by Yoram Kaniuk
Next day somebody lent us a car, we left on our honeymoon, we heard police sirens, we pulled over. They dragged us out of the car. They were rough. They wouldn’t listen to us. They shoved us against the car and handcuffed us and Miranda tried to raise her head and they pushed her back against the hood. They switched off the engine. They began firing questions at us in harsh voices. Now and again they roughed me up a bit more and laughed and laughed again. I started shouting that she was the daughter of one of Time magazine’s editors and they didn’t listen, and in the end they shouted into their radio, or at us, or at the pines along that beautiful road, and the officer with them came over and said, Time magazine? What’s the name? I told him. He asked who died yesterday. I said we’d been married yesterday. More shouting: If it’s Time magazine then who died yesterday? We didn’t know. In the end, their hands got tired, they were worn out from shouting and they radioed to someplace and from there they contacted Miranda’s father and we were released without explanation. Take off, they said, and we did. We called Miranda’s father who said that, yes, Ed Cerf, a dear friend of his had died. He had committed suicide on the morning of our wedding and Miranda’s father hadn’t wanted to spoil Miranda’s day.
And around then a photographer named Bezalel turned up. He wanted to work in New York. I found another painting of mine at a friend’s who didn’t want it any longer and I sold it to a stubborn collector who believed I’d go back to painting and with the money I bought a Hasselblad camera. We rented a studio on Fourteenth Street. We decorated it. As I knew nothing about photography we decided that I’d be the second cameraman and artistic director and he’d be the photographer. We made phone calls all over. Two or three people came along to see our portfolios, somebody commissioned a photograph for a Manischewitz wine ad. We did a publicity photograph for a hernia truss. A heavily bearded Jew asked for a nice poster of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s maxims. A girl came along who wanted to get—cheap—a model portfolio. There were a few more customers, but there was no real money in it. Expenses were high. I dreamed of an artistic and commercial photography studio, I wrote letters, but zilch. Then Miranda’s father wanted a piece on the architectural standards of New England. He said that there were basically a limited number of building archetypes. He wanted to do an article for Life. We were given an advance and off we went, Miranda, Bezalel, and me. Two or three weeks in New England. It was June. The trees were in full leaf. The air was heady and astonishing. We drove through Massachusetts along side roads until we came to typical-looking wooden buildings and Bezalel photographed them. We reached a small town in New Hampshire. We stopped at a diner. We had lamb chops and people in hats and checked shirts came in and said hi to everyone and sat down. Somebody came over and talked to us. Another played an Eddie Fisher record on the jukebox and a hundred-year-old waitress danced with a man who had arrived on a green John Deere tractor and asked us amiably what we were looking for and said maybe he could help us. We told him. Leave your car here, he said, and come with me. He brought over a pickup truck with huge wheels and we drove along dirt roads and passed farms and silos until we reached a line of hills and a long avenue of margosa trees that ended in a kind of flower-bedecked crater: an old cemetery and a winding road that went up a hill. Facing us, on the green hill divided by a line of oaks, we saw a secluded house. We stood about seventy yards from this beautiful, classical building and the man yelled and a tall pale man in a rumpled suit came out. Our man had brought a flashlight and he took it out now. He flashed a signal at the man in the doorway and the man on the hill returned the signal with a flashlight of his own. They communicated in this way for about ten minutes. Our guy said that the man had said we could come up and take photographs but had asked us not to talk to him. I asked why and he said that the guy’s name was Stanley Webb and once he’d been driving too fast in his car and had seen two children and he’d yelled to them to get out of the way and they’d panicked and run in the wrong direction and he’d tried to stop but he ran them down and killed them and it had happened twenty years ago and since then he hadn’t spoken to anyone and didn’t want to hear anyone speak. We went into the house and without a word he offered us fruit juice. The house was empty of pictures and there were antique furnishings and a mahogany staircase and we took photographs from every angle and tried to say thank you and the man pointed to the wall on which was written: “Love! Go!” We went back to town and stayed at a motel and then continued through that land of rivers and forests and isolated houses and small old towns in which nothing had changed in centuries except for power lines and TV antennas. We enjoyed the simple monotonous New England food. Butter that was almost red. Cheese from heifers and cream that you could stick a spoon into and the spoon would stand upright, and sharp Cheddar cheese, and we saw deer, and at night we saw foxes and we drove to Vermont and then Maine along the coastline dotted with bays and fishing boats and my friend took photographs, I found the houses, Miranda knew exactly what her father was looking for, we did a catalogue of New England’s wooden houses. We were invited to stay at farmhouses and we found small hotels near colleges with huge gardens, wooden buildings everywhere, white and a few yellow ones too. Porches. Varicolored roofs.
