Frank & Andrea, 17 October 2026

    I haven't been to what used to be Frank from Philly but now is Frank and Andrea for nine years, a month, and a day (three thousand three hundred eighteen days) because, as we all know, I fucking hate Dinkytown. I hate Dinkytown so goddamned much that until now, there were only six episodes in all ten seasons of Sandwich Bully that are set in Dinkytown.

    From our very first episode set in Dinkytown, which was also about Frank from Philly:

OK, so here’s the first problem: Frank from Philly is in Dinkytown and you couldn’t pay me to live, work, or play in Dinkytown. The way Olive Garden is authentic Italian made by your great grandmother, Dinkytown is 1970s Times Square, and the way shop owners in Bowling Green’s “Four Corners” district have to hose the vomit off their sidewalks every Saturday and Sunday morning is a task I imagine Dinkytown businesses have to undertake every day from seven in the evening until seven in the morning JUST TO KEEP UP. Dinkytown is populated by college freshman, hungry for constant stimuli, usually meaning whichever curly-q’d-moustache-and-suspenders version of Mumford & Co is being rammed down their millenial earholes this month that’s playing at the Varsity Theater brought to you by Summit Brewing Company and 89.3 The Current, Great Music Lives Here. And for every reward I was granted in the form of an inch of eighteen and nineteen year old ass hanging out of Daisy Dukes, I was severely punished by the sight of two dozen tie-dye-and-high-top goons with burlap sack colored baseball caps and pinch-an-inch-ish chin hairs that were probably named Josh and could sell me a hit of weak acid. I would’ve taken the art school damaged kids in Whittier any day over these freaks, who looked like the kind of kids who’d never fucked WITHOUT the condom and were constantly poised for their next Instagram selfie, this generation’s version of the Clearisil commercial.

    From our second episode set in Dinkytown, again about Frank from Philly:

My previous review of Frank’s is a far different animal. I told a tale of suburban gym surrounded by antiseptic teens who’d never touched a cigarette or their own clits. Affable lil’ duders who could sell you a Xanax come midterms. A bunch of kids who looked like they did safe things like check in with their roommates if it got late, dipped their bread in milk, had no intention of ever fucking bareback. But that was summer time. That was when the Hitler Youth’s Townie Division was in full force.

This?

Heh.

This is fucking football season, bitches.

Everything I’ve ever told you about Dinkytown is like something from Bizarro world.

I have never in my life seen so many absolutely sinister looking white kids gathered in one place in the day light. They looked like they want to beat me up just for being old and better sexed. They looked like their genital warts were burning. They looked like they did abortions the way their grandparents did them: a couple kicks to the stomach and a straightened out coat hanger up the kid shitter. And there were about two hundred billion of these absolutely psychotic looking fucks in Frank’s today. My god, the terror.

Fucking football season.

    You know I do not want to go back here. Just for a cheesesteak.

    A cheesesteak selling at Dinkytown prices.

    Especially since I don't know what sports season this is right now. Once baseball went into another Tiger-less post season, I stopped paying attention. I tried watching the World Cup. I'm thinking about getting into hockey. I really like biathlon and Triple Crown horse racing -

    WHAT WERE YOU DOING IN DINKYTOWN, CHARLIE!?

    Well, Vinegar Syndrome opened a brick & mortar location in Minneapolis and I had to go. The problem was that it's in Dinkytown. I love Vinegar Syndrome but I hate Dinkytown.

    Fuck.

    And just very quickly, for those unfamiliar, Vinegar Syndrome is a boutique film label, specializing in restoring rare and cult films and distributing for / collaborating with other labels, like AGFA, Something Weird, I think even the National Film Board of Canada, maybe.

    It's kind of my jam.

    So I had to put away my hatred for Dinkytown for just a moment to go check out the store. I got there and the place is packed. Every cinephile and film connoisseur in Minneapolis has decided to come out to read the back of every Blu-Ray case in its entirety, including all the little numbers at the bottom, ensuring absolutely no movement. And, as you'd expect, everything is expensive. The one thing I would have loved to have gotten was a Frankhooker t-shirt but it was a long sleeve (not into) and it was forty two dollars. So, after ten fifteen minutes of over-stimulated claustrophobia, I left empty handed.

    I looked catty-corner from the shop and saw, "Oh, Frank from - Oh, it's Frank and Andrea, now."

    I was pretty sure I hadn't been there for a while, just didn't think it had been three thousand three hundred eighteen days. It was getting to be about lunch time and I figured, shit, I had just saved a bunch of money by not buying anything at the Vinegar Syndrome store, let's get a cheesesteak.

    Remember the first time I ordered?

Fifteen minutes turns into twenty, I’m actually contemplating asking for my nine dollars back because, at this point, I’ve spent more time waiting on the sandwich than I will eating it and that’s with a string of two - Asian dad and two slice guy - customers behind me who just ordered pizza slices. You know, slices. Of pizza. Already made. Really. How long is the wait on this fucking cheesesteak? And now the cashier asks me, “What kind of cheese did you want? Cheez whiz, right?”

Yeah, cheez whiz.

“We’ll have that right up for you, OK?”

Cool, thanks!

“Sorry about the wait.”

No problem.

But it is a problem because I’m in Dinkytown. Putting me in Dinkytown is like dropping an unarmed ISIL member in the middle of a Gay Pride Pork Roast: I’m filled with an anxious, nervous hatred stemming from a core of beliefs contrary to my surroundings; I’m lost, adrift in a sea of Connors and Bethanies and music I don’t understand and pussy I’ll never get and I just want to get back to my neighborhood where people work for a living and fuck without condoms and smoke grass when they listen to Sabbath LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE and -

“What kind of cheese did he want?” the grill cook asks the cashier even though I’m standing RIGHT THE FUCK HERE.

