This article is adapted from the book Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, by Jamie Loftus, published by Forge Books.
I get a message from my friend Carlye just before Thanksgiving. “Relevant to your interests: did you know the WIENERMOBILE is in LA on Friday?!?!?!”
Reader, I did not, but in a way … I always knew. If you stay in the hot dog game long enough, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile will find you, and my only mistake was looking for it instead of letting her—the feminine penis on wheels—find me.
Perhaps you know of her. The ’Mobile was first introduced in 1936 by the nephew of the German immigrant that the company’s named for, Mayer, but this came after decades of establishing themselves as the family hot dog (as opposed to a slutty hot dog, which I will carelessly speculate includes the brand Hoffy’s). The company’s founder had begun working at a meat market in Detroit and then Chicago, eventually opening his own shop in the latter city and participating in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. His business grew at a steady clip in the way that hot dog businesses did in that day, and Mayer made the smart move of quickly adapting to Food Safety and Inspection Service standards after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle gave the meatpacking industry a shake-up. This secured the promise of quality onto the smartly marketed product’s image, as a yellow band of assurance was added to its signature red packaging and Mayer skinless wieners became the go-to hot dogs for kids.
How do you market to kids? According to Mayer’s nephew Carl, with a big sexy hot dog on wheels with 500 whistles inside. Originally, the 13-foot-long metal hot dog monstrosity was used as a chariot for the company’s now-defunct and extremely dated mascot “Little Oscar, World’s Smallest Chef.” The character was played by actor Meinhardt Raabe, best known for playing the coroner munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. He began traveling in the Wienermobile beginning in 1937 and well into the World War II years.
Raabe’s part then went to actor George Molchan. He worked as a bookkeeper at Pepsi for many years before the Mayer company expanded its Wienermobile fleet in 1951 and began casting additional Little Oscars. For some time, Raabe and Molchan played the same role in different areas of the country and Molchan continued after Raabe moved on, traveling the U.S. in the Wienermobile for 20 years. It was Molchan who popularized the ritual of giving away Wiener Whistles, which still exist today and make me foam at the mouth to think of receiving one. The whistles are miniature versions of the vehicle itself, and recipients are encouraged to hum the Oscar Mayer theme song upon getting theirs. (And if the Wienermobile drivers really like you, they have some glow-in-the-dark ones too.) It’s a near certainty you know the jingle I’m talking about, which debuted on television in 1963 after composer Richard Trentlage submitted lyrics in a contest and quickly became connected to both Little Oscar and the Wienermobile itself. Don’t leave me hanging here:
Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener.
If you don’t know the rest, you are not a true American.
By 1976, the Wienermobiles had been on the road for 40 years, and the company elected to retire the program in favor of allocating marketing money to TV ads. Molchan remained employed by the company after the vehicles were taken off the road, moving to Orlando, Florida, to hold court as Little Oscar at a branded location at Disney World. When he died in 2005, the Mayer company sent the Wienermobile to his funeral, where mourners hummed “Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener” and whistled along on the toys that he’d made his living giving to Americans.
By 1988, the public demand for the Wienermobile was high enough that the company commissioned and sent out across the country an updated fleet of six new vehicles, piloted by recent college graduates, with souped-up additions like microwaves and stereo systems that played 21 variations on the Oscar Mayer theme. It was updated again in the ’90s and 2000s.
Today you can track where the six Wienermobiles are across the country, piloted by two specially trained drivers apiece, and the people still mob them—anywhere from a formal parade to the random grocery store parking lot I find myself wandering into to meet Wienermobile drivers Little Link Lauren and Nacho Dog Nicholas in November 2021. Their fans are a bizarro mix of older people with Wiener Whistle nostalgia and younger people who know the chokehold the Wienermobile has when posted to main.
I’m sure you have the same question about this that I did: Are the people who drive the Wienermobiles fucking?
The short answer is yes, some are, but it’s complicated. The particular Wienermobile drivers I meet and exercise my never-caused-me-a-problem-before anxious attachment style upon are not fucking, but the month I spend talking to Lauren and Nick is well worth the absurd mental gymnastics.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our story begins in the last hour of a Wienermobile’s dedicated shift at a Culver City grocery store, where two people in their early 20s wearing signature red-and-yellow Oscar Mayer uniforms quietly talk in the warm womb of the Wiener, with a screen flashing fun facts around which one has hung a wreath of plasticky-fake autumn leaves to remind visitors what month it is. One is Lauren (“Fun fact: I once sat in the front row of The Tonight Show and got a high five from Jimmy Fallon”), a petite girl from rural Georgia with stick-straight brown hair, a middle part, and a cheek-smile combination designed to sell back-to-school clothes in a catalog. She’s an excellent driver and the first to let you know it, having begun her driving career on a tractor back home.
