Love Me Back (10 page)

There are two other piano men who work for The Restaurant, Ted and Ed. He knows Ted, who subbed for him at Valentino’s and plays Pearl Jam and Prince covers at the height of service when he thinks no one will notice. Marie notices, Jimmy respects her for noticing even when she is so busy it takes everything to not fuck up. She notices and reports that Ted and Ed are nothing. She says Some of the other servers don’t even know who’s Ted and who’s Ed. Ted has his gimmicks and Ed his Delilah bullshit, she says. You’re not a radio show and you’re not background, you’re a musician. This is how they started talking at first, when Marie was new. Chef didn’t like it when the servers stood with their backs to the dining room so she’d step up onto the dais next to him and look out at the guests, standing properly with her hands behind her straight back, in the ready meerkat posture Chef approved. He played whole concerts for her between requests. There was a Bud Powell night and a Chick Corea night and a Hank Jones night. After a few months he started quizzing her. When she swooped by with four steaks up her arm she’d say Ray Charles or Nat Cole as she passed. More often than not she was right. He didn’t register surprise at this, only delight. He had a two-note laugh that bounced like a rimshot and cracked him into talking about her like she was a racehorse, She’s a winner, ladies and gentlemen! Look at her go! Jimmy would you put all your money on me for the next one, she’d say. You betcha, sister, you betcha, I got one comin at ya, try this on, he’d say. He ran through everything he knew of jazz, R&B, blues, and Broadway before he started in on his classical repertoire,
which wasn’t a great soundtrack for The Restaurant so he meted it out slowly.

You’re not gonna collect much hiding the tip jar under the lid like that, Chopin, she’d said once, and gone to move it out where people could see it. It was a snifter from the bar that lived on the far end of the soundboard. Ted and Ed would take it from its place there and put it up on top by the music stand, level with their heads—you looked at them, you’d see the glass there. Ed even put a twenty-dollar bill in it each night to make it look like somebody already appreciated him. But Jimmy stopped her from moving it. No, no, he said, serious, don’t. I’m just playing for you.

She rolled her eyes at that but he meant it, a little. He never would take money from people, would act like he was unable to lift his fingers from the keys to receive it but they would set it on the music stand anyway; sometimes Hank Earl gave him nothing for Cielito Lindo, sometimes a tenner he’d stuff in the snifter with a Thankee, Billy, thankee. Once he stiff-legged it up to the dais, a man who knew his size to be potentially lethal if he stumbled and corrected that with slower movements rather than less drink. He had his glass of chardonnay in one hand and set it on the edge of the piano top by the music stand. Though it wasn’t Jimmy’s piano he didn’t need to see it treated like that, it was enough that the full-size quilted cover had been misplaced or stolen and the keys, especially in the oppressive mug of the summer months, had a film of filmy kitchen air on them. He was playing some Nina Simone right then, Mississippi Goddam, and he cut down to just that frenetic train-ride bass line so he could pick up the glass with his right hand, saying Yes sir
what can I do you for, Mr. Jackson? to Hank Earl, who said Nothing nothing I just want—just here—give you some—preciate you you know—while he steadied himself against the piano to pull his money clip from inside his jacket and then tried to dislodge some bills from it. The bills looked new and stuck together and to save face he decided to make it appear as though he had always intended to give the piano man all of them and he dropped the entire clip in the snifter. There that’s for you, that’s for you, you’re the best, tell me your name again? It’s Jimmy! Jimmy LaRosa! But I can’t take that, don’t give me your money, I play for the music, the music and you, they already pay me! Take it back! he yelled over the music and Chef’s call for Hands! And Somebody get me Art! and the expo’s order to dale gas a la treinta y cinco and the ever-ascending elevator of sound, the heavy machine parts of three eight-hundred-degree broilers and the popping of four fryers and forty clattering pans and pots and bowls and six clicking-airlock slamming walk-in doors and a couple of microwave timer bells and hundreds of Saturday-night conversations all trying to make the restaurant go, go, get to a good time. Nah, nah! said Hank Earl, reaching for the glass of chardonnay Jimmy was holding suspended in air like a single-use flashbulb. Just as he found the stem of the glass, just as he was feeling up the stem like a blind man, like alcohol had risen six feet three inches in his body to leave only his forehead dry, a tide coming in to wash away sight, just as he was getting a better grip on the bowl of the glass before he could shift his weight back upright, a busser knocked a plate off the service station and the ceramic shattered on the kitchen’s tile floor and Hank Earl’s sixty-six-year-old hand
jerked away from him like a dead chicken and sloshed the chardonnay onto Jimmy’s lapel. Jimmy kept playing with his left, had never quit playing, even knew where he was in the unplayed vocal (Tennessee). Whoa sir! he said, You okay there? and that’s when Marie came out of the dishroom with a stack of clean salad bowls and set them down in the first wrong place on the dessert line to come over and take the glass from Jimmy and lead the big man back to his booth, holding the tablecloth out of the way while he sat down. She returned with a linen and dabbed Jimmy’s lapel and soaked up the pool of wine that had collected in the depression of the leather piano bench against Jimmy’s thigh. The track lights in the kitchen prismed off all the stainless steel behind him, twinkling the three fake diamond solitaires in Marie’s left ear. No one ever had reason to be that close to him while he played. Jimmy had taken up Nina’s melody right when the glass had been removed from his hand and now Marie said This is a show tune but the show hasn’t been written for it yet, right Jimmy? What a fucking clown that guy! I’m sorry! Don’t worry about it, sweetheart, he said, don’t worry about it.

