Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Chapter 1 - Hot Dog

Fuck! I am late for work, again.

It shouldn't matter so much; I get my work done, stay late and don't goof around -- but it nettles my bosses, Irv and Mathilda endlessly and has cost me promotions. "It shows a lack of respect," they say. And I guess it might; but it's not that I am intending anything. I don't respect them, but I don't disrespect them either. I'm just wanting to get things done, and done perfectly.

You might think that my colleagues would admire and praise the perfect work I do. It pleases our customers and quietly and sublimely makes our company, Oodles of Insurance, buckets of money. But since what I do cannot be measured -- its contribution to the bottom-line calculated -- it is only my attendance record, with its red-checked chart of absences and tardies that can be used in a performance review.

It's five minutes after 7am and I have a quarter-mile run from the busstop where I got off to the office in Embarcadero Two. While folks on the sidewalks in downtown San Francisco walk very fast, they are thick as locusts and much slower than my runningback gait. I weave through the mob, strong-arming cravat-wearing businessman and prickly legal secretaries.

But then I see the hotdog cart. It is a curious element of my attention span, or inability to focus, that food always distracts me. Or, I should say, that I rather willingly give in to the lure of a quick bite. Yes, I knowingly loose my focus. I don't know how that is, or why that can be, but for all the problems it is likely to cause in my worklife, I decide -- in some supercasual, non-decisionmaking way -- to go for the food.

There's a line at the hotdog cart. Curious, I think. It's only just after 7am, and this line is ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen -- thirteen -- people long. The minutes tick by; the vendor, an elderly Chinese man, is slowmoving and chatty. When I am finally served, he tells me he is out of regular dogs, and has only one left, which is very special. I turn to see that there is nobody behind me in line.

"Last dog," he says in his clipped English. "Yours." I growl at him and nod my ok.

"Five dollar," he says. I turn to leave, when he grabs me by the arm. "Free, today."

He pulls out this purplish-looking sausage out of his warming oven and places it in the nest of a steaming black-bread bun. From several squeeze bottles, labeled with Chinese characters, flow ribbons of lime-green and polkadotted goo that make a lattice design on the top of the dog.

He hands me the beast. I look at the dog, fearfully.

"Want sprinkles?" he asks. He laughs hardily. "Me kid. Crazy Chinese."

He hands me a cold can, the size and heft of a softdrink -- only I can't tell what it is exactly with its Chinese lettering.

The old man motions toward his throat. "Wet neck," he says.

I motion my unworded thanks and walk off slowly toward work, toward my silly job, toward what I supposed would be an unmemorable day.


On to Chapter 2

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