Farewell, Sandwich Man …you will be missed.
I recently learned of the passing of my friend Michael Abedin. For readers that didn’t have the good fortune to know him, Mike was one of the elder statesmen of the Austin, Texas “Keep Austin Weird” movement …though he wasn’t particularly interested in keeping Austin weird, per se: “I was one of the people making it weird in the first place,” he said.
As the owner, editor, and publisher of Austin All-Natural Magazine, Mike was something of an Austin fixture. He was a teaching martial artist, a radio disc jockey, a newsman, a film actor, and a legendary raconteur. As a young man in the early 1970s, Mike had once manned a Salvation Sandwich® cart selling cellophane-wrapped sandwiches with Constant Comment® iced tea and honey from a cooler in front of the School of Fine Arts Building on the University of Texas campus. Handsome, witty, and charming, Mike had soon attracted a dedicated fan base that made it impossible for him to go anywhere in the city without being spotted: “Hey, Sandwich Man!” In public, a smile from Mike — “the flashing of the the pearly whites,” he called it — was enough to garner instant invitations to the very best and most discriminating parties about the town.
I first came to know Mike growing up in Abilene, Texas. In school, he was an academic standout and was voted Senior Class President of Abilene High School. His mother once told me that he scored 160 on the standard WAIS IQ Test, but I never was able to get him to speak to that topic …but I never knew him to resort to opening a textbook, either. At any rate, I first met Mike as a party guest in his parents house. A mutual acquaintance invited me to one of the regular poker games Mike began hosting after his parents relocated to Arlington, Texas. Mike was a junior in high school, so his parents decided to leave him in Abilene to finish his senior year in high school and watch the property until they could sell it …unsupervised and utterly Home Alone. His parents trusted young Michael, an Eagle Boy Scout, to remain calm and level-headed when confronted with what, for most of the rest of us appeared, at first blush to be unlimited and potentially unbridled freedom. Very much in character for Mike, he displayed textbook leadership skills, effortlessly assuming a statesman-like role in supervising the poker games. You should understand that these games weren’t attended by wild teenagers drinking beer, partying, and barfing on the carpet; rather, these games were relatively quiet gatherings of wannabe grown-ups driving their first car to a seemingly grown-up poker game; each kid pretending to be a hardened professional gambler smoking cigars in a smoke-filled back room — you know, like real adults. After each game, we choked back the nausea of our first-time cigars and whiskey until after we left, our glowing speech somewhat slurred by the warm scotch buzz. Most of us struggled mightily not to vomit in the aforementioned first cars on the way home (a struggle several of us lost). We discovered that adult hangovers don’t necessarily wait for the next morning.
After graduation in the summer of 1968, Mike’s parents sold the house, but instead of following them to Arlington, Mike chose to move to Austin and begin his lifelong journey of making his way in the world. The following summer, I joined a number of my Abilene friends in what must have appeared to be a mass migration to Austin, but was, truth be known, the migration of a veritable rogue’s gallery of young adventurers; pirates who descended on a certain West 25th Street rooming house — a house of such dubious reputation that it had been dubbed “The Flop-House.” Mike was already in residence. Those of us who followed lived in that rose-colored, patchouli-scented psychedelic flophouse for one glorious summer that became an epic adventure for each one of us. Someone always had a story to tell at the end of each day, and Mike Abedin was often at or near the epicenter of some well-crafted tales. Anyone who knew Mike has heard such tales told by a true raconteur to some of us who are re-telling them still. I recall one of my favorite memories from that era:
Mike was working for a husband-and-wife start-up business one summer selling sandwiches and honey-laced Constant Comment® tea from a stationary cart parked in front of the University of Texas Art Department building for an hour each weekday, which not only provided gainful employment, but, seen in the proper light, actually presented a unique opportunity for him to get in on the ground floor of the next Great American Enterprise. He called to tell me that, if I hurried to Austin, we could ride the crest of a groundswell wave of popular demand; a groundswell, he insisted, that would catapult us to our rightful place on the pinnacle of the food chain for the counterculture!
So with this lofty ideal in mind, we rented a four room flat a few blocks away from Bevo’s Bar (apparently now defunct). Each weekday, after a grueling hour standing behind a cart taking peoples money and handing them sandwiches, the owner would drop us off at our flat. We would spend the next hour or so plotting our evening’s adventure over a cold bottle of Shiner and a burning tube of a then-illegal smoking substance. Once we established the proper mood platform, we would sketch out a general outline for the rest of the day and discuss the broad arc entertainment options. There were always logistical considerations to consider for each proposal.
