The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  We spent a certain amount of time feeling sorry for ourselves, lying on cots lined up in our dank, dark quarters. Many of the boys were prideful, and many of the guests were rude. This was a bad equation from our point of view, because the customer was always right and the busboy was expendable and had to stuff it. We were teenagers barely out of adolescence, for whom summers had always meant freedom, and now we were tethered to two months’ hard labor.

  There was a most interesting and enigmatic character on the scene that summer named Morris Landsman. Born in Poland, he was the headwaiter and the undisputed boss of the dining room. On the other side of the kitchen door, the chef was in charge, but in the dining room, Moish, as he was called, commanded the waiters and busboys like a culinary Captain Queeg. Moish did his share of yelling, mostly about clearing the livestock, which was the name given to perishables like milk and butter, retrieved from the tables to live another day. He had an excellent, sardonic sense of humor, and while he occasionally sounded harsh and strident and impatient with the boys, many of whom were learning on the job, he was fair as long as you tried. Moish was not a student; he was a professional waiter who had survived the holocaust but seemed to barely survive the summer’s agita.

  In August, an improbable event occurred at the hotel involving Morris Landsman. A middle-aged couple checked in, with European accents and no children: Mr. and Mrs. Von Cherbourg. The husband was exceedingly handsome, with a full head of gray hair, and his wife looked like an older movie star. Moish met them at the casino bar, and the three engaged in ordinary conversation. Herr and Frau Von Cherbourg were natives of Hamburg, Germany, who were now living in New York. Then Moish recognized the gold pin in the new guest’s lapel. He had seen these pins many times in his postwar debriefing days for the U.S. occupation forces in Europe: They signified an honorable discharge from the Luftwaffe. Von Cherbourg was, it turned out, an ex–German fighter pilot. Why such a couple would check into a hotel in the Borscht Belt just fourteen years after the war is an interesting question.

  The guy took a liking to Moish, who spoke some German, but the headwaiter skillfully brushed him off, just short of rudeness. When some of the boys would kick around a soccer ball after breakfast outside the kitchen door, Herr Von Cherbourg would gesture from a distance for the ball to be kicked to him, to be included. Moish, about to kick the ball, would display a broad smile for the fellow while muttering profanities under his breath that we could hear but the German could not: “You cocksucker, find your own game, you piece of Nazi shit.” He would then kick it to someone else. This occurred practically on a daily basis, with the German gesturing “Hey, over here!” in two languages and then walking away rejected.

  The Von Cherbourgs had befriended a young Jewish couple with two children. Both couples were looking to buy vacation property in the area and planned to stay at the hotel at least three weeks. Von Cherbourg would intermittently ease off of his unrequited courtship of Morris Landsman, but after a day or so, he was back trying to get in on the boys’ soccer catch, but always at a respectful long distance. “Hey, here here!” he would shout, but no one would kick him the ball. Moish would dribble it awhile from his head to his knee and look tantalizingly in the direction of the Luftwaffe. “Kiss Hitler’s ass, you putz,” again said so that only we could hear, which was cause for some satisfied giggling. This soccer ritual, a sort of revenge for World War II on a playground, continued for the better part of the three-week stay. But despite the laughs, there was a sobering aspect to it as we watched Herr Von Cherbourg: none of us had ever seen a German officer in person before.

  Moish was an angel compared to the staff on the other side of the kitchen door. Nothing could have prepared the boys for the dark, amoral characters who worked in the kitchen. The chef was a Hungarian named Henry, a stocky balding man with tortoise-shell glasses and a sour countenance who had emigrated during the 1956 uprising in Hungary. He worked in Miami during the winter months and drove up from Florida to work at the Fieldston Hotel every summer. To be sure, Henry was far from a first-class chef, but earning seven hundred dollars a week in 1959 at a hotel that featured its food made him pretty important to the operation. The hotel owners fawned over him, desperate to keep him happy, though he grumbled incessantly behind their backs. Like everyone else in the kitchen, screaming was his specialty, especially “PICK UP!,” which he pronounced “PEEK OP!,” followed by a slew of Hungarian curse words.

