The Sausagetatian Lifestyle

Yesterday I arrived at the Bleecker Playground for my Dogmatic shift with the full intention of not having any sausage that day. I’d enjoyed a big bowl of homemade turkey and rice soup, along with a crusty roll, and I’d packed an apple with me to snack on if hunger struck midway through my shift.

I got to the cart early and ate the apple before I even began working. Then I suited up in my chef coat and apron and grilled off a few sausages for customers. I enjoy seeing people’s reactions to both the presence of our cart and its offerings. We have a sign on the side of the cart (see photo) with a drawing of a mopey woman saying “Portable sausages? I don’t get it.” Most people do get it, and get it quickly. What about artisan sausage in a toasted baguette is there not to get? Meat, bread, Bob’s your uncle. Some passersby are perhaps a bit timid, or a bit full, or a bit hurried, but I sometimes see the wheels turning in their minds, filing us away in their memory.

And some people really don’t get it. Backcountry camping, the band Ween, living in New York City—these are all things you either get or don’t get. Add sausage to this list. The people who don’t get Dogmatic walk on and continue with their lives. Maybe they get something that I don’t get, things like baseball or Scientology. You can’t expect any one person to get everything.

Enough people get us that I have brief but rewarding exchanges with customers every day. Some people get very excited when they see our spike machine, which impales the bread and toasts it from the inside out. Some people—usually European expats—recognize this baguette-toasting method from their homeland, and they smile knowingly. But being an American establishment, Dogmatic offers elaborate, multi-syllable gourmet sauces like Sun-Dried Tomato Feta, which I’m guessing they don’t do in Europe.

So observing what people do when they see the cart is all part of the fun. The other part of the fun is cooking and grilling the sausages. I can’t wait until I’m working the grill and we get slammed. I want my grilling-and-filling motions to be efficient and poetic. There’s some footage in Rick Sebak’s A Hot Dog Program of an employee at Gray’s Papaya flipping several dozen hot dogs on the flattop with one flick of an offset spatula. It’s mesmerizing. Someday, that’s going to be me turning sausages so beautifully.

In the meantime, I have some work to do. I need to be faster, but yesterday was not terribly busy, and I had no chances to practice this dog-flip maneuver. Instead, I got hungry an hour into my shift and ate a dog—beef with sun-dried tomato feta. I think maybe I like the beef dogs best, at least for now. I’ll probably change my mind tomorrow. Anyway, my turkey and rice soup and healthful apple snack did not deter me from caving in to the whims of the sausage gods. Once I’d prepared my hefty sausage snack, we had some customers, so I wrapped my beef-feta dog in a foil bag and attacked it a few minutes later, once business had been taken care of. The sauce had soaked into the bread a bit. It was kind of nice. Our sausages are extra-portable that way.

Not long after I’d broken my sausage fast, the lady from the ice cream truck across the playground came over to say hello. We talked about the weather predictions for the week, and what days we were planning on being at the playground. We offered her sausage and she offered us ice cream. Of course I took her up on this offer—ice cream! She pulled up to the curb right before she left for the day, and she made me a vanilla cone with an extra-tall swirly top. Her truck is a Captain Softee truck, which I assume is a Mister Softee knockoff. The ice cream was fluffy, with the appealing but highly artificial flavor of mass-produced marshmallows. I might even prefer it to Mister Softee. We owe her a dog now. I want to become friendly with our new vending neighbor, but it could be dangerous. I may have to choose between ice cream and sausage.

In any case, once the turkey soup is finished, I’m going to give the sausagetarian lifestyle a go—no more meat for me unless it’s in sausage form. Desperate times call for desperate measures.