The ham sandwich.

That same corner was a Deveson's bus stop; there was no ad-rashed glass shelter or even a fixed bench, just a 'bus stop' sign on a lamp post. If you wanted to, you could sit on the low brick wall of the white house from which an aproned housewife once had come running upon hearing a screech of brakes. Now, twelve years later, I am a teenager waiting at that same spot watching my eternal four-year-old self repeating that ride into the side of a car with the never-seen driver until the bus’s groaning whine of brakes brings me back to the present, and I pay five cents or whatever the ticket was in 1973, and the bus roars away, and I stagger down the back and the bus sways, almost tipping, around the uphill, half-left, past St Teresa's parish hall where'd I'd been a cub and then a scout during those Beach Boys years - I Can Hear Music and Do It Again echoing down the years into remembered history. Diesel fumes, drawn into the open windows, reek all the way to Essendon station where I catch the 4.35 p.m. train to Puckle Street. Puckle Street is all kitsch homewares store now, and hipster and gangster cafes, short blacks and dark glasses and muttered conversations; but then there were haberdashers and ladies' boutiques, and butcher and cake and greengrocer shops, and hardware stores and dusty pre-scan era supermarkets where cashiers tapped adding machines enumerating prices in sing-song voices, and furnishings shops with rolls of lino in darkened upstairs showrooms. There was a record bar: Rick Wakeman, Eric Weissberg, Loudon Wainwright, Madder Lake in psychedelic LP sleeves in crimp-edged square plastic covers and small stickers on the top right corner: '$5.95. 100 Puckle Street, Moonee Ponds'. The shop I worked in on Friday nights was halfway between the station end and the tramstop end. The customers were from two planets, maybe three. Suits, cummerbunds, bowling jac-shirts, hopsac trousers and hats for one; sharpie cardigans for another; and for a third, ties five inches wide and body shirts of purple swirling paisleys that stretched over your biceps (or your beer gut) when you buttoned them. Break was seven o'clock, I slipped out of the paisley and sharpie and dinner shirt world into the east-west street as daylight fought its losing battle with fluorescent late-night shopping neons. The sandwich bar was only a sandwich bar whose name I forget, and the sandwich was only a ham sandwich but its salty buttery neon-toned interval between school and teenage Friday night sleep was a short sensual walk into eternity.