by Pete Hautman
Mal is an excellent judge of character.
“Mal has potato chips,” I say when I return to the kitchen.
Mom does her eye roll, sigh, and sag — all in one take.
“How does he do that? I hid them in the dryer.”
“Mal always finds them,” Bridgette says. “He must be clairvoyant.”
“Clairvoyance is a myth,” Derek says.
“I wasn’t serious,” Bridgette says.
“How was I supposed to know that?” Derek says.
“Sorry. I guess I should have added a smiley face.”
Derek nods, agreeing with her. As if she was serious.
“Maybe he has super senses,” I say. “He can sniff out potato chips like a bloodhound.”
Derek nods and makes his thoughtful face. “Enhanced sensory capability has been observed in autistics.”
“We don’t call Mal the A-word,” I say.
Derek looks confused.
“We don’t like to use labels,” Mom says.
“We label him Mal,” I say.
I try to avoid using labels in front of Mom. But I use them all the time when she’s not around. I label Derek an idiot, I label Bridgette an overachieving priss-butt, I label Arfie a dog, and I label myself the beef in a SooperSlider. You know what a SooperSlider is, right? It’s like a White Castle. We don’t have White Castles in Iowa, but it’s the same thing: a greasy wafer of pulverized cow in a squishy bun half the size of your palm — a two- or maybe three-bite hamburger. Being the middle kid of three is like being the beef in a SooperSlider — you’re just there to weld the bun together.
Most people don’t think about what’s inside the bun. They’d rather not know. But it’s important. It’s what puts the slide in slider.
The second pizza is Mom’s veggie special — artichoke hearts, broccoli, and green pepper. I grab a slice and try to eat it slowly so as not to upset Mom. The rest of dinner is a constant stream of boasts from Bridgette punctuated by oohs and ahhs from Mom, with the occasional useless trivia erupting from Derek, and invisible me eating pizza. I’m reaching for another slice when my mom tells me to slow down.
“This is not an eating contest,” she informs me. “Leave some for the rest of us.”
“If you guys would eat instead of talk you wouldn’t fall so far behind,” I say.
Mom gets this pinched look.
“You may leave the table, David.”
I grab the slice and stand up. Mom gives me a look.
“The crust is for Mal,” I say.
I don’t give the crust to Mal, who’s full of potato chips anyway. I eat the whole thing while I wake up my computer. There are several alerts, mostly about eating contests. El Gurgitator won a chicken-wing event in Pennsylvania. Six pounds of wings in ten minutes. The results were disputed. The second-place finisher claimed that the Gurge had stuffed several wings down his shirt. Still, the Gurge won by twenty wings, and I don’t see how he could have concealed that many greasy chicken wings in his shirt, but who knows? The Gurge is a controversial guy. There’s even a word for getting beaten — fairly or unfairly — by El Gurgitator. They say, “You’ve been Gurged.”
In other news, a Nathan’s Famous qualifier is being held at the Iowa Speedway. That’s in Newton, only an hour from Vacaville. If I could figure out how to get there, I’d go.
Do you know about the Nathan’s contest? Since 1916, Nathan’s Famous hot dogs has held a hot-dog-eating contest on the Fourth of July at Coney Island in New York. The first guy to win it, James Mullen, scarfed down thirteen hot dogs in twelve minutes. I would’ve kicked his butt.
In the years since, the Nathan’s contestants have been managing to eat more and more dogs. In 1958, Jerry Kilcourse broke the twenty-dogs-in-ten-minutes barrier. That’s thirty seconds a dog. I could eat a hot dog in thirty seconds, easy.
Slowly, over the years, as the eaters and their bellies got bigger, the record advanced. By the year 2000, a Japanese eater named Kazutoyo Arai was able to put down an impressive twenty-five and one-eighth hot dogs. That’s a lot of dogs, but not beyond imagining.
Then, in 2001, things got crazy: another guy from Japan, the great Takeru Kobayashi, ate fifty.
Fifty hot dogs!
