I just posted that I ate a Subway sandwich that upstaged the entire cast of Mannequin in  regards to Estelle Getty Passing away. Come with me and explore how vital a role Subway has played in my life, won’t you?

First, there was one that opened right next to my house when I was like 8. I could ride my bike there. It was a nice clean store, and it was owned by a guy who had a Abe Lincoln beard. He ran the joint. I used to go in every other summer when I was about 12 and get a foot long club, that was 2 days worth of eatin’. You’d think that after 3 months of getting the same damn thing ever other day Abe would know who I was, what I wanted, and how much it cost, but nope. Everytime he would say “So, what’d like on this today?” “Same thing as Tuesday, John Wilkes Booth, everything but Tomatoes”. He didn’t get the joke, and I never got a discount. For all I know he knew I would be in every other day and used to rub his hands on his cash and prizes when he saw me pedal up to the store, and then make my sub without washing first. Oh yeah, I applied for a job at this Subway when I was 15 and they had a math test on the Subway application. I think there was also a portion on it where you had to answer an ethics question about a friend who wanted you to give him free food…

Then there was the whole Mannequin incident where I got a sandwich and snuck it into the theater, and then completely forgot about the movie I was watching. I know that the movie had a Starship song in it, and you almost saw Kim Cattrall nekked, but more than anything, I remember that my sandwich had a LOT of black olives on it. Black olives trump anything Starship has EVER done.

Back in the 80’s and up until the mid 90’s the Subway sub was made on decent bread. Not this bullshit they have now. They used to take those small knives and cut a nice “V” into a loaf, then pull the V out, then put the goods in the crevice, then put the V back on. There was actual bread surrounding the meat. Now they puncture a loaf and it deflates like a balloon, while Jaimé slides it down to Rosa who puts as little vegetables on it as possible.

What you may not know is back in the day they used to count the bread as the indication of how many sandwiches they sold in a day. So in theory (and in practice) you could go in and have someone hand you a pile of meat and veggies in your hand and it would be free. This would work really well when our completely shiftless friend Sean Roberts used to work at the one down the street from high school. We would go in, completely blotto and DEMAND him to make us “MEAT MASH!” which was literally a 1” of meat jammed into a loaf of bread, bacon on top of that, and then cheese on top of the bacon, and then microwaved. Sean hated this so much, but went along with it, because our friend Andy used to play D&D and Robotech with Sean & Co. on the weekends, so he would comply, because Andy would always have his brother buy him beer to take over to game nights. Andy had Sean trained so well as our Subway Bitch that he used to just make up the Meat Mashes for us at around 11:30 and would put them in the microwave as soon as we walked in. He got fired for falling asleep one morning while baking bread and catching the oven on fire.

I went to college, and my friend Matt worked at a Subway. We used to store 4 kegs in the walk in at any given time because he had a friend who worked at the beer distributer and used to steal kegs regularly. They were kept behind some boxes and tapped while at work. He had an empty box of Tomatoes that sat on top of the tap that never was inventoried or opened. I am not sure how the owner didn’t notice that. Oh! That’s right, the owner was this older woman who’s mom owned the store, and she used to take the cash the store made at the end of the week and get some coke, and then would come in all tweaked out and hit on me and Matt. The rampant substance abuse and drinking at the Subway led to me trying to eat an entire loaf of unbaked wheat bread one night. That ended up with me puking it up in the parking lot, and never being able to eat wheat bread again. Matt and I used to blare NOFX as loud as possible and fail to turn it down when customers walked in. There were nights where I was hanging out and would make people sandwiches in my street clothes (I didn’t work there, I was just there for the beer) and then take the cash (never ringing up the sandwiches) and going to Target and buying Super Nintendo games.

After grad school there was the job that I had, where I worked for the doctor who self prescribed his own pain killers and couldn’t remember who he hired and fired on a daily basis. He really liked me, but I hated him with a passion. He was allergic to onions, so anytime I saw his car in the parking lot when I pulled into work (he wasn’t there a lot, because you know, painkillers) I would go to Subway, get a sub with onions, when he wasn’t in his office, take a handful off of the sub and literally grind them into his office carpet, and then scoop up the scraps and put them in one of his potted plants. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t breathe in his office, so he would go home, gasping for air, and yelling delusional threats to all of us.

Now I make sure that I don’t go to Subway unless its forced upon me, or I don’t have any other options. Plus its not fun when they don’t have Meat Mash waiting for you when you walk in.