The Sandwich of Death

Photo by Sara Cervera on Unsplash

My roommate Stacy once made a sandwich that was so impressively unhealthy that I can feel the glucose in my blood burping up like magma when I think of her eating it. The size of the sandwich was not far off from the dimensions of the average cinder block. There were not layers of ingredients inside this sandwich as much as there were stories, like that of an apartment building, of edible cement packed tightly into a daunting caloric cube.

Stacy described the sandwich to me like she was laying out the tenants of a sacred rite, of an eternal and prophetic tradition that must be exalted with impeccable execution by those worthy and skilled enough to assemble it. Someone describing how they put together a sandwich is not something I would typically consider enthralling, but hearing Stacy paint a mental picture with phrases like “three ice cream scoops of mayonnaise” and “pack the meat down” had me under a spell. And osmotically pre-diabetic.

The first step, Stacy emphasized, is that one must procure a loaf of white bread. A loaf. Not a few slices from that loaf, but the entire loaf itself. Her insistence on the whole loaf of white bread made it seem like having less would be like having an office building with no floors or walls. Once the bread is present, brave attempters of the sandwich need to have large cartons of the following three food glues — mayonnaise, cream cheese, and sour cream. Without these, the food structure will have no chance of staying together, just like not having nails, bolts, or caulking would spell doom for a new edifice. The last collection of ingredients necessary to gather before assembly are the meats — at least three different deli meats. Having two pounds each of turkey, ham, baloney, pastrami, or any other common deli meat are needed if you are truly dedicated to erecting “The Sandwich of the Gods.” The “Blood Sugar Behemoth,” “Clash of the Calories,” “The Brick”…all nicknames apply.

I observed Stacy as she set about stacking layers of the holy materials, laying down an astounding pattern: double-ply white bread base, a slathering of one type of glue, a slat of one type of meat, then a slathering of a different glue, a different meat, the third type of glue, the remaining type of meat, and then another double round of white bread for the roof. There were probably five or six repetitions of this pattern. Each time another one was added, the layers underneath became increasingly packed down and cemented. The end result was a thick, beige block that looked like, if projected from a cannon, it could take out a large section of castle wall. Even more impressive was her unflinching intent to consume the entire thing, which Stacy proceeded to do whilst engaging her La-Z-bike. Her La-Z-bike was a recliner with a set of petals, which had been scraped from a bike, jammed into the bottom of the chair. Genius. I sat across from her in the living room and my gaze never broke as she did to that sandwich what a Velociraptor would likely do to the inside of a Butcher’s shop.

I should have clapped when she finished, or struck a commemorative gong, or maybe even opened one of her Pagan portals (that she spoke of doing) so she could transport herself directly to a warehouse-sized bathroom to properly discharge the remnants of her digestive feats. If I myself had to de-escalate after witnessing The Immaculate Consumption, I could only imagine what techniques she must’ve employed to return to baseline following such a massacre.

Keep hitting that La-Z-bike. Pagan rituals. Do your thang, girl. Long live “The Sandwich of Death.”