“Come, join us at Hot Dog Heaven. See what is our secret sauce.” His gold tooth glinted in the sunlight, his hat brim pointed straight at the world.
Strangely, the longer Eugene spoke English, the more problems he encountered with idioms. But he made it work. People loved it. He was a poet when he talked about Hot Dog Heaven. “Come, fresh yourself at Hot Dog Heaven. We have secret sauce for making perfect. Hot Dog Heaven make you out of this world.” Eugene made hot dogs sound like a transcendental experience. That’s conviction. And you can’t fake it.
“First time I’m having hot dog, I say, Shit motherfuck, why I’m eating cabbage and beets all my life? ”
Over and over he shared this sentiment with patrons, and over and over they ate it up.
Hot dogs were not, however, a transcendental experience for Acne Scar Joe, who was a klutz when it came to hot dogs because he didn’t much care for them. He was still a hamburger man. Hot dogs were tubular; they had a way of getting away from you. They were messy. The buns were always blowing out at the seam. But what Joe lacked in grace, he made up for with effort. He worked hard because he liked the money. Joe was flashy with his hundred bucks a day. The first week alone he bought a red suede jacket, two pairs of Air Jordans, and four new rims for his purple Honda. He wasn’t thrilled with the whole paying-off-the-principal arrangement. He didn’t seem to care about equity, he wanted a spoiler, and a subwoofer, and some fuzzy dice.
Blueprint for Heaven
On the afternoon of June 11, 1991, shortly after I graduated from Santa Monica City College two years behind schedule, I ran into my old mentor Gerard Smith on the promenade, and I couldn’t help but notice that his sleeves had lost some of their billow. His clogs were mired at last in the vagaries of day-to-day life. He’d lost his teaching job, I soon learned. His partner of ten years, Randall, had left him for a surfing Buddhist. His dog died of pancreatic cancer. His glasses were fastened together with tape. I hated to see him that way.
I spotted him a bagel and a cup of coffee and we wandered in the direction of the pier, where we leaned against the rail. Gerard was schlumpy. Even in a stiff breeze, the best his sleeves could do was flap around like wind socks.
“I feel like a bagel,” he said. “Like there’s a hole in the center of me.”
I lived that feeling for most of my life, but I didn’t say so. There were times when I felt like the hole and not the bagel, but I didn’t tell him that either. “Well, you know what old Locke would say. He’d say that just because your bagel has a hole in it doesn’t mean it will always have a hole in it. Observe.”
Using my index fingers as a putty knife, I mortared over the hole in my open-faced bagel with cream cheese, until the surface was smooth and seamless.
“Voilà!”
“It’s not the same,” he intoned.
Gerard proceeded to explain that upon losing his post, he’d turned to his old pal Aristotle for comfort, ransacking The Organon at length for some logical solution to the hole, trying to devise a syllogism that concluded in happiness, and when that failed, he turned to the rigid determinism of Hobbes and the haughty empiricism of Locke for answers, and when all else failed, to his old friends Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but neither the Lutheran piety of Kierkegaard, nor the syphilitic rantings of Nietzsche, could fill the hole.
Finally, Gerard said, he turned to hedonism. For two full months he loafed around his apartment trying to fill his hole with pinot noir and donuts, neglecting his existential anxiety altogether, surrendering completely to his Epicurean appetites without guilt or moderation. He completely redefined success by developing a whole new paradigm for it. He took money out of the equation (though it probably cost him Randall), he cut bait on the adoration of his fellow man, awards dinners, professorships, reliable cars, you name it. He managed to whittle success down pretty good. He even went so far as to devise what he called the Sweats to Pants Ratio (SPR), by which success was measured relative to the number of days a week he spent in casual versus formal attire, formal being anything with pockets. By this measure, seven days a week in sweats was the pinnacle of success. Gerard managed to achieve a ratio of four to three within a month of losing his job. He was at six-to-one when Randall left him. Pretty damn successful.