That’s enough to fill a grocery bag, and he did it at a rate of fourteen seconds per dog. What was really amazing was that Kobayashi was not a big guy — he weighed only about 130 pounds at the time. The same as me.
For the next five years, Kobayashi dominated the Nathan’s contest, winning every year, but in 2007 things changed again. A guy from California named Joey Chestnut blew Kobayashi away by slamming down sixty-six dogs. Now he’s up to seventy.
Joey Chestnut is a phenomenal eater, no question, but I’m a Jooky Garafalo fan. A 150-pound guy who can eat sixty-nine and a half hot dogs is way more impressive than a 230-pound guy eating seventy.
Since losing to Joey Chestnut, Jooky has been lying low. But everybody expects him to turn up at the big Nathan’s contest in July. I mean, how could he not?
I do a search for Jooky Garafalo and get only one recent hit. It’s a link to the online auction site BuyBuy. I click on it, and I can’t believe what pops up: a photo of half a hot dog sitting on a paper plate. I read the text.
I look back at the image. The photo must have been taken right at the end of the contest, before they cleared the plates away. It’s making me hungry.
I keep reading.
Last year I went to the State Historical Museum in Des Moines on a school field trip. They have a gigantic mammoth skeleton. I picture the preserved half hot dog in the same room as the mammoth. It’s no contest.
The hot dog is way cooler.
I scroll down and almost fall off my chair.
Fifty cents? For a piece of history? And nobody has bid on it yet? That’s crazy.
I imagine the half dog sitting on display on my shelf.
Below is a live ticker, counting down the hours and minutes until the close of bidding:
The auction is going to end at midnight. My heart starts pounding so hard I can hear it. I call HeyMan.
“Dude! You’ll never guess what I’m looking at!”
“Prob’ly not,” he says. I can tell he’s eating something.
“Jooky Garafalo’s hot dog!”
More chewing sounds come through the phone, and then he says, “Is that, like, a what-do-you-call-it . . . a euphemism?”
“No! It’s the half hot dog Jooky couldn’t eat!”
“Why are you looking at Jooky Garafalo’s hot dog?”
“It’s on BuyBuy! The half dog he didn’t eat!”
“I don’t get it.” More chewing.
“It’s history! And it’s for sale!”
“Oh. You gonna buy it?”
I make my decision right then and there.
This is my chance to own something really important. But you need a credit card or some sort of Internet money to bid on BuyBuy. I don’t have anything like that.
Mom, on the other hand, has all kinds of credit cards. In fact, she once let me use her Visa to order a book I needed for school, and I wrote down the card number someplace. It takes a while, but I find it scrawled on a scrap of paper on my desk.
A few minutes later I’m registered. I bid fifty cents. My hands are shaking. I’m the high bidder. I’m the only bidder.
Naturally, I’ll have to pay Mom back. And she’ll probably be mad about me using her card without permission. But it’s only fifty cents, and this is an emergency. Easier to just do it and apologize later.
I’m about to call HeyMan and tell him when my computer bings and the numbers change.
Someone else has topped my bid. The high bid is now a dollar.
I bid a dollar fifty. I watch my bid come up on the screen. Two minutes later — bing! — the number jumps to two dollars.
I take a deep breath. Time to pull out the big guns.
I bid three dollars and sit staring intently at the screen, willing my invisible com
petition to give up. This time he makes me wait a full ten minutes.
Bing! Three fifty.
I should mention here that I am very competitive when I want to be, and this other bidder is starting to bug me. I bid four dollars.
By seven thirty we’re up to nine dollars, but I sense I am winning — each time I raise the bid, my opponent takes longer to come back with a higher bid. I’m getting bored. A pop-up window appears advertising an “Exciting New Feature” called AutoBuyBuy that will automatically overbid the competition until it reaches the maximum I’m willing to pay. I open my wallet. Twenty dollars in cash, and an iTunes gift card with $3.47 left on it. Pathetic.
I hear the droids drive off. A few seconds later my mother’s penetrating voice snakes up the stairs and squeezes under my door and drills into my ears.
“David!”
“What!” I yell back.
“Dishes!”
“In a minute!” I shout.
“Now!”
There is no getting around it. It’s my night to do dishes, and until I do them, the wheedling will not end. Quickly, I set up AutoBuyBuy for a maximum bid of twenty dollars. It’s more than I planned to pay originally, but I have the money, and if I have to give my mom the last of my cash to cover her Visa bill, she’ll probably be okay with that. Maybe not exactly okay, because I’m using her card number without permission, but she won’t go ballistic. Probably.
I run downstairs and power through the cleanup routine. I don’t really hate washing dishes, but there are things I’d rather be doing.
I’m wiping the countertop when Mal starts screaming.
When Mal screams, there is nothing else in the universe but the sound of his voice. It is a black hole of sound, a shrieking vortex of fury and frustration. I drop what I’m doing and run upstairs. Mal is sitting on his bed, exactly where I left him. The only difference is that his bag of chips is empty and he’s screeching. Is he screeching because his chips are gone, or because of some invisible, unknowable thing that only he can see? With Mal, there’s no way to know.
I do what I always do, which is get behind him and wrap my arms around his chest and squeeze.
Sometimes it works. This time it doesn’t. Mal starts squirming and his shrieks get impossibly louder. For a ten-year-old kid, Mal is incredibly strong — it’s all I can do to hang on.
Mom appears in the bedroom doorway with the rug. The instant Mal sees the rug, I feel him relax.
The rug is eight feet long and three feet wide. It looks like the carpet in a movie theater: about a dozen colors all mixed and scrambled together in a random-looking pattern designed to hide soda-pop stains and trampled Junior Mints. In fact, that’s exactly what it is — an end scrap of some ugly commercial carpeting. Dad got it from one of his clients and brought it home to use in front of his workbench in the garage, only he never got to do that because Mal fell in love with it, and what Mal loves to do is roll himself up.
Mom lays the rug out on the floor. I slowly ease my grip on Mal.
“Okay, Mal. It’s burrito time.” I let go completely. He slides off the bed and lies down on the end of the rug, and I roll him up, all the way, his legs sticking out of one end, his shoulders and head poking out the other.
Mal closes his eyes and smiles. Being wrapped in the rug is the best way we’ve found to calm Mal down when he goes off. He’ll stay there happily for a time, a Mal burrito, then suddenly — it could be five minutes or an hour — he’ll start whining and whimpering, and if somebody doesn’t unroll him right away, he’ll go right back to the screeching. It’s all about the timing.
“Can you stay with him, David?” Mom asks.
I nod. I can tell from the dreamy smile on Mal’s face that he’s settled in for at least half an hour, so I sit on his bed and try — as I’ve tried many times before — to decode his Wall.
It’s not just a random mass of feathers and leaves and butterfly wings. Mal has a system. I’ve figured out a few things. For example, all the yellow poplar leaves are stuck on with the stems pointing down, while the oak leaves point either left or right. The blue-jay feathers go every which way, but they’re always underlined by a black feather from a starling or grackle. The brown feathers seemed to be randomly arranged, but I suspect there’s a pattern I just can’t see. Same with the butterfly wings, although I notice that the orange-and-black monarch wings are usually next to an oak leaf.
A few weeks ago, just to see what he would do, I went into Mal’s room while he was outside, carefully removed two of the leaves and switched their positions. A few minutes later, Mal came back, looked at his Wall, and froze. I braced myself for an eruption, but he just turned his face toward me without meeting my eyes, smiled his lopsided Mal smile, went directly to the two leaves I’d moved, and put them back where they belonged.
Mal doesn’t really talk, but he seems to know what we’re saying sometimes. The words are there in his head, tumbling around, rearranging themselves and mixing with all the other data that comes in through his senses. I think his Wall is his way of talking back. If only we could figure it out.
One time Mom tried to get him to eat a bowl of chicken alphabet soup, the kind where the noodles are shaped like letters. Mal was fascinated. He picked a bunch of the letters out of his soup and lined them up on the edge of the table. Then he grabbed the box of Ritz crackers and took it back to his room without ever tasting the soup.
He had laid out the letters like this:
TWIFEKY OCDRGP
I looked at those letters for a long time, thinking maybe it was some sort of secret code. In fact, I was so sure it was a message that I copied down the letters before I cleared the table. Later, I figured it out. The letters on the left were all made of straight lines. The letters on the right had curves.
Mal’s no secret-code genius. But for a kid who doesn’t even talk, I thought it was pretty clever what he did with those letters.
I look at him, all wrapped up snug in his rug.
He opens his mouth and says, “Okay.”
I said that Mal doesn’t talk, but technically that’s not true. He has one word, and that word is “Okay.” It can mean anything: yes, no, help, go away, more, shut up, or any number of other things. In this case, I know it means he’s ready to be unburritoed.
“You ready, bro?”
“Okay.”
I unroll him slowly, talking the whole time — stuff like, Hey, Mal, how you doing, buddy? You have a nice little rug rest? Here you go, just two more turns and I’ll have you out of there. . . . Mom says we should talk to Mal as much as we can. She says, “When Mal starts talking, we want him to know lots of words, not just ‘Okay.’”
When Mal starts talking.
Mom is convinced that it will happen any day now. She says it’s not uncommon. She reads everything, and there are lots of cases of kids who never speak a word until age four, five, six, seven . . . even ten. Not very many wait till they’re ten, but Mom knows about the ones who do, and she’s sure Mal is going to be one of them.
Mal is free. He hops up and walks out of the room and down the stairs, probably on the prowl for more chips. I listen until I hear Mom say something to him, then go back to my room to check BuyBuy. I tap a key to refresh the screen image . . . and I stop breathing.
The current bid for Jooky Garafalo’s half hot dog is one thousand nine hundred ninety dollars.
My shoulders sag, and I slowly let the air out of my lungs. I’m out of the running. Probably just as well.
Bing! The counter advances to an even two thousand.
Who is crazy enough to pay two grand for half a Jooky dog? I’m about to sign off when one little detail catches my eye.
That can’t be right, I think.
Your bid? Meaning my bid?
Impossible! I gape at the screen, willing it to return to some semblance of reality.
Nothing. Shakily, I check my AutoBuyBuy settings. The maximum bid was set at two thousand dollars.
What?
I quickly cancel AutoBuyBuy, but the bid remains on the screen.
Decimal points are the worst invention in the history of the world. If not for decimal points we wouldn’t have the Colt .45 revolver, Windows 8.1, or BuyBuy.com. A simple little mistyped decimal point is the difference between twenty dollars and two thousand dollars. According to BuyBuy, that was what I typed in as my maximum bid.
I wait, heart pounding, for the other bidder to top my $2,000 bid.
Please, please, please!
Nothing.
I sit there until midnight, when a big flashing rectangle appears on my screen.
I am the proud owner of the world’s most expensive half hot dog.
I don’t sleep so good that night. Actually, I can’t get to sleep at all. At two in the morning, I call BuyBuy’s customer service number and talk to a woman named Sue. I think their headquarters must be in India or Singapore or someplace where it isn’t the middle of the night, because Sue has an accent and she seems way too perky for two in the morning. She keeps repeating the phrases “integrity of the auction environment” and “your credit card has been charged,” and “terms of service agreement,” all of which add up to “You’re stuck with your purchase.”
Then she says, “But you can put the item back on BuyBuy and sell it to someone else.”
Problem solved!
Ten minutes later, with Sue’s help, Jooky’s half dog is back up on BuyBuy with an opening bid of $10 and a “reserve” of $1,990, meaning that I’m not obligated to accept the final bid if it isn’t at least $1,990. Sue says the ten-dollar opening bid is the best way to attract serious buyers. At Sue’s suggestion, we set the auction to expire at midnight on Saturday. That will give other bidders five days to go at it.
I try to go to sleep after that, but it’s no good. I keep getting up to check BuyBuy. But nothing is happening. Maybe the other bidder went to bed, I tell myself. Maybe he’ll see it tomorrow.