22. Mark

My days of employ at Zemblanity are numbered. The road beckons once more, as does Europe for the first time, as does the hope of something better. “Dear Tanya,” I wrote in my notice, “March 30^th will be my last day. It has been a surreal pleasure to work amongst a cast of such colorful characters. My experience of New York will forever be entwined with this magnificent old restaurant.”

I ripped out this sheet of paper and handed it to Tanya as she marched by to which she said, “Aw, a ripped sheet of paper? You know, you almost got it perfectly right.” This illustrated in sharp relief the sentiments opposite to those that I had expressed. Zemblanity is just a stupid, cruel, waste of a job that tears down character. It makes me practically giddy to think about throwing off the shackles of this place.

But then, just to complicate matters, Tanya came down from her office and put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I really liked your note.” And she smirked her tough guy smirk, nodded, and marched off. Of any of the characters I have briefly examined here, she is the most perplexing of all. One moment, she’s a terrifying, bloodthirsty valkyrie and at the next moment, she’s your buddy, she’s your pal. The lady is an enigma.

I rather wish that I could show her this blog, or anyone at work for that matter, although I know that I won’t. How strange it has been, walking around the workplace amongst my fellow employees and all the while with an undisclosed volume of observation scribbling itself behind my eyes. Perhaps everyone feels like this. Perhaps everyone has a vast, unread manuscript of thoughts tucked between their ribs… uninhabited and dusty palaces... unvisited libraries…

Actually, come to think of it, I have told one person that work with about this blog. His name is Mark and he was the receptionist when I first began. He left a month or two into my time at Zemblanity to go to work for the New School and now only fills in from time to time on the weekends. I figured that he would be safe to tell because he’s sort of an outsider at the restaurant and promised never to divulge the contents of these secret tracts.

Mark is a tall drink of water from the state of Alabama, complete with rolling southern drawl and a set of almost antiquated manners, all “yes ma’ams” and “y’alls.” Everyone loves him partly because he seems impervious to the spirit-tarnishing grind of working an unsatisfying job. Now that he only works part time, he’s doubly impervious. As he often likes to ask, “what are they going to do? Fire me?” Then he impersonates Michael Jackson, singing “woo!” and laughs. The dude makes himself laugh all the time.

There’s a sort of manic, attention-deficient glee with which he cartwheels through the workday. He seems to have no filter whatsoever and says whatever ludicrously stupid joke springs into his mind. Actually, part of the reason that he’s so hilarious to work with is that his jokes are so unfunny. He seems to take a bizarre sort of pride in allowing himself to shout out profoundly random non-sequitors. Here are some approximations:

“What if I had hooves instead of feet?”

[While speaking in a squeaky voice] “What if I talked like this?”

“Would it blow your mind if I just disappeared right now in front of you?”

[Under his breath to a rude customer] “Oh no you didn’t, you old pig face.”

“Gosh darn, I smell like a turd today, don’t I?”

“You know what I love? McDonald’s sweet tea. No lie.”

Once Mark told me a story about Mr. Charles coming in with a new cologne. He wanted Mark’s opinion and said, “Marcus, smell my neck. No, you can’t smell it from there. Come close and smell my neck Marcus.” MY GOD! How creepy is that? Mark and I got a few rounds of hearty laughter out of that one.

Last weekend, I told him that it wouldn’t surprise me if in a fit of weird hysteria, it popped into his head to burn the whole place down for a laugh. He thought this was pretty funny. His brand of wonky, delirious hysteria effects everyone who works with him. Last weekend, several times, I ended up laughing so hard that I had to step out in the hallway so as to not disturb any of the patrons. As far as I’ve seen, this ludicrous, unfiltered sense of humor is the best defense against an existentially hollow stretch of employment. It is a flailing, farting, discombobulating sort of rebellion. If your work makes no sense, it’s okay to make no sense.

At the end of the shift, I took him aside at said, “Okay Mark, you’ve got to check out this website of mine but you seriously can’t tell anybody. I mean no one. It’s a secret.”

Recent Celebrities:

Pre-Oscar Jeff Bridges, Lady Gaga, Kevin Pollack, Some America's Top Model and... Barbara Feldon, who played "99" on the old Get Smart. Every year, she and her best friend celebrate their birthdays at Zemblanity. They sit in Marilyn Monroe's old booth for over three hours and don't tip nearly enough to make up for it. "There's nothing we can do," says Miss Annette. "It's always the same every year. This is Zemblanity and it's the way things are."

21. The Game of Life

I found Mr. Charles reading a newspaper review of the Russian Tea Room. Old school restaurants of the tacky, kitschy variety rarely receive press but ever since the Tavern on the Green closed down, all eyes have been on the Russian Tea Room, the last remnant of the legacy of Warner LeRoy.

Surely you have seen the Tavern on the Green. Remember in Ghostbusters, when Rick Moranis runs up to the glass of a schmaltzy restaurant as he’s being chased by a ghoulish gargoyle dog? He screams and falls down and all the rich people stop momentarily, look over, and then return to their conversations. That’s the Tavern on the Green and it’s actually in Central Park. That is, it was until New Years when it closed its doors because it couldn’t pay the bills.

It was a big deal for New York. That ridiculous, outlandish relic of a bygone age was a real landmark in this city of cities and it’s closing came as a shock. The ooze of it’s glitzy “magnificence” was an embarrassment (my wife once mocked it’s faux-luxury as we walked by on a particularly pleasant summer stroll) but when it shuttered its doors, it was like losing an old friend. And New York said goodbye the best way it could- they sold every bit of that restaurant, piecemeal at an auction, every nut and bolt. Mr. Charles probably obtained the mirrored butterflies in the same manner, by picking over the corpse of Josephine Baker’s defunct Parisian nightclub.

Well, the same guy who ran the Tavern on the Green, ran the Russian Tea Room. Back in the day, this place was a wonderland of Eastern European and Russian glamour, all dazzling reds and gold. Wild intellectuals and ballet companies would drop in for parties. A radio interview show was broadcast regularly from one of the dining rooms. The place was on top. That was before old Warner LeRoy kicked the bucket a few years back.

Now there’s this review in the Post that is as bloodthirsty an evisceration as I have ever read in print. Here’s a few delicious, horrible tidbits from critic Steve Cuozzo.

“The RTR has been plagued by rude and/or moronic hostesses since the LeRoy days… A $38 Shashlik ‘tasting’ was evidently inspired by the shoe Khruschev pounded at the UN: skewered chicken, beef and lamb burnt to a uniform leather no street vendor could likely replicate.” He goes on. “Chicken Kiev ($38) contained mysterious hollow apparently meant for herbs that took the night off.” The herring is called “Supermarket-Grade.” The gravlax was called “mucilaginous.” The kitchen is said to be “beyond hope of rescue.” The headline reads “Just Say Nyet to Terrible Tea Room.”

To me, it seemed that as Mr. Charles read this review, he was looking into a sort of mirror and his reaction was interesting. “Well, it’s just a sort of oversized monstrosity now, an enormous white elephant. It’s bound to happen to every restaurant. People get bored and move on, especially now with the influx of cuisine with such refined tastes. Even the most loyal customers can be two-faced. People can be real mother-fuckers.”

This is the only time I’ve ever heard Mr. Charles use foul language.

“If you own a club or a restaurant, two years. Two years is all you have to make your money. We’ve been very lucky to have lines out the door for all these years but you know what they say. Nothing lasts forever.”

To me, Zemblanity is many things- comic, ludicrous, mysterious, cruel. But it’s difficult for me to imagine how Mr. Charles must feel about the restaurant that he has devoted over fifty-five years of his life to. It makes me think about how Walt Whitman wrote the same book, “Leaves of Grass,” over and over throughout his life. He just kept revising it and adding to it and putting out new editions of it. He thought of the book as if it were his body or his life. I imagine that when Mr. Charles considers Zemblanity, he must think of it as interwoven with his own life- his history, his memory, the lives and deaths of his best friends, the passing of time and question of mortality. Mr. Charles just turned 78. He must wonder what will happen to Zemblanity when he dies.

