Life at Lucky Dogs these days is also tamer. The company's current headquarters, a 19th-century building with faded-red garage-scale doors and no identifying sign, sits just outside the Quarter in a neighborhood of staid banks and hotels. On this day a few men of varying degrees of scruffiness lounge around the entrance. Inside, a dozen carts, their fiberglass buns in white shading to brown, rest against the wall near a Coke machine, a washer-dryer, and tanks of carbon dioxide. A ceiling fan lazily whips the air, which is ripe with smells, some of them from food, some of them not.
Up a dingy flight of stairs, at the back of a cavernous storage space, is Strahan's office. It is spare and orderly, the high white walls adorned with a deer's head, Lucky Dogs memorabilia, and blueprints related to the general manager's grand passion: the landing crafts of World War II. (The first book Strahan wrote was a biography of Andrew Jackson Higgins, designer of the boats that moviegoers know from Saving Private Ryan.) Sitting at his desk, Strahan fields panicked calls from a vendor at the airport who is running low on supplies and wants the general manager to solve the problem from a 20-mile remove. "All he needed to do was call Mike [Russell, an assistant manager] on concourse B or walk over to him and say, 'I need some more," says Strahan, putting down the receiver with a sigh. "But instead he calls here and wants me to call Mike. Which is fine. Sometimes they just don't think for themselves. If it makes them more comfortable and it's that simple of a problem, then you do it."
Between calls, Strahan tries to explain the strange mathematics by which--even though staff appear and disappear without warning and no one can predict who will show up on any given day--there are always enough bodies to keep hot dogs flying off the company's 22 carts. "The key to being successful in this type of transient business is to have enough dependable people who know how to do enough different things so that there's always someone in control," Strahan says. Later, for example, the general manager himself will descend into the shop to scrub carts, substituting for "Big Alice" Knight, who the previous Saturday had run over her own foot with one of the 650-pound hot dogs, breaking two toes.
Replacing people is made easier by the fact that there's not much to learn: in many ways the 52-year-old Lucky Dogs is still a 1940s business. Vendors need no skills beyond making change; managers must be able to set up carts and count the day's takings. Technology presents no learning curve because, aside from the PCs that Strahan and owner Talbot use, there is no technology. When the general manager wants to get in touch with someone who has drifted out of town, he simply mentions it to the next vendor getting on a bus. "The people I'm looking for are going to be at the mission or the Salvation Army," he explains. "And the guy I'm asking to pass along my message is going to go to those same places, so he's going to run across them. You'd be amazed: two or three weeks later the person I'm looking for will contact me. It's like beating the drums in the old Tarzan movies."
Also key to keeping the business running is setting expectations worm's-belly low--and then praying the vendors meet them. "I tell the vendors, 'You need to be neat, you need to be clean, you need to be on time, you need to be polite, and you need to be conscientious," explains Strahan. "But the vendors say to me, 'Jerry, if I could be all those things, I'd be working in an office building on Poydras Street. Can we go for three out of five?"
Three out of five is dandy by Strahan, who dismisses the traditional code of business behavior as impractical for Lucky Dogs. "Most companies will say, 'If you don't show up for work, you're fired. If you show up for work drunk, you're fired," says Strahan. "Here, if you show up for work drunk, at least I've got to give you a C minus because you showed up." Since erratic behavior is the norm--Schmitt's dressing like a woman, Hager's getting riled and slamming the counter with a metal pipe in an attempt to get a drunken vendor's attention--Strahan chooses to react with unflappability rather than censure. Recently, when a vendor disappeared for a while and then showed up barely able to stand and smelling like a winery, Strahan asked him to explain himself. "He said, 'I thought I was pregnant," recalls Strahan. Not missing a beat, the general manager replied: "In your condition you probably shouldn't be working. Why don't you go home and we'll talk about it tomorrow?"
Indeed, Lucky Dogs' entire ethical framework is a matrix of relative sins, uniquely structured for compatibility with the street. "I know down here the guys are going to mess up generally," says Strahan. "You tell them they can't drink. People offer them drinks all night. So it's like a game. If I see that they're drinking too much, I bring them in. But if they're hiding a beer in a coffee cup, they're not openly saying, 'Hey, I'm going to drink in spite of the rules.' So you tend to look the other way. You could catch them all if you wanted to."
Strahan has been looking the other way since 1971, the year he started working as Lucky Dogs' relief manager as a freshman at the University of New Orleans. Over the next six years he ping-ponged between frankfurters and academia, eventually abandoning his plans to teach history and settling in to wrangle vendors full-time. Although 28 years with one company sounds like a career, Strahan bristles slightly at the suggestion that Lucky Dogs is his life's work. "I think any time I wanted to leave, I could," he says. "I could go back and teach--I'd probably have to take one or two more courses, but I could find a school to teach at. It's not like I'm forced to stay."
