The Parker Sub doesn’t want those things. It likes simple. Plain. Which is why it’s something a simple and plain man has to ask for. But I am a Parker. And I do want those: the pepper, the onions, the upgrades. That’s because I see our sub as a project, not a perfected object.
By Lauren Parker
My family has a sandwich named after us. It’s called the Parker Sub.
It’s not on the menu of Pizza Plus, a central Michigan pizzeria about an hour from Traverse City, but if you order it, they’ll know who it’s for. It’s what my dad always ordered when we visited. It’s just a good sandwich, he said, his mouth full of ground beef and bread, swigging a can of Pepsi.
I’ve never really felt like I fit in with my family. My father disliked the way my sister and I grew up. He called me fancy, often, tossing it out like a swear. I don’t know that I disagree with him, but we all know what fancy means. He’s all spaghetti and no western, comes from people living mostly on Bud Light, nicotine, and dirty water hot dogs.
He’s diagnosed with brain cancer in March 2023. I try to make the sandwich in my California apartment kitchen, a world away from the intersection with the swinging traffic light that’s named after a timber baron. We’ve never gotten along, me and my dad, me and the sandwich, and for the first time in ten years he and I are talking and I have a craving.
The Parker Sub is the sort of hot sandwich you whip up in a hurry. It’s got melted mozzarella, Thousand Island dressing, ground beef, and a bit of lettuce all on a roll. It’s basically a minced Big Mac.
The sandwich is not bad. The crux of its failure is that it’s incomplete. It needs some sautéed onions, some red pepper flakes, and something else that I cannot name. Only the basics are there. Pizza Plus has each of these things scattered on the rest of their menu. They know what belongs on a sandwich. But the Parker Sub doesn’t want those things. It likes simple. Plain. Which is why it’s something a simple and plain man has to ask for. But I am a Parker. And I do want those: the pepper, the onions, the upgrades. That’s because I see our sub as a project, not a perfected object. It’s our familial mystery to solve, and a broken thing to fix.
When I make the sub, I lay out the ingredients and consider them, like photographs on the table in triplicate and determining which one to toss. I spent time looking up at a laptop screen I have resting on my fridge to dive into the history of iceberg lettuce, the blend of mozzarella and provolone most common in restaurants, and the Adventist philosophy behind abstaining from pork.
I accidentally became a historian of Thousand Island Dressing. Between books on my shelves and the boundless records of the internet, I flip through a condiment’s entire living legend. I talk about the major players of its creation like we are related, like Sophia LaLonde, a fisherman’s wife in a touristy part of upstate New York, is just my auntie passing me a recipe card. I looked at ingredients at one of my smaller grocery stores, the only one where there are chestnuts. I googled the difference between water chestnuts and regular chestnuts before taking my selection home to roast myself. I bought a package of California hoagie rolls that are raw on the inside to roast in my broiler and firm up.
I get vegetarian meat substitute; I’m not Parker enough to eat real ground beef.
I assume that I have mayonnaise somewhere in my fridge. When I see that the jar expired six months ago, I use it anyway hearing the word fancy rocket around my head. Who’s fancy now, I think as I stir in the chopped chestnuts and exactly eight sliced olives according to the digital newsprint I had pulled up on my phone screen.
With painstaking care, I sauté onions, cook ground veggie beef, add chili oil to give it a bit of dimension. I try to make it more, make it fancier, a Premier Parker Sub, a blend of high and low culture, a version of my own name I can stand to live with. I still serve with a Pepsi or a Bud Light. Am I fancy or classic?
I make a ritual of it, of playing my music too loud, leaving the window open to let the steam out, of leaning against the wall and taking deep breaths like my dad did when he quit smoking. Sometimes WE just want to stand on a corner and breathe.
I plate the sandwich, it’s messy and gory, not like if Pizza Plus had made it neat for me, but I’m doing my best. I pull the tab on a tall boy and take a few sips before biting into my masterpiece.
The sandwich is somehow blander than its inspiration. The ingredients work but are unremarkable together and the ways it’s distinct count against it. It’s no fun to eat. I eat half of it before tossing the rest in the trash.