  The other key people in the kitchen were the assistant chef, the baker, and the salad man. Henry’s assistant was an alcoholic Slav named Johnny, with a paucity of teeth and a wet-lipped Chesterfield perpetually dangling from his crooked mouth. It was repulsive to watch him working over food, with his ashes and his runny nose. He stood over six feet tall but weighed only about 135, giving him a dissipated, tubercular look. He had a hefty underarm odor straight out of 1943 Paris, and an assortment of obligatory tattoos covering his hairy forearms. The tattoos were snakes curling their way up from his wrists to his biceps, and their greenish color was fading. With a large knife in his hand, and a bone-chilling stare, he promptly got anyone’s attention. He was mean and fearless and probably crazy, and it was clear that Henry was afraid of him, just like the rest of us. It was said that upon receiving a complaint that a dish of mashed potatoes was cold, he heated it up, spit in it, and sent it back out to the dining room. Unfortunately, he was indispensable. What Johnny lacked as a cook he made up for in speed, which was at a premium in the job, and even semireliable help was difficult to find in the middle of the summer, ashes and mucus notwithstanding.

  The baker was a temperamental Romanian who pretended when convenient that he did not understand English. He had an odd sense of humor, as when he invited me to smell “something delicious” that I thought was a fresh pastry, and then he thrust a pan of pure ammonia under my nose. As I coughed and gagged, he laughed hysterically; it was the only time I ever saw him enjoy anything.

  The salad man was a Taiwanese named Chen with an assistant called Lee. They gambled heavily at cards, craps, and harness racing at Monticello Raceway, and they yelled the loudest of anyone in the kitchen, albeit in Cantonese. God knows what they were calling us. They had an excellent grasp of English words that were useful to their everyday lives: words relevant to salads and gambling. They could say “lettuce,” “tomato,” “I raise you,” and “six is your point” like Oxford scholars, but they couldn’t carry on a conversation outside of those subjects.

  The rest of the kitchen workers—the unskilled lower echelon, like the dishwashers and the pot washer—were pickups and drifters from everywhere, who would gravitate to the Sullivan County resort area for work. For a bunch of sheltered college boys, these people represented the authentic underside of society best known to us from literature or strolling through the Bowery. For the most part, folks like us had never interacted with folks like them. Nevertheless, we were largely the children of liberal New Yorkers, readers of the New York Post back when it was ennobled, full of Eleanor Roosevelt and John Steinbeck; so it was natural for us to ascribe to these misanthropic strangers a fair amount of that good old “dignity of man” we’d read so much about. Spending a summer with them, however, tended to confirm that there are bad and good among all classes of people, and the experience pushed our progressive political beliefs to their absolute limit.

  We all liked the mildly retarded pot washer named Guy, who was big and gentle and central casting for Lenny in Of Mice and Men. There was a sweetness, an earnestness, about him. Pot washing is the most difficult and least desirable physical task in the kitchen, and it suited the man to a T. Always eager to please, he would scrub the huge soiled pots compulsively until they shone. For him, no job in the world was more important, and Picasso himself could not have derived more satisfaction from a work well completed, than Guy did from a well-cleaned pot. Such, I suppose, is one blessing of simplicity of mind. The downside was that his colleagues, knowing his docility and lack of guile, mistreated, cheated, and sco
rned him.

  The key dynamic in the frenzied kitchen was that everyone hated everyone else. When they weren’t hurling multilingual invective, they were saving their most vituperative stuff for the waiters and busboys—especially the busboys. Neither the chef nor his colleagues ever memorized the waiters’ or busboys’ names, so they would habitually refer to us by screaming what our order was: “Hey, tuna salad, pick up already! You, too, pickled herring!” If the retort was not to their liking, they would surge into a rage. “Hey, don’t gimme no lip, tuna salad, you asshole! That goes for you, too, potato pancakes! I kick your ass, too! Hey, tuna salad, tell your friend pickled herring I kick his ass, too!—PEEK OP!”

