Dirty Dishes Read online

  Those urgencies aside, I focused on each table as its own little dinner party. It was second nature to me to know when the kitchen would need to have the next course ready, or when a wine bottle was nearing completion. I also quickly became adept at visualizing the progression of each table’s meal from the moment I had their order in my hand, a guide to the logistics of what cutlery and implements they’d require and of how much time I’d have to spend with them finishing and plating their dishes tableside.

  Also, perhaps because of my acting training, I picked up on the slightest indication that people wanted to see a waiter or busboy. I had an auctioneer’s eye for discreet gestures: for instance, in most cases, when diners are looking at each other and talking that means that all is well. But when you see customers looking around, it usually means they’re seeking a waiter and that you should get over to them and ask if there’s anything you can do for them. By July, I had categorized a few recurring types of couples and what each one sought in a dining experience: older married vacationers wanted to dine quickly so the husband could disappear to the lounge and enjoy an amaro or join the other men for a game of cards, young lovers wanted to linger and cuddle in a corner, and so on. I always made sure that each one got what they wanted, often giving them the check before they asked for it.

  “Why are you always rushing everybody?” my uncle said to me one day.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You give them the check before they ask for it.”

  “Zio Natalino,” I said, “look at them: the napkins are on the table, the espresso cups are empty, their chairs are pushed back, and their legs are stretched out. If you don’t give them a check soon, they’re going to forget about paying and just walk out.”

  As he thought this over, I spotted a young couple with all the same done-with-dinner signs.

  “I’ll bet you one thousand lire that they are ready for the check,” I said.

  We shook on it and I walked over to the table.

  “How are we doing?” I said.

  The man and woman looked at each other and then the man looked at me and said, “We’re ready for the check.”

  “Right away!” I replied and as I went off to total their check, my uncle handed me a one-thousand-lire bill. This became a recurring contest for us for the rest of the summer, and I usually won the bet, but he was tickled that another family member had instincts on a par with his.

  Another method of upping my income was revealed to me one morning when an elderly couple was in the lobby with their luggage, checking out after a two-week stay. The wife saw me coming to work at the restaurant and smacked her husband on the shoulder and said, “Dagli la mancia!” Give him a tip!

  The husband retrieved a few bills from his wallet and handed them to me, and from that day forward I would make a point of complimenting the older wives in the restaurant. It always produced that same sentence on their last day with us: “Dagli la mancia!”

  Between my little bets with Natalino and my talent for flattering the dowagers of Porto Santo Stefano, I added substantially to my haul for the summer.

  THOUGH I WON the lion’s share of our little wagers, there was no question that my uncle was the master and I was the pupil. By observing him, I also learned about the business of the restaurant business. He wasn’t looking to have one or two Michelin stars; he was looking to have six or seven figures in the bank. His practicality rubbed off on me, as in my method for earning more tips. But my mercenary intentions soon gave way to a self-discovery: I loved interacting with the customers. And I took the responsibility of being the face and voice of the restaurant very seriously. My goal was to add to each and every guest’s experience: to describe the food lovingly, present it beautifully, and ensure that every need was anticipated and met. I also took great pleasure in learning about the guests, where they came from and what they thought of the town and the beach, even playing concierge by offering suggestions on where to go after dinner or where to find the best cappuccino the next morning, or even the perfect places to watch the sun rise and set.

  I couldn’t wait to stroll over from the dorms every morning, and the days and nights flew by. I returned to my uncle’s restaurant for another summer, and when I came home the second year, older and more self-assured than when I had left, it was difficult to be there. As my siblings and I grew older, my father tried harder than ever to maintain his control over us. Chauvinist that he was, he insisted that I chaperone my sisters, Rita, Franca, and Anna, when they went out. We all used this to our advantage: we’d leave home, go our separate ways, then reconnect and return together.

  Given the hardships of his own life, I guess my father didn’t know any other way. But I didn’t have that kind of perspective back then, and I had simply come to despise him. One day when I was in my final year of high school, things boiled over and Papá and I got into a nasty and escalating fight, hurling insults back and forth. At the peak of the confrontation, I told him he was nothing but “another loser in a uniform.” He removed his belt, doubled it over, and raised it in the air as if to strike me. I caught his hand and when he tried to pull it away, I didn’t let go.

  It was then that I decided to leave, for good, and moved to Rome.

  I PLAYED ALL of this back in my mind as I drove home on that October evening in 1980. The other reason for the visit was to let my parents know that I was leaving the country. During the summer, I had hired a lawyer and told him to do whatever he had to do to keep me out of the army. After doing time in boarding school, there was no way I’d wear a uniform again; something deep down told me that if I went into the army, I’d come out a diminished person, a broken soul.

  The lawyer’s advice was simple: if I wanted to make sure to avoid service, then I needed to get out of Italy until he could work things out.

  “Fine,” I told him. “I’ll go to France or England.”

