Hello all, this is another short piece by me that was written for my Intro to Fiction course last semester as a part of being a Creative Writing major. This is only a short preview of the whole story, but this piece went over extremely well with the class and I was quite proud of it. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy, and as always, constructive criticism is appreciated.
The Corner of 5th & Teller
By Adam Unger
My name’s Dennis. My Mama tells me I’m 38, and Pops loves me just the same. I’m out here every day, buddy, at our deli, on the corner of 5th and Teller. Every red brick of our building snuggles together on that nice corner, and our sign is wooden and nestles itself right above our door, even higher than the cute little bell by the entrance. It reads “Moe’s Delicatessen- Eat In or Take Out” in big black letters, and I’ve read the words on that sign sill-of-bull by sill-of-bull every day since 8th grade, buddy.
And, oh jeez, the little stacks of bologna and pastrami and lettuce that hold up each letter crack me up, and they are pretty important, too, or else we wouldn’t have a sign. I’m pretty humble, but buddy, I get a little fire in my heart every time one of Pops’ pals slams a twenty on the counter and looks right at Pops’ mole and say, “Best sammiches in the city, Moe, best goddamn sammiches around!” The only other time my heart gets like that is when I sneak some pastrami out of the fridge at night and make my favorite sandwich. I don’t make this one at the restaurant, no buddy, it’s just for me, and Mama even said so. It’s white bread with pastrami-on-turkey-on-ham-on-chicken-on-bologna and between each slice of meat are two little blankets of Swiss and American, and holding it all together is a plump little olive, like what Mama used to call me, sitting right at the top stabbed with a toothpick. Mama never tried to put a toothpick in me, though, and Pops only tried once when he was drinking the wrong cola. I call it the “Big Nice Sandwich”, and, buddy, it’s all of that and more.
When I’m not making the best sandwich ever, I’m making the next to the best ones down in the deli. Yup, it’s all me in the kitchen, while Julio does the fryer and calls it his “baby”, even though it’s a hunk of steel. He scratches his moustache sometimes while the chicken tenders are down in the fryer, and I’d have to get the special net and take them out. He’s typically quiet, but not around me, always going on about his “Mami” and “Papi” and “Abuela” and “sex”, so it wasn’t too hard to fetch the hairs from the fryer without hurting his feelings. At least he doesn’t smoke in the kitchen, Pops would have to tell me that’s not what he meant by smoking cheese, no buddy. We had the crowd that knew exactly what I wanted: when I just wanted to be thinking, there’d be nobody around to order something, and when I was bored, Pops came straight to me and handed me the ticket slip the same way Ms. Mary would hand me a good-boy star in 9th grade. Her smile was cuter, though, since Pops don’t have dimples, but their moustaches were just about the same.
Pops was grateful to our crowd, too, ‘cause they never caught him sifting through his black-beard after the mole that has been on his neck since he was 26, and they treated him like he was born in Manhattan, and it was funny, cause we are not from New York. That was pretty stupid to me, but Pops would interrupt Mama reading me to sleep when I was younger and go on that we were “Jersey first, Jews second, and Americans third.” You’d catch him saying stuff about foreign stuff like that every now and then too, mostly when I was thinking and our crowd wasn’t around. He’d put on the TV that hung right in the corner above Table 7, watching Bill O’Reilly’s show on the Fox channel. There’d be pictures of screaming people, and fire, and sand, and sand on fire, before Bill would give us the news really loudly. Mama would click off the TV when she was wiping Table 7 and say “that’s no good for him”, whoever he was. Pops would tear his hand away from his mole and mutter about “foreign policy” and how we were “catering right to the terrorists.” After hearing that I’d go back and check the order tickets, but the terrorists hadn’t ordered anything that day.
