For the next few days, after that fight with The Hot Dog, I worked late at the office.  Or to be more precise, I said that I was working late, but really I was just watching old episodes of The Office.  When I would come home, Debbie would already be asleep in bed.  I’d crash on the couch, which was uncomfortable, but made me feel as if I was proving a point, to both the Hot Dog and myself.

So, in short, it took me much longer than it should have to notice that Debbie was sick.  Like really sick.

By the third day of our “fight” I couldn’t take coming home at 1 in the morning anymore, and when I got back she was awake in bed, coughing.  It was a sort of dry wheezing, but something about the sound was off.  When I walked into the bedroom and looked down, I saw she was green all over, and covered in whelts.

-Oh my God!  What happened!?

-It’s (cough) it’s ok Peter.  I’m just a little (cough COUGH cough)… sick.

-We have to go to a hospital!

-No.  No hospitals.

-But, you need-

-NO.  No hospitals.

My eyes started to water up, and it hit me suddenly that I knew this was coming.  Like deja vous or a bad dream, I all of a sudden knew this had already happened.  But even still, looking down at her, this was much much worse.

I’ve often imagined this moment where you are with another person, and they are sick, and dying, and suddenly you get to be heroic and take care of them, and it’s like a movie.  But this was nothing like a movie.  It was bleak, and horrible, and unfair.

I leaned over to Debbie and held her in my arms.

-I’m sorry!  I’m so sooo sorry.

-I know Peter.  I’m sorry too.

-But you didn’t DO anything!

-Maybe I expected too much.  Maybe I was too naive.  I wanted to believe that a man and a hot dog could defy the odds and love each other…but that’s…that was foolish of me.

-No!  I do love you!  I love you soo much!

I reached down and pulled the Hot Dog close to my face, which was red and tear stained.  I started kissing the hot dog, crying, which is when my roommate walked in.

I suppose, seeing a man in his 20′s carressing a clearly rotten hot dog, while crying would have bothered the average person, but Kelly, just looked at me for a split second, dropped off her luggage, and backed out of the room like a cartoon burglar.

I thought to say something, but everything was happening so fast, and it seemed irrelevant anyway.  I turned my face back to Debbie, and pressed my forehead against her bun.

-Peter, this is good.  It’s ok.  I mean, it’s the way life goes.

-No!  I don’t want this!  I want you!  I want to be with you!  I fucked up, and I’m sorry, but we can fix this!

Debbie coughed again, and it felt like she closed her eyes.  There was this pause that lasted forever, and for a second, I thought she was gone.  But then, she cleared her throat and said:

-Petey, this moment, this time we had together, well (cough) that was more than either of us could have asked for.  I know you don’t know much about me, you have been so kind to respect my boundries, but you should know this: before I met you, I didn’t think I could be with anyone else.  I thought I was just dead inside.

A part of me wanted to make a food stuff joke, about her being dead inside to lighten the mood, but it seemed woefully inappropriate.  But the she went:

-And not just because I’m reconstituted meat stuff.

I started laughing in between my tears, and smiled.

She laughed too, and I held her tighter.

-Listen, what I’m saying is this: our time here is brief, and hard.  One day you are swimming along in a bath of hot dog water, feeling like you are on top of the world, and next thing you know, it’s out into the harsh cruel world.  When I met you, I really felt something, and I know that my life wouldn’t have been nearly as rich if it wasn’t spent with you, for better or worse.

-I just, I just feel like such an assho-

-Shhh. Petey, we all make mistakes, all have to learn how to do this thing.  It’s ok.  You’re human.

I got really pensive all of a sudden, trying to understand what was happening.  I felt like I was getting dumped, but also like I was being carried.  I looked back down at Debbie and asked:

-How did you get so wise?

-I’ve been around the block a few times.

Then she started coughing a lot, and her skin was dripping with perspiration.  I ran to the bathroom and got some tissues, and blotted her “face”.  It seemed like old times all of a sudden, holding her, with napkins in my hands, and I lost it.  I cried so hard, my chest hurt.  She kept trying to shush me, saying “there there” but it was no use.  I couldn’t hold back what I was feeling.

After I was done crying, which seemed like an eternity, I laid down next to her in the bed and kicked off my shoes.  We talked for awhile that night, about life and love, and just being happy.  She said she was really happy, and I wanted to believe her, even though I’m not sure it was true.  The next morning I woke up, and she was next to me, but…

She was gone.

