The Chicken Guy was not impressed. He spat on the floor, looked my
boss in the eye and said, "Fuck you, asshole! You know who I'm with?!
You can fly to fuckin' Virginia and buy direct all you want—you still
gonna pay me! Frank Fuckin' Perdue pays me, asshole! And you're gonna
pay me too!"
My boss was suitably chastened—for a time.
But he got wackier and wackier. When we finally opened, we were
packed from the first minute. Orders flooded in over the phone and at the
counter and at the tables. We were unprepared and understaffed, so the
Italian contingent—including various visiting dignitaries, all with oddly
anglicized names ("This is Mr Dee, Tony, and meet a friend, Mr Brown .
. . This is Mr Lang"), all of them overweight, cigar-chomping middle-
aged guys with bodyguards and 10,000-dollar watches—pitched in to
help out with deliveries and at the counter. Guys I'd read about later in
the papers as running construction in the outer boroughs, purported
killers, made men, who lived in concrete piles on Staten Island and Long
Beach and security-fenced estates in Jersey, carried brown paper bags of
chicken sandwiches up three flights of stairs to Greenwich Village walk-
up apartments to make deliveries; they slathered mayo and avocado
slices on pita bread behind the counter, and bussed tables in the dining
room. I have to say I liked them for that.
But when my boss, inexplicably, showed up one day and told me to fire
everyone with a tattoo on my staff, I was faced with a dilemma. Every
one of my cooks was festooned with prison tats: screaming skulls, Jesus
on hypodermic crosses, bound in barbed wire, gang tats, flaming dice,
swastikas, SS flashes, Born to Lose, Born Dead, Born to Raise Hell, Love
Hate, Mom, portraits of the Madonna, wives, girlfriends, Ozzy Osbourne.
I tried to put him off, explaining that we couldn't do without these guys,
that the hardest-working, most indispensable guy we had—the guy who
right now was loading trash cans with hundreds of marinating chicken
parts in the cramped, stifling unrefrigerated cellar on his twenty-second