Selling Hot Dogs

"I do not believe there is anything more satisfying in life than the first crunch of a dill pickle."

She was ogling the thing like that first bite would save her life. She ogled it like her life was in mortal danger without it. We were drunk. We'd just met that night. I had abandoned my friends to end the night with her. I didn't remember meeting any of her friends. She had been saying stuff like this all night, and now we were standing in front of a hot dog stand on a freezing cold corner of a freezing cold city on a freezing cold night.

"What about sex?" I was drunk. I pride myself on being obnoxiously clever, but the booze had dulled the obnoxious and drowned the clever. Graciously, it had awakened the id. My id wanted to have sex with girls like this. It's a sucker for the ridiculous.

She giggled. She had asked the hot dog vendor for a just a hot dog and a dill pickle spear. She didn't want the bun. She didn't want any condiments. He seemed amused, but not surprised. "And sauerkraut is right out, please." I'm sure she had good reason. She was probably part of some anti-sauerkraut cruelty league. "Hippies," I thought. She shook the hot dog, and giggled again as it bobbed energetically back and forth.

"That's sex. You need it. But it's fun. It's silly." She looked at the pickle in her other hand. "This is love. I mean, it's not the pickle that is love, it is the very first crunch." If the hot dog was sex, and the hot dog was silly, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be having sex with her. At this point in the night, a hot dog was all I was selling, and she didn't look like she'd need a second one.

"Explain yourself woman." She seemed pleased by my directness. "I'll tell you, mister hot dog vendor." The man selling hot dogs cocked his head, but she had clearly addressed her words to me. Men at this hour, in this cold and in this circumstance, are all hot dog vendors. Her recognition of that only made me want her more. She asked, "do you know how long it takes to make a pickle?"

"Nope."

"Two months. You have to take a perfectly beautiful cucumber that would be delicious right in that first moment with a little salt and pepper and you have to soak it in the sourest thing you can think of for two months."

"For that whole two months, you can't help but think about that cucumber as it turns into a pickle. You build this anticipation. Something that was so simple becomes something more complex. Something that would have been gone in an instant can now be delicious for a year."

"Uh huh." I was listening, but I was also a little lost. She had these librarian glasses on. I wondered what she looked like naked. I wondered what she looked like naked with those glasses on. I was drunk. My id was lively. She continued.

"So when you can't take it anymore, when you've waited for as long as you can wait, the experience changes. It goes from something that will happen sometime to something that is only moments away. It becomes something that cannot be stopped, only something that can be savored and slowed. I like to draw that moment out as long as possible."

She said all this as she hungrily munched down the hot dog that was in her other hand. When it was entirely gone, she focused back on that pickle. "Ok, I get it. But why the crunch?"

"Because the crunch is the exact moment when the experience happens. Life doesn't have a soundtrack like the movies do, but it does have a soundtrack if you listen closely. The crunch of a dill pickle is the moment when anticipation become fruition, and after that everything is different."

"Different in a good way?"

She giggle again. There was light in her giggle. I recognized it even then. "Different in the best way." She drove me crazy for the next two months before I finally got to see what she looked like with nothing but those glasses on. Time slowed to a crawl in that moment as we both savored the inevitability of what was happening. Our crunch was a gasp, and everything changed.

That was 16 years ago. It's been different in the best way for every single second, of every single day, ever since.

R