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).

While the maitre d’ was escorting us to our table, Barbara gave my arm an annoying pinch while gasping wide-eyed that Jolie Gabor, mother to Magda, the infamous Zsa Zsa, and Eva was sitting at a table in the center. I had noticed the large jovial group and some of the women bejeweled.

 During the course of our dinner, Barbara began to complain how it was like pulling teeth to get any one of her males to volunteer to help wallpaper her kitchen. I think I saw tears well up in her mink-lashed cocker spaniel eyes when she switched her tone from being pissed off to heartbreakingly lonely. The topic of women’s lib and its pros and cons arose and suddenly, perhaps under the influence of her third glass of white wine, Amy, who believed and rightfully so that we were still too young to concern ourselves with men or kitchens, began to ululate like Tarzan.

I noticed a man seated across the room at the Jolie Gabor table cock an ear. Then without the slightest hesitation, he got up to make his way over to us.

“It’s Tarzan!”Amy shrieked.

It was Tarzan. But in my eyes he was Johnny Weissmuller, five time Olympic gold medalist swimmer and one time bronze.

“That’s not the way to do it,” he said annoyed, all 6 ft. 3 of him.

A waiter appeared like a miracle from out of nowhere to swiftly and graciously slide a chair under Mr. Weissmuller’s rear, I think preventing him from putting it into reverse and careening through the swinging kitchen door.

He was still handsome decked out in his well-tailored tuxedo. The cuffs of his starched white ruffled shirt revealed embroidered initials that repeated themselves as ornate gold and diamond links, and around his neck hung his medals.

The others sort of sat there with ridiculous grins on their faces but I, a swimmer for all my life, looked upon him in awe.

“I’m a swimmer,” I said, rather like an idiot.

After a few minutes of cordial chat, this absolute sweetheart of a man rose from our table, almost taking all of it with him. Later I read somewhere that he'd recently had hip surgery and a broken leg.

Denise Falcone is a writer who lives in New York City. Her New York stories have appeared in J Journal, Antique Children, Kerouac's Dog, and others.

A Free Evening of Non-Fiction In The Lower East Side.

Reading on September 23 will be:

Rob Williams - Bear Patrol 

Lily Shen - It Is Easy To Speak Chinese

Kenneth P. Nolan - Farrell’s

Nathaniel Page - Spanked 

The host is Connor Gaudet - Hung Out

About The Readers...

I got a beer, walked into a corner and rested against a broken office chair. The Lower East Side looked like a bunch of moving lights from the opaque glass in the windows. The ceiling used to be white at some point but had now turned brownish grey. Words and shapes were drawn all over it. It looked like a used piece of paper that had been flying out in the wind for too long, from one garbage heap to the other. Behind the bartender, the wall was filled with all sorts of stickers and tags: some ironic, some radical and some obscene. The bar was packed. Every stool around the bar table was taken. Those standing made a parallel line near the glass windows, leaving hardly a foot’s space to walk between them and the people sitting. But no one was doing too much walking that night. Everyone just drank and talked to their companions. Every once in a while, someone started talking to the group next to them and formed another group.

A middle-aged woman sat across from me and sipped her drink. Someone came from behind her and spanked her hard on her large buttocks. The slap made her rise up a little from her stool. She looked at the person behind her, recognized him and gave him an affectionate hug. They must have held each other for at least a minute, after which he spanked her again a few times and then went across the bar to meet other people. A few minutes later an older man walked in and caressed the woman’s hair. She kissed him. They sat together and made out for the next hour or so.

A few skateboarders stood against the wall next to me. Their group kept changing as new people came in and some people left. A beautiful black woman with a mohawk sat on a windowsill, her arms wrapped around a girlfriend, as she chatted with the skateboarders.

I sipped my beer and talked to the woman standing on the other side of me. She was a music journalist from San Francisco and told me that it was hard for her believe New York had legalized gay marriage before California. She was at Mars Bar because she wanted to sit somewhere and think things through. She didn’t want to say which things. As we talked more she told me about finding a broken flip phone in the middle of road. Who uses a flip phone these days?, she asked me. And how would a phone be in the middle of the road like that? “Maybe some stupid hipster thought it was ironic to still use a flip phone and dropped it while speeding on his fixie?” I said. “I have a fixie.” she said. A few minutes later she left and I got my second beer.