I spent the next few days in a fog.  I couldn’t tell you if I ate, or shat, or anything.  Some stuff I dealt with, namely dealing with her remains, but aside from that I was a wreck.  Even burying her was a nightmare.  When I finished digging in the back yard, where I put her body, Cuna, the neighbors pitbull started pawing at the spot, and I lost my shit and kicked her.  I’m not proud of it, but it happened.

It took me about a week straight of crying and sleeping before I even felt human again.  I cried so much my face hurt, my eyes felt dry all the time.  I never even thought it was possible to cry like that.  By the second night Kelly came home and would just hold me while I bawled.  She never asked me what happened, but I think she knew.  Regardless, that kind of sympathy was amazing, and I almost felt, actually I totally felt it was wasted on me.  Who was I to deserve comforting?  What made me worthy of love?  When push came to shove and I actually had the opportunity to love another, I blew it, and was too fixated on my own wants and needs.

I started to go back to work, mainly because I had used up all of my sick days, and couldn’t afford not too.  In the interim the Ad agency had promoted me from freelance to full time, which was good I guess.  Everything felt pretty meaningless to tell you the truth.  I would sit in my cubicle with Glenda listening to her chatter on, just zombied out until it was time to go home.  Then I’d go home, and lay in bed sometimes not even sleeping, and get up and do it again.

It wasn’t until a month and a half later, that I found the note she left in my shoes I had kicked off that night.  I stopped wearing them, mainly because the canvas was spattered in relish from cleaning up after the mess.  But inside of the shoe was scrawled,

“I love you and don’t you forget it.  Be happy, even if only for me.  Yours forever, Deb.”

I was so incredibly overwhelmed, that I didn’t even stop to think about how she was able to write that, for, well, until now really.

I kept that note in my pocket and would rub it when ever I missed her, to the point that it wore thin, and no longer had any text on it, just the faint hint of where the words once were.  After a few months, the paper was basically lint.

The last time I held it, before I put it in my hope box (shut up, I know) I thought about the last things that me and Debbie talked about.  I was surprised with how close to home her words about feeling dead inside rang true to me.  But what I also remember thinking a lot, even when Debbie first said that was, “That’s ridiculous!  How could she have even considered not sharing all of that love inside her.”  Which, was pretty hypocritical, as I had stopped letting myself really experience stuff years ago.  Here I was, in my twenties with a job I couldn’t care less about, just wasting time, and space, holding onto a the tattered remains of a piece of paper a hot dog gave me a year ago.

It was a year to the day when I finally mustered up the courage to go back to that vendor on 37th street.  I’m not quite sure what I thought would happen, but I felt like I was finally ready to open up to the possibility of feeling something again.

So when I saw her there, smiling at me with her long flowy hair standing in front of the vendor dressed up in that big hot dog suit handing out flyers, I…I just knew I was ready for something amazing to happen.

1. “I was pretty jacked up on marijuana”=classic.

2. I have tapped into a cultural zeitgeist!

3. OR I’m a hack!

The next few weeks were amazing.  I’ve gotta say, as nutty as it sounds, my relationship with the Hot Dog was probably the best relationship I’d ever had.  Everything was so easy.  I mean, first of all, me and the Hot Dog or “Debbie” as I later started calling it, had so much in common.  We both liked laying around, going to ball games, and just generally shooting the shit.  All of my other girlfriends seemed so needy in comparison.  If I wanted to watch television, Debbie was into that.  If I wanted to go to park, Debbie was down.  There wasn’t a single thing I could think of that Debbie didn’t want to do.  Well, save for go to the butcher, but that had more to do with fidelity issues.

We got along really well, but then after about a week, I noticed that we weren’t really talking as much.  You’d have probably imagined that dating a talking hot dog would be non-stop chatter.  And there were definitely moments of that.  But I was always cautious to ask to much, to talk too much, fearful of what I might actually hear I guess.  At one point I thought to ask Debbie about her background, you know, where she was from, which is pretty routine stuff for first dating talk, but when I started to begin the sentence, I could already see that she was about to stone wall me, grimacing with that cold stare she could give.