One bright and sunny spring afternoon our simple plan was to ride the campus bus to “The Drag,” a venerable section of Guadalupe Street. There, we could hash out the details over a couple of Shiner Bock beers and a smoking tube. We often sat under the outdoor awning at Les Amis, a popular bistro, where we could watch the passersby on the sidewalk. That particular day, for some reason, we crossed Guadalupe Street and sat on a bench in the courtyard of the University Administration Building. The birds were chirping, and all appeared to be right with the world. Nearby, yet obscured by dense topiary, a soap-box orator was delivering what sounded like a crazed end-of-the-world tirade of anti-something-or-other sentiment from the other side of the walkway. I remember thinking at the time that maybe things were not so right with him — after all, we were seated at the base of the infamous Texas Tower. As we sat by the dense, sculptured shrubbery, the pop-up speaker was becoming progressively louder, more insistent, and more aggressive toward the few students who had paused to listen. We had automatically assumed his rambling oratory was merely the raving of a malcontent (at best) or a madman (at worst); however, as we listened, what he was saying actually began to make sense. So much so that, at one point, Mike and I looked at each another and without a word between us, stood up and walked around the hedge to see for ourselves just exactly who in the hell was talking. It took a full minute to sink in — a full minute to associate this wild-haired man standing on the concrete table with his picture on the back of novels we had read: The man turned out to be Norman Mailer, Pulitzer Prize winning author and towering cultural icon himself in the corporeal flesh. He bellowed an invitation to everyone in earshot that he was speaking in such-and-such auditorium that evening and admission was free to students, jumped down from the table, and disappeared into thin air.
Mr. Mailer swaggered onto the stage that night wearing a ten-gallon Stetson hat, a pair of Tony Lama ostrich boots, and a bolo necktie. Mailer’s Texas caricature was hilarious in a way that only a five foot three, fifty-something New York Jew, literary and media megastar could pull off. While imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery …well, satire almost never is, but this was hilarious. The audience howled. Unfortunately, Mr. Mailer had no sooner adjusted the microphone to his diminutive stature than the auditorium air conditioning died (some said the University authorities shut it down on purpose). With the hot breath and sweating bodies of five thousand or so students in the small audatorium, the temperature in the theater shot up like a jet leaving O’Hare. Within five minutes the auditorium was sweltering. Mailer stopped his lecture in mid sentence: “This isn’t in my contract,” he announced, “I’m leaving.” He took a couple of strides toward the curtain then stopped, turned, and faced the audience: “I’m going across the street to Hank’s for a beer. Anyone who wants to come along …I’ll see you there.” He jerked his thumb in the vague direction of Guadalupe Dtreet, and dashed off the stage.
We didn’t really know how Norman Mailer might have become acquainted with Hank’s, but Mike and I knew Hank’s Bar and Grill very, very well. It was Just across Guadalupe from the campus mall. Hank’s was basic and straightforward — convenient for swilling down pitchers of cold beer and talking politics with one’s peers. It had eight or so huge booths, a few small tables, a bar with vinyl stool seats, and one or two pool tables in the rear. It was practically empty when we walked in that night, so we sat in a wall booth to wait for the Mailer crowd to arrive. We ordered a pitcher of beer and waited …and waited …and waited. An hour after we left the auditorium, Hank’s only had a small group of people we took for the regular denizens, not the student literati we expected to be there to see Norman Mailer. We were starting to wonder if there were another Hank’s Bar and Grill somewhere we didn’t know about when in strode Norman Mailer himself. He had changed into a corduroy jacket with elbow patches and jeans. Surprisingly, he walked into the bar by himself with no bodyguards or handlers. He wordlessly bypassed the bar crowd and sped to the rear of the establishment without a sideways glance. He took off his shoes, leaped onto one of the pool tables in his stocking feet, and picked up his lecture with the same sentence he had cut short in the auditorium. He spoke for over an hour, then took questions from the now-crowded bar packed to overflow capacity. When there were no more questions, he said something very much like this:
“When you get up tomorrow morning, look in your newspaper. What is it here …the Austin American Statesman? Look in there. Look for the article about the lecture I gave tonight. I will guarantee that you will not recognize anything in the story you find there. That’s because they will take the lecture described in my press release, add a stock photo, and write a story about something before it has even happened. I promise you. Look it up!”
With that admonition, he jumped down from the pool table and magically vanished into the night. Poof! The following morning we bought a copy of the American Statesman and found that Mailer had been dead right about their story. Mike Abedin never forgot that lesson, and if you were one of Mike’s friends you have undoubtedly heard this story before ..in which case I hope re-telling it now somehow reminds you of Mike.
Mike passed away on October 13, 2019 after a long bout with cancer. Goodbye, and Farewell, William Michael Abedin. You are and will always be sorely missed.