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 60th street between 2nd and 3rd 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.”
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