  This was how it went for eight hours. Every day. When the Fieldston was operating at full capacity, we didn’t have enough time between breakfast and lunch to go back to the hovel where we slept, so we would gather outside the kitchen door, exchange complaints, and smoke. A few Israeli and European boys, along with Moish, might kick a soccer ball, though it beats me how they had the energy. Some of the Americans would play catch with a Spaulding rubber ball. I had never appreciated such simple things as fresh air and relative quiet, a wonderful relief from the torrid kitchen. It was also the zenith of my love affair with tobacco, a death grip that I have continued to battle for the rest of my life. The cigarette with morning coffee was great, and the cigarette after eating was splendid. But nothing compared to that first inhale after three hours of sweaty, breakfast madness, stinking of smoked fish and spilled milk. Though many of the dishes prepared in the kitchen were delicious, the aggregate odor was not: a commercial-kitchen stench of food, garbage, disinfectant, and sweating human bodies. I have never eaten in a restaurant since without thinking of it.

  About twenty of us slept in an ancient wooden building that we called the Waldorf, not much more than a large shack, which also housed the hotel casino above. The creaky structure was built on a hill, so we lived and slept underneath the casino. The rooms had few windows, a communal toilet, and smelled of mildew and old mattresses, as befitting a cellar. Above us, there were calisthenics, Simon Says, and dancing several times a week with live music provided by the house band called the Fieldston Four. The combo was led by an accordionist who was a third-year NYU dental student named Herbert Schwam. He was the prototype that would come to prominence thirty years later in Revenge of the Nerds. The sound of two hundred klutzes doing the cha-cha on a dry, groaning wooden floor reverberated through our humble rooms and shook our beds until eleven P.M. So we, who were exhausted after a long day of kitchen and dining room abuse, could not even expect proper repose at night. We were expected to be in the dining room for breakfast no later than six-fifteen A.M. (the tables having been set after the evening meal) or we were denied our own breakfast. Most of us didn’t have much of a morning appetite and preferred to sleep. The guests could stroll in from seven to ten, which made for a less hectic meal but also a time-consuming marathon. The food was the thing here, the selling point, the star. It was an all-you-can-eat jubilee. Can’t make up your mind between pickled herring, scrambled eggs, pancakes, blueberries with sour cream, or lox with cream cheese? No problem, have all five.

  Lunch and dinner for the hotel patrons, arguably the two most important events of the day, were heralded with a loudspeaker announcement from the owner’s sister-in-law. She had a thick Brooklyn brogue that she attempted to enhance with a pompous affectation in the form of a bad British accent. She spoke slowly and deliberately, with all the dignity she could muster, like a Jewish duchess of York, but Flatbush came through loud and clear: “Yaw attention, please, ladies and gentlemen. The doining room is now open, and dinnah is soived.” On the words “your attention, please,” the veritable stampede of guests would commence. Many of these hungry people would congregate near the dining room doors, salivating. After all, it had been a full two hours since breakfast. The five-hour fast between lunch and dinner was difficult for many, so the small hotel coffee shop did a tremendous business in late-afternoon snacks.

  The staff ate lunch and dinner at our stations, forty-five minutes before the doors opened. These meals consisted of the leftovers from the previous day or days, and the selections were limited. We were forbidden any expensive cuts of meat or the wonderful European pastries, which made us covet them all the more, so that stealing food and consuming it surreptitiously became the order of the day. I can recall eyeing a half-eaten steak on a plate I was clearing, going through the swinging doors of the kitchen, finding a secluded spot, and devouring it like a feral dog. Or seeing two honor students arguing over a lamb chop in true Dickensian spirit. One could detect bits of meat or pie or gravy on the mouths of dining room staff who had sneaked a quick bite and returned to work, attempting to conceal the chewing. A busboy named Charlie Abrams, a Boston University prelaw student, was wearing sunglasses to hide a minor case of pinkeye. He had evidently scarfed an entire slice of Boston cream pie in one quick bite, because his sunglass lenses were covered in whipped cream. Temporarily blinded, he crashed into a tray stand filled with aluminum meal covers, which collapsed and jangled for what seemed like five minutes, just like a vaudeville joke. He got off without serious consequences because he looked so stupid that none of us could stop laughing. Even the mysterious Moish got a kick out of it.