I don’t know why I can’t fix the Parker. I cannot make it some premier version of the name and the legacy that I’m stuck with. I don’t fit in, and I’m not a successfully improved model. I chuck the jar of mayo. My remaining chestnuts mold forgotten in their jar, and I eat my package of rolls with garlic butter and little chopped rounds of string cheese that I melt in the broiler. I wash those down with a Bud Light.
When I walk into Pizza Plus a year later, it’s for my father’s funeral. It’s a small pizzeria with a few specialties on the menu, no booths, exposed brick inside but a polite couple of tables and chairs. Cadillac, Michigan is a cute town that is trying real hard. A former timber town, they have a Narcan dispenser on the street, a playground by the lake, and a natural food store run by your local Adventists. Pizza Plus is the sort of place where most of their social
media posts are announcing the internet is down and they are cash-only for the day, looks homey in it. There’s the signature sub with the special house sauce and it wins local prizes.
But the Parker Sub has no crown. It’s just a thing that people who knew someone back in the day get to eat. That’s the sort of history we’re talking about. A measure of “befores.” The sort of history written in pacts scratched in schoolyard dirt with a stick, kicked like a can down the gravel of no sidewalks on a road. The sort of affection built by proximity. My family just calls it Dave and Jim’s.
I don’t expect them to recognize me. I never lived here, after all, just a visiter, damn near a tourist. Related to the better part of three counties, but who isn’t? A frequenter of the new brewery with its vegan options and eight dollar pints. My hair color changes as often as a hunting season. Blues and reds running out and flying south to be replaced by whatever soars in on the wind. And then, there was the decade I went missing.
It’s the off season, empty for a Saturday at lunch. March in Michigan is birch trees as stark as corn stalks. It’s not home but it is ancestral, the cemetery filled with tombstones with my last name on them. Everything is brown and gritty as a ghost. It’s how I know it. Like one, long, endless November creeping its skeleton hands through the wool of your sweater to give you a chill that makes you feel not just mortal, but terminal. The door hits the bell as it closes and I ask, if I order a Parker Sub, would you make it for me? The cashier, who’s name I don’t know, says to me in a low voice, sure thing. I’m sorry about your dad.
The meat of the sandwich is also brown and gritty against the white of the cheese. It matches the dirty, ailing snow banks that remain in the cold but brittle March that promises no summer, no fall, no Christmas. Admittedly I’d eat it far before the snow.
The owner, Dave, sits down at the table across from me and asks how I am. I am trying to lie and say “Oh, been alrigh’,” because by being here I am not alright. None of us are.
“I’ve known him since I was this tall,” Dave says, his hand barely clearing the height of the table. The memories of someone who grew up six farms over on a brutal country highway. I remember him with fewer grays. I’ve known him since I was about that tall.
I make a man cry in his own pizza parlor when I give him a hug and say, “I am sorry your friend is dead.” I pick granules of ground beef out of my teeth and hug Dave. “Too soon,” he says, “Your grandma didn’t get a fair shake either.” That’s the truth about the Parker family: to know us is to lose us.
I sip the dregs of my Vernor’s ginger ale and take the second half of the sandwich to go. The sandwich is unfixable. It’s set in stone. And if it cannot be improved upon, does that make it perfect? Family is nourishment, but it’s not fine dining.
I post photos of the sandwich online and my friend says, “I’m confused. This looks really good.”
As my ancestors start to die and I become an ancestor, I wonder what will happen to the Parker Sub. I live states away, two flights, a layover in Denver, and a two hour car ride away, and I’m not around to order the sandwich. I don’t know when I’ll be back again.
I hope this isn’t the last time I see them.
Lauren Parker is a fourth generation female breadwinner descended from male charlatans, and thus has grown up to become a very educated liar. She is a writer, zine maker, and visual artist and has written for the Toast, Strange Horizons, The Racket, Xtra Magazine, Catapult, and Autostraddle. Her work focuses on the intersection of class, queerness, and the occult. She’s the author of the poetry collection We Are Now the Thing in the Woods (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Dark Way Down (Animal Heart Press, 2025), and Spells for Success (Simon Element, 2025). She has a newsletter, Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?
