to sketchwich and back -- consuming the legend

i realize most of the day's posts were illusively obscure.

so here's something more straightforward for the epicurious to digest:

there's this sammich place in the Macarthur Park district called "Langer's" that lk and i went to a while back. the story behind the magic corned beef grew and grew until finally the tale had become legend.

we lured some new recruits to brave the wild and join us on another lunchtime excursion. lk, "mr. o'fox," "music guy," "mr. poison paranoia," and myself squeezed into "MPP"'s WRX wagon and drove east. this was an exciting combination of people, the kind of group one could cast for an episode of the next big faux-teen WB show. or at the very least, an ensemble that would have made a really great Subaru commercial - complete with Stones soundtrack. yup, so fashionable you'd want to throw rocks at us.

now i don't know if it was my hyperbolic praise of the corned beef that convinced everyone to come with or my gift for exaggerated story-telling, but everyone in the car had high expectations. dammit, if they were going to trek over to sketchville for a friggin' sandwich they wanted to see crack whores, anticipated being accosted by beer-bellied latino dudes in cowboy hats, and prayed to get mad-dogged by the pigeons for refusing them scraps.

we drove around a while since we couldn't make a left turn onto 7th from alvarado. but finally we ended up in the Langer's parking lot. maybe it was the safety in numbers, maybe it was because there were boys with us, but this time the neighborhood didn't feel quite so "hood-y". sure we were a little nervous when these two guys followed us with staredowns while we parked. but we realized they just wanted to sell us fake ids. even the dead rat on the corner didn't freak us out. (we turned seeing the dead rat into some really nerdy potter reference. potter power!)

the five of us walked into the haven of the deli and breathed a sigh of relief, taking in the sights and smells of our sliced salvation. our stomachs echoed with rumblings of hunger and we wished we could settle into a booth and stay a while. unfortunately, time wasn't on our side.

so we bid farewell to sketchville and hurried back to boringtown.

we checked our lunch order when we got back to the office. there were the right number of sandwiches, but the codes scrawled on the butcher paper were confusing. alright, only one of them was confusing. CB - corned beef. got that. HP - hot pastrami. right. makes sense to me. ASS. hmmmmmm... what the hell was ASS??? of course it would be MY sammich!! ASS?!! now i was scared. what i wanted was a CB w/ cole slaw on toasted SD. what i got was ASS. this didn't add up. how do you get ASS from the food combination i wanted? unless, they were trying to tell me something... *suspicious eyes*

at any rate, it was a pretty nice piece of ass.