Truth be told, I called her Debbie, but had no idea if Debbie was a woman.  In fact, the one time we sort of attempted to be intimate, it…well it was awkward to say the least.  I could tell Debbie was sort of into it, but I was really skeeved out.  First of all, “she” smelled terrible at this point, I mean, we are talking about a week old hot dog.  And as much as there was definitely some sort of chemistry going on, I don’t think, at the time, I was man enough to look beyond my own inhibitions.

I told myself, that I was just being chaste, or better, that I had a love that wasn’t predicated on physical attraction, which was a first for me.  I thought, in some weird way, that I was evolving, becoming a better person, one who wasn’t so superficial.  But after a few days out, seeing other couples, really in love, canoodling, being so overtly lovey-dovey and intimate, made me sick to my stomach.

In short, I started to resent the Hot Dog.

After the second week, Debbie could tell something was wrong.  She tried to overcompensate, becoming more sexual, talking dirty at night, trying to get a rise out of me.  But it was no use.  I found, very quickly, that I was avoiding going to bed with her, always staying up late to jack off to porn.  At first it was regular stuff, girl on girl, threeways, but then after stumbling onto a fetish site, where girls put random stuff into their…you know, and it was all I could watch.  Cucumber, carrots, any food item really did it for me.  I would stay up ’til all hours until my dick was sore from jerking it.  Eventually even seeing a coupon clipper for the supermarket was enough to get me hard.

But still, I couldn’t find a way to bring myself to touch Debbie.

I’d hear her crying in the bedroom some nights, but I was too pre-occupied, and in all actuality, too callous to try to comfort her.  What would I have done?  It was like being caught between a rock and a hard place, except I was caught between a bun and a pickle.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to say, she got all done up, with relish, and whatnot, to I don’t know, I guess try to save what we had.  But it just pushed me further away from her.  I thought, God, this is so tacky of her.  But when she asked me how it looked, I lied.

-You look great!

-Really?  You really think so?

-Yeah!  Of course, the green really accentuates your shape.

-Oh, thank you Peter!  I’m so glad you like it.  Some people don’t like pickles, or-

-No, no, I’ve always been a pickle guy.  You can ask anyone.

During that conversation, she got really quiet for a moment, before asking me:

-Do you…do you think it’d be possible…when can I meet your friends?

-I told you a hundred times!!!  It’s just not…

And that set off the next of our big fights.  She was always trying to meet my friends, wanted to “get to know another side of me”  but how could I possibly do that?  She accused me of being embarrassed of her, and I would always try to deflect it, saying that “no, I just need to find the right way to do it” but really I was embarrassed.  I was in love with a hot dog, and no matter how I phrased it, it was crazy…

Continued here.

I felt like I was sitting there forever, I had no idea what to do.  So when I heard the familiar clip clop back into the men’s room, I figured it was just time to leave.  I got up and walked out of the stall and made eye contact with Martin for a second.  He looked at me, the stall and then the hot dog, and thought to say something about it, but I guess he was so confused or embarrassed he let it pass.

When I went back to my desk, I had been gone for a really long time.  Glinda asked if I was feeling well, which at this point, I wasn’t.  I knew she meant if I was sick, but rather than explain (where would I have started?), I just said no.  So in an extreme moment of kindness on her part, or just basic germaphobia, she let me go home early.  I grabbed my jacket, and gingerly put the hot dog in my messenger bag and took off.

As soon as we got out the door to the building, I took the hot dog out of the bag. By this point, I was crying.  I don’t know if I can explain it, but I really wanted this…this thing to work out.  I mean, the hot dog really had a point, I had felt something, and yet I didn’t know what to do with that information.  So as I’m holding the hot dog, walking down the street, it says to me:

-Why are you crying?

and I go:

-I don’t know!  I just feel bad!

-Look, Peter, this isn’t supposed to be complicated.  I’m not trying to hurt you or make you feel bad, I just want to have a chance, to…well to give us a chance to just see what happens.

I looked around for a second, suddenly worried that someone would see us talking but I apparently was just lost amongst the crowd.  I suppose I looked normal enough, like maybe I just had one of those hands free headsets.  Also, I’ve found people in cities don’t like to approach strangers crying.  I once was on the train and saw a girl balling her eyes out, like she maybe just got hit by a car, or lost a baby or something, and no one said anything to her.  So I reached out and as I was leaving, gently patted her on the shoulder and said:

-It’s gonna be ok.

