Ya gotta understand, I love hot dogs, but only the ones you get from New York City street vendors. Nothing beats the hot, spicy onions and dark, brown mustard on a Hebrew National from a road trolley at ten o'clock in the morning. You can keep your corn flakes and Starbucks, a juicy frank on the streets of New York never plays second fiddle to anything. I'm fifty-five and I ate my first hot dog while most kids I knew were still suckin' their meals from a bottle.
So now that my eating habits are on the record, you can understand that it was only natural that Aquavir, the Middle Eastern type who works Embassy Row at the corner of First Avenue and 45th, and I became buds. Two dogs in the morning, every morning except weekends when he works the park, and four in the afternoon for my lunch break. Nice guy, except for the friggin' armpit stench and the weird accent. You'd never know he was from another planet. Matter of fact, I'm probably the only person he told it to that believes him.
He ain't never said where he came from, used to just point up at the sky and mumble some crap about Alpha Saint something or other. But he knew all about the stars and planets, even said he'd been to a few of them before coming here. At first, I thought he was just another whack job. Hell, this city's full of them, most of them frequent the bar I work at on 47th. He said he'd been to Florida once, even tried to get into NASA, but with all the crap that's happened since 9/11, they spun his ass around and chased him back to the interstate before he could talk to anyone besides a tour guide.
I gotta admit, I had a hard time taking him seriously, although I did spend an afternoon in the library reading up on Fig Newton and his laws of perpetual commotion. But when Acky showed me the hot dogs all lined up in their little steam bath this morning, I finally knew he was callin' the score dead on.
Of course, the science of hot dogs and street vendors must be clear to you for all this to make sense. These guys crank up their cookers when the sun is just workin' its way through the early morning smog and most of us are still tryin' to find the cool side of the pillow. When the water gets to boiling, they dump in three or four dozen frozen franks at a time.
All helter skelter in the tank, cooking for at least thirty minutes before they wrap 'em in buns and add the condiments for us pavement gourmets. If you take a peek in the tank, like I always do to make sure the water is hot enough, you'll see they're all over the place - left, right, all angles of the compass. Some of them are bobbing - tips up - and there's always a few sinkers that ride the bottom, might not make it to the surface until they burst their seams from all that heat.
And it goes on like this, day after sunny day in those two-wheeled buffets. Dogs in, dogs out, and you and I don't give it a second thought.
Except this morning, this glorious April morning when everyone but me thinks all is well with the sphere. When you and your wife are tryin' to decide if you've got enough coin for a vacation on the Jersey shore or you're worried if the boss is gonna notice the gravy stain on your favorite tie or any of the other useless crap you consider so important to your meaningless day. 'Cause there in that little stainless steel tub, with the same water them dogs have been cookin' in for a month, where they take their last bath before gettin' chomped by the very folks who swear they're eatin' healthy, they're all facing in the same damn direction. Lined up like a bunch of soldiers waiting for their marching orders. And you wanna know why? You wanna know what's so damn important about the hot dogs all facing east toward the rising sun? It's because the Earth has tilted just a bit too much on its axis and the tug of gravity from the friendly toaster that glides across the sky every day is sucking the planet out of its slot and pullin' it across the solar system and we're all along for the E-ticket with no chance to jump off.
You think that's funny? You'll be laughing real hard as we cruise past Mercury and the seas turn into salty tea. Just wait until every thermometer pops its top and all the air conditioners in Macys aren't enough to cool your sweaty drawers. Aquavir told me this was gonna happen over a year ago when the hot dogs started actin' funny. He said it was just a matter of time before his tank full of wieners were all aligned. He knew this was happening and did his best to try to whiz outta here last winter when he said his interstellar buddies were supposed to be back. But they never showed and now he's gonna take the hot plate highway right alongside a couple of billion folks that don't even know who he is, even though they've been patronizing his hot dog cart for years.
I mean, think about it for a second. We've been shootin' stuff outta Cape Canaveral for decades. Basic physics man, you push and whatever you're pushin' on has gotta go in the opposite direction. You ever played pool? One ball hits another and off they go. Aquavir said it's one of the fundamentals of the universe. Like it or not, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. Those hot rod engines on the space ships push away from the Florida sands and the Earth moves backward just a little each time. Okay, I know it sounds farfetched, but think of all the other crap we've popped into outer space as well. All those Mercury and Gemini and moon missions, all those space shuttles and spy satellites, every one of the rockets that Bell Telephone blew into orbit so they could keep you connected to your mother-in-law that hates your guts anyhow. Every time one of them goes up, they push the planet just a few mustache hairs off balance until finally, the hot dogs are lined up.