Seven years ago, my first year in New York, I tried to go to CBGB one Friday night. It was the last sign of the edgy punk days of the Lower East Side, I had heard. When I got to the door they asked me for a twenty-five-buck cover. The neighborhood had gentrified so much, apparently, that even the temple of un-gentrified times was charging heavy money. I didn’t pay it. CBGB closed down and was replaced by a John Varvatos store, where you can pay a lot of money to buy clothes that remind you of artists that didn’t have a lot of money. A very fitting tribute, I feel.

East Village and Lower East Side dive bars weren’t like that. They remained cheap and they remained dirty even as the neighborhood around them cleaned up. Mars Bar had been one of those places. But instead of being dirty, relaxed, and lazy like some others, say Holiday Cocktail Lounge, it was dirty, edgy and alive.

On a New Year’s Eve, six years ago, I sat there and sipped my last whiskey of the night. It was about 3:30 in the morning. The man in the next seat had flopped down on the bar table and was snoring. He woke up, grabbed my shoulder and said, “You think this is cold? Vermont is cold.” I wished him a Happy New Year and he went back to sleep.

During my first four years in the city I went to Mars Bar quite often for their four-buck shots of Jack Daniels. It reminded me of another time: not of New York City — I didn’t live here in that another time — but of bars, when bars were simply places you went to meet people you knew and drink or to hide away from people you knew and drink. No big-screen TVs, no bouncers. There was also the beauty of my own hypocrisy; I loved to be around a rough-edged group of young semi-punks and older crusties, drink cheap drinks, and then take a cab back to my luxury apartment 10 minutes away. As time passed, Mars Bar got into more tourist guidebooks, blogs and best-of lists. Slowly more people like me started showing up. They were happy to be in a seedy dive bar like they would have been in a zoo. I stopped going.

When I heard it was closing, I wanted to go there at least once more. So there I was. There was a constant flow of people coming in. Some stayed- but most came in, took a look, and left. A couple wearing small backpacks walked in. The woman had a New York tourist guidebook in her hand. They discussed, deliberated for a moment and decided to stay. He went to the bar to get drinks and she put their backpacks in a corner.

A few minutes later, a man from the other side of the bar decided to walk on the bar table. People cheered and clapped. He put his hands up and touched the ceiling and walked a couple of times back and forth while pushing up against the ceiling. The crowd shook their beer bottles and sprayed them on him as he strutted past them. He looked around the crowd as if for a signal. The crowd cheered. He unzipped his trousers and shook his penis around. Then he proceeded to do a few pushups on the bar table before zipping himself back up and going back to the corner he had come from. People went back to their conversation. I looked for the couple with the guidebook. They had left.

I left after one more drink. That stretch of Second Avenue was bustling. Beefed-up gay dudes in yuppie clothes stood outside Urge Bar, and a few guys in tight undies and wife-beaters stood outside Cock Bar. A flock of pretty girls in short black dresses shuffled around on the road and tried to flag down cabs that were off duty or taken. I walked towards the Pak Punjab deli for a samosa chaat, got it to go, and jumped in a livery cab.

Mars Bar closed down this week, for good.
 

Another man said, “Well, the world ends every day.”

“And it begins every day!” I said. I’m usually the optimistic one in a crowd. I also believe in everything: ghosts, King Arthur, Robin Hood, the Loch Ness Monster, conspiracy theories and true love, amongst other things. So May 21st was a challenge as it’s hard to be an optimist on a day you believe the world could end. There’s no denying the world can end on any given day, but I would much rather it be a surprise. I must admit that when I found out about the world ending in May of 2011 I felt a little gypped, as I had expected to enjoy a whole year of my life before having to worry about the world ending in 2012.

Of course, the End of the World is a common theme in humanity’s collective memory. We are obsessed with our own demise and our collective ego does not allow us to separate our fate with that of the Earth’s. So, naturally, during catastrophes like the Black Death we assumed the world was ending. In reaction to the forecasted doom, many practiced extreme penitence and flogged themselves. These flagellants rolled into towns carrying the plague with them. Since misery loves company, the flagellants claimed they could cure plague victims and perform miracles in an effort to persuade others to join them. Some people, seeing that the plague did not discriminate between sinner or saint, resorted to hedonism and debauchery so they could at least go out with a bang. Though the Earth has continued to continue, the world has ended in many ways already. The world as the Native Americans knew it, for example, ended the day Columbus landed on Hispaniola.