We went back to New York and found that Sandy and Steve had disappeared. I’d tried to find Gandy in Vermont but without success. Avi Shoes had vanished and so had Mira. Oved had gone to Los Angeles with Carole to get married and travel for forty years between Mexico, Los Angeles, Guatemala, Honduras, what was later called Belize that I once visited before it became Belize, and even Peru. Hanoch had gone back to Israel. There was no money. I wrote a new version of the book that wasn’t to be, Hughie and the Dog, and I ran into Jerry Tallmer who invited me to a small party and I met a lawyer there who was representing somebody who’d opened a restaurant and bar and was looking for a bartender and I said I’d worked for a year in the Cellar and I had experience and he didn’t ask if I was a certified bartender but his mother was an devoted Zionist and next day I was introduced to one of the two owners who was one of the last people around who really believed in Israel and Israelis and he took me on to work the bar on Madison Avenue, and I started work as though I really knew all about it. For a few days at home I’d studied books on how to make drinks and when I got there they wondered how I knew so much, and I said I was a pro and after a few days of experience that I came through with flying colors thanks entirely to luck, I went to take the test to get my bartending license, and found myself facing four Irishmen. They were sitting with their hands folded on their vast bellies and said, Kid, make a martini. I was surprised, because I’d got myself ready for all the usual crazy crap, all the weird names like “Moscow Mule.” But one of the Irishmen, who barely spoke at all—the rest didn’t say a single word, with what appeared to be moral fortitude—asked, Has the young gentleman ever been to Paris? Yes, I replied. Paris, France? Yes. Does Paris, France have the most important restaurants in the world? Yes. And who prepares the food? Chefs. And how do they test a chef there? I didn’t know. The Irishman said, You were in Paris and you don’t know? I’m sorry, I said, but no. He said, They don’t test them on all the dishes you can learn from books. They test them on an omelet. If you can make a good omelet, with soul, you’ll be a good chef. Now mix a martini. I mixed a martini. They said I had an innate talent and embraced me and gave me a license to be a professional bartender in the City of New York in the State of New York in the United States of America. I went back to the restaurant and apparently I knew how to mix a superior martini. There were two of us, me behind the bar and Big Charles in the kitchen.
He was very black and thought about me for two days and finally came to the conclusion that I was a real crook and a man after his own heart. He said he’d learned to cook in the navy. He said he’d served on an aircraft carrier as the assistant cook’s assistant. The chief cook had taken ill. The assistant was drunk and there were hundreds of hungry sailors, they were at sea and trying out new anti-aircraft guns, and he was
told that there was no alternative and he’d have to do it and he should just work out of the ship’s cookbook. So what was for dinner on Tuesdays? He read: One thousand ounces of red meat. Two thousand onions. A barrel of cooking oil. Five hundred ounces of peas. Make gravy with the roast meat. With his assistants he peeled one thousand five hundred potatoes. He took fifty bottles of gravy with the picture of the naked woman on them, mixed it in with the meat, and then read: Add a pinch of salt. Five hundred sailors and two hundred technicians and another hundred and fifty men sat down. The pilots ate in their own mess. The officers in theirs. And they ate hundreds of pounds of well-cooked food with one pinch of salt for everybody. It was almost the end of Big Charles. But he had magical hands and was a quick study and he began cooking from his soul, where a good cook keeps his food, and he was forgiven and after the Korean War he came home and wanted to work in a restaurant and he had certificates but he was black and how could a black cook white food, and he met the restaurant’s two owners, one a wannabe author and the other a wannabe politician, and they hired him and now everybody knew where to find the best hamburgers in town. From the word go he knew I was the sucker he’d been waiting for and maybe I’d passed a test but you also have to know something about a pinch of salt. For the price of a shot of bourbon or Kentucky sour mash he would teach me how to mix every cocktail in the world. The customer would order something, I’d lean over toward Big Charles, he’d tell me what and how and I’d serve the drink and give Big Charles a shot of bourbon.
