Tenting Tales: Hot Dog Soup

For most of my college summers, when my friends were doing resume-building internships on Wall Street, visiting strange and exotic lands or otherwise Building a Better America, I worked as a Tent Man.

Here is the first of many Tenting Tales.

Enjoy.

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Hot Dog Soup

If you've had a moment to peruse the help wanted section of your local newspaper, I can guarantee you you've never seen this:

WELDER WANTED - Must be lover of humanity, selfless, dedicated family man. Hours flexible, skills optional.

Welding isn't about peace, love or harmony. It's about super-heating metal until it sticks to other metal, or at least bends. That's it. And Bill the Welder was a fucking master. Caked in metallic ash and sweat, the man proved there is no "I" in "tent" and the "I" in "awning" is powerless in the face of a million-degree flame. He was also a horrible father.

Bill was no Mikey Harvey, the most evil man to walk into the TentCo shop. No, Bill didn't have an aura about him that screamed, "watch out, drunk chick--he's gunning for you!" Bill was just really, really, really, really, really bad at being a dad.

It was almost worse that he didn't have an excuse--it wasn't like Bill was pulling a Mikey and waking up on a raft in the middle of Lake Havisu tripping his balls off on acid only to realize "holy crap, I've got two kids three thousand miles away!" And it wasn't like he was some sort of absentee dad who left the kids. Instead, he did them the ultimate injury and actually stayed around.

No one at TentCo had much to do with Bill on a daily basis, and he was just fine with that. In fact, he occupied his own nook in the tent company shop. Big Willy had his office. Roy had his four hundred square foot tent-making-platform with a sewing machine built right in. But for Big Willy's heaven and Roy's purgatory, Bill had his own fire-and-brimstone Hades in the back corner.

What a Hades it was! Bill's corner was a welder's wet dream of twisted metal, flammable gases and ill-fitting welding helmets that were great protection during our tent-pole swordfights whenever Bill had called in sick and wouldn't be there to kick our asses for messing with his shit. These occasional Star Wars re-enactments aside, though, the welding area was his.

And he worked magic, crafting custom-made awnings for small businesses, big houses, pretty much anyone who stopped to think, "what's something really expensive I could hang on the outside of my home or business to make it obnoxiously visible from the freeway?"

He was a man of few words, so when he lifted the helmet and spoke, people naturally said, "holy crap, he CAN talk!" Dirty jokes and curse words usually followed, but Bill also couldn't resist bragging whenever he'd successfully pulled his proudest parenting feat--Hot Dog Soup.

At the mere mention of this innocent-sounding meal, the veterans would shake their heads, silently praying for Bill's family and hoping against all hope that his kids were at home that very morning planning to run away that afternoon. Inevitably, the New Guy Who Wasn't Going to Last Very Long would ask the obvious question, "What the fuck is hot dog soup?"

Bill would cradle his helmet under one arm, wipe his forehead with the other, and beam with pride. "Hot Dog Soup is my kids' favorite food. Every time I get hot dogs, I boil the 10-pack for myself. When I'm done, I give the water to my kids. Hot Dog Soup! They love it!"

This usually left The New Guy Who Wasn't Going to Last Very Long a broken man. Every time, though, it put a shit-eating grin on Bill's face. Even when Bill put the helmet back on, you knew that grin was there for the rest of the day.

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As an aside, I was particularly saddened to learn, years after my TentCo days, that there is actually a tasty comfort food that also goes by "Hot Dog Soup," which means there's a very good chance that the kids' teachers heard them talking about their "Hot Dog Soup" and thought, "Bill the Welder is the best Dad ever!"