Yesterday, an old man was helped through the front door by his good looking, well dressed and (apparently) successful son. This old man was very feeble but seemed kind and cordially addressed Mr. Charles who returned the greeting. After I had seated the father and son, Mr. Charles came over and asked, “Do you know who that is?”

I did not.

“That fellow invented a board game for Milton Bradley called LIFE. Made a fortune on it too.”

I looked at that old fellow, chatting happily with his son and remembered playing that game as a kid. You’ve got your little plastic car and you eventually go to school (or just get a crappy job) and get married and then get kids, which are little pink and blue pegs that you stick into the car. You turn the multi-colored wheel of fortune (which is situated on the game board up inside a green mountain) and you try to make a ton of money so that you can retire in style. What a truly existential board game that was… like a proto-typical Sims.

And there’s the guy that thought it all up, sitting there at table 32 with his son and he seems pretty happy. Good for him. He shook my hand on the way out and thanked Mr. Charles and me for our hospitality.

Later, during that same shift, Miss Annette started coughing and coughing. It was the horrible, gut-wrenching, emphysemic, bellowing sort of cough that breaks the ribs of old people. “God,” she sighed after regaining her breath.

“I don’t think I’m long for this world.”

20. Zemblanity Day

A few days ago, I was cleaning what I thought was a large wooden cabinet hung on the wall. “Hey Mr. Charles, what’s this big thing that I’m cleaning?”

“That,” said Mr. Charles, as he regarded it like a painting, “is a mailbox from Goshen New York from the 1890’s. Do you see the little key holes there? The mail officer would put the mail into the back of those chambers and residents would use their keys to get it out from the front. That’s probably one hundred and twenty years old.”

“And what’s that creepy head in there?” I asked. I was referring to what I had thought was a disturbing looking Mardi Gras mannequin head displayed in one of the mailbox windows (refer to Zemblanity #2).

“Don’t you make fun of her,” said Mr. Charles in his mischievous way. “She’s famous. That is an old-fashioned wax mannequin head that I brought back from Paris many, many years ago, when I was an aspiring designer. She’s probably worth a lot of money. One time, Salvador Dali was in – this was when he was living in New York… the mid-sixties, I think – and he took one look at her and said, ‘I must have her for my show!’ So I said, ‘Why yes. Of course!’ and he walks out with her.

“Well, for my contribution he gave me a free ticket to the show, which was at the Museum of Modern Art and there she was, at the bottom of an enormous fish tank. She was surrounded by car parts as though there had been a terrible car crash into a river and there were shells and snails all over her face. Who knows what it all meant.”

“So Dali brought her back?”

“Yes, a week or two after the show had closed. And then we had a waiter who was also a hair stylist and makeup artist. I was gone on vacation one summer and he put that wild wig on her and that makeup all over her face. I don’t much like it that way to tell you the truth. Makes her look like a hooker. Loses some of its authenticity, don’t you know.”

I touched the waxen mannequin face. Wow. This was a part of a work by Salvador Dali. I probably should have guessed.

“Did you also know that those mirrored butterflies upstairs came from Josephine Baker’s nightclub in Paris? She was the black dancer from Chicago who would dance in Paris wearing only a string of bananas around her waist. The Parisians absolutely loved her. The stained-glass butterflies downstairs aren’t from her club, they’re from the Tiffany Company.”

At this point, Miss Annette shuffles up in her flamboyantly red shaggy coat that looked as if it had been made out of a hundred false feather boas or perhaps a quantity of skinned Elmos. It occurred to me that she was the legendary Madame of Zemblanity and that when she died, it would be as if a great and scandalizing library had burned down. She was chuckling and reading a book from the Zemblanity General Store entitled “How to Live with a Huge Penis: Advice and Meditations and Wisdom for Men Who Have Too Much.”

