San Diego Supermarkets

Me and Ol' Bud used to do everything together. We were easily entertained, which is good because we didn't make much money, and in San Diego, as is probably true elsewhere but is exceptionally noticeable in Southern California, not having much money won't take you far. Won't get you much. Is not particularly effective as an aphrodisiac. So... that was us.

We would often go to the supermarket to eat. We loved Carl's Jr. burgers and Del Taco burritos, but those things cost money. I already said we wasn't rolling in the spending cabbage. So usually we would just go to Von's or Ralph's (yes, those are the real names) and get some queer bread and pressed meat. And please, before you get all "deviant lifestyle alert" on me, let me immediately explain that.

Let me start with pressed meat. You know what that is. The flat chicken, or ham, or turkey, or beef you buy to make sandwiches and cream chipped beef with. I like to think of it as little packages of moist, flavorful roadkill because it is such a flat meat. But also it is plentiful and cheap. It's about sixty cents a pack now, but in the olden times of this story it was twenty or twenty five cents. For the record, I preferred the chicken over the others. Followed by turkey. So now, if you're keeping score at home, put an X in the column titled POULTRY.

Queer bread is a baked goods that tells lame jokes like, "Remember, don't let your meat loaf." OK, OK, but I finally did work that joke in. No, queer bread was nothing more than our name for flour tortillas. I know exactly what you are thinking. Why, good man, did you give it such an awful name? Here's the story, as I learned it while living it.

We would get a pack of 12 tortillas and 2 packs of pressed meat each. We'd put a half pack of meat on a tortilla, roll it up an eat it, washing it down with as much spit as we could muster up (sody water costed money). If you do the math, and since I have my fingers with me I have already done it for you, that comes out to four roll ups each, or eight roll ups total. I KNOW... what were we gonna do with the four left over tortillas?

Save them for later? Nope. Guys don't do that, especially if they more or less live out of a Mitsubishi Mighty Max truck. A Mighty Max without a refrigerator, I might add. Throw them away? Nope. That'd just be darn wasteful of us. Feed the seagulls with them. Nope. Screw the noisy, aggressive scavengers.

We put them on cars, underneath the driver side wiper blade. Nothing vandalous. Just gently placed beneath the blade like a flyer for a tree trimming service. And we would be filled with a sense of great amusement. Then, with our pleasantly full bellies, we would drive off to begin the new evening's great adventure. And adventure that was likely to be so great that we could hardly wait to begin it. So we wouldn't. Wait any longer, that is.

And, as for the name "queer bread", it has it's origins in the first time we distributed the excess tortillas to other shoppers. As we were laughing at what we had just done, and the grandness of the idea, I exclaimed between chortles, "...then they'll come out and find them on their windshield. And they'll think to themselves, 'Goodness. How queer. There seems to be a tortilla on my windshield'." Since "queer tortilla" is not as melodious, we called it queer bread.

Did I already mention that we were easily entertained?

All that and a sack of boiled peanuts, out
Ramblin' Ed