Janey and the Hot Dog Queen

Janey resented her short story being subject to Marlena’s opinions. “Your story is… afraid.” Marlena was just another student in the creative writing class at the community college. But because she wrote about French women and Morocco and death, she often acted like she was the instructor. Her hair was long and brooding. Her stories were long and brooding. “The brass marigolds are abundant. Les fleurs sont belles. They die.” It bothered Janey that she never wore her hair up. It bothered Janey that young Mr. Baxter, in his Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, let Marlena have the floor for so long while he leafed through Janey’s pages as if there might be some better story underneath.

“When something is authentic, so beyond, like, words, stories become almost too fragile to write,” continued the star pupil with the army surplus bag and Micron pen, “It’s like holding a newborn baby. Or dropping a baby. Or eating a baby.”

One of Janey’s older classmates, Barb the retiree, asked, “Do you want to eat a baby, Marlena?”

Barb’s gunshot humor lifted the class’s mood – even Janey’s goofy laugh made its rare appearance. It was an outdoors laugh, showcasing her large eyes and state fair teeth.

Mr. Baxter checked his watch. “Anyone else?” There was still another hour left to workshop Janey’s story. “Let’s call it.” End of class, end of story. While Juan passed out his story for next week’s workshop, Janey read the comments she received from her classmates. “Good work.” “Promising.” “Great spelling.” “The main character was a woman?”

Before it was goodnight, Mr. Baxter gave a sedate reminder about the state’s short story competition.

Marlena interfered. “Submitting to contests – writing as sport – is not a call I heed.”

Janey rolled her eyes. “You’re not at least gonna submit something? It’s $20,000!”

“Is $20,000 really worth it?”

Before Janey could say “Yes,” with one of those joyful exclamation marks that featured so often in her stories, Mr. Baxter cut off the lights.

“It’s gonna be a real whopper, Derek,” Janey was saying to her dopey older brother. “It’s about a girl whose father enters her in a lot of hot dog competitions.”

Janey also could have been mistaken for someone who won a lot of hot dog eating competitions. She was thin, with loose, wettish skin.

“When they make a movie out of it, make sure you sign my copy.”

It wasn’t just the money – but it was. Money was great. Twenty thousand bones could get her out of the townhouse dump she shared with her brother and his two married friends.

More than the money, she loved writing. Her father had said she was great at it. Her brother, even though he was a dope, said she was great at it. And she was, especially in her black notebook.

In Janey’s black notebook, her characters did everything. They went all over! Bright lights shined upon a cast of motorcyclists and costume designers and actresses on Laurel Canyon and bad guys from parts unknown. There were hills and dales and dormer windows and red settees and murder mystery ambiguities. In these pages, Janey was a liar, a bombshell, a four-alarm fire.

There was just one problem. When it came time to typing her work on her crummy laptop, there was a little bit of a disaster in everything Janey wrote. Her stories lacked see-through, connecting narrative lines, character development, common sense. She either didn’t understand basic grammar rules or she hated them. She often switched between third-person to first-person, past to present and then back to past. Her pronouns were hard to figure out. Periods appeared after question marks. Commas were coughed onto the page. And any sentence featuring a semi-colon was guaranteed to be a nightmare. Outside of her black notebook, she was awful at every aspect of writing.

She was late to class. Janey was never late to anything, but tonight she was late to class. At the classroom door, hot sauce packets and straw wrappers fell out of her bag as she dug around for Juan’s story, which she now saw under her bed. What a bum! Late and missing the work.

From the cracked door, sweaty palms mopped a sweaty head, and she heard a wild fever of activity.

“Juan! The writing is superb!”

“Juan, the family’s food truck comes alive!”

“And the fight between the mother and son – heartbreaking! ¡Ay Dios mío!”

“You speak Spanish, Marlena?”

“And after last week’s… story.”

“It sucked. Isn’t there a pre-req for this class? Like Intro to Spelling?”

“Bless her heart – she reminds me of my grandson. He’s twelve.”

“Look, everyone, we all know she lacks emotional maturity. Give her time. Jenny’s young.”

“Isn’t her name Janey?”

“Does it matter?”

“She’s in my gradebook as Jenny.”

A sticky rain followed Janey all the way home. Got in her ratty hair, her ratty clothes, her ratty head. She was steamy and stupid in her stupid hole of a room, and she wanted to slam her door, one of those good slams before a good, funnel-shaped cry, but her door was too stupid to slam good. They were talking about her writing – writing was her life, man!

But not the writing they saw.

It was like there were two writers. There was the Janey in the black notebook, writing with joy and abandon, sugar and sick. The black notebook Janey was Janey at her most authentic. Then there was the Janey the class read – read for filth. And she didn’t like this person or her stories. Everything came out labored like some try-hard literary snoozer. Estranged couples in the suburbs, with jobs and affairs and nights lost at the Beer ‘n’ Pool ‘n’ Beer.

For two weeks, Janey skipped class. Instead, she traveled the rolling, unspoiled pages of her black notebook. It went like this.

