested, maybe even encouraged, edibility. But it just didn’t look right. My bangs bounced in front of my eyes, and I swiped them back over my ear with my clammy hand.

  I’d hit a brick wall, completely and utterly lost, with no idea what I was doing. Maybe it’d be better just to face the facts and gracefully admit defeat. Or if not that, then at least ask for some help. I turned around to look at the lady in the fur coat and wondered how I should phrase my plea.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, did you want the skins on that?”

  Silence swallowed the room. Even the Car Talk guys shut up. The woman looked at me through narrowed eyelids.

  “The skins?”

  “Yes, the skins. The avocado skins.”

  She laughed uncomfortably and delayed her answer, waiting for me to tell her that I was joking. I held my ground, stone-faced. Because I wasn’t joking.

  She looked at her friend, who returned her confused gaze.

  “No,” she said, as if I had just asked her whether Santa Claus might help me refinance my parents’ house.

  I quickly nodded, extremely satisfied with her answer. “Oh, OK,” I said, then pivoted to my defense: “Some people do.”

  After saying that, I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with her again until I’d finished making her sandwich. I sliced the skins off the adorable little avocado crescents and discovered that I should probably spread them onto the bread like butter. I started doing that. Oh, I see, avocados are spreadable! Like butter!

  “Excuse me,” a lispy-voiced gentleman said from the other side of the pastry case. I turned and saw a handsome man in his mid-twenties looking at me with just a hair of impatience. He was the tablemate of a guy I’d already waited on and whose sandwiches I’d made (a veggie cheese and a Reuben). He was holding a bottled beer that he’d pulled from the beverage cooler.

  “Do you have a bottle opener?”

  “Sure,” I said, hopping over to the register. He was tall and well-groomed, his black hair styled in the manner of a jazz-age film star, his olive complexion denoting an otherworldly sophistication that I yearned to experience firsthand, while naked, on the Riviera, in a boat, drinking crème de menthe. I opened the bottle for him after dropping and picking up the opener a few times, and handed him the bottle. Meanwhile, the lady in the fur coat huffed and puffed about her sandwich, which I’d yet to place into her greedy little hands.

  “Thank you,” he said, flashing the briefest of smiles. “Can I also have a glass?”

  “Sure, of course,” I said, sweating frantically under my vest, bangs breaking free and bouncing in front of my face. I turned to grab a glass and then thought I might offer him something else that might help him enjoy his beer more. It’s called customer service.

  “Would you like me to put some ice in it?” Ice, right? What could be better than enjoying a cold beer over ice in a chilled glass? So urbane, so genteel, so Continental.

  The gentleman looked at me like I had just grown a nipple on my forehead.

  “Ice?” he said, lisping as if his life depended on it, drawing out the “sssss” sound as if to emphasize the ssssssstupidity of the question.

  “Yeah, ice. No? No ice?” I couldn’t believe he didn’t want ice.

  He shook his head slowly and removed himself from the counter, looking slightly offended.

  “Excuse me,” the lady blurted out, her patience having been well and truly tested. “Can I get my sandwich now? Without the skins.” Her friend laughed.

  I nodded and returned to the sandwich table to finish up the avocado jack, feeling like I’d been shown up completely and utterly as a know-nothing hick with no taste, class, or sophistication. Who was I kidding? No one. I should probably just hang up my apron and return to Kerr Drug, where I could assist people shopping for nail polish remover, hair clips, Ogilvie Home Perm kits, and denture cream. People more my speed.

  It was a good-looking sandwich that I placed in front of the fur-draped lady a few minutes later, but it was too late to matter now. I rang her up, and she handed me her money as if she were tipping a bathroom attendant, then sat down with her friend and ate her avocado/jack on sunflower, the Official Sandwich of Judgy Bitches.

