We live in the Village, off Christopher Street. The greeting card store has cards with jokes I’m not sure I totally understand and there is a bakery with X-rated cakes. I want Carvel. My mother is experimenting with baklava.

The city is filled with perverts, junkies, pushers, muggers and arsonists but, at the same time, we roam freely. My best friend’s mother has left her conservative husband behind in the suburbs and her boyfriend is bisexual. They live in a loft on the boundary between the West Village and the meatpacking district. It had been the office for a gay magazine and they kept the original bathroom, complete with urinals and a toilet cubicle sporting graffiti with drawings of penises. Their father recalls my friend and her younger sister to the suburbs the next year. The city, clearly, is no place for children to grow up. I missed her.

I am friends with a man who works in a store on Christopher Street called The Soap Opera. He has salt and pepper hair. He goes to drag balls in Alphabet City, which is where he lives. It seems then like a faraway land. He loves the glamor and the illusion. I see how the store itself is like a stage set, with a brocade curtain covering a squalid and miniscule bathroom, a tiny kitchenette, a painted-over window, the shop cat’s box and food. It is the opposite of the boudoir atmosphere of the shop, though its products are destined to sit on the tiled windowsills of so many tenement bathrooms just like it. He sells lip balm that comes in a little tin with a sliding lid and Victorian lettering. They become popular at school and I take orders from friends to buy them, always getting the new flavors as soon as they are in stock.

I had all of this in mind when I wrote Lunch in Brooklyn, a novel of a pre-coming of age in the late 70s, commuting to school, feeling in it and not of it, at the age of extreme social conformity in an era of hedonism. I set the book in my friend’s loft because it expressed that better than our townhouse flat. I loved being on the roof. From the roof, it’s all beautiful and it all makes sense.

...

The Gift of Tongues
I go up to the roof after dinner, after the dishes are done. I tell them I come here to think, which is true, although it’s not the whole truth. My mother thinks it’s important to give me private space. From the roof, which is five stories up, you can see down to the river, although, because of the old West Side Highway, you can’t really see much. This is the edge of Greenwich Village. On one street is a row of little townhouses with planters of ivy spilling down from the window boxes. Around the corner, on Hudson Street, men are carrying in the antiques they had displayed outside their store. They have a cat called Sheba who sleeps in the window.

Across Hudson is the meatpacking district. The street widens for the trucks and the loading docks, where sides of beef are connected to pulleys, and the spaces between the cobblestones shine with blood in the morning. In the evening, when the meat-packers are gone, men dressed as disco queens and Catholic schoolgirls appear. They stand on the corners and stroll down the side streets, swinging their purses by the straps, dragging their satin jackets along the pavement.

From the roof, the loading dock looks more like an abandoned railway station. It feels quiet up here, despite the fact that you can still hear the rattle of trucks and the rush of traffic. An airplane tears slowly across the sky. Down in Corporal Seravalli Playground, the boys play basketball. From here they are graceful and you forget the way they show you their tongues, French kissing the air. Hey baby, come sit on my face.

The sky is a dark, streaky, polluted turquoise. I sit on a wooden crate, like a raft in the curling, blistering, tarpaper sea. My mother used to want to have roof parties until she learned how much it would cost to deck it over. My father has carefully explained to me how the upstairs neighbors will sue us if I walk on the tarpaper and damage the roof and they get a leak.

“They’ve heard you moving around up there,” my father has told me.

“Fred,” my mother says, “Kate is very responsible.”

I started smoking in sixth grade with my friend Stephanie. She lives in New Jersey now. I miss her a lot. Stephanie was my best friend more than Monica was. She used to come over all the time. My mom was happy for me to be “entertaining.” She bought us frozen yogurt bars and didn’t tell us when we had to have lights out. We shaved our legs and practiced with makeup. We read the instruction book that came in Tampax so we would be prepared. We pored over my mother’s Erica Jong books for the sex scenes. Some days, anything made us laugh, especially the recipes for game in The Joy of Cooking:

“Place rabbit on serving dish and pour sauce over it. Serve with: noodles, 213.”

“Use young animals only.”

“After scraping away blood clots...”

“You guys are so sick,” Monica would yell us when we phoned, laughing so hard at first we were just gasping, making her think it was a prank call.

“Singe and clean the insides well: Pigs’ ears,” Stephanie joined in.

“Lucky indeed is the cook with the gift of tongues!” I retorted.

“The testicles of young lambs are a great delicacy. To prepare, first cut into the loose outer skin for entire length of the swelled surface.”

Seventh grade was not as good without her. I had tried to cheer myself up with the notion that I would go back to school a woman of the world and all the cute, new boys would fall in love with me. I was tan and blonde and knew what an erogenous zone was. But there were only the same old boys and it was harder to stay a changed person in your mind when you realized you were still plain old, flat Kate.

This fall, starting eighth grade, I have vowed not to be disappointed. Everyone is ruling the middle school, but if you ask me, it’s a hell of a domain. Sixth graders are practically lower schoolers; seventh graders are either your friends or you ignore them. But at least we no longer have to worry that the eighth graders are having all the fun.

I drop my cigarette into the can with all the others and slosh the liquid around to be sure it’s out. It’s almost dark now. A boy runs through the park. The basketball he is carrying under his arm slips and he swoops down to retrieve it while still running. It is an amazing moment of total coordination. Harry Finch has this grace, flicking his hair over his shoulder, tapping his pencil on the desk in time with whatever music is playing loud in his head. The boys are bigger this year. Maybe, at long last, this will be the year that I find someone. Lucky indeed.

Rebecca Moore blogs at wertis.wordpress.com and is author of Lunch in Brooklyn, (lunchinbrooklyn.wordpress.com)  available on iTunes, Amazon and Smashwords.

My exoticism does not go unnoticed. A doorman on Dean Street gives me a consistent greeting. "Shyaaan Weiyte," he says, alluding to the famous red-headed snowboarder. The words drift slowly past his sparkling grill on a soft Jamaican accent. He once had me pose for a few iPhone snapshots so he could show his friends.

Near dusk, I lock my bike to a fence outside of a large, old apartment building on St. Johns Place. In the lobby three men at the end of middle age are horsing around. As I pass by them on my way to the stairs I slowly realize that the sudden shouts of "Faybio, Faybio, Faybio!" are being directed at me. I turn around. "Fabio?" I chuckle. The three explode with laughter and literal knee slapping. "Fabio! He looks like Fabio!" Says one to the others with a swaying arm stretched out in my direction. "You're delivering food? I live on the other side of the building in 3D," he says proudly. Another says, "I dunno man, to me he looks like a guy who..." he puts his weight on his back foot executes a series of arm flourishes against strategic points on his friend's body. "I look like I know Ninjutsu?" Again they burst into a jovial frenzy. "Have a good night guys," I say as I slip up the stairs. When I return, the mood has changed. They are gathered around the doorway inexplicably hushed and serious. I slip through without a word, which seems to suit them.

I climb three flights of stairs in a brownstone on Prospect Place to be greeted by a mother and her two children. One of the children, a little girl no more than 6, asks me if I am a boy or a girl. I tell her I am a boy, but I have long hair the way a lot of girls do. Her mother tells her that when she met her father he had long hair like mine. Father's head appears around the door frame to appraise his wife's comparison and we share a brief smile. The little girl is unconvinced. "You look like a girl," she says. "Some people make a good living that way," I want to say, but think it might be rude putting her parents in the tight spot of explaining to her what I mean. She asks me my name and I tell her, setting the record straight. Her younger brother had greeted me by exclaiming "Hello, Pizza!" He now asks why my delivery bag is red. I pause my bill counting. "Good question" I say. I've never wondered about this before, and I tell him so.

Ernest Merrimont is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College where he studied writing and theatre. He lives in Bushwick, where he copes with the tribulations of being a young, white, educated male. Non-fiction poetry comes out of his phone and goes into the internet here: http://txtmuseum.blogspot.com/.

Signs of the café’s demise were written everywhere, literally. Last July, a chalkboard appeared in the Smith Street window inviting passersby to a closing party. Five months later, The Fall Café was still steaming scrambled eggs and wrapping breakfast burritos, but customers knew the end was near. For one thing, the chalkboard remained in the window. Similarly, the art on the wall, a rotating assortment of amateur collages, non-representational portraits, and dreary urban landscapes, hadn’t changed in a year, and for the final few months of 2011, there were never paper towels in the bathroom. Instead, a message, scrawled in red on a sheet of loose-leaf, chastised customers for flushing them. “If you want dry hands, use your pants,” the note read.

I knew the owner only as Henry, and he reminded me of those old men Woody Allen describes at the beginning of Annie Hall—the guys who wander into cafeterias dribbling saliva and screaming about socialism. Five foot nothing and whippet thin, Henry had the body of an ex-jockey, his neck, arms, and legs a spidery map of veins and tendons. His movements were strange and spastic, and I liked to watch him dart around the café, arranging tables and chairs in a pattern only he could see. He moved like a bee and had a voice like one too, nasal and slightly swallowed. Customers heard his high-pitched murmuring as he tidied, his squeaky rants about the news as he scanned the papers. We laptop users rolled our eyes at his distracting antics, but they were also why we kept coming back.

The Fall Café became mine in 2005 when I started dating a girl who lived on Smith and Douglass, just a few blocks away. I was a grad student upstate at the time and I’d visit for four-day weekends as often as I could. Her apartment was small, poorly lit, and she had a roommate, as well as cats—all of them, roommate and cats alike, ornery and peevish. When my girlfriend went to work on Mondays or Fridays, I’d escape with my books to the coffee shop, order an endless mug, and sit near the window for a few hours, gazing blankly at the passing strollers, truant teenagers, and local Cobble Hill culture.

I began to recognize the regulars, and though I never talked much to anyone, I eavesdropped with abandon and picked up their names when the baristas would call out orders. There was Stan, a stocky Japanese gent who liked English muffins and rolled his own smokes after eating; Sanjay, an amateur economist of some sort, who loved the merits of free markets and machiattos; and Ali, a Yale professor, whose essay on Melville’s poetry I found online and once read in a pause before a refill. I learned the names of employees, too: Rachel; the two musicians, both named Chris; Becky; Scott; and Jerry, Henry’s muscle, the strongman who hauled in supplies from the beverage depot and left, I suppose, with beans. The Fall Café was a place where no one knew my name, I knew theirs, and free Wi-Fi allowed me to google their lives.

Even when graduate school ended and the girlfriend became my wife, I remained among The Fall Café’s faithful. The wife and I established our domestic lives together, bought furniture and kitchen utensils, a coffeemaker and a teapot. We were equipped to brew our own and did; yet, most Saturday mornings and every snow day I made my way to sip from Henry’s cups.

The coffee, though, was never what drew me there. Baggy and flat, the brew tasted like it was left out overnight to thaw. I wasn’t there for the food either. The place sold oatmeal and muffins, soups and shrink-wrapped baked goods. The food was meant to keep coffee drinkers from burning holes in their stomach, not for savoring or making the neighborhood’s “best of” list.

I came back for the down-at-the-heels nobility of Henry’s establishment. I liked the signs near the door ordering customers to bus their own tables. I liked the music played by the people who worked there—Pavement and Sonic Youth one day, bluegrass, nineties hip-hop, or Motown the next. I liked that the scuffed wood floors had blurry imprints of fallen leaves, which might have been an aesthetic choice but, just as easily, might have been from a failure to sweep. I liked that on two different occasions a stranger asked to borrow my computer to hold a conversation on Skype.

Near the door, there was an often-occupied velvet couch, a secondhand find that coughed out dust whenever anyone sat down. On rainy days, a street person might rest there for a spell, drying out the dirty contents of his plastic shopping bags. Then, as soon as he’d leave, a customer at one of the tables, someone who’d been there the whole time, would move to the couch and feel grateful for the chance to recline. I liked that, too.

Like me, Stan, Sanjay, and the others never left, but the crowd at The Fall Café thinned over the years as the neighborhood changed. Trendier spots opened nearby, places that advertised organic joe and vegan scones. There were probably paper towels in the bathrooms as well. Smith Street more and more resembled an eastern outpost of Manhattan, and from inside the café, I’d watch couples peer into the window before moving on to someplace Zagat-rated. Maybe they didn’t want to bus their own table; perhaps they’d seen the wood floors and the couch and opted for something cleaner. Their loss, I’d think, flicking an ant away from my breakfast.

Several Saturdays ago, after a weekend away, I walked to The Fall Café, hoping to get through a stack of students’ essays. The place was shuttered. A work order adhered to the window, and renovations were already underway for a new place called Trattoria, a name I have trouble pronouncing.

Nothing of Henry’s was visible from the street. I looked for a note, an explanation of what happened to the café. I knew, of course, but part of me wanted a good-bye, a thank-you for all the years of loyalty. The window chalkboard was gone, and the only words on the shutters were inked in graffiti. The Fall Café closed, and no sign, no story, no paper towel, told what happened.

Nicholas Soodik is a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

The door is windowless and made of sheet metal and houses a 20-by-30-by-one-quarter-inch Plexiglas shell. In it at the moment is a geometric print by Christopher Watts, an artist based in Pullman, Washington.

Behind the door is the only firm in New York that delivers fresh-made bento-box lunches. The company, Fuji Catering, (www.fuji-catering.com/) is owned by Toru Furokowa, a thirty-two-year-old Tokyo native who wears black-rimmed glasses and, during working hours, usually has on a Fuji Catering t-shirt, black rubber boots, black leggings under shorts, and a black do-rag. Ten years ago, as an exchange student in Portland, he stayed in Charles’ basement and they got to be close friends.

Back in Tokyo, Toru worked for Azuma, a bento-catering company that had been started by his grandfather in the early 1960s. In Japan, the bento—a boxed meal, comprising many variations—has a tradition stretching back roughly a thousand years and is the predominant form that lunch takes. Azuma is one of dozens of companies that prepare and construct bento and delivery them to the desks of salary men and women throughout the city.

One day about five years ago, Toru was watching a travel documentary on television. It featured the owner of a New York bento company. Toru decided he wanted to work for the company, Fuji Catering, and came to New York with that goal in mind. He made his way to Ludlow Street and met the owner of the company, a Chinese man, who hired him.

“After two or three weeks passed,” Toru says, “the owner told me he wanted to retire and he wanted me to take over the business.” Within months, Toru bought the company, with the help of loans from his family.

He had six competitors at the time, but now he’s got the only bento-delivery game in town. This is mainly because of a drop in demand, he says. The market for delivered bento is made up almost entirely of Japanese expatriates, and when the Japanese economy began to perform poorly, many companies brought their workers back home. Also, he says, “We make a better product.”

Over the years, Charles and Toru maintained contact, visiting each other in their respective cities whenever possible. Last year, Charles says, “I was thinking of how I could expand experiences with art, and have a presence in New York. New York has location. I knew Toru didn’t have customers come to his door, so I asked if I could install a display case. He said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’”

The idea was that Charles would solicit work from artists all over the country. Each month he would select one to display on the door, after which that artist could say he or she had shown in New York.

In August 2010, Charles came to Ludlow Street to mount the housing to the door. “I was drilling at one in the morning,” he says. “An anti-graffiti van came by and the guys said, ‘We’re going to paint over that.’ I said, ‘I’m trying to make some art here.’ They said, ‘OK, we don’t paint over art.’”

At the beginning of each month, Toru unbolts the display, removes the top sheet of Plexiglas, slips the old piece out, puts the new one in, and secures it. Toru tweets an announcement of the new piece; there is a place on the door where the artist can leave business cards. To date, no piece on the door has sold as a result of being on the door. However, early on, one was stolen.

“That was lame,” Charles says. After that, he had a video camera installed to monitor activities near the door. There haven’t been any further incidents.

Despite the lack of competition, the bento business is not where Toru would like it to be. The problem, specifically, is the American market, which he has not been able to penetrate. Every weekday he offers three different bento combinations, descriptions and photos of which are on Fuji Catering’s website. Each contains fish; beef, chicken or pork; rice or noodles; and several side dishes. Customers can place orders, online or by telephone, up until 10 o’clock in the morning. (There is no walk-in trade.)

The bento are fresh, tasty, nutritious, substantial, and affordable: .50 to .00 per box, delivery included. Yet although Toru—who creates all the recipes himself and designs each bento according to both culinary and aesthetic principles—has made accommodations to American tastes, offering, for example, meat loaf and potato salad, the bento, with such sides as “grilled bread Erengi,” “Vinegared seaweed, beansprout,” and “Veg and pork wrapped in tofu skin,” still have an exotic feel.

Then there is the temperature issue. “Americans want either cold or hot,” Charles says. “Not lukewarm.”

The resistance is especially frustrating because glitzier, generally less authentic, versions of bento are hard to escape these days. Sister, a new place on lower Madison, features the “Lunch Box”—basically an Americanized take on the form. One variety has crab cake, fried calamari salad, and seared tuna for . Sylvan Mishima Brackett, the former creative director of Chez Panisse, offers seasonal bento at his Bay Area caterer Peko-Peko, delivered in bamboo husk boxes; currently on offer is “Fall Chestnut Rice and Minced Cutlet,” at .50 a box. The minimum order is $75.

Even Starbucks has gotten into the act. Since the summer, a lunchtime feature at the chain has been “Bistro Boxes,” and you don’t need the alliteration to figure out which ancient Japanese tradition is being coopted. I asked Toru, by e-mail, what he thought of this innovation. “It has same concept of Bento but much worse than our bento!” he replied. He concluded—and I could almost see him raising his eyebrows over the information superhighway—“That was just salad combo meal.”

About 8:30 on a Monday morning recently, there was steady activity inside 27 Ludlow Street. A couple of dozen dishes, for three separate bento, had already been prepared in the kitchen, which is in the basement. Bento were being put together, on the ground floor, by twelve employees stationed at a twenty-six-foot conveyor belt, which was custom-built last year to Toru’s specification by a company in Texas. Its pace allowed for the assembly of ten bento per minute.

Toru stood at the end of the belt, inspecting each box, adding additional toasted sesame seed if he deemed it necessary, then putting a clear top on each black plastic container and securing it with a red rubber band.

“Human robot,” said a deliveryman who was standing nearby. All of Fuji’s employees are either Japanese expatriates, like the deliverymen, or Hispanic.

At one point, noting that the potato salad portions had become slightly too big, Toru directed a comment toward one of the workers in the middle of the line: “Pancho, pocito menos.”

Toru piled the completed bento on a big table. Deliverymen claimed them, loaded them into giant blue Ikea bags, and over the course of the morning conveyed them, by bicycle, pushcart, subway and car, to 940 customers, most in Manhattan, but also in the outer boroughs, New Jersey, and Long Island.

Presumably, Fuji has fully cornered the Japanese market for bento delivery in New York. But the indifference of the American consumer gnaws at Toru. He lives three doors down from Fuji, with his wife and young child, and spends nearly all his waking hours on bento. One day in September, he went to midtown and handed out brochures. This did not yield dramatic results, but he presses on. Through a venture with a charitable organization called Table for Two, he supplies bento to a restaurant and bakery called Café Zaiya, which has three locations in Manhattan; for each one sold, twenty-five cents go toward feeding children in underdeveloped countries. Today, for the first time, Toru was providing six Table for Two bento to a Columbia University cafeteria.

The educational market is capacious, but six bento are six bento. New inroads are required and Toru is intent on carving them out. “I’ve been trying to contact Michelle Obama,” he said. “The new ‘My Plate’ icon looks like a bento box. Do you know how to reach her?”

Ben Yagoda (www.benyagoda.com) is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of Memoir: A History, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, and other books. He blogs at britishisms.wordpress.com.

It takes a while to settle into a new place when you move. The way you think furniture is going to work within a space isn’t usually how it ends up, so we spent a lot of time rearranging. We finally decided we were happy (for now) on where everything was and we would just live with it (for now).

I was meeting people at work, but it was on a professional basis and Susan was writing again, which means she spent a great deal of time by herself. We would cook dinner, have some wine and talk about what we did that day. Susan told me of the progress on her book and how she hoped to wrap it up by the end of the year. I told her stories about my boss and colleagues at the investment firm. We are settling in, we would say, finding our place here.

Warmer weather and longer days had come as we approached Memorial Day. Every morning when I got up, I would look out the kitchen window at the flower boxes. By now, the plants had grown and I could see buds appearing. The promise of summertime flowers.

One day, Susan called me into the kitchen as soon as I got home. “Hey, look at this,” she said. Across the driveway, a woman was weeding and watering the flowers in the flower boxes. She had on a light colored, flowing dress and her long hair would spill over as she tended to her plants. Behind her, I could see two place settings on the table with candles and a small bouquet of flowers. A date?

As we were cooking our dinner, a car we hadn’t seen before, a grey BMW, slowly pulled down the driveway and parked awkwardly on one side of the parking area.
As Susan finished sautéing the salmon, a man with a bottle of wine in his hand carefully made his way toward the balcony, unsure of where to go. Our neighbor appeared, greeted him and asked him in.

We ate our dinner and after the last sips of wine, decided to take a walk through town. It was still warm out with almost no breeze. A perfect evening. As we made our way back up to our place, we heard talking and laughing. We went into our kitchen and took a peek out the window. The date was going well. The candles were flickering, the wine was flowing. But before we went to bed, the BMW started, and the man was gone.

For the next few Saturday nights, this pattern continued. Spring had given way to summer and the flowers in the boxes were now in full bloom. The colors were spectacular and our neighbor made sure her plants were well cared for. Then I woke up early one Sunday morning in July. I thought I heard a noise outside and took a look out of the kitchen. A dog was digging around in the bamboo. After giving up chasing whatever he was chasing, the dog lifted his leg on the tire of the not-so-awkwardly parked grey BMW.

Later that morning, I told Susan that BMW guy had spent the night. “Good for her”, Susan said. “Good for him”, I said. We decided that we would get to know our neighbor a little. I am constantly amazed at how much information Susan can come back with after what always seems to me to be the most idle of chats. Later that week came the report: her name is Pamela, she is about our age, she works at the jewelry store in town, she likes classical music, she moved here 12 years ago and is, or maybe was, single.

August was hot. Early, before the heat of the day would melt everything and everyone, I would go for a run on the beach. On my way out, I would admire the flowers in the boxes, standing bright and colorful, hopeful before another day of baking in the sun.

Cool evenings became the norm as fall pushed summer into the past. The days got shorter. Susan’s book was almost on schedule and the editors at the publishing company were pleased with the progress. For me, it was business as usual. Markets go up and markets go down. There is opportunity in both.

Pamela and BMW guy were together every weekend. While Susan and I cooked and ate in our apartment, they would sit out on the patio, even when it got chilly, late into the night, talking and sipping wine. Good for them.

Then, for several weekends, there were no late evening conversations, no sipping of wine on the patio. Maybe BMW guy was away on business. Then, he was back for a weekend.

We were expected to get a cold snap in the last week of October. Pamela had, in the past covered her plants with a plastic cover to protect them from the cold. I was surprised at how well it worked. The flowers were still beautiful. Then, one weekend, we had a storm. The temperature dropped to freezing and the wind blew 40 miles per hour. The plastic got blown off of the flower boxes. The next day, the sun came out, but the temperature struggled to get into the 30’s.

After a couple of days, it was obvious that the flowers had died from exposure to the wind and cold. We never saw the grey BMW again.

What bothers me is when they leave and I see their tip.

Hordes of European and South American tourists come through the restaurant and leave paltry tips or none at all, unless we add it to their bills. Just last week a family of eight from Colombia spent a hundred and twenty dollars on dinner and left a ten dollar tip. They waved at me when they left, thinking we were best friends because I spoke to them in Spanish, have a friend living in their hometown and plan on traveling to their country soon. I felt bad for resenting them, but it was a slow night and I needed all the tips I could get.

It’s not their fault they’re unfamiliar with our tipping system. They don’t know that, as a waitress, my hourly wage is less than the Mexican dishwasher’s. But fortunately it’s not the restaurant that pays most our check—it’s the customers and their tips.

The West Village restaurant I’ve been working at for four months serves Balkan and Mediterranean cuisine. We also have a wine bar, and though we do have wine from Italy, France, and Spain, many of the regulars come here to try our wine from the Balkans—stuff they can’t really find at other restaurants. But the French are different. They come here to drink Bordeaux.

On slow nights we pass out wine coupons. A customer with a coupon gets a free glass of our house wine. Usually when people get free wine, they feel inclined to order food, drink more wine, or at least leave a cash tip. It’s because of the coupons that a young French couple ended up at the bar.

Though they finish their glasses of our house red—a Pinot Noir from Italy, they make it known that it had not met their expectations. It is not my favorite either, but I’ve never complained about a free glass of wine. At least our coupon ploy worked because they decided to buy two more glasses of wine, and because they are French they felt entitled to sample over half our wine list.

Most customers, when they dislike a wine, will politely ask to sample something else, but this French couple made a histrionic show of their disapproval. Their lips, which arched and curved gracefully when speaking to each other in French, puckered grotesquely and they vigorously shook their heads at every wine they tried until they finally settled on two glasses of Bordeaux.

“Eet reminds us of home,” they said, and ordered some meats and cheeses to accompany their wine. Their cheeks got rosy as they imbibed and spoke softly. If they were bitching about our wine selection I would not have been able to tell by their tone since the French language seems to be devoid of hard consonants. They could have been comparing the Tempranillo to horse piss and it would have all sounded like docile cooing to me. There are some moments when I almost thought the French couple was cute, but I always managed to recover my senses.

After sipping the same glasses of Bordeaux for two hours they finally requested the bill twenty minutes after we were supposed to close. The man left a tip of one dollar and twenty cents after spending over twenty dollars. He smiled at me as they grabbed their coats to go, as if the experience had been equally endearing for both parties.

A buck twenty? Oh no, buddy. You can keep your smile.

With that smile he is in the same club as the Colombians and numerous other international visitors. The whole herd of them will have grinned and waved their way through countless New York City restaurants by now, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are a waitress’s worst nightmare. The Colombians were a lost cause, but it was not too late to reach this Frenchman. It was not about the money. It’s not like a bill of twenty-something dollars will ever fetch a large tip. It’s just hard for me to let bygones be bygones.

For my mission to be successful I had to quickly engage the French couple in this small talk before they left, and I had to do it with a smile—though all I really wanted to do is fling a glass of Bordeaux in their faces.

“So, how long have you been here?” I asked, trying to look casual with my elbows on the bar.

“Oh, I hev been here fur a monz,” explains the girl. “I hev an intairnsheep,” she added. “He eez my friend. He eez visiting for a week,” she said of her male companion, who offered another ridiculous smile.

“Okay!” I said, hoping the foreigners would not detect my false enthusiasm. “And how long will you be staying in New York?”

“Fur two more weeks,” replied the guy. I didn’t know about the girl, but estimated that since he was a tourist he would probably eat out every meal, which meant that there were at least forty-two different waitresses he would be shortchanging.

“Hmmm, okay….that’s great!” I gushed, causing the French man to look at me expectantly, perhaps thinking I would tell him some important insider information. Like where all the actors hang out. The girl, on the other hand, had already put her jacket on. That was my cue to hurry up and stop beating around the bush.

For dramatic effect I quickly dropped my smile and peered straight into the Frenchman’s pupils. “Well, since you’ll be here for a while you might as well know that in New York City you are supposed to leave at least a fifteen percent tip.”

I guess my affectations worked because the girl suddenly started to get anxious.

“Ow much did you leave?” She asked her compatriot, her face beet red instead of cute red. In the time that she’d been here she already figured out about gratuity, but it didn’t matter what she knew if she wasn’t paying the bill.

The guy looked at me for an answer. He hadn’t even looked at the bill when he put down his cash.

“You left one dollar and twenty cents,” I said.

Words were exchanged in rapid French. The man blushed. I wish I could have sugar coated this learning experience for him, and perhaps it was bad form to educate him in front of his female companion, but as most Americans know, getting schooled on another country’s dining etiquette while abroad is hardly ever a graceful experience.

Most people react by getting defensive or repeating the obvious. “Well, it’s not like that in my country,” they say before expounding on the virtues of their way of doing things. I waited for the Frenchman’s rebuttal, but never got one.

“I’m sorry, I deed not know,” he said, which surprised me.

The man seemed so genuinely remorseful I felt obliged to dish out some good old American optimism. “Well, it’s okay, because now you know!”

He put two more dollars on the bar, which I did not expect him to do. Now it was my turn to feel remorseful. I decided to appeal to the French’s sense of patriotism in an attempt to uplift his spirits and quell an impending sense of guilt.

“Yeah, things are different in France. In France your waitresses get a wage …and….and…gratuity is included in the bill…” My discourse devolved into babble about living wages, vacation time and health care, until eventually the Frenchman’s smile crept back onto his face before the couple left.

“Good bye! Come back again!” I said out of habit, knowing they wouldn’t.

Robin Kilmer graduated from Bard College in 2007 and worked for three years at a public school in the Bronx. She hopes to one day successfully converge two diametrically opposing forces: writing and making a living. Until that day she is working as a nanny (and a waitress).

I usually pass by and pick up a cup of coffee on my way to the subway, at about ten o’clock most mornings. The cavernous space is always completely deserted. There’s a large, wide-open counter area where various pastries and bags of High Point brand gourmet coffee are displayed, and an enormous adjoining room with dozens of empty tables and chairs. The radio plays strange old songs, like “Somebody’s Watching Me,” by Rockwell. Behind the counter stands one of two men: (1) A friendly, round-faced, round-bellied African who is usually on his cell phone when I enter, but who’s also courteous enough to put it down right away and say hello, or (2) a laconic Hispanic man, who smiles at me and averts his eyes slightly when we speak and moves very slowly about his business, as if everything around him is a dream.

I always order a large coffee, dark, then ask if I can have the thermos of milk. (Since there are no other customers, the milk is always in the fridge.) As the only customer, I feel especially obliged to be friendly, which is good, since that is sort of a project of mine. "Practicing to be a person," I call it—and I want to put on a convincing show. I always say hello and speak confidently, then thank the man as I leave, sometimes even being so bold as to say, “Have a good day,” or “See you later.” He always reciprocates in kind. Sometimes, if I am feeling giddy that morning, I almost feel like crying. I feel a bit guilty, like maybe I should buy more. One cup of coffee a day is not much, especially in such an enormous coffee shop, but it’s all I want.

I have heard other people disparaging High Point, anecdotally. Once, when I suggested to a friend of mine who also lives in the neighborhood that we go there, she said dismissively, “Oh, I heard they have really bad coffee. Plus, it’s always so weird and empty in there.”

“But you don’t drink coffee,” I smartly pointed out to her. “And I don’t actually understand what people mean when they say 'bad' coffee. I am not able to evaluate coffee objectively like that, or even subjectively—this is 'good' coffee, this is 'bad' coffee, this is just 'average' coffee. I don’t drink coffee on those terms. Plus, I like that it’s weird and empty in there! That’s why I go there. Come on, let’s go!”

What a snob everyone is, I think to myself, as I stand on the subway drinking my tall dark coffee ... which always tastes fine to me. One day, however, as I was sipping my coffee, I glanced down at my shirt and saw several drops of coffee spreading out across it and felt my chest immediately constricting in annoyance. Dammit! How had I managed to let that happen? I began to sip more carefully, but noticed drops of coffee were still falling from the cup—into my beard, onto my jacket, all the way down to the floor. After a few minutes of investigation, I was able to determine that the coffee was actually dripping from the back of the cup, from along the top rim. Apparently the lid did not fit tight enough! Somehow I must have gotten a dud. I was annoyed, of course, but also soothed by having found the source of the trouble.

The next day, when the same thing happened, I became even more frustrated. Two dud lids in two days—that’s really a stroke of bad luck. On the third day, a pattern had been established and I could no longer attribute this misfortune to “luck.” I had to admit that, amazingly, there was a coffee shop with lids that did not fit the cups. Such an essential thing. And such a frustrating problem. I couldn’t go to work day after day with coffee running down my hands and onto my shirt because of the crummy lids at my coffee shop! But as their only customer, I couldn’t just stop going there either. More than that, as I said, I liked going there. It was such a relaxed, easy way to practice my “being a person” routine ... I couldn’t just give that up. I wondered if perhaps they had a suggestion box. That would take care of the problem nicely. I decided to do another day or two of reconnaissance as I tried to determine a solution. I could deal with sticky coffee-hands that long.

Not surprisingly, there was no suggestion box. Just a long table lined with mysterious flyers for events that probably no one ever attended. On the fourth or fifth day, I almost felt bold enough to tell the African man about the problem with the faulty lids—but as I was about to speak, I suddenly became too shy. I felt that my words would not be understood, and not even because his thick accent suggested a communication barrier, although it did, but rather because the problem was so trivial, so absurd, and yet so important, that I did not feel I would be able to express it. I often think life is like this—that the most trivial things are actually the most important, and therefore the hardest to express. I knew that these simple words, “These lids do not fit,” once uttered, would become hopelessly complex and incomprehensible.

I needed a few days to think this over. Perhaps I could just write them some kind of note? That had an appealing element of mystery to it! In any event, in the meantime I still needed my morning coffee, so I started stopping off at the bodega near my apartment instead. I felt somewhat guilty, as if I was “cheating” on High Point—but I told myself this was just temporary, until I could figure out a solution to the lid problem.

So then, on that warm April evening, as I passed by with my groceries and saw that the windows were already dark, I was immediately concerned. I rushed up to the window and peered in, but I already knew what I’d see. The place was completely empty. The counter, pastry display cases, tables, chairs, everything—all gone. The floor even looked dusty and ragged, as if even it had been stripped away. A note on the window said:

Marshal’s Legal Possession
Civil Court of the City of New York
County of Kings
The Landlord has legal possession of these premises.
For information, contact Landlord or Agent immediately.

I didn’t fully understand the words—but I knew I had done this. I had been their only customer, and I had deserted them, just because the lids didn’t fit right, and now the whole place was gone. This was a problem I could have done something about. If I didn’t learn to speak up soon, I realized, to be a person, or at least a better approximation of one, eventually there wasn’t going to be much of a world left ... and trudging home, my bags felt very heavy indeed.

Rob Williams is a mercenary copywriter and copy editor who currently lives above a meat market in the East Village.

Viva Pancho is a Mexican restaurant in Times Square, on West 44th Street, just off Broadway. It’s verde awning reads, “Viva Pancho”/“Home Of the Sizzling Fajitas,” in chili pepper script. Neither quaint holdover from the old Times Square, nor modern day restaurant group vision, it could very well be situated in a New Jersey strip mall. I suspect most of their business comes from Red State tourists who are relieved by the unassuming nature of the exterior, and reasonable prices on the menu in the window.

The entrance takes you into the bar, which features a rectangular counter that’s pushed into the corner, and seems too big for the small room, like an unfortunate sectional in a Manhattan studio apartment. The walls are mirrored, I suppose, to give the illusion that the space is bigger than it actually is, while having the consequence of forcing you to see yourself sitting there. The other, better option is to look up at the muted soccer game on the TV hanging overhead. A single strand of colored lights dangles above the dining room archway, as though someone forgot to take it down after the party. During the day, the room is awash in anemic sunlight.

Though I’ve waited tables at Virgil’s, the barbecue restaurant next door, for a decade, I’ve only been to Viva Pancho three times. The first was shortly after being hired. Several of us, who had all started at around the same time, and were destined to become the next senior staff, went there as a group following a shift. Everything was new, and we’d yet to discover ourselves, or our regular spots, Jimmy’s Corner and St. Andrew’s, the other direction down the block. Though no one complained, it didn’t feel right. And we never went back. It was kind of like Freshman Orientation Weekend, and making out with the girl in your dorm, who would eventually ostracize herself for the stuffed animal collection overcrowding her bed. The memory is slightly fuzzy, and somewhat embarrassing, but mostly just weird.

On another occasion, while leaving work, I happened to glance in the window and notice a coworker and friend, sitting alone at the bar, smoking, and sipping a slushy red margarita. Impulsively, I reached for the door. He seemed uncomfortable with the encounter, like I’d caught him waiting on a tryst. I begged off when the bartender approached, and made a hasty exit, purposely avoiding looking back in the window as I hurried past. Maybe he was meeting someone. Or maybe he was embarrassed to be discovered alone in Viva Pancho. Or maybe, after a particularly trying shift, he didn’t want to be bothered; which was why he was there in the first place.

The last time was when a new-hire waitress, whose drink was margarita, felt like a margarita after a lunch shift, and convinced me, as we happened to be getting off at the same time, to join her. Said waitress always felt like a margarita after a lunch shift. Viva Pancho was her hangout. She headed a regular Viva Pancho clique. So I had no expectations. But what the hell, I figured. After an hour of our venting about dealing with the public, and two or three margaritas, or maybe it was two hours and four margaritas, I looked in the mirror and saw our miserable faces at that sad bar in the middle of the afternoon and knew that wasn’t going to work out.

Everyday, I walked past Viva Pancho without giving it a thought. On my way to work. And on my way home. Five days a week. For ten years. If I ever did consider it, it was in regard to how it had remained in business for so long. Restaurants come and go in this city. New Yorkers swarm a new place, like wolves on a fresh carcass, then abandon it to the vulture Bridge and Tunnel and tourists who pick over the bones until there’s nothing left. Yet, Viva Pancho had survived the revitalization of Times Square without so much as a facelift.

When the economy slumped, Viva Pancho took to marketing in order to foster business, in the form of an ancient Mexican man in traditional sombrero and sarape -- or, at least, a kitsch version thereof. He didn’t call out to you with a deal, in the manner of the Little Italy barkers. Or shove a menu at you, like they did on Theater Row. He simply stood there, the embodiment of Viva Pancho. For months, I passed without acknowledging him, and without receiving acknowledgement. Then one day, while on my way to work, we looked at each other.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hey,” I replied.

It was not a casual hello. This was a friendly greeting. One that recognized a relationship. He knew me, and I knew him, even though we’d never so much as exchanged a glance. The next day, it was back to our agreed upon anonymity, even if the dynamic was altered, a level of self-consciousness added. Everyday, I passed. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.

How many of these stealth friendships was I involved in? There was the thin security guard who walked with a transistor radio tuned to NPR, seemingly always just ahead of me on the ramp to the Staten Island Ferry in the afternoon. There was the older lady with hair like Marie Antoinette, and a penchant for paperback thrillers, who sat across from me on the ferry on Tuesday mornings. There was the middle-aged African American man in the skullcap from the 1 Train, who was quick to give up his seat for a lady. On the corner of Broadway and 44th, there was the man with the kabob food cart, and the man who sold New York street scenes and celebrity 8x10s, and the caricature artist, and the Chinese calligraphy artist, and the fortune teller, and the guys that hawked knockoff designer handbags from a sheet unfurled on the sidewalk, that they snatched up when the police approached. And the kids that asked, “Do you like comedy?” -- which counts, because they didn’t ask me. And Batman, and Spiderman, and Elmo and Cookie Monster. And, of course, there was the man in front of Viva Pancho who, one time, broke the fourth wall and said “hello.”

Sometime ago, while passing Viva Pancho, I realized the ancient Mexican in the theatrical Pancho Villa costume was gone. Maybe he ran into immigration problems. Or finally had enough of that oversized sombrero and gold lame sarape. Hopefully, he didn’t meet a worse fate. Most likely, since he wasn’t replaced with another Pancho, he’d been given the pink-slip. I guess the economy had recovered sufficiently, or the summer tourists invaded, or gone back to work, as the case may be. Or, perhaps, it was determined, in a Viva Pancho departmental meeting, that it was no longer cost effective (re: someone’s bonus was on the line) to employ a living, breathing Pancho. Who knows, maybe one day he’ll suddenly reappear. Viva Pancho.

Tom Diriwachter's new full-length play, "Age Out," runs to the end of January at Theater for the New City

All meals arrived with gobs of potatoes—baked, boiled, mashed, au gratin—and vegetables—peas, string beans, corn, the usual. My father always made a huge salad in a wooden bowl with oil and vinegar, eaten after the meal which lore has it he learned in France during the War. And if every crumb wasn’t devoured, we heard the hysterical admonition about starving children of China. So if I finished my mound of mashed, all the little Chinese kids would be fat and happy?

My Mom’s specialty was gravy, near perfect and never to be tasted again since she took all recipes to the grave, including her Thanksgiving apple pie. “It’s too much work,” was her bored response to pleas that she write them down. After her death, we found recipes on index cards, but in shorthand which she mastered in secretarial school and used all her life. Especially when she attended college after my father died. All her class notes were in shorthand. “Mom, what do you take down?” I asked scanning pages of wavy lines. “Everything the teacher says,” she replied with indignation.

Meat, potato, vegetable. Not exactly haute cuisine but way above average considering many families in my Brooklyn Irish neighborhood wouldn’t go near vegetables, fish, spaghetti, even Chinese food. And no one thought it odd. “Can’t even stand the smell.” So I always believed we were culinary royalty until I dated Nancy Cirrito and was invited to Christmas Eve dinner.

I thought I knew Italian food cause on special occasions we would go to Monte’s on Carroll Street for veal parmagiana with a side of spaghetti. And pizza was eaten nearly daily along with fat meatball heroes from Romano’s on 13th Avenue. But to be honest, my exposure was just a trifle parochial. Right after we married, I tossed away an omelet sitting on the counter. “What did you do with my omelet?” Nancy asked. “It was bad, green, threw it away.” “It was a squash omelet. It was supposed to be green,” as she rolled her eyes and tried to figure out whether the “in sickness and in health” vow included stupidity.

Back then any dinner at a girlfriend’s house was a big deal. It isn’t like today where you never know who or how many will be mooching down your favorite foods. It signified serious romance, meeting the relatives, using a napkin, eating stuff you hate. And since Christmas was the grandest, being invited to her family feast probably broadcast that I was The One which was kinda funny since we were babies--19 and 21 and were dating less than a year. And I didn’t even try to wiggle out of it since I was clueless and my Christmas Eve only meant last minute shopping.

And you’ll play Santa for my sister Marilynne’s three kids? So along with chatting up her relatives, attending midnight Mass, exchanging presents, I had to make sure I didn’t screw up the beard and the ho ho hos. Nice.

The Cirritos owned a two family red brick across from the monastery in Borough Park. Simple, small with plastic covers on the beige couch, some fancy lamps and an oriental rug. Whenever I arrived to pick up Nancy, her mother, kind smile gentle voice, would inevitably ask:

Would you like something to eat?

No thanks.

Have something.

No, thank you.

How about some soup?

No, that’s OK.

Chicken?

No, I’m not really hungry.

Macaroni? I can heat it up.

No, really.

How about a peanut and butter sandwich?

No thanks really.

Sweet of course, but different from my world where the first question involved drink and, if you were lucky, a handful of pretzels.

So at 7, wrapped present in hand, jacket and tie, I rang the bell. The Christmas tree sparkled. The dining room table was loaded with china, crystal glasses, fancy napkins. Then the food started. And never ended.

I had eaten shrimp, and some clams on the half shell from Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay. I once had a lobster, but that’s about it. Everything else was, well, different. And all home-made. Hot, light sfinge sprinkled with powdered sugar were the pre-appetizer appetizer while milling about, saying hello. Have one more.

Cold fish salad—lobster, shrimp, squid, calamari, scungilli, crab, octopus—in a huge bowl, with green and black olives, celery cut small, capers, peppers, lemon, parsley, olive oil. After a bowl or two, the main courses began: fried smelts and eels; linguine in white clam sauce and macaroni in red sauce with cabbage; fried and baked shrimp; baked clams; stuffed calamari in red sauce.

“Be careful. The stuffed calamari are sewn closed with thread.” “Thread?” “Yes, like when you sew a button.” “So your Mom sewed these, er, what are they called, closed?” “Yep, they’re called calamari, and she stuffed them and then sewed them so the stuffing wouldn’t fall out.” “Never had a meal with cooked thread before.” Who would have the patience, care enough to spend hours on just one of the myriad dishes. No one I knew.

Thin slices of broiled sole in butter, lemon and white wine. Lobster tails and baccala, “It’s what we call it, really a cod like from Cape Cod.” Just when I thought there couldn’t be more, there was another dish, another food I never tasted, could barely pronounce.

Shiny string beans sat in oil and garlic; artichokes with breadcrumbs. “How do you eat these things?” Stuffed baby eggplant covered with homemade tomato sauce and dripping with mozzarella; broccoli steamed littered with slivers of garlic shining with olive oil; stuffed mushrooms. Sometimes my Mom would serve peas and corn because Bird’s Eye frozen foods packaged them as one, but a half-dozen vegetables at a meal? Ha.

Crisp loaves of Italian bread were used to soak up the sauce or the juice or whatever was left on your plate. “I don’t see any butter.” “You don’t eat Italian bread with butter.” “No, what do you eat it with?” A few chuckles told me to shut my trap.

Everyone ate everything. Even the kids all under 10. No one screamed, ewwww eels, disgusting. The family ate and talked and laughed and ate some more. At home, hearty meals were cooked and eaten quickly. Not at the Cirritos. After one serving, dishes were collected, cleaned. We’d shuffle into the kitchen or living room and soon another course would appear. I started strong, eating seconds and remaining silent as food was heated on my plate. How much more could there be?

Desserts included shiny strufoli—honey balls—covered with sprinkles. Cannolis, sfogliatelle, a huge platter of Italian cookies, homemade cheese cake and a pie or two. There were more desserts than people. “Try this.” “Have a small piece of this.” “One more.”

We’ve eaten that meal on every Christmas eve for more than forty years. First sfinge, now made by my children, and then cold fish salad the same as that wonderful evening so long ago. The food is the passion, art really, to be savored, cherished. Yet it is more—family, love, memories. Santa with the pillow still appears and my kids and their cousins, now mostly grown, climb on his lap laughing, excited. Presents are opened. Look what I got. Hold it up, let’s see. After a bit, we wander back for dessert: strufoli, cookies, cheesecake, a pie or two.

Ken Nolan is a lawyer who has always lived in Brooklyn.