In the kitchen next to the bar there was a huge stove. On it was an enormous iron skillet and underneath some knobs that Big Charles had invented and installed. On the left-hand side the heat was slightly lower than in the middle or on the right, where the heat was fierce, and Charles twiddled the knobs like an artist, raising and lowering the heat and at any given moment about a dozen steaks were sizzling simultaneously in varying stages of broiling. Charles spread his wonderful sauce all over and caressed fifteen hamburgers with a brush dipped in egg white and he’d have ten omelets going too. He’d shove bacon over the low flame and at his side was a metal basket he filled with chipped potatoes frying over a low flame, and he bent over and looked at them and refilled and his sauce was top secret and he guarded it with his life. He’d spread his spices by touch and knew each of the hamburgers and steaks and bacon strips by their size. They all danced to his baton, leaping, landing, that one’s thin, that’s well done, that’s medium, that’s rare, each one needed its own time, its own treatment, a fried filet steak needed to get this much time while being flipped over and over and hamburgers without cheese needed to get that much time, and if cheese was needed he’d add it, and everything happened at the same time, the potatoes hissing quietly, he was focused, smiling as he worked, he loved every hamburger he cooked and each perfect omelet and every steak and they all came out just right. Big Charles had a real craving for beauty, he noticed if a hamburger was changing shape and he’d flatten it, straighten it, add more egg white, move it left of right, he danced his creations around like a puppeteer maneuvers his creations and he’d produce broiled and fried masterpieces. He knows every order personally, said Verity the beautiful waitress, he remembers every detail, and sometimes he’d throw a steak up into the air and before it came down would flip a frying egg to get a perfect over easy. One of his greatest talents was making triangular omelets. There was no chef like him in town. As the meats danced he’d fold an omelet into a perfect equilateral triangle and study it, correct it, while the rest of his children jumped and sizzled. He didn’t look as if he was working. He smiled his lovely smile, give me a recipe for a cocktail, quickly gulp his drink, his shirt and apron as white as the driven snow. He looked like the conductor of an orchestra whose musicians were constantly changing, and he went on conducting, orchestra after orchestra, with the greatest respect for each and every member. I called him the Toscanini of the grill. And the best waitress we had was Pat Bosworth who was a professional and worked with total seriousness though sometimes joined our table when we sat drinking after closing time. She was an actress who’d recently played a leading role on Broadway, the show had closed, she had to make a living so she became a waitress. Together with her twin sister Kate she’d been in a movie, A Stolen Life, in which she played Bette Davis…unless I have that backward. She later wrote biographies of Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. It was a surprise to me that such an important actress was willing to wait on tables, because in Israel such a thing would have been unthinkable. One night we were particularly busy. We both worked very hard. There were college students trying to impress their girlfriends with their knowledge of drinks and they’d gotten some dazzling, long-forgotten cocktail names from their grandfathers—or books by O’Hara or Fitzgerald or the Algonquin Round Table gossips—long-forgotten, but which a professional bartender had to know, and despite the rush Big Charles shouted: Rye with lemon, a drop of Granier, the purple one, not the pink, and a pinch of sugar. A dash of raspberry cordial and orange zest. I did it. In the meantime I’d learned a lot. I’d hear somebody order a Black Label. Black Label was expensive. As in every bar the owner kept a case of cheap whiskey under the bar. You would use it if the guy who’d ordered didn’t look like he really knew what he was doing—which was most of them. Then you’d pour the whiskey below bar level and say it was Black Label and the young man would smile at his girlfriend and I could see how excited she was that he knew exactly what Black Label was and she would put her hand on his. Actually, we did it with most name whiskeys. And I almost never heard anyone say, for example, Hey, this isn’t Beefeater. But once there was one guy, an older man I didn’t know, he was on his own, annoyed. He asked for a J&B, I gave him the cheap stuff, he rolled it round his mouth, pulled a face, and said, Come on, throw that shit away and give me the real stuff. I pulled out the bottle of J&B so he could see it, apologized, and poured him a shot, and he said, Don’t apologize, you’ve got to do it. I was a bartender in a whorehouse, I know whores and bartenders, they’re are the same thing really, and thanks. There were some guys that even from across the room I knew would order Jack Daniels or Chivas Regal or Johnny Walker, which I’d taught Big Charles to call Johnny Ha’Mehalech in Hebrew and he pronounced it perfectly just like everything else he did. Then another waitress by the name of Melinda told me that it seemed to her that I’d found my vocation, found myself, the meaning of my existence; at the time she was taking courses on self-realization and said, It’s like you have no yesterday and no today and no tomorrow and no death and no life, everything flows, she said, your eyes are fixed on the drink and you’re flying into it as though it’s a sculpture but your flight has turned it into a sculpture and not the other way round. I was happy.
