freddie mercury, the future and me

It had been another terrible day. I had spent it washing up dishes and porridge bowls and heavy soup containers and cutlery in the enormous kitchen of my local hospital.

It sure was hot in that kitchen, and my shirt stuck to my back while I stood letting the air from the industrial dishwasher blow the hair out of my face. During every revolution of the mechanics I forgot about the dishes and made the machine stop as the brown plastic bowls got trapped under the relentless motion of the conveyor belt. This didn’t make me feel so bad. The old man I had been working with had a red face and seemed exasperated by my slovenly technique. He had spent a lifetime washing dishes like me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I knew what I was doing.

Man I hated that goddamn job. The final straw must have been spilling hot fish juice from a hot plate serving tray and all over my blue Levi 501 jeans and scalding my leg. I’m the kind of guy who only has one pair of jeans, and all I had really wanted to do was wash up the pots as quickly as possible and get home. I knew things had to change from that moment on, and spent the whole afternoon trying to smell my thighs and spraying aerosol deodorant over myself to try to hide the stench of cheap badly cooked fish bits, plotting elaborate ways of escaping the hidden washing room where the sound of machinery drowned out the radio and I kept forgetting that there were other people alive in the world.

Yes particularly, things had to change.

I had met the most unfortunate group of devastated men of my life in that hospital kitchen and was happy I never got to eat their food. I could tell by their capillaries and halitosis that they were nearly dead but not near enough for themselves, and teetering endlessly on the wrong side of alcoholism.

One man’s name was Colin. He was terrible and hideous, but all of my colleagues said that it wasn’t his fault. He was over six feet in length and his head was spread thinly with patchy grey hair. The hospital legend was that he was run over by a bus when he was seven years old and since then he had developed amusing brain damage and could barely talk or learn. I wasn’t sure if this was true though because everyone who told me the story laughed about half way through, and it shouldn’t have been funny. I laughed too.

Even at I guess fifty-something years old Colin still lived with his old mum, who beat him up badly if he was late home from work. This might have explained the bruises on his arms and the nervousness in his gestures. He only ever said “sorry m’mate”, or “y’all right m’mate”, his deformed mouth somehow stuck on these frantically uttered sounds, erupting like pointless gunfire from the physical dyslexia of his heavy pink idiot lips. There was always a look of madness in his vacant eyes, despite his simple nature, as if he were moments away from exploding into an act of unprovoked violence without either thought or conscience. I suppose a life like Colin’s can often push a person into that kind of direction.

His washing up talent was a little better than mediocre because he had done it for more than twenty years in the same hospital and learnt it like a baby. He always did the heavy-duty washing, pots and pans, his leathery sausage coloured arms immersed to the elbows in scalding greasy water.

Trevor was a bigger shithead than Colin, mainly because Colin smoked such rancid cigarettes so incredibly quickly, and kept them lovingly in a tin with his full name engraved on the lid as some kind of reminder, in case anyone asked him who he was and the silence that followed became unbearable. Trevor didn’t smoke at all. He made me want to commit beautiful suicide. When I worked really long days with Trevor he talked about nothing but himself. He had once had the same moustache for ten solid years, but shaved it off for a part as an extra in a movie so small it was almost invisible.

It upset me that he thought he was a star because he signed up to free extra agencies in London and got occasional one second shots in films and sometimes even got paid but never got credited for them. He managed to spend too long telling me his Hollywood anecdotes that had clearly come from the pages of old copies of the Readers Digest, waxing lyrical about the stars as though they were golf associates or dinner companions.

Each story was told the same over and over again. I think he really had forgotten that he had told me them before, and all I could think about was shaking the bastard by the collar and telling him to shut his stupid mouth up because the rotten pots are better than your life and I’m glad I’m not you and forty-one.

