By CLAY MERCER

There is only one place in the world to get a pool room hotdog and that’s at The Pool Room. You can have your Ball Park Franks and your bratwursts and your sausage dogs and your Coney Island dogs, but as for me and my family, we will have Pool Room Hotdogs.

The Pool Room stands as a temple to indigestion and entertainment. The pathway to enlightenment lies through the secret passages of steamed skinless hotdogs, mysterious chili, Irish stew/chili combos, and, the holy grail of hotdogs, The Scrambled Dog -- often imitated but never duplicated.

I know that there are other ‘hot dog stands’ out there. PBS did a whole show on hot dog stands but the closest they came to Cordele was the Varsity in Atlanta. If you prefer the hotdogs from the Varsity over the Pool Room hotdogs, go ahead and flip over to the funny pages and see what Dilbert and Snoopy are up to because it just gets worse from here.

For years I stood in line at the window and bought my hotdogs with the other lesser mortals that weren’t allowed inside the temple. It was there that I began learning the mantras and responses of initiates.

For instance, standing in line indicates that you want a hotdog. The only question is how many hotdogs you want. Hotdogs ‘all the way’ come with mustard and ketchup, already mixed together, onions, and chili. If you don’t want your hotdogs ‘all the way’, then you need to specify what you want them ‘without.’

I remember the first time I got up enough nerve to go inside The Pool Room for lunch. I immediately got busted when I got home because, of course, I smelled like The Pool Room. I didn’t figure that out until much later in life, but it didn’t stop me from going inside for my food.

Going inside was something of a rite of passage for kids my age in those days. The guys behind the counter had a reputation, unwarranted, as it turned out, for selling beer to minors. My friend Johnny “Bones” Watson and I made a number of determined efforts to order ‘two all the way and a draft’ but it never worked. We tried the ‘nonchalant’ approach, the ‘insolent’ approach, the ‘what the heck, I’m here anyway’ approach but nothing ever worked.

That old dude behind the counter met every request with the same response. “Gonna have to see an ID on that beer, boys.”

Oops. “How about a coke, then? I left my ID at home.”

Twenty years later, Bones was passing through and stopped to visit. We were on the way to town for lunch when we agreed that The Pool Room was where we both wanted to eat. We walked by the same window, through the same door, sat at the same stools at the same counter, and ordered, in unison, “Two all the way and a draft, please.”

That same old dude behind the counter looked us over and said, “Gonna have to see an ID on that beer, boys.”

Who says time travel is impossible?