N.J. Chronicles 2016, day one, part 6

Breakfast Dog Assembly

The morning excursion into my father’s world begins with us standing over huge vats of boiling oil with Randy, Carlos and Hank in the kitchen of Toffle Road Grill. Very few are admitted into the inner sanctum of the Grill, the holiest of holies of N.J. dog culture, but my father happens to be one of the chosen and I am his son.

New Jersey is home to the style of hotdog known as a Texas Weiner; all beef dogs loaded with a homemade chili sauce, the recipe of which is a well-guarded secret. So far as fast food goes, these Texas Wieners are hard to beat.

My father and I enter the Grill through the back door and into the kitchen. Randy, the owner, is already there, busy stirring the secret dog sauce in huge industrial pots.

“Hey, it’s the professor,” he calls out, spotting me. “How’s trix in Canada?” he asks. He’s a tall, robust fellow, an avid opera fan, in his late sixties. We shake hands. “Just fine, Randy, but you know a guy needs a real dog every once in a while.”

“And a guy needs to make sure his old man isn’t getting into too much trouble,” he joshes, looking fondly over at my father.

My father, once safely away from the Hundred Years War at home is a universally loved individual. In his retirement from the aircraft industry he had calling cards made up which simply read: Manny

Shirardo, Your Friend. This never fails to bring a smile to others faces. And it’s true; my father is a world class friend, kind and generous to all he meets, but now even this simple statement, too, is being eroded by the hate mongers, the slime ball Corn Dog Jesus xenophobic racists running the shop.

“Eighty six years old,” Randy comments on my father’s age. “Can you believe it?” he asks. “He looks good for a guy who can’t get it up anymore, am I right?” We all laugh.

“You been talking to my wife again?” my father responds with a quick come back.

The vats are ready now and Carlos drops first load of dogs into the inferno.. The kitchen pops and sizzles with boiling oil. I don’t see any exhaust hoods anywhere. It feels like the entire kitchen is about to explode. The fries go into neighboring vats. More sizzling oil takes flight. I take a few steps back. In just ten seconds I’m already permeated in burning grease. It’s not unusual for customers to order dogs for breakfast. Night shift cops and factory workers stop in on their way home; truck drivers who need to maintain a balance of bennies, caffeine and grease, others just need them immediately upon waking with a smoke and a cold beer.

A genuine Texas Wiener has a certain snap to it as your teeth break it’s surface, then a satisfyingly dense meaty center as the bite is completed. The sauce should be thick, not runny and cling to the dog so you’re not wiping it off your shirt front every minute. The bun too is important – fresh with a precise thickness just doughy enough to soak up the sauce.

I watch the grease pit crew at work. It’s a long tough day at these vats. By noon the lunch crowd will be lined up five deep at the counter, many hundreds of dogs and fries flying across the room into dog hungry mouths . These guys are used to it, the boiling oil, just another day on the job. I know what it’s like to grind it out in Hell. I paid by dues, worked on the loading docks, in the hellish flames of the plastic bottle factories, sucking in the toxic plastic dust. I once spent an entire year working on a dry wall crew in South Florida: a hundred and twenty plus degrees in those construction sites, your lungs, eyes, ears and mouth, nose clogged up and burning with compound dust and sweat, every muscle in your body aching.

But the boiling oil is tough to take. After eight or ten hours at the vats the Grill crew is routinely fried half to death, walking human wieners. Of the original four partners in the Grill, three have already been sacrificed to the grease gods. Randy, himself, will soon pass away in his early seventies - thirty plus years of breathing in these fumes will kill anyone. You can’t enjoy your millions if you’re dead, and I can’t help but feel that Randy should retire right now, this morning, turn in his apron, get in his car, buy a villa in Tuscany and live the good life with Verdi and Puccini, before it’s too late.

But I know he can’t quit. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself, his routine suddenly gone. He, too, must be sacrificed to the grease gods, the Rumpty Dumpty culture of greed, of senseless consumption. Throughout my week in New Jersey, I will meet several well off people who do not appear to be enjoying their good fortune, who can not envision themselves away from their vats of boiling oil, their mountains of wrecked cars, their darkened warehouses, the realization that money can’t buy them anything they need.

Wealth, it would seem, in New Jersey, at least, does not necessarily free us from servitude. My sister is a servant in her own castle, her husband enslaved to addictions and delusions that will ultimately bring him crashing down in flames. Lenny the Limo King replays Guadalcanal everyday in his office, Mike has literally not left his junkyard in years, the short walk through the oil soaked auto wreckage trenches from his house to the shop’s parts counter circumscribes his world and here at the Grill, aside from driving a more expensive car and living in a bigger home, so far as I can see, Randy’s daily life is not really much different than Carlos or Hanks – all of them, boss and worker, slaving away at the deep fry oil pits. Randy is the first one there in the morning and the last to leave. He has no one to entrust his dog sauce secrets to. His two sons want nothing to do with spitting vats of boiling oil. They analyze data, wear Armani, eat effete, overpriced nouveau cuisine. On top of that, more often than not, the help he tries out only rob him blind. The last guy he hired was caught loading boxes of wieners into the trunk of his Granada.

Randy, think about it, I feel like saying to him, your partners died in this grease pit, Carlos and Hank will find better jobs, outlive you, is that what you aspire to? Walk away with your millions, right now, while you can, please.

