staring at stuff

i see them, wandering away from a party in the restaurant, wrists clasped behind lower back, up and down the hallway, staring blankly at posters, memorabilia and artifacts. it is as if they don't feel like small talking, or managing a birthday moment, or being pushed about by a friend or family member to participate. they want outa there, but can't leave, so they wander and gaze like giraffes at anything not human. that's one version. the other is the small town tourist i imagine driving a gigantic stainless steel RV, traveling the USA and stopping to gape at every scenic view. they have to take a picture, to memorialize what is to me impossibly boring. and so, at Doyle's i see them, up on tiptoe and down on heels, wrists round the back, squinting at all that crap on the wall as if it tells them something vital, something which, if they missed it, would become an existential loss.

harlow my hero

Harlow was The Man when i was a boy growing up on the Main Line, just north of Philly. he lived in the big house across a thin road from our big house. his family along with mine were inseparably close until the inevitable college diaspora. we did small kid's 'dirty things' in the fields when we were small. we built tree forts, hauled up buckets of pine cone ammo to heave at imaginary enemies and had school girl crushes on each other. but it was Harlow who was the undisputed king of our insular, one-square-block hood. he sported a floppy white-man's fro, had a lanky build, angular features, rarely needed a shave (though he was hardly baby-faced) and he had a sharp tongue and flint-sharp eyes. he seemed to know all the post beats. Dylan, Baez, Van Ronk were his discoveries and he turned us onto them. he could play hard, finger-picking folk, none of his own songs, but the newly minted from the soon-to-be legends. one night, drunk, he sang 'Motherless Children' in front of my best friend at the time who's mom had just killed herself (there were a lotta suicides in the hood). this didn't slow him down. forthrightness was his MO. maybe he did the right thing. he always seemed to do the right thing, even when it seemed 'wrong', which shook up my pre-teen head. he did that a lot, shaking up the complacent and the fearful. word had it that he fucked Baez, but we were never sure. he scored big with the Bryn Mawr girls even before he graduated high school, which, near as i can tell, he never finished. he started his own construction company (in his early twenties) in South Philly, tearing apart brownstones and putting them back together and yelling at workers in a good-hearted way. he was a kid on the way up we figured. i worked for him one summer, in over my head, but his charismatic bluster held me in thrall. hell, he was friends with Mott, an inventor who looked like Gandalf and who met visitors at his door stark naked and bellowing. Harlow (nice name for a boy, right?) won the heart of an insanely beautiful Russian girl, Leah. they had a kid. we were never sure if they married. there was even a famous photograph by a famous photographer that showed Leah's full tit squirting milk on their baby and they let the kid ride mama's back when they were fucking. at one point he accumulated a pile of parking tickets at his construction sites which added up to cash in the thousands. he couldn't afford to pay them so he changed his name, skipped town and moved to San Francisco. he got a commercial pilot's license and flew rich people up and down the coast. the last great time we spent together was when my dad flew him out to Santa Barbara to pick me up after i'd been busted and jailed for shoplifting. we drove home cross-country, non stop, high on meth and solving all the problems of the world in one sleepless trip. i wonder how he's doing. breaking barriers still, i bet.

bloody shave

at one point i had free access to a gym. a 30th floor downtown health spa filled with chrome machines, mirrors, men and women sweating off pounds and working hard to transform flubbery bodies into generic, cut, hairless 'beauty'. nothing more absurd looking than a rock hard 20 year old body sprouting a 45 year old head. i pretty much got nowhere fast. there were no pounds lost, no change in body contour. i went because it was, for a few short months, free and it got me out of the non-profit office where i holed up. what stayed with me was an unforgettable sight. in the shower everyone keeps an eagle-eye perimeter around their naked selves. 'i'm naked. you're naked. i see you, but i'm not looking at your dick and for fuck sake's don't look at mine'. one afternoon i'm toweling off at the sink while the guy next to me is shaving. he has a big slap-happy grin, but his face is covered in blood. the blade has sliced up his neck, throat, cheeks and Adam's apple. i can't believe what i'm seeing until i get it, he's blind. the guy is fucking blind. here he is, 30 years old, 30 stories up, towel around waist, shaving in a public bathroom. shaving blind and bloodied-up and ecstatic. the freedom he feels, unassisted, shaving himself thoroughly rips me out of my bleak cynical judgement. what a dude he is. what an amazing amazing guy. i didn't say a word. i just admired how incredibly awesome he was.

patience

does not become me. i try to wait (they also serve who only stand and shit), but i'm terrible at it. i rush through songs, i tick off my list-for-the-day like a housewife on meth. i meet new people and crash course their biography. at work i smack the plates down on the table even as i try, so help me, to gently settle the food onto the paper mat. driving cross country i count not miles, but states, hurtling through the imaginary dotted lines that atlas-separates Kansas from Iowa. i drink beer like water at an oasis. i eat shovel-fulls of Chinese and suck up Pu Pu like a Hoover. perhaps i am racing towards the end of my life. or maybe i'm trying to see, touch, experience, absorb everything and everyone in my path as quickly as possible so as to not miss anything. i watch myself roar down the road in 5th gear but it never slows me down. i rev the engine, i lurch through life. Buddha would have a problem with me.

nureyev revives fonteyn

he pulls her out of retirement. they dance on big stages across the globe. she's young again. he's leaping to inspired heights. they adore each other. the other night i'm watching the last 5 minutes of Toy Story 3 and working up a good cry when i notice my spinster cat, Sofi, on top of the foot stool. underneath is the new kid, Mao, who looks up at her with half-closed but curious golden eyes. Sofi half-heartedly paws the air with a matchstick leg. Mao's seems half asleep, but they're communicating. what was once fight and scratch has for the moment become what i can only describe as play, or off-hand shadow boxing. Mao has drawn her outside her stay-in-the-safe-closet persona and now they're in kitty love. she prefers to leave my room when i go to sleep rather than crash at the foot of my bed. she wants to be out there in the hallway with Mao. they've slept body-to-body when i caught them in an unguarded moment and the other morning. he stood watch at the door to the porch while she shat in her box, undisturbed, like the centurion boyfriend who guards the men's room while his girlfriend takes a hurry-up piss. it took months, this ever so gradual friendship and on Christmas day, i swear, as Sof was curled up on a couch pillow, Mao leaped up, clumsy tip-toed over to her and kissed her on her hard licorice-lipped kitty-mouth. a tiny cat kiss like a bird fart. they still wrestle and scratch and bite and hiss and spit, but it's closer to a good time than a hate-fest. so on top of Toy Story 3 i get this image of two ex-enemies in a paw-de-deux.

the old lady

in the back room has one good and one fucked-up eye. she's all chicken bones in a house dress, frail and helpless. she needs to be led around by the elbow. she doesn't want a cocktail, she wants coffee. she helps herself. the bad eye is watery, poked-out and unseeing, a scary egg-white blob. i wonder if, in an earlier century, she would have been accused of practicing the black arts, run outa town or burned at the stake. she doesn't say much. she's in her own world. at times it's as if she's not there at all. friends and family speak to her or at her. how is she doing? she looks at her loafers. she waits until they finish with their attentions. i imagine her young, pretty, flirting, but it's a stretch. i see her in her kitchen under a harsh fluorescent light, the dishes piled up and befouled, a smell of piss and toast crumbs on the formica. definitely a bad-picture TV with the sound on low, her slippers worn at the heel and the photos of relatives turned over. a sickly cat is curled up in a corner. i hope i get her wrong. i hope she's aware, safe, living in her own house, taking calls and sky-high on pills.

my job:

waiter at Doyles and for more years than i can count. doing anything that long invites disaster, boredom, wet brain, mistakes, getting shit-canned, psychiatry or criminal acts. in my case i'm just plain lucky because i love what i do. i did from the start. i look forward to it every night, even when my art homework is coitus interrupted and a song is half boiled on the stove. there are so many reasons why i dig the gig. for one, it ain't phony. yuppies (when they existed) are never comfortable there. it ain't posh, but it's decent and it's a good time, the food and service friendly and inexpensive. booths and beer sell the joint to the newly arrived. the three rooms, from the original antique bar to the 80's additions, have a family frankness, a we-did-this-ourselves-not-some-interior-designer-with-ascot-and-little- dog crap. tin ceilings, wobbly fans, paintings and photos of politicians, Red Sox teams, high school year book portraits taken back in the mid-20th clutter the space. i like looking around. it appeals to me in an easy way. the worn-through linoleum, beer neon, hanging lamps and the recently added flat screen tvs co-exist with the sway-backed shelves behind the bar. the kitchen is huge and crazy loud with the attack of cooking, dish washing, pizza hurling, foul language, frantic expedition and screaming cel phone calls to kids. the bar is one yards long slab loaded with a soldier's salute of beer taps. the murals make no sense. are we in Boston? Switzerland? Ireland? some are incomplete (the artist couldn't paint hands and hid them behind Pilgrim skirts). the Indians are more yellow than red and were repainted, as well as the ceiling, after the smoking ban. the cigarette era accumulated a nicotine crust on the walls and tin. the new paint job holds, translucent as glass. but none of the above would keep me, or anyone else, working there all these years if there wasn't more to it. more than whizzing about the floor, banging through doors, mopping up kids rice-on-the-table or dealing with idiots. it's who you work with and work for that gets you through the night. i get a bang out of my co-workers, then and now. they are a rag tag lot and we yell, fight, laugh, steal tables, shrug off asshole customers as we beat up on them as soon as we're out of earshot. we squeal/cheer the Sox, Pats, Bruins and Celts. the jokes and anecdotes never let up or get stale. gossip is as thick as gravy, complaints wild and the side-work can be spotty. we shrug off the annoying cliches: 'i'll DO a Hogaarden' - 'do'? are you serious? should i watch? 'i'm still WORKING on my prime rib' - with a screw driver? can ya get me a glass of water 'when you have a chance'...as in HURRY THE FUCK UP! 'i hated it' hardy har har har (when every plate has been licked clean). the naughty desert eyes: 'i'll try the mudd pie' tee hee hee - like they're remembering some exotic sexual position. the presumption of the regular who assumes that because he's been to Doyles a zillion times, he deserves the extra attention. really? probably. but over time, regulars become friends. like teachers, we watch their kids grow up. we hear about an impending divorce, a son's first guitar, a daughter who won a writing award. the wait staff (except for me) are girls. cooks, dishwashers, bartenders are all dudes. the kitchen guys hang tough and are dirty-mouthed and hilarious. when you boom through the swinging door you enter their turf which is louder, raunchier and more real in a lotta ways than the 'how can i help you?' politesse back on the floor. the bartenders open wine bottles by grabbing the belly in one hand and back-assward twisting the bottle not the corkscrew. but hey, we ain't in the South Wnd. we ain't Vogue sleek or knock-out hot. we cover a broad age spectrum, but we're good looking in that straight forward working class what-the-fuck way. we wear t-shirts, shorts and jeans. there is no snotty have-to-wear-black dress code. and we're quick. turn over is our bread and butter. not many customers linger anyhow. big families with lotsa kids running all over the restaurant want in and out with a snap. the back room is the only function space of its kind or size in Jamaica Plain. it can handle birthday parties, political fund raisers, soccer trophy nights, wedding receptions, graduations and lesbian football teams. years ago, Eddie Burke, who bought the joint back in the 60's, made sure that no prejudice be allowed. he made it a rule: if some asshole was racist or homophobic, he was banned for life. who knew that a liberal agenda was gonna take over the hood? dykes love doyles. so do cops, veterinarians, African Americans, indie rockers, Germans, nuns, Haitians, students, socialists and trans-genders. the polyglot is happy here. there's no paid vacation, sick or maternity leave. you show up or you don't and you make the money you make, but you walk outa there with your tips, you can adjust your schedule to suit another occupation and you don't take the job home. i rarely hang after work. i love the interplay and frenzy during my shift, but i don't feel like sticking around later. (i have other friends at another bar.) but ya know what? when things get tough, we count on each other. we pitch in. we pass the hat for someone who's sick or who's lost a friend, having a birthday or getting married. we read with a glance how waitress X is handling the dope at table 30 and we have her back. regulars have nick names: 'the dog lady'. 'the basketball guys'. 'why do you DO that?'. we laugh about them. we have to. it's like that in 'the industry' and especially at Doyles. it ain't corporate and that's why it's fun, that's why it works and that's why so many of us have stayed on. my sister, a waitress for years, said 'you can't be yourself when you wait tables'. i get it and acting does happen at Doyles, but it ain't Shakespeare and you can pretty much be who you are. you can even have a count-your-farts-in-the-hallway contest with Kelly and Sheila, or do the crossword when it's dead slow. that's just part of why the place is awesome, why there are so many returnees ('are you still here?'), why so many of the staff have stuck around and why i'm grateful to have the gig. hey, they even call me 'Ricky'.