It is one of these sub-zero evenings. It is yet another lonely visit to the local repertoire cinema, and I walk alone, preoccupied with questions of moving ahead. Problems of inadequate subsistence, jobs and the plight of hot dog vendors are signs of 'things to come'. This I know. Each sign, as unforgiving as a grand aunt finger wagged sternly at my situation, unravel before me, that bleak picture of an unenviable future. For sometime now, and with perverse satisfaction, I have watch myself fall deeper still, into that deep throated vortex of dame Poverty and sire Neglect -as I grapple with abortive attempts to articulate, in one single work of fiction, the pointlessness of being. Existentialist, romantic or a mere fool, I often swing that (inept) swagger of the unpublished writer. Chronically running low on cash and spirit -and I mean at once both literal and transcendental notion of the word-- I am reminded, by an experience as banal as hunger, that I am no more than a chronically underemployed statistic; nor is the futility of such hackneyed position the least eased by claims of ‘writing a book’; claims I throw casually at any inquiring sort even as I cringe behind that shield of disdain and self-assurance. I am no Hercules and this shield is as perforated as that hero's lionskin is impenetrable. The warning signs of ‘things to come’, announced right from the start when I took that first step to complete a work of fiction -an odyssey of sorts, if you may-, have since evolved as a series of restless meanderings, which nightly sends me, dissatisfied and frantic, to portentous French noir in deserted repertory film houses. MARC BARBÉ est tré KILLER BON HOMME digging the belly buttons of vampiric French men with violent tempers.

My face braced doggedly against the wind, bleary eyes searching La Vie Nouvelle –that New Life promised at age so and so when a hugely agreeable uncle had swung me up and flung me happy giddy and said, as proud as a pappy, DESTINED FOR GREAT THINGS!

GREAT
THINGS soon come is the universal matter of grub and how to get it quick and cheap. What I need right now is some kinda speedy to speedy up the excruciating time between starved and actual fulfillment.

Turning instinctively away from a particularly bitter wind, I step right foot forward into the bitter wind, all set to understand hot dog vending. How does one become a hotdog vendor? How do I become a hotdog vendor? From this view and in this context of walking home on a severe evening, hotdog vending in winter seems just as deplorable as windy assaults on my frostbitten face. The question itself implies the circumstantially vulnerable, the tragic, the johnnyjustcome refugee. I know these indicators. I myself have used it to mark situations embarrassingly similar to mine. Year after year, bulbous human forms, recognizable as hot dog vendors, stand resolutely beside mute machines; each, human and machine, unwittingly expressed as unhurried registers of ongoing immigration. Draw closer, and that peculiar look of contempt with proud claims to a better life once lived in some recently ravaged land flashes at you from underneath the droned offer of service. Like an unexpected moment of shocking realism in comic horror--or that moment when a robed monsieur BARBÉ gnarls bloody murder and spits tooth--one is momentarily blinded by the sheer impotence of its message of loss. Or, for the actively indifferent, irritated at such unsolicited exposure to someone else's pain.

