For 40 years on Venice Beach, Jody Maroni's Sausage Kindgdom has been 'the home of the haut dog.' Now Venice has changed so much and the beachside institution has decided to shut down.
So here’s the thing about life: You think you’re going to make all these choices. And sure, you make some. But some also get made for you.
Maybe the name Jordan Monkarsh doesn’t ring a bell for you? How about the alter ego he made up, the often brash, sometimes ribald Jody Maroni who built an empire out of Jody Maroni’s Sausage Kingdom, “the home of the haut dog,” the little business he launched by the beach?On Sunday, I went to say goodbye to Jody Maroni’s, which is closing shop after 40 years.
Jody Maroni’s sausages went to Dodger Stadium. You could watch the Padres in San Diego while eating them. You could buy Jody Maroni’s sausages at Trader Joe’s or Costco and heat them at home. He did a lot of things for laughs, like posing with sausage links wrapped around his head and neck and shoulders a la Peter O’Toole in full headdress as Lawrence of Arabia.
Back in L.A. in 1979, he found in his travels what at first he saw as a temporary way to make some money. Inspired by the street food he’d seen elsewhere, he got someone to build a makeshift cart with a grill and piled on the Italian sausages he knew how to make and rolls he bought — and set up shop selling sausage sandwiches on the Venice boardwalk, in front of a little two-story Ocean Walk apartment building that his parents recently had bought.The sausages sold fast.
And in this free-form corner of the world, the introverted bookish boy and the extroverted sausage salesman melded into one. Which part is more real now? “After 40 years, it’s hard to say,” Monkarsh told me on Sunday, as barefoot drifters and homeless people and longtime friends and neighbors lined up for his food.
Anyway, he still has a lot of non-sausage dreams to fulfill. He wants to travel again. He hopes to lie on a beach or two and read. He plans to stop just yelling at his TV and “be like Don Quixote,” going wherever the progressive group Swing Left tells him he has the best shot to help try to defeat President Trump in 2020.
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