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.”