Our guide skims trout from the stream with a net and carries them over to an old woman, who cooks them whole over an open flame while she makes tortillas. The fire is in the ground under a grate. The fish smoke on the grate and the tortillas cook in an iron skillet. She squats, turning the fish and shaping the tortillas and looking at nothing. At intervals she scoops fat out of a plastic Big Gulp cup and flicks it off her fingers onto the skillet. When the fish are cooked she places each one on a tin plate and motions for us to come get them, one by one. We say Gracias, and she says Dios te bendiga to each one of us, looking into our eyes. When it is my turn I see that she has not been looking at nothing but I see that she knows I thought that she was.
We sit at the tables and eat. The fish still have their heads and their tails. I have never tasted anything so good. There are no napkins so your dad takes his bandana out of his pocket and we share it to wipe the grease off our faces.
When everyone has eaten, they tell us to take our plates downstream from the fish and rinse them. I stand and take your dad’s plate and mine and step out from under the thatch, but as I move into the sun I look at the old woman and fall.
I don’t know that I fall. This is what your dad tells me later. The sun, the mountain, says the guide. It does that. One minute okay, then—pff, he says, making a motion with his hand like he’s letting go of an invisible dove. When I open my eyes the first thing I see is your dad’s face, and he looks so concerned I think If I could just stay here with him, looking at me like that.
You are strong. My father calls you Little Boot because when you fall you never cry. You can read when you are four and I ask you to help me memorize the parts of the cow. You have a lisp and I tell you to say brisket over and over just so I can hear it. But when you fall asleep I go into the bathroom and do lines off the map of the steer. I read about the difference between Kobe and Wagyu and I feel replete with the beauty of your small self. Just imagining it—the everything of you—my body tingles and quivers like the air inside a guitar. I am freezing. I get into bed with you. You like staying with me because you get to sleep with me. You are so warm but I can’t stop shivering. I feel a soaring bliss—I adore you—I feel a plummeting ugly resentment—I am a pile of shit falling endlessly down a dark shaft, I am the hate that hurled the shit and the fear inside the hurled shit. If you slip out one stitch in your brain high and low are the same. I don’t realize I’ve said that aloud until you turn over to face me. Mama, you say, what’s wrong? I see in your face the deepest empathy and your mouth pulls down. I realize nothing else is happening in your life at this moment. You are here with your mother who is crying, so you cry too.
Intermezzo
Jimmy plays at The Restaurant three nights a week, from seven until eleven or until the last guest leaves, whichever comes first. When he sees the last guests cross the threshold of the door out of the dining room into the lobby he’ll stop in the middle of his chill Jobim or his John Williams show tune, right in the middle of an arpeggio, stand up, shut the lid, grab his bag, walk out. The effect is as abrupt as turning off a stereo except that sometimes the last note he played drifts there in the air, along with the smells of butter and salt.
The piano sits on a dais in the middle of the open kitchen, right in front of the dining room. It’s a black Yamaha concert grand, and too nice to be in The Restaurant’s kitchen. When Lissandri hired him eight years ago Jimmy didn’t mention that, afraid he would sell it when he learned its worth, since the rate Jimmy was offered to play there was less than he was used to. That was right after Valentino’s burned down, and he needed the work so much he didn’t bother to argue with a man he knew from D Magazine to be one of Dallas’s wealthiest. Valentino’s had been a great gig, five nights a week and just two blocks from his M Street bungalow. He walked there, he didn’t wear a tie, the bartender poured him a glass of Chianti as soon as the rush was over. Best of all the owners liked to close early and often. That gave him plenty of downtime, and freed up New Year’s Eve for lucrative one-offs at mansions in Preston Hollow or hotel galas or even, once, he made a thousand dollars playing for Emmitt Smith and his wife while they sat on their couch and watched the ball drop.
Jimmy had to drive into Uptown to play at The Restaurant, and the valets were stingy with their spots so he parked his minivan on the street somewhere in the neighborhood. It was supposed to be a nice part of town, all the most expensive restaurants and condos, but his driver’s-side mirror had been broken off once before he started folding it in, and the managers wouldn’t let the girl employees leave at the end of the night without a man to walk them out. Jimmy had to wear a suit and tie but he left the top button of his shirt unbuttoned, and sometimes he wore the same suit and tie all week. He saw the servers being reprimanded for wrinkled sleeves or dirty aprons or ties tied sloppily and prepared an excuse for his unbuttoned button that had something to do with mobility and piano playing, but no one ever said anything to him. Often he had trouble finding a parking spot near the restaurant and this frustrated him until he settled into it as a believable excuse for being a few minutes late every time he played, and sat in the van for a short spell even when he found a space on the first try. No one seemed to notice that either, and when he did walk in he made sure it was with the same quick keen purpose every night. As if he couldn’t wait to get in there and play.
His second night in The Restaurant he’d closed the keyboard lid at eleven and left his bag of charts on the dais while he stepped into the bar. He asked the bartender—who also lived in the M Streets and whom he knew as a patron of Valentino’s, and who had done him the favor of telling Lissandri he knew a piano man, he knew the best piano man in town—for a glass of whatever Italian they were pouring. He took a stool at the end of the bar and had sipped only two sips when he felt an arm around his shoulder and there was the man himself on his left, saying Buddy you’re here to play not drink all right?
All right, all right, so he played. He was a little late and he was quick to leave but he played. He played the requisite mix of big band and lounge and pop and he played Happy Birthday four or five times a night when the servers took out chocolate soufflés with candles in them. For kids he played The Rainbow Connection and songs from Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. He played the Elton John, the Billy Joel, the Norah Jones their parents asked for. Hey sure I know Your Song! Comin right up! Come Away With Me? Sure I know that! You got it ma’am! When the guests asked he played the Jim Brickman, which he resented even more than the Cielito Lindo he played for Hank Earl Jackson, a gigantic six-foot-seven alcoholic with a head the size of a steer’s who owned an eponymous bar in the Fort Worth stockyards. Hank Earl’s was more than a bar, it was an A-list venue for any country act that came to Texas, and while Hank Earl was famous for it that wasn’t how he made his money. He was an oil man, like Lissandri was an investment man, their nightlife ventures only toys, things they did with the money they’d already made. Jimmy had been playing in restaurants long enough to know that actually making money from a restaurant was hard to do.
Hank Earl never requested Cielito Lindo until late in the evening, after he’d had at least two or three bottles of chardonnay poured over ice. Cielito Lindo was a cow-herding song, a ranchero song, a mariachi song, and often Jimmy would hear a tired Mexican cook behind him sing along, Ay, ay, ay, ay, while he cleaned the broiler. Over the years Hank Earl had requested the song almost every time he was in the place, which was at least three or four times a week since he lived across the street in the Hotel Fitzandrew. His driver picked him up in the porte cochere at the hotel, made a right out of the driveway and then an immediate left into The Restaurant’s porte cochere, repeating the trip in reverse at the end of the night. Hank Earl had vomited, pissed, and passed out in the back of the town car on the way back across the street so many times that the driver, Hector, told Jimmy he was grateful when only one of the three occurred, and would have chosen piss if he could, since the man was impossible to wake or move an
d at least some of the piss would stay on Hank Earl’s pants. If Jimmy had found a prime spot on the street in front of The Restaurant, near where Hector waited with the town car, Jimmy and Hector would chat sometimes when Jimmy stepped out for his break at nine, to smoke his pipe in the minivan. He would sit in the driver’s seat smoking his pipe with the window rolled down, listening to Mose Allison.
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.
Love Me Back Page 6