Untitled
an excerpt

I’m standing in Times Square in front of a place called Happy Deli, across from the Olive Garden, wearing a foam hot dog. My employers have repeatedly demanded that I dance, but at $10 an hour, they’re not paying me enough to look like that much of an asshole.
What I’m supposed to be is a life-sized cautionary tale promoting the employment section of the Village Voice. On the flyers I shove at anyone who comes within arm’s reach, there’s a picture of me printed in lustrous color in full hot dog gear, gloomily handing out flyers on the same street corner in the middle of a heat wave. This could be YOU! is scrawled in red graffiti-style letters across my face.
People are taking pictures of me, so I laugh and shimmy. I’m a born performer, after all. In the costume, it looks like I’m having a full-on seizure, the hot dog absorbing then amplifying the ripples made by the flab on my body. Very quickly, it gets so I can’t breathe and I wonder whether people would worry about me if I keeled over from a heat stroke, or if they would just keep snapping my picture, thinking it was part of my act - Oh, I get it. So now he actually dies of humiliation – funny.
The thing I’m looking forward to most in life at the moment is the air conditioned subway ride home to my apartment. I have learned to appreciate the smaller perks in life, especially at times like these, where I can see myself from the outside for a moment. Small blessings – like air conditioning in New York City in August – is why I get out of bed in the morning.
A couple of drunken tourists sway out of the Olive Garden across from me. They might as well have Danger silk-screened on to their $3 t-shirts. I try to keep my head low, which is difficult when you’re a giant hot dog. They spot me right away. I tuck the sheaf of flyers deeper under the four inches of arm that sticks out of the hole in the side of my costume and sidle toward downtown. They’re faster than I expect, kicking me square on the ass with big tourist feet before I make it across the street.
“Haha,” they bellow. I fall flat on my face in the path of an oncoming yellow cab, which swerves at the last second, the driver honking and screaming at me in a language with a lot of throat noises. I feel the wind from the back of the cab as the driver stomps on the gas and keeps going. There’s no breaking the fall when your elbows won’t bend and I’m pretty sure I’ve broken a tooth.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see $.89 flip flops, toenails that are yellowish and peeling peeking out from beneath dull red polish, and next to them, a pair of eight year old Reeboks with rubber flaps smiling, standing near my head. The tourists yell something unintelligible. I try not to open my mouth because my face is in something yellowish and sticky.
When I don’t answer, the tourists give me another jovial kick and saunter off down the sidewalk. That’ll teach me to dress like a hot dog.
I manage to roll out of the gutter and onto the sidewalk with the force of sheer will and determination, where I loll like a turtle on its back for a few moments before a couple of girls in pigtails and velour yoga sweat-suits give me a hand. I’m only bleeding a little.
Because I can’t get the thing off without help, I can’t reach my pockets. With my luck the stranger I ask to help me will leave the costume stuck over my head (where I will suffocate) and take off with my wallet (I would have the last laugh in this scenario as they will have murdered me for a measly $8, a New York driver’s license that lapsed six months ago, and a MetroCard with two rides left on it). So I walk. 20 blocks downtown.

When my life gets really shitty, I think of my dad. He started out like me now, with nothing, and worked his way up. Went to law school while working as a bartender, met my mom, an beauty queen who quit school the moment she bagged a go-getter like my dad, ran for office as a conservative, won, then won again, then kept winning, all the while buying shit like apartment buildings, cheap property that eventually proved to be harboring rich stuff like coal and oil and space for windmills. This never fails to make me more depressed.
As I walk, I make a mental list of the things I need to do to make my life better. This is something my therapist taught me to do long ago, when I was still happy (and rich) enough to be in therapy.
1. Lose fifteen pounds
a. Make that twenty
2. Find a job that makes me feel as though my life’s goals are being fulfilled
a. Or, at the very least, a job that doesn’t require me to dress in humiliating costumes
3. Find a way to afford to run air conditioning or heat year round, not just when it is above 85 or below freezing.
a. Better job will take care of this problem.
b. Or a roommate.
4. Read more literature, less porn
5. Watch less television, less porn
6. Meet someone who inspires life. Marry her
7. Stop seeing Tiffi, since she obviously does not like me
This is why I make lists only as a last resort. They also never fail to make me more depressed.