I've thought on it some, and I've found that I spend a lot of time in sandwich shops. (See: Fifty Dollar Cheese Sandwich Standoff). No matter how well stocked your local deli is, they can offer only so many combinations of bread, meat, cheese, and condiments before it gets boring. It's moments like these when you need to get subversive.

The deli I frequent makes the best egg salad sandwiches -- thick-sliced bread toasted until it achieves  the load-bearing strength for a half-pound of golden egg salad goodness inside. Add in a slice of yellow cheese and a dash of paprika, and you've got the best sandwich this side of New York State. Great as the sandwich is, man cannot live on egg salad alone, which is also why they offer foot-long hoagies. Having frequented this deli so often, it was only a matter of time before I ordered a foot-long egg salad sandwich.

The deli man's cocked eyebrow said it all: "Are you sure?" Without waiting for an answer, he got to work, piling into the hoagie bread three times as much egg salad as a normal sandwich -- and presumably a normal human -- should require. The sandwich was glorious, but I'm fairly certain that pain in my chest after eating it was not regret.

At lunch the next day the deli man shook his head as I stepped inside. He reached under the counter for the egg salad and started to made another foot-long, but I stopped him. Rarely have I seen more relief on another man's face. His expression was short-lived, however. It cut short abruptly when I told him I wanted a foot-long peanut butter and jelly.

With America being the land of the free where the customer is always right, it was a foregone conclusion that I would get my sandwich. Freedom to do such dumb things as this was practically written into our constitution.

Compressed into that one sandwich experience were all the summer vacation days of every year of grade school --  endless summers of days in the park, and always with peanut butter and jelly as a packed lunch. I might have lost a few summers -- you know, taken off the tail end -- by eating the whole thing in one sitting, but it was completely worth it if only to revel in the horribly perplexed look of the deli man.

It was a boutique resort. I didn't know much French at the time, but given the context, boutique meant expensive.

The open-air mezzanine overlooking the parking lot called to mind a beachside motel from the '40's, which was exactly what the place was. North Beach was full of these, except these days they all were being converted into resorts. And unlike the brand new luxury high-rises that formed the coastal palisade, these boutique resorts were always in some stage of repair or another.
 
The TV hanging in the poolside bar buzzed to life. It was an old TV, a CRT unit with a big square back and bubble screen. Its display was faded, shadows burnt into it from years of running the same advertisements for hotel services. Onscreen, a lady in a polka-dot one-piece and pompadour hairstyle took a dip in the hotel hot tub, contentedly smoking a cigarette all the while. If at all her look was fashionable, then it was decades before I was born. That gave some clue as to how long the TV had been running those ads.

The sign by the hot tub read "temporarily out of service", which was a half-truth. Out of service it was -- the only water in the pool was the six inches of rain that had collected at its bottom. The "temporarily" part was questionable. The hot tub looked like it hadn't been used in ages. And seeing as the other pool patrons out today were well into their seventies, I'd have wagered the last time anybody had enjoyed the hot tub was when they were young.

My wife climbed the steps out of the pool. In her arms was our one-year-old daughter, her poutiest face on for leaving the pool. My wife deposited our child in the basket of a shopping cart from "Cashway", a supermarket up the road. We'd forgotten to pack a baby carriage, and this was the model the hotel was so eager to rent us.

An advertisement for the resort's steakhouse restaurant flickered on the pool bar's TV. Onscreen, women in ballroom gowns dined with tuxedoed men. The scene had a grainy filmreel effect and was slicked over in a thick sepia veneer. It was altogether too much and came off as ridiculous. My wife didn't seem to think so. In fact, she was thrilled with the idea of a steak dinner. We left the pool and headed upstairs to our room, her leading the way and me struggling to get the shopping cart up the steps.

Once at the top of the stairway, I followed the walkway overlooking the car park and rounded the corner of the building. Suddenly my foot missed the floor. The shopping cart pitched forward into the gap of open air where the walkway had been shorn away. The cart's basket snagged on some exposed reinforcing bars, breaking its fall. I pitched over the cart's handle and hung half-in, half-out of the cart, some forty feet from the concrete below. My daughter shrieked.

My cries for help were cut short by the roar of diesel heavy machinery. A man in a lift bucket coasted into view by my left shoulder. He lifted his hardhat and scratched his head, looking about as perplexed to see me as I was to see him. Then he yanked a lever and a series of pulleys whirred to life, hauling a heavy load of splintered two-by-four planks over the balcony railing. The planks settled onto my back, threatening to crush the wind out of me. I screamed at the man to stop, but he only shook his head. The construction crew was on a tight schedule and they couldn't afford any holdups.

The diesel engines roared as the pulleys went for another load. Jagged wood crashed onto my back, punched through the shopping cart basket. One particularly nasty plank with a serrated edge slid closer to my daughter. It was inches from her face. I scooped her up in one arm and held her to my chest. Eyes shut, all I could do was wish I were somewhere else as the next load of materials crushed me flat.

Speaking strictly in the interest of free markets everywhere, I have to denounce the artificial restrictions imposed by online auction businesses. Take for example a perfectly salable abstract commodity such as love. Undeniably, love is something that the world needs more of, and yet most online auctioneers forbid its sale in its venues. Why, we ask, when love is so freely exchanged for jewelry or chocolate or – dare I mention – even cash under city streetlights?

Honesty is another great example of something we need more of yet they won't let us exchange. Don’t we all wish that everyone had a bit more honesty, from our neighbor down the street with the shifty eyes to that congressman with shifty eyes?

