Surf Doggies

The street upon which I operate, Plumeria, has been rezoned to a "no stopping anytime" street. Other than that nothing has changed. Same great food, same great service.

Rains make the operation difficult, pardon my absences. Reminder: I am closed Mondays and Tuesdays .

We will be open Wednesday January 2nd, jumbo beef dogs are back on the menu.

I also feature food for your soul: https://www.amazon.com/Creaking-Door-Alej//ref=mp_s_a_1_2

Surf Doggies Menu = Stephen’s Meats, TOP SHELF in my industry All beef frank: 1/6 lb frank in a standard bun $4... Polish sausage: HUGE kielbasa, 8 inches, a third of a lb. Served in a sesame steak roll $7 SPICY Cajun hot link: authentic Cajun recipe, lb link on a sesame steak roll $6 $2 hot dog: standard super market dog (Hormel/Oscar Meyer, etc) The world’s BEST homemade chili: Regular bowl: $4 Large (= 3 regulars) $10 Chili topping $1 Cheddar topping $1 Soda/water $1.50 Gatorade $3 Candy bar $1.50 Kosher dill pickle $2 Homemade tamale $2

Surf Doggies is still in business. This page is seldom updated The owner, Al Melendez, is semi retired and only works intermittently for mostly health and medical reasons. If you want info on the schedule, inquire or "friend" Al Melendez at his normal FB page. Mahalo!

Dark clouds, foreboding and numerous, assemble like an Apache war council on the open grassy plain that is my life...

The Story of my Story -- Alejo Melendez I was fifty four when my novel Creaking Door was published in November of 2017. I always knew I had at least one great... story to tell, and Lord knows I’d started dozens of them only to either lose interest or suffer the ignominious and inevitable writer’s block. There was also the small matter of my chronic alcoholism. I first took a drink at the tender age of eleven and a half. Some high school boys who of course were socially much older than my unsophisticated thirteen year old sister and I, had come over with designs on my sister’s ripening womanhood, and they brought booze and marijuana. Both of our parents worked nights so we were left to fend for ourselves. Of course a younger sibling always follows whatever the older one says or does so, as a ruse to distract me, some of the boys stayed with me and kept me occupied, while one, a calabash cousin of sorts, courted her privately in another part of the house. It was a bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine that was presented to me. I of course and at that age, wanted nothing more than to be one of them, so I dutifully took the bottle and claimed I could drink the whole thing. And I did. I unscrewed the aluminum cap, broke the seal, put it to my lips, and proceeded to down the whole.750 liters. I was young, had a fresh liver and fresh albeit stupid brain cells. It tasted like juice, just not as good, but entirely manageable. Those boys were amazed at the feat, and I thought nothing of it. I never put the bottle down until it was empty. Oddly enough, I did not get sick or even catch a buzz, so right then I thought my young self immortal and all grown up. When I was thirteen I was placed in a public school. My father complained bitterly that our combined Catholic school tuitions were killing the family, so, like the good son that I was, I volunteered to get free government instituted adolescent-aged education. Of the many turning points in my tumultuous life, that may have been the biggest fundamental shift in my devout catholic morals and therefore my burgeoning identity. Already introduced to alcohol and marijuana, I soon became indoctrinated to some harder substances, and by the age of fifteen I’d already sniffed paint, smoked opium, took a multitude of downers, and dropped acid several times. LSD was great, until it wasn’t. A bad trip did not keep me away, and soon I took another bad tab and one hour into the twelve hour trip I thought I was going to die. I kept wishing it to be over but incredibly the wave of negativity and horrifying hallucinations continued to escalate for hours. It was, at the time, my very worst nightmare. I guess my mind was OK because it sure didn’t need altering. I ran with a bad crowd, did things so I’d fit in, things like robbing houses, pawning my father’s power tools, and became a prodigious liar in pursuit of my drug habit. I wasn’t an addict per se but it was just the thing teens did back in the seventies; wanting to get high. And it greatly affected my future, my life as an adult. I dropped out in my sophomore year. No one cared if I attended classes or not, so I went off to surf and get high. When the report card was mailed to our house with straight F’s and my atrocious attendance record (or lack thereof), my father finally caught on. I was immediately enrolled into an all boys’ Catholic High school. Our alumni list is a distinguished one, and our football program, perennial state champions, is consistently nationally ranked. We have produced Hawaii’s only Heisman trophy award winner, and the latest NCAA national championship (Alabama over Georgia) was engineered by a sophomore quarterback who is one of ours as well. Governors, Senators, Federal judges, and even an Oscar winner are also on that list. In my junior year I achieved a 4.0 GPA one semester, perhaps my