The first time I heard about the end of the world was in 2007. There was a special about Nostradamus on the History Channel and he predicted that the world would end in 2012. I found out the day before a test for grad school. I was a New York City Teaching Fellow getting my Masters in Teaching while working full time as a classroom teacher. To prepare for the test I was diligently Googling all the names and theories and laws that I had failed to pay attention to in class. After learning that the world might end in five years I saw the test not as a step towards my future, but as an obstacle preventing me from relishing every last moment of my life on Earth. I found my way to the nearest bodega and got some beer.

At the bodega a funny thing happened. The sliding glass door guarding the beer looked innocuous and the handle felt normal when I gripped it hard with all the weight of my new knowledge, but as I pulled it, instead of sliding obligingly to the right the door started keeling over right on top of me and I thought I would be one of the lucky ones to die before shit hit the fan. Though it would have been painful to be impaled by hundreds of glass shards, at least there would still be people around to mourn my passing.

The door fell on top of me knocking me against a shelf. But it bounced off my body as if I was made of plush before tossing itself to the floor and smashing into a thousand pieces; none of which touched me. Was it a miracle or was I just lucky? At any rate I was comforted by the fortunate outcome of this near death experience and took it as a sign that I shouldn't so readily believe in the worst.

Three years later, when I was still a teacher in the Bronx, I was in my classroom proctoring a state-mandated practice test. My students had already taken at least ten such practice tests in different subjects. This test came on the heels of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Some of my students, who didn’t have younger siblings or cousins, had been bringing used clothes to class to send to Haiti. My students were quite the humanitarians, but there isn’t a state-mandated test that measures that.

Five minutes after I had distributed the test booklets, one of my students, Eladio, turned to me and said, "Ms. Kilmer, maybe 2012 will happen."

It was not unlikely that my students equated all of these tests with the death of a certain part of their soul, and that perhaps Eladio was using a clever metaphor to express his feelings regarding all of this testing. But I wasn't sure.

"Why do you say that?" Though Eladio was taking a test and as the proctor I should have scolded him for talking, this was a matter of tantamount importance. After all, I know how hard it is to take a test while the end of the world is on your mind.

"Well, first there was an earthquake in Haiti, then there was an earthquake in Chile, and this morning there was an earthquake in some place called...Turkey?"

Eladio was one of the first students to know about the earthquake in Haiti and one of the first to vocalize his desire to help. He loved watching the news and telling me about it, and now he was informing me about this earthquake that I was not even aware of.

I told Eladio that many scientists say that 2012 is not going to happen. It was the least I could do. In retrospect, I should have told him that yes, 2012 will happen, right after 2011, and right before 2013. Not sure if his fear had been dispelled, I wondered if he was thinking of five thousand and one better things he could be doing with his limited time than taking that practice test.

In the hours that led up to the projected end of the world this May, I found myself wondering how I should spend my time before the apocalypse commenced. Believers quit their jobs and spent what they thought would be their last days at Columbus Circle passing out flyers. I, on the other hand, wanted to make sure I was at least enjoying myself. Conveniently, it was a Saturday, a day on which I tend to enjoy myself anyway.

My friend and I ended up spending the whole day walking along the Hudson River and working up an appetite. We decided to get pizza at an Italian restaurant. I’ve been trying to mind my budget, so I was going to pass on ordering wine. I explained this to the waiter since he looked offended when I declined to look at the wine menu.

“Ha!” He mocked my logic. “The world is going to end, so if I were you I would just buy wine and forget about the food!” My friend and I laughed and decided that, what the heck, we might as well get both.

As the day progressed I started using the Apocalypse as an excuse for mild misconduct. My friend and I left a bar without paying for our drinks, bought more beer at a bodega and drank it on a stoop. We saw people fighting, boozing, carousing and canoodling on the street. But then again, if there hadn’t been fighting, boozing, carousing and canoodling on the streets of New York City I might have been more likely to believe the end was near. And because this is New York City, where anything can happen, it was strange, but not too strange that I ended up sitting next to a white man in a Native American headdress after the deadline for the end of the world.

