Domestic Left #73: Enjoy every sandwich
Warren Zevon, the singer and songwriter best known for “Werewolves of London,” passed away 21 years ago today. He was 56 years old, just five years older than I am now. His final public performance was on the David Letterman show the previous October, shortly after he was diagnosed with the pleural mesothelioma that would kill him. When Letterman asked him “Do you know something about life and death that maybe I don’t know?” Zevon famously responded, “Enjoy every sandwich.”
At its most basic, this is simply a cute version of the common dictum to enjoy every day like it may be your last, live life to the fullest because you never know when it may end, etc. But it is also an injunction to enjoy every sandwich, a quotidian and utilitarian thing that you pack for yourself when you are going to eat lunch at your office desk, or purchase while on the go at an airport or a turnpike service area. It is an injunction to enjoy not just every day, but the everyday.
A woman I was in love with once wrote to me that the time she spent without me (it was a long-distance relationship) was like a turkey sandwich — perfectly fine, filling, nutritious, tasty even — but, still, lacking something. When we wrote to each other about food, we wrote about more exciting fare: risottos perfumed with saffron, or the long, slow simmer of ropa vieja, which turns a tough cut of meat into tender, yielding flesh too juicy to be contained by slices of bread.
When a subsequent relationship with a union organizer suddenly became long-distance, due to the vagaries of how union organizers are assigned to organizing campaigns, I made a sudden decision in the summer of 1997 to drive from Iowa to North Carolina — not quite halfway across the country, but not a drive to sneer at either. At the time, I was a frugal graduate student, so before leaving I made a bag of sandwiches and tossed them in the front seat to sustain me during the drive. Although the drive itself was impulsive and romantic (and resulted in a marriage at the end of the year), the sandwiches seemed, at least at the time, no more romantic than the gas that I pumped into my car along the way.
Not that sandwiches cannot be romantic. In chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s 2011 memoir Blood, Bones, and Butter, her description of her marriage falling apart is interrupted by one wild, glorious memory of her Italian soon-to-be ex-husband procuring sandwiches piled high with various cold cuts and cheeses, putting her on the back of his motorcycle, and taking her on a ride through a Brooklyn afternoon that briefly reminded her of why she fell in love with him.
When I first moved to Pittsburgh, in August 2017, I got an apartment in Bloomfield, Pittsburgh’s “Little Italy.” I did not have a car, so I would frequently shop at the grocery closest to my apartment, Donatello’s Italian Grocery on Liberty Avenue.
The quality of the produce at Donatello’s was ... uneven. But they carried these fantastic soft onion rolls, and their deli was, unsurprisingly, full of first-rate Italian cheeses and cured meats. So I developed a habit of making sandwiches of salami, capicola, mortadella and provolone to take to my downtown office on weekdays. And I definitely enjoyed them.
By February, I noticed that I kept coming down with colds with far greater frequency than usual. I can’t prove that this was caused solely by my diet, but after I stopped eating all that processed, high-fat lunchmeat on white bread, I stopped getting sick.
Sometime last fall, I started watching YouTuber Barry Enderwick’s daily video series Sandwiches of History. The videos usually follow a predictable script: Enderwick chooses a sandwich recipe from an old cookbook, makes it on camera, tastes it, and usually chooses to “plus it up” with one or more additional ingredients. He rates both the regular and plussed-up version from 1-10, then declares whether he will finish it (the sandwiches are his actual lunch), and whether he would make it again.
The sandwiches range from simple to complex, and from obviously appealing to bizarre — a recent sandwich deemed too terrible to be worth plussing up consisted of a mixture of raisins, olives and cottage cheese “sandwiched” between two pineapple rings. I love the videos because they are short — just a couple of minutes each — and also because of one of the things I take to be the moral of the series: It is okay to literally stop eating a mediocre sandwich after a bite or two to “plus it up.” And perhaps metaphorically as well.
The idea of making a sandwich for oneself at home has always seemed to me slightly indulgent. Going to the trouble of putting something between two slices of bread, making a small portable feast, and then just eating it right there? For some reason, my inner New England Calvinist is always telling me that when I am eating at home I should either be frugal by, say, reheating leftovers, or virtuous by making a proper meal, with vegetables and whole grains. Furthermore, most of the people I have made food for over the course of my life have not really been fans of the sandwich as a meal form.
But some kinds of sandwiches — grilled cheese, for example — cannot really be packed for later. And a good, thick slice of fresh tomato — which will “plus up” most sandwiches — will fall apart over hours in a plastic ziploc in your backpack, especially if properly seasoned with salt, making the bread soggy and the sandwich a disaster to eat.
So during the pandemic lockdown, one of the small indulgences I permitted myself was making sandwiches of Italian cold-cuts again, topping the cured meats with cheese melted under the broiler. Not every day mind you — I was especially keen not to undermine my immune system in that moment — but enough to, in a small way, make up for the sudden constriction of our world, the shutting off of possibilities as we hunkered down in our domestic bunkers.
