All About Lulu (30 page)

My whole orientation to American culture was changing. I was assigning myself a new caste. I
fi
nally learned the difference between coveting success and simply pining for it. The difference resided in action.

To watch Eugene Gobernecki handle a hot dog was truly inspiring. The way he nestled each sausage lovingly into its bun, wrapped it fastidiously in gold foil (
Gold!
he insisted.
Everybody doing silver!
), the way he tucked it snuggly into its paperboard cradle and passed it over the counter like a newborn, like every hot dog was his god-daughter. Hot dog vending was Eugene’s love story. He handled the money just as lovingly as he handled the sausage, smoothing out the wrinkles, scrupulously laying all the bills in the cash box face up in the same direction, wincing every time Joe and I refused to do the same. Eugene did it all with panache. He didn’t serve customers, he seduced them. The guy just looked good with a hot dog in his hand.

Some guys were born to hold a hot dog, I guess. Eugene knew how to woo the hungry masses. Like a siren, he crooned to would-be customers as they passed.

“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
fl
ashy with his hundred bucks a day. The
fi
rst 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.

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 sur
fi
ng 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
fl
ap 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
fi
ngers 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
fi
ll the hole.

Finally, Gerard said, he turned to hedonism. For two full months he loafed around his apartment trying to
fi
ll his hole with pinot noir and donuts, neglecting his existential anxiety altogether, surrender-ing completely to his Epicurean appetites without guilt or modera-tion. He completely rede
fi
ned 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, speci
fi
cally 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 cof
fi
n.”

I decided at that point that what Gerard Smith needed was not knowledge, or allegory, or even a rop
e, but inspiration, pure unmiti
gated 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
fi
nished, 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 satis
fi
ed patron-age 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 re
fl
ective 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-con
fi
dence 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
fl
ag 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 con
fi
rmed 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 slightly.

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: over
fl
owing 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,
fl
ashing 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
fi
nd 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
fi
ve bucks in the other. His billowy sleeves grazed the relish boat without ever getting soiled. Moreover, he brought a philosophical
fl
air 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
fl
avor and hearty spirit to the diversity of its origins! A tube of the
fi
nest 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
Frank
furter, Germany. Same as the hamburger was invented in
Ham
burger, 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
fl
ight like rockets into the ether. And it was of
fi
cial—I,
Will Za Srill
, had saved my
fi
rst 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.