Tony looked up, and was about to say I am perfectly capable of finding my car key, thank you very much, but the man was gone. There was only a crowd of faces flowing between the coffee shops and investment banks and fast food vendors and wholesale oriental rug merchants.

Tony frowned defiantly, folded his arms tight and dug his feet in where he stood. Nope, he thought. Wrong.

He leaned against the building and waited. He watched the start-stop of traffic on his side of the boulevard. The Thmmmmmmm tack, thmp, thmp tack of a car with a subwoofer came down the street in Tony’s direction. It was a blue Chevy Nova, and as it went by it sped up, cut off a taxicab in the next lane and tried to dart through the intersection before the light turned red. He was too late, though, and as he screeched to a halt the cab behind him did the same. The cab driver swore and leaned on his horn for two long seconds. Tony looked at the driver of the Nova to see if he had a similar reaction but the windows were tinted black. As Tony tried to imagine the driver’s face he grimaced, concentrating all the day’s impatience, all the burnt rubber, all the abandoned shopping carts down to a pinpoint between the driver’s eyes. He continued to wait. Still the man with the keys did not come back.

“Hey!” Tony looked around. Halfway down the block, a man in a green and black striped T-shirt was standing on a bus stop bench and yelling at him. “Yeah, you! The blue Honda Civic, right? That’s what you drive?”

Tony frowned. “No. I drive an orange GM van!” he shouted back.

The man grinned, then jumped off the bench and disappeared.

Tony shook his head in disgust. Idiot, he thought, and started down the street in the other direction.

Later he related the story briefly to a hot dog vendor. “Honest,” Tony told the hot dog man, “who the hell could ever mistake an orange van for a blue Honda Civic?”

The hot dog man smiled weakly. “Jesus,” he said in a supportive way. He pulled a dog from the roaster and slapped it in a bun. He was rooted to the southwest corner of the intersection, across from the guy shouting apocalypse gibberish. The building nearby was a major insurance provider, and its executives came to him one by one, down the thirty-eighth-floor elevators and into the street, every day from eleven to three. They came to him because he was a listener, a man with a tight square face who seemed in his hard expression to be a focus of all the fresh, commonsense American understanding they needed in their various crises. These streetcorner confessions occasionally worked to the hot dog man’s advantage, because he was secretly a shareholder in all the corporations in the downtown area and he knew about all their impending disasters well in advance.

He knew instantly why Tony had come to him. He didn’t want a hot dog. None of the suits did. They were strictly salad-eaters; they took a bite from the dog and threw the rest away. They wasted them. No, Tony just needed one or two sentences of counsel and assent. No problem. But it was early yet, just 10:45, so emotionally he wasn’t quite prepared. He would simply repeat and rephrase what Tony had said. It was a simple technique - it was usually effective. “A van and a Honda Civic? Not much similarity there, pal,” the hot dog man said, and scooped some relish on the bun.

“Guess not,” Tony said, and looked around impatiently.

“Then again, maybe he was just colorblind,” the vendor said, smiling. He couldn’t resist.

Tony stared at him evenly for several seconds. “There’s no need to patronize, buddy.”

“Sorry?”

“Just drop the sarcasm. It’s obvious he was colorblind, okay?”

The hot dog man was momentarily speechless. “I…I mean…” he began.

Tony’s voice rose in pitch. “Do you think I’m standing in this gutter not drafting memos, not itemizing, and not collating because I’ve suddenly decided to come to you, a hot dog vendor, because I don’t have enough sarcasm in my life? Is that what you think?” His body started to shake with the rant. “You people! You little – I – these – you’re everywhere!” he said, one hand flailing, one going to steady his tie. “You know, you and Jenkins should win a prize! You really should! The Sarcastic Bastard Prize! I told him yesterday, I said, ‘The copy makes sense! If you have one ounce of brain in you it makes sense!’”

The hot dog man’s face was bunched up, stiff and quiet. He looked Tony calmly in the eye, calmly held out his hand and waited calmly for Tony to put some money in it.

“And Jenkins laughs and says something devastating and walks back to his office with his little secretary and closes the door! And I give him the new copy and he refuses to run it! I tell him, ‘The Hsiong-Hsiang Enchanted Butterfly is not a car for the average Joe! It’s a luxury sedan, for God’s sake!’ And he just laughs at me! You’re all just laughing and shirking! The hell with you! I don’t need your sarcasm and I don’t need your ridicule! I’m back in accounting! Ha! Right where they want me! The failure is all yours!” he ended, and rubbed his headache-beaten eyes. He swung around, swiping at invisible irritations.

Tony saw several people were in line behind him now. He got in close to the hot dog man and lowered his voice.

“Look,” he said. “Look,” he repeated, “if that man wants to borrow my car, fine. If he borrows the wrong car because he’s colorblind, fine. And maybe I didn’t tell the story very well. I’m not a good storyteller. But that’s no excuse for you to ridicule a complete stranger. If I had got where I am today,” Tony said, and he gestured backwards vaguely, pointing up at a tree, “if I had made it up to the fifteenth floor, the offices of the Polterneck Advertising Agency, by being vicious and sarcastic just like you – you who feel you have to belittle everything and everyone – I mean, is that what it takes to be successful? Is that why I’m on a bank run? Is that why I am now down on the street with cash and deposit slips like some college puke house runner? Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years! I thought it was responsibility that led to increased responsibility when it was actually SARCASM that leads to increased responsibility! But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? You sell hot dogs!” He looked over his shoulder, exasperated. “I don’t know what I’d be doing, but…well I just don’t know. Jesus!” And Tony threw down his money and left.

The crowd swallowed him. The hot dog man lost sight of him instantly.

The next person in line, a woman, stepped up. “Can I have one with mustard and relish and no ketchup,” she said, not asking. Tony had left without his dog, and the hot dog man still had it in his hand. He looked down at it. It had relish. It had mustard. He hadn’t put on the ketchup yet. He wrapped the dog in wax paper and handed it to the woman. She paid him and left. There was no one else in line. Tony had scared them off.

Hmmm, the hot dog man thought. Hsiong-Hsiang...Oh yeah! I remember those ads! I thought they were too fantastic to appeal to the intended demographic – obviously they were going after the pragmatic single homeowner buying her first car. Hmph.

From up the street there was a sudden squeal of tires followed by a loud bang. Everyone turned to look at the car accident, and then they went back to chatting and eating and walking.

Ah well, the hot dog man thought. We all take the Stupid pills. Christ – look at me! Sellin’ hot dogs! What wrong line did I stand in to get stuck with this job? That’s what I wanna know. He looked at the wad of money that Tony had left and sighed. He picked it up and started to count it. There was $8700 in hundred-dollar bills. He tried to put the cash in the till but the door wouldn’t close. He pushed harder and banged it with his fist but still it stayed open. He slapped the counter hard, swore, then took two steps back and counted to ten.

Christ, he thought. People can be so rude.

He returned to his concession, stared at the wad of money and shook his head. Finally he picked it up, removed the rubber band and separated the bills into three piles. He put one pile each in the till under the ones, fives and tens. Gently he clicked the tray shut. Then he stood, waiting, watching the people go by, trying to tell who was going to just buy his hot dogs, and who was going to eat them as well.