21 November 2005 | Vol. 5, No. 3
Darryl's 1890
Long before theme restaurants became a blight upon the land, before House of Blues and Planet Hollywood, even before the Hard Rock, there was in my hometown an eatery built of gray wood and deep red eaves that sat where Garrett Road crosses highway 15-501: Darryl's 1890 Restaurant & Bar. The interior was downright crepuscular, but that just added to the coziness and mystery, and for years it was considered the place to snuggle with a honey or celebrate after a ballgame or have your first legal drink. The antiques on the wall were real, not reproductions like you see in chain joints these days. In fact, even the seating was antique: scarred tables from long-demolished hotels and diners, railcar berths, an old-timey elevator.
Oh yeah. The old-timey elevator. What I wouldn't give to see that again.
I bussed tables there for six long months in 1981. The Reagan assassination attempt and alligator shirts and Smurfs and me prepping the salad bar, clearing dishes, topping off water glasses. I worked there because I got kicked out of college after one lousy semester and had to prove I could be responsible. I got kicked out because I was all the time thinking about a girl. Margot was never thinking about me, though, and that's what broke my heart.
What a crew we were, me, a love-wrecked college failure, and three others. There was this guy Begly, who we called Piranha, not because he was small and vicious but because he had a jaw so underslung it looked like an open cash register drawer. Every day for six months I had to resist the urge to reach over and push it shut. Cedric, powderkegs in his biceps and calves and a short-fuse dislike of white folks. He'd just finished three years in the Marines—it was that or marry one of the girls he'd gotten pregnant, and Parris Island looked better than matrimony at the time. He had applications at a cool dozen police departments, said he was just waiting until one came through. And last, Toking Thomas, son of our best cook, Mama Bliss. If Thomas worked a day without a hit or nine off a fat blunt I'll cheerfully read the collected works of Harold Robbins.
Morning setup was my favorite time. Pull the chairs off the tables, lay out the condiment cradles, run a carpet sweeper over any crumbs missed by the night crew. Usually it was just me in the dimly lit volumes of space, the red flocked wallpaper and sconces, the subway car that had room for sixteen diners, the spiral staircase that led to a second level, to the antique elevator.
That elevator booth was the site of our first date, my first ever, back in the fall of 1979. I had Margot by three and a third years but it was no contest in all the ways that count where love is concerned: I was a flyweight to her Ali.
I'd get the jukebox key, make my selections, and hurry through setup so that when "Use Ta Be My Girl" came on I was finished and sitting in the elevator. Those warm tones and smooth "shoop shoops" would fall from the O'Jays' lips and I'd sit there staring at the hurricane lantern that illuminated us that night, awash in quiet lamentation, wondering how I screwed up with her, what happened, and why I seemed constitutionally unable to recover and move on. Every morning at the restaurant during setup there I'd be, lost in the worst excesses of morose thought, so tangled in my recent past that I got caught several times by one of the managers and dressed down. And since I needed a written testimonial from one of them on the subject of my work ethic and all around can-do attitude, I had to eat their shit with a spoon.
Funny, about that night. I sat across from her, taking mental snapshots for the express purpose of future remembrance, but never, during those mornings I gathered wool and listened to the O'Jays before the restaurant opened, could I conjure more than fleeting impressions: her hair tucked around one ear, a pearl gleaming in its lobe; the way her eyes gathered the candlelight and tossed it sparkling through the air. And though I still can't recall the name of her perfume, my nose has always been able to identify the way it combined with her soap to portend groaning sighs, moisture, and tumescence. A hint of anything remotely similar and I get short of breath and my cock snaps to attention, even today.
Cedric eventually warmed up, got to where he said the sight of me didn't make him want to beat hell out of my ofay ass. I said that was mighty white of him and he warned me not to let it go to my head because he could always reconsider. We reached this happy state one morning when I overheard him singing "Here's To You" and joined in. He stopped, looked at me as if I'd pissed in the salad bar, and asked in his delicate way, "The fuck does a white boy know about Skyy?"
I shot back that he shouldn't judge a book by its cover and then we settled in to talk about Zapp, Fatback, Instant Funk, the shows we'd been to, and by the time we'd skated away an hour on the clock, Cedric and I were as tight as an angry young black man and a confused young white guy were ever going to get.
"Come on, Saltine, get your sorry ass out that elevator and help me bust these lettuces."
Cedric called me that because I'd become his favorite cracker and I let him because it wasn't bad as nicknames go. I'd been dreaming my usual dream of love regained, as well as a new dream—or plan, really, a scheme—of how to make enough money to buy a hellacious new skateboard. The money I made bussing tables, per my dad's orders, disappeared into an account for when I returned to school, so anything extra had to come from elsewhere. I take this now as a sign of the heart's resilience: even in the midst of soul-crushing despair I still made time for the comparatively frivolous.