Gerard tossed the remainder of his bagel to a frenzy of gulls, and talked about the future, specifically his own murky future. There might be an adjunct position up north in San Mateo in the fall, he explained, but nothing for sure. He confessed that he was uncertain whether or not he still believed in the future. The idea was elusive. What did I think?
I told him I already saw my future (which was a lie), and it wasn’t all sunshine and shitting from high places (which was probably the truth).
“But all in all,” I concluded, “it looks better than the inside of a coffin.”
I decided at that point that what Gerard Smith needed was not knowledge, or allegory, or even a rope, but inspiration, pure unmitigated old-fashioned American inspiration. So I told him about Hot Dog Heaven, in particular about my poultry-obsessed Greco-Roman wrestler slash Soviet-defector free-market-capitalist business partner from Rostov, and the formidable body of knowledge he’d amassed regarding all things hot dog. Gerard listened with a furrowed brow until I finished, whereupon I asked him whether he thought hot dogs could ever be a transcendental experience for him.
“I doubt it.”
“What about a hundred bucks a day?”
“I doubt that, too. But it would put me in some new clogs and some new glasses.”
So, without conferring with my business partners, I offered my old mentor a job at Hot Dog Heaven right on the spot. We drove down to Venice that very afternoon in my Bondo-dappled ’84 RX-7, which I bought from an ex-cop in Riverside, whose satisfied patronage of Hot Dog Heaven had in fact helped pay for it, and which Eugene had promptly christened “Za Srill Mobile.” It was a little rough around the edges, but it wasn’t gutless, and the driver’s side was pretty clean. It had a decent stereo and sheepskin seat covers. I always sat real low in the seat. I didn’t have a choice—it was stuck in the back position. My feet barely reached the pedals. I had some cop glasses I found in the glove box, the reflective kind with the wire frames, which I usually wore when piloting Za Srill Mobile.
Cruising our way down Ocean Boulevard toward Hot Dog Heaven, I missed as many lights as possible for the purpose of revving the twin turbos, even though the timing was off and the fan belt was slipping. I sat really low in my seat, like a guy with so much self-confidence he didn’t need to sit up straight. I was a city-college graduate, a restaurateur, my hair was falling just right. I tingled with a sense of my own nobility.
Gerard (who didn’t seem to notice he was in an RX-7, or that it growled like a mythological beast) looked like a big white flag in the passenger seat. He turned the crosshairs of his anxiety outward, aiming his uneasiness at the state of the civilized world, at Rodney King and Jack Kevorkian and the Church of the Creator. The world had gone mad, he concluded. We were building smart bombs and stupid people! Electroshock was back! The drug war was a fraud! Ronald Reagan was a confirmed rapist! All signs pointed toward the end: Tornados in Kansas! Cyclones in Bangladesh! A guy was killed by lightning at the US Open!
But what about Lithuanian independence, the end of apartheid, the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, I beseeched him, to which Gerard countered with cholera in South America and the death of Frank Capra.
Poor Gerard. It didn’t matter which way he turned, his disillusion was complete.
I reminded him, in the rare spirit of Danish optimism, that as long as he knew he was in despair, he wasn’t actually in despair, and giving the twin turbos a rev, I observed that a hundred bucks a day could buy a lot more than clogs and new glasses. This seemed to comfort him somewhat. By the time we reached Speedway, Gerard had rolled his window down and rested his arm out the window, and his sleeve began to billow slightl
y.
We arrived at Hot Dog Heaven shortly before closing. There were no customers about, though a wealth of evidence pointed to a late-afternoon rush: overflowing garbage, disheveled napkin dispensers, swampy sauerkraut.
Acne Scar Joe was red and blotchy. He had a black eye.
“What happened?” I said.
“Fucking high school punks.”
Eugene was whistling as he wiped down the nozzle of a mustard dispenser—not in itself a trustworthy indicator—but whistling Rampal, which invariably meant a twelve hundred–dollar day.