And she looked back up at me and smiled.  I guess I was hoping that would happen to me.

I wiped my tears away, and said to the hot dog, maybe we can just keep talking for awhile, at home, and the hot dog said “ok” and I headed down the stairs of the subway platform and got on the train.

It was an excruciatingly long ride to my apartment in Long Island City.  We didn’t talk, but there was a lot of tension.  At one point I saw an older business man, who was probably just really hungry, staring at the hot dog which I had perched on my lap.  Out of no where I suddenly became very jealous, and shifted position, trying to hide the hot dog from his gaze.  I know it sounds irrational, but at the time, with things happening as fast as they were it made sense to me.

By the time we got to my house I was spent.  I realized by this point, I hadn’t really eaten anything all day.  Even though I had a fridge full of food, I couldn’t figure out what was appropriate to eat in front of a hot dog, so I just sat down at the kitchen table and took off my coat.  The room was eerily quiet, and it felt like we were at a standstill, until finally I said:

-Ok.  What if we were going to try this?  How would it even work?

to be continued  on 3.5.10

UPDATE!  Continued here!

So as I’m staring at this hot dog, which has suddenly gone silent, I paused to look around.  Maybe I was on one of those prank shows.  People always seem really happy that they’ve been busted on a prank show, even when they look like total assholes, and I guess it’s ’cause of moments like these.  It would be so much better to find a recorder in the hot dog and look like an idiot on tv than the reality of actually talking to a talking hot dog.

But there are no camera crews, no Ashton Kutchers with his stupid trucker hats, just me, surrounded by a throng of business commuters.

I thought to throw out the hot dog, and then something felt off about that, so I took it back to my office, and just had it sitting on my desk, until Glinda, the lady I work for asked me to throw it out.  Actually what she said was: “Uh, Peter! I can’t believe you can eat that stuff.  It’s totally gross!” Which is her way of saying: get rid of it.

I started to hide it in my desk, but as I was opening the drawer, the hot dog “looked” at me, I mean, I could really feel it, and it said, softly:

-Why are you doing this to me?

And so I whispered back:

-Not now! Please, please, please don’t say anything.

-Peter, I’ve got feel-

and then I put my hand on the hot dog, and excused myself to the bathroom.

We were in the last stall of the mens room, which I’ve gotta say, is pretty nice.  I mean, they have a velvet curtain in front of the urinals!  That seems a bit extreme, but I guess if you want to project an image of power, using expensive fabrics to get your pee spatter on is a good start.

As I was saying, we were in the last stall and at this point, I’m practically flop sweating.  I know this may sound funny, like some sort of Jim Carrey movie, but when you start hearing hot dogs talk to you at work, it is scary.  Terrifying really.  So after I locked the stall, I lifted the napkin off of it’s, I want to say face, and started to freak out.

-What do you want from me?!

-Peter, I don’t want…well…(sigh)…I just want to be with you I guess.

-Are you crazy?!  You’re a hot dog!

-But you said you loved me!

-To eat!  I loved that I was going to eat you!

-I know.

-And you are okay with that?

-Of course not.  But when you love someone, things get cloudy.  Can I tell you something morbid?

-Um…

-When you bit me, I got kind of…turned on.  Is that weird?

-YES! YES that is WEIRD!  I was eating you!

-But you didn’t swallow.

-Because you started talking!

-I don’t know Peter, I…I just know how I feel.  It might not be rational, but I don’t think we should overlook what’s happening.  You felt something and so did I.

-Do you realize what you are saying!?

-I want to have a rela-

-SHUT UP!

-Do NOT tell me to shut up!  This is very hard to say for me!

And for a second it was silent.  I felt horrible, really guilty.  Not for eating or, attempting to eat, what seems to be a sentient being, but for being insensitive.  When I was in high school I had to have a talk like this once with my best friend at the time.  And I remember the hardest part about saying that I really loved her, in a romantic way, was that I didn’t feel like I was being heard.  So to muster up the courage to say all that, well…this hot dog had guts.

Then suddenly, very quietly I can hear tears, or the sound of choking back tears.

-Are you crying?

-Yes! I have feelings! It may be hard for you to deal with but what I feel is very real.  I want to be with you.

-We hardly even know each other!