Cashier asks me, “Hey, man, what kind of cheese did you want again? It was cheez whiz, right?”

Cheez whiz, yeah.

“Cheez whiz,” the cashier tells the grill cook.

“Cheez whiz?” the grill cook asks.

“Yeah,” the cashier says.

I stare out the window and I wonder if I will ever get home. I am a lost argonaut in the labrynth of the Minotaur and fuck you if you’re about to tell me I’m mixing my mythology there, it’s been a while since I read anything published before the nineteenth century so keep in mind that if you say one fucking thing at this point, I’ll make you kiss my dick and smile, goddamn.

“He wanted cheez whiz, right?” the grill cook asks.

Before the cashier can ask me again, I turn and say, Cheez whiz, yeah.

Grill cook hands me my sandwich and says, “Sorry about the wait, man.”

Hey, no problem, thanks.

    Remember the second time I ordered?

    “What can I get you?”

    “From behind,” is what my sick man devil brain wants to say but what comes out of my mouth is, “Yeah, I was looking at a cheesesteak. Can I get that with cheezewhiz, peppers, and onions?”

    She starts typing on the register, muttering what I think is, “God, this customer is so fucking good looking and refined, not like these short-dicked boys that always come in and out of here,” but turns out to be, “OK, cheesesteak… pppeeepppppeerrss… oooonnnnions…” She looks at me and does not tell me, “You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a sexual partner and I would like to give you a tour of our walk-in cooler,” opting instead to say, “You said cheezewhiz?”

    I want to say, “Take me to bed and lose me forever,” but I said, “Yeah.”

    She asks, “Is that for here or to go?” because you know I’ve beaten this joke to death when I break out a Top Gun reference.

    This time I went in, went up to the counter and ordered a cheesesteak whiz wit, and the woman at the counter started punching my order in and she stopped and she asked me, "What kind of cheese?"

    I said, "Cheese whiz."

    "OK, so," she looked back at POS system, "That was cheese whiz?"

    I said, "Yes, cheese whiz."

    "On the cheesesteak?"

    What under all of Christ's observation is with this fucking place??? "Yeah."

    "And that was the steak with the onions?"

    "Yes."

    "With cheese whiz."

    Oh. My fucking. God. I told you this is a cheesesteak place, right? Because they told me this was a cheesesteak place. How is this fucking hard for them? There's no loud music. There are no loud customers. (It was just me and a dude who looked like first and second season Roseanne who stared at me while I locked up my bike, chewing his food the way a cow chews cud.) There were not, to my memory, any overly loud ceiling fans. The dude in the back on the grill heard my order. How do the cashiers at this place not understand when "cheese whiz", the number one and default cheesesteak cheese, is ordered? Three times! Three times in my life I have been to this place! Each time, ordering cheese whiz on my cheesesteak and they get fucking confused. Even forgetful! Like, dude, get. your shit. together.

    "Yes."

    "OK," she punched it in and said, "Should be about - Ope!" She looked over. Big ass football player looking dude is slapping a wad of meat on the grill. She went on, "Looks like he's already getting it started for you!"

    She asked for a name for the order and I swear I have never enunciated my name so clearly in my fucking life. She gave me my total, which, hey, it's been a while; these things used to be nine and change, this weekend, my sandwich was somewhere in the fourteen dollar neighborhood. She also projected a ten minute wait. I barely had time to put it in the group chat that the VS store was cool but I'm going to wait for the excitement to die down before I go again before future Packers fullback Rusty Van Horne calls out my name and hands me my cheesesteak.

    And how was the cheesesteak?

    Kind of unfair to call it mid when I can't recall ever having had better. I mean, yeah, in the thirty three hundred eighteen days since my last visit, I've had other cheesesteaks, banh mi cheesesteaks, gyro cheesesteaks, pretty sure I've had the Arby's cheesesteak. Maybe this is the best cheesesteak in Minneapolis. It tastes exactly as you'd expect it. Savory meat, salty cheese product, sweet grilled onions. A roll with a sturdy flaky crust on the outside while light and airy inside. Am I just being a little mean to the sandwich because I just can't with the cashiers unwillingness to hear the words "cheese whiz"?

    And, really, if I turn inward about this, I'm liable to give myself a complex. Like, have I been pronouncing "cheese whiz" wrong my whole life? Can somebody call me and just say the words "cheese whiz" so I can hear what they sound like? Actually, let me go first; listen to me say the words "cheese whiz" and tell me what you heard me say because, for real, you'd think I was speaking Russian in there. (Which, if you're curios, is "Сырный соус".) (Just say "Surney Sauce.") (Yes, I'm aware it doesn't look like it sounds like that but - no, shut up. Trust me, I took a semester of Russian. That is the sound those letters make.)

    But still, I don't feel sufficiently wowed enough to go back. Could be because it's Dinkytown. Could be because their cashiers don't clean their ears. I think the only way I'll eat there is if I have to go back to Vinegar Syndrome for literally any little reason but I won't go into Dinkytown just for Frank from Philly or Frank and Andrea or whatever.

    Basically, you have to get me to go to the video store to convince me to get the cheesesteak. Give them your money, don't give them your money, I don't care. Just be sure to grab your Narcan and your EpiPen and text your friends your outfit before you go to Dinkytown.