The man in the headdress confessed that he was an alcoholic. I wondered if alcoholism is another form of flagellation. Standing outside Columbus Circle all day passing out flyers certainly is, and debauchery is rampant in New York City on any given day. In some ways not much has changed since the Black Death. I thought about Eladio and what he might have done on May 21st. It was a comfort to know that since it was a Saturday he couldn’t have possibly been taking a test.

“Mickey Skin,” he said. He ran his hand over his scalp, then held his fist in Henry’s face, knuckles tattooed “SKIN.”

Henry nodded, feigning appreciation. “Henry,” he said. They shook.

“Hank,” Skin said, “This is a cool joint, but there’s too many fags.”

Henry usually smiled and nodded with most of the sentiments offered in a conversation, whether he agreed with them or not, simply out of convenience, but he did not smile or nod at this. He stalled, wanting neither to concur, nor to rile up the short, muscular skinhead. Henry figured his Doc Martin’s had probably kicked their share of shit.

“This music’s gay,” Skin said. The bar was called Mix-Tape and the jukebox was loaded with garage rock and new wave. Hip, but not excessively so for the Lower East Side.

“I like it,” Henry shrugged, quietly rebelling against Skin’s prejudice. He wanted to escape but figured since the guy had bought him a beer he owed him a few minutes of conversation. He didn’t really have anyone else to talk to either, and part of the reason for being in New York was to experience new things. Conversing with a skinhead was certainly new to Henry.

“I’m going to this party in BK,” Skin said, “Wanna come?”

“BK? Brooklyn? I’m supposed to meet some friends here in a bit,” Henry said. A lie. He had no friends in this place.

Skin rolled his eyes. He was wearing a yellow backpack with a cell phone slung between the straps. He whipped the phone open and held it away from his face like a tape recorder. “Yo, where you at?” There was no reply. “Fuckin’ thing.”

“Why don’t you text them?” Henry said, pressing mime buttons with his thumb.

“I don’t know how to do that shit,” Skin holstered the phone.

The two men stood there, out of things to talk about. Henry sipped his beer to camouflage the silence. Two black girls passed and stood at the bar.

Skin nudged Henry and mumbled. “Why don’t you get on that?” Shyness and desire hid behind his mask of aggression.

Henry was surprised at his choice of women. “Me? I never know what to say.”

“Yeah, me neither man. That’s always my problem,” Skin said. The conversation sprung into momentum.

“You just gotta go talk to them. The more you stand around thinking about it, the more nervous you’re gonna get. You just gotta turn off your brain and go.”

“So do it.”

“I'm not the one who likes them," Henry said.

"That's why you should go. Set me up."

Henry sipped his beer. A guy with dark hair splayed on his scalp like a banana peel started talking to Skin.

Henry was suddenly struck with paranoia that Skin had put something in his drink; some kind of drug or poison. He pretended to sip it while he looked around the bar, then he slipped into the bathroom and dumped it down the sink. He looked at himself in the mirror while he peed, his face lazy with drink. He laughed at the absurdity of the situation, his paranoia. He went back into the bar and saw Skin pretending to punch the banana-haired man in slow motion. Henry thought he should try to find an exit out the back so he wouldn’t have to walk past Skin on his way out. He sifted through the pages of the jukebox, stalling for time, and decided, finally, that the bouncer, a large black man, would probably take his side if Skin attacked him, so he headed out the front door. He checked over his shoulder a couple of times as he went down the street, but Mickey Skin wasn’t following him.
 

They and others like them found a felicitous culinary compromise at Bloch and Falk, a short-lived kosher idyll of Wurst run by Berlin émigrés that briefly thrived in the early sixties and then disappeared, as a consequence of changing demographics, on 37th Avenue, near the corner of 74th Street, in Jackson Heights, Queens, an enclave subsequently redubbed Little Bombay where now the Indians, Pakistanis and Sikhs coexist with their conflicting tastes and taboos.

In that Jewish replica of German Wurst-lust, the reprehensible pig-craving was painstakingly and precisely transposed, or rather reformed, into a kosher cow-craving. But even as a boy, I fathomed that, to get the flavors right, or at least to find a fair Kosher approximation for pork sausage, some enterprising Jewish butcher armed with a meat grinder and a willing tongue, had at least temporarily to suspend his Semitic aversion and embrace Teutonic taste whole-hog, applying a Talmudic rigor to isolate and translate porcine products, and beef them up for a Jewish palate.

