comrades' confidence that Luis, for instance, wouldn't skip town on a
drunk after getting his big payday, and leave the others in the lurch. I
held on to my meager paycheck. I had no time to spend it anyway.
One foggy night around ten, with only a few customers left in the main
dining room, an electric current seemed to run through the floor staff.
There was a sudden gang-rush to the upstairs bus station, where one
could just barely see and hear what was going on in the Room. "Frank is
here! Frank is here!" was the battle cry. Even the cooks abandoned their
stations to see what the commotion was about. Sure enough, the Man
Himself had come to dinner: Frank Sinatra was in the house—and he was
singing! Sinatra had swung by with a posse of thick-necked pals, ordered
up some bottles and snacks, and now, backed by the house orchestra, was
belting out tunes to an awe-struck audience of about twenty customers
who had been lucky enough to linger over dessert. These few tourists
who, up to now, must have been bemoaning the bad weather, the lack of
visibility ruining the famous view, the empty dining room and the
miserable food, were suddenly the luckiest bastards in New York.
Sinatra, having a good time apparently, sang for quite a while. He was
still there when I knocked off work.
Other celebrity sightings included a well-known member of a Sicilian
fraternal organization—in the "entertainment and financial services
sector"—who made an impromptu visit to the kitchen for a few words
with our kindly Neapolitan chef. I saw a fifty go into poor Quinto's chest
pocket, with an affectionate slap on the cheek. Now the hapless bastard
was committed to making "Gnocchi genovese . . . like I used to get".
Gnocchi genovese was not on our regular menu, and I doubt that the chef
had actually cooked anything—much less gnocchi and meat sauce—
from scratch in years. Quinto was more like an air-traffic controller than
a cook, but he'd taken the man's money (not that he'd had a choice) and
he spent the next hour, in the middle of a busy dinner service, spooning
batch after batch of gnocchi into simmering water, his hands shaking
with fear and tears streaming down his face, as one batch after another