-But that’s besides the point.  I knew the minute you purchased me from that vendor, that we were made to be together.  I don’t know how or why, but that much is clear.  You…Listen, I’m not a romantic, ok, and I never believed at love at first bite, I know it’s crazy.  But I have never felt about anything, the way I feel about you.

-But don’t you realize how crazy this is?

-Yes, of course, but I’m willing to make that leap.  I don’t think people, or hot dogs, should be calous with their feelings.  If something moves you, you just go for it.

-But, hot dog, you realize that we were never designed to be together.  I mean.  I want things, a family, kids, and that just can’t happen with us.

And the hot dog was suddenly very silent, almost as if jolted by what I said.  The door to the bathroom opened, and by the heavy set click clock of the shoes I could tell it was Martin from Accounts.  He tried to come into our stall, which, admittedly is the nicest of all of the stalls, really roomy, truth be told, practically bigger than my roommates bedroom.  But she has a thing about space.  That’s beside the point.  Anyway, I scream out: “Occupied!”  And Martin, I guess was startled, so he mumbled something like “sorry” and just left.

So know I’m sitting on the toilet with the lid down, letting all of this stuff wash over me, and the hot dog says:

-We can adopt.

Like it’s been thinking this whole time about how to make things work, while some fat fuck was trying to come in and take a shit.  And I gotta be honest, a part of me was really touched.  All the girls I’ve dated lately, they just seem like they only want to fool around, or are too intent on having careers to want to start families, or atleast anytime soon, which is part and parcel of being in your 20′s I guess.  So hearing that level of interest, it really got me.  I put my head down, and took a deep breath.  As I sat on the toilet, I knew this one thing to be true: I was gonna be there for awhile.

continued tomorrow (2.26.10)

Update!  Continued Here!

Nevermind, I think you get what I mean.

Anyway, when I was on my lunch break at the ad agency I freelance for, I only had time to run out for a second, and the only thing close by was the hot dog vendor on 37th street.  But I was so greatful to even have that, I absentmindly said: “I love you hot dog,” because, well, just because.  But what was weird, is that the hot dog said: “I love you too,” which made me spit out the bite that I just ate.

So at this point, I’m thinking, I’ve gone crazy.  I’m legitamitely crazy.  I often imagine what it would be like to go totally nuts.  I mean, people who are crazy, most of them weren’t born crazy, right?  So it stands to reason, that at one point, they were normal, regular people, like you or me, eating street meat in midtown before BAM! Nutso.

You know how when people have hard times, you are supposed to say something like, “stick in there!”, or, “keep at it!”, or some other equally obnoxious meaningless phrase, and then the other person, the sad sack person will say something like: “Whatelse can ya do?”

Well, me, I always think, “you could go crazy.” I don’t say it, but it’s a viable alternative to dealing with your problems.

So as all of this is playing out in my head, I look down at the hot dog, which still looks like a regular hot dog, save for the part that I bit, and I can feel somehow that this hot dog is smiling at me.  It didn’t have a mouth or anything.  I mean, it might have been made of mouth for all I know, but it wasn’t like, a cartoon hot dog.  It looked just like a regular hot dog, except it could talk.

So after I catch my breath, I look back down at the Dog, and it says to me:

-Are you okay?

and I’m like:

-No! I’m talking to a fucking hot dog!  Do I seem okay?!

-I think you really should calm down.

- What?!

-If you can just calm down we can have a rational discussion like two civilize-

-People?! Are you for real?

So then the hot dog sighs.  And without any good reason, I sigh too, just sort of catching my breath stealing myself for what ever is about to happen.  Like maybe this hot dog will fly me away, that’d be nice.  Or we could go on some hot air balloon adventure, but even I know that’d be stupid.  So I wait, wait for the hot dog to talk again, but nothing happens.  And it occurs to me this could be like the time when I was five and me and my friend Dave thought the door next door to my house could talk but it just turned out to be a guy on the intercom fucking with us.  Which really hurt my feelings.  I mean,  I went home that night and drew pictures of the Door, and told my mom about it and everything.  But when I went back the next day, the Door was silent, cause the guy wasn’t there.

I mean, it was a pretty good trick and all, and if my apartment had a intercom that worked, I’d do it too.  Because, seriously, telling a kid you are a talking door, and then saying your girlfriend is the door next door to you, but she’s asleep, well that’s pretty genius.

(continued tomorrow: 2.24.09)

Update! Continued Here!