come. The closest we got to that was when one of our aged bar customers
got lucky over at the Haymarket, a particularly nasty, mob-run hustler
bar over on Eighth, and would treat one of their under-age, dirty and
potentially vicious pick-ups to a nice meal.
Tom and Fred had taken a lifetime lease on the building. They lived on
the top floor, fully intending, I believe, to spend the rest of their lives
there. So it pained me to see their dream die in increments, to see the
realization dawn—with each expensive repair, each slow night, each
unforeseen expense—that things were not turning out as hoped. The
waiters, not uncharacteristically, joked bitterly about the situation.
Where were all of Tom and Fred's friends now, they asked knowingly,
now that they were no longer getting comped free meals?
"But Betty Bacall loves that dish!" Tom would protest when I suggested
removing a particularly moribund item from the menu. He'd keep certain
things on, favorites of celebrity pals, day in and day out, waiting for
them to return. But Betty Bacall was not coming to dinner every day, I
could have pointed out, nor every week—in fact, she probably wasn't
ever coming back. The place was dying. The smell of desperation was in
the air. You could detect it halfway down the block—as we were
surrounded by equally customer-hungry places—you could see it in
Tom's face, and when a few straggling celebrities would on occasion
wander through the door, he'd pounce on them like a starved remora.
I soldiered on. I didn't know what else to do. Restrained from putting
much of my own imprint on the place—and unprepared, in any case, to
offer a viable alternative—I occupied myself with scoring drugs on
Ninth Avenue, maintaining a nice buzz at the bar, and keeping a stiff
upper lip about our declining fortunes. I may have been the chef but I
had in no way learned the chefly arts; there was really no need to at
Tom's. I was working with friends, so there was no call for the
manipulation, intelligence gathering and detective work of later posts.
The place was slow, so the air-traffic controller aspects of chef work had