  That wasn’t good enough. Those countries had extradition deals with Italy and would turn me over if asked to. He told me to get myself across an ocean.

  I decided to go to the United States, to New York City. Patty was ready and willing to leave with me, and a friend of her family’s had offered us the use of an apartment, though it wasn’t in Manhattan; it was in some place called “Queens.”

  I’d been to New York once before, six years earlier, when I was twenty-one, to experience firsthand the city I’d seen on television and in the movies all my life. I’d felt a connection to America since I was a little kid, and a special bond with New York City. We all did. There were just two television channels in Italy at that time, Channel 1 and Channel 2, and both of them were government controlled. Every night the news began with reports from New York. There were also two reports from Washington, D.C., but I didn’t care about that because it was all politics. But New York. Just the name meant so much: New York was Wall Street. New York was Broadway. New York was the ladder of the New World. You climbed in New York. You climbed, and at the top of the ladder, there was money, power, sex, theater, art. Everything you could dream of, or at least everything that I dreamed of. I was so excited to go there that when we landed, I knelt down and, with the roar of departing airplanes rumbling in my ears and the smell of gasoline in my nose, kissed the tarmac. The city was in the middle of its decline back then, and everything seemed extreme. Everybody talked about “don’t go here or you’ll get mugged,” and “don’t go there or you’ll get mugged,” or “I was just mugged for the third time this year.” None of that bothered me. I stayed in this cute little apartment on Jones Street, in the West Village. I was twenty-one years old: I wore jeans everywhere and smoked a lot of cigarettes, and everything else available back then, and I had a great time.

  And so, when my attorney told me to get across an ocean, I simply didn’t know where else to go. Plus a number of my heroes lived in New York, all those filmmakers and actors who I so looked up to, and musicians like John Lennon—one of the ultimate iconoclasts—whom I positively idolized. When I thought of
New York, one of the first images that always came to mind for me was the black-and-white Bob Gruen photograph of Lennon in sunglasses and that sleeveless T-shirt with the simple black letters spelling New York City in the middle.

  But as much as I loved the idea of New York, this time, obviously, the circumstances were different. It was, in my view, a trip I was being forced to make, and one I might never return from. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got, and by the time I parked outside my parents’ building, I was seething.

  I ran upstairs to their apartment on the second floor and pressed the buzzer. When my father answered the door, before he could say a word, I waved the little pink card in his face.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” I demanded.

  “Of what?” He was right to be confused; he’d known for months that I’d been drafted.

  “Why did they call me up after all these years?”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was you! You told them to call me up. You got your friends to do it.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  He looked me squarely in the eyes when he said this, as though trying to bore right into my brain and make me believe him. And I wanted to believe him. But I couldn’t; there was too much painful history between us.

  My mother, no doubt sensing that something awful was transpiring in the foyer, came in and tried to change the subject. She knew how to appeal to my better instincts, by raising the promise of one of her home-cooked meals.

  “Are you staying for dinner?” she asked. “I made pappa al pomodoro.”

  Since moving to Rome I had never visited home and not stayed for dinner. We were at the very end of the summer, and more than once I had thought of my mother’s pappa al pomodoro and looked forward to a visit so I could eat it.

  But not this time.

  “No,” I told her. “I need to go”

  She was stunned: “What do you mean?”

  I told them I was leaving. That I was going to America until my attorney could work things out with the Italian government.

  “What do you mean, you’re going to America?” she asked. “Do you have money?”

  She touched my arm, as if about to pull at my shirt. I sensed a big scene about to transpire, a lot of screaming and tears.

  “Lascialo andare, Mafalda,” said my father. Let him go.

  “Stai, zitto, Antonio,” she said. Be quiet.

  It was one of the rare times that I was in agreement with my father. There was really nothing to say, so I turned and left.

  I walked down the street to my car. I wanted to be tough and not give my father the satisfaction of seeing me look back, but I did: my mother was standing on the second-floor balcony, waving sadly at me. Behind her stood my father, emotionless as ever.

  I turned away, got in my car, and drove back to Rome.

  INTERLUDE

  GIANFRANCO! GIANFRANCO! TABLE Forty-Six has been trying to get somebody’s attention for ten minutes now.”

  We are sitting, Pino and I, where we always sit, at a little table for two at the top of the staircase inside his restaurant, Centolire, near the corner of Madison Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It’s an opulent neighborhood, and this restaurant, with its blond wood floors, smartly dressed managers, and sophisticated take on Italian-American cuisine, caters to it perfectly. It’s also the ideal location to talk about Pino’s life because the restaurant essentially encapsulates it: the name Centolire comes from an old song—it literally means “one hundred lire”—and the lyrics are about a young man asking his mother for just that amount so he can go to America. For those who know Pino, the subtext is obvious: he himself came over with scarcely more than that, and now here he is, almost thirty years later, the owner of a restaurant in one of the most well-heeled zip codes in the United States.

  Across the table, Pino watches as his general manager, Gianfranco Cherici—an Old World sort with trousers hiked up to his navel, a short, thin tie, and aristocratic face—whispers instructions to a waiter, who walk-runs to the neglected table.

  Pino watches until the waiter has spoken to the customers and departed to attend to their needs. He nods solemnly, satisfied for the moment.

  “We should probably order,” he says. It’s a superfluous comment because I’ve never sat down with Pino in one of his restaurants and not had lunch or dinner. The years have done nothing to diminish his passion for food and wine, and I often learn that he’s been pondering what we might eat all day long.

  “I was thinking maybe we split a puntarelle with garlic and anchovy, and then the lamb stew. It’s very good tonight.”

  I nod. “Sounds great.”

  Pino rarely orders from one of his waiters, instead waving over Gian-franco and delivering instructions to him in Italian. He does just that, and Gianfranco takes off to personally put in the order. It’s good to be the king.

  “Sorry, where was I?”

  “You were about to leave for New York.”

  Pino takes a sip of wine, and continues.

  TWO

  Abandon Hope, All Ye

  Who Enter Here

  ON MY LAST morning there, I saw the sun come up over Rome.

  Patty and I spent the entire evening hanging out on my terrace with our friends, then everybody went their separate ways and we watched the city rise up out of the darkness, like the image in a Polaroid. Most of the city was east of the apartment, so when the sun rose, the sky was a perfect, pristine blue. For what might have been the last time, I witnessed the Colosseum and the Vatican emerge, and all the other buildings, especially the churches, which always stood out for me because of the way they pointed up at the sky.

  We both dozed off out there, but we were soon awakened by one of my favorite sounds in Rome, the chirping of hundreds of robins as they swept past. I stood up and began my morning routine, making an espresso in my moka coffeemaker, then sat outside again, sipping it and breathing in the aroma of the fragrant citrus fruits that always seem to perfume the Roman air at sunrise.

  Will they have good coffee in America?, I wondered. Unsure of the answer, I washed and dried the machine, tucked a bag of Segafredo grounds inside, and packed it in my suitcase.

  I took a shower and got dressed. My suitcase had been lying open on the bed for almost twenty-four hours. Though I’d been fully packed I had avoided clasping it shut. Finally, I did, but I was so loath to leave that I couldn’t make my feet move for the door. Patty led me, keeping us on schedule. We got downstairs and hailed a taxi.

  Like my morning ritual at home, the drive out of the city was chockfull of things I was going to miss, like the little bakery that my friends and I used to walk by after being out all night; its dairy deliveries would be sitting outside in wooden crates and we’d help ourselves to a few bottles of milk and guzzle them as we headed home to bed.

  At the airport Patty guided me by the hand all the way through the check-in and right to our seats. When the stewardess pulled the heavy door closed on the airplane and I heard it seal, I was overcome with panic. Should I have run down the aisle and begged them to let me off? Should I have gone back home and made peace with my military obligation, reported to Barletta, and been done with it?

  But it wasn’t until the plane pushed away from the gate and began the slow crawl down the runway that I began to fully comprehend the possible consequences of my actions. When I failed to return to Italy and report for duty on October 19, I would become a deserter, subject to criminal prosecution, and could be thrown into prison. This wasn’t a night in the boarding school brig we were talking about, and it wasn’t a scene in one of my favorite movies or in a play I was rehearsing. It was real life.

  As the plane took off, I thought back to those nights in Orbetello leaving the watermelon field and soaring along the winding country roads on my scooter, that feeling of freedom that came wit
h the wind in my face. But now, as we climbed higher and higher, the sense of speed was terrifying, and being in flight only added to my feeling of impending doom.

  I barely spoke to Patty for the entire trip. I was playing my life over in my mind. Since saying good-bye to my parents, the fight with my father had weighed on me, mostly for the grief it had surely caused my mother. I was old enough by then to know that there are certain things you say in life that can never be forgotten—forgiven, maybe, but never forgotten—and it was sinking in that in some respects my relationships with both of them would be forever altered.

  I promised myself that everything would be all right, that the lawyer would come through, that I’d be able to return to Italy in three months, tops. Nobody had ever told me that, but that’s what I told myself for peace of mind. Three months.

  I spent eight hours thinking about all of this. I didn’t drink anything, didn’t partake of the in-flight meal, didn’t get up to go to the bathroom.

  After all that time, slipping in and out of consciousness along the way, the plane began its bumpy descent through the clouds, and I became vaguely aware of the east coast of the United States down below. I didn’t really focus on it until the plane got lower and lower and suddenly I could discern the landmarks of New York City: the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building.

  Almost at the same instant I noted them, the plane’s PA system crackled to life and the opening piano chords of the song “New York, New York” came blaring through the cabin. Liza Minnelli had introduced it to the world a few years earlier, in the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name, but Sinatra had pickpocketed it in 1979, making it his forever. It was Sinatra’s version being played on the plane: