Dirty Dishes Read online

  As my first days passed, my opinion of Silvano changed like the weather. His admirable bravado on the service floor was offset by his arrogance and eccentricity; a few days later, he blew through the front door wearing a floor-length fox-fur coat that I never saw again. I also noticed that he would begin drinking before lunchtime, which seemed like a bad idea to me, but this too was balanced by the fact that he was always able to function like a pro: he’d work lunch service, then stroll over to his apartment around the corner for a nap, and then return fresh as a daisy for dinner.

  Adding to my seesawing feelings toward him was the fact that Sil-vano continued to keep me at arm’s length, but I was grateful to him for having created this restaurant that relieved my homesickness. Once again, I was part of a team—a “family” as they said in the industry—and it was like belonging to a theater troupe again, except instead of putting on plays for people, we served them meals. My happiest times were just before and after lunch and dinner when I’d stand out front under the awning and speak Italian with Delfino.

  I also found comfort and familiarity in the similarities between the restaurant and theater. It occurred to me that there was little difference between what Silvano did and what I had done as an actor: he put on two one-man performances every day—a matinee and an evening show—and we were all his supporting actors and stagehands. There was another parallel to theater: working in an authentically Italian restaurant in America was an opportunity to participate in the creation of an alternate reality. I knew very quickly that this was going to be my salvation, that when I came to Da Silvano I was coming to Italy. I could speak Italian, eat Italian food, and be surrounded by Italian furnishings.

  I was also grateful for the work, and I plunged into it wholeheartedly. To compensate for the language barrier, I looked for ways to make myself as useful and indispensable as possible. Because of my experience working for my uncle, I understood how to synchronize the kitchen and dining room, and I would do everything in my power to keep meals moving along, clearing tables that were ready to be cleared and running hot food out from the kitchen while it was still giving off steam.

  The cooks loved me. They saw the effort I was putting forth and would thank me with bits of food. “Hey, Pino,” they’d say, and slide me a little dish of pasta on a bread-and-butter plate, just the right size for me to twirl and devour in a bite or two—a little carbo-load to get me through the next hour.

  The only problem I had was that one of the American waiters, a guy named Tom—a tall, gangly college dropout with a Prince Valiant haircut and glasses—was supremely lazy and spent most of his time talking to customers. He was a master of small talk, able to stretch any topic—from the Yankees to the downtown scene to where he bought his eyeglasses—into a ten- to fifteen-minute conversation. Meanwhile, I ran around him doing my job and his. I came to think of him as “Mr. Finger” because he was always pointing at things, such as tables that needed clearing, and saying “Pino,” treating me like his dog. It really began to piss me off, and also to threaten me. I couldn’t speak English, and I didn’t have a relationship with Silvano, so it was impossible for me to confront this guy directly. I lived in fear that one day Delfino would leave and Tom or the new manager would find a way to get rid of me.

  Late one night while we were still serving customers, Silvano was sitting at the bar and Tom was standing there telling him stories. I walked by with a stack of dishes in my arms, sweat pouring off my face, and said to Silvano, “Parla con te, incula a me.” Because he talks to you, he’s fucking me.

  Silvano thought about this for a second, then cracked up. I could tell it was the first time the effect of Tom’s chattiness on the other employees registered for him. After that, I tried to make the point in other ways; we had two busboys for the busiest days of the week, but I knew that if Tom only pulled his weight, we could get by with one, and have more room to function, so one day I told Silvano, “This is a job for one busboy.” Silvano just nodded, but he never really followed up on it, and I began to form an opinion that he was simply one of those people with little stomach for confrontation.

  Despite my nemesis, I was so happy in my work that before long I had no desire to be anywhere else, especially because, outside, the city remained threatening; one afternoon, while standing under the awning out front with one of the cooks, I heard a commotion and turned to see a shirtless and sinewy black teenager in cutoff denim shorts running for his life from the basketball court on the corner of Houston and Sixth Avenue. Behind him, a small mob of four guys in shirtsleeves, each brandishing a baseball bat, was in hot pursuit. They chased him right into the middle of Sixth Avenue, where his escape was blocked by a moving truck stopped at a red light. The guys went to town on him. I looked away but I could hear the sickening sound of bat meeting bone and I remember being struck that nobody in any of the cars was doing anything to stop this.

  Then, I heard a shriek and looked up to see another black kid, coming from the same direction, this one being chased by six or seven guys, most of them also carrying bats, which they had at the ready like polo mallets. They caught up to him on the sidewalk and began savaging him as well. The wail of a police car caused the assailants to flee and when I looked at the guys they’d been beating, I almost threw up: one of them was trying to rise up off the pavement, but he literally didn’t have the strength to get to his knees. The other had been reduced to an inert, bloody mass, right down to his skull, which had been split open. Cars drove past them indifferently. I was reminded of myself, standing on that sidewalk a few weeks earlier, people rushing by, and I thought how brutal the city could be—emotionally, physically, financially brutal.

  I turned away from the circus on the street and went back into the restaurant, back to the smells and sounds of Italy, and when the door closed behind me, it was as if I were in another world again, safe from the violence outside.

  ALTHOUGH DA SILVANO offered me emotional refuge, it was also challenging to be there. I was constantly surrounded by people who were eating, drinking, and laughing, and I had no way of participating. The sounds of a busy restaurant are happy sounds but I tried to shut them out, or sometimes think of them as a kind of background music. In order to survive, I also began calling even more on my theater training. I imagined that when I was at work, I was playing the part of The Busboy. The dining room became the stage, the kitchen became the backstage, and the patrons became the audience in what I came to think of as a kind of experimental space where the observers were seated right onstage with the actors. I functioned like this for several months, but facing the loneliness every day was the biggest challenge of my life. Eventually, though, I learned how to enjoy my own company, and my own thoughts. I would often get into such a flow of work that I was able to pass entire evenings meditating on aspects of my life—whether or not I’d done the right thing leaving Italy, my conflicting feelings about my father, how much I missed acting and my friends.

  The moments that took me out of my own head involved the screen artists who frequented Da Silvano, many of whom, such as the director John Cassavetes, were regulars. Ironically, by fleeing my life in the theater I had ended up in a place that drew celebrities, including many of my heroes, like an awards show. The irony was compounded by the fact that I couldn’t converse with them, like the first time that I saw Robert De Niro—this icon I knew as a forty-foot-tall image flickering on the screen of a Roman movie house—come in for dinner. It was thrilling to watch him sit in the corner eating a bowl of pasta. I can still see him there, slightly hunched over, with the lights from passing cars dancing over him while he ate, rendering him as cinematic as ever. I would have loved to have met him, to have spoken to him. But I couldn’t, and it was hard to refrain from making eye contact, or even trying to strike up a conversation, when I would refill his water glass or sprinkle parmesan on his pasta.

  In time, De Niro came to recognize me, and he would nod to me when he sat down and unfurled his napkin. One day, I took the sign of
familiarity a little too far and in my mangled English said to him, “In Italy, was an actor. I was in Italy an actor.”

  He smiled painfully, then put things back in their proper context by asking me: “What are the pasta specials tonight?”

  BY DECEMBER, THE only two things I was concerned with, from the time I woke up in the morning to the moment I went to bed at night, were working at Da Silvano and learning English. I spent many of the service hours observing little details about the restaurant: how the tables were packed but in such a way as to grant each one just enough privacy; the level of the music and the adjustments Silvano made to the lighting during the day and evening. I’m still impressed by the way he ran the reservation book. Silvano understood, or gambled, that people were willing to wait in New York. Personally, I think he went a little far with it, because his basic attitude was, “I’m the hot shit in town, and you people will sit when I say you can.” I couldn’t treat customers that way, but he never suffered for his arrogance: there was a little bench outside the restaurant that got to know more famous asses than any bench in New York City because even celebrities were happy to camp out there until their tables were ready. I’ll never forget the time Silvano dispatched me to take wine to a couple parked out there, and when I did they turned and I saw that it was Kelly and Calvin Klein, huddled together to stay warm, just happy to be in New York, downtown, about to dine at Da Silvano. We did three seatings, about one hundred ten dinners, in that little room between six o’clock and eleven thirty, which is impossible, but we did it most nights. That’s one of the things Silvano taught me: how to do the impossible.

  I’ll be honest: I was stealing from him, and because he didn’t pay any attention to a lowly busboy like me, he never noticed. I wasn’t stealing money; I was stealing the tricks of the trade, my eyes pilfering every last detail, even little things like how to watch the door and the dining room at the same time and how to anticipate the customer’s next move. It was like the New York City version of my time working for my uncle, except that the space was so small that there was an added element of physicality; when the place was fully occupied there was no room to turn or twist, so we were constantly reaching over, under, and around each other and the diners to get things done. I took to this naturally; working the floor was like dancing to me and in no time, I could clear a table, or lay down hot plates, while lifting my hip over a chair, or standing up on my tiptoes to get out of the way of a rising diner from an adjacent table.

  As for learning English, I had no time for taking a course. Instead, I listened to the news every chance I got, and I conversed with anyone who would talk to me. Some of my best teachers were the delivery guys who brought food to Silvano’s. “I no order veal shank,” I’d say. They’d say back, “Ah, man, that’s our name for osso buco.”

  I also read the papers every day, especially the New York Post—which I later realized uses some of the worst English imaginable, but which added a great deal of American slang to my repertoire. I also began to lean on American swear words, like motherfucker, scumbag, or dickhead, the way the Peanuts character Linus clung to his security blanket. I probably used them too much, but they were just so descriptive and created a sense of instant intimacy with whomever I was talking to, especially the guys I worked with. And I had a special place in my heart for Yiddish: oy gevalt, shtup, schmuck. I guess I was assimilating a little after all, going the path of Oreste and Claudio, but working at Da Silvano made me feel as if I were still living in Italy most of my waking hours so it was alright.

  I was getting more and more used to life in New York, when all of a sudden another bit of violence rocked my world: During service on December 8, 1980, I learned that John Lennon had been shot. I was in shock. I had always thought of myself as a member of the Beatles generation, so it was like hearing that a relative had died. I asked one of the guys where his home, the Dakota, was and he told me. I got on the subway and rode up to West Seventy-second Street, then walked over to his building. The streets were packed with people, some of them wild with anger, others weeping, many of them kneeling down on the ground like that woman in the famous Kent State photograph.

  Like many of those people I just wandered around in a daze, eventually finding my way over to Central Park. Somebody was playing Beatles songs and John Lennon songs on his boom box, and we all sang. We sang “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road” and “Imagine,” and whatever else we could think of, and we didn’t stop for hours.

  Nothing brings you closer to your neighbors more quickly than a shared moment of tragedy.

  That was the night I became a New Yorker.

  I WENT THROUGH another rite of passage about a week later when a huge storm hit the northeast on a Saturday afternoon. One of the waiters, Dmitri, got stranded on his way back to New York City and Tom called in sick with claims of a high fever.

  For all of his manic energy, Silvano was as cool and calm as a field general.

  “OK, Pino,” he quacked as he hung up the phone with Tom. “I guess it’s you and me tonight.”

  We quickly drew up a simple plan for the evening: Silvano would greet customers and take orders, and I would do everything else. It was a reprisal of my role in my uncle’s restaurant, although on a smaller scale. We began welcoming diners at six thirty, and it was instant pandemonium. I spent the next seven hours uncorking wine bottles, shuttling dishes from the hot line to the tables, and then hustling the dirty dishes from the tables to the dishwasher; I offered parmesan and black pepper for people’s pasta, made them espressos and cappuccinos, and poured them grappa; I wrote and totaled checks for the customers based on Silvano’s scribbled tickets and collected money; I reset tables and even mopped up spills. I was a one-man bussing, serving, coffee-and-drink-making, maintenance, and housekeeping crew, and I loved every second of it.

  All of this allowed Silvano to do his thing, and I must say that it was something to behold. I was most impressed at how he managed to lavish personal attention on every party when they needed or expected it, sometimes interrupting himself mid-sentence to pull it off. “Tonight for the specials we have . . .” he’d be saying to one table, pausing to acknowledge a party of four who had just walked in the door, “Good evening, give me a second,” then turning back to the table and finishing up, “roasted duck with dry vermouth.”

  As two A.M. approached, and he ushered the last guest out into the icy streets, Silvano locked the front door, told me to have a seat, went into the kitchen, and made two orders of tagliolini. He brought them to the table and shaved a few hundred dollars’ worth of white truffles over each portion, popped open a bottle of Cristal, and we toasted our triumph; then the two of us sat there eating and reminiscing until about three o’clock in the morning. It was the first time I really got to know anything much about him as a person. I learned that certain menu anomalies, like that oyster stew or specials like breaded abalone, were remnants of his time spent training in French hotels early in his career. I also began to understand that he was enjoying a relatively new level of success, fame, and disposable income, which helped explain some of his behavior: that kind of transformation can really go to your head and make you feel infallible, hence the daytime drinking.

  At the end of the evening, we divvied up the tips. My half was three hundred fifty dollars, but the money was incidental. I left knowing that I had his confidence and trust and that big things were in store for me.

  THERE WAS JUST one problem: in January 1981, my visa was close to its expiration date.

  Patty and I solved the crisis in the only way we knew how: by getting married. We’d been together for three years, and it seemed as if it would be the answer to so many challenges. Her office was down on Broad Street, so we met at lunchtime one day and walked over to City Hall.

  The City of New York’s marriage office is not a romantic place, but that didn’t keep the other couples there from feeling the magic of their wedding day: they were holding hands and caressing and kissing each other. Me
anwhile, Patty and I were all business, there to obtain a piece of paper and move on. We looked as if we could have been waiting to see a dentist.

  It was not the way I had pictured my wedding day. I had a great deal of respect for the sanctity of marriage and ours was something of a farce. But the alternative to a visit with Manhattan’s justice of the peace was an appearance before a very different judge back in Italy, so I went through with it. Because my English was still lacking, we worked out a system whereby Patty would pinch me on the side of my belly whenever I was supposed to say “Yes, I do,” and that’s what I did, agreeing to whatever I had to in order to remain here in America.

  ANOTHER HUGE DEVELOPMENT took place that month when Delfino decided to leave Da Silvano to return to Italy. Before departing, he pointed at me and said to Silvano: “He’s the only one here you can trust to do my job.”

  Silvano promoted me to manager, and as he was often off on some vacation, that was like being crowned the king. But even though I was now able to conduct basic transactions, such as welcoming guests and getting them to the table, in English, beyond that I still got lost in the language. Because I couldn’t communicate that well, no matter what a customer would say, I would crack up as if it were the funniest thing I’d ever heard, pat them on the back, and walk away laughing. This worked, but I felt like a trained seal.

  Being a lieutenant did have its advantages. Fed up with Tom’s laziness, and with the growing offense he took at my now outranking him, and at the real work I made him do—even universally accepted waiter tasks such as setting tables before service—I walked up to Sil-vano one day and said, “him or me.” Silvano’s response was swift: “You’re the manager; you decide.” Later that same afternoon, I ordered Tom to bring some wine up from the cellar. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “I’m out of here.” I just waved and said, “Bye. Bye.”