Even with
a twenty-foot gap between the two windows, I can see her blushing. She is impressed by how sweet I am. Ain’t that precious? This is why I'm a good wanderer, because I know how to put on the charm when the time is right. I wander because people love my shit, no matter where I go. Even though she thinks I’m a little light in the loafers, that don’t mean I won’t be deliverin’ her the meat-man in record time, know what a’mean?
"Aren't you a
sweet dear?" she asks. I don't know if I'm supposed to answer that question. That’s what they call
re-tor-ikal
. And yes, I am. I'm a sweet, sweet dear. I'm a peach. I'm a prince. Look at me, makin’ the world a better place. Punky Fuckin’ Brewster over here.
Another cat comes up to M
arianne, rubbing against her arm, showing its ass in my direction. She looks at it, smiling and nuzzling her face against its fur. You have no idea how bad I want to tell her that I want to come over and
touch her pussies
. Zing. I don’t go saying that like I want to, since that will really fuck things up if I do. But a man can think whatever he wants, right? I’ve got a whole garage full of pussy jokes, just waitin’ on her to give me the opportunity. Life is grand sometimes.
Chapter Three
Marianne keeps trying to push these nasty hotdogs on me. The bull of it is--
and man oh man am I biting my tongue as I explain this shit to her like a proper gentleman
--they ain't hotdogs at all. They ain't even meat. She keeps hemmin' and hawin' about how delicious they are, and how healthy they are for my colon, and how they'll spoil if we don't eat all fifteen packages of them soon. I tell her there's no worry in that, since it ain't meat, so it has almost no chance of spoiling. She doesn’t believe me, but I know they won’t spoil. Them silly shits are made of plastic, I swear it.
They taste like a little baby's mashed up fingers
, and they kinda look like ‘em too. I never eaten a baby's mashed up fingers, but I bet they would taste better than her endless supply of "Happy Pups" hotdogs. They’re some fake-ass shit and Marianne's a damn faker for eating them. I almost tell her that it's been a long time since she had a
real hot dog
in her mouth and she might'n change her mind if I stuck my commander-in-beef in there and wiggled my hips around, just for a few minutes. I can make this shit-for-brains a meat eater again, and you just watch me. And there’s a big ol’
zing
for ya’
. Zing a ling.
This morning she keeps feeding the
m baby fingers to her cats. They chomp on 'em like they was made outta mouse meat or somethin’. Marianne keeps dippin' them tasteless nubs in some sort of barbecue sauce, and that just about turns my stomach inside out. I love me some barbecue sauce, especially on a hot rack o’ ribs, but this hippie bitch has ruined that right there for me.
I force one of them into my throat, mostly because my stomach is growling like it’s pissed off at me and there's not much else to eat in her fridge. Everything else is just as fucked up-- some shit called
Kim-Chee
(I once banged a Korean tramp named
Kim Chee
, bet your buttons I did,
zing zing zing
), pickled cabbage that looks like it was dragged out some sewer grate, and some weird ass rubbery stuff called “temper.” I wanna tell her that my
temper
is risin', especially if she tries to get me munchin’ on that deathly lookin’ shit. The
temper
(she keeps correctin' me with
temp-UH, temp-UH
) has this bluish and gray tint to it. It’s more of that fake-ass meat she says. Ain't nothin' that's pretending to be meat should be blue. Maybe brown, maybe red, but not blue. That's some twisted shit right there.
Jesus Christ,
oh Lord on high, oh King of Kings, spare me this woman before I smite her ass. Spare me her shitty taste in food, if you even wanna call it that.
While I chew on the little baby fingers, I close my eyes and try to remember the last time I had a juicy hot dog that didn't make me want to vomit.
I keep thinkin’ that maybe I can trick myself (all of it up inside my mind) into thinking that this is a real tasty hot dog, and that I don’t want to cut this chick’s head off real slowly, and with a toenail clipper.
Yep, I remember my last hot dog. It’s been awhile.
I remember Kyle, wearing his stupid red and white paper hat, fishin' out chili on to a dog.
Frannie's Franks
.
That’s what
he called his hot dog cart. I never knew where he got the name, but he gave me a job when I was first tryin’ hard to settle in and settle up. Matter a' fact, it was the last time I had me a job. Was about two years back, maybe three, when I took to roamin' in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, more in the south than I am these days. I was pickin' cans at the landfill when I seen this fella rooting around for scrap metal. He's dressed in a striped up suit, whistlin' to himself like he's one of those seven fuckin' elves that lives with that pale princess bitch in the woods.
We get to talkin' and I find out he's real excited
about hot dogs. “Christ on a bike… who the hell
isn’t
?” I said to him. So Kyle said that he just opened up a hot dog stand and he needs somebody to watch it for him, just for four or five hours a day while he's at his day job. I didn't have much else going on--the cheap fucks at the State Offices in Rhode Island wouldn't give me any money for my horrible affliction from the big War. They kept askin' me which war it was, and I said that I fought in the greatest war of all--the battle between the wanderin' man and
the suburban suck-rod
. They didn't find much of a laugh in that, so I left brown logs all over the employee parking lot. It was only like three or four of them, but I'd been holding them in my gut for a few days. I can be a real spiteful shit like that. We wanderin' men get constipated from not havin’ much fresh water to drink. When we get backed up, and it finally comes out... well… cover your eyes, cover your ears, cover your mouth.
So Kyle…
the freakin’ king of the frankfurter…said if I guarded his cart every night, (since he left it out on a main avenue in Providence, so that nobody would ever take his spot) I could get four dollars an hour plus all the hot dogs I could eat. I didn't mind the gig much, because I was livin' in the outdoors anyway. Being able to sleep underneath a hot dog cart was a-okay by me. Better than snoozin' in a dried out drain pipe, which is what I was doing up until the hot dog gig.
M’job
lasted about three weeks and let me be clear: I enjoyed those steamy little fuckers to the full extent of my pleasure-buttons.
I even in
vented a couple hot dogs myself.
Yep, you heard right. Edgar is an inventive son of a bitch.
The Brain Licker
. Half a bottle of ketchup, jalapeno peppers, heavy on the onions. Somebody actually threw one at me because they thought it tasted like shit, but I picked it up and ate it, showed them I ain't a wasteful cunt like they were. I didn’t give ‘em their money back either.
Texas Pete
. I'd chop up the hot dog into tiny little pieces, almost like it got mashed on accident. Then I would swirl it all up with some barbecue sauce and mustard, and then I'd sprinkle celery salt all over it. Those didn't make people as mad as The Brain Licker, so Kyle actually gave me a fifty-cent raise for inventin' a top seller.
I was well on my way to freedom.
And my favorite hot dog creation--
The Wanderer
. Named it after myself ‘cause the meat was mighty tasty on the lips, just like your old friend here.
Zing.
Chopped onions, ground beef, spicy mustard, sour-krout (however the fuck you spell it), and diced chili peppers. The chili peppers were a whole new thing on his cart, on account of me buying them at the dollar store on my own dime. Like I said to him, “You're welcome, Kyle. You unappreciative cocksucker.”
Hell, by the end of the month, I planned on ownin' Frannie's Franks outright. Kyle wouldn't even see it coming.
I’m a shark like that, ya’ hear? I had the American Dream goin' on, inventing hot dogs and eating like a king, sleepin’ through the night with the smell of hotdogs making me have some fucked up hot-dog-related dreams.
I wondered:
why should he get all the profits?
I take what’s mine, case you ain’t noticed none.
It was
a winnin’
sitch-ee-aye-shun
. I still got to do my regular wandering-man thing, mostly roundabout Providence. I got to wander, but for the first time, I had a damn fine reason that most people could understand; I was makin’ that green stuff hand over fist, eating hot dogs all day, pocketing my own percentage like I saw fit. Kyle was paying me to gorge on them sweet dogs, and I must have eaten my weight (not even includin' the buns) five times over. My shits smelled like dirty hot dog water, and I kept droppin' them off at the unemployment offices on a daily routine, until security started chasin’ me away every morning. The cops got to know my face so I stopped hangin’ around that place. Not like they were gonna give me nothing anyway.
Hot dogs, I reckon, are full of fat and all kinds of bad stuff
that ain’t too healthy. I ate 'em since I was a kid, probably three or four times a week, and I never got fat. That wasn’t the way things were no more though. I was fucked mostly because I was gettin' on my years. I'm no spring chicken. I went climbing "over the hill" a couple years back and it ain't been the same since. Like my body ain't my own. Sometimes, I look in the mirror and I’m not sure who I am. I’m not a fatty, but I’m leanin’ in that direction.
So here I am, pushing a cart around all day, getting good exercise all the same, but I started to get fat
for the first time in my whole goddamned life, which is the last thing a wanderin' man like me needs to do. Gettin’ fat is what makes people give up on everything. I seen it on television before.
