If you're going to have a beef, it might as well be in front of a hot dog stand.
That's where two men on Lower Broadway were standing the other night, the other unseasonably warm December night, the night the Chicago Blackhawks took a stick in the teeth from the Preds across the street at Bridgestone. They started throwing punches, and down they went. They succeeded mostly in knocking down a hula-hooped flower girl who peddles dirty jokes and spankings to tourists.
For Chase Humphrey, it was another day at the office.
Make that another night. He's posting up behind his hot dog stand on Broadway around 10 p.m., with hillbilly music blaring through honky-tonk doors and echoing off the sidewalk around him. On his nearly bald head rests a yellow paper Vienna Beef hat, cocked a little to the right. Vienna Beef is the lord of his realm. The gold letters on his red metal cart read "Old Fashioned Carnival Hot Dogs," shielded by a yellow umbrella bearing the hot dog provider's blue logo.
That's what he sells — "100 percent beef, no fillers," he notes. A lot of the hot dog slingers down here use Nathan's, he says, or Hebrew National. Not him. He's his own best advertisement. He'd already downed his own first dog of the night: kraut, spicy mustard, grilled onions and hot peppers, finished with a shake of celery salt.
"It's perfect," he says.
He should know. Food sold from trucks is ubiquitous now, but the 27-year-old Humphrey has been selling hot dogs from this spot outside Layla's between Fourth and Fifth avenues for more than a decade. His mother used to run the stand for Layla, the bar's proprietor and namesake, and Humphrey, then in high school, helped her out. He was 14 then.
"Finally she was like, 'All right, I'm done selling hot dogs,' " he remembers. "So I decided to jump right in."
So began his career as an O.G. dog dealer on Nashville's most visible thoroughfare. The honky-tonks, the bands and the dancers kicking up dust within may be the main attraction on city blocks irradiated by neon. But it's the street economy that hypes up the carnival atmosphere: the bronze-painted human statues posing for photos, the flower pushers, the sidewalk drummers and buskers — and of course the hot-dog vendors staked along the district's hottest blocks at carts, at stands, in Airstream trailers.
All these denizens easily blend into the background if you don't know where to look (or your perspective happens to be temporarily impaired). To spend a night outside of Layla's with Chase Humphrey, though, is to be given a pair of 3-D glasses allowing these characters to pop out wherever you look. If the honky-tonks are the hot dog, the downtown vendors are the toppings: the mustard, the grilled onions — the cream cheese, if you're one of those freaks from Seattle.
On most Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, you'll find Humphrey selling hot dogs on these dirty sidewalks of Broadway. A good night? He'll make 50 to 150 hot dogs, however you like 'em — 200, if things are really hopping. A quick calculation suggests he's sold around a quarter-million dogs in his career. Making them is muscle memory at this point. The Guinness World Record for most hot dogs assembled in one minute is nine.
"I'm almost 100 percent sure I could beat that," Humphrey says, with the bluntness of someone who's tried it a time or two in his mind.
Humphrey's was one of the first hot dog stands down here. When he started out 12 years ago, he says, the only other one was Ricky down at Second and Broad. Ricky left under circumstances that still aren't clear to Humphrey, but now he sets up in front of the Metro courthouse. In the years since, others have come, like Heather, from Two Girls and a Weenie, who sets up at Fifth and Commerce and has been downtown for around five years. Rebecca — Dancing Dogs — sets up shop on Fourth and Commerce, and she's been there for a few years now too. Somewhere around there's a preacher selling two-dollar dogs.
But there was briefly some tension last month when a new crew of vendors began flouting the hot dog laws. Unbeknownst to honky-tonkers, the people slinging sausages and wieners downtown have to register their carts with the city. What's more, the carts and commissaries used by the vendors have to pass inspection by the health department. Dog dealers also have to follow sidewalk encroachment ordinances that prohibit them from parking a cart on Broadway unless they're on private property with the owner's permission.
When the new dogs on the block sidestepped the rules, it was anarchy for a bit on the strip. Four or five carts were working a single block, some within sight of signs reading, "No Trespassing." Feuding vendors reportedly ripped paperwork from rival carts. Established vendors almost came to blows with rogue slingers, and not just once.