Maria, the waitress, hands us two coffees. Most of the regulars, the Last of the Blue Collar Heroes are already assembled, taking up two booths, side by side, in the usual place as we make our way over. I shake hands all around. I already know Tony, the retired police chief, his girlfriend Ruthie, the Second Coming Corn Dog Delusional, Jules the retired welder and antique motorcycle collector, and Woody the well digger, from previous visits. I’m introduced to Henry the retired shipping agent and Big Bob, a huge, bearded guy about sixty, who, my father later informs me, is the traveling secretary for a celebrated marching band. There are other members of this casual group who come and go, mostly retired workers. I like this assembly. They have all worked hard all their lives, raised families, but now when they should be enjoying their retirements they find themselves struggling to understand a government, a world that seems to be punishing them for being responsible citizens.

“Jeff lives in Vancouver, Canada,” my father tells Bob and Henry. They both nod their heads. They will need to think about this; am I friend or foe? Yes, I’m Manny’s son but I’ve gone to the other side, a socialist, a liberal. Few Americans know or care much about their neighbors to the North and South, the domain of the sushi rollers, the taco chompers. Even for those Americans with good educations, Mexico and Canada exist only marginally, as vaguely politically suspect, people not to be trusted.

The TV Oracle hanging on the wall is tuned to the tongue twisted Hyena babbling of the fountain of hate and moral corruption. Woody is the first to put me to the test. He wants to know what I think about the TV Oracle headline feature that is being broadcast right then and there before us. I have a listen:

The U.S. is building five hundred new mega prisons at a cost of twenty billion dollars. We desperately need, the media whores tell us, more long term lock ups for the ever growing hordes of terrorists, serial killers, drug dealers, uppity Blacks, Spics and other degenerates who are threatening our American way of life. The NRA is advising all Delusional White Patriots to barricade themselves inside their homes with bazookas and missile launchers, to shoot on sight anything that moves around White Citizen perimeters. Here’s the Rumpty Dumpty, himself, addressing the dumpster dinning Delusional World:

“All Ragheads, Gooks and vegetable chompers, should be deported immediately; every Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu temple razed to the ground. I don’t remember any monkey boilers being among our Founding Fathers, do you?” he tells Tom O’Mealy. “I should say not. Any Spooks, Chinks, Wetbacks, all those jungle Sim-i-an types we allow into our great nation to clean our toilets should be castrated first and kept in compounds when they aren’t working at our dog shit jobs. The women - especially the hot blooded Latinos, should be kept separate from the men so they can’t breed any more egg foo my ass dishes on U.S. soil. If they don’t like it, they can stay in their miserable mud huts, pluck their chickens and pray to Allah or Ballah or Baba Ghanoush for all I care.”

“Now that’s telling it like it is!” I can hear the Delusionals shout.

Oh, boy. The Dumpster really has it cranked up today! The Hyena Newsroom is obviously sharpening it’s fangs, ready to strike. Yes, it’s America against the world. The nation has evolved from a rural isolationist country to a global mega power and now to a fabulous financial consortium that is both secret and omnipresent. We can liken this consortium to a hydra-headed Beast. Like all Beasts its nature is to consume. It has no other consciousness. It has grown to such gargantuan size, consumed so much of the world already that we are subservient to the reality it imposes upon us. This is, I suppose, a definition of empire, the might of the aggressor ever recreating reality in its own image.

In 7^th Century B.C. Sparta, the poet Alcman wrote: “We sit, wicked men, among pleasant things, upon a rock overhang, thinking we see and seeing not.” Tell me, has anything changed? Are we not blinded by the sumptuous pleasant things piled up before our eyes? Do we not imagine that we live in an America that still functions as a government, that isn’t a well disguised kleptocracy, a brand name, a bogus image, nothing more. America is a mirage, a seductive illusion our consciousness buys like any other product. Within this mirage, we are deluded into making countless choices, forming misinformed opinions, taking sides from a spectrum of illusions, ideologies, platforms that are all the work of the Beast. The Beast doesn’t care whether we watch this or that news or read Noam Chomsky all day and night so long as we don’t see it’s fangs at work, that we remain trapped within the Beast’s parameters of perception, that we don’t question the reality imposes upon us. Thus, it has always been.

I listen to the broadcast. All eyes are upon me. I am my father’s son, the heir apparent to his dog throne and I have a responsibility to honor him before his peers. When you know you are being set up, the only effective defense is to parody the enemy, put on a burlesque show. This is my current strategy:

“I don’t see another way out,” I tell the Gang. “We need tougher laws, tougher punishments for serious offenses. Our Judicial system is too lax on criminals today. Some crack head junkie kills an innocent person on the street and gets six months in prison. What the hell is that! He should be locked up for life. The only thing I would change is, instead of building expensive prisons, they should send serious offenders to some island way out in the Pacific, like a Devil’s Island, and let them rot away there. Cheaper and better. All you need is a drone flying overhead, no guards, no walls, not even any food. Let them grow their own food, raise chickens, catch fish. It’s ecologically sound. Any boats or planes approach, shoot them down. Anyone launches an escape raft, blow it up. It’s simple, effective and very cheap.”

The Gang considers my suggestion. I can see they like it. No, they love it! Maybe I’m not so bad, after all. What a brilliant idea! They all congratulate me with a resounding round of applause. Woody slaps me affectionately on the back and looks over at my old man. “Your kid has a good head on his shoulders,” he tells him. “A chip off the old block,” my father says. We all share a laugh.