Part Two

Suck It

Suck it is Danny’s favorite phrase, which he employs as a general greeting. Sometimes he inflects it as a question: Suck it? Directed at a female, it might often be appended: Suck it, sista. This is only for staff members, of course; our patrons will more likely get an egregiously enthusiastic What’s up, my brother? accompanied by a handshake/backslap combination. (If you’re one of his friends you might receive a more sincere What’s up, my fucking brother?) Egregious enthusiasm is Danny’s trademark—he can transmit his buzz and momentum to anyone at will. This is called charisma. His charisma—any charisma, I suppose—is entirely performance, yet in being never more nor less than a performer he somehow remains endearingly genuine. He might embrace a beautiful woman, kiss her on both cheeks, escort her to the bar—What do you like, sister, what do you want? Cosmo? Martini? Chardonnay? Tequila? Tongue kiss? That’s what I thought—Ethan, get my lover here a glass of Mer Soleil, thank you brother—Good to see
you, love—and as soon as he spins around to answer your question mutter Dirty whore, suck it.

Almost every question must be brought to Danny, because it’s his restaurant. These people want a booth instead of a table, ask Danny. You want Friday off this week, ask Danny. The guy said his steak looked more medium than rare and he wants a different one, better check with Danny. Music’s too loud, lights are too low, the room’s too cold, tell Danny. You want to go to Silver City, ask Danny—he’s king there and she’ll fuck you for real in a back room at his word. You want tickets to the game or an eight o’clock reservation at Tei Tei, which doesn’t take eight o’clocks—Danny will work it out for you. You need a bump, ask Danny—but not until after service, he never starts till almost everybody’s out of the building.

Most nights he gets it from the undocumented Mexican and Salvadoran bussers and dishwashers. The Mexicans are usually from Guanajuato, some from Yucatán—the Yucas have a reputation for being lazy, the Guanajuatans for being easygoing and hardworking. Sometimes on his day off Danny comes up to the restaurant, ostensibly to check on us and grace the regulars with his presence like a politician, but he’s also there to pick something up. He’ll say to me Pablo working? Get me sixty? and I’ll say Okay boss. I pick up a stack of dirty plates and silverware and head into the dish room, where I unload them and then hold up three fingers for only Pablo, who is polishing Bordeaux glasses, to see. He nods with his eyes. A few minutes later I’ll come back to wash my hands or run some stock out to the line and he’ll discreetly slip me a tiny square package, three twenty-bags
wrapped up tight in a piece of paper towel. I’ll wait for Danny to come find me, or sometimes he’ll ask me to put it under a Le Volte bottle. The Le Volte is a Chianti in the uppermost corner of the French/Italian wine bin wall; I’m too short to reach it, so I have to climb up on a chair without being seen. If he pays me I pass the three twenty-dollar bills along to Pablo—back in the spring he used to ask me to front it for him and bring it to him somewhere, like the W or the alley behind the Fitz. I rarely have money I don’t need to spend immediately on something or other, so sometimes I had to borrow from someone else to get it for him. The first few times he gave me extra cash when he paid me back, which I think was supposed to seal me into the whole thing, but since I quit using I’ve just been asking the bussers for it. They know it’s for him, and somehow he knows I don’t want to front it anymore, so he settles up with them when he’s back in the restaurant. I hate this arrangement, because I’m both too timid and too interested in protecting my income to beg off, and the bussers are barely making a living as it is. They live in one-bedroom apartments with five other people and share broken-down cars and every one of them has a morning job in a different restaurant.

Lately they’ve been coming down harder on me. There’s something wrong with Pablo’s eyes; he has kind of a flat face, like you see in the pictures of fetal alcohol syndrome victims, and his pupils are strange. The top half of each is a cloudy blue, and the bottom half is an opaque dark, so when he stares at me and says Tellen, tellen Danny que necesita pagar, tellen Danny he pay, okay? Ten. Diez. I feel disarmed by his aberrant, unreadable gaze. He tells me in Spanish,
then in English; then he holds up how many fingers to make sure I get it.

My friend Calvin says they’re going to start cutting it worse for him, that even though he’s their boss they won’t tolerate it. We agree that he makes too much money to do it like this, that if he wants it he should just pay for it. Either give me the cash or get right with them straightaway.

Suck it is his favorite, but not by much—we joke that he has Tourette’s syndrome, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. He might be looking over the seating chart for the night, trying to puzzle out how he can possibly fit another six-top in at seven thirty, and run through a litany like Suck it shit fuck cock ’n’ balls shit fuck fuck fuck fuck suck it. He might hang up the phone after sweetly giving a stranger detailed directions and declare Filthy cunt whore suck my cock may I help you?

Every night he makes snap public-relations decisions with a ferocity that is unquestionable and an accuracy that is never less than dead-on. He is a fast-talking Italian fox from the Bronx who can get his way with anyone, can make any Mur feel like a VIP, and thus has been the general manager of a multimillion-dollar-grossing fine-dining steakhouse since he was twenty-four.

(
Mur
is a term that denotes any individual “we don’t know.” A Mur is just a regular customer, no one deserving of special treatment. This fairly benign significance is the standard, though it might also be used more pejoratively, to indicate that the individual is a nobody, a chump, a tool—all of which in turn signify primarily an absence of wealth.
Example: Honey-love, see those Murs hangin out in the fuckin doorway over there? Would you please take them in to twenty fucking seven. I once inquired about the etymology of Mur, and Danny said that he and his buddy, who is the general manager at our sister restaurant Il Castello, used to know a guy named Murray when they were kids growing up in the Bronx. Murray was a social misfit, soft or naive in some unforgivable way that inspired them to refer to any such person as a Murray, and later simply a Mur.)

But Danny is blowing his crystalline mind four square inches of shittily cut cocaine at a time, night after night. The urgency in his voice when he calls up the restaurant on his days off to ask me to get it for him—well, last night all he said was Four. Now.