Part II: Sandwiches (If you missed Part I, click here)
Over the days that followed, more came to light. Jerry learned that his wife had opened several secret 
charge accounts over the years, which she had used to order things over the phone, running up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Naturally, this increased his anger at his dead wife even further. There went the three-hundred dollars a week he thought he’d be saving.
But a week later, after the funeral, Jerry seemed to soften a bit towards his wife, and to regret that he had made her look bad. He started trying to puff her back up:
“When my wife was in the hospital, hundreds of people would come by every day. Some days somebody would order twenty pizzas to feed them all, another time somebody bought $200 of chicken parmigiana subs. For the funeral, all the cops from the neighborhood came and carried her coffin down the street wearing their dress uniforms and white gloves. She was only fifty, you know. Everybody loved her.
“After the funeral I threw a big New Years Eve party. We always used to do it, me and my wife, every year. So this year I turned it into her wake, and everybody from the whole neighborhood showed up. Went on ‘till dawn. We went through dozens of kegs.”
“Yeah, sounds great,” I said.
“So, enough about me,” Jerry said. “What did you do for New Years?”
“Oh, nothing really,” I said. “I just stayed home and read, and went to bed early.”
“Really?!” Jerry said. “What, don’t you have any friends?”
“No, it’s not that,” I said, rather defensively. “It’s just that it’s too much of a fuss. There’s all this pressure on you to drink. And then you just feel bad the next day. You’re starting the new year off on a bad note.”
This was not the right thing to say, apparently. Jerry got mad at me, really angry. Perhaps he felt guilty about having a party and getting drunk when his wife just died. No doubt drinking contributed to her death. For once he had nothing to say. He served my cheeseburger sullenly, and didn’t say goodbye when I left.
Jerry was never was too friendly with me after that. He never made my sandwiches quite right again, and one time he gave me some bad chicken salad that made me throw up. I didn’t go back so much after that, at least not while Jerry was working.
Donuts Sandwiches closed at the end of the 90s, the victim of the rising rents that came with the gentrification of the Chelsea area. Its storefront was taken over by an over-priced muffin shop. The McBurney went down too, at about the same time, and now it’s a condo building, called, cynically enough, The Y Building. The Chelsea Hotel is the lone holdout. (Copyright Ed Hamilton 2006)
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