{"id":169905,"date":"2025-02-19T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T14:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169905"},"modified":"2025-02-21T13:42:42","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T18:42:42","slug":"i-killed-wolfs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/02\/19\/i-killed-wolfs\/","title":{"rendered":"I Killed Wolf\u2019s"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

A history of sandwiches. Drawing by Todd McEwen.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was California, so, sandwiches. I sat by the window overlooking Balfour Avenue, at our kitchen table. Its plastic cloth, gray, with a fringe of white yarn. (How did she ever wash that thing?) My mother was moving between the sink and the stove, framed in the doorway to the dining room. Outside was a big lantana with orange moths in it. I remember this as the time when we started to talk to each other a lot. Was I four? I said to her that I was glad I didn\u2019t have to go to school yet. \u201cOh, yeah?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The sandwich dear to me in those days was Monterey Jack with mayonnaise and lettuce on Van de Kamp\u2019s sliced white bread.<\/p>\n

MY WHOLE LIFE HAS BEEN MAYONNAISE<\/p>\n

There was a perverse ancillary reason that I liked this sandwich: an ancient cartoon that returned again and again, on Sheriff John\u2019s Lunch Brigade<\/em> on KTTV, which I never missed. In this, one of the hundreds and thousands of characters from the early days of commercial animation\u2014Sparky? Inky? Horny? Drecky?\u2014ate a sandwich that looked like mine and smacked his lips loudly while he did it. Of course, I could only smack my sandwich this way when I was in front of the TV and my mother was out of the room, and out of earshot. But it did make it taste better.<\/p>\n

A grilled cheese sandwich, made on our aluminum griddle with the rounded corners. Same bread, same cheese. Maybe Tillamook cheddar once in a while. Perfect. Golden. A big hand for my mom, folks.<\/p>\n

Honey sandwiches. Van de Kamp\u2019s white bread, butter, and Sue Bee whipped honey. I still have a horror of honey you squeeze out of a bear.<\/p>\n

I liked peanut butter and jelly. Everyone does. But while Welch\u2019s grape jelly was the national standard, I accidentally discovered that I also liked peanut butter and Rose\u2019s lime marmalade, something my parents had around from a trip to Canada. What a little snob! But you should try it.<\/p>\n

I liked baloney OK, but I really liked liverwurst. My father was particular to call it braunschweiger<\/em>. Oscar Meyer, or, better, Farmer John. My dad would add raw onion. A step too far for me at that time. But when I later encountered the liverwurst sandwiches at McSorley\u2019s, packed with onion and mustard that blows your head off, I found that I was, in fact, prepared.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Later in life I developed a real taste for Bermuda onion sandwiches. Just onion. Out of simple human compassion, I try to eat these when no one else is home. One day however I had just polished off an entire purple beautiful onion on pumpernickel when the phone rang. It was the dentist\u2014where was I? I\u2019d gotten the day wrong, something that often happened when I was using diaries from Ordning and Reda, who print them in such an ultra-cool light gray that you can\u2019t see what fucking day it is. \u201cBut I\u2019ve just eaten an onion sandwich,\u201d I said. \u201cOh, that\u2019s OK\u2014come on over. Come on now.\u201d I brushed my teeth three times, which ruined the heady experience of the sandwich, and ran over there. I opened my mouth and they were truly amazed at how I could fill up their entire practice, really the whole building, with this essence of one onion. They\u2019re still talking about it.<\/p>\n

I was once alone in winter in a house on Long Island. The salient features of this house were a big dining table at which I could work, a faulty wood stove that almost killed me one evening, and a closet full of the owner\u2019s Ballantine\u2019s scotch and Pall Malls (I more or less replaced them as I used them). There were also a lot of books by Simenon and Bemelmans. What I brought to this solitary party were onions, cheese, ham, and beer, from a little shop I could cycle to on the ice (this was pretty Buster Keaton sometimes).<\/p>\n

There was a week or so in deep winter when it was so frozen that I had to stay indoors. There were cardinals on the fence. After I finished working for the day I would select a handful of Simenons, pour a glass of beer, and sit at the luxuriously large table and read in the heat of the stove. Each time Maigret ordered a glass of beer from the bar in the Place Dauphine and drank it in front of his stove, I drank one too. If he ordered a sandwich, I had a sandwich. When he smoked his pipe, I smoked mine.<\/p>\n

Was this any way to pass the coldest part of the winter? Yes. It was. I kept myself alive, kept the villagers at a distance. After all, I was \u201ctrying to work,\u201d the phrase that I\u2019ve used against everyone I\u2019ve ever known. I have to.<\/p>\n

Sometimes it got a little nuts because there was a radio station in Bridgeport that played the most adorable R&B records on Saturday night and I\u2019d bop around the living room and then zoom back to the big table for another sandwich and a glass of beer and then drowse, until the whapping of the mousetraps in the kitchen awakened me\u2014there was nothing to eat in there but the detritus of my sandwich-making and a big bar of Ivory soap. They would run across the floor to get at it.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\"\"

An autumn lunch in Edinburgh. Drawing by Todd McEwen.<\/p><\/div>\n

My dad had a laboratory accident in high school where his hair caught fire and the inside of his nose was scorched. After that he couldn\u2019t taste or smell much (his hair survived). His gustatory life was muted from that period. He liked strong tastes, though now that he\u2019s ninety he only likes candy. Where he got a taste for German and Jewish stuff I don\u2019t know\u2014he grew up French Catholic, eating baked beans and pancakes in the middle of nowhere, and in the Navy he was stationed in Nassau. Once in a while he\u2019d take me to LINDEL\u2019S, on Lincoln Avenue in Anaheim. There I\u2019d watch him eat gefilte fish and pastrami and sauerkraut. This place was owned by a rotund, jovial man who always came over to our table. My father seemed really grateful to this man for selling food that had flavor<\/em> in Orange County, California, in 1958. One day my dad asked him if he was Mr. Lindel? (Pronouncing it like \u201ckindle.\u201d) The man said, \u201cIn a manner of speaking, sir. The name of my restaurant means \u2018Lincoln Delicatessen.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

(My parents are, in actual fact, the last people in the world who eat baloney. After a twenty-four-hour airplane trip it\u2019s a real treat to be offered one of their quite dry one-slice baloney sandwiches and to be told \u201cWe forgot to buy beer.<\/em>\u201d)<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In 1964, we moved to a more genteel, more sophisticated town. I\u2019m not proud of it and I don\u2019t like mentioning it. It was Palo Alto, California. New place, new sandwiches. The real discovery was the VILLAGE CHEESE HOUSE, a large deli with elegant stuff\u2014my grandmother used to send me chocolates from there that had baby ants, bees, and caterpillars in them. They were dead. Crunchy.<\/p>\n

This shop was run by Europeans. Their preferred breads were pumpernickel and rye, and they put heaps <\/em>of meat and cheese onto their sandwiches, along with mayonnaise, mustard, and PICKLES, which I had never agreed to and I thought I\u2019d probably hate, but I didn\u2019t and now I MUST have them.<\/p>\n

My mother spent most of her life in the frozen food section of the supermarket. There she found \u201cLarry\u2019s\u201d frozen poor-boy sandwiches. These came wrapped in silver mylar and you put them in the oven for half an hour. They fascinated me because they had mayonnaise in them along with ham and baloney (I guess) but the mayo became nice, not horrid, even though it was hot and had once been frozen. Mayo, mayo, mayo. I coveted these but only got one every couple of months.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

A HAMBURGER USED TO BE CALLED A HAMBURGER SANDWICH<\/p>\n

When my father had to go out of town, our mother would take us to MOORE\u2019S BURGER HUT, which sat practically right on the railroad tracks. It was built of cinder blocks and it was very smoky inside and the hamburgers were great. N.B.: the construction of MOORE\u2019S BURGER HUT was identical to that of KIRK\u2019s, in Los Altos\u2014was there a guy driving around California building the exact same burger joint everywhere? Beige cinder block, linoleum, beams, the grill half indoors and half outdoors?<\/p>\n

HIPPO, Menlo Park. Funny murals, big fat hippopotamuses waddling around and enjoying hamburgers. No one needs funny murals if you have good burgers. My father always threatened to order a Cannibal Burger, which was steak tartare, but he never did. He just liked hearing us squeal.<\/p>\n

Hamburgers, the smell of bad ones, pervaded Third Street in San Francisco. Walking from Third and Townsend up to Market Street was like crawling commando-style through a vat of frying onions. You still smelled like it the next day. My mother hated<\/em> this.<\/p>\n

In North Beach there were all these family Italian places along Columbus Avenue and they sold giant hamburgers on San Francisco sourdough, stuffed with onions and saut\u00e9ed green peppers and garlic.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\"\"

Various pleasures of sandwiches. Drawing by Todd McEwen.<\/p><\/div>\n

New York City. Now that<\/em> is a sandwich town. WOLF\u2019S. ZABAR\u2019S. CARNEGIE DELI. THE STAGE DELI. KATZ\u2019S. B&H. BARNEY GREENGRASS. MURRAY\u2019S? Forget it. I\u2019m not even going to talk about bagels. It\u2019s just too huge.<\/p>\n

In my neighborhood there was TA-KOME FOODS\u2014\u201cHome of the Hero.\u201d Far from it, I\u2019d say. The rolls were not nice and the place smelled. It could have been cat piss or mouse piss or roach spray. Or all three. Bigger men than I swore by their meatball heros. (I\u2019ve never eaten a meatball hero, and hope I never have to.) I preferred ROUND sandwiches to LONG sandwiches. A WUSS.<\/p>\n