The triple-wide, triple-deep sinks were full of frigid water and bobbing lettuce heads. We stood side by side, fishing out icebergs, slamming them against the stainless steel sink to loosen the marrow, ripping them into shreds, seizing another, our hands frozen after one or two submersions. As with everything in my life at the time, I related this somehow to my ex. This was exactly the sort of work Margot never had to do, child of private schools that she was, and never would do. Never, I had to admit, because no way would she settle for anything so menial: even in junior high she'd done things like intern with a television station so she could study the reporters and anchors and camera guys. Me at the same age, I was cutting grass at five bucks a pop. Grunt work.
"Damn, bwah, going to let me do this whole bag by myself?" Cedric glared at me.
Nine disemboweled lettuces over by Cedric's sink to my three. Couldn't even make a proper go of grunt work anymore, so I mumbled an apology and picked up the pace. We worked for a few minutes and then he asked how come I was every morning camped out in the elevator listening to the O'Jays. He was sharp, and since keeping it bottled up had so far only got me kicked out of school, I spilled. His face, by the end, wish I'd taken a picture of it: textbook disbelief.
"You fuck her?" he asked, grabbing for another iceberg.
I thought about lying, but figured he'd see through it, then thought to tell him she was underage, but for Cedric that'd be a lame excuse at best—if she was old enough to ask for it, as indeed she had, she was old enough to take the consequences. So I ventured an unadorned "No," trying to drown out the shameful syllable with a series of vegetable whomps against the sink.
"Eat her out? Tell me you at least ate her out."
"Once." But no way could I admit to Cedric how magical it had been: the way she stretched herself along her bed, one knee propped up and flung to the side, the intoxicating smell and how that furry crease took on such a plush slipperiness under my tongue. The involute beauty of it as she unfurled before me. He'd only laugh at such rhapsodizing. And it was pitiful, really, to be still under her spell half a year after getting dumped.
"Well, that's something at least." He stopped mauling lettuce and shook his head. "But damn if you ain't the saddest cracker-ass motherfucker I ever saw. How in the hell can any man let himself get beat down so low by pussy he never fucked?"
I assumed it was a rhetorical question and suggested we get started on the god damn onions. But he was right. How in the hell? A question that plagued me for years.
I'd worked there just over a month when Begly told me about this sales gig called Amway, said I could make big dough like him and his girlfriend if I joined. I almost asked what the hell was he still bussing tables for if the money was so big, but didn't want to be rude. He kept it up, day after day, until I said sure, I'd go to one of the meetings, figuring I could at least sell enough crap to buy my skateboard.
I should've known better. As a salesman, I'd always stunk: sold the least amount of candy in junior high for new football uniforms, gathered the fewest pledges for CROP walks, collected paltry sums for UNICEF. Just couldn't do the necessary sucking up, the bowing and unctuous scraping that came natural to good salespeople.
Begly, his girlfriend Lisa, and I went to the "convention space" of the Holiday Inn downtown—a depressing room the color of crusty vanilla pudding, filled with styrofoam coffee cups and people who spent more than they could afford so as to look like extras on Dallas. Some guy started evangelizing about diamonds and double diamonds but I lost the thread. The people were more interesting: rapt faces like you'd see in church, and I realized this was nothing but a religion of money. I began having second thoughts, but the desire for a bitching skateboard, Tony Alva design rolling on some cool green Snakes, was greater. If I could just sell enough of their cleaning products, that baby would be mine. Amazing, now that I look back on it, how focused I could be on such a simple goal when the rest of my life was in shambles. I signed up, shelled out money for a starter kit, already planning my first sale: to Mrs. Troy, Margot's mom.
In retrospect, not such a great idea. Begly told me I'd have better luck if I put on a coat and tie when calling on people, said folks respected the authority of your words more if you threw a little style at them, and again I ignored my gut, which knew, in a way my brain seemed to have forgotten, that I feel like a hypocrite when I put a noose around my neck and pretend I'm a suit. I was taking off early from work, and was knotting my tie in the bathroom when Cedric came in to take a leak. He shook his head but held his tongue until I couldn't stand it.
"Some of this shit really works," I said, brandishing a jar of stain remover from my kit. Then, abandoning rationalization in the face of his bemused pissing: "I need some extra cash."
He flushed and leaned against the privacy panel. "Take control of your life, then. First you let this cock-teasing bitch break you down, now you going to join that asshole Begly's get-rich-quick plan. 'Stead of pushing this crap—" dismissive flourish at my kit "—fucking sell off a couple these antiqu