Hot Dogs and Garlic Salt
It was a lazy weekend afternoon and I was seven years old. I had just spent the entire morning playing hard outside, spinning around the cul-de-sac on my pink and white Barbie roller skates and trying to learn how to stop without jumping off the sidewalk onto someone’s lawn. Sweaty and energized, I burst into the cool silence of the kitchen to see what my mother was doing. She had something simmering in a pot on the stove and was rummaging through her spice cabinet, humming a church hymn.
“What are you doing?” I asked while simultaneously trying to scratch a scab on my knee and swat at a fly that had managed to follow me inside.
“Dinner for my girl,” she answered. My mother’s voice was teasing, which always seemed to emphasize her Vietnamese accent. She looked at me with an affectionate smile.
“What’s that?” I asked
He had retrieved a small container of some condiment from the depths of the spice cabinet and was shaking it liberally over a plate of raw chicken breasts. It looked like salt (which I loved) with little yellow flecks.
“Garlic salt,” he said, turning to me and holding his hand palm up. I copied her and she shook the container gently on my palm. I licked the tip of my finger and gently dipped it into the garlic salt, then transferred the tiny grains to my tongue.
It was magnificent.
The garlic salt dissolved faster in my mouth than regular table salt (possibly because its pungency made my salivary glands go haywire), leaving a tasty glow that vaguely reminded me of ramen noodle soup. After running my tongue along each crevice in my palm until the saltiness had been licked away, I reached out for more.
“No, you have to eat something,” he told me. “You can’t just eat salt!”
Say oh! How wrong was I! Unfortunately, however, her words were true, because she could not do what she did not allow. No one seemed to understand my total devotion to salt, my craving for it. If allowed, I could easily have downed an entire salt shaker, savoring it slowly, point by point, until my tongue was raw. I felt like I could never get enough.
As if sensing my situation from his position by the grill in the backyard, my father came into the house with a foil-covered platter. The sweet, smoky smell of grilled meat wafted under the foil. “The lunch is ready!” he yelled at him, even though yelling was unnecessary because we were less than twenty feet apart.
I watched him put the plate on the kitchen table, cautious. If it was steak, I’d be in trouble. The steak was bad. Eating a bite of steak, the first two bites were passably tasty, but after that it turned into a soft, rubbery substance that made it impossible to swallow. It was like chewing through a bunch of matted hair. Or so I imagined.
As luck would have it, my father brought hot dogs, not steak. I let out an audible sigh of relief and allowed him to serve me a portion. Curled up inside a soft bun, the hotdog looked sad and lonely, but the condiments were a problem for me. The tomato sauce tasted good, but she soaked the bun and left it undesirably soft. Mustard was a joke, such a terrible taste that he was convinced mustard fanatics must have been brainwashed at some point in their lives. The sauerkraut and relish were “acquired tastes” that I had yet to acquire, and the chili and cheese combination endorsed by my brother did not appeal to me. Too messy, too soggy, too much. I stared at my unadorned hotdog for a moment before realizing that I had just introduced a new and extremely tempting condiment into my life.
Without asking or waiting for my parents’ approval, I grabbed my plate from the table and went straight for the garlic salt my mother had left on the counter by the stove. I remember the weight of it in my hands as I removed the cap and carefully sprayed it over my naked hotdog. Garnished with garlic salt, it looked like a sunburned appendage with some strange blotchy disease. I didn’t care. Back at the kitchen table, I ignored my parents’ nauseated expressions, sat down with my creation and took a big bite.
Darling.