Victrola!!
In light of that, this year’s remembrance will focus on Russ’
laughter…
I forget what year it was, or even what time of the year it
was at. It wasn’t Labor Day because I
was the only one up there. Russ and
Gretchen were still together and doing well, so I guess it must have been a
fair amount of years ago. There was some
kind of barn party going on at one of Russ’ friend’s places and we were headed
there for the evening.
Something else to keep in mind; at the time, Russ was still
on his kick to try and replicate Tommy’s (from Olean) amazing steak sub
sandwiches. He’d….perfected (??) his
attempt and had locked down his own personal recipe and while it wasn’t very close
to what Tommy was serving, it was a damn respectable sandwich on its own. Cabbage, special red hot dogs, thin sliced
meat (not SPAM), special hot sauce, etc., etc., etc. Those of you who’ve had them before, you know
what I’m talking about.
Anyway, back to the remembrance. We’d gone food shopping during the day and
collected all the various odds and ends needed for the sammiches and had spent
most of the afternoon cooking them up just right. We ate a few of the first batch while
preparing the second and third batches.
Hell, it was going to be a long night, we needed to get a good base
established!
Eventually, all the ingredients had been doled out, all the
sammiches had been broiled, some had been eaten, some had been put away into
the fridge, but 6 of them…yes, the finest 6, dare I say…those were individually
wrapped in foil and placed with care into a cooler, along with some ice, to be
brought with us. Sure our bellies were
full at the moment, but there were MANY hours still ahead of us, and we needed
to make sure we could counter our future hunger pangs with solid sustenance!
We stocked a separate cooler with our beers for the evening
and off we went.
Arriving at the party, we were welcomed in as if weary
travelers returning from a long trip away.
But this was normal whenever I was with Russ; no matter where we went,
if they were friends of Russ, they always welcomed him and whoever he was with,
as if they were brothers.
The crowd was sizeable, there was a band playing, we made
lots of rounds saying hello to people.
The beverages were flowing well, and as is often the case when
excursioning with Russ, the mantra of “Maine; The Way Life Should Be” was
running through my head.
After a bit, we found ourselves a place to pull up some
floor and relax for a bit. I was
destroying the beers, Russ and Gretchen got their smoke on (if you know what I
mean), and we were all kicking back and laughing ourselves silly. After a bit of that, Russ was hit with a
full-on bout of the munchies and decided he needed one of the sammiches. He reached in, grabbed one and pulled it out…and
there was some water dripping from the end of it. What the…damn, the ice had melted (duh) and
the ends of the sammiches – wrapped in foil – weren’t exactly water proof, so
the sub rolls had soaked up some of the melted water. I was quite certain that this would render
the lower half of the sammiches as inedible, but Russ, not to be deterred in
his smokey state of mind, unwrapped the foil and gave the soggy end a mighty
bite.
I peered at him with serious anticipation – how was it? Was the wet part; disgusting? I was getting pretty hungry at this point and
was loathe to think that half of our food supply had been ruined! But Russ assured me that oddly enough – the sammich
tasted amazing! But there’s no way that
wetting a sub roll would make it taste any better? He couldn’t explain it, but for whatever
reason, he exclaimed the sammich to be more delicious than ever! And then he accentuated his argument by
taking an even larger bite, and savoring it with moans of delight and what appeared to be a near
swoon. I was sold!
I grabbed one of my sammiches, tore the foil off of the
soaked end, took a humongous bite and chewed with reckless abandon, eagerly
awaiting the moment when the new, enhanced flavors would coat my tongue and
send ripples of satisfaction to my brain.
But…something was wrong…this didn’t taste good… This…this tasted…TERRIBLE!
I froze in mid-chew and looked at Russ with what must have
been a pathetic look of confusion and revolt.
My brain, in its beer-muddled state, was unable to figure out what was going
on. How could Russ’ sammich taste so
amazing while mine tasted so god-awful??
I looked at Russ and managed to garble around the stuff in my mouth; “…but…this
thing tastes like SHIT!?!?”
But then it all became clear to me because I could see Russ' face register the disgust and confusion on my face as I
stared at him with this half-chewed mouth full of sammich, and he immediately burst
into full-throated laughter.
Now when I say full-throated laughter, only those of you who
have seen Russ when he’s been hit by one of these fits will understand what I’m
saying. When I tell you that he was beside
himself with laughter, he was almost unable to breathe from laughing so hard.
When he was able to summon half a lung of air, he paused to
look at me and say, “Of COURSE it tastes like shit, it’s soaked with COOLER
WATER!” before succumbing to another fit of amazingly contagious, hearty
laughter.
I could not spit that stuff out of my mouth fast enough, and
seeing me trying to paw that crap off of my tongue only sent Russ into deeper
fits of laughter. There we were; me
trying to hack this soggy sludge out onto the ground, Russ literally almost pissing
himself from laughter, and Gretchen just caught up in the whole spectacle and
laughing herself silly, too. Folks around
us were looking over and trying to figure out what the hell was going on. For all appearances, it probably looked like
I was choking, and Russ and Gretchen were laughing themselves to death at the
sight of me struggling.
The whole thing had been a joke at my expense. Of course the soggy part of the sammich tasted
like shit! But rather than let on, he’d
built it up and suckered me into falling for it. And man, did I bite!! (Pun intended.)
It took us quite a while before we all finally gathered
ourselves and got the laughter fits under control. Suffice to say that we cut the soggy ends off
of the rest of the sammiches, but for years after that, whenever one of us was
hungry, we would joke about the soggy sammiches, and it would send us into
brief sessions of laughter at the memory.
God I miss that laugh…
Victrola Brother!!!
