“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

 Right after Fitzgerald wrote that immortal line, he made himself a grilled cheese sandwich. It is to mortality what ambrosia is to immortality. It is the food of isolation and loneliness. You just broke up with your high school sweetheart, the one everyone thought you’d marry, and on the long lonesome ride back home the radio plays Roy Orbison - or is it the piano outro to Layla.

Hard to say which, reception is bad.  

Home. Your forsaken headlights shine their mournful beams across the forlorn gravel in your driveway. You stop and turn off the engine but still you sit, hand on the wheel, numb, lacking the will to move. When you do, each sound – the door handle, the creak of the hinges, the punctuating slam – is a discrete event, seemingly unconnected to the others. The footsteps you hear in the driveway are your own. You open your front door and switch on the 60-watt bulb hanging by its wires in your kitchen. You see a cast iron pan on the stove. On the counter, half a stick of butter still on its paper and half a loaf of bread, stale, not yet green. Open the refrigerator door to stare. Mostly empty shelves, outdated milk, uncertain leftovers in a grease-stained Ziplock, and a bright yellow box of Velveeta…

 Like a rising sun!

 That’s when it’s time for grilled cheese sandwich!

Or you wander into a deserted Howard Johnson’s by a wintry beach. Or a lunch counter at Walgreen’s, maybe a shotgun shack greasy spoon that time and the Sterns have forgotten. A place where the menu board shouts out “GRILL CHEESE” because they ran out of magnetic letters…

  There’s not much you can do to sex it up and maybe you shouldn’t even try. Still, there are possibilities. If you’ve ever been to the G&R Tavern in Waldo, Ohio for the fried bologna, you know that sweet pickles are a wonderful and an under-utilized sandwich accompaniment. Sweet pickles (technically not pickles so much as candied cucumbers) are a niche flavor and since sweet gherkins, the American answer to cornichons, are a traditional side to grilled cheese, why not slice ‘em thin and put ‘em right on the sandwich?

Bacon – what can I say? It has become the universal symbol of low-life gastronomical excess. There must be bacon everywhere, especially here.

And, say, it has been a while since we used that Panini press we impulsively bought on sale at the WalMart. Gotta use that. It doesn’t work very well with grilled cheese. We tried that and most of the cheese ran out. Lame sandwich and we had to clean up a bad mess. Hey, maybe if we layer up the bread, kinda like Bob Wian did with an extra slice of bun and an extra burger back in 1936 when he created the World Famous Big Boy! Now we’re cookin’! Let’s do it!

Give toasting a head start by buttering 3 slices of bread, both sides if you’re in the mood and don’t mind buttery fingers. I used Pepperidge Farm sandwich white, but fluffy marshmallowy white bread works too, maybe even 12 ways.  Get those neat-o grill marks on the bread, that’s what you paid for at WalMart. Slice a couple sweet gherkins lengthwise as thin as you can manage without cutting yourself. I made the bacon, 4 thick slices, in the microwave between paper towels. It was crispy in 6 minutes. Now assemble: Small pieces of Velveeta – not too thick or it’ll run out (though the “waffling” of the bread will help contain it) – topped with gherkin slices on one slice of toast, cheese and bacon on another, plain toast on top. Make sure you rotate the slices 90 degrees to get a crosshatch and grill in the Panini press until the cheese melts. Serve with leftover bacon and gherkin slices, as if anyone cares.