The usual drinkers sat hunched over the bar and told jokes about me. Or cried. Or grumbled. There was nowhere to run from or to. The place was a sealed off universe. Most or the customers were regulars. They were looking for warmth. Looking for a home. We gave it to them. Big Charles and his skills and the skills I’d acquired were the core of their lives. It was an eternal moment. The farthest thing from the cemetery. Winter had already come. It was cold. Snow fell. Miranda announced she was pregnant. I waited for a daughter I’d call Chamoutal. Miranda said that was fine. I didn’t have a name for a son. In the daytime we’d walk after I’d slept. We had visitors. We went visiting. I missed my old friends, but they had gone. Each to his or her own remote corner. There was one cold evening and snow had started to fall. Big Charles and I were getting the restaurant ready. I did the bar, sliced lemons and limes, cleaned the shakers, wiped glasses, cleaned the countertop, put out plates of snacks and appetizers, made jugs of orange juice and tomato juice, and Charles cleaned the kitchen thoroughly, the Puerto Rican busboy had finished and we helped him arrange the tables and chairs. As he did every evening, Charles locked the kitchen door and prepared his secret sauce, and then opened the door with his usual apologetic look. It’s okay Charles, I said, have a drink. The waitresses ha
dn’t arrived yet and Dick Haven the crook, who played Gangster C or D in movies, and who came in every evening, called as usual to say he’d be coming and we should save him a seat, as if he didn’t know that his seat was as safe as Fort Knox, and through the window we could see a thin layer of snow spreading over the street.
A big white Lincoln pulled up outside the restaurant. A tall broad-shouldered black guy got out. He stopped to look up and down the street and his upper body was inclined forward with a gentle carelessness. He was wearing a white suit and a bow tie. He looked a little heavy but he sailed inside. He sat at the bar I’d just finished cleaning and looked at me with a smile. I looked back. White boy, he said, give me a boilermaker, I asked him what whiskey he’d like and he said, Old Crow. Right, I said. White boy, he said, you know of course that it’s a double? I said I’d worked at Minton’s Playhouse. He asked, Did you know Art Blakey? I said I’d heard him but I didn’t know him personally. Pity, he said, a great musician. The man had a little gray in his sideburns and his smile was that of a young boy. He wanted me to lean closer to him. Charles was busy preparing hamburgers and slicing steaks in the kitchen. The man asked me to move up very close to him and whispered, That’s far enough, not too close. I began pouring his double bourbon and opened a can of beer and was about to serve it to him and he said, No. I want it here, I want it here at this crappy bar, I want thirteen doubles in line like fucking soldiers. And thirteen cans of Tuborg beer even if they get warm, and you just open each one the moment I finish the last. I said I was worried because it was an awful lot, and he said, Listen, cute Minton’s boy, you just worry about your mama, I’m the customer here. You think you’re a wise-guy but you’re not. You do exactly what I tell you and leave the prophecies to Walter Cronkite or Moondog. I asked whatever happened to Moondog who used to walk the Village like a prehistoric seer, and he said he wasn’t an information desk and asked if I understood him or not. Not eleven, he said, not twelve, thirteen doubles and thirteen beers, capice? So I stood the doubles in a line. Altogether there were twenty-six shots: that equaled a fifth, which is a standard bottle. The man sipped with a kind of blithe indifference and took the beer I served him and chased the whiskey down his throat and his Adam’s apple jiggled slightly but he didn’t move a muscle and didn’t make a sound, he just smiled at me in a friendly way, he realized I was watching him and gestured for another. At the fifth, Charles, who had been watching with no real interest, came out of the kitchen and stood in the doorway. At the sixth I could see a look of disbelief on Charles’s face, He whispered, The guy’s cheating. He sounded threatened and angry. After the ninth—the guy was putting them