“My God,” said Annette. “Get this. Did you know that Hitler had a one-inch penis when erect? And that the Nazis prized small penises? My god, do you believe that or what? I wonder how they found out about that. It would sure explain a lot of things though. Says here Churchill knew that if Hitler won the war, men everywhere with big penises would be in danger. God, do you believe that?”

Then, only a few minutes later, Zemblanity’s publicist comes down and hands me a piece of paper, which I promptly copied down. It reads:

Whereas: In this culinary capital of the world, New York City’s restaurants are true Meecas for gastronomic aficionados. And no restaurant fits the bill better than Zemblanity 3, which opened its doors in our City in 1954. Since that time it has been dishing out such delectable treats as its signature Icy Hot Chocolate to countless customers from around the globe. Today, the City of New York is proud to join in celebrating Zemblanity 3’s more than five decades of success as it serves its ten millionth Icy Hot Chocolate.

Whereas: As New York’s first coffee house boutique, Zemblanity 3 opened with just four tables, sixteen chairs, and a sturdy espresso machine. Its Icy Hot Chocolate recipe is a highly guarded secret, but what we do know is that this combination of fourteen different premium cocoas has become an iconic gastronomic experience for locals and visitors alike, who will wait on line for hours to enjoy one.

Whereas: On behalf of the City of New York, I commend all those associated with Zemblanity 3 for bringing the wonderful art of the Icy Hot Chocolate drink to our great city for more than five delicious decades. Please accept my best wishes for an enjoyable celebration, many more years of success, and (at least) another ten million more Icy Hot Chocolates!

Now therefore, I, Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor of the City of New York, do hereby proclaim Wednesday, February 3^rd, 2010 in the City of New York as:

“Zemblanity 3 Day!”

19. Interview

Way back when, Zemblanity was a suit and tie sort of place. Mr. Charles and his partners, Kitt Caruso and Billy Mann, would stand at the omelet buffet and would make custom omelets for guests while each wearing three-piece suits. They would sometimes cook pies and casseroles and the like in similar attire. All the waiters wore suits. All the male guests wore suits and the women wore dresses. I asked Mr. Charles when dress code stopped being enforced.

“Oh, my word, some time in the seventies I suppose. That’s when everything seemed to get so much more casual. We dressed in suits in the fifties because everyone wore suits in the fifties. Everything was so much more formal then, so much more naïve. Now everyone thinks they know more than you do. Back then we were so spontaneous, this restaurant was so wild!”

I thought it over awhile and asked him why things had changed. Why don’t we play crazy pranks anymore or act wild and spontaneous at the restaurant?

“Well, you see, back then it was only the ‘it’ crowd stopping in to eat with us. I remember when Cary Grant and Grace Kelly stumbled down our stairs. They were just back from France where they had been filming To Catch A Thief, you know, the Hitchcock movie? Well, I think they must have been having a little affair because Grace didn’t seem to care at all what she looked like and had that glow about her.

“Anyhow, for a few years this was the scene, the crème de la crème and that was all it took to keep us in business. That’s what created the lines outside. And you have to keep that momentum for years and years. Now that we’ve had that momentum for so long, it’s self-perpetuating. On the other hand, it isn’t as many of the celebrities, or as many of the young and fashionable. They will always find new hotspots. Now we mostly have families and tourists. They don’t take outlandishness very well, do they?

“You know that Andy Warhol used to come in here out of the blue…”

At this point Mr. Charles begins in on a story I had heard him tell several times about how Andy Warhol would come in and place a copy of Interview Magazine (of which Warhol was editor) on every table without a word of explanation. The kicker was that when he left, everyone would ask who that strange fellow had been and Mr. Charles would say “Andy Warhol” and everyone would freak.