The Scene went downtown looking for signs of this conflict. These days, however — perhaps in preparation for the holiday trade and the New Year's deluge of 120,000 revelers — it seems to be mostly dog-day aftermath. Metro police have put pressure on the dog sellers by enforcing the regulations, vendors tell the Scene, and relative peace has been restored. Earlier tonight, before the fight breaks out near Humphrey's station, cops can be seen shutting down a few carts.
Humphrey stands outside Layla's with Big Josh, a familiar figure to Lower Broad regulars, a man with beard and build enough to justify his nickname. Like Humphrey, he's gregarious, a needed quality for hours of brief interactions with complete strangers. The two have an evident rapport: When Big Josh steps away for a moment, Humphrey mans the door.
The street's on edge tonight — not so much because the Blackhawks are in town, but because their fans are. A line stretches from the door of Acme Feed & Seed and up the street. Squads of fans in Blackhawks jerseys are prowling — staggering in some cases — up and down Broadway. Earlier in the week, Humphrey suggested this night as an ideal one to hang out at the hot dog stand. His reasoning? "Chicago loves hot dogs."
That's putting it mildly. "Dogmatic" is closer. Woe betide the vendor who suggests a Windy City visitor might want a squirt of ketchup on that wiener. You might as well wipe snot on a picture of Mike Ditka. Humphrey takes the precaution of stashing the condiment away for the night. Why take chances? The last time the Chicago Bears played the Titans in Nashville, he recalls, their fans drank Broadway dry. Literally. Bars ran out of beer.
"It was legendary," he says.
Among the NHL, only Detroit Red Wings fans have the same potential for mischief, Humphrey says. So he's keeping tabs on the game across the street, just to be prepared. As the hockey game lets out, Humphrey texts: "Chicago lost, so should be interesting."
But except for the late-night fight outside his stand, the weeknight turns out to be slower and less rowdy than he anticipated. At one point, another hot dog vendor, Ed, swings by to say hey — he's decided not to set up tonight, but soon rushes off to make sure no one is taking his spot a couple blocks away.
Inside Layla's, the band launches into Garth Brooks' "Callin' Baton Rouge" as a middle-aged man in a Blackhawks hat and jersey walks up to Humphrey's cart. He makes his order in a Chicago accent: Polish sausage, mustard and onions. Here ya go. He eats it in a couple bites, tosses the wrapper, and ambles on down the street.
That's how most of his interactions go, Humphrey says. Most.
"One time this guy was angry that someone cut him in line, or he thought someone cut him in line, and I was just working with whoever's in front of me, you know?" he says. "So the guy yanked the umbrella, almost threw the hot dog cart over. So I might've thrown some hot dog buns at him, you know? I'm not proud of it, but ..."
Actually, he seems a little proud of it. Maybe it was a cold night. The potential for conflict is inversely proportionate to the temperature, Humphrey says.
"When it gets cold and it slows down, normally all the people are crazier because the crazy ratio — the sober people are smart enough to stay home," he explains. "So only the craziest of people stay down here, and it really throws off the balance of everything."
The unruly and the overserved are a time-honored part of any downtown scene, certainly one inhabited by the ghost of Hank Williams. But whereas getting hammered used to be more of a side effect of hardcore honky-tonking, Humphrey says, he's seen it become the main objective — especially over the past decade, throughout Nashville's march to It-ness.
"Back in the day, people would come here to really listen to the music," he laments. "Now people just come to just get wasted. Which, you know, that's cool in its own regard. But a lot of people are missing what the big picture is. But it makes money."
A few minutes later, like a stage actor who's just missed his cue, an employee from the bar emerges onto the sidewalk.
"We need to get people off the fucking Fireball and get 'em drinking Jack Fire," he says to Big Josh. "Shit's so much better. We're gonna give people fucking diabetes drinking that goddamn Fireball."
When it comes to people-watching, a perch on Broadway is hard to beat. That's what has kept Humphrey stationed at a hot-dog stand for hour after hour of fleeting encounters, a rock in a human tide of tipsy tourists, competing vendors and downtown denizens that flows almost to dawn. Humphrey's dad owned a swimming pool business, and his son used to work with him. He's worked other jobs too. But it wasn't this.
"Every time I think I've seen it all, I see something else," he says. "I've done everything from dig holes to sit in a cubicle. This is it."
