E-Mail This Article to a Friend The little cart that could (continued)

In 1996, Littlefield finally scored the spot on Lansdowne Street after two and a half years of working through the management layers of the parking-garage company that owns the spot. He used it during Red Sox home games and to catch the club crowd stumbling home. Around that time, he also commissioned a business logo from an artist friend. The result was a priapic emblem that capitalized on his product’s suggestive shape: a buxom Bettie Page look-alike, clad in a red bikini and high heels, straddling an airborne rocket. Though some criticized the image as sexist, Littlefield slapped the new Sausage Guy symbol on T-shirts, baseball hats, bumper stickers, and his cart. Admittedly, it’s caused him some problems: because of the logo, New England Patriot Adam Vinatieri pulled out of a Sausage Guy calendar at the last minute back in 2001, and Littlefield says some customers won’t come into Salsa’s because they see the rocket-riding sexpot on his van parked outside the restaurant. But he doesn’t get as much guff for it "as you would think. It goes in spurts," he says, no pun intended. "It’s just a logo."

And the branding worked. Littlefield distinguished himself from the street-vendor masses and created a marketable brand in the process. Red Sox fans adored him, lining up around the block and chanting his name. Before the other street vendors were kicked off Yawkey Way last year, the Sausage Guy was the only one on Lansdowne. He used his meaty earnings to buy — and then sell — a pizza joint, Three Clovers, and then to buy Salsa’s, a purchase he considers his best business decision. "Salsa’s was a real business decision, whereas the Sausage Guy was about survival and instinct," Littlefield explains. He appeared on Phantom Gourmet. He became a fixture of the Herald’s "Inside Track." He put out two celebrity calendars, featuring the likes of comedian Lenny Clarke, Ruthie from The Real World: Hawaii, and Jasper White.

"David was building that Sausage Guy brand way, way, way before that became such a cool term in business," points out Andelman, who dressed up as the Sausage Guy for Halloween last year. "But he doesn’t use that word ‘brand.’ That’s part of his appeal, too. He says, ‘Here’s how I’m going to build the Sausage Guy; here’s what would be good for the Sausage Guy; 30,000 bumper stickers for Sausage Guy.’ He’s not a marketing guy who comes in and goes, ‘Here’s what I want to do with a brand.’ That is what he’s talking about, but he doesn’t talk about it that way. It’s amazing, he really should teach a seminar at Harvard Business School on the building of a brand with no budget. It’s incredible."

"Dave is larger than life," says chef/owner Jasper White, who recently added Littlefield’s sausages to the menu at his Summer Shack restaurants. "He put a face and a name to a product that everybody loves."

THE Sausage Guy has ballooned into an entity far bigger than its founder: a product line, a catering company, and a local personality. He’s even become a political pawn. During the 2002 gubernatorial election, Mitt Romney scheduled one of his "Work Days" — publicity stunts in which he collected trash and rode tractors to show that he understood the working class — at Littlefield’s cart (though he didn’t wear a Sausage Guy shirt). "That was so funny," Littlefield says, cracking up at mention of the governor. "I’m here in my office one day and I get a call from the Romney campaign. They’re like, ‘We want Romney to come out and work the cart.’ I’m like, ‘What?!? I gotta call you back — I’m a Democrat over here in South Boston. I gotta make some phone calls.’ I hung up on him. I’m like, can I really do this?" Littlefield eventually agreed to the stunt. "To [Romney’s] credit, he did work with me for an hour and a half, two hours. But I went to a fundraiser for [Shannon] O’Brien soon thereafter, and I became a political football."

While Littlefield remains his company’s congenial mascot — an illustrated caricature of him appears on his dollar-off sausage coupons — he doesn’t spend nearly as much time at the cart as he once did. Since the early days, he’s gotten married, started a family. "One of my goals is to keep the Sausage Guy as cool as I can," he says, "so that when [my kids are] in school, they’re not embarrassed."

These days, Littlefield has a part-time staff of eight Sausage Guys, along with a few young, tanned, cooing women to pass out fliers, collect cash, and sometimes squirt condiments on men’s meat. ("This is the happiest tube steak in the city," said one bald, tattooed Sox fan on a recent Wednesday evening, after getting mustard assistance from one such woman.) But people still love him. Last year, a California Marine e-mailed Littlefield a snapshot of himself in Iraq, posed beside a Sausage Guy bumper sticker slapped over a defaced mural of Saddam Hussein. A framed copy of the picture hangs in Littlefield’s office.

Fans still keep an eye out for the original Sausage Guy at Red Sox home games, where he claims he can be found on weekend evenings and occasionally during the week. "For a while, I actually had a cardboard cutout of myself because the guys working were getting so much hell. People kept being like, ‘You’re not the Sausage Guy! Where is he?’ "

Now munching on a taco, Littlefield tries to explain his popularity. "The little cart that could, I call it. I think that’s part of the charm of it. An American-dream type of thing. After all, I started in the food business with a sausage cart." And Littlefield won’t stop there. He has his sights set on a small Sausage Guy restaurant because, he says, "it’s time for the guy to have an indoor home."

"He’s a metaphor for all those guys out there, it’s not just him," says Jasper White. "He’s smart enough to realize that. And that’s what makes a person a good businessman.

"What else can you say," he adds, "about a sausage guy?"

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com