“All he ever seemed to say was ‘Wow…’” Mr. Charles imitates Warhol’s fey, stoned-out-of-his-mind way of speaking. “You know, he used to have a crush on me. I’ve told you about those 32 drawings that he gave me.” Here, Mr. Charles shows me a picture of the portrait that Andy drew of him. “You see the little heart there? They’re all covered in little hearts. But I couldn’t be with him because I was with my partner Kitt.”

Kitt Caruso, one of the other founders of Zemblanity, died of AIDS a number of years ago.

This was probably the most that Mr. Charles ever said to me at once so I decided to keep him talking. I asked him about where he had met his friend August. August is a long-time friend of Mr. Charles who stops in from Palm Springs for a week or two every so often.

“Oh, I met August at the disco.”

Studio 54?

“Of course! My god we used to have such wild times. It had been a theater before. Well, they took out all the seats and made the dance floor but kept the stage in tact. The bar ran in front of the stage and they kept all the box seats in the balcony. At four in the morning, they opened a bridge, which extended through the air across the theater. People would go dancing across it and oooh, if you looked down it was so terrifying but that was part of the kick. And the drugs… and all the sex…”

I heard it was real hard to get in. How did you always get by the bouncers?

“They knew us, for goodness sakes! We were all so famous then. And it was their job to let us in. That’s how you start a successful club. You get all the right people in. Annette and I would waltz right in the front door while all the Plebes waited in line (that’s what we called the people, Plebeians). I should show you a picture I have of Annette in a shag bikini I made for her. You wouldn’t even believe it. And the dancing was just out of this world!”

Here’s a quote I found from an article about Andy Warhol biographies in the New Yorker by Louis Menand which, I think, augment’s Mr. Charles’ memories in an interesting way:

“The culture around Warhol was a culture of high artifice—it’s icon was the drag queen—and the gossip, the posing, and the pretense were part of that. They do not make reliable history.”

For some strange reason or another, Old Miss Annette decided to open up on the very same topic during the very same shift. In the end, she expressed the regret of the restaurant’s soul very succinctly: “We just got too famous for our own good.”

But then, as if the restaurant were itself arguing for its continuing intrigue, a middle-aged woman came up and put her arms around Miss Annette. They chatted and commented on how well the other looked and Annette took this woman a very nice table. When Miss Annette came back, she said something which has baffled me profoundly:

“That woman used to come in here once a week in the eighties. She would come in with this really good looking guy. They both worked for NASA and their job…” At this point, she sort of stops and chuckles. “… Their job was to have sex on spaceships. I don’t know why, some sort of experiment. So I started talking to her about this just now and she said, ‘Annette, I just can’t believe you remember what my job used to be.’ And I said, ‘How many people do you think have jobs where they have sex on spaceships?’

I didn’t get a chance to ask this woman, who is now apparently a painter, how or why or what the hell this sex work for NASA could have possibly had been motivated by. This woman and her project, like so many things at Zemblanity, remain mysteries.

18. Five Episodes

1. Right when I walked in the front door today, Zemblanity’s repairman asked the cashier, “Do you believe that there are people out in space, on other worlds?” After a lengthy discussion of this, he asks “Okay, well then. Do you actually believe that astronauts landed on the moon.” Commence conspiracy theory discussion. Later, I found the repairman back in the kitchen and the cooks were really going for it. The fry cook, named Ed, was practically shouting about how genetic history proves a higher intelligence and that scientists have found- they have ACTUALLY FOUND- computer programs in our DNA. “Ones and zeroes, baby, ones and zeroes.” Diners, this is where your food comes from.

2. I was telling Miss Annette that I was going to see a Streetcar Named Desire with Cate Blanchett. She says, “I think Tennessee Williams lived in a hotel near here for awhile. Apparently he came in from time to time but somehow I always missed him. I would have liked to have met Tennessee Williams.”