He did disco dancing in a group in his local town and in nationwide talent contests, and he won a lot of rosettes for third place or pleasing competitive spirit. I asked him to dance by a recreational pool table and he hand-jived in silence for five minutes. I think we both felt uncomfortable at the futility of it all. I imagined him in sequined flare and trainers, sweating under the clinical white strip lights of a community centre, the plastic chairs piled around the peripheries of the room, the soles of his feet squeaking on the highly buffed floor. He is alone there.

He insisted upon hedging most of his sentences with “-ish”, even when it was completely unnecessary.

“I don’t think it will take too long to do those spuds. Ish.”

“I loved that movie. Ish.”

“I collect pornography and live alone. Ish.”

Once it had become noticeable it became harder and harder to take my ears off.

*

I needed to do something with my life, that much had become clear through the headaches. It was difficult to find things I liked about the building where they secretly stowed the kitchen, and nothing there made me feel like smiling or used the kind of good quality building materials that smelt like an old house. It had been hidden by the hospital bigwigs behind cracked walls and decaying areas full of skips of rubbish, as if they pretended it belonged to somebody else, some embarrassing defective extended family member, probably so they could feel sorry for that person when they looked out of their executive windows. A middle-aged woman whose hair was taller than her head blushed when she saw the kitchen staff in the corridors. I wasn’t sure if it was bad to have people feeling ashamed to talk to you because you wore a wet apron.

So on my way out of work that day I stole a hotdog vendor’s portable cart that had been left unprotected outside a public convenience. I pushed it home, following the coast road where joggers cursed mumbles and jogged past the wheels, and old people seemed to be unsure about everything. I was formulating a business plan and whistling songs by the rock and roll band Queen.

Half way through the second chorus of the song “Don’t stop me now” it all fell into place. With special modifications that I had loosely drafted outside a residential block of flats I would use my new cart to sell chilled or warm peanut butter sandwiches to the public, in polythene bags or on sticks, for snacks or even evening meals depending on the complexities of the recipe and the quality of the ingredients.

It seemed likely that I would be famous. The world had to be waiting for something so simple. I had never seen a peanut butter sandwich for sale in a shop. I had to get to work as I quickly as I could. I left my job washing dishes behind forever, folded all of my belongings into my brown leather buckled suitcase and walked down the familiarity of the road and into the sun with my peanut butter stall in the other hand. It was Freddie Mercury, the future and me.

*

It didn’t take long to prepare the cart itself. I painted it a new green colour I had found in a hardware shop and asked a mechanic friend of mine to take a look at the wheels. “They seem to be in full working order,” he said. I had to explain that I couldn’t pay him for his time but would gladly offer him as much peanut butter sandwiches as he could eat. It could be hungry work being a mechanic. He rubbed his chin and agreed that it made good business sense.

I had managed to pick up a second hand sandwich display unit at a junkyard I used to play in. it looked a lot like a toast rack, but I could tell it was a sandwich display unit. The manager recognised me from all those years ago and I only had to pay him enough for a coke. He even offered to throw in a baby’s pushchair, but I told him he should hang on to it for the right person. A prospective mother would have a really good day after drinking coffee and buying that pushchair for the price of a couple of cokes. I didn’t know how the junkyard manager called Steel Mike managed to live very easily on just coke, but that was his business.

The secret would be in producing good sandwiches with thick peanut butter. Nobody wanted a sandwich with thin peanut butter. Thin bread could certainly make for a better peanut butter sandwich, just as long as the peanut butter was used well. I practised making up sandwiches for a whole day until they tasted just right. I spent the next day making a large replica sandwich out of wood and glue that could be mounted on the roof of my peanut butter sandwich cart to attract attention. This would be called marketing in the business world. I was marketing my peanut butter sandwich cart.

I could barely sleep at night, thinking about the bright green cart and its sandwich display unit.

*

One Thursday morning that started off cold enough to wear a jacket I woke up early and made up a batch of one hundred fresh peanut butter sandwiches, which I carefully placed into the chilled half of the cart, and set about wheeling it to the centre of the main shopping street. It was empty when I arrived so I displayed four sandwiches on the display unit. They looked very attractive and made me start to feel hungry. Peanut butter escaped from the sides of the bread, just like it should in a well made sandwich, and I poured hot coffee from a flask into a paper cup and waited for somebody to walk by and buy a sandwich for their morning snack.

After two coffees a man with a broom asked me what exactly I was selling. I pointed at the sandwich display unit and he squeezed the bread gently between his thumb and forefinger. He looked happy with surprise, and bought a sandwich for sixty pence. I asked if he wanted a bag or a stick. He laughed like a waterfall and said a bag’d be fine. The bags were see-through and said “peanut butter sandwich” on them, which he seemed to enjoy. I pointed out the condiment selection on the front of the stall: jam, banana, pickled gherkin or bacon. He smelt the bacon but said he was okay and walked off with his broom and his sandwich.

A few minutes later he came back with the empty bag.

“That was a good sandwich,” he said contemplatively. “Damn good sandwich. You bet. Thickness of peanut butter was just the right compliment to that soft bread you’re using back there.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad you enjoyed your sandwich.”

“It was delicious. I think I’ll tell people I know about this green sandwich stall.” He nodded at me.

“Thank you very much again.” I nodded back at him.

“What else are you guys selling but those peanut butter sandwiches there?” he asked. His hand was rummaging through the change in his trouser pockets.

“I’m emphasizing the peanut butter. You can buy any number of sandwiches from any number of food shops, but I never saw me a retail peanut butter sandwich before, not in or box or in a bag, and never on a stick.” We both laughed at this because it was so crazy it was true. “I can do a peanut butter sandwich of any size you like. Or a delicious hot peanut butter sandwich.”

He looked toward the heated half of the peanut butter sandwich cart. “A hot peanut butter sandwich?” His eyes had opened wider at the nearly unfathomable prospect. “How much is that?”

“As my first valued customer I shall sell you a hot peanut butter sandwich for just fifty pence. I recommend it with bacon.”

I carefully lowered a sandwich into the heated drum of the old hot dog vendor’s cart, and waited while it heated up some. The man rested his broom against the paintwork and bought the sandwich, which this time he ate in front of me off of a stick with bacon and a slice of pickled gherkin on my recommendation. He put the stick in a dustbin and came back for his broom.

“You make an excellent sandwich,” he said and offered his hand for me to shake. “I’ve never tasted anything like that before. Are you going to be here all the time from now on?”

“Every day.”

“Thanks.”

He went back to sweeping the streets clean for the day, and I had some coffee and thought about the one pound and ten pence I had made with my sandwiches.

*

As people heard about and then tried and then spoke about this strange green cart with a wooden sandwich on its roof that sold peanut butter sandwiches in the high street, the number of fillings grew and the choice of accompaniments grew also. But the peanut butter always came first. As long as that was smooth and thick then the sandwiches would always sell, even without the gourmet additions. I began to prepare sandwiches of peanut butter ‘plus’, using a variety of carefully selected fillings to further the sandwich eating experience. Handmade peanut butter sandwiches prepared to order on a cart in the street. Customers were excited and started to queue to buy my sandwiches. Working men who smelt of lager ate peanut butter and chilli sandwiches; mothers talked to each other about my peanut butter, plum and finely sliced duck explosion; children screamed and pulled and stamped for the triple layered peanut butter, chocolate and cream surprise.

But still nothing sold better than plain old PB, and the man with the broom was always first in line every day for his steaming hot peanut butter sandwich on a stick.

I had even started making small amounts of profit from my stolen hot dog cart, but it had become about something more important than money. People began telling me that this simple sandwich idea was changing their life and finally giving them a reason to go to work, just to wait for their lunch hour.

*

After a few months of ideas and experiments I faced my first problem as a peanut butter sandwich vendor. While I was just putting together a peanut butter-mayonnaise on rye I noticed a frustrated looking woman next in the line. People hadn’t often looked frustrated in my queue before. The smell of good nut seemed to bring a kindly feeling to all. But this lady had a red face and her hair was a-fluster, like she had walked a long way very quickly in a moderate wind. I finished up the sandwich and asked her what she would like.

