Underbelly Archives

For a myriad of foolish reasons, I have a storage locker located in my childhood home of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  This is 75 miles away from where I now live in Brooklyn, New York, and is very inconvenient. I usually need to go there about two times a year, and spend little more than a few hours there before scrambling to beat traffic up the New Jersey Turnpike back to Brooklyn.

When down there, I like to sometimes drive around and take a tour of how my hometown of Levittown has changed over the years, but more amazingly, how it HASN’T changed.

On my last trip there, last weekend, I drove an hour and a half down there in order to move heavy boxes and dig through the archeological site which that storage space has become, for the purpose of finding what amounted to a couple of sheets of paper bearing some old drawings I needed for a project I am working on.

To reward myself for having to go through such misery, I decided to treat myself to a lunch of a genuine Italian Hoagie–a specialty down there in the Philadelphia area.  I was in close enough proximity to have the opportunity to purchase said hoagie less than a mile from the house in which I grew up, at the very same deli I had walked to as a child to buy candy and soda with a dollar I had begged for from my mom or dad.

…And so, I would be having a nostalgic return to “Dale’s Deli”.

Now, I had not set foot in Dale’s Deli for about thirty years, when I might have stopped in there as a teenager to get hoagies with my high school friends and then go hang out in the park to while away the hours hopped up on Stewart’s root beer, chips, and salami, and a giant cassette playing boom box blasting Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” Album as we stressed about whether or not we would get into our first choice college, or get stuck at our safety school.

When I pulled up, Dale’s still looked the same on the outside. I mean it. EXACTLY the same. And when I walked in, I was blown away by how it still smelled the same. Like pickles. Which was odd because, the pickle barrels that used to be there were now gone. It still looked pretty much the same on the inside, though, minus the pickle barrels, and I went up to the counter and guiltily ordered my hoagie. I say guiltily because I don’t, as a 49 year old man, generally eat that kind of crap anymore.  I haven’t had a hoagie, or, as we call them in New York, a “sub” in YEARS, mostly out of fear of sudden coronary infarction via capricola and provolone, and out of fear of my gut becoming so large I would need to take a jazzy scooter to the subway station, and because, in New York, the fast food specialties are a bit different and include items that would be considered culinary oddities by the average Levittowner; items such as as Falafel and Crepes.

When I placed my order, “One six inch Italian hoagie, please!” the middle aged woman behind the counter asked me a series of questions, “Raw onion on it? How about tomato?”

“Yes, and yes!”

Then a few more questions, until she asked the most important question of all, “Mayonaisse or vinegar and oil?”

“Vinegar and oil!” I responded, knowing it would not be a true hoagie with mayonaisse.

She then said, “Oh! You want a TRUE Italian hoagie then!”

I responded by saying that I had not had a hoagie in years and that I grew up nearby and hadn’t been inside this deli since 1979, and that if I was going to get a hoagie today, it had to be the true thing.

She then said, “Well not much has changed here in thirty years, in fact, we are still using a lot of the same….”–and then she stopped herself. Then there was silence.

“The same? The same WHAT?”, I thought. The same hunks of lunch meat? The same rusty slicer blades? The same WHAT????

A minute later she finished slicing the meat and struggled to finish her statement in a way that would not scare the hell out of me, “…well….”, she said, “A lot of the same people are working here.”

With that she rung up my hoagie along with a Stewart’s root beer, a bag of chips, and a pack of Tastykake Kandykakes I had put on the counter, and I went out to my car where I sat with the hoagie in my lap as I stared at the deli and the row of shops there at the Skyline Shopping center. For me, that string of stores might as well have been unearthed structures from the lost city of Pompeii.

I then picked up the hoagie, pulled back the soggy paper in which it had been wrapped, and as a stream of ancient memories began to race through my mind, took a bite into my delicious past.