  Thus for a salary of twenty-five dollars and a three-dollar tip per week per head, we, whose mothers might scrimp on anything but food, suffered these indignities like ragamuffin children of 1850 London. Only subsequent history would tell if these travails would be in any way beneficial to the boys, but at that time “a good learning experience” was the furthest thing from our minds. Besides food, money, sleep, and bullshit sessions, the other major pursuit of the collegiate staff was sex, though this pursuit was often an exercise in futility. We had at this stage of our lives varying degrees of experience in such matters, the busboys less than the waiters. The scuttlebutt was rife with stories of summers past, of lusty girls who went all the way, and a few of their mothers, too. This raised the expectations considerably in early July, with lots of optimistic bravado. But after weeks of life in the real world, of girls too young and girls too old and girls too good and girls who paid not the slightest attention to me, the summer was waning, and those stories of Catskill sexual conquests seemed like bitter pipe-dream fantasies. I was, as usual, left to my own devices on my prison cot at night. There were visions of the women I’d seen that day in the dining room, or half clad at the pool, dancing in my head like sugarplums but out of my reach. Then something happened to shake up the routine and drudgery and the sexual doldrums. Some delicious gossip: word of a notorious woman checking in for her annual stay at the hotel. How much of what I heard is true and accurate, I cannot say. But from the moment she arrived, rumors crackled through the staff like an electrical storm, and this is what I heard.

  “Diamond Lil” was the staff nickname (no one dared use it to address her) given to a Miss Dora Pincus. She was an unmarried career woman (that was what they called it then) in her fifties, with a penchant for expensive jewelry, who had booked a three-week reservation at the hotel every summer for ten years straight. She took the only two-room suite the place had to offer, tipped all personnel generously from a fistful of bills, ran up a tab equivalent to a family of ten, and was the most important guest of the season from the management perspective. Word was she could have afforded Paris or Newport but chose a small hotel in the Catskills, apparently choosing to be a big fish in an extremely small pond.

  An excellent dancer, she had a special affinity for doing the cha-cha with the young men of the staff, picking out one or two each summer, and lavishing gifts on them. She bought a few ties for our handsome master of ceremonies with the nice tenor voice, Paul Sorvino, but he backed away as charmingly as he could from any further involvement. Lil was given to sexy, strapless mule shoes, and summer dresses that carefully accentuated her excellent legs and breasts, while attempting to hide a fairly wide load on the hips and buttocks. Th
e quid pro quo in her annual summer adventure was that the particular waiter or musician or busboy would be obligated to be an attentive lover. She would be discreet in front of people, not wanting to cross the middle-class sensibilities of the hotel clientele by appearing to be a cradle-snatcher. No hand holding or stolen kisses. In the daytime she was Dora Pincus, middle-class straight.

  Lil was a dyed redhead with high-fashion clothes and a Cadillac convertible who, through the years, had no trouble turning the head of one aroused Oedipal college boy or another. But this summer she was having a problem finding the increasingly elusive gigolo-in-training. According to a few hotel waiters who had seen her over the years, she was never a beauty to begin with, but over the winter, her aging process had evidently taken a geometric leap, and she had metamorphosed from a vivacious middle-aged woman into an old lady. The situation had become so serious that Lil, feigning the flu, let it be known that she was contemplating checking out of the hotel after only five days. This was bad news to management, who proceeded to shower her with attention and free limousines to the Monticello shops and the racetrack, not to mention a hundred-dollar bill to bet with. But it wasn’t limousines or cash that Lil needed. It was the high hard one from some delectable young man that she craved. It was a little sad to see her tickling the chin of some college sophomore sitting at the bar, to no avail, though the staff had a few cruel giggles.