“Are you that peanut butter guy?” she snapped.

“Yes missus,” I replied. I think I was smiling a little too hard, and she seemed to notice that. “Peanut butter is my trade! What would you like today? I can recommend my new special brandy peanut butter for the perfect solution to a hard day.” I was still smiling at her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Her voice was hoarse and I imagined her shouting about things at home in preparation for our dialogue.

“What?” I asked.

“Two days ago, mister, you sold a peanut butter sandwich to my eleven year old boy. Thomas.” She showed me a photograph of an unusual looking kid who I remembered well. He had shouted at me when he asked for the sandwich too. She had one hand in her brown coat pocket and one hand clenched and half pointing at me.

“I remember. He seemed happy with his purchase.” She stared at me and didn’t say anything. “Was he happy with his purchase?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

“No. In fact, what you seemed to not realise was that my son is allergic to nuts. And you sold him a peanut butter sandwich. He had two separate fits and got swollen!”

“That is awful.” I said. I had not anticipated this, and felt a true pain for my irresponsibility.

“Yes it is you irresponsible fool.” She wasn’t shouting anymore. I preferred it when she was shouting as it made her actions more predictable.

“Might I refund the cost of the offending sandwich?” I suggested in a way I deemed appropriately humble. “In some small way it might ease the pain of your swollen son.”

“Your attempts at situation rectification are embarrassing. I don’t want your money. I want you to think about what you have done. I will be coming back here with my husband who is a tall, tall man. I want you closed down.”

She snatched the photograph of Thomas out of my hand and stormed off. I could hear her huffing all the way down the street.

*

The next day I opened up the cart ready for business as usual. I was more tired than most mornings because I had sat up all night trying to come up with a way that people with nut allergies might still enjoy a good old-fashioned peanut butter sandwich.

The plan I came up with involved selling genuine and tasty peanut butter that contained absolutely no traces of peanuts, an idea that sounded crazy. I baked some up and it sure tasted like real peanut butter to me. I spread a few thick cut sandwiches with my idea and offered it free of charge to my friend with the broom that very morning. He said it tasted great, but why would I just give him this regular sandwich for nothing?

I gestured for him to come a little closer. “That sandwich you’ve just eaten, how’d it taste?” I asked in a whisper.

“I told you, it was delicious. Your sandwiches are always delicious.”

“Interesting.”

“What is?” He looked confused.

“That sandwich you just ate didn’t contain any peanuts. Not one.”

He laughed at me. I didn’t laugh, so he laughed again. “No peanuts?” he said between laughs. I shook my head. “With respect,” he went on, “I just ate that sandwich, that peanut butter sandwich, and it tasted a lot like peanuts to me!” he laughed a few more times and looked at me like I was crazy.

I explained the whole story to him, about allergic Thomas and the angry mother, about my night of testing recipes. He looked doubtful.

“So if there ain’t a single nut in that peanut butter,” he pointed vaguely at the cart, “what is in it?”

“You really want to know?” I asked. He nodded. “FUN! That’s what’s in there, plain old fun, enough to make one hell of a great sandwich.”

He really laughed at this and slapped me on the back. I sold him another two nut-free sandwiches and drew up a poster advertising my 100% fun and 0% peanut peanut butter sandwiches (suitable for allergy victims everywhere). Before long, I didn’t even have to use regular peanut butter for those who requested it. They just couldn’t taste the difference. Everyone in town was dying to get their hands on this crazy nutless butter that tasted somehow better that even the real thing.

*

Swollen Thomas’ father never did come to find me, tall as he might have been. Sometimes I saw Thomas and his mother walking past the cart and I pointed at my new sign, but still she would never let him have the sandwich. Despite his unfortunate allergic reaction, I think Thomas was happy that he’d eaten that sandwich that time. It gave him a little taste of something he might never get again. At least until he gets a bit older.