They Don’t Tell You This in the Hot Dog Handbook

They don’t tell you this in the Hot Dog Handbook, but hot dogs are hungry for mystery…

There’s something weird leaking from gas station ceilings. What’s dribbling down is not rainwater or condensation from an AC unit or anything gnarly like that—it’s a pink juice we like to call “Mystery D.” Some people suspect the juice is windshield-washer fluid or Mountain Dew Spark. But we know it’s not any of that stuff—it’s Mystery D.

Look for the big hole in the ceiling once you’re inside a gas station. It should be right above the commercial hot dog steamer and the liquid cheese dispenser. And teetering on stilts—in the space between—you will find a stinky old milk crate lined with a garbage bag. The function of this receptacle is to collect Mystery D from the source, presumably so it can be bottled and sold as antifreeze or Pepto Bismol. But who gives a shit about that? We’re here because we want to take the ultimate ride.

You want the ultimate? Drop Mystery D on your hot dog.

What the hell are you waiting for? Tong a hot dog into a paper food boat, flood the boat with cheese—hold the bun. Then knock that stupid milk crate to the ground, stick your hot dog under the pink juice as it leaks from the hole in the ceiling, and start counting:

One drop, and you’re feelin’ groovy.
Two drops and it’s outta sight, man.
Three drops and you’re DEAD! DEAD, YOU HEAR ME?

So just, like, beware…

’Cause we’re all just trying to have a good time and get high on hot dogs, right? ’Cause hot dogs are even hotter when you’re trippin’ on Mystery D without losing your shit, you know?

Anyways, after you drop some D on your dog, stir the slop it’s floating in with a compostable straw. When the slop starts to sizzle? When the food boat gets, uh, too hot to handle? That’s “Mystery Cheese.” Throw it on the floor.

Mystery Cheese will spill from the boat and splatter all over the shelves. And once they get a whiff of that cheddar—as soon as they pick up the scent—the freaks will start coming out of the woodwork. They’ll crash from the ceiling and scramble out of the crawl space. The freaks will come running. They’ll be slipping, tripping, falling on their asses. They’ll writhe on the linoleum, covered in hot cheese. And you know what?

Feed the freaks. Let them EAT.

There’s lots of cheddar to go around. You set off a chemical reaction that will flood the gas station. But the truth is, most of the cheese flowing from the boat is being siphoned away by a powerful force. Where is it all going? Who’s pulling the strings? Well…

They don’t tell you this in the Hot Dog Handbook, but hot dogs are hungry for Mystery Cheese. Your greasy little wiener just sits there in the floor dirt, slurping up the goo like a suction pump made of beef. Filling. Stretching. Expanding. Can you see it?

You’re making the world’s BIGGEST hot dog.

What’s twelve feet long and thick as a tree trunk? A total showstopper? The culmination of our life’s work—our masterpiece? The pinnacle of hot dogs?

It’s “DELICIOUS.”

The scoop so far:

The juice is leaking from the ceiling. The juice is called Mystery D. Mystery D plus liquid cheese makes Mystery Cheese. Mystery Cheese explodes from the boat and feeds the freaks, but most of it is pumped inside your hot dog, bequeathing it with astonishing proportions, imbuing it with properties of a truly bodacious sort, thereby creating a singular entity known only as DELICIOUS.

Cool? Let’s party.

We have a yellow BIC lighter, a full moon, a rack of sunglasses, a disco ball, and a big musical number. We have four-dimensional vistas, six-sided breath mints, and eight grams of blow, a fishnet stocking with enough stretch to hold the world’s biggest hot dog. We have six meat hooks, six quarts of motor oil, seven Slip ’N Slides, a bunch of inflatable toadstools for DELICIOUS to smash into, and a couple of gas station employees who have absolutely no fucks left to give.

Whether we like it or not—we don’t—we have an army of freaks clad in suits of rubbery cheese, wiggling down the aisles like worms in the rain.

When things start to go bad—and they will—we have two packs of string cheese, some mozzarella sticks, and a fistful of shredded parm. Should be enough to get the freaks to fuck off for a sec. What else?

Oh yeah, we have an adversary named Big Hot Dog, and they don’t want you to know about any of this.

Unlike the stockinged sausage pulsing under the strobe lights, Big Hot Dog is not a hot dog—it’s a corporation, and its subsidiaries, Hot Dog Holdings Inc. and Gouda Adhesives, are the top players in the game.

The game is gas station cheese dogs.

Big Hot Dog doesn’t like how we play it.

For us, getting a gas station hot dog is about excitement. It’s about the thrill of the unknown. The smell of gasoline. It’s about danger. It’s about the sticky and the icky, the ooey and the gooey. It’s our chance to do something meaningful by making a mess.

Big Hot Dog’s afraid—that if you see the world through our eyes, it will change the way you think about their product. They don’t want us showing you that you can do things with your hot dog you never knew were possible. They just want you to eat it.

As we speak, execs from Big Hot Dog are racing over here to start the cover-up. If they get a hold of DELICIOUS, they’ll cut it into bologna with the front ends of their Lamborghinis.

It’s the erasure of the truth—the death of our dream. You’ve got to move this meat out of here! But how are you gonna outrun a fleet of Lambos when you’re haulin’ the world’s biggest hot dog?

You need the world’s fastest hearse.

We call it the “Mystery Machine.” It’s a 1995 Lincoln Town Car Hearse in metallic eggplant. A six-liter twin-turbo V8. Twelve hundred ponies under the hood. The gas is punchy. The brakes are mushy. Don’t go throwing this thing around the corners—this fucker was built for STRAIGHT–LINE SPEED.

See that? The freaks have stopped squirming. Shit. Must be feeding time.

Listen, we’re loading the hot dog into the Mystery Machine. The keys are in the ignition. The engine’s running. Get to the car—move that meat. Don’t worry about the freaks. We’ll hit ’em with the mozzarella sticks!

Where does Mystery D come from? Who are the freaks, and what’ll become of them? What’s next for DELICIOUS? Where are you going to go?

We don’t know. They don’t tell you that in the Hot Dog Handbook.