Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [142]
“Hot dog stands,” Milton announced at dinner one night. “Start with three or four and add on as you go.”
With the remaining insurance money Milton rented space in three malls in the Detroit metropolitan area. On a pad of yellow paper, he came up with the design for the stands. “McDonald’s has Golden Arches?” he said. “We’ve got the Pillars of Hercules.”
If you ever drove along the blue highways anywhere from Michigan to Florida, anytime from 1971 to 1978, you may have seen the bright white neon pillars that flanked my father’s chain of hot dog restaurants. The pillars combined his Greek heritage with the colonial architecture of his beloved native land. Milton’s pillars were the Parthenon and the Supreme Court Building; they were the Herakles of myth as well as the Hercules of Hollywood movies. They also got people’s attention.
Milton started out with three Hercules Hot Dogs™ but quickly added franchises as profits allowed. He began in Michigan but soon spilled over into Ohio, and from there went on down the Interstate to the deep South. The format was more like Dairy Queen than McDonald’s. Seating was minimal or nonexistent (at most a couple of picnic tables). There were no play areas, no sweepstakes or “Happy Meals,” no giveaways or promotions. What there was was hot dogs, Coney Island style, as that term was used in Detroit, meaning they were served with chili sauce and onions. Hercules Hot Dogs were side-of-the-road places, and usually not the nicest roads. By bowling alleys, by train stations, in small towns on the way to bigger ones, anywhere where real estate was cheap and a lot of cars or people passed through.
I didn’t like the stands. To me they were a steep come-down from the romantic days of the Zebra Room. Where were the knickknacks, the jukebox, the glowing shelf of pies, the deep maroon booths? Where were the regulars? I couldn’t understand how these hot dog stands could make so much more money than the diner ever had. But make money they did. After the first, touch-and-go year, my father’s chain of hot dog restaurants began to make him a comfortably wealthy man. Aside from securing good locations, there was another element to my father’s success. A gimmick or, in today’s parlance, a “branding.” Ball Park franks plumped when you cooked them, but Hercules Hot Dogs did something better. They came out of the package looking like normal, udder-pink wieners, but as they got hot, an amazing transformation took place. Sizzling on the grill, the hot dogs bulged in the middle, grew fatter, and, yes, flexed.
This was Chapter Eleven’s contribution. One night, my then seventeen-year-old brother had gone down into the kitchen to make himself a late-night snack. He found some hot dogs in the refrigerator. Not wanting to wait for water to boil, he got out a frying pan. Next he decided to cut the hot dogs in half. “I wanted to increase the surface area,” he explained to me later. Rather than slicing the hot dogs lengthwise, Chapter Eleven tried various combinations to amuse himself. He made notches here and slits there and then he put all the hot dogs in a pan and watched what happened.
Not much, that first night. But a few of my brother’s incisions resulted in the hot dogs assuming funny shapes. After that, it became a kind of game with him. He grew adept at manipulating the shapes of cooking hot dogs and, for fun, developed an entire line of gag frankfurters. There was the hot dog that stood on end when heated, resembling the Tower of Pisa. In honor of the moon landing, there was the Apollo 11, whose skin gradually stretched until, bursting, the wiener appeared to blast off into the air. Chapter Eleven made hot dogs that danced to Sammy Davis’s rendition of “Bojangles” and others that formed letters,