Co-Pretenders

I stood in line patiently at the Italian deli near my place of employment/living quarters in Pennsylvania.  I’d been driving around all day running errands trying to decide what I wanted to eat.  When I passed the deli the second time, on the way back to my temporary home on campus, I realized I felt like a New York-deli-style sandwich.

            I reviewed the offerings presented by the menu.  There was a ‘hot sandwiches’ category, a ‘special sandwiches’ category, a ‘grilled panini’ category, and a ‘salads’ category, all posted on the wall.  As I stood behind the two gentlemen in front of me, both of whom were being helped, I noticed that both of the deli workers sported New York Yankees baseball caps.  I wore a similar blue and white cap demonstrating support of my lifelong favorite baseball team.  I’d been to the deli once before and knew that it was owned by transplanted New Yorkers; however my previous visit did not reveal their allegiance to the Bronx Bombers.

I looked at the menu again with renewed interest and noticed that some of the items were named for famous Italians and others for famous New Yorkers.  They had ‘The Godfather’, ‘The Raging Bull’, ‘Soprano’s Special’, and ‘Rocky Marciano’s Knockout’, all special sandwiches; there was ‘Mike Piazza’s “Catch a Local Favorite,”’ and ‘Joe Torre’s Roast Beef Italiano,’ both hot sandwiches; there were even dishes bearing only a first name, no doubt the inventions of deli employees or regulars: ‘Michelle’s Delight’, ‘Doreen’s Delight’, and ‘Nancy’s Salad Sampler’, all salads.

A name that was noticeably absent from the list was that of the captain of the Yankees, my favorite sports figure, Derek Jeter.  Of course, Jeter isn’t Italian, a trait all the other namees shared, but to a Yankees fan that shouldn’t matter.  It was my turn to order.

“Half pound of pastrami,” I said, partially to kill time while I thought about my sandwich choice, partially to cross off the last item on my mental list of groceries.

“Anything else?” the lone remaining deli worker asked.  Sometime during my musing the other employee had retreated, perhaps in favor of more pressing duties.

“I notice you don’t have a sandwich named after Derek Jeter,” I said with a sly smile on my face.

“Alright, you got me,” the worker said with a chuckle and a glance at my sideways-turned baseball cap.  “You from New York originally?”

“Yeah,” I said proudly.

“Yeah, me too,” he said.  “Not too many of us around.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“What made you come down here?”  He made the words “down here” sound particularly distasteful as though the area in which we stood was a major step down for a New Yorker.

In many ways the deli man’s implication was accurate.  The deli was located in a very rural section of Pennsylvania, a little less than an hour’s drive from Philadelphia.  The town did not have a stadium or a theater, a major highway or a major taxi cab company.  It was an area where vehicle ownership was a necessity.  In these ways one might say that The City That Never Sleeps was vastly superior.  In this town, however, drivers did not honk their horns unnecessarily, the roads were well-paved and without potholes, and people were generally courteous to each other.  New York wasn’t superior in all areas.

“I’m stupid,” I said still smiling.  “I do want a sandwich,” I said, regaining my focus, “but I’m not sure…”

“You don’t have to get something from the menu,” Deli Man said.  “You can have anything you want.”

“If I make up a sandwich will you call it the Derek Jeter?” I asked, only half joking.

“Sure,” he said.

It was then that I realized Deli Man wasn’t really a Yankee fan.  He wore the hat, he had the manager’s name on his menu, and he came from the city, but he didn’t love the team.  He may have watched some games or even followed the team’s success (or lack thereof), but he wasn’t a fan.  A Yankee fan would have had some memorabilia in the store; a Yankee fan would have been excited about the proposition of adding another Yankee’s name to the menu; a Yankee fan would have had a current Yankee player up there already, instead of merely a ‘Steak Bambino’ hot sandwich in honor of Babe Ruth; a Yankee fan would have been excited about my being a Yankee fan – this guy only cared that I was a New Yorker!

“Let’s see,” I said, this time looking at the menu of available meats and cheeses which sat atop the large refrigerated glass case Deli Man stood beside.

“Let’s have… corned beef, peppercorn turkey, muenster cheese… lettuce, tomato, onions, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, and oregano.”

“That sounds good,” Deli Man said as he opened the case.

He filled my pastrami order first, carefully laying each slice of the salted cured meat on the parchment paper itself, not stacking the meat carelessly like they do in most grocery stores.  The care with which he handled my order reminded me why I preferred to get my lunch meats and cheese from delis rather than supermarkets.  He cut a predetermined number of slices and weighed them on the deli scale.  It was a little over half a pound, but I didn’t care.  The meat would not go to waste.

“What part of New York are you from?” Deli Man asked me while he wrapped my pastrami.

“Brooklyn,” I said a little too proudly.  I chided myself for forgetting what I called my “New York demeanor” – sounding a little annoyed every time you spoke.  The pride in my voice made my being from Brooklyn seem like a ring rather than a watch: an adornment rather than a necessity or a reality.  It was the moment I gave away the fact that, although I had been born in Brooklyn, I was not really a New Yorker.

“I’m from Staten Island,” Deli Man said, un-phased by my slip.  It was only after revealing my own semi-New Yorker-status that I considered the possibility that he was like me: born in the city to a New York family, but not raised there.  He had neither the accent nor the demeanor.

“My uncle used to own a pizza place on 46^th and...” he stopped making my sandwich for a moment to think, “… 122^nd?”  He could have been making the blocks up, I had no idea.

“Oh yeah?” I said, trying my best to limit my speech to avoid further non-New York revelations.

“Yeah,” he continued making the sandwich.  “My dad got transferred out here for his job a while back and I opened up one of these in Montgomery County.  A few months later I opened up this one.”

“Ah, so you have an excuse,” I said.  It was a lame reference to the question he had asked me earlier as to why I was in this Podunk town.

The joke was lost on him.  He was concentrating on making my Jeter sandwich.  He was doing a fantastic job.  For the second time since I had entered the deli I reprimanded myself silently, this time for considering Subway before pulling into the deli.  Subway advertises sandwich artists, but too often the “artist” in question is a pimple-faced high school kid making minimum wage who has no real concern for the quality of my sandwich.  This guy, however, this man, this Deli Man, cared about his work.  This was clearly his shop; it was his business, his livelihood.  Since I had been standing there a woman had walked by two or three times, walking to the cash register in the front of the deli, then to the back room, and back again.  She had emerged from the back with a baby in her arms.  At one point she stopped and said “say hi to daddy” to the child, who gurgled his excitement.  Deli Man was a father who fed his son based on the satisfaction of his customers.  Deli Man wanted me to be happy with my sandwich, and he took the time necessary to make sure that would happen.  Deli Man was a sandwich artist.

“Yeah, not many of us around,” Deli Man said again as he was wrapping up my sandwich.

I picked up my package of pastrami from off the counter where Deli Man had placed it.  He handed me my sandwich with a sincere look in his eye.

“Let me know how it is.  Then when you come in and order a Jeter I’ll know what you want.”

“Sounds good,” I said, returning his earnest gaze.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, placing the hoagie in my hand.

I lingered for just a moment, trying to think of the appropriate thing to say.  We were both liars.  He was not a Yankee fan; I was not a New Yorker.  But in that moment, I did not hold his abstracted disinterest in the only baseball team that ever mattered to me against him because he was a New Yorker.  In that moment, he did not hold the fact that I obviously hadn’t been reared in New York against me because I reminded him of home.  In that moment it didn’t matter that neither of us was exactly what the other wanted.  By being a New Yorker, he was a co-Yankee fan; by being a Yankee fan, I was a co-New Yorker.  We were co-pretenders.