Leaning tentatively against the steam table, Gerard Smith appraised Hot Dog Heaven through broken glasses, and in greeting his deliverance, seemed somewhat less than awed. His handshake was as limp as his sleeves when I made the introductions.
But Eugene soon wooed him. “Zis is great honor meeting professor,” he said, flashing his gold tooth.
Gerard blushed. “Well, actually, I’m not a—”
“I have philosophy for selling hot dog in China. Business plan. Maybe sometime I show you, and you help me expand. You come to my house, we cook a duck.”
Gerard consented to this arrangement with a nod. His glasses were starting to fog up. “Of course, business isn’t technically my area of scholarship, you understand. But I do like duck.”
Acne Scar Joe, for his part, was skeptical. He was always skeptical, in particular where business arrangements were concerned. Joe thought my old mentor was a fag, I could see it in his eyes, which made me a fag by association. But deep down Joe was an egalitarian.
“I don’t give a shit,” he told me later. “As long as he shows up on time and he can find his way around a hot dog.”
Gerard quickly proved that he not only knew his way around a hot dog, he handled them expertly and passionately. In the heat of the lunch rush, he was Baryshnikov in clogs, spinning like a whirligig, with a hot dog in one hand and five bucks in the other. His billowy sleeves grazed the relish boat without ever getting soiled. Moreover, he brought a philosophical flair to Hot Dog Heaven. “A hot dog,” he mused, “is the noblest of all dogs, for, is it not true that it feeds the hand that bites it?” He likened Oscar Mayer to an alchemist, turning lips and assholes into delicacies, like base metals into gold. The hot dog was not only an American treasure, according to Gerard Smith, it was practically a tenet of democracy!
“For the hot dog, like the great democracy out of which it was born, owes its unique flavor and hearty spirit to the diversity of its origins! A tube of the finest steak does not a hot dog make!”
But Joe Tuttle was still a hamburger man. “The hot dog was invented in Germany, dumb ass! In Frankfurter, Germany. Same as the hamburger was invented in Hamburger, Germany!”
“Oh, Gerry, do not listen to Joe. Hot dog is not frankfurter. Zat was genius. Zat was pledge of allegiance for Hot Dog Heaven, Gerry! Zat was marvelous. You write for me book about hot dog philosophy, I make for you big seller!”
“Well, I suppose I could . . .”
“Zat would be book for everybody. Everybody like hot dog, Gerry. In former Soviet Republic, too, they liking hot dog. You think they having coup if hot dog was invented in Russia? I sink, Gerry, zis is brilliant idea you have.”
And with each gust of admiration from Eugene Gobernecki, Gerard’s sleeves billowed anew, and his clogs took flight like rockets into the ether. And it was official—I, Will Za Srill, had saved my first soul in the name of Hot Dog Heaven. And it was good. At least for a while, it was good. Gerard wound up taking that adjunct position up north in the fall. And from there, I heard he got a teaching gig at De Anza.
He sent me a postcard once when he was living in Los Gatos. It was a picture of a mummy from the Rosicrucian museum in San Jose.
Dear Will,
Philosophical traffic report: Still stuck in the intersection of free will and determinism, but I’ve put eternal recurrence in the rearview mirror, at least this time around. I’ve been trying to reduce life to arithmetic, but the equations are too often illogical. I find myself adding and subtracting and multiplying, but I never get to the sum. The one thing I know for sure, and you showed me this truth, is that anything, even hot dogs, can be a transcendental experience. Say hello to Eugene and the crew!
Semper experimentum,
G.S.
But that was the last I heard of my old mentor Gerard. People just slip away if you’re not careful. Big people. Everything is smaller in the end.
Out of This World
One Friday morning when I was in the bathtub reading Forum (a little yarn about a sorority initiation involving dog collars and sodomy), I thought I heard a knock on the door, but I couldn’t be sure because there were at least three washers in spin cycle downstairs, and the apartment was quaking at a seven-point clip.