Nevertheless, online auction businesses have made a practice of rejecting for sale those items one cannot grasp in the hand. Company policy appears to be that such things as honesty and love cannot be sold because it is impossible to set a price on such things. Such policies are as sensible as the flat Earth theory. Honesty has been bought and sold since antiquity, and contrary to what the Beatles may say, money really can buy you love in some contexts.

You may be asking yourself, “What’s the big deal if there’s still joy, happiness, and a multitude of other good, salable abstract commodities?” Well, the big deal is that these online auction houses won’t let you sell or buy any of those either. In fact, whoever said money can’t buy you happiness probably works for them.

Shock however, seems to be on the rise, but not because it commands higher prices than ever. No, actually, the
auction companies practically hand this one out to all takers. Shock comes free with every purchase when your account status shows up in your e-mail. That’s when you realize the auctioneers are taking a cut of your sale coming and going. It’s like setting up a booth and offering free samples of ice cream (or anything else for that matter – I like ice cream) just beyond the threshold of a revolving door. Of course, the consummate businessperson that you are, you offer only one sample per person. But, consummate scammers (with shifty eyes no less) know that they are “new” customers each time they walk into those revolving doors, take the spin and walk back out again, right into the path of your booth. Here’s where they look surprised and say, “Ice cream! My, what a pleasant surprise!” for the third or fourth time in fifteen minutes.

Bring the gavel down on those chintzy auctioneers. Insist upon love, joy, honesty, happiness. Tell them you want your abstract commodities, and you want them now. Stand up to them, and for all the money they exact from their fees, those auctioneers will wish they could buy yet another abstract good – time, because it won't be long when they'll be forced to change their game.

Almost as good as a good story is a good story behind the good story itself, which we suppose would make a good story better and a better story best. Sorry. That one made our brains hurt too.

Today's feature is the story behind the story of our very own R. Perez de Pereda's sword and sorcery novel, The Many Deaths of Cyan Wraithwate, which, if you haven't checked it out yet, you really should. It's a great fantasy novel that almost never was. 

Our story begins in Cuba in 1941 with nothing short of the author's  birth. Pereda was born at a time when then-democratic Cuba was experiencing unprecedented foreign investment under the presidency of Grau San Martin. The influx of foreign capital brought with it the pop culture items of the day, among them pulp fiction magazines, which young Pereda avidly read and collected. Far and away, his favorite were the Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard.

Unfortunately, the good times would not last long. In 1956, Cuban Communist insurgents launched an uprising. Nowhere was safe -- the rebels holed up in the countryside and carried out bombing attacks on urban centers. All at once, the island nation became a dangerous place to live. Pereda, fifteen years old at the time, walked to school with his father's World War II 9mm Luger in his pocket. The gun was always unloaded -- Pereda's father never told him where he kept the magazines -- and Pereda hoped the sight of the gun alone would be enough to scare off anyone who meant him harm.

Two years later, the fight became all too personal for Pereda. He did things in furtherance of the anti-Communist movement which he was not comfortable sharing at the time of this writing. That notwithstanding, his fight was over by 1959, when the Communists assumed control of the country. He wasn't Communist Cuba's public enemy number one, but he was still too high on that list for his liking. He bought a one-way airplane ticket with the cash in his pocket and fled to Miami, leaving behind everyone and everything he ever loved.

With naught but the clothes on his back and a fair grasp of the English language, Pereda found work in a produce warehouse. Several years and several jobs later, he landed an entry-level position at a blue-chip company and worked his way up the corporate ladder. By the mid-1960's he was living the American Dream -- he had a wife, a car, and mortgage. He took up his old hobby of collecting the pulp magazines he enjoyed in his youth and rediscovered the fantastic adventures of Conan the Barbarian. It was about this time that he tried his hand at writing, and after two years of diligent work at the typewriter, in 1967 he had penned -- in his native Spanish -- The Many Deaths of Cyan Wraithwate. It was, in his estimation, a story of the sort he enjoyed growing up, replete with fantasy creatures and plenty of hack-and-slash action.

Miami in 1967 was a different time and place for the book publishing industry. Much as he tried, Pereda could not find anyone who would take his novel on. In a way, it was understandable -- he was an unknown author and had written a novel in Spanish. When news came later that year that he had a baby daughter on the way, he all but shelved his dreams of becoming a published author.

Fast forward to 2013. Pereda, since retired and now a grandfather of five, was looking through his filing cabinet for the deed to his home. After he'd scoured the filing cabinet but could not find the deed, he turned his attention to the desk in his study. There, at the bottom of a drawer, was his manuscript, where it had sat for over forty years. Even he had forgotten about it. Figuring he had nothing to lose in attempting to publish it, he searched the Internet for Miami-based publishers and found us.

Turning the manuscript into a paperback was a daunting task for two reasons. First, the text had to be translated from Spanish. A word-for-word translation would not have sufficed, as the product would have lost much of its wit and readability. Second, the prevailing conventions in both English and Spanish writing had changed in the intervening decades. Both are living languages, and some expressions that may have been chic in their time might today be considered trite. Now imagine encountering a concept or expression that has since fallen out of use in one language, then attempting to figure out what it means, then finding an English equivalent. Or, say you have a particular sentence structure that, in order for it to have maximum impact on the reader, has to follow a certain word order. Now translate that across forty years and from one language to another. It's not easy, but we're glad to have done the work.

Pereda today is seventy-three years old. He has lived long enough to see all that life held in store, or at least that's what he thought. Never in his wildest dreams did he think something he wrote as a young man would be shared with the world. Never did he suspect that his novel could transform from the story that almost wasn't to the novel that is.