I told her that I had just read that Tennessee Williams had been a big influence on John Waters of all people. “Well… yeah," she says. "They’re both crazy. But I doubt that Williams would ever have Blanche Dubois eat dog shit. John Waters did that you know. (I did know). In Pink Flamingos that was. You know, I knew Divine. We went out together to stay at this condo for week or two out at Fire Island. We had this cook friend who told us he would make us anything we wanted and so we said ‘Chicken.’ Well, Armond, that was his name, comes back with four whole chickens and I said, ‘there is no way that we’ll eat all that’ and Armond says, ‘these are just for Divine.’ She ate the whole thing. God, she’d sleep at night in nothing but a jock strap and would have to sleep diagonal so that she fit. I remember walking by when she had the sheets over her thinking she looked just like the biggest cream puff in the world."

Then Bernie, the accountant for Zemblanity, walks out, overhears us talking about Divine and says “Ah Divine… she was one of the greats.” Then Bernie walks off down the street to wherever it is he goes.

3. Big Gay Sam told this amazing story about how he would wait on Jacqueline Onassis in her twilight years. She was a very sweet lady, very demur. Once, after taking her order he went back into the kitchen and there was one of the other waiters, wearing a basket on his head in place of a pillbox hat, sitting on the counter and re-enacting the Zapruder film. “Oh… my… god! Roland! Don’t you have ANY decency!?”

4. I ought to say that for all the fracas, melee, and generally angry bedlam surrounding the holidays at Zemblanity, the actual holidays themselves were quite magical. For some reason, the crowds on Christmas Eve were really quiet and manageable. Everyone was happy for reasons no one seemed able to explain. All of the customers were kind and aglow. It was as if the impossible storm had finally broken and calm had washed over the island of Manhattan. But it hadn’t broken. After Christmas the next few days before New Years was a riot but… New Years Eve was a shift full of gladness. All of the busboys shook hands and exchanged greetings in their own languages. The cooks wore party hats. There was a kind excitement. Hell, I even hugged Tanya as I left. Ah, New Years in New York City!

5. Miss Annette: “God, there was this really good eggs place we used to go to after dancing at Studio 54. Where was that place? We used to only be able to stay awake for like five minutes or something before our faces started dropping into our plates."

17. The Cold

As the final week before Christmas approached, things at Zemblanity became even weirder- a fiercely surreal holiday glow resembling the panic of a refugee mob. Now, every single day of the week (even Monday mornings and Tuesday afternoons) was overrun from opening until close. Standing in the kitchen, it was almost possible to make out the whining complaint of the overtaxed gears as the dungeon churned out a quantity of food beyond its capacity. Everything was beyond capacity. The pistons are buckling! The ovens and dishwashers are breaking down!

Several times, the vents above the kitchen gave out and actual smoke came billowing out into the dining areas, curling around in wreaths around the flamboyant Christmas tree, which burned pinkly in the haze. The manager would run out to me and tell me to stop seating, STOP SEATING! so that the kitchen wouldn’t receive anymore orders while he frantically called maintenance. Having the manager shout at me to stop made me think of myself as an engineer shoveling coal into a furnace, only the diners are the coal and the entire restaurant is a madly barreling locomotive, close to coming off the tracks.

At one point- and keep in mind, many of these shifts seem like a dream- I remember my manager Gabriel shaking his head and saying “This whole damn place is coming apart!”

The worse loss, by far in my opinion, was when the heaters in the entryway gave out. A few days later, the repairman said that they had just been turned on full blast for too long. You see, the front door of Zemblanity often stays almost fully open. People are coming and going through in perpetually- to add their name, to check their reservation, to look through the gift shop, to take a picture, to go get the rest of their party… who knows what these people were doing? But what they WERE doing was opening the front door and upon each opening an arctic blast of such frigid intensity was invited in that everyone on the first floor shuddered in unison. When those two mighty heaters out front gave out, it became unbearable. Customers came up to me demanding to be reseated. “I WAITED FOUR HOURS to be seated and I DAMN WELL better get a warmer table!” It’s hard to blame them really, I certainly wouldn’t want to eat ice cream when its 20 degrees or lower in the restaurant. On the other hand, and for the same reasoning, I can blame them and do. Why’d they wait four hours in the first place?