finest academic feat. This was a tough curriculum with award winning no nonsense teachers. From about the age of thirteen on, I was damaged goods, a broken boy who would become a dysfunctional man. And a raging alcoholic. Brain surgery, a ruptured stomach lining, and severe alcohol induced paralyzing gout, none of these stopped me from drinking. I attended my niece’s wedding on crutches due to severe gout, a crippling grapefruit sized swelling on my knee. SECRETS OF THE AUTHOR Creaking Door was a much needed creative outlet for me. What I find remarkable is that all of the characters are figments of my imagination. I’ve used names of friends and family but there are no discernible traits that tie fiction to fact. If there is anything in the story that reflects me, it is the geography. The western coast of Oahu has always been the side my friends and I would frequent. First and foremost, as any surfer will tell you, solitude is an important factor in choosing a surf spot, almost as important as wave quality, and the far reaches of the Waianae Coast provided both of these. The main characters learn to hunt as young men and develop into avid, seasoned hunters as their odyssey sojourns over the twenty or so years that the story runs. If you read the book, it may surprise you to learn that I personally have never hunted in my life. I’ve fished, caught literally hundreds of trout alone, often poaching more than my limit during late night illegal excursions, not because I needed the sustenance, but merely because of my addictive personality; once I took to fishing, I mastered it. I made my own rigs and devices that enabled me speed in dispatching fish. One must be ready when the school swims your way. I had readymade leaders ready to unspool off of homemade cutout cardboard squares. I could remove barbed treble hooks lodged deep in the fish’s belly in literally one second, then have the hook rebaited and recast in the blink of an eye. I could also make any lure dance and look like wounded prey. And this was just my mainland statistics. As a boy and young man in Hawaii, Mother Ocean’s weight and magnitude are an undeniable influence in the book. I was on a boat that caught a 1500 pound marlin. Its head was as big as a Buick. I had no idea what I wanted to write, to create. I harkened back to an old and trusted high school English teacher who made us free write every day for ten or fifteen minutes. I still have those writings kept chronologically in its original loose leaf three ring binder. And so I began typing, jotting down ideas, phrases that I thought sounded cool. I knew the beach and surfing would be prominent, and I also knew the leeward side of Oahu would be the main setting. I don’t know if all writers experience this, but this is what typically happens with me. I dawdle, kill time, elucidate, type, try a few lines, a few names, and a few concepts. And then somewhere in the jumble, the fingers just become super charged as if on methamphetamine ( I was a meth addict in my mid twenties for a few years here in California). And soon I am banging out words that are connective, events that are cohesive, characters that fit the needs of what I now envision happening. This momentum provides the sporadic impetus that fuels what I’ve commenced, and soon, a story takes root. It is sloppy, disjointed, unattractive even, but soon I do my own corrections and edits, and it becomes more legible, prettier even, and this spurs further content and inspiration, and eventually, over about seven or eight months in this case, my manuscript was ready for the pros to look over. In this case my publisher Ken and the editor he assigned me, Keith. ** I am a hot dog vendor. Not the kind at sporting events with a tray strapped around his or her neck yelling red hots! or hot dogs! loud enough to wake the dead. The stadium stair climbing looks aerobically beneficial but I’m sure my feet would be killing me at the end of each shift were that the case. No, I have a food cart, and I set up on a street corner and have condiments laid out on a counter. I am the guy stand up comedians have a field day over. I am the guy you drive by and think has failed in life to end up there. I am the guy most people think of as selling cheap, dirty food at rip off prices and who probably does not have a high school diploma. I am none of these. In fact, my story and circumstances will surprise you. I left a well paying job at Hewlett Packard in the late 80’s because corporate hi tech life was smothering me. I had a company car, an expense account, wore wing tips and a tie every day, and was as unhappy as a female Christian in Libya. At the time, HP was the most powerful company on the planet. Getting hired in itself was quite the major accomplishment. But I was miserable and hated my ineffectual brown nosing co workers. They called themselves go getters, which is really slang for assholes. Owning and operating a hot dog cart is like owning and operating a restaurant; the permits required are virtually the same. The insurance for brick and mortar eateries is very expensive, and they operate at about 23% margins. A hot dog cart’s is a whopping 65-70%. And as a cash business, you can claim as little or as much as you want every April. In that sense my job is very much like a book in that you simply cannot judge either by its cover. At HP, I had a list of clients and did field work for the company, so I was on the road 90% of the time. Understand this: I grew up on Oahu in the 60’s and 70’s, when there was still a lot of rurality, there was only one freeway, and even then it was fairly new. It took an hour to drive from one end of the island to the other, not quite two to encircle it (which we did on occasion. Remember when families took Sunday drives?), so we grew up never having to sit in a car for, on average, more than thirty minutes a stretch. Then of course my new HP job required me to navigate a system of endless junctioning freeways going in every segmented direction of the compass dealing with demanding people who looked upon me as the messiah who could magically bring their systems back up, awaiting my arrival with the staggering impatience and fervor of a company that is losing ungodly amounts of money until I can miraculously and sometimes mechanically cure their Hewlett Packard ills. Growing up in Hawaii, directions are easy. You are told to either head mauka (mountain) or makai (ocean). You never lost sight of either anywhere on the island so it’s all we needed. The simplest stuff is always the best. I had to pilot a bustling Silicon Valley well before the advent of GPS navigational systems. Long story short, I endured it, even got good at it, but eventually determined I would rather be free than well paid, independent and gleeful instead of structured and admired, a social butterfly rather than an entombed caterpillar. And so I found a job that had decent wages, allowed me to make my own hours, had no dress code, and afforded me ample time to do something I have always loved; READ! I finally spent time with my favorite writers and their cast of characters. Over the years as a food vendor I became very proficient at it and, during the dot com boom, was actually pulling in six figures annually just working my normal three hour lunch shift. My product was good, my brand even better, and I was eventually asked to work outside events. I’ve done several birthdays, two weddings, but the real kicker came when I investigated a rumor that working in the county parks could be lucrative. It required an entirely different set of permits. Two crossovers from the ten or so city permits required were the ubiquitous health and business permits. Once approved by the county, I applied for some of their special events and made a surprisingly rapid climb up their food chain. Soon, I became their favorite son. Head rangers began recommending me to other head rangers for their events, and soon I was working everyone’s busiest events; concerts and festival that garnished me triple my weekly earnings in two short hours. You read right, HOURS. The typical concerts were two hours; a few of their festivals ran all day. But there was an annual three hour long holiday festival that was absolute gold. The first time I worked it I went with my normal amount of inventory and my poor but industrious eleven year old niece. We ran out of product in an hour and were overwhelmed from the get go. The next year I tripled the product and brought my niece and three teen aged boys, her older brother and his besties. We kicked ass but again ran out of product. We had to sit around for an hour before they allowed the vendors to leave. The third and final time I worked this event, I showed up with a van full of my fine all beef hot dogs and a veritable bakery of buns. Again I sold out, but this time we made it to the very end of the shift. There was so much cash I had to fashion a small cardboard box with a slit to stuff the twenties into. My humble cash till overfloweth. That box, which was a little bigger than a shoebox, was stuffed to the gills and full of bills by the end of each night (it was a two day affair) There were a few hundreds, more than a few fifties, and so many twenties it literally took me about an hour to count them by hand. I could have used one of those automated bill counters like you see in drug kingpin movies. I should clarify and say it took an hour to count and re-count, because a good cash salesman always double checks his work. Still, if you can imagine taking that length of time to perform the simple act of counting money, then you know it MUST have been a lot. I will not divulge the actual amount, trade secrets and all, but it was enough to not have to work for maybe a year if I spent prudently. But of course I worked. Despite whatever preconceived notions you may have about that job, I gotta tell you I LOVED it! It wasn’t work; it was like hosting a luncheon party every day. It was so loose and free and fun that soon I began imbibing, after all, what’s a luncheon without cocktails? I did shots with customers. A good time was had by all. Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A rise, an apex, and a decline. I am on the back end of this gig as a lunch host. The very busy office park in which I’m situated, still teeming with a hungry labor force, is now besieged with food trucks that circumvent city laws by camping out on company property and stealing people who would otherwise seek me out as their lunch break destination. I find that writing a book, even a good one like mine, is very much different from what I’m used to. Ken told me it’s like selling hot dogs, you gotta hustle and sell it, sell yourself. But it has become apparent to me that reading literature is a dying pastime. Instead of books, everyone holds their device, the one that connects them to society and the world. Except for the chosen few, the special, opening up a book and allowing the author’s and your imagination to meld and create whatever the words are beholden to you may soon be obsolete. Fear not, man’s creative juice will never be denied and some other form will evolve to take its place. It is difficult, but we must embrace some but of course not all change. And so this new venture is not at all like my normal job. People HAVE to eat. Today’s populace, more than ever, CHOOSES to read or not. But one day, when technology advances and we use it to kill ourselves and our technology based worlds, the literate survivors will once again hold power. Every tribe, every society has always had three members who were esteemed above all others: their leaders, their healers, and their story tellers, for the latter are the ones who will be able to pass on their culture’s ways, secrets, and history, because without those things, that society ceases to exist. The world will move on and no one will ever know about a parallel super society that may have emerged and lived alongside the ancient Egyptians. Of course I have many many stories about my twenty years, as of now, as an esteemed hot dog vendor. Many colorful characters have graced my humble establishment. I’ve always had this knack for making people feel at ease and want to engage in my merriment. I tell raunchy jokes, am quick witted, and charitable with smiles and compliments. I also have the wordsmithing ability to turn these many adventures into a compelling book, but that of course is a matter for another time. And the women. That is an entire Britannica waiting to be told. I have photos to prove it, twenty years worth. I am famous for my homemade chili. There was a time when the area was inundated with a globally transient labor force, so I got to feed and know many citizens of the world. I have shipped my chili to places as close as Denver and as far as Amsterdam, Germany, India, China, and a few other countries that have seen my chili delivered upon request. It is flattering. So one day some old hippy holdover-looking guy with long, stringy gray hair and a goatee to match emerges from the long slopey sidewalk west of me. I forget how our first conversation went, but I do remember him asking me how I obtained my vocabulary, something no other customer has ever broached. And he liked my chili. I don’t remember my answer, or if I even had one, so caught off guard was I by that non-sequitered query. I’m sure customers appreciated my conversational skill but this was the first time I’d been asked about it schematically. He became a regular and visited many more times with his customary greeting: feed me. We got to know each other. I found things out about him in stages and over time. He was a writer. He played golf. Badly. His wife played golf as well, and far better than he. He was a publisher. He had his own publishing company. In today’s online world, who doesn’t? I thought to myself. Turns out it’s an established firm, brick and mortar, somewhere out west but outside of California with an impressive stable of eclectic and intellectual authors. He’s an engineer, CMOS I think. And he’s a liberal. He never pushed, but he kept telling me he believed I had a voice, publisher-speak for I believe you can write a book that can make us money. I dawdled, even had some short stories published many moons ago, was interested in his proposition but not yet ready to commit. In due course I actually submitted samples and writings for him and his murder of readers/critics to peruse, and these were all shot down. These samples truly were huge steaming piles of self indulgent crap. And of course I was still drinking. Two Decembers ago I was admitted to the hospital with congestive heart failure. For months I’d been experiencing symptoms. The problem was that I was lost in my ubiquitous alcoholic fog, and I suffered from two conditions with no known cure for years: asthma and gout. So the shortness of breath was attacked with extra doses of my nebulizer, and the gout was handled with the strongest anti-inflammatory medicines money could buy. And still I continued to drink. And confuse those symptoms as my normal crippling afflictions. A hole in my stomach lining was torn asunder. I felt like I was going to die on the night I finally went to the ER for the first time in that cycle of downward spiral. My vomit and stool were as black as squid ink, and I could not move two steps without feeling like I’d run a marathon with a mini fridge strapped to my back. I worked that day. My normal twenty minute shutdown took an hour and a half as I had to continually stop from an overpowering alien fatigue. So they stuck some fancy laser down my throat and cauterized the rupture. I was discharged sans that bothersome overpowering fatigue. Still I drank. I was in the hospital for three days for that particular malady. That was in the beginning of 2016. By August I was sick again, but trudged on, believing vicious bouts of crippling gout and severe asthma were all that were plaguing me. I’m a tough guy, so I worked through it. The big holiday festival at the big county park was coming up so I made plans to take full advantage of it. I hired a big crew, there were five of us. We killed it, but I had trouble keeping up with the nonstop lines of hungry and thirsty masses. I needed relief, something that’s never happened. This all happened in early December. After the festival I was wiped out and knew something was drastically wrong with me. I am unsure of the exact date, but it happened around December seventh, an easy date to remember, and that was the day I took my last drink. And it wasn’t because I was smart enough to quit, I was simply too sick to do it. My whole lower body was swollen now, not just my feet. By then, my shoes no longer fit and they looked grotesquely like two footballs, and I am NOT exaggerating. I should have taken a picture but of course I had other pressing matters. My sister drove me to the ER at about two in the morning. Bless her heart, she was exhausted and had just returned from one of her very frequent cross country trips. I had to be wheeled into the ER waiting room, saw that there were about forty people ahead of me, then sat back and prepared to die. Miraculously, I was soon wheeled into a side room and given an EKG. I’m no doctor or technician, but my chart had spikes that covered the entire realm, long zig zags stretched the gamut, from borderline to borderline, and I knew I was in trouble. I was wheeled back out into the fray and set myself up for, hopefully , a long night of waiting and not dying. But another miracle; my name was called shortly after the EKG and I was wheeled into the actual emergency room. They did a bunch of stuff to me, all of which proved unsuccessful, and all of this was the precursor to my five day stay in their ICU for CHF. I weighed an incredible 250 pounds at the time of admission. I wasn’t just retaining fluids, I was pooling Lake Michigan in my lower extremities. They gave me strong diuretics and I pissed out 25 pounds of fluids in three days. I left the hospital a week later at a svelte 218 pounds. But well before discharge, there were many unpleasant as well as pleasant moments, as every hospital stay is fraught with. There were light moments, but make no mistake, by and large I hope to NEVER have to repeat that experience again. While in an ER treatment room on that very first night, they tried several things to slow my heart down, one was a shot of something the doctor told me was going to make me feel like I was going to die. He looked me right in the eye and told me to be prepared for perhaps the most unpleasant feeling I’ll ever have. It was injected into me. It was so serious they had two doctors and four nurses bedside in case I needed a crash kit. Nothing happened, but even better, I felt absolutely nothing in the way of pain. When results from my blood test came back, yet another doctor again looked me sternly in the eye and said tell me about the alcohol. A doctor of East Indian descent was consulted and asked me about my alcohol use. I was candid, for what else could I be with death staring me in the face. He concluded rather cavalierly that I was undergoing alcohol withdrawal. I’d not had a drink for about a week at that point because, again, I was simply too sick to maintain my addiction. So they shot me up with another strong drug and again nothing happened and I felt nothing. Finally I was admitted, taken upstairs, and a team of cardiologists took over. Problem solved. This cardiologist still sees me, my next appointment is in two months as of this writing. One thing that stands out is that I could not poop for the first three days. Whether pharmaceuticals or my own psychology was involved I’ll never know. They tried many things to regulate my heart but nothing worked, and so it continued to race at 150 bpm. Combine that with the buildup of fecal matter fermenting in my colon and you have a very unpleasant feeling. And a man too sick to be cranky. On the third night I felt a slight twinge of bowel movement so had a nurse help me to the bathroom, which was ten feet away from my bed but it took us ten minutes to get there. I had about a dozen lines from various instruments and implements hooked up to me that could NOT be disconnected under any circumstance, even my shitty one. By the time I got there the urge was gone, so I sat on the pot for about five long, lonely minutes before I realized I was not going to unburden on this particular evening. There was a button next to the toilet for nurse’s assistance, and I pushed it forlornly. He came and we did the whole arduous journey again, but in reverse. Finally, the next evening I defecated. I will spare you the gory graphics but it was a very impressive amount. Three and a half days worth to be exact. The next day my family visited, and at my urging brought me the fresh fruit I so sorely craved. They brought me some Fuji apples, about three in those small sack nets. They were wonderful, a Godsend. I devoured two of them after they left and the effect