The Cheater’s Guide to Love: Eating in Hoboken

Amy and girls inside Luca Brasi’s underneath a fake pergola, which E referred to as a sukkah

We made our way down to Baltimore today with a lunch stop in Hoboken, my home during the 90s. When Amy and I were courting and she lived in Boston, having amazing Italian subs in Hoboken took the edge off her long Peter Pan bus ride to see me. Was it when we ate a Sweet Marie sub from Luca Brasi’s on the campus of Stevens Tech, overlooking Manhattan, that we Really Knew for the first time?

M. tucks into her order of mashed potatoes (??!?) while I eat a Sweet Marie

In case you didn’t know, the Sweet Marie is perhaps the least vegan-cheatin’ option at Luca Brasi’s Italian deli at the corner of 1st and Park in Hoboken, on the same block as my former shul and two blocks from my last apartment–I had it good! The Sweet Marie is scrumptious homemade “muzz” with sun-dried tomatoes and arugula. It’s been about eight years since I last had one and it (all) went down just as blissfully as in the old days.

A. with her new BFFL, the meatball sub

M. went for the whose-child-is-this-really choice of a side order of muzz and a container of mashed potatoes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! A. and E. went traditional with a meatball sub. They couldn’t finish and Amy and I were forced to help them out. This is all part of my philosophy around vegan cheating: don’t eat a chicken nugget, but cheat rarely and with quality. An added bonus is that I now have a much greater appreciation for a serious meatball.

We cheated on over to my old stomping ground, the City Hall Bakery, to maybe pick up a crumb cake Danish. But it turns out this regular old bakery is now the subject of some kind of reality show. Cake Boss–heard of it? Anyway without showing Hoboken ID you have to wait in line outside to get served.

City Hall, where Police and Parking don’t talk

Being in the vicinity of City Hall reminded me of the first week I moved to town. I had been living across the street from a synagogue in Highland Park and got a little complacent about auto security. I noticed right away that just about everyone had a Club on their steering wheel and thought I ought to get one too. Within days, while I thought about Club color choices, my car was stolen off Garden St. (in fact right outside the middle school). I reported it blah blah, got the Club for whatever car was coming next, and then, two weeks later, walked by the very same block my car was stolen from to find it sitting there with a bunch of parking tickets on the window. When I brought up the idea that maybe Parking Enforcement might have figured out this was the car reported stolen, the response was an eloquent “Whaddaya??”

Just down the block from Luca Brasi’s is another former stopping point from my lapsarian life in Hoboken. The First St. Deli is just a joint where every so often I would go in on my way to teach at Rutgers to pick up an egg and cheese sandwich, gobbling it down on Route 1 and 9 going down to New Brunswick and thinking about how to work in eggs to the day’s discussion. The title of this blog is a shout out to Junot Diaz, the Rutgers grad and MIT professor who just won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant timed to the release of his new collection, This Is How You Lose Her. One thing I’ve picked up from reading Diaz and hearing him talk about his work is how you need to always be getting more disciplined with yourself. The daily, weekly and monthly routine is essential to defining a space for success as a writer, or as a parent or as anything else that is pretty much free-form and life-long. The egg-sandwich-on-the-lap while driving approach to curriculum prep (not that that was the only way I did it, mind you) is just a reminder of how far I was from being locked in on effective teaching. Mostly eggless, I continue to try to get better.

2 thoughts on “The Cheater’s Guide to Love: Eating in Hoboken

  1. I came across your blog while searching for Hoboken living in the 90s for a novel I am writing. Thank you for post. I see you taught English and are writing more. I’ve done both of these things. Is it okay if I write again for more Hoboken info?

    Thanks, much!
    P.S. Lovely poems.

    Thea

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