Hot Dog Week continues!
When my older sister was a senior in high school, she decided to become a vegetarian because she was perpetually bothered by the idea that she “enjoyed consuming dead things.” As a result, our refrigerator soon became filled with fake dead things: namely Boca Burgers, bacon that looked like cardboard, and tofu dogs.
At the time, I was a sophomore in high school and the hot dog was no longer banned from my diet because of phallic associations, but rather because of my ever increasing FOF–Fear of Fatness. I don’t remember the exact moment when FOF became a part of my life, but once it was there, it never went away. Like herpes. After all, FOF is kind of an STD–a socially transmitted disease.
Anyways, due to FOF, I enjoyed few real hot dogs, but occasionally tried to settle a craving by eating one of my sister’s fake ones. Faking it never really did the trick.
That spring, my parents did the unthinkable: they went out of town for the weekend. My sister had no choice. She threw a party. Nothing extravagant–no more than twenty-five seniors that she was pretty good friends with.
And then I was there. As a sophomore, I’d never been to a high school party before. My sister discouraged it. She said she didn’t care to be around to witness “my demise.” Besides, I wasn’t in a huge rush to enter that social scene. With a tendency towards paranoia, I felt sure that becoming drunk meant instant loss of control. I’d pee my pants for sure and then I’d have to live with some horrible nickname like Wet Blanket or Notorious P.E.E.
The party took place in my basement. Which was kind of “finished,” but pretty rundown—an area where there wasn’t much opportunity for destruction. She set up a Beirut table, made a few mix CDs, and had her friend with a fake ID buy beer and some disgusting cheap hard alcohol. By 9:00 p.m., the gathering was in full-swing.
I sat up in my room for the first hour. As the lone sophomore, I felt nervous, even if it was my sister’s party. She’d forbidden me from having any of my friends over, convinced that if anyone found out about it, she’d be in a lot more trouble for having included innocent underclassmen.
I finally went down around 10:00 p.m.
People were playing beer pong. My sister was taking a shot with a couple of other girls. Mostly, there were clusters of people talking. A Ludacris song was playing.
“Yoooooo!”
I’d been spotted. Tom Reynolds approached me beer in one hand. . .dick in the other.
I couldn’t help but emit a little scream as he came lumbering towards me, brandishing his sword, well, pocket knife. I thought for sure he was going to christen me Wet Blanket whether I deserved it or not, and I got ready to dash up the stairs.
I heard a bunch of guys roar with laughter. As Tom stood in front of me, drunkenly chuckling with his eyes half shut, I realized that he’d stuck a tofu dog through the open fly of his pants.
“Oh,” I said to him. “Ha ha ha ha. See you guys later.”
I was not ready for this.
However, forty-five minutes later, my sister burst into my room and demanded that I come downstairs to play Beirut with her.
“I promise Tom won’t scare you with his tofu dick again,” she assured me. “He’s passed out on the couch.”
Reluctantly, I allowed her to lead me back down to the depths of the basement, a dark place where I would soon discover that a tofu dog’s bark isn’t nearly as bad as its bite.
To be continued. . .
Photo Credit: lightlife.com
February 11th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Well, as a dick, I’d bet hot dogs would be pretty small and unsatisfying.