The hotdog man
I’m always scared when he and Pauly come together, matter and anti-matter teasing us with the threat of calamity we know must eventually bring an end to the known universe, each a snake charmer in his own right, until we are confused as to which one we should follow, Pauly, the master manipulator whose silver tongue sways us one way, Dwayne the deep thinker who stuns us with sudden inspiration.
Pauly comes here for more than just the free food, seeking something he can’t divine for himself, while Dwayne aches for something from Pauly in return, seeing Pauly as some kind of gateway to something he can’t achieve without Pauly.
Dwayne latched onto Pauly that last year at Passaic Valley after Pauly had been thrown out of a Catholic High school for being too sacrilegious, a wise guy underclassman who constantly questioned the concept of God when the good brothers there had always assumed, he had a calling for the priesthood.
Dwayne, the smartest kid in PV, claims he got bored with all the bullshit, yet not only managed to graduate top in his class, but went onto college for his degree and masters, and would have had his doctorate had he bothered to turn his thesis in.
“Philosophy is a dead science,” he tells me. “I want to experience everything at least once before I die.”
He means more than sex since he gets all the sex, he wants from the underage girls who work for him, one of whom I later learn, he knocks up and is forced to marry, and the next time I see him, he’s as miserable as if they had put him in jail.
Lauren is different that the other girls, she actually loves him, and actually believes he loves her back.
Maybe he does; it does not stop him from cheating on her, something that really irritates Pauly, since he loves Lauren, too, just won’t admit it.
Pauly is more upset with Dwayne than any of us, especially knowing what happens when Dwayne comes home drunk and drugged, unable to contain the rage about where life had taken him; the marks rarely show, but Pauly sees them each time he gets me or Hank to drive him over for a visit, mumbling to us on the way home, “I’d steal her away but…” we knowing he has no more desire to get trapped in that life than Dwayne does.
None of us are brave enough to tell her about the cheating, even after Dwayne caught something from one of his bimbos that he brought home, and which infected his kids, one going into convulsions as if timed to the phases of the moon, Dwayne blaming it on something he did to himself back when he needed to escape the draft, some concoction of drugs he took the night before the physical which everybody but Lauren knows this is bullshit.
This all nearly comes out one night they move to an apartment in Paterson and invite us over for a home-warming, and the boy goes into a convulsion in the other room while Dwayne gets drunk with us in the kitchen, Pauly so livid it freezes he silver tongue, and the most he can say is how he once lived in an apartment just like the one we’re in (later to learn that it was that very same apartment years earlier when he briefly attended the same Catholic grammar school as I did)
None of us can look Dwayne in the eyes when he shows up to see Pauly sing with the band, bringing a different woman each time he comes, older than the bimbos from the hotdog stand, but barely enough to get passed the bouncer’s ID check at the door.
I’m nearly as livid as Pauly when Wayne comes in with some rich bitch, a married woman, who married a man who can’t satisfy her and decides to play footsie with Dwayne here at the club, and I go over and no so accidently tip a pitcher of beer into his lap, Dwayne growing nearly enraged enough to try to do to me what he does to his wife at night, thinking better of it with a shrug as the woman – smiling at me the whole time – tells him, “It’s all right. It’s only beer,” knowing that when they got back to the motel or her place, clothing wouldn’t matter anyway, and neither would the scent of beer, and maybe Dwayne recognized a real kindred spirit in me, saw the rage I hid better than he could, and sensed my desire to let it out on him, his outrage sputtering out behind his eyes, he, struggling to laugh at the whole thing as he went off to the men’s room for paper towels to soak up his mess, while his rich conquest smiles at me and asks, “So what do you do for a living?” while she was really asking, what would I be doing later, when Dwayne was not around.
When Lauren does find out about his cheating, she forgives him, an act of charity that son enrages Pauly he plots to kill him, giving up the plan when neither me nor Hank will supply the getaway car, mumbling why Dwayne can’t take up an honest profession like being a burglar, something we can all respect.
When Garrick tells us, Dwayne is opening a restaurant of his own in Hawthorne and wants us all to help him set it up, we agree, envisioning a return to those innocent old days when we could divorce his sexual exploits from the food, he provided for us, knowing deep down we can’t go back, and that this like all before it will also pass.
He comes to the club later alone, a disheveled, desiccated figure looking twice our age, thin gray hair, bent the way laborers are bent, only not from any labor he gets a wage from, barely recognizing me when I approach, accepting my offer of a drink too readily with me as the priest offering him the blood or Christ, learning amid the sniffles of self-pity about Laruen’s leaving, and when he rises, I think to offer to drive him home, but I don’t, learning only later about his driving into a ditch from which he still somehow lives, dying not long later from a bad heart.
Pauly doesn’t talk about him; he no longer eats hotdogs either.
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