She sits beside Nick, whom I never see without his bright red wiener-emblazoned bomber jacket. A central California import (“Fun fact: I won a scholarship in high school for winning a hot dog eating contest!”), he stands several heads above his fellow driver, his black hair slicked over, and has the loud, warm voice of a college orientation adviser who looks at and through you simultaneously. It does not surprise me to learn that he’s very into Disneyland, which sounds like a value judgment unless you know I keep having that recurring sex dream about having my back blown out above Radiator Springs.
Let me describe the ungodly feat of American marketing they drive every day. She stands at 11 feet (24 hot dogs) high, 27 feet (60 hot dogs) long, and 8 feet (18 hot dogs) wide. She weighs the equivalent of 140,500 wieners minus the two pilots who’ve been steering her around the country for the past six months, and has more features than any car that anyone in my family has ever owned. An assortment: six-speed transmission, a gigantic resin hot dog on the dash, a ceiling painted like a bright blue sky with cumulus clouds, bright yellow walls with velvet seating (burgundy, with yellow leather and embroidered hot dogs to match), a massive sound system, a roof that lifts, and a horn that plays the jingle that they swear they’re not completely sick of.
It’s fucking magnificent, and Lauren and Nick really had to lobby to get the gig. The pair had extremely different approaches to securing the job—they make sure to mention that fewer people have driven the Wienermobile than have been to the moon (not true), and that it’s statistically harder to secure employment in a gigantic hot dog than it is to get into Harvard. These are all lines pulled directly from the company’s website, but hey, these kids are working in public relations. I am the public, and I’m sucking it down like a skinless frank.
Both met the basic qualifications to apply for the yearlong position (a 3.0-plus GPA and a valid driver’s license), which involves a two-week training in Wisconsin and two legs of driving of six months apiece, with a change in regional assignment and driving partner midway through the year. Hotdoggers live a functional paid yearlong sabbatical, living out of hotels and short-term housing between long driving stints, between which they’re expected to show up to a series of press events and are empowered to arrange their own public appearances.
This has been the process for Hotdoggers since the post-college processed-meat gap-year program began in 1988, and it’s had a huge impact on those who’ve participated, whether they ended up fucking each other or not. One of my favorite examples is Robin Gelfenbien, a woman who worked for the program between 1993 and 1994 and was so affected by it she wrote a one-woman show on the subject 15 years later called My Salvation Has a First Name (A Wienermobile Journey) at the New York Fringe Festival.
“I went to school at Syracuse. The Wienermobile came, and I fell in love with it,” she told New York magazine when the show debuted. “It was a low point in my life, and I knew I wanted to drive it. I did everything I could, including making up songs and tap dancing at the Oscar Mayer headquarters. I got the job.”
Little Link Lauren is the outlier here—initially a Type A Wienermobile skeptic, she describes her journey to the “Hot Dog Highways” from her hometown of Toccoa, Georgia, as almost divinely determined. “For me, if the pandemic hadn’t happened I definitely wouldn’t be here,” she explains.
Still, the hot dog pursued her. After she had applied to a series of postgrad jobs, Oscar Mayer came to recruit Hotdoggers at the University of Georgia for the first time in years, and Lauren decided that it was a sign—she applied that day and promptly forgot about it. And then she got an interview. And another. And another, and suddenly Little Link Lauren was in the final 24 job applicants in a pool that’s said to include as many as 25,000 in any given year. My pragmatic queen was shocked.
Nacho Dog Nick had a more classically Gen Z route to the Wienermobile, first learning of the Hotdogger program in a BuzzFeed piece and going in deep on its lore. Oscar Mayer doesn’t carry the same cultural clout in central California that it does in the Midwest, but Nick was already a shrewd social media operator and threw in his lot with Big Hot Dog by submitting a hot dog–themed parody video to the tune of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License.”
When I meet them, Lauren is on a journey to see something west of Alabama in the Wienermobile, but Nick is firmly planted in the importance of the vehicle itself—he repeatedly references its history, how people react to it, and where he sees Lauren and himself fitting into its legacy. “People are obsessed with it—any type of family, class, race, status, we have come in contact with everyone in between,” he tells me. “We’ve met vegans who are like, ‘I love the Wienermobile!’ It’s amazing—there’s nothing like it.”