How well do I remember Bloch and Falk’s the grand opening, with banners unfurled and mountains of Belegte Brötchen (finger sandwiches) stacked tall, free for the picking, stuffed with slabs of sausage and smoked meat of every description, Teewurst, Krakauer, Kopfkäse, Jägerwurst, Leberwurst.

From near and far they came, the strongly accented refugees of my parents’ generation, dressed to a T in ties and jackets or skirted suits, German from head to toe, except for a few recalcitrant curls and a certain sadness that never quite muffled their innate exuberance. Waiting patiently on line, with their little native-born progeny in tow, their mouths watered for a licensed taste of the taboo.

One woman, I recall, got so excited approaching the counter she could not control herself and succumbed to a nervous cough that sounded suspiciously like a dog’s bark. “Bitte, Lise! Control yourself!” her mortified husband looked aghast. But she couldn’t help it, and in any case, nobody but me seemed to notice, every other customer consumed by his or her own craving. Was it an involuntary response to the scent of sausage, I wonder, or just a bad case of the hiccups mythologized in my memory?

But on Saturdays, when Bloch and Falk was closed, my understanding mother turned a blind eye. My father, a man of prodigious appetite, took my brother and myself along on his weekly expedition to the City, ostensibly to buy tea from a Palestinian tea and coffee shop downtown, my recollection of which is laced with exotic scents. But afterwards we always ended up at Schaller and Weber, a German deli, now a chain, to sample a thick slab of the real thing, forbidden flesh cut off a fresh hot loaf of Leberkäse, still steaming under the knife. Sliced by a bald-headed counterman with gold-capped teeth and a grotesque grin straight out of a Georg Grosz drawing, it was the incarnation of what my father had fled. I watched him savor every bite.

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.

Internal Affairs arrested 2 cops from the 9th precinct, a sanitation cop, a bag man for the fire department, two transvestites, a circus clown, two barboys, three female bartenders, and me. The sanitation cop put up a struggle. The cops hauled him into the back bedroom and broke his leg with a baseball bat.

"Anyone else want some." A plain-clothed officer shook the baseball bat at us.

We shook our heads.

After 30 minutes an ambulance arrived for the injured cop and the officers led the other arrestees into a paddy wagon. We were arraigned in the morning and released without bail. Arthur and Scottie met me later that night at the Ritz. Arthur was wearing sunglasses and as nervous as a fugitive.

"What did Internal Affairs say?" Arthur had been visited by a psycho cop. A double blast from a shotgun was the 9th Precinct's warning to keep his mouth shut. He was hoping that we had done the same.

"Nothing. They didn't ask us anything."

"No names?" Scottie wore the same jeans, shirt, and jacket as the night before. His hair stuck straight up in the air as if he had standing on his feet and in his unshaven state he looked like Charles Manson's illegitimate nephew on the run.

"None. They booked us, arraigned us, and cut us loose."

"Cool." Arthur was relieved that none of us were in trouble. Not that he could do anything to help us.

The Jefferson closed its doors forever. I paid three months rent in advance. We never went to trial for the Jefferson. The story never made the papers. None of us had jobs. We didn't deal drugs. We only did them. Mostly cocaine. Within a month we were broke. Arthur kept talking about opening another place. His wife thought he was crazy, but agreed to decorate the next venue.

"Think about how we can do if it was bigger," Arthur told Scottie and me. Bigger meant more money. Investors thought the same thing and in the summer of 1981 Arthur found an abandoned garage on West 25th Street. He told the landlord that it was going to be an art gallery.

"It just needs a little work." The floors were caked with oil. The walls sagged with mildew, and the ceiling panels hung down like limp tongues. "We don't have to make it livable. Only good enough to serve drinks. We can open by Labor Day."

"Who's going to do the work?" I wondered. Scottie was a bartender. I was a doorman. The only time we used a hammer was to chip the ice out of the freezer.

"You guys and your friends." Arthur said without saying how. "I'm no contractor."

"How much are you going to pay?" I was only interested in money.

"Not much." Arthur was living on the skinny edge of life same as us. “But you'll have a job at the end of it."

"Throw in lunch and you got a deal."

"Deal." Arthur’s word was good enough for Scottie, myself, and several friends.