down one after another at intervals of less than a couple of minutes—I could see an expression of admiration being etched on Big Charles’s face. He whispered, This motherfucker’s a king, he’s sticking it to all the white boys. The guy didn’t move. He didn’t turn his head. He didn’t wipe the moisture from his mouth because there was no moisture on his mouth. His lips even dried the tiny tears of a foaming beer after it had been standing open for a few minutes. He almost swallowed the big glasses. He drank to a certain rhythm, a rhythm I’d heard about from Charlie Parker, the syncopation, the phrasing, and when I gave him a beer he poured it into a big glass, shook it, and downed it in one. Never in two swallows. I saw how he kept a little whiskey in his mouth for the next beer and then how the swish of beer down his throat must have blazed its trail. His Adam’s apple always bobbed up and down at the same pace, but gently. I’d be waiting with the next beer in my hand. He’d roll the whiskey in, take the beer, smile his thanks, and drink. And something cracked in Big Charles. The guy facing me didn’t get up from his stool, didn’t chew potato chips, didn’t chew the thin carrot sticks I’d prepared earlier. He didn’t swallow almonds or peanuts from the dishes on the bar. He didn’t get up to go to the bathroom, not even after the ninth beer. Not even after the tenth. Not even after the eleventh. He drank thirteen boilermakers as if he’d been walking through the desert for a week. By this time Charles was in love, but also anxious. But mainly he was happy. I’d never seen him so happy. His face glowed. His tongue was hanging out. The guy finished his twelfth and picked his last one, stopped for a moment, drank, smiled at me, asked me to show him the bottle, I showed it to him, empty, he saw it and said, The bottle’s gone. And how it’s gone, I replied. Charles growled. The guy gave him a friendly glance, like a king to a loyal subject, and said, Stick your nigger tongue back in your mouth. A nigger doesn’t stand with his tongue hanging out it front of white trash. He got up as if nothing had happened. He asked for his tab, paid, gave me a big tip, and I said, No! No! Shut up, he said, when a nigger gives you a tip, you take it. He started to leave. There were three steps at the entrance and he climbed them with a strong, steady gait. He stood at the door. He looked like a statue. The snow was now falling heavily. It was windy. He put on the heavy coat he’d kept on his knee while he was drinking and stepped lightly into the white Lincoln that was covered with snow. He yelled: Hey! White on white! You were an artist, weren’t you? I asked, How did you know? I was told, he said. He started the engine and Charles said, He drank like it was a commandment, or a punishment. I could hear boundless loyalty in his voice. We looked at the man in the car. He drove straight through the thin slippery snow without skidding. Charles prayed that everything would be okay. Now he’d found a hero, he didn’t want him to fail. He said, Just as long as he drives like he hasn’t been drinking. I understood him, and complimented the guy—he’d stopped at the first red light. We waited. The light changed and he took off without skidding. When he was out of sight we went back inside. Charles looked depressed and happy at the same time. He checked the empty glasses. He bent down, picked up the beer cans, and counted them. He tipped them up to see if there were a few drops left, but there weren’t any. He even checked the cash register to see whether the guy had really paid for thirteen “Killers,” as he called them. Even then he didn’t really believe it. He tried to find a flaw. A trick. Are you sure he didn’t go to the bathroom? I said I was sure. He didn’t move? I asked how he’d known to ask about the painting in the museum, the white on white, and how he’d known I’d been an artist. Charles said that anybody who can drink thirteen boilermakers knows everything. Just think, a guy sits here for maybe an hour, it’s snowing outside, he’s got a white Lincoln, a Brooks Brothers suit that costs thousands of dollars, the hands of a boxer and a mama’s sweet face, a bottle of Old Crow, thirteen beers, thirteen strong Tuborgs, and then the king gets in his car as if nothing’s happened.