“I heard the wind chill is five degrees!” says one guest.

“Stop squishing me!” exclaims another.

“Close the door!” I shout.

Thus, the manager arrives at the horrible decision that the entire crowd has to be moved outside into the cold. This is no easy feat. The human animal does not want to wait out in the cold. The human animal wishes to avoid the five degree wind chill. But it was precisely for situations like this that God invented Brooklyn and people from Brooklyn and the Brooklyn accent. Gabriel (in sort of an angelic pose, now that I think of it) holds the clipboard of names above his head and belts out, loud as a bullhorn:

“Alright folks! Guess what’s going to happen now? You aren’t going to like it. We’re all going to move outside. I’m not taking another name or seating another person until we’re all outside! Got a question? Take it outside! Need to check your status? Take it outside! The faster we all get outside, the quicker we’ll be able to seat you! Move on back folks, move on back!”

Then he sort of herds them with the clipboard like cattle out the door, every one of the folk braying and kicking up a horrible fuss as they are pushed back out into the mind-boggling cold. Eventually, people can’t even move out of the front door because the people on the sidewalk aren’t moving far enough out. So I have to run out the side door and tell people to keep continuing to back away. Soon it is impossible to walk down the north side of the sidewalk on 60^th street between 2^nd and 3^rd avenues because a scene like something in Dante is taking place.

Great throngs of miserable people crowd up around poor Gabriel as he starts to sort out the mess. Only the next few parties waiting to be seated can wait inside at any one time and he sends them inside to be seated by the host. As soon as those people have been sat, the next few parties are sent inside. This means two things. Many of the people who have three hours yet to wait, realize that they cannot stay in the cold and leave, seeking warmer climates. This is part of the point. The other thing that it means is that to run this system of seating, you must have one person inside to seat people at tables and one person outside at all times to send in the next parties in line. The person outside, in the five degree wind chill was oftentimes me.

I’ve had a job where I had to root around in a dumpster. I’ve had a job where I had to change old people’s diapers and had to jab a guy in the muscle with a really thick needle. But I’ve never had a job even remotely as shitty as my job at Zemblanity when I’m standing out in the cold. People came up to me complaining that their toddlers were freezing in the cold and couldn’t they come wait inside? Old people would show me their chilled purple and blue arthritic fingers and ask if there isn’t just a little spot where I can sit inside while I wait? It was my job to tell them no while waiting myself out in the miserable, piercing cold. It got so I couldn’t feel my feet anymore and had trouble gripping my pen whenever anyone added their names to the godawfully long list. “Yes,” I told these freezing, pathetic people. “The wait really is four hours long. Do you still want to add your name?” And still they did, as some sort of bewildering masochistic punishment for some terrible thing they must have done in a past life. But what about me, the gatekeeper?

Every so often, the manager would come out to relieve me. It was so cold in New York that the only way to keep the restaurant warm inside was to keep switching off in shifts. Going back inside, I would immediately head for the kitchen, the fires and steams of which now felt like a balmy tropical paradise. The men who were sweating fiercely in their doo-rags over the ovens and boiling pots looked at me and laughed and laughed as I rubbed my bone-white knuckles over the heat. It was actually my feet that hurt the worst. They got so cold that I could barely stand it to walk around.

My wife would like me to take a moment to acknowledge that for a couple of these shifts, I left the house so quickly in the morning that I forgot to bring a hat. Luckily, we at Zemblanity have a rather hilarious lost-and-found. Although there are many warm hats to be found within it, all the hats were women’s hats. So now picture me, 28 years old, heading out the front door of Zemblanity into a vast multitude of angry and bitterly cold people. All around me Midtown Manhattan swirls with snow and the energy of the impending holiday. And I am wearing a woman’s hat.

Just before leaving me outside to confront the cold, Gabriel comes back out with a cup of coffee. He hands it to me and, sipping it, I realize that it has been spiked with whiskey. “There we go boy,” Gabriel said, giving me a fist bump. “That’s how we do it.”