There was something kind of urine-y about all their sandwiches, come to think of it. They did that thing of sprinkling every sandwich with oil and vinegar, whether you wanted it or not. Everything at TA-KOME was slightly obscured<\/em>, like it was an aquarium, because of the steam tables and because they never really wiped the splash guards. Or anything, really.<\/p>\n

MAMA JOY\u2019S was cleaner and tastier, and more expensive. The cheeses were much better. The main experience was the enormous guy with the enormous mole on his face, the Ham-and-Salad-Tub Man.<\/p>\n

The bread and rolls were better here\u2014I don\u2019t think TA-KOME had real rye at all and they certainly didn\u2019t have pumpernickel. At Mama\u2019s the lettuce and tomatoes were fresher. We could buy Bering cigars, our pipe tobacco (Sobranie and Mac Baren), and stuff like that. We experimented with Tijuana Smalls. IDIOTS.<\/p>\n

I went through a period when I ordered everything on whole wheat. But that gets tiring, no?<\/p>\n

One day Isidor and I decided to invite our professor to lunch. He was very late and we finally phoned his office\u2014he\u2019d probably been hoping that we\u2019d forgotten about it. Anyway he finally came down the street and he seemed pretty unimpressed by the grilled cheese sandwiches I made (just like Mom\u2019s) and the Campbell\u2019s tomato soup, I mean he was about as impressed as he was with us as scholars.<\/p>\n

Isidor was not a sandwich type of guy. So whenever I went over to his and Mary-Ann\u2019s place on the east side, I would stop at this deli on his corner and pick up a baloney and Swiss on a roll. Just to annoy him.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I surprised myself by getting a 1000% Celtic Girlfriend. She was Scottish and Irish AND Welsh!<\/p>\n

Her pop was a guy who used ham sandwiches as a way to avoid his family. He was on a totally different schedule from the rest of them, on a different plane entirely\u2014even though he made it appear<\/em> that he lived among them. He always had soup for breakfast, and six days a week he took a very early train into the city. He left his office on Third Avenue just as rush hour was ending and arrived at home about seven thirty, when most commuters had already had dinner. As his wife prepared their meal, he had three big scotches. Then he ate a little bit, asked a few polite questions about how everybody was, and went to bed.<\/p>\n

Sunday was the one day he was literally, inescapably at home, and he struggled with that. When things got too familial, too American, who knows, too CELTIC, he retreated to the kitchen. Dads always retreat. They can\u2019t bear to see what they\u2019ve wrought. He had these stoneware beer steins in the refrigerator that said L\u00f6wenbr\u00e4u<\/em> on them. He\u2019d fill one up with a can of beer and eat a ham sandwich. The ham sandwiches were made by his wife, and they appeared always to be in the fridge, waiting. Enviable arrangement. Day or night, he stood at the kitchen sink, looking out at the backyard. Like a Hammersh\u00f8i painting of a scene from Updike.<\/p>\n

This kind of thing really works as a break for MALES, but MALES don\u2019t really need, or deserve, a break.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

There is nothing to be said about Boston, except that they had excellent tobacco and there were two sandwiches, both in Cambridge. One was MR. BARTLEY\u2019S, where the hamburgers are very like KIRK\u2019S. The other was a totally fake but quite magical German restaurant, the WURSTHAUS, where the sandwiches were generous and tasted like those at the VILLAGE CHEESE HOUSE. Maybe it was the pumpernickel or maybe I was just missing my family.<\/p>\n

Durgin-Park didn\u2019t have sandwiches, and even if they did, you\u2019d have had to get some big guys to help you shove a ton of prime rib to the other side of the room even to find them. Jacob Wirth\u2019s had sandwiches, and good ones\u2014corned beef, tongue, Westphalian ham, even sardines\u2014but I only ever had hot bratwurst with beans and sauerkraut.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\"\"

Breakfast. Drawing by Todd McEwen.<\/p><\/div>\n

The tramezzini<\/em> of Rome. There is something slightly strange about them. They\u2019re surrounded by a kind of oily glow; they look like they\u2019d come apart in your hand. I\u2019ve never seen anyone eat one, either, yet there are always piles of them. There is a certain sense to this: it\u2019s ROME. What do you need a sandwich <\/em>for?<\/p>\n

They say you can\u2019t get a bad meal in Paris. This is a stupid and pathetic thing to say, because I\u2019ll tell you exactly where you can get one: at a blue-colored caf\u00e9 on the rue de l\u2019Odeon. They have the most awful, inept, disgusting salmon sandwiches ever made. Write me and I\u2019ll give you the address.<\/p>\n

Isidor and I were wandering around London. We passed a pub where there was a sign announcing<\/p>\n

FRESHLY CUT SANDWICHES<\/p>\n

This incensed Isidor, who stood looking at this sign in fascination, saying, \u201cDo you get this? This implies there\u2019s some kind of art, or technique, to merely \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

On Calle del Laurel, in Logro\u00f1o, Rioja, the street of vendors of tapas and pintxos<\/em>, roasted calamari, pulpo<\/em>, tuna, cigalas, patatas riojanas<\/em>, olives, meatballs, mushrooms, manchego, idiazabal, bacalao, anchovies, morcilla, chorizos, croquetas<\/em>, torreznos<\/em>, patatas bravas<\/em>, tortillas and padron<\/em> peppers, they don\u2019t need no steenking sandwiches.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\"\"

Sandwich dimensions. Drawing by Todd McEwen.<\/p><\/div>\n

What is called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should not be, because there\u2019s nothing united about it. There are cucumber sandwiches, but bleccch. There were the historic duck-paste sandwiches that killed a lot of people in Scotland. Bleccch. There are chains that try to imitate American delis, but bleccch.<\/p>\n

What the English call a ham sandwich contains only the faintest memory<\/em> of ham.<\/p>\n

I had to resort to working at an English university, out of poverty. Of imagination. And money. This was a dire wholesale reentry into the domain of the sandwich. At the university there was nothing to eat BUT sandwiches. They appeared at any and every meeting, seminar, class, WHATEVER, from a secret location, and they were always damp. The cheap, sweet mayonnaise (don\u2019t ever visit England) made me nauseous and the margarine gave me diarrhoea (that\u2019s how they spell it!). The fillings tasted like they were scooped up off the floor.<\/p>\n

Just when I\u2019d finished one sandwich, the one I couldn\u2019t imagine<\/em> how I was going to swallow, I\u2019d have to go to a MEETING, where there would be PLATTERS of sandwiches, the same silly, terrible ones I\u2019d just paid money to GAG DOWN because I was working a ninety-hour week and had no time to go anywhere for decent food. Not that there was any. It was ENGLAND.<\/p>\n

They RAMMED these platters and platters of sandwiches at me, and down me, until I had to QUIT.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\"\"

Wolf’s. Drawing by Todd McEwen.<\/p><\/div>\n

WOLF\u2019S: \u201cEvery Meal a Memory,\u201d it said on the matchbook.<\/p>\n

We liked to walk around Midtown. She favored the east side for its boutiques and galleries, while I favored the west side and its theaters, broadcasting companies, beer, and tobacco shops, which she didn\u2019t give a damn about, though she was nice about it. She bought me an avocado-green sake bottle to put my pipe cleaners in.<\/p>\n

Wolf\u2019s wasn\u2019t kosher. They had everything<\/em>: all kinds of bread, meat, fish, cheese, no problem. The sandwiches were about eight inches high. I had consumed a number of them during the course of our romance, but one day my attention was arrested by the sight of a CHEF\u2019S SALAD on the arm of a waiter. From that day on, all I ate at Wolf\u2019s were these chef\u2019s salads: two kinds of lettuce, Swiss cheese, cheddar, even a little scoop of farmer cheese; batons of ham, turkey and tongue, tomatoes, radishes, black and green olives, hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, carrots, the whole drenched with \u201cbleu\u201d cheese dressing or Thousand Island and topped with the dill, dill, DILL of the seventies. Where has it gone?<\/p>\n

One day we were feeling cozy and happy in Wolf\u2019s\u2014I say cozy but really it was a very hot day, so we were feeling reverse-cozy in the blast of their really powerful air-conditioning. I had my chef\u2019s salad and Heineken, she her blini and iced tea. And in the icy coziness, talking, laughing, she relaxed and put her feet up on the empty chair opposite her. But this waiter passing our table looked down at her and said, \u201cMiss! Please!<\/em>\u201d Now, this was a very well-brought-up, ladylike girl. And she blushed. Deep. And after that I wasn\u2019t so keen on Wolf\u2019s. And their subsequent history was checkered: the place started getting regular red flags from the health department. An altercation between kitchen workers ended in a stabbing.<\/p>\n

But perhaps their troubles really began the day I deserted the sandwich for the salad.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Todd McEwen is the author of several novels, including<\/em> Who Sleeps with Katz and<\/em>\u00a0The Five Simple Machines, and<\/em> Cary Grant\u2019s Suit, a book about the movies. He lives in Scotland.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cMy whole life has been mayonnaise.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2569,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[67827,14459],"class_list":["post-169905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-featured","tag-sandwiches"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nI Killed Wolf\u2019s by Todd McEwen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 19, 2025 \u2013 \u201cMy whole life has been mayonnaise.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/02\/19\/i-killed-wolfs\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I 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