Her girl’s name is Shayna and she has one talent – and that’s gulping down hot dogs. The girl’s father enters her into hot dog competitions, lots of ‘em. She’s slidin’ dogs down her gullet like there’s no tomorrow – without the ol’ bun-in-water cheat! Father and daughter touring the world of competitive hot dog eating. Gulping and sweating through more than a Nathan’s on a bun. She’s taking on specialty dog challenges. Your Hawaiians, your Alabama Double Seaters, Cauliflower Footlongs, Creamy Poodles. She wins most. Her father’s ecstatic, but her body’s breaking down. In Arizona, The Zip Tie tears her esophagus. The Kentucky Hammerhead almost puts her in a coma. The Oregon Trail introduces her to blood poisoning. And the less said about The Magnum in Texas the better. Everything tastes like hot dogs. Her shower water is hot dog water. Her sheets are hot dog sheets. Everything is hot dogs. Hot dogs – like wild snakes trapped in a cage. Hot dogs wrapped in taco cheese. Hot dogs wrapped inside other hot dogs. Finally, in a telecast event, Shayna faces down the Beer Battered Batter. The crowd is frenzied. The father is frenzied. Shayna’s body is wrecked. She removes her champion’s visor and walks away. Janey submitted her story to the state’s short story contest.

Mr. Baxter and his rolled-up sleeves were seated in the class’s semi-circle, facing the whiteboard, facing Marlena who was up there with a dry-erase marker diagramming one of her stupid masterpiece labyrinths. Janey kicked open the door, and the rest of the class, who all looked like cobwebs, woke up to Janey’s two words. I won.

She was met with skepticism.

“Won what?”

Shoot, she had been skeptical. But there it was. The congratulatory email. The $20,000 she’d receive at the awards presentation.

“They emailed me – I got it here.” Janey pulled out her laptop and Mr. Baxter wrenched it from her well-oiled writer’s fingers.

He read the email out loud.

“Thank you for applying... We received many impressive … committed to finding radical fearlessness in stories… Congratulations! Your story has been selected as this year’s winner… We are excited for your reading at this year’s award presentation at the state capitol.”

A fat silence gathered in the classroom, a classroom divided into those who were stunned, those who were pissed, and those who were just taking the class as an elective.

Janey expected the silence to be broken by Marlena, but the first voice was Mr. Baxter’s: “How is this possible? You’re the worst writer I’ve ever seen!”

“According to this, I’m the state’s best writer.”

Someone demanded, “Does she have the story?”

“Do you have the story?”

“I don’t have the story.”

“She didn’t write it – she’s a rat-faced liar.”

“Wait,” Janey remembered, “they sent an attachment of the story in the email.”

“Read it!”

And she did. Holding her crummy, overheating laptop, Janey read the story to a class spellbound from sentence one. The female character was authentic and vulnerable, her weaknesses shored by poetic yet violent humanity. Scenes flashed by with smooth orchestration. The settings were natural and her metaphors star-studded. The more Janey read, the more the class understood, rapt by the crossroads of the character’s inevitable, unappetizing choice, rapt further by the unifying, though no less painful outcome. At the last words, “drifting towards the prairie of solitude,” the laptop had burned Janey’s forearms, and Marlena was out of her seat, applauding wildly. Sierra followed. D’Armani, Juan, Barb, and the rest – hooting and huzzah’ing for their classmate. All except Mr. Baxter, whose sleeves and faith in writing had unraveled.

And the reaction would have been gratifying if the story had been hers.

The moment Janey opened that attachment, she knew there had been a mix up. The story’s author was “Janet Asp,” not “Janey Asp.” But she couldn’t stop – not after being named the state’s best writer. Not after the class loved her writing.

Before her award acceptance and reading at the state capitol building, Janey unrolled the story from back pocket and read it to her brother.

“I don’t get it.”

In her room, there wouldn’t be much to box up. The $20,000 would be enough for a place by the water, away from the strip mall and the Beer ‘n’ Pool ‘n’ Beer.

“It’s art, Derek.” She was testy. “Art’s a little above your paygrade.”

At the capitol building for the award ceremony, the state poet laureate opened with a reading of something very long. The giant woman who introduced Janey had gnarled gray hair pulled back like a stalk. When she placed the medal around Janey’s neck, Janey sniffed an aura that intimidated her and annoyed her. Janey reached the podium and stood in front of a university-sized crowd with university-sized brains. Behind her were men and women of starched literary prominence.

The first time Janey read the story in front of her class, some of the words were foreign. This time around, she had a passing familiarity with brambles, voyeur, promontory, codicil. Janey had read Janet Asp’s story so many times that she could recite the first two paragraphs by heart –yet she still didn’t understand it. She understood that she hated it, but that didn’t help her tonight.

“Hello, folks! A friend of mine who I really hate said that stories are sometimes so fragile that you sometimes drop ‘em like a baby.”

Janey spoke into the microphone and all she heard was the microphone. She reached into her back pocket and brought out her black notebook. Its stiff spine got a good cracking.

“A lot of blood, sweat, and tears goes into making a hot dog. But enough about the pig! This one’s about Shayna, professional hot dog competitor, and the story of what happened to her guts.”

It was hard to see with the lights on her and not on audience, but she thought she could make out Marlena in the back, who seemed to be cheering loudest above the roar of boos that followed as Janey read her story, the very moment that Janey’s writing was no longer afraid.