In the summer of 2006 my friend Rob and I were staying over at the apartment of William Cashion, the bass player for Future Islands. William lived alone and had a real Fight Club refrigerator — in the sense that it was nearly empty except for condiments. Before heading out one morning, William took a look in his fridge and told Rob and me if we got hungry “I guess you could have a… peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich. Haha.”
Man, isn’t this story great so far? Can you see where this is going?
I was incredulous at first, but behind my doubt, William must have sensed an underlying gullibility. He told me that the PB&M was “a North Carolina thing. Ha.” William is from North Carolina, so how could I argue with that?
After he left, still chuckling (which, in hindsight, should have been a red flag, but I just assumed everyone from North Carolina chuckled all the time), Rob and I tried the sandwich, and as you can tell from the title and first paragraph, actually liked it.
The epilogue to this story is that it wasn’t until last year — many, many sandwiches later — that I learned that peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches were not a staple of the North Carolina diet.
I ran into William on the street and thanked him for introducing me to peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches and told him how I ate them all the time. His response: “What are you talking about?”
It was like the end of The Sixth Sense, when you find out that Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time and you immediately run through all these flashbacks, thinking, “Of course! It’s almost too obvious!”