My extra pounds were hard to hide. Even though he didn’t suspect anything, he suspected my double chin. Kyle called me out,
sayin' I was eating all his profits or some crazy theory like that. Didn’t respect his workers none. Typical. “You know what you are? A capitalist pig-fucker.” I called him that to his face and he fired me right there on the spot, just like any real capitalist pig-fucker would do.
You’re screwing me. You know that?
I’ve got a wife and kids to take care of, Eddie. You get that through your skull? You’re fucking fired,
he said.
In case you’re wondering who
Eddie is, I told Kyle that my name was Eddie. Sometimes I come up with new names (like Duke Suckwell or Rocky Ricardo), or I make ones that sound like other names I use, but just a little bit different. Keeps a wanderin' man on his toes.
I reckon you better mind your manners
, I said back at him. Before I knew what I was doing, I'd wrapped my meaty (pudgy? Were my hands getting pudgy?) hands around one of the topping tins and tossed some shredded cheddar in that fucker's face. He glared at me like he was a big man or somethin’, like he wasn't wearing a stupid paper hat with a crude magic marker drawing of a hot dog on it.
You have some balls on you, huh?
Mr. Big Balls, tossing cheese at the boss.
He’d already fired me by then, so I didn’t give a shit what he said.
I threw onions at him next and he comes barrelin’ at me, angry as a viper on a hot day, wrapping his sweaty, hot-doggy hands ‘round my throat. I only laughed, starin' him down. I got the eyes of a bull when you try to hurt me. Hell, I did that bull face in a mirror once and I even scared the shit out of myself. If old Edgar is dropping them bull-eyes on you, best get in your car and drive home,
hombre
.
And what happened next... well, this is
the reason why I took to wanderin' again.
A wandering man gets himself in a heap of trouble,
from time to time, which is to be expected, and then he gets his cowboy boots clippin' and a'cloppin' before The Man with the star on his chest comes and sticks his finger up that ass. Sometimes, a sign shows itself and, sometimes, you just know when your time is up. Sometimes it’s a mix of both and I think this was one of those times.
I took to stranglin' him back
, only a whole lot harder than he did me, more like I mean to kill him and then I see his face realizin’ that. Kyle thinks he’s gonna die and I can’t help but feel excited about that. I love when they realize that I’m not just playin’ tough. His face went all eggplant-purple and veiny. I'd been strangled plenty of times, so I could take the punishment a lot longer than he could. I had callouses the shape of man-hands all around my neck, what with people always trying to strangle my ass for one dang thing or another. Him and me were stranglin’ each other hard, getting harder every second, but he didn’t have the strength in his forearms like I did. Like I still do. I could have snapped his neck with one flex of my arms.
Instead,
I asked him:
You
hungry?
His eyes bulged out of his head
like he was a cartoon character that just saw a pretty lady struttin’ by with her skirt hiked up to her pinkish lady zone. That happens when you're stranglin' on somebody real hard. You kinda think that maybe—just maybe—one of them big steel anvils is gonna fall on their head. If one of ‘em ever actually does, I swear I’ll stop strangling them because I’ll be laughing so hard.
You look mighty hungry. So h
ere y’go
, I said.
I shoved one of the buns in
to his mouth. When I put it in, he tried to bite down on my fingers, but I pulled 'em out right quick. He wasn't too quick, ‘cause he was probably seeing all them pretty stars in his eyes, trying to stay awake. Kyle knew if he passed out that I would kill him and piss on his corpse. The bull-eyes… they tell you that once you see ‘em on my face. This wasn't peddlin' hot dogs. No, this was some real warrior shit goin' down.
A couple people stopped on the sidewalk,
gawkin’ at the two of us, dressed up like assholes, strangling on each other and gagging on hot dog buns (well,
one
of us was gagging on a hot dog bun). One of the bastards in the growing crowd took a picture.
I shoved a
cold hot dog in Kyle’s mouth next, and then another. He started gaggin' like he was gonna lose it, so I put two more in. Then I started thinkin' to myself about how many hot dogs I can fit inside before he dies. Sort of like a game, but instead of screamin’ “BINGO!” at the end, he’d fall down and die on that there street, lookin’ like a street vendin’ asshole for his trip to Jesus’ side. Although, I bet if you die with a hot dog in your mouth, you go to Satan instead.
Zing.