Another returned prodigal son sometimes does maintenance on the company's carts. Today he works peacefully alongside Hager--even though it's been only four years since he was charged with holding the day manager and another employee, both longtime friends of his, at knifepoint. The charges were eventually dropped, and the maintenance man was soon back on Lucky Dogs' doorstep, angling for his old job. Strahan turned him away but after a few months agreed to let him work on the carts occasionally--at Hager's behest. "In this job you've got to forgive and forget," says the day manager, waving a hand as if to shoo away any lingering resentment. "If I held a grudge, there'd be a lot of people who wouldn't be working here."
Strahan insists that real violence--anything more serious than the waving of fists and the hurling of objects--is fairly rare at Lucky Dogs. But there's a lot of yelling. Emotionally, some of the vendors aren't wrapped too tight, the general manager says, and little things set them off. "I've had people want to kill each other because somebody took somebody else's onions," he says.
Strahan doesn't mind the screaming--the vendors' anger is as quick to fizzle as it is to ignite. And when the screaming is directed at him--as it often is--he happily responds in kind, at first raising his voice above his adversary's, then quickly lowering it and assuming a gentler tone. "I'll say, 'Look, I'm screaming at you, you're screaming at me, why don't we talk about this reasonably?" he says. "Sometimes that calms them down." It's a lesson he's trying to instill in Talbot's sons. "Paul Hager absolutely blew up at Mark the other day, and Mark said, 'I want to fire the son of a bitch.' And I said, 'Mark, do you want to do his job?"
Strahan describes his approach as a "fluid type of management, person by person, instant by instant." In practice he generally responds to infractions brought on by the heat of the moment with a brief squall, and those he considers calculated with a slow freeze. So when night manager Charles Pike recently threw his keys at Strahan and screamed, "I quit," for example, Strahan simply threw the keys back, yelling, "There won't be any mutinies! Now get back to work!" But when Pike specifically requested to work one New Year's Eve--Lucky Dogs' biggest night outside of Mardi Gras--and then chose instead to deliver pizza for another company, the general manager decided a line had been crossed. "I banned him from the shop for a year," says Strahan. "I wouldn't talk to him. I wouldn't take his phone calls." Pike has been back at Lucky Dogs for five years now, "and he's shown up every New Year's Eve," says Strahan with satisfaction.
Strahan takes a similarly relativist approach to theft. Although it's been a while since any substantial funds have found their way from the company's coffers into the vendors' pockets--vendors hand in their money at frequent intervals during their shifts, so they never have much on them--some pettier pilfering still occurs. The most common ploy is buying cheap hot dogs at a supermarket, selling them off the cart, and pocketing the profits. Such transgressions aren't just forgivable, they're expected, says Strahan. But stealing from another vendor--snatching a couple of packs of hot dogs off someone else's cart, for example--is one of the few offenses on Lucky Dogs' nonexistent books for which workers can be fired. "If theft is perpetrated against me, I can live with it," says Strahan. "If it's perpetrated against another vendor, I can't live with that. The company can financially take the loss. For the other vendor the loss is proportionally much greater."
For all that Lucky Dogs' vendors are unreliable, volatile, occasionally dishonest, and sometimes violent--they are not bad salespeople. Otherwise the company wouldn't be profitable, as it has been almost every year since Talbot bought it. A few, like recently retired Bill McCarty, will sell just until they make enough to cover the day's food and rent--$20, say--and then lounge around the cart holding court for the street crowd. But one or two are what Strahan calls "greedy" vendors, meaning they're in the Quarter to make money rather than for the never-ending party. During peak periods like Mardi Gras, real hustlers can make a couple of hundred dollars in a 12-hour day.
James Hudson, 36, marked himself as a go-getter early in his career--selling 3,300 jumbo hot dogs over a three-day stretch during Super Bowl '86, a company record that stands to this day. At 8:30 in the evening, Hudson perches on a stool on the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon streets, directly in the stumbling paths of folks exiting both Pat O'Brien's (home of the "Hurricane") and Tropical Isle (home of the "Hand Grenade"). His clothes--a dark blue shirt and gray slacks--are immaculate. All the items on his cart--the rolls, the napkins, the ketchup and mustard dispensers--are carefully arranged for rapid access. The foil covering the hot-dog well has been peeled back--just at the corner--emitting a plume of fragrant steam into the night air.
Hudson, who generally shows up at about 5:30 p.m. and works until 4 or 5 a.m., is cagey about how much he makes on an average night. "If I told you, that would be unfair to the other vendors," he says, his eyes scanning passing faces for signs of peckishness. "But I'm the best. There's always what you call so-so, good, and a cut above. Michael Jordan is a cut above. What makes him a cut above? I can't explain it. And I can't explain why I am either."
Hudson's prowess may owe something to the excellence of his bark. Tilting his head back, the vendor demonstrates: "Hot dog! Chili dog! I normally don't do that until late at night," he explains, as startled revelers turn to stare. "When they've been drinking a lot, that's when it's most powerful with them. It gets in their heads. That's when you nail them." Not all of Hudson's marketing strategies are equally subtle, however. "Once there was a guy walking by wearing a suit," he says. "I walked right up to him and grabbed him by the tie and pulled him over to the cart and started making him a hot dog."