While it gives me no pleasure to inform you that Nacho Dog Nick and Little Link Lauren aren’t fucking, it at least sounds like they’re an exception to the rule. Once training begins, things start to get horny. Before they take to the road, the 12 Hotdoggers-in-training spend two weeks at headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, in a truly demented adult summer camp called Hot Dog High.
Of course, there are plenty of logistical things the team needs to learn in the two weeks when they’re sharing every meal, moment, and scent with the people they will be randomly assigned to spend the next six months with. There are extensive driving lessons with retired police chiefs from Madison that test employees on their ability to navigate a massive hot dog over narrow bridges, into difficult parking spaces, and onto ferry boats that culminate in a test required to graduate. There are full days on public relations and marketing training, how to interact with the public in a way that will best represent the company that once found it appropriate to have a representative named Little Oscar, lessons on best practices to plan events independently, and a half day on hot dog puns alone. This last part is particularly vile—the way that Hotdoggers smugly tell you how the cops conducting their driving lessons “sat shotbun” and that they are “really relishing” this experience makes me feel physically ill. There is a Freemason-style graduation ceremony where the 12 apostles of the skinless frank place their hands on an all-beef dog and pledge their loyalty to the company before leaving with their newly arranged spouse the next morning.
Then there are the more intimate aspects of training, which I later learn happen in conjunction with the Planters Nutmobile team. This is exactly what it sounds like—a rip-off of the Wienermobile from the Planters company that emerged in the late 1990s, owned by the same Kraft Heinz parent company until just a few months before Hot Dog Summer commences. The Nutmobile is far less popular—Lauren says that this is due to a handful of cases of children with peanut allergies passing out when getting too close—and employs only three people full-time to the Wienermobile’s 12.
Please forgive me for what I am about to say, but what you need to know is that the twentysomethings in the Nutmobile fuck. They, uh, they nut. They don’t work for the Nutmobile for nothing, and they nut into Wienermobile employees more than they nut into the other Nutmobilers. These are the facts as they’ve been presented to me, and you can’t be happy to know them.
Little Link Lauren and Nacho Dog Nick cannot vouch for why there are so many Nutmobile drivers who fall in love with Wienermobile drivers, only that they firmly believe they belong to the superior caste. “This sounds mean, but most people want to drive the Wienermobile,” Lauren says. “Not the … well, you know.”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t significant cross-genital pollination in the world of Wienermobile driving pairs. Hotdoggers roll deep. When I see the two again in Los Angeles in December, Lauren laughs as she tells me that 50 percent of the Hotdoggers on the road during the peak of the pandemic in 2020 ended up dating, and that at least one couple is engaged so far. That’s proportionally higher than most years, and Lauren explains that it has everything to do with the pandemic restraints placed on the program. This restricted pairs mainly to drive-bys at hospitals and nursing homes, the rest of their time spent alone in hotel rooms and the honking dog itself to, well … six of them are in relationships; you tell me. They were fucking. They were fucking in the hot dog.
Not Nick and Lauren, though. They’re so not fucking, in fact, that they tell me they’re going to see the woman that Nick is in love with right after their shift ends so Nick can give her a hand-painted ornament asking her to be his girlfriend. Lauren giggles as she shows me the painted snowcapped mountains and Nick’s boyish scrawl: “Meet me at the Swiss Alps … but first, will you be my girlfriend?”
Nick smiles, and it’s a real one this time, not the gumless marketer’s grin he’s given me for the past hour. It’s their running joke, he explains, because she can’t see him on the road, so they might as well be in the Alps. “He’s been pining for her for two years,” Lauren says, goading him on.
So then, what else do you do for six uninterrupted months with someone you barely know?
Little Link Lauren sighs. “It’s most similar to an arranged marriage, if I’m being real,” she tells me. “Thankfully we get along. We’re like brother and sister. We bicker and are like, ‘I’m gonna kill you if you play that song one more time!’ ”
This is something that’s on her mind a lot. There’s something amiss in the aux-cord etiquette between these two—something that’s difficult even when you are in love, not to mention when you’re in what you are quick to identify as an arranged marriage. Lauren and Nick have similar taste in Top-40 music and say that most days, there’s barely any distinguishing between their individual playlists. And then there’s the Zac Brown Band issue. Lauren is gorgeously passive-aggressive on this matter, something Nick is less skilled at hiding. He loves the Zac Brown Band, a group I refuse to learn a single thing about but whom he describes as having a “very different vibe” from a different terrible band he loves called the 1975.
He fixes his eyes on Lauren. “But we love them both.” Lauren refuses to meet his gaze, looking down the barrel of my skull. “I no longer like the Zac Brown Band,” she says simply, prompting a silence so long that I decide to see if the three of us will just die here. Finally, Nick sucks parking lot air through his teeth and changes the subject. “Did we tell you that people have been making Wienermobile mixes since the ’90s?”
Lauren is visibly relieved. “Yes!” She rushes to the back of the Wienermobile where the aging sound system looms over the seats and comes back with a binder full of burned mix CDs that makes me feel like I’m in seventh grade. “Each pair of Hotdoggers used to make a mix of the songs they listened to the most together and leave it here for the next group. Kind of a history thing.”
I look at the big, looping Sharpie handwriting, which reminds me of my cousin before her husband died. Their titles are goofy and all ring a little bit west of soft-core porn titles: “#thunderstruck,” “Schnitzel Itzel Ketchup Kyle XXIIV,” “Too Cool for Cornfields #Wisconsin,” “Bumpin’ Through the Bun Roof,” “Hottie Hotdoggers Volume One,” “Buns and Kisses! Tailgaitin’ Traci.”
Are Lauren and Nick going to make a mix? I realize, the microsecond after asking, that I’ve hit the same Zac Brown–shaped nerve. “There’d probably only be one song on it,” she says, and Nick rolls his eyes. The girls are fighting! I want them to fight. I’m rude.
I tell Nick I’ll reach out soon about a Wienermobile visit to the comedy theater, and he excuses himself to pee at the Del Taco across the lot. I feel bad keeping them for so long and tell Lauren I’ll let them be, but she seems a little relieved to be alone with me. Maybe it’s the rare feeling of being unsupervised after a long time, or more likely it’s the feeling of not being around the world’s biggest Zac Brown Band fan.
We haven’t talked much about the danger, which sounds ridiculous but isn’t. A woman and a brown man traveling through the country in a gigantic hot dog is a beautiful thing, but it’s a dangerous one—even now, only two of the Hotdoggers in their class are not white, and the company doesn’t allow two women to drive a Wienermobile alone in this area of the country. “Which I know sounds messed up,” Lauren says, “but I think they’re right.”
The sun is going down in the almost-winter sky, and she tells me about times they’ve been scared, times that usually start with the interactions they were excited to tell me about when I first arrived.
People just get hyped with the Wienermobile, which makes them do crazy things.” Nick laughed earlier, but the things that are done are worth examining. Most of the time, the Crimes Against Large Hot Dog happen while neither of the drivers is there—Hotdoggers have an emergency hotline they can call whenever there’s damage done to the vehicle, with side mirrors and windshield wipers the most frequent targets when drunk people become determined to scale the Wienermobile. That’s not what Lauren wants to tell me about.
“Sometimes people follow us,” she says, and she explains how she often needs to park the Wienermobile around the corner from where they’re staying to protect them from being followed home. This has become second nature, she explains, but she’s extremely careful not to forget anything in the Wienermobile after the sun goes down. She keeps looking at me apologetically, like I’m going to tell her she’s overreacting.
“Let’s say I leave a bag in the Wienermobile, so I mosey on out at 11 at night,” she says, returning to a night when she forgot something and went to unlock the massive vehicle on her own only to find that a man had followed her once she was inside. She closed the door, but the man was determined to get into the hot dog he had seen on television as a child, and started beating on the door violently. She looks to me wildly. “And he was like, ‘I saw you go in there!’ over and over, and that’s why our hiding spot is right here.” She points to the velveteen seat just like the others but out of sight from angry, drunk eyes that saw a young woman enter a Wienermobile alone at night.
“Does that happen often?” I ask her.
She nods solemnly, looking at me and then down at her lap. “It’s not—it’s not as bad if you have a male partner that’s very present, but I mean.” She goes through a filing cabinet of examples and chooses one. “I’ve been at Walmart before and gotten stalkers and gotten love notes, and it’s been creepy. And then they start taking photos, and so my partner is like, ‘Just go hide in the Wienermobile.’ ”
Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs
By Jamie Loftus. Forge Books.
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Once Lauren gives me one example, they keep tumbling out—the time at a gas station when someone didn’t believe she could drive a hot dog, the time a man her father’s age took a weenie whistle from her and then leaned against her and asked, “What else you have.” Nick approaches from the Del Taco, beaming and pissless. Lauren sighs one last time and looks at me, resigned to a night of watching her Hotdogging brother present another girl with a Love Ornament.
“I guess,” she says, “I guess I just wish I could do things without having bear spray in my pocket. You know?”
We say goodbye, and I walk to the train station with my keys between my fingers because I do know.
