Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  4

  IN JUNE 1982, I GRADUATED FROM ALTERNATIVE HIGH SCHOOL, BAREFOOT and in an ankle-length white gauze dress that I’d shoplifted from a store in town. Even though the school was only two miles from our house, I was enrolled as a boarder because there would be consistent adult supervision, regular meals, and “structure.” I’d sort of skipped some of ninth grade and some of twelfth grade at that school where, at the time, you could substitute sports credits for science credits and theater credits for history credits, and where my English credits were strong enough to stand in for all the others. “Life experience” and “individual character” were also taken into consideration, and after my interview with the heads of the school, I was allowed to graduate at sixteen. I moved to New York City the day after the ceremony with $235 in graduation checks that friends of my parents had sent me. Both of my parents came to the ceremony and struggled with the awkwardness of having to pretend to be perfectly comfortable seeing each other, while I flitted away as often as possible to have ultra-jaded, ultra-sarcastic huddles with my teenage friends until the whole thing was over, and everybody left campus and I went and packed up my dorm room. It took four roundtrips on the Hunterdon Bus Line, its underbelly stuffed each time with my bags and the odd wicker hamper full of miscellany, while I rode inside with a desk lamp on my lap. I also had a huge jar of change that I kept in the apartment I moved into in Hell’s Kitchen with my older sister, Melissa, who was away for the summer, and I lived off that change for the first three months. The apartment had a cockroach infestation of such magnificent proportions that I have never ever encountered the like since. They even scattered, by the dozen, from the bed when you pulled back the covers.

  The little grimy apartment was on Twenty-ninth Street and Tenth Avenue directly across from the Morgan General Mail Facility, where all of the city’s correspondence passed, and one block south of the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, with its constant reciprocation of traffic—commercial and domestic—between New Jersey and New York.

  Some of the astonishingly underdressed hookers who worked the tunnel would hang out on my stoop, in good weather, and have egg-on-a-roll sandwiches from the Terminal Food Shop Deli downstairs. I did not know about egg-on-a-roll sandwiches. They didn’t exist where I grew up. For ninety cents you got a griddled buttered roll, split in half, into which the deli man set a fried egg, a slice of cheddar cheese, and a couple of strips of bacon. With a sweet and light deli coffee in a blue cup designed with the Acropolis on it, and that sandwich, I started each day of my first summer in New York City.

  “Iassou, Dimitri,” I said each morning to the owner, proud of my ability to pronounce his name correctly and to speak a few words in Greek. Everyone called him Jimmy, which is how he introduced himself, but I’d been to Greece and wanted to show him how clever I was. Whether he was charmed or annoyed, I could never tell because he had that utterly Greek way of being friendly to everyone.

  “Iassou, Gabriellaki.” He smiled every morning and sometimes tsked and raised his very bushy black eyebrows as a way of refusing my ninety cents, which I had nervously counted out from the dwindling jar upstairs. It must not have taken him very long to notice that I never once pulled out a crisp five-dollar bill to pay for my breakfast, but always arrived, instead, with a stack of dimes.

  Delis were still run by Greeks then, not Koreans, and they were not the twenty-four-hour salad bar affairs they are today. You could get a can of ground Café Bustelo, cat food, toilet paper, cigarettes, and a turkey sandwich but that was it. There was no Annie’s sesame-ginger salad dressing and precut packages of watermelon on ice. No fake crab leg sushi rolls. No vegan cookies or wasabi peas. The corner deli was a carefully edited experience in those days. Egg on a roll and coffee were the measure of a good deli, and a good deli man.

  I took my foil-wrapped sandwich and the Times and sat with the ladies on my stoop, counting the Nina’s in the Hirschfeld while feigning total nonchalance regarding the elaborate production going on around me involving Charisse, and the laying out of a single baby wipe on the step before placing her totally naked ass on it.

  My jar of change was running low. I bought rotten and bruised fruit from the little stand on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, which was kept in a separate bin and sold for only nineteen cents a pound. The fruit was easily salvaged with a paring knife—with a quick bit of work, you could remove the offending, unsellable bit of brown—which the few West Indian women and I who bought this waste often exclaimed about, with great pride.

  “Look at these plums! These are perfectly good plums!” we shrilled, willfully ignoring the large brown bruises at the tops.