  That was the last of the late afternoon rush, and as I returned to my depraved Village Voice I was breathing heavily and my legs were tingly. I flipped the pages and gazed at them with glazed eyes. I wiped beads of sweat from my forehead. My hair was wet and dangling in front of my face like tendrils of a grapevine. After a few minutes it came to me: My blood sugar was low. The thought I had immediately after that was: And I am in Willy Wonka’s freaking chocolate factory.

  I traipsed over to the cookie case, slid it open, and grabbed the largest item I could find, one of the deluxe chocolate chip cookies. Leaning on the case, I took a big bite of it, catching stray crumbs with my hand and shoving them into my mouth as I stared off into space like a zombie devouring brains made of sugar.

  Even through my insulin-fueled stupor I could feel the avocado jack lady intermittently looking at me with condescension and disdain, but I didn’t care, because after this cookie I was going to go chow down on a chocolate croissant and maybe even go stick my head into a big tub of cookie dough. And during my avocado search I’d caught a glimpse of a big tub of cream cheese cake icing, so I’d be paying that a visit, too.

  She could take her avocado, and she could shove it.

  It was a trial by fire on my first day at the Elitist Sandwich Making Institute, but the humbling and humiliating experience of publicly not knowing anything about avocados or beer or sauerkraut or corned beef or what a convection oven was made me stronger. And while I was stretching my wings and learning all about the gustatory delights the Coterie had to offer, I was also getting regular exposure, via my dear sweet Village Voice, to culture, and by culture I mean cultcha, and by cultcha I mean pictures of hot dudes in 1-900 ads and alluring gay personals and reviews of homoerotic plays and interviews with Harvey Fierstein and articles about ACT UP and “outing” and how Mayor Koch is a total closet case. In short, I was thrown a lifeline, shown that there was a big gay wonderland out there that was mine for the taking, and that maybe, one day soon, I would be the go-go birthday boy happily unwrapping a big, thick, throbbing gift, maybe in the back of a pickup truck, maybe in a library study room, maybe in a fancy hotel room with a cock-shaped bathtub.

  In the meantime, I was becoming an expert not only at Reuben preparation and av
ocado identification, but also at muffin making, pastry recommendations, and scanning of the bookshelves for novels with gay content. (Best find: Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John Lahr.)

  Within a few months I was a seasoned server of highfalutin food and beverages (no ice), with an attitude to match. I knew how to handle all comers, from the unbearable woman who came in every Saturday for two cheese straws, a bran muffin, and an Earl Gray tea and would never shut up about her son’s SAT scores, to the man who told me and my coworker Jenn every week that we had “Jewish noses” and that we really should look into getting an espresso machine, to the woman who’d just been released from Dorothea Dix mental hospital and always demanded I wash my hands in full sight of her before preparing her food. During my downtime, whenever I wasn’t reading the Voice, trolling for a good paperback, or just standing behind the counter, staring out into space, and wondering who killed Laura Palmer, I could be found chatting happily and flirting ever so slightly with the handsome surfer dudes who worked next door and came in every day for their veggie sandwiches and shop talk or breezily conversing with customers such as the gallery owner who shared my love of Anne Rice’s vampire novels and Siouxsie Sioux’s new bob haircut.

  But my favorite customers—and by favorite I mean least favorite—were the terrible yuppie couple who always came in after the lunch rush and always, always, always ordered whatever it was we were out of. I relished waiting on them every few weeks, because for a truculent adolescent, what is more enjoyable than giving irritating people disappointing news?

  In they would stroll, the gentleman wearing khakis and an immaculately combed beard, his haughty, terminally unhappy lady friend all angles and elbows between her shoulder pads and heels. They sauntered to the counter in slow motion as, say, I flipped through that week’s Voice and noticed with delight that there was a photo of a cappuccino-brown black man’s butt accompanying a review of what looked like a wonderfully unbiblical film called Looking for Langston. After I left my new customers waiting for a suitable amount of time, I looked up to see them staring at me with irritated eyes.