The Heroism Of The Embedded Pickle

IF YOU HAVE BEEN PAYING ANY ATTEN-TION, you've seen this trick before. Or at least I think you must have. It's basically a take on what gets called a Cuban sandwich, which essentially boils down to some kind of pork on some kind of bread with pickles, grilled. (I know, I may be being disingenous, but if I could count the many different kinds of "Cuban" bread I've had over the years . . . Oh, and while I'm at it? While I'm disparaging trends? RYE BREAD IS NOT MULTI-GRAIN BREAD. And MULTI-GRAIN BREADS IS NOT RYE BREAD. And that GADDAMNED SANDWICH PRESS is NOT the solution to every sandwich question.) So I am calling this the Cuba Tarde, which I have just now decided means "The Cuban who missed the boat." For no good reason, but that's what I've decided. It's Black Forest ham with two kinds of mustard-- more on that in a bit-- with dill pickle slices grilled on rye bread, which is decidedly non-Cuban. The Saranac is what I picked up earlier in the week as a fall-back position, when the promised on-sale 12 pack of specialty beers-- $13.99!!-- failed to materialize at my Harris Teeter, as did my threat to go visit another nearby location.

The mustards are my beloved Plochman's yellow and a generic store brand brown "spicy" mustard, also known as "deli" mustard.

The film of the day is not Papilon, although it kind of could have been. Last Monday night I managed to get the Wifey to watch that one. To be fair, she was the one who put it in the queue, but I was the one who decisively put in in the player and made it go. She watched it while reading the second Stieg Larsson book, while I watched it while revisiting the previous two times I watched the whole thing end to end. In the final analysis, this is the movie equivalent of spicy brown deli mustard. It's good, but it's kind of generic.


Which brings us to this.

This is also not the film of the day, but it was the film of the day after we watched Papilon. I watched this alone-- and on purpose!-- day before yesterday over lunch. The lunch that day was the double cheeseburger, which was oddly appropriate. The whole film I expected the three surfer dudes at the center of the story to have cheeseburgers, but I don't recall any of them actually doing so. In fact, one of the key scenes late in the film, meant to show how much Southern California had diverged from being the Great American Youth Paradise and Home For Wayward Squares, one of the principle characters is rebuked for ordering cheeseburgers, as the local joint where, he SWEARS, he was just there YESTERDAY, miraculously no longer serves dead animal flesh. (So informed by a hippie-dippy waiter embearded and just a decade and an orange skin away from shoting AN-I-MAL! AN-I-MAL!) (Muppet joke, anybody here not get muppet jokes?) And that was kind of the key tenor of the movie: the real stuff is kind of left out. No cheesburgers. All of the hijinks with only a kind of a nod to the truly assholish behavior demonstrated by the pioneer surfers of the mid-sixties. The local boys dodge the draft by pretending to be, by turns, deaf, dumb, blind, queer, and crazy-- all of this smiled upon by the local-boy-makes-good character, which I still maintain is preferrable to the local-boy-makes-on-carpet character, who enlists and serves and comes back an Officer And A Gentleman (although NOT, presumably, because he got no place else to gooooooo!!!!). Prior to this they trash the house (and lawn) of the local mother who tolerates their outrageous behavior because, oh well! Boys will be boys! The Local Hero Surfer God gets to spend a fair spread of time being the local drunk, and then later disparage the Local Hero Surf Board Shaper Entrepeneur for turning into the local drunk, but then redeem him by riding his custom longboard through The Big Swell Of 1974. (Tonight the role of the Big Swell will be played by Maui. We apologize, but Surfrider's Beach is unable to appear tonight, due to laryngitis.) The serial beat-downs, the "Get off this beach we don't actually own!" arrogance, the shit-behind-the-dunes nastiness of the era is all washed away by a sepia-toned wave. Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints.

The surfing footage, of course, is gorgeous. But the central flaw there still remains: while sitting on your board outside the last set, waiting out the swell, it is not possible to look over the top of the last wave and admire the surfmanship of another surfer, dude. ("Alright, cue Gerry Lopez!* Aaaaaand SMILE!!!)

So what is a poor boy to do? This isn't a Po Boy, silly, it's a Cuba Tarde!! The secret to any fake Cuban sandwich is the embedded pickle. And while you might think the embedded pickle in Papilon is Dustin Hoffman, it's actually Steve McQueen. (I have no idea whether he'd agree with that assessment or not.) The embedded pickle in Big Wednesday is William Katt, who went on to play the Greatest American Hero after he played a fake Vietnam vet, whatever that says about Hollywood. Jan Michael Vincent, who you might have thought was the embedded pickle, was actually the embedded passive-agressive alcoholic former child genius, which either makes this a chillingly prescient performance or the dirtiest cruel joke in the universe. Enough to make you believe there is a God. A cruel, vicious God.

*Gerry Lopez is a genius surfer who got the semi-thankless job of playing the new-school hotshot usurping the former glory of the local hot-dog surfers-- huh. Come to think of it, there were no cheeseburgers AND no actual hot dogs in this movie. Don't seem right.