Werthel, a lanky 19 year-old cokehead from the Five Towns, also wanted to join the work crew. During the last months of the Jefferson his use had gone from daily to hourly.

"Why don't you go to rehab?" Scottie asked at the apartment that Werthel shared with our mutual friend, Richie Boy. "Your father has money."

"I don't want him to know about it." Werthel was swearing off blow forever. He gave us the last of his stash. "Have a party," he said.

"You mind if I take some change too." Scottie was staring at the bowl of coins on a glass table. It was filled to the brink with quarters.

"Sure, but only as much as you can grab with one hand."

Scottie snatched a handful and Werthel grabbed his wrist, shaking it so hard that Scottie's take was decreased by half.

"You're the meanest man in the world," Richie Boy declared from the sofa. Richie was Werthel's schoolmate from kindergarten. No one knew him better.

"What you mean by that?"

"If you have to ask, then what the use of explaining."

"Do you guys think I'm mean?"

"I won't if you let me take another handful." Scottie was ready to go double or nothing.

"Get out of here."

The coins covered a sandwich at the nearest deli. The cocaine went fast at AM-PM, an after-hours club abutting the exit for the Holland Tunnel. Free cocaine always had a funny way of making you too many new friends.

On Monday we showed up to West 25th Street at 9am. The street was shimmering with heat. Arthur’s craggy-faced partner was waiting for us. We all recognized him as the coverboy for a Time Magazine article on Herpes. We called him HP.

"You were supposed to be here at 8." HP was standing with his twin brother and a friend. The brother wasn't as craggy and the friend was wearing a very professional carpenter belt. It was leather. "Any of you have tools?"

"Tools?"

"I'll take that as a no." HP gave the carpenter friend $40. "Go get some hammers and shit. The rest of you I don't want talking to anyone about what we're doing. Nothing. I want you here on time. 8am. We finish when we finish. No overtime."

"What an asshole," Werthel muttered under his breath.

"As long as we get paid I don't give a shit." Scottie’s definition of paradise was a joint and Chinese take-out.

"Yeah, but he's still an asshole."

Within 30 minutes we were tearing down the walls. Scottie and I loaded up metal in a trolley. Werthel commandeered the sledge hammer and pounded the walls with a fury confirmed his status as the meanest man in the world. Decades old dust covered our bodies and sweat wet our skin. Arthur showed up at noon.

"Good work, guys. You look like coalminers."

"Looks like lunch time." Scottie was exhausted from the first physical work he had done in his life. I was out of shape. Only Werthel was ready for more, because his system was running on cocaine fumes.

"Who said," HP countermanded Scottie's suggestion. "It's lunch when I say it's lunch."

"Who elected you god?" Arthur snidely demanded in our defense.

"I'm paying for this. I'll tell them what to do." HP was approaching the first stages of apoplexy.

"Shut up already. Don't be such an asshole." Arthur was our union rep. "Lunchtime, guys. Cough up."

"Cough up what?"

"Lunch money." Arthur had as little money as we did i.e. nothing.

"I never said anything about paying for lunch.” HP was as stingy as a 13 year-old boy on his first date. “These guys are on their own. You have thirty minutes."

Werthel, Scottie, and I muttered "asshole" under our breath and Arthur rolled his eyes as if to apologize. Arthur and Scottie looked at the scrap metal. There was a junk dealer on 28th Street. The metal had to be worth something.

"We'll get rid of the metal and be right back."

Arthur and Scottie rolled the trolley onto West 25th Street. The temperature would have been 95 in the shade if there were any trees. The trip took them 20 minutes. They came back with two sandwiches. The junk dealer had given them $8. Arthur split the sandwich four ways.

“You done her.” HP was complaining about us taking too much time.

"I'll talk to him." Arthur was good with people, only HP wasn't listening to anything Arthur had to say. He knew it all. By week's end we wanted to quit. Arthur begged us to reconsider.

"This guy won't hire you, if you do." Arthur was powerless to stop HP from being an asshole, but we knew once the club opened we'd get our reward one way or the other and we stayed on the job.

Werthel was the only one who didn't mind not having any money for lunch. His mother thought that he was in summer school and gave him a weekly stipend. Every lunch he'd get himself a good sandwich, while Scottie and I ate a $1 slice of pizza. Scottie and I were losing weight. Werthel was getting stronger. We tried to schnorr extra food. He would throw the half-eaten sandwich in the trash. Scottie and I were too proud to dig out his scraps. He didn't deserve it, but we transferred our hatred from HP to Werthel.

The demolition got harder and dirtier. Things should have improved once we started construction, except none of us knew what we were doing. Werthel fell off the ladder and I smashed my thumb with a hammer. Arthur suggested that I should go see a doctor. HP wouldn't pay for the visit, so I wrapped my thumb with a torn tee-shirt.

One day Scottie and I were starving and Werthel said, "I'll race you for a sandwich."

"Me?" Scottie was short, but very fast.

"No, you." He pointed to me.

"Me." I had been a cross-country runner in high school in 1969. My finishes were never in the top 5.

"Yeah." Werthel was younger and taller. “You’re not hungry?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Then race me?”

“Werthel, just give us the money for a sandwich.” The previous night I drank until dawn with Richie Boy. My skin was sweating vodka.

“You want it. Run for it.”

HP and the rest of the crew stopped working. Arthur and Colleen got out of a cab.

“What’s the wager?” My stomach was growling from the lack of food.

"Okay, two sandwiches versus you being my slave for a day." Werthel was wearing sneakers.

"One day." I had on cheap work boots.

"I'll take some of that bet." HP yelled to Arthur from the loading platform. "But you have nothing to bet."

"I do." Arthur pulled $100 from his pocket. Colleen slapped his hand. The money was probably for an over-due bill.

"Straight up." HP was giving no odds.

"Straight up." Arthur looked at me. "You can do it, kid?"

"No problem." Arthur was 35. I was almost 30. His saying 'kid' made me feel younger. "The bet's on."

"Scottie, you hold the money." Arthur handed his c-note to Scottie. HP did the same and stared at Werthel. "If you throw the race, I'll welsh on the bet."

"I'm not throwing any bet. I'm the meanest man in the world." Werthel threw his sandwich in the trash. This race was a test of his drug treatment. "You ready?"

"100 yards." He was definitely faster than me for 50.

"100 yards." Werthel dropped his tools. Colleen was berating Arthur. Scottie was the referee. Werthel and I walked off the distance in the middle of the street. Workers from the rest of the street stopped what they were doing.

"You know we don't have to do this. You could give me the money for the sandwiches and I'll be your slave." I was more hungry than proud.

"No, this is a race." Werthel stopped at a manhole cover. "This 100?"

I nodded yes. He crouched like Jesse Owens and I stood at ease, both arms at my side.

Scottie shouted from the finish line. "On your marks. Get set. Go."

Werthel and I burst down the street. He pulled ahead instantly. One yard. Two yards. I dropped my head and pushed harder. My feet slapped onto the hot pavement. Shouts filled my ears. We were neck and neck. Scottie was only ten yards away. I leaned forward and beat Werthel across the line by a foot. Colleen screamed with delight and HP called for a rematch. Arthur grabbed the 2 $100 bills.

"No rematch. He won fair and square."

I thought so too, then he winked at Werthel. I turned to him and he said, "What? You won your sandwich. Enjoy."

Arthur gave Scottie and me $20 each. The sandwiches from the closest deli were terrible, but victory was a tasty condiment. That Friday HP said he'd pay us at his apartment. We went to One 5th Avenue. The doorman told us that he had flown to Paris to shoot a commercial about acne. We didn't see him till the following week. After HP paid us, Werthel called him an asshole.

"I don't need to hear that. You're fired."

"You can't fire me. I quit." Werthel chucked a hammer at HP. It travelled too fast for him to duck, but Werthel's aim was off. The hammer quivered in the wall. Werthel stomped off the site and HP said, "Don't even try to come to this club."

"Asshole," Arthur muttered.

He was a good judge of character. Later that night we went to see Werthel at his apartment. Richie Boy had a good laugh at everyone’s version of the story and Scottie asked, “Werthel, how it feel to lose to an old man?”

I might be beat up for my age, but not old, but before I could say anything, Werthel put down his Diet-Coke. It was the drink of recovering cokeheads. "I didn’t lose. I threw it."

“You don’t like losing at anything. Even checkers when we were kids.” Richie Boy had all the answers.

“I made it look like he won.” Werthel folded his arms across his chest.

“Shut up already,” Arthur sat forward on the sofa. “I saw your face. You wanted to win and thought you could win against a drunk and maybe if you hadn’t eaten your sandwich before the race you could have beaten him, but not on a full stomach. He won, because he was faster.”

“I could beat him now.”

Werthel was right. I had already drunk 5 beers. My feet and legs and heart were out of the competition.

“Maybe.” Arthur wasn’t letting Werthel slide. “But not then. Who was faster? Tell the truth?”

Werthel waited several seconds and grunted with an off-center smile.

“I have a good eye for winners.” Arthur was looking at Werthel with a sly grin. “And an even better for losers and no one’s as big a loser as HP.”

“Asshole.” We clinked glasses and drained our drinks.

"But not Werthel.” Arthur added, because where Werthel might be the meanest man in the world to his friends but he would always be one of us and to this Werthel had nothing to say. He could only smile.

Peter Nolan Smith left New England in 1976 for the East Village. The nightlife became his vehicle for traveling the world; Paris, Hamburg, Nice, and London. His career ended at the Milk Bar in Beverly Hills in 1995 and devoted his years to traveling in the Orient, supporting by his new profession as diamantaire. Most of his 21st Century has been spent in Thailand, although economics forced his return to the USA in 2008. Peter NolanSmith currently lives in Brooklyn and Sriracha, Thailand. He is the editor and writer of www.mangozeen.com.

My wife and I had been sitting outside the ice cream shop for only a minute or two when an old woman wearing dark sunglasses and moving her elbows quickly, as if she was exercising, walked by. She stopped when she saw us, perhaps because my wife was smiling, as my wife tends to do whenever she is happy, even if there is no one in particular to smile at, and said quite curiously, "Is that store open?" meaning, of course, the shop that had sold us the ice cream, and in front of which we were now sitting.

Both of us said yes. My wife likes to talk to strangers, and I like to talk to strangers if they are old, because I tend to assume old people are lonely, though this doesn't always turn out to be true, and though I know it shouldn't be a requisite for making conversation with anyone. This old woman simply seemed very engaged with the world, very interested. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead in the style of Jackie Onassis when Jackie Onassis was old, and despite her thinness she was lithe, and full of a curious energy. But it struck me as strange that she was wearing shorts and a singlet. I wondered irrelevantly if she had a husband who was still alive.

She cocked her head to the side, not unlike a bird, while we watched her watch the store with unusual patience. "They look as though they're closed," she said dryly. My wife and I glanced behind us. It might have been true. The shop's lights were off, but it was the middle of the day, and enough natural light came through the windows from the street that it wasn’t the first question that came to mind. We hadn't noticed a lack of light when we'd been in there. I remembered how I'd dropped my wallet because I'd been distracted by the T-shirt of the guy who'd served us our cup and our cone. I’d seen it clearly. It was a concert T-shirt for the nineteen-eighties metal band Metallica, embossed with the "Ride the Lightning" album cover. I'm not sure what "Ride the Lightning" means, but the T-shirt depicted an unoccupied electric chair hovering over a sea in a stormy landscape. In any case, the guy himself was ordinary enough – neither overly nice nor impolite. He'd made a sympathetic noise when I'd dropped my wallet.

My wife and I agreed with the old woman vaguely. "Yeah,” I said, “It could be they’re trying to conserve light,” which I didn’t mean sarcastically but which, if I’d thought about it a moment, I would have realized didn’t make much sense. I’m not the wittiest person in the world. My wife said something like, “I wonder if they know that they look closed,” to which the old woman responded with undue enthusiasm. “You know,” she said, without removing her sunglasses, “I think someone ought to tell them,” and with that she opened the door and stuck her head inside. We heard the gist of the ensuing conversation. The old woman said her piece, which was polite but a little drawn-out, and the guy who’d served us, the guy with the Metallica T-shirt (a young guy who couldn’t have been the owner or even the owner’s son) responded with a sort of rude non-sequitur, asking in a monotone if she knew what she wanted to order. All this happened in the space of a few seconds. We heard the woman tell him, “I’m not ordering anything, I never come here,” and when she closed the door to leave, she paused to tell us what she’d told him, as if we hadn’t already heard, and as if we wouldn’t think the episode was anything but funny.

Edward Mullany writes poetry and fiction. He is an editor at matchbook and Anderbo, and teaches writing at College of Staten Island.