Free to eat all the bunless hot dogs we want, commissary workers appear to be chomping on cigars as we go about our business, but the smoldering Cohibas plugged into various mouths are in fact steaming Schweigert hot dogs. A vast walk-in meat freezer holds endless reserves of those wieners and boxes of Northland Dairy Frosty Malts, but this same freezer—a ballpark food Fort Knox—is also used to lock away any commissary workers who “fuck up.” (The Met’s introduction of daily profanity into my life is another Rubicon crossed, an irreversible passage.) Anyone caught warming their hands on the bare bulb suspended from the freezer’s ceiling has their sentence extended.
Commissary crimes might consist of anything: singing the wrong lyrics to whatever song is on the radio that plays pop music throughout the Twins games. (The radio never, ever plays the Twins games themselves.) It might mean failing to boil the hot dogs long enough, so that an irate fan gets a frozen franksicle from a vendor. Or it might mean boiling the hot dogs too long, so that they all split down the center to form a little flotilla of meat canoes. These dogs are bunned split side down, so that the vendors (and the spectators they sell to) are none the wiser.
The Met introduces me to a whole new lexicon, not all of which is profane. “Dogs” are “stabbed”—forked out of the boiling water—then “bunned.” (We’re taught to break a dog open and lick the inside to see if it is hot enough for serving to Twins fans. The licked dogs are thrown away or, more often, eaten on the spot.) We “cup corn”—scooping cups of yellow popcorn from enormous clear bags whose corners get nibbled by mice whenever the Twins are out of town. (Veteran corn cuppers vigilantly screen out any mouse turds.) “Sodas” are “pulled”: a tray of two dozen wax cups filled with ice is slid onto a stainless-steel rack; each cup is machine-filled and topped off by hand with a soda squirt gun—eighteen Cokes, six Sunkists; a sheet of cling film is stretched over the tray; and an ancient device is pulled down over the rack, sealing the cups and trimming off any excess cling film. At least one time a superfluous bolt falls off the sealing contraption and is entombed inside a cup of Coke. “Missing something?” says the unlucky buyer of that soda, presenting the bolt at the commissary door, to which he was directed by the vendor who sold it to him.
The vendors are arbitrarily our enemies. A sign in the commissary reminds us that we’re not allowed to give them food. DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS, it says. Some of these animals are our high school classmates; others are thirty years our senior. None of them complains directly to us because Jim is our manager and he frightens everyone, including—especially—Tom and me.
One night in the seventh inning of a Twins game, after the commissary shuts down and a fellow fourteen-year-old is mopping the floor, an irate drunk walks in, demanding to speak to the manager. “I’m the manager,” Jim says, “and we just mopped that floor so please don’t…”
But the drunk keeps walking, stepping up to Jim aggressively. The man is brandishing a hot dog. It’s squeezed in his fist like a bouquet of flowers. Every commissary worker turns to watch, curious which one of us fucked up and how. There is silence save for the radio—Eddie Rabbitt singing about windshield wipers slappin’ out a tempo.
“Notice anything?” the drunk says, thrusting the fisted bun in my brother’s face. Jim leans back and slips on the freshly mopped and highly polished concrete floor.
We all know that any number of things could be wrong with the man’s dog. Perhaps there was no dog in the bun when he bought it, or the dog had a bite taken out of it in advance by a hungry commissary worker. All I know is that Jim is fueled by testosterone and two gallons of Coca-Cola. He picks himself up off the floor, his T-shirt wet and soapy, and drops the complaining customer with a left cross. When the guy doesn’t get up fast enough, Jim grabs him by the belt and collar and slides him across the soap-slick floor and through the commissary door like a curling stone.
I know exactly what will happen next: nothing. The drunk doesn’t return with a cop. He doesn’t return with a friend. He doesn’t return with a broken beer bottle or any other weapon, because he has learned what I knew all along, without Jim ever having had to say so: that he has made a grievous error. The drunk just melts into the crowd.
Except that there’s never a crowd at Twins games. In 1981, their final season at the Met, the Twins average 8,529 fans in a 45,919-seat stadium. Just before one sparsely attended game, a commissary colleague whom everyone calls Ziggy retreats to a men’s room stall, shits in a paper cup, and beckons several of us to the empty second deck of the stadium to see what happens next. Holding the cup over the railing, he decants its contents onto the first deck below, safe in the knowledge that these sections down the right-field line are yawningly empty.
After seven innings, we can punch out, unless we’re sent to Trays. Trays is another windowless room, down the tunnel from Main, where the vendors’ empty hot dog coolers—reeking of boiled sausage and stained with ketchup and mustard—are stored after every game. The unlucky commissary worker sent to Trays has to wash all of these coolers out with a single filthy rag, watched by an overlord named Twister.
Commissary workers are sentenced to Trays for errors of omission (giving a vendor thirty-five hot dogs instead of thirty-six) and errors of commission (Ziggy, on a dare, also took a dump in a hot dog vendor’s empty cooler). If there is no obvious candidate, the commissary manager—often Jim, or his friend Dobesh—holds a contest. All the workers line up against the wall as if to face a firing squad. Instead, they face a guy called Gumper, who—at the count of three—rolls up his T-shirt, exposing his vast, fish-white belly. The first one to laugh goes to Trays and spends an unhappy hour with Twister. If no one laughs immediately, Gumper is asked to jump up and down. It never takes more than fifteen seconds before someone breaks. Gumper is happy to participate because it gets him out of Trays.
I almost never go to Trays because Jim is my ride home and he doesn’t want to wait around. Come fall, when he’s back at Providence and the Twins are playing out the string and the Vikings are starting their season, Tom drives or we get a ride with a coworker. One day Ziggy gives us a ride and—on a dare from Tom—takes a shortcut. A middle-aged man is sitting in an aluminum-framed lawn chair on the concrete front stoop of his corner-lot house when Ziggy, driving his father’s Oldsmobile Cutlass, abruptly turns off East 86th Street and cuts across the guy’s front lawn. As we pass, not ten feet away, the man throws down his newspaper and actually shakes his fist at us in anger. I’ve ducked below the window line, fearful that any transgression I’m a party to will go down—in Mom’s words—on my “permanent record.”