weekday deli & salad pilot

Somewhere in the Great Move, G uncovered the holy grail of this blog. G uncovered the ORIGINAL Weekday Deli & Salad document, dust-covered and well-worn, and we look forward to plating it in gold and preserving it for posterity. What you are about to read is the combined efforts of G, B, and TJ on a rainy Saturday afternoon as we sat through the most boring class on earth. Now, I am a teacher. But I wouldn’t be that upset if my kids were writing this while I talked.
NB: Scribbled at the top of the paper are the words homily, pescavorous, camelopard, confusion. One can only assume that in our Saturday-school coma, we were attempting to entertain ourselves at any cost.

It was a cold, windy day in southern Manhattan. Two figures wander, searching in vain down Nassau St. for a deli with an operating salad bar. Their stomachs growling, G and B enter the Blarney Stone Grill. No luck.
Then Subway? No, too commercial.
Ah – a block away – the Deli & Salad.
Now, approaching Deli & Salad, our two heroines assumes, rationally, that the humble food station shall provide, first and foremost, deli items and assorted grazing offerings. Upon entrance, we find that the restaurant offers NutriGrain bars, raisins, smoothies. Oh, and a Chinese Buffet. Oh, and also sandwiches (premade) and deli meats and cheeses in every shape and form. What’s missing here? Oh – the salad bar.
Wait, wait. But wasn’t it our young heroines’ intent to obtain salads? And didn’t we enter the Deli & Salad? Surely there must be some confusion. Sure our protagonists have merely entered, “Chinese Buffet, Deli, Grocery, and No Salad.”
Curious, our first young lady, B, poses a query to the middle-aged man behind the Deli counter. Perhaps he knows the whereabouts of the Deli’s other half, since, to be fair, the signs in the immediate 50 ft radius advertise both Deli and Salad.
“Excuse me, do you know where the salad bar is?”
“No salad bar.”
“But, isn’t this ‘Deli & Salad’”?
“Monday through Friday, salad bar.”
“Oh, I see. So really, this is ‘Deli & WEEKDAY Salad,’ right? Isn’t that false advertising?”
“We serve salad Monday through Friday,” responds middle-aged automaton.
“We were lured here by the promise of salad and now are duped!” cries our beloved heroine, dismayed.
“Sorry,” he nods, and stares blankly. Our heroines sigh, and, dejectedly, forage for new fare, selecting soggy and decidedly mediocre sandwiches. Apparently, the Deli half of the Deli/Salad union suffers almost as much as the Salad. “Why not just call it ‘Dunkin’ Donuts’? B mutters. ‘Burger King’?”
Dejected, but not hopeless, the young ladies search the dimly-lit room for a welcoming table. “Surely,” G muses, “Surely there must be a seating area somewhere…spoons? Napkins? Salt packets?”
But, alas, no such area was to be found. Instead, the girls’ eyes landed on a narrow lofted area at the rear of the Deli & Weekday Salad, nee Deli & Salad, building. B, clearly the group’s spokesperson in the endeavor, opts for a small table by the window.
The girls stared at their sandwiches. Sandwiches, salads- it most definitely was NOT all the same. Still, B was famished from her long Friday evening of bartending and body shots. She tore into her sandwich, a morass of second-day mozzarella and peppers, with gusto. G picked more deliberately through her egg salad (really?) sandwich. Both wandered how they had wound up here, so far from the lunch they’d dreamed of. So far from the friends and Pace lunchtime giddiness they knew.
Unsure of what else to do – people watching was an impossibility since evidently the other passersby had gotten the ‘no-salad-on-the-weekends’ memo – they gazed at The Strand bookstore. They made small talk neither truly cared about and waited for something to jolt them out of their funk.
Then, a phone call.
“Where are you?” inquired TJ.
“Still here,” G sighed.
“At the Deli & Salad?” The irony did not go unnoticed and G laughed as she hung up the phone. TJ and another comrade, M, soon arrived to join our heroines, now finished their sandwiches and wholly without purpose.
After some moments of deliberation, the group decided to try their hand at dining in the lofted area. They passed by the navicular, forlorn, sometimes-salad bar, and all thought in silence about what might have been.
As they climbed the stairs – the weird half-stair kind designed to trip the same ignorant people who come to such places looking for fresh salads – they noticed some tables had already been occupied that morning. Four Budweiser Tallboys stood like the calling cards of some over-zealous wino. Like four lone kings of long-forgotten kingdoms, the Budweiser cans guarded a third-world chess board [ugly tile floor]. They were sheathed in paper bags, not unlike the businesswoman on her way to work, wearing her best Diane von Furstenburg dress to mask her hangover and the ills within.
The four tacitly considered the beer cans for a moment. Surely they must belong to someone. Would their owner(s) return to claim their belongings, much as a dog returns to its vomit? The four could not conceive of someone leaving so precious a booty in a prestigious establishment such as the Deli-Sans-Salad. And so they continued. Above the flotsam and jetsam of General Tso’s chicken & egg rolls, from their camolepardeon vantage point.
After dismissing the perplexing situation with a giggle, our two heroines sat down to observe the eating rituals of their two friends. Not quite satisfied by her meager assortment of day-old meats and cheeses, B stared covetously at TJ’s pureed eggplant and chickpeas. TJ generously offered his babaganoush to compliment his vignettes about his affinity for tacos and aversion to people suffering from lactose intolerance. B, G, and TJ continued their luncheon conversation by unbosoming their best teaching practices to M as the owner of the King of Beers gracefully returned to his beverages.
The conversation quickly turns from academics to politics.
“I’m having trouble convincing my students not to begin their essays by explicitly stating what they’re going to talk about,” begins G.
B quickly links this pedagogical practice to our nation’s past fearless leader. “It reminds me of the speeches delivered by George Bush.”
“Perhaps he is given sentence starters to write his speeches,” TJ suggests. Mentioning this to our students much be an effective way to eschew this practice, since they hate Bush so much.
“What about Bubba?” interjects a voice in the distance.
“I’m sorry?” responds B, absently.
“Bubba,” the King of Beers repeats, as if the problem was in hearing and not in comprehension.
“Barbara? Like his wife? Are you implying that she writes his speeches?”
“No, Bubba.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with Bubba,” admits B.
“Nevermind, I’m just the drunk guy,” concedes the Drunk King of Beers, honestly.
“You ate the salad, didn’t you,” accuses B. “You ate the salad, and that’s why you’re talking all weird like that, and that’s why they took it away on weekends. We can thank YOU for Deli & Weekday Salad, you son of a bitch.”
The motley crew upstairs erupts into laughter. Our protagonists, laughing also, yet oddly dazed and slightly displaced from the political homily from Mr. Beer (and its ramifications), leaves the site of their feast and brainfuck foreplay.