As the knock persisted, my manhood wilted, and I finally wrapped myself in a towel and went for the door, certain that I would discover Eugene on the other side in coveralls and a Hot Dog Heaven hat, holding a pipe wrench or a rake, or a new brand of mustard from the former Czech Republic that was forty percent cheaper even with shipping. He would be impatient about something. Something would need to be done. Something would need fixing, or preparing, or replacing. Or just moving around. Whether here or in Venice, something would need to happen, somewhere, as soon as possible. Making dreams happen is not about sitting around on your ass, it’s about the tireless pursuit that never drains you.
“Zis is what make American world go around.”
Eugene was undrainable. He was Ragged Dick on steroids.
A week earlier Eugene had caught me in a similar towel-clad, semi-erect disposition when he came to my door before work to tell me that Frank was haunting, among other people, the Ramirez family in 214.
“You need keep an eye on for that cat. Now he bugging people in other building, even. Miss Boswell saying she hearing bumping in her closet at night. I telling her maybe mice. But I know zis is Frank bumping around.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Maybe you not let him out so much at night.”
“He’s a ghost, Eugene.”
“Zis is no matter. He your cat. You better keep an eye on for.”
My last thought before I opened the door was that I hoped Frank wasn’t in trouble again. Instead, when I swung the door open, I discovered my brother Doug standing in the causeway in clean pressed military attire, hefting a giant green duffel bag.
Before I could ask him what he was doing there, he was bear-hugging me, even though I was wet and practically naked. He didn’t smell like armpit. He smelled like lavender and leather. I felt tiny in his embrace.
“What’s happening, big brother?” he said, releasing me.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m on leave. Four days. Got the hell out of Dodge.”
“So you came here?”
“Where else would I go?”
I had about five answers off the top of my head, but the more I thought about each one, the more sense his answer made. “Well, come on in,” I said, stepping aside. “Let me throw some clothes on.”
Doug stepped in with his duffel bag and took a long look around my dark hovel. The apartment had stopped shaking for the time being, but the dryer vents under the window were working overtime. There were dishes in the sink, laundry scattered on the floor. Frank had knocked over a lamp during the night.
“Not bad,” he observed.
I must admit that Doug cut a handsome figure standing there in the living room. He was all grown up—and I don’t mean in terms of size, but overall carriage. He stood straight. His mouth wasn’t hanging open. His skin was unblemished. But I was most impressed by the fit he’d managed to achieve with his military wardrobe, in spite of his hulkish build. Big Bill could never have pulled such a thing off. He would have looked clownish—the cuff of his pant legs would have
been halfway up his shin, the material would have been stretched tight over his massive quads, the shoulders of the coat would’ve been cinched up around his neck. But Doug’s uniform hung like it was tailored. His hair was cropped short and neat, but not too short. He looked pretty sharp.
“What smells like diapers?” he said.
As if on cue, the washers began their gurgling drainage.
“It’s the laundry room,” I explained.
“Jesus. How can you stand it?”
“Somebody has to.”
I retired to the bedroom to put some boxers on, and when I came out, Doug was sitting on the sofa, an ancient kelly green castoff from the Pico house, perusing Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. His lips weren’t moving. The book looked small in his clutches.
“I gotta hand it to you, Will. You’re a pretty smart cookie if you can make any sense out of this crap.”
“I can’t.”
“You hungry? Sizzler’s got an all-you-can-eat buffet going for $6.99. I saw it on TV.”
“It’s 9:00 AM. You wanna eat at Sizzler?”
“Why not? You gotta work or something?”
“Actually, no, but I don’t even think Sizzler is open for breakfast, are they?”
“Yeah, maybe not. Hey, let’s call Ross and go play some pickup down in Venice. Like old times.”
All About Lulu Page 24