But the question remains: how does one-- how do I-- get a job like that? Ponder after ridiculous ponder. How does one find oneself a hot dog vending job? That is the question. A question as crucial to me in my disposition to dread the dreariness of jobs as my current inability to meet up with the coming month's rent, a whopping 80% of earnings on full time shifts. Shifts neither available nor expected of me. An employer's lack of interest in my services fills me with little wonder. Where do they get hooked up, these thickly insulated vendors? What is the point of their insulated status ... do they have any ... does it ensure safety from, to put it the way that rally poster did, the on-going criminality of existence charged against citizens by an increasingly corporate government? Do they answer ultimately to some supervisor? Can I get hooked up? These are strategic questions and one would think that I want nothing more than a vending job. However, underneath it all, and like the shameful knowledge of private secretions, I'm aware that, in some sort of reverse-subversion of chronically undermining one's self, I want nothing more than to find that this too, this glorious life as a hot dog vendor, like everything else attempted, is unavailable to me. Failing, once dreadful, has become a sort of pride. It is easier to secretly mean to fail than to go boldly at, only to fail all the same. Hotdog vendors however, never fail. To start with, they got hooked up. Like familiar homeless people, the hotdog vendor braves yet another winter in the big open. Human and vending apparatus abominably bundled with the solemnity of those quite prepared to fence off indecisive bleat of New York's winter or, a more recent phenomenon, global riot police. More familiar with a sweltering West African climate, I am still baffled at how readily I grew accustomed to degrees much lower than those of the freezing compartment of a refrigerator -at least, until I too acquiesced to the pressure to dish out the obligatory complaints against winter's equally tedious bleat. Degrees much lower than a freezer, regardless, are unlikely temperatures in which one jobs outdoors. Door to door canvassing in frenzied (if not frost bitten) efforts at fundraising in those mean February days years ago to help the cause of clean air now appear as fictional past. I have ridden bikes on bitingly cold winter days as if in bold defiance, stooped and freezing out of sheer necessity, swearing through clamped teeth as the sound of approaching cars screech down every shred of will. The hot dog vendor, however, as an entrepreneur, must sell hot dogs. Rain or shine, humidity or wind chills. Hot-dogging is a job. Jobbing it is. Jobbing: that peculiar mental sprain that robs each jobber of energy. Does a secretary work or is (s)he jobbing? Is my part time minimum wage job real work or is it merely killing time? Aren't most jobs about killing time? Is hot dog vending an enterprising venture or the only alternative for the unemployed recent immigrant? At what point in life does one decide to become a hot dog vendor? As any can guess, by now, I am mindlessly juggling thought after thought, ponder after ponderous; from the needless realism of movie just seen, the possibility of quick death for all jobs and jobbing, to the hope that a hot hog vendor would appear soon, and, like some masochistic auto-voyeur, I watch sly as my mind plunge plummet like Tuesday’s exchange, weighed down slow with inane options.

Having somehow connected failure and weighty meanings in French cinema to the drab reality of jobs passing for work and the perennial nature of hot-dogging, I walk on. Man cannot live on macaroni and cheese: thou needeth meat; real meat will finish that manuscript and make a masterpiece of it.... meat alone will do.

Famished, I see ghosts of rising smoke, as visible and as stylized as in cartoons. They float upwards, towards me. I trace source of swirls to the hazy form of a hefty hotdog machine crowned with a bright red grill. The redness is almost translucent: the colour of pure throbbing heat. Rows of glistering skin-tight tubs hang over the grill like a levitating brotherhood of yum. I recognize the small party as succulent, well-stuffed sausages. It happens that I am being exposed to the precise moment when sausages swell, and grateful, I watch sly bursts of fresh juicy grease ooze through perfectly lined slits. A hundred sausages all in a row, slanted and quite contrary. Balls of fatted juicy roll down flaming red coals and a splatter of smothering sweet-smelling fat burns eagerly; in the background, crowds of people who appear to have been there all along, applaud the marvel as well as my unwritten book. Together, we all watch pungent swirls of mustard and roast meat rise and rise, joined happily by the burning sounds of slabs of moist fats on burning coals. Blurred though distinguishable, the corporeal form of the high priest, the hot dog vendor, watches the ritual proceedings even as he makes slow movements of turning over roast meats; his teeth bared in jealous protection. Partially hidden from full view, he protects the mystery of his revered status enveloped in a miasma of taste and abundance. burst slice slice burst. I dig my bare hands deep into torn pockets; cold fingers strokes numb hair shafts on my thighs; I am wavering between gratifying urban mirage and futile musings on forms, wind-chills and livelihood. MUST shake self to reality. Make it real people say to me, MAKE IT REAL. In relation to WHAT? is what I say. I cannot help thinking that right at this moment, someplace somewhere, the best tasting sausage in the entire world is furiously grilling away without my much needed participation. All over the world, sausages are being grilled, hot dog vending or not; cash or not; manuscript or not.....For the here and now, however, a hog dog vendor is the easiest means to one.

