Charlie, one of the cooks at the diner, is lying on the floor in front of the fridge on a short piece of cardboard, wholesale Crisco oil packaging. He’s in a fetal position to fit on it. He’s sick as a dog. I know sick dogs because we had two of them after the Communist Party allowed dogs in apartments. They both died, and we buried them in the park under two pine trees where the main road made a turn. Dad said it wasn’t Christian to mark the graves since they were animals. Otherwise, the stones would have read “Charlie and Maxie, our best friends if we ever had any.” We choose beautiful American names for our Irish setters. We had that freedom with dog names, but according to the Communist Party directive, all humans had to have Bulgarian names. At one point even the Turkish Bulgarians were forced to change their names, which almost caused a revolution but then turned into the first mass exodus from Bulgaria.
Sick dogs suffer quietly, careful not to disturb you, because they are delicate creatures. All that beating with newspapers on the nose haunted us now. We were told that was how you taught dogs not to pee all over the apartment. You shouldn’t beat them with your hand, because they will hate you and bite it, so you use mass media instead. We felt guilty for ages—what kind of an animal beats their friends? No one was ever that happy to see us come back home. Did we really have to use all those newspapers on our dogs? The pee barely smelled.
Cockroaches are dying slowly around Charlie. The owner of the restaurant sprayed Raid last night, and now they are crawling out of their holes at the most inappropriate times. One of my favorite customers, this cool and funny French woman who has the same full lower lip as Jamie in the kitchen and who always tips generously, discovers one roach in her home fries, right as she finishes eating them all. I don’t know what to say. I know how to say Bonjour, les infants! from my sister’s French classes. I also know a few songs like “Frère Jacques.” I tell my beautiful French customer, who I knew I would never see again, that this meal was on the house. She looks up at the ceiling the same way I instinctively do when people use that expression, expecting to see the plate on the roof. She smiles sadly and pays anyway, such class. I want to vomit the whole day. Or maybe I am catching Charlie’s cold. I’m humming Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques/ Dormez-vous? joylessly, in order to not think about roaches in fries.
Charlie is scheduled to cook the whole Saturday double shift from 6 a.m. until 1 a.m. It is around four o’clock now, a gorgeous Greenwich Village afternoon if you are a three-year-old native-born American with your tricycle, helmet, Mom and Dad, but for Charlie, it isn’t looking good. His real name is something else like Cristobal or Xavier. Everyone here has fake American names and fake social security numbers. We Bulgarians, on the other hand, proudly use our real names, which is, of course, irresponsible.
The cooks and busboys, they are all from Puebla and have anywhere between three to six kids each. The younger men live in rooms with three or four beds. Some people even rent their beds if they work night shifts. They eat in the restaurant and try to save practically every penny they make. When they reach their personal goal, they go back to Puebla, buy a minivan and start their own transportation business, and then get married. On birthdays and holidays, they go to the restaurant Caliente on Seventh, dance, flirt a little, and get drunk. Most busboys and cooks don’t really like America. They call it United Stay. They want to go back to Mehico, as they say. Life there is easy; people are nice, everyone speaks the language, and you don’t need a lot of money if you have a van.
“Don’t you have to pay for heat in the winter?” I ask, heat being the most expensive and impossible luxury in Bulgaria. They laugh.
“No, flaca, it is hot in Mehico, you don’t need heat.” I start to consider Mexico as a Plan B if America doesn’t work out. I can teach school kids English and rudimentary math, or work in a restaurant that has fried cockroaches on the menu, now that I am so good at serving those.
Charlie has six kids, and they live in the Bronx. His wife is very good looking, but she is losing her front teeth. This bit I know from our busboy, Jimmy Hilares, whom I call Hilarious, because he’s a joker. He’s also our gossip central station. We immigrants don’t have money for dentists. As a matter of principle, if a tooth hurts, you take it out. You need to be functional, not beautiful; it’s a completely different concept, think pilgrims and the American frontier in the winter. This immigration business has cost me a tooth already; it’s in the back, though, so I am considered lucky.
Charlie doesn’t know how to read or write in English or Spanish. But he has this very elaborate pictographic system of three horizontal sticks and a wave, for cheeseburger with bacon; and three beans with a horizontal stick and a wave for chili with bacon and cheese, so all goes well and in order.
We try really hard to not go all Karl Marx on America, especially since in our Bulgarian case, we like to think we personally helped destroy socialism by staging sleep-ins in the university yard and going on hunger strikes. But we didn’t have legitimate information about capitalism—it was behind the curtain all that time, like a naked woman dressing or undressing. It was alluring but may have also been ugly and repulsive. Nine-dollar sandwiches, which were made of twenty-cent buns and two slices of ham, amounting to negative-five cents when you divided the big Costco bag by the number of slices; the profit, it didn’t make sense, compared to our pay. A hundred cable channels did; attitude from old ladies addressing you as a slave didn’t. It was all very confusing and thanks to the beautiful Greenwich Village backdrop, which looked like a set on Sesame Street, I had a false sense that all would be well, and it would work out, and in a funny way. I was mesmerized by the bright red and blue doors and the golden brass doorknobs and the handrails that doormen dressed like sea captains shined relentlessly every morning. I looked inside the windows, whose curtains were left open, just so you could view the grandeur. There was order and peace in all that. We were just trying to find the door to sneak through and be an official part of the set. In our heads, we were still somehow all equal and deserving. In our dreams, we turned the doorknobs, looking for the one that would give in. In the morning, the sea captains erased our fingerprints.
Charlie’s wife doesn’t work because their smallest kid is only two. They all live off his salary, which is two hundred dollars a week. He is around sixty-five but looks forty, with his raven black hair and kingly expression. He is a quiet, warm-hearted man who talks little and tries to stay away from trouble. He can’t really afford to be deported for the third time; he has been here for twenty years, all his kids are citisen. Jimmy Hilarious jokes that Mexicans only make citisen. Hilarious is very careful not to make one, being van-oriented and all.
Charlie can’t afford to go home to the Bronx and get better either. He sleeps for twenty minutes and then I wake him up so he can start the evening especials. I secretly make a very strong double espresso and hand him a piece of carrot cake, which he normally would never dare touch. He protests with a lot of coughing, but I convince him that sweets give you energy, and he hides behind the kitchen wall to eat it. He tells me that cake is for kids; grown-ups shouldn’t eat it. I say I know, but my daughter is so far away, I can’t send her any. “How old is your niña?” he asks. I hold my hand by my hip, as if I am resting it on her hair. “That old.” He protests that I shouldn’t hold my hand like that as if I am petting a dog; for kids you show size like this—and he holds his hand next to his hip like me, but points his index finger up, slightly turning his wrist. It looks like a blade of grass, which will continue to grow.
I know Zaza is that tall because that’s how her father and I used to walk around with her, and I just held the back of her head. Once, she stumbled and fell so fast I couldn’t catch her by the hair. That probably would have been more painful than hitting the sidewalk. She looked up at me with a distorted face. There was this long, unbearable silence when she cried it all out and had to breathe in deeply to continue crying. I was always afraid that with those desperate cries she would just stop breathing. Her mute sad face, a pictogram for the question, “Couldn’t you have done something?” In my nightmares now, