I remember the first time I met my father. My job took me to New York City once or twice a year, usually during the warmer months. Most mornings, unless the rain was too heavy, I would try to get over to Central Park to people-watch and maybe grab lunch from a street vendor.
If you never ate hot dogs out of a Sabrett’s cart, you don’t know what living is all about. The snap of the fleshy meat, the tang of the mustard, the give of the soft bun… just thinking about it makes my mouth water.
This particular day, the line in front of the Sabrett’s guy was at least thirty people long and I didn’t have time to wait and still be able to enjoy my wiener without feeling like I had to scarf it down. With a heavy sigh, I bypassed that cart and moved down the sidewalk looking for something suitable I could get to and still have time to take a leisurely stroll back to the office.
Just as I was about to give up and turn around, I spotted the sunlight glinting off the sides of a shiny chrome cart across the street. I checked traffic and hurried over to check it out.
As soon as I got within a foot of it, I could smell the savory goodness of sausages being grilled. The guy who ran it, perspiring a little from his labors and the growing summer heat, stood turning the meat, his head down and eyes fixed on his work.
“Sausages ready?” I asked, stepping in front of him.
He didn’t even glance up at me. “Four minutes, five tops.”
“That’s good, I’ll wait.”
He nodded and kept working. While he did his thing, I decided to step away and lean against a nearby wall. Pedestrian traffic wasn’t as busy on this side, giving me ample opportunity to watch the guy ply his craft.
I like to play a game when I meet strangers. It involves observing them and then forming a little profile about them, completely fictional and I’m sure nowhere close to the truth. I smiled as I looked at him, preparing to do this right now. This one would be a good one, I predicted.
He stood about five-foot-six, but while not tall, he had a broad chest and thick arms matted with dark hair much like my own. His dark eyebrows were bushy and unkempt, and even though he wore a white cap, I guessed the hair on his head, if he still had any, shared the same hue.
I hadn’t yet seen his face yet, but I didn’t need to yet. I already had an idea forming about his profile. He was the son of a Greek or Italian immigrant and had lived in New York his whole life. Like his father before him, he sold food on the streets of Manhattan or maybe Brooklyn, I wasn’t sure. Brooklyn sounded more ethnic, so maybe there.
In my fictional world, the guy was married with two daughters and maybe one son. The daughters were the apple of his eye but disappointed him because they were still unmarried and wanted to move away. The boy, however, was a hard worker, yet did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps. He wanted something more, something that would give him an opportunity to travel. The boy wanted to make his unique mark on the world.
I was still in this reverie when I saw him waving to me. After checking my watch to confirm I still had time, I hurried over to him.
He handed me my sausage in an aluminum foil wrap, not even looking at me.
“How much?” I asked reaching into my pocket for my wallet.
He pointed to the sign delineating the prices for what he sold. A sausage sandwich was five dollars, which to me was a bargain for New York.
I handed him ten and he gave me five ones in return. I noticed a tip jar in front of him and I slid two bucks into the jar. He nodded his appreciation and kept his eyes on the grilling meat laid out in front of him.
“May I ask you something?” I said.
For the first time, he looked at me straight in the face. Right away, something in his eyes looked familiar to me, but for the life of me, I couldn’t recall from where.
He said nothing, but he stared at me with such impatience I found myself stammering out my question.
“Are you from New York?” I finally asked, expecting him to confirm he was.
Instead, he gave me a quick shake of his head and his gaze returned to the sausages.
“Where are you from then?” I pressed.
He shrugged, but that was all I could get out of him.
“Okay then, thanks for the sausage,” I said, raising the aluminum pouch I held like a toast.
He grunted an acknowledgment and nothing more.
I left his cart and headed back down 5th Avenue toward my office. I had less than twenty minutes to get back before my next meeting and I had already wasted enough time trying to find something to eat.
The rest of the afternoon I keep thinking of the guy and the familiarity I felt looking at him, puzzling over where I had seen him before. At first, I thought it was because he resembled the late actor John Belushi so much and maybe that was all it was.
But the longer I pondered it, the more I thought that it had to be he reminded me of someone in my past, but I couldn’t think of who.
The next few days, I stopped by his cart for a sausage sandwich and another chance to see his face. Like before, he said little to me and only gave me fleeting glimpses of his face.
By my last day in town, I had grown frustrated that I couldn’t figure out the mystery. Some of the local staff invited me to join them for a departure lunch, but I begged off, telling them I had to meet a friend.
I hurried up 5th Avenue and crossed the street to the Sausage Guy’s cart, as I began to call him. Unlike previous times, he had a couple of people in line ahead of me, but that didn’t bother me. I had a few hours until my departure flight and had nowhere else to go until then.
After the previous customers left, I stepped forward. He looked up at me and nodded.
“Same?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He nodded and turned over a sausage nearly ready to be served. While I waited, I peered into his face again, tilted as always toward the grill’s surface. He noticed me doing that and faced me.
“You keep doing that. Why?” he said, his voice a cross between a growl and a purr.
I played dumb and shook my head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Every day you come here and order the same thing. I watch you. You look at me like the police do.”
“You have problems with the cops?”
He shook his head. “No. But you act like they do. It’s not right.”
We stood in silence for a few minutes while I considered a response. I already asked him if we met before and he denied it. Maybe he didn’t know we did.
“Where are you from?” I asked out of the blue.
“The USA.”
“Okay, but where? Specifically?”
He flipped the sausages on the grill again and said nothing at first. Then he finally spoke up, obviously annoyed.
“I grew up in Los Angeles, okay?” he said.
“That’s where I live.”
He shrugged. “A lot of people live there.”
“I know. You got a family?”
Instead of replying, he took one of the finished sausages and tucked it into a bun. He then wrapped it in aluminum foil and handed it to me.
“Five dollars,” he said.
I pulled out my wallet and fished out a five and a couple of ones. I slipped him the former and tucked the latter into his tip jar.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Sure thing,” I said. I turned to leave and then stopped. “Do you have kids?”
He flipped a couple of sausages and moved them to a place on the grill to keep them warm.
“Well?” I said.
“I did,” he said. “But that was a long time ago.”
“How long?”
The guy looked me in the eye again. “A long time ago, okay?”
With those words, I began to feel like I had a bead on this whole thing, like I didn’t have to make up a story about him now. The guy had his own tale to tell. He watched me with curiosity as though he could read my thoughts.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer for a long minute. By then, customers had formed a line behind me.
“I have to serve these people,” he finally said. “Come back in a couple of hours. We’ll talk then.”
“My flight back to the West Coast leaves soon. I have to get to the airport early or may not make it.”
He shook his head like it wasn’t any skin off his nose and pointed at the customer behind me to take her order. I stepped aside, trying to decide what I would do.
After a few moments, I moved away from the cart and found an empty spot on a bus bench. Keeping an eye on him, I ate my sandwich and contemplated what my next moves would be.
Fifteen minutes later, I had finished eating and balled up the foil and other trash to take to the waste can. I walked by the man as he worked. His stiffness reminded me of someone who only dealt with bad news with insufferable, silent annoyance.
Even though he was still filling orders, I had to say something before I left.
“I’ll see you again next trip,” I said, tossing my trash into the can next to him. “Maybe then you’ll be willing to talk to me.”
He didn’t say anything, but I could tell my imminent departure put him on edge. I didn’t care. I had a home to return to.
The flight back too LAX was uneventful. I slept part of the way and the rest of the time I did work. I had the entire row to myself, giving me the opportunity to get comfortable for the long trip cross-country.
It wasn’t until I was in my car driving back home that the thoughts of the “Sausage Guy,” as I labeled him, returned. It helped me while away the time during the long commute and for that I was grateful. But whether I was tired or just distracted by the traffic, my mind eventually moved on to more important things.
A few times I even tried to find him online, searching the web using phrases like “sausage seller on 5th” and “sausage cart Central Park,” but I had no results worth pursuing. Sidewalk vendors didn’t garner enough of a fan club to earn space on the internet, I guessed.
Over the next few months, whenever I would have a hot dog or sausage sandwich, I would think about the guy. By then, most of the brief time spent with him had become a distant memory, but the intensity of his eyes never left me.
In November, I drove up to Ojai to visit my mother for Thanksgiving. She had moved up there from Los Angeles after she retired and now she made a small living painting wildlife canvases and selling them at arts-and-crafts fairs.
Because of the distance and my job, I only got to see her during the holidays. Since I was had to travel back to New York on business during Christmas, this would be the only time we would visit for the rest of the year.
As usual, Sue, my mom, invited a dozen of her artists friends, most of them retirees in similar circumstances as Sue. They all felt grateful to have survived the rat race in the big city and now were spending their golden years making pretty things.
We spent the day swapping stories, many of them featuring my mom, who joined in with the gentle teasing, only stopping to interject a story or two about my adventures as an unruly child and her raising me as a single mother.
All her friends knew how my father had run out on us the day I was born and neither one of us had heard from him since. Still, the inevitable questions about him came at me as they always did.
“Did you ever see that bum in your travels, your father?” a man named Arthur asked.
Arthur was blind in one eye thanks to a degenerative disease that was slowly taking the rest of his vision. That didn’t stop him sculpting some of the most beautiful art pieces I had ever seen an amateur create.
“No, never, Arthur,” I said with a smile. “I don’t even have a picture of him, so I wouldn’t know who to look for even if I was in the same room with him.”
“I told you what he looked like,” Sue said. “Just like Grandpa Joe, but with more hair.”
Joe was my father’s father. He and Ruth, my grandmother, played a prominent role in my life as they tried to fill the void that my erstwhile father had left in my life.
“I know, Ma. Still, Grandpa Joe looks like a lot of other guys. Besides, what are the odds I’m ever going to meet him?”
“He’s right, you know?” an elderly woman named Peggy said, her shaking hands held in her lap.
Peggy had Parkinson’s, but her paintings boasted of a creative eye and a steady hand despite the tremors. I loved her for her practical view of life and always enjoyed her company.
The conversation then moved onto more mundane topics. While they talked, I got up from the table and walked into the living room. There on the fireplace mantle sat a dozen framed pictures, many of me throughout the different phases of my life.
I hadn’t looked at the photos in a long time, so I spent a few minutes examining each and trying to recall the events that led to the moment being captured on camera.
One featured me at five years old wearing a light blue cap and gown, holding up a rolled diploma, a big grin on my face. Kindergarten graduation, my mother told me one time. I had no memory of that. Another showed me playing basketball, a high school snapshot that somehow ended up in the local newspaper.
I was near the end of the line when I stopped in front of a picture I had completely forgotten about. In it were Joe and Ruth on their wedding day, standing in front of a huge cake and smiling at the camera.
I bent closer to examine their faces. There was Ruth, her blonde locks hanging down across her shoulders, looking out at the crowd watching her, a big grin on her face.
And then Joe, his dark hair combed back in a pompadour, his hand clenching that of his new bride, a smile that told everyone how happy this conjoining made him and spoke of endless promises of a long life together.
Just then, I heard someone approaching me from behind. It was my mother.
“You okay, honey?” she asked, standing next to me. She touched the framed photo and smiled. “They looked so happy, didn’t they?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just wanted to see Grandpa Joe’s face when he was younger.”
“He was a handsome man,” she said. “I miss them both.”
“Me, too, Mom,” I said, putting my arm around her.
We stood like that for a long while and then something dawned on me. I leaned closer to the photo and peered into my grandfather’s face.
“What, dear?” my mom asked me.
“Grandpa’s eyes… something familiar about them.”
“He had very expressive eyes, didn’t he? Unique. Just like your father’s.”
I turned to her. “Dad’s eyes are the same.”
She nodded. “Exactly the same. You have my eyes. Why do you ask?”
I pointed at the photo. “I’ve seen these eyes recently. Back in New York.”
I quickly explained to her the source of my mini-obsession. She kept quiet until I finished and then smiled.
“I doubt it’s him, but it wouldn’t surprise me he’s selling food,” she said. “He wanted to be a chef in a fancy restaurant someday. Unfortunately, he could only get a job as a dishwasher at a greasy spoon until…”
Her voice trailed off, but I knew she was going to say “until the day he ran out on us.”
She shook off the temporary cloud that passed over us and smiled. “Come on, time for coffee and pie. I made sweet potato, your favorite.”
“Sounds good, Ma. I’ll be back in a second, okay?”
She patted me on the shoulder and left me alone.
I looked at the photo one more time and then pulled out my phone. I took several snaps of the image and then went back out into the dining room. I had a plan.
I arrived back in Manhattan a few days before Christmas. As usual, the company put me up in one of the four-star hotels near midtown. By the time I had checked in and unpacked, it past eight at night and too late for any street vendors to be out working. I’d have to bide my time.
As it turned out, my co-workers insisted on taking me out for lunch my first full day in the office, so I never got a chance to go over to the Park as I planned. By the time I made it there after work, no food carts were in sight. Disappointed, I headed back to the hotel.
The week ended up being busier than I thought. Each day, we’d have so much work going on that we would order lunch to be delivered and then we would leave until well after dark.
It wasn’t until Friday, the day I was scheduled to return home, that I got a chance to break away for lunch. Making sure I had the photos I had taken queued up on my phone, I headed up 5th, keeping an eye out for the sausage cart.
I stopped at the place where I had last seen the guy, but there was no sign of him. Undaunted, I continued my search for a few blocks, but to no avail. He wasn’t there.
I only had to walk down a couple of blocks before I spotted a food vendor. I found myself almost jogging as I approached it, but soon saw it was only a Sabrett’s cart and not the sausage guy.
Frustrated, I continue moving down 5th Avenue to check out the other carts, but one by one I passed them by as the target of my search had apparently disappeared in a big cloud of greasy smoke.
Just as I was about to give up, I spotted a shiny food cart parked at the corner of 5th and 79th. I hurried over to him and waited behind the short line of customers getting their food.
Finally, it was my turn. I stepped forward and smiled a greeting. “Remember me?”
He didn’t even look up from his grill, he just shook his head. “What do you want to eat?”
I pulled out my phone, turned it on, and held it up in front of him. At first, he ignored me, but curiosity got the better of him. He looked at the photo for a long moment. Then he stared at me.
“Damnit,” he muttered. “I can’t believe it.”
“It is you,” I said, my voice rising. “You’re my father, right?”
He looked down at his sausages and nodded, but said nothing.
“I have a question,” I said, my voice quieter now.
“What?”
“Why?”
At first, I didn’t think he would reply, but he realized he had no choice. Other customers began to line up behind me and soon he’d have to get me out of there or risk losing a lot of money.
“I’m no father,” he said. “I told your mother that before she got pregnant, but that didn’t stop her.”
“Hey, you had something to do with that.”
This time he looked up at me, his face a mixture of anger and anguish. “It was her job. She told me she had it covered.”
“Yeah, but accidents happen,” I said, my teeth clenched. “You couldn’t man up when it all came down, could you?”
He shook his head. “I’m no father, like I told you.”
“Did you ever remarry? Have other kids?”
“No. I’ve been alone my whole life.”
With those words, I suddenly understood my compulsion to meet this man. Despite the fact my mother and grandparents raised me and I grew up to be a happy, successful man, I still lacked the one thing I need in my life — a father. Even if that father was the most imperfect man in the whole world, I would have appreciated knowing he was out there.
“What else can I say?” he asked, his eyes flitting to the customers grumbling in line behind me.
“Did you ever think about us? Me?” I asked.
He didn’t reply for a long time and then he nodded. “Tried not to think about you too much. I just hoped you grew up happy and healthy without me. It looks like you’ve done okay.”
I nodded. “Mom is the best mother. And your parents helped, too.”
He smiled for the first time. “They’re good people.”
“They were good people. Both of them died years ago.”
I heard him sigh then. An expression that sounded so plaintive that it almost broke my heart.
“Look,” I said. “I know you have customers. Can I see you again? I fly out here a few times a year. Maybe we can, you know, become friends or something.”
Part of me hoped he’d say no, because I didn’t know if I really wanted this kind of complication in my life. To my surprise, though, he nodded and I realized that was the only answer I wanted.
“Come see me the next time you’re in town and we’ll go out for coffee or something,” he said.
“I will. Thanks.”
I moved to the side to let the next customer order. As I watched him work, I couldn’t help but think of how much this would change my life and maybe even my mother’s, too. But I thought that if I’m going to move forward, I needed to step back just a little and find a piece of me I lost so long ago.
I could only hope it would help him do the same.