As if in material response to my wishes, one of the venerable entrepreneurs suddenly pops out -it seems- from underneath the pavement. Right at the northeast comer of 122 and Malcolm Haile XX. I hailed his timely appearance as one would a fully armed warrior bursting forth out of the head of a god at a critical moment of creation. He glares at my approach, hooded closely against an especially disagreeable building on the run; lips pressed pencil thin. Either from having to look up at the building -though why he should have to do this baffles me-- or because this is the vendor's habitual way of speeding up time, his facial muscles move in a steady back and forth rhythm, which in turn, gives the effect of a thoroughly ill-disposed attitude to the way things are. It’s this; or he is simply bored. His eyes continue to survey my approach without the least interest. All armed and fully loaded for a mere solitary consumer; decked and no cheering crowd; trained and no work to flex it all on. And so on.

Not at all discouraged, I walk rapidly forward as one expected: I am here to ease the problem of dismal lack of traffic. Within seconds, my insignificant frame stands well angled before vendor and machine, equipped with the right facial expression that I believe transmits the message, "zippy fast food, please". Just at that moment of establishing critical contact, a young man springs out of nowhere, shoves into me without seeming to care, his eyes searching as if he's lost something. Hands in pockets, elbows jutted out to form a small radius for full space and attention, he pressed urgently against the mobile grill. I edge off slightly, taken back by the agitated tension of his appearance.

The expression on his worn desperate profile is of confounded seriousness. The hot dog vendor too, is held back as I am. For a good five seconds, there is nothing but the sound of our patience. In situations such as this, attempts to assert my rights do more to wear me out than correct aggression. So I wait. And I'm thinking to myself: in this cold, could he not simply decide?

“I come here a lot!” he suddenly exclaims with the defensiveness of someone who is often taken for a liar.

“What?” In an instant, the hot dog vendor sets an already stolid face into that of complete indifference.

“I come here a lot!” our boy repeats, apparently expecting shouts of denial.

Now, what does he want? A discount? An extra bun plastered with mustard? Extra mustard? All you can load pickles? Well, to think of it, ‘Buy ten get one free’ ain’t such a bad idea nor is a 10% regular customers’ discount. For hot dogs that are a colossal three bucks each, is that too much to ask? The verbal shuffle wanes and continues in tandem with the varying gusts of wind.

Here we are, three adults, waiting and instigating both the concluding and hopeful results of a hot dog harangue. With a booming economy flaunted daily by flourishing condos honed with expensive blinds, surely times are not quite so hard that the hot dog vendor would refuse to acknowledge his customer's loyalty? Would he now say, ‘no you don’t! And for that, I hold back that extra pickle!” Or would he welcome this self-proclaimed loyal customer as a sign of the success of a recent promotional and marketing strategy and promptly begin to interrogate the young man with survey questions:

‘Where did you hear of my hot dog?’

‘Do you live/work nearby?’

‘How many times per week would you rather have hot dogs for lunch?’

‘Are you interested in a work/home hot dog delivery?’

Ill-tempered and cold -despite being bundled up to his cheeks under the weight of five or so jackets as would cause the restricted movements of even the most agile- our hot dog vendor offers the slightest nod of acknowledgement, and at this, he turns pointedly to a middle-aged woman revealed at my right as newcomer number three. I watch her uplifted face as she speaks to him of that ‘zippy fast food’ desire feelings that I had earlier on expressed with a similar smile and had been rudely cut off before I could utter a word. nearly knocked over. Ignored, the young man turns with sudden jolting gait, shoulders set to move faster than legs, and again, nearly knocks me over. As I grabbed his arm in reflex, and perhaps this time, in anger, and as we are of equal height and size, our faces come quite close. His eyes meet mine, if only for a brief hostile moment. I look into his eyes and see him: he is my double. We recognized each other instantly and at once, our eyes glazed over. He saw his past and now he snickers. I saw the bleak future and I flinch. He is my exact double though a stage ahead: instead of wasting time fumbling with furtive halfhearted plans of a future as an enterprising hot dog vendor, he actively solicits the real stuff that hot-dogging is about -getting the belly full. I am still flinching.

And this is where I turn, monsieur BARBÉ bottoms long forgotten, hotdogless and famished, wondering, at what point in life does one get to this point? At what point in life does one befriend/bully hot dog vendors for a bit of charity?

Is it really the next stage?