*
After that day his brief dramatic life as a crime fighter began. He broke up muggings. He thwarted burglars. He foiled toll-booth runners with mustard. He caught a guy trying to pour a pan full of old motor oil down the sewer. And he got on the news now and then, and people loved his little dogs, so soon his fame began to grow and he soon he was giving more speeches than fighting crime, and his old TV show spiel returned to his heart and voice hut with a new vigor, and before long he was talking to schools and various society guilds about taking care of animals and not doing drugs and eat right and saving the planet, and he was making good money at it.
But every costume hero eventually evokes the appearance of a costumed criminal counterpart, and it would have been wise of him to remember the time when his PBS show had been in its heydey that he had told an idealistic school boy that if he worked hard and lived a good life and got good grades all his dreams would come true. Well they never had – his life had turned cruddy: his folks lost their jobs, his dad took to drinking, his mom ran off, they had to move to a crummy neighborhood with a really bad school district, he got terrible acne from the years 14 to 18, he turned terribly near-sighted and had to wear thick glasses, and the one college he had really hoped to get into turned him down because he just wasn’t diverse enough (he had listed his primary extra-curricular interest as taxidermy, which did not help).
And so the boy grew up and turned into a grease-spattered burger-flipping man, and he nursed a grudge against a society that made bright promises but only sold chains, and seeing Hot Dog Guy on the news every night just made him sicker. And so Burger Guy was born - it was not a difficult criminal vocation for him to step into. He had worked at nearly every burger joint in town; he had stolen several of their costumes; he knew the secrets of all his past employers - that this one’s tills never really locked, that that one left the back door open for the grease truck guy, that the security camera at Happy Burger was really just a shoebox and a toilet paper tube spray-painted black - each one had their Achilles’ Heel and he knew them all.
And so he began a crime spree, and he openly taunted his costumed counterpart to try to stop him. The trouble is, Wainwright’s life had gotten cushy, which had been helped along by the fact that it had been impossible for him to stay anonymous. Whereas Burger Guy could be anyone, everyone had figured out who Wainwright was after maybe 30 seconds, because they remembered the guy who’d been on PBS with all the wiener dogs. And when he had told his sob story of getting fired to the local media, he became a cause celeb. “How could they have done such a cruel thing? Work for us at Channel 48.” His public speaking career grew exponentially; in addition, he became spokesman for a local brand of dog chow (his dogs hated it); he addressed the college media class with a speech called “Voice and Choices: Preserving Local Media Identity in an Era of Commoditized Corporate Creativity.” He came to have mostly given up wearing the Hot Dog Guy suit, opting for stylish suits and a hot dog-themed tie instead, but every once in a while he donned the full suit (it was the kind with big fake kooky eyes while your real eyes looked out the mouth hole), and he fought crime for the sake of keeping up appearances. The local police agreed to tip him off about the occasional mugger if he in turn promised not to squirt mustard on the windshields of cars speeding in school zones.
But soon Burger Guy’s crime spree grew so big and so brazen that the local media could no longer ignore it, and when that happened he sent a video to all the local TV stations daring Hot Dog Guy (“Mr. Wieners”) to try to stop him. It was a cruel, disturbing video, filmed in shakey cam from within some small cruddy apartment. The man did not seem right in the head. He taunted Wainwright from within the Burger Guy costume, which consisted basically of typical fast food servant attire - cheap blue slacks + white short-sleeved shirt – but with a giant burger for a head, onto which he had smeared a large uneven smile with ketchup. He bobbed this giant head at the camera as he ranted, which made the video all the more freakish.
“You call yourself a hero! Hah! Hot Dog Guy - you are worse than a lie - you are an old, bad joke. You say the world’s a bright place where dreams can come true - I say the world sucks. You suck. You stand for nothing but giving the system a friendly face to excuse its many many sins. You tell people to adopt puppies – the system kicks people out of their homes to build Big Box Stores. You talk about saving the planet – the system pushes all its slavery and pollution to the third world so people can buy cheap merchandise and think they still have morality. You once told a boy bused in to watch your stupid TV show that if he worked hard and got good grades all his dreams could come true. But the system told him “you aren’t rich enough and your folks aren’t connected enough and you don’t look like the kind of kid we want on our glossy brochures - good luck flipping burgers.”
“Don’t you get it? The world is a lie, and you’ve become a lie! If you hadn’t you would have noticed by now that one of your dogs is missing and has been replaced with a cunning counterfeit!” At that he held up a squirming wiener dog which twisted and turned in attempts to bite him. “That’s right, Hot Dog Guy - you want him? You want to prove you haven’t become as shallow as all the ‘causes’ you shill for? Meet me at the abandoned sausage factory at midnight tonight and try to stop me - or your little dog is toast.”
Wainwright looked down at the cloud of hounds around his feet. One, two, three, four, five, six ... and a hairless cat with a fake snout held on by a rubber band. Dixie was gone! Or was it Trixie? It wasn’t Milo - he had liver spots. In any case his heart shattered. He picked up the cat and tore off the fake snout in a furious rage. He stomped up and down the hall and the dogs followed him in an increasingly excited flurry. They had been trying to tell him - if he had not been so self-absorbed he would have noticed. He was so angry he could kick himself - he tried and fell. The dogs surrounded him, their little eager brown-eyed faces saying “We tried to tell you! Why didn’t you notice? Haven’t you been wondering why the couch smells like pee?”
He dropped the cat off at the apartment of his nosy neighbor Nora (or was it Dora? Anyway she was a cat-lady), and then he looked at the clock - 10:15! He had less than two hours to save his pooch! He shuddered to think what the burger maniac might do to it.
Just then the chief of police called. “Don’t do it, Wainwright. Don’t take the bait - this one’s a nut job - we’ll handle it. Damned fool tipped us off to exactly where he’ll be. My boys on the SWAT team can handle this punk - we bought ourselves a butt-load of gear with Department of Homeland Security cash. I think we can see through walls now - I haven’t tried those goggles on myself yet but they sure look cool...”
“Well Chief...”
“Listen Wainwright, you’ve become a big man. You’re important to this community. You’ve got bigger things to live for now than that mutt. We’ll save her.”
Wainwright dropped the phone.
“Wainwright? Wainwright?” the Chief’s voice came from the receiver. Wainwright hung it up.
He heard the villain’s voice in his head, and then Chief’s - had he become a phony to himself? “You’ve got bigger things to live for than that mutt?” The words hit deep in his heart. He had become a lie. He had six faces looking up at him that were too kind to ever, ever say as much, but in their very loyalty they told him. He knew what he must do. He must do what he had always done - look out for his loyal charges through thick and thin. He must do the one thing he had always done right, his whole life, long before the fame had come to him - he must return the loyalty of his pets with love and trust and protection.
He threw open the closet door. There, in the back, behind all the fancy suits he was now able to afford, hung the Hot Dog Guy costume. He took it off the hook. He sniffed it - it was kind of crusty. But he put it on. The dogs began to caper and leap with excitement.
“Come on my friends,” he said. “Let’s go save Dixie (or Trixie)!”
With that he dashed out the door. Nora (or was it Dora?) popped he
r head out the door of her apartment and tried to talk to him but he waved her off. He and his six remaining hounds piled into his car, and Wainwright roared out onto the highway while six pointy noses hung out the window and snuffed the night air, hoping to pick up the scent of their missing comrade.