  I stole fistfuls of ketchup packets from all the McDonalds on Eighth Avenue and I’d make pasta “sauce” with it. The Village Voice advertised bars that held happy hours with free hot hors d’oeuvres. After walking around all day from job interview to job interview, saving myself the subway fare by walking, I would make my way to them for dinner, from five to seven pm. With my purchase of two beers for five dollars, I would eat my two little plastic plates of complimentary—and to my frame of mind, utterly delicious—buffalo wings, which had just become “the new thing” in culinary New York City, and then walk as many blocks home as I was far from it.

  I lived on canned sardines cheaply bought at the grocery store for thirty-five cents each.

  I had strategically sworn off the habit of shoplifting, because I had this naive idea that in New York City, I would be sent immediately to women’s prison if I got caught. I’d heard stories, exaggerated and magnified just as you’d imagine, back in Lambertville, that quite convinced me to not shoplift.

  I pounded the pavement, instead, looking for a job. Because I didn’t know my way around New York and because I didn’t know what I was doing, I pounded it a little harder than was necessary. I ushered two nights of a performance way downtown for twenty-five dollars and saw Kate Valk naked on stage. I stood on the corner of Thirty-third and Sixth and handed out fliers. I sold something brand-new called FrozFruit from a cart in Central Park during a No Nukes free concert. With my earnings I bought a dime bag at a bodega that had about three dusty candy bars in its case behind the bulletproof glass through which you passed your money and back through which they handed you the weed. The same friend of my sister’s who had told me you could do this—buy pot at the store!—also introduced me to his “slug” dealer, a guy who sold little brown packets of fifty copper slugs that got you through the subway turnstile, at half the price of a real token.

  On my way back home to Twenty-ninth Street from an interview at a Spanish restaurant on Fourteenth Street that I had read about in the Voice that morning, I casually wandered into a bar with a revolving door on Thirteenth Street. It’s only now, in the retelling, that I realize I was lost, walking south and east, away from home rather than toward it.

  The Lone Star Café had a giant iguana on the roof, looking down over Fifth Avenue. It was dark inside, with the glare of midday crushing in through the few windows the place had. There was a tall guy with a well-groomed glossy brown beard in denim and cowboy boots with a beer gut standing at the entrance talking to a young woman in a high ponytail, which swung around dramatically as she performed her portion of the conversation.

  “I just have have have have to take it,” she was saying, as I entered and stood slightly stunned at the door while my eyes adjusted. He looked pissed. Shifting his French-fry gut back and forth, arms crossed over his chest, he set his lips tight and said nothing.

  “Okay, Donny, I’m sorry but …” she singsonged, untying her apron and kind of scooting away.

  And there I was, in the right place at the right time, a warm body, sixteen years old about to lie to be twenty-one, and he hired me on the spot.

  He looked at me standing there still disoriented both from the change of light and from quickly trying to understand what was happening before me. Was this a waitress quitting right this very minute?

  He sai
d, “What do you want?”

  I said, “Hello, I am looking for some work as a waitress …” and he cut me off by barking, “What’s wrong with your eyes? Why are they so red?”

  This was decidedly not Johnny Francis letting me—kindly and gently—lie my innocent thirteen-year-old lies. This was no pleasant sunny interview by the canal with ducks. But I mustered myself and said, “There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. What? Do you think I’m stoned or something?”

  And he actually smiled, and his face turned into a good-looking warm face, and he was pleased with my comeback, and he gave me the job of waitress, the job I’d tried to bluff my way into three years before unsuccessfully.

  Suddenly, I was in a navy blue Lone Star Café T-shirt with white lettering, a short denim skirt, and cowboy boots.

  My first few weeks had been entirely wholesome and uneventful, working the practically dead lunch shift, with this beautiful, friendly, seasoned waitress named Lori who taught me how to use a credit card machine, how to write an order on a dupe pad, how to check out my paperwork at the end of my shift, and how to tip Billy, the daytime bartender, the required 15 percent of my daily tips. Hardly anyone ate lunch at the Lone Star Café—it was a nightclub after all—but there were a few businesses around and not many other options, so we served chili and chili burgers and beer, slowly and easily, all afternoon to the few who did join us. When I tipped out Billy my 15 percent, it was not more than ten bucks. I left it at the service end of the bar, calling, “This is for your help, Billy. Thank you,” as Lori had taught me. Not even a year had passed from the time I was still in high school plays, and so I said my line to Billy the same stiff way I said my lines, in tenth grade, in Hedda Gabler. And Billy waved from the middle of the bar where he was talking with an early happy-hour customer, “Thanks, hon!”