was immediate. My bowels were not just moving, they became front loaders, bobcats, and bulldozers, the serious earth moving equipment. I screamed at my nurses to get me a bed pan because there was no way I was going to make it to the pot. They got it to me just in the nick of time, I could hold it no longer. Sadly, that thin, tiny bedpan was not big enough for the moment nor any match for my second coming. Skip this paragraph if you are queasy, the gory details cannot be sanitized with high prose. There was way too much shit for the flat little stainless steel port-a-potty. And it ended up mounding high over the rim, and despite my best efforts to hover, the stuff got all over my cheeks and onto the floor. I was not allowed to disconnect and take a shower, so I wiped myself off with wet towels and endured the impartial faraway stares of the janitorial crew working as if this kind of stuff happened every day. Perhaps it did, but not to me. It was humiliating, depressing, and I still was not cured. The procedure to regulate my fast beating heart had finally been scheduled for the next morning. It took that long for the blood thinners to reach therapeutic levels safe enough for the procedure. Apparently, the electrical current can potentially knock coagulated blood into a main channel, like my carotid, and induce a stroke. They were going to run a current through my chest, up to five times if needed. If that failed, it was on to the more invasive stuff. Everyone dreads going under the knife. Even just the electrical procedure I was to undergo terrified me. It was not risk free and I would be put under with anesthesia. The staff was wonderful but this was all going down at a county hospital. Statistically, my fears were well founded. The procedure worked, I was discharged after a night of observation but stayed on another day because I could not walk. Oh by the way, did I mention being gout ridden the entire time I was there? It’s a long story but the diuretics they gave me caused gout, but given my massive fluid retention, the lesser of two evils was chosen. My big fear, among many, was that it was a few days before Christmas and that I was going to be bed-ridden and hooked up to monitors in a cold, sterile room with an adjustable bed and a high mounted television with only ten channels, none of them good. Once out, I was confused, as most near-death self-evaluating patients are. But I stopped drinking. I was still too unhealthy for alcohol and combined with my fear of both dying and repeating that nasty hospital stay, I am proud to say I have been sober since; fourteen glorious alcohol free months as of this writing. Soon I began crafting a story, mostly because I could not work (doctor’s very strict orders), it was an ordeal and I was physically very weak, still am in fact. It changed me. A story developed. The pain was guiding my words and my creativity. It is feast or famine. Either I am typing blindly at the speed of light or I am sitting there wondering when an idea will come. But it came, and then I polished it, sent it to Ken, who assigned it to Keith, a man whom I found entirely engaging and motivated and really the perfect partner to finalize my story in the kind of luster needed for print. Keith is British and lives in Cypress. He has at least one home here in the states, New York I think, and perhaps another in Arizona as well. Keith and I worked tirelessly. Despite the fondness and closeness I’d developed for the old chap, I’ve never met him in person. Our engaging and warp speed collaborations were done exclusively over email. That in and of itself can be the genesis for yet another book. But it was his steady eye and verve that made my book the best possible story it was destined to become. I now see after the fact that the changes he insisted upon and that I fought tooth and nail to keep were the correct avenue. There was elation, frustration, and good natured ribbing. There was also a pretty big generational and cultural gap between our ideologies, but we managed to overcome them. He’s like a hundred years old while, in my mind, I am still a carefree island teenager looking for perfect waves to surf until sundown. A very big turning point for me came when, early on, Keith told me he believed in the book. Another great sign for me during editing was the big revelation, the plot twist in my story. Keith said he got so mad that he actually threw things off his desk. He’d spent so much time correcting my rookie mistakes that he thought I’d fucked up royally yet again by mixing up the characters. He soon came to see it was by design, and he later called it brilliant and ingenious (his words, not mine, including the anger based profanity). This veteran editor, seasoned and eagle eyed, was fooled by this small time hot dog vending recovering alcoholic. That’s when I knew I was onto something. Let’s take that something’s inertia and propagate the next chapter, or better yet, the next novel. I have stories to tell, but no man is an island. Help me get my stories out to those of you who want to read, who want to go on an adventure or two. Especially a Hawaiian one. Aloha! Alejo AL Melendez http://a.co/acZvnWB See more

Eloquence as well as great food...

My very compelling book.