Zevon was known as the “bad boy” of 70s singer-songwriters, certainly for his prodigious consumption of alcohol and drugs but also, I suspect, because his songs rock a little harder than those of his contemporaries Jackson Browne and James Taylor, with lyrical themes that are often surreal, dark, acerbic, and/or macabre. The last song he performed (on the Late Show, at Letterman’s request), “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” is a story of betrayal and supernatural revenge among mercenaries fighting in the African civil wars of the 1960s. After he got sober, in the mid-80s, he released a hilarious send-up of celebrity recovery culture called “Detox Mansion,” backed by members of R.E.M. and employing the same hard-driving beat and heavy, crunchy guitars as “Finest Worksong,” the song that opened their 1987 move into heavier rock, Document.1
But he could also write songs of incredible tenderness and vulnerability. The narrator of “Carmelita,” who is “all strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town” after pawning his Smith and Corona typewriter to buy drugs, the narrator of “The Hula Hula Boys,” relating how his wife or girlfriend is abandoning him for (and likely cuckolding him with) the locals on a vacation to Maui, and the narrator of “Desperadoes Under the Eaves,” who wakes in the morning with shaking hands, staring into his empty coffee cup, are all anti-heroes who make no claims on our sympathy except insofar as we may identify with their particular situation.
Zevon presents their misfortune, or perhaps his misfortune, in stark and unsentimental terms, but without judgment or voyeurism. He paints their sadness, regret and despair with a light and empathetic touch, all the more touching for having come from someone also capable of writing, well, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.”
I don’t really remember exactly when I became a devotee of breakfast sandwiches, but my fondness for them was definitely well established by about a decade ago, because in a Facebook group I was active in at the time people would remark upon it — at one point someone commented that, for me at least, breakfast sandwiches have the power to make “all things possible.”
The breakfast sandwich is a liminal thing. Like brunch, it sits in between breakfast and lunch, but not so much in time as in structure. Where brunch is expansive and shared, sprawling out in time and space, across buffets and large parties, a breakfast sandwich is compact and personal, yet still luxurious. It is a sandwich, yes, and can be held in one hand and eaten without utensils, but if properly made, with the yolk of the egg still at least a little soft and runny, it constantly threatens to escape the bounds of its bread, whether it be an English muffin, a soft roll, a biscuit or bagel. It can accommodate a wide variety of not only breads but also cheeses, meats, and other fillings, and it can telescope a leisurely weekend breakfast into a meal eaten on the road on the way to an early-morning union meeting. It is a thing of wonder and possibility.
A few days after Zevon’s death, Bruce Springsteen opened one of his concerts with “My Ride’s Here,” a song written by Zevon and released on an album of the same name released in 2002. At the time, Zevon described the album as a “meditation on death,” in an eerie prognostication of the surprise diagnosis he would receive a few months later.
The lyrics, co-written with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, are somewhat in the mold of those fantastical Dylan songs populated by an improbable cast of characters from across myth and history. In a narrative that seems to take place in a variety of modern chain hotels in the southwest, we meet Jesus and John Wayne; the Romantic poets Shelley, Keats, and Lord Byron; and, in the final verse, the actor Charlton Heston, playing both Moses and John the Baptist.
I much prefer Springsteen’s version — the first one I heard — which was released on a Zevon tribute album (appropriately entitled Enjoy Every Sandwich) in 2004. The slower tempo, the prominent acoustic guitar, accordion and fiddle, and Springsteen’s weary yet stirring voice make his performance both elegiac and triumphal. I discovered it during a particularly difficult period in my life around six years ago, and its confidence in the act of leaving, its repeated simple refrain of the three words “my ride’s here,” the melody descending slightly over an ascending I-IV-V chord progression, felt deeply comforting.
In the first two verses and the bridge, the destination of the ride is earthly: Yuma, Arizona; across the San Jacinto; out of East Texas. But in the final verse, the narrator is invited by the Biblical Heston to contemplate his Christian faith (“It's still the Greatest Story”). He declines (“Man, I’d love to stay,”), but then ambiguously invokes a gospel song (“But I’m bound for glory”) before announcing his departure: “Yeah I’m on my way.” We don’t know for what glory Zevon is bound2, but he is confident enough to turn his back on the known story, handed down through the ages, to find his own way into the unknown.
Earlier this week, while working from home, for lunch I put some slices of a soft, camembert-like cheese onto a slice of whole wheat bread, ran them briefly under the broiler to soften, then added some sliced roasted beets and mesclun that needed a home and topped it all with another slice of whole-wheat bread. It’s probably not a sandwich that people are going to be eating a hundred years from now, and it’s hard to say whether I will ever make this particular sandwich again. But it didn’t need a plus-up, and I finished it. And definitely made sure to enjoy it.
About a year ago, David Letterman’s official YouTube channel posted a high-quality recording of Zevon’s final appearance on the Late Show, which includes not only the interview, but also performances of “Mutineer,” “Genius,” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”:
While working on this newsletter, I put together playlist of 21 of my favorite Zevon songs. It includes a few cover versions by other artists, but does not include “Werewolves of London” or some of his other more well-known songs like “Excitable Boy” and “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” If those are the only songs of his you know, do yourself a favor and check out some of his other work:
The drum parts on “Detox Mansion” and “Finest Worksong” are almost identical; R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry once recalled that they would always open shows with “Finest Worksong” because its unrelenting sixteenth-note hi-hat pattern and heavy beat made it the hardest song for him to play; the rest of the show would be relaxing by contrast. The harmonic structure of both songs also consists primarily of hanging on a single chord, with the bass (in “Finest Worksong”) or guitar (in “Detox Mansion”) providing contrast by dropping down a whole step. Document and Sentimental Hygiene (the Zevon album which includes “Detox Mansion”) were released within days of each other at the end of August 1987.
Apparently not the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or at least not yet.