  In the fall, I started my very first semester of college a few blocks away at NYU. I told Donny that I needed to switch to nights. And somehow he was persuaded. He handed me off to the night manager, Buddy.

  It was incredibly loud, crowded, smoky, and great fun at the Lone Star. It was the original urban cowboy joint in New York at a time when urban cowboy was really hitting. Wall Street was off the hook, and young white traders from Goldman with not-thin stacks of hundred-dollar bills in their pockets would pile into the place while their black stretchies idled outside, waiting to take them to the Odeon later for steak frites and Cristalle as a nightcap.

  I clocked in for my first night shift just after Labor Day. There were six women over thirty in the locker room, spraying their hair, squirting Visine, and chatting easily, though I thought somewhat frantically, with each other. Not one of them said hello to me. Up on the floor, I worked my station as best as I was able, but with the aisles packed with guys screaming their conversations at each other and dancing and the live music and the tower of amps vibrating on either side of the stage, it was a whole new game compared to anything I’d played at lunch, where the loudest thing had been fifteen minutes of sound check. I made my way through the crowd by tapping people on the leg with my foot, while carrying a large and very full tray of long-necks over my head, high up in the air. Not unlike the way we had drilled at basketball practice—sweaty teenage girls with ponytails—just one spring ago.

  The cocktail waitresses ran a cash-and-carry business. We bought the drinks from the bar ourselves, and then we sold them to the customer at the table and collected his money on the spot, making change if needed, from our own cash in our apron pockets. Sometimes the bartenders would be so busy that we just left our dupes there in a slot with everything we needed written down in funny code: arrows for “up” drinks and x’s for drinks on the rocks, and when we came back in a few minutes our tray of drinks would be ready and our ticket rung up. In the mayhem of the place, I had sometimes received drinks I’d asked for but forgotten to write down and which the bartender had forgotten to ring up. When I found time later during my shift, I hailed the bartender, who oozed irritability, and squared up, as Lori at lunch had taught me.

  I was the early girl out my first night. I don’t remember the band, I don’t remember how I made it out the revolving door, I just remember proudly handing Chris the bartender my tip-out—a whopping twenty-five bucks, unlike anything I’d done by day, and saying thanks.

  He picked it up like it was covered in wet mucus and sneered at me, “What the fuck is this?”

  I had never been spoken to like this.

  “My tip-out.”

  “Twenty-five fucking bucks is your tip-out?” he spat, with a kind of sybillant “s” as he had a space between his two front teeth. His eyes were hard to see under the brim of his baseball cap, so to me he seemed like a dangerous raccoon.

  I was electric with fear, with his unapologetic aggression. He seemed to have not one qualm about generating conflict with another human being.

  “I made one hundred and forty bucks, that’s my fifteen percent, what’s wrong? What do you want?”

  “I want you to learn how to work your fucking tables.” He shouted and turned away and walked down the bar, his back lit by glowing liquor bottles like that black-pawed critter who has just ripped apart your garbage and now waddles off into the hedges, silhouetted by the little mushroom cap lights that line the driveway.

  I turned seventeen during my waitress shift at the Lone Star Café, high on coke. And I made a big show of it. It made me feel something, something like bad and good, to run to the restroom in pairs, giggling with one of my new waitress friends, while patrons watched. I felt, somehow, as if I were sending a coded signal to potential admirers if I made an oh-so-casual point of wiping the little trickle of coke-laced snot from my upper lip and then licking my finger so as not to lose that last shot of tongue-numbing tingle.

  We were partial to an after-hours club called the Zodiac, which I’m embarrassed to say that in spite of having been there dozens of times, I couldn’t find today. Possibly it was in Soho, as I recall we always made a point to walk to Houston to get a cab home. I remember, with a kind of powdery nausea settling over me, coming out of it often and seeing droves of children coming home from school. Jake, the dealer, sat in a booth at the Zodiac and sold coke by the line. You slid into the banquette across from him, he cut out the line, you paid, snorted, and then vacated the seat after a soft and unpleasant handshake.

  Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” was a constant pick on the jukebox and the last time I walked out of that place, late summer 1983, it blared out the doors as I pushed them open and, wincing from the daylight, hailed a checkered cab, one of the last of a dwindling fleet. In that spacious backseat with so much room for your luggage and the round low stools for extra passengers, I lay down and thought, “Does anyone know where I am?” and rolled whichever way Tenth Avenue bumped me.

  Obviously, I had learned how to work my fucking tables. Everybody was working their fucking tables, I soon learned. The girl at the door was selling tickets for the show while keeping half the “sales” for herself. The waitresses were not getting lost in the mayhem and accidentally not writing down drinks on their dupes and the bartenders were not supplying those unrecorded drinks unwittingly. They were in business together. I too, learned to sell them at the table, to keep the cash from the sale of a drink that didn’t, on paper, exist, and to share that profit with the bartender, through tipping.

  The tip-out at the end of a night when the waitress has pocketed seven hundred bucks is obviously a little more appealing than when the stupid sixteen-year-old lunch waitress hands over a “fucking” twenty. Chris and I had become, tentatively, friends. He slipped me an occasional shot of Cuervo for myself and only once spiked it with Tabasco.

  There was a bartender upstairs, at the bar that serviced all the tables on the balcony with great views of the stage, who was rumored to have his own cash register, which he’d bring in zippered up in his duffel bag, set up under the counter behind the bar, and ring up drinks all night long that never made it into the company till. I nev
er saw this, but the rumor was persistent and sworn to more emphatically the more I dismissed it as urban lore.

  Even the coat-check girls were on the take. They invented a two-dollar fee for checking your coat and then were tipped as well for the pleasure. I was now cutting most of my classes at school but becoming friends with everybody at work. I, too, was frantically chatting away in the dressing room with Tooney and Duggan and Auntie Mary, the ninety-pound Englishwoman at least forty-five years old who kept right up with the coke and the job and the short denim skirts. Laura, an unexpectedly Upper East Side type of girl who kept her hair in a short pixie cut and wore penny loafers, had become an especially good friend. She always doubted her ability, after a certain point in the evening, to keep track of things, so she had the habit of bundling up her cash in hundred-dollar increments, rubber banding it, and putting it in the waistband of her stockings throughout the night so she wasn’t walking around with half a grand in twenties bunched up in her denim apron pocket.

  There was so much money being passed around at that place—legitimately and otherwise—that the owners had all of us bonded. We all went through a long, paperwork-filled process by which they insured themselves against theft.

  Lloyd, the Jamaican night porter who drank warm milk with Guinness stout and a few drops of honey, had a whole substantial second income derived from doing our closing sidework, for which we tipped him lavishly. The sooner we got out of work, the sooner we could get to the bar at 1 Fifth, or the Zodiac, or a place on Tenth Avenue called Chelsea Commons, which would let us in after hours and lock the door with us happily inside because someone knew the bartender.

  I never made it to the end of my first semester. I couldn’t get to morning classes after what I’d done the night before. I dropped out. My dad, whose impeccably performed complaint to all of his friends at the time was that his kids only ever called when they needed money, was bone-ificently relieved to be sprung from the balance of the tuition he carried after my student loans and aid package covered what they could. I paid my mother’s electric and phone bills that year, while she puzzled out how to be an independent, financially solvent divorced woman in blue jeans for the first time in her life. I gave her a wide berth. When Jeffrey had been questioned about the liberty he was taking by helping himself to a couple of eggs out of her fridge the morning after the long drive up to Vermont in his truck filled with her things retrieved from the split, furthermore making some derisive comment about our dad’s inconsistent and inadequate support checks, I decided to just send the electric bill money and to avoid the fraught visits to her home. She mishandled a lot of things in those first years, but nothing more so than her evident inability to shield us from her significant fury at my father. I bought a stereo and got a Macy’s credit card. I flew to Aspen and went skiing. I took home more than ninety thousand dollars that year and spent most of it on drugs.