Aquavir was so shook this morning that he didn't even want to take them out of the tank and sell 'em. I had to spear my two and fix them myself. I mean the guy was shakin' in his shorts so bad, I thought he was gonna crumble right there in front of the Don't Walk sign. Dude grabbed my arm and kept pointing at the perfectly straight rows, shouting at me, "We're moving! We're moving!" He even spun the cart around halfway, but the franks rotated back to the east faster than a Boy Scout compass. I'm tellin' ya, it was just too cool the first couple of times he did it. I thought it was some kinda magic trick. But then he pulled 'em all out of the bath and tossed 'em in the sewer. Then he took a fresh bag and dumped them in. In seconds, they lined up exactly like the other ones and I started to freak. I couldn't even finish the one I was holdin' and you gotta know that's a bad sign.
Anyhow, Aquavir does this wild two-step back from the cart, rubbin' his hands together and starts talkin' in this strange language. It was sorta like a cross between a cow gettin' its ass branded and that scrunchy noise you get when you rub two balloons together. Not a single word that I could understand, mind you, but the way he was pointing back and forth between the hot dogs and the sun, I got the meanin' pretty quick.
Suddenly, he grabs my copy of the Daily News and there, on the front page, is a black and white of the space shuttle, sittin' on the launch pad. Well, Aquavir's eyes get as big as hubcaps on a limousine and he latches onto my arm and finally drops back into English.
"You must stop it," he pleads with me. "This rocket must not go. You must stop it or we are all doomed."
"Acky," I say to him, "how the hell am I supposed to do that? Cape Canaveral is a month's worth of tips by air from here."
He starts dancing like some crackhead's poppin' bullets at his toes, wringing his hands, and moaning in a mix of downtown and outer space. I was gonna stab another dog, double up on one of my buns while he was distracted, when suddenly this huge stretch limo comes barreling around the corner, runs the light, and screeches into the UN driveway, almost knocking the hot dog wagon over on its side as it passes. Aquavir spins me around and points with a bun, his voice now in a perfect imitation of Cary Grant tellin' Gunga Din it's all up to him now.
"The United Nations. You must get them to see the frankfurters. You must show them what has happened." He pulls me down and whispers in my ear, "They will not heed my words, but you are an American. They will listen to you."
So we both take hold of the cart and start across First Avenue, dodging traffic, pickin' up speed. Even with the bouncing, those damned hot dogs are still locked on the rising sun and I'm really gettin' crazed with this whole thing. As the trolley slams into the curb, a few of them pop out, all the ketchup bottles roll off, and the onions dump over into the steam bath. Aquavir looses his grip and I slide over to take control of the attack, aiming the hot dog wagon at the nearest opening in the security barricade where the limo just went through.
Three of the rent-a-cops see me comin' and they start wavin' their hands and screaming "Stop, halt, and freeze!" in three different languages. But I keep pushin', goin' for broke at this point. If I can get past them, I figure I can find someone inside who'll listen to me and just maybe we can stop the damn rocket from tippin' the scales.
I hit the first guard broadside with the wagon and he goes down, cursing at me in what I think is either Lithuanian or Croat. Hey, after tending bar in this neighborhood for as long as I have, you pick up a few words in just about every language in the Berlitz catalog. The second one snatches a radio from his belt and I hear him callin' for reinforcements. But this makes him miss me as I take the cart on one wheel around him, just a few feet away from the open barricade. I would have made it if the last of the guards hadn't maced me. Christ, he was half my size and with the coke-bottle glasses he was wearin', I'm surprised he could squirt that crap in my face with such accuracy.
Well, I lose my grip on the cart, tryin' to rub away the stingin' and the next thing I know, bug eyes is beatin' me with his nightstick and I go down for the count. You guys showed up just in time to save me from a severe ass kickin' and now here we are. Aquavir's in the wind, the world's about to become a well-done sirloin, and the damn hot dogs are still starin' at the sun.
If that clock's got good batteries then there's only a minute or two left until the shuttle shoves off and the planet gets its final kick in the pants. You guys do what ya gotta do with me, it ain't gonna bring a dead dog back to life. Party's over and the hangover's already started.
And you know, the only thing that pisses me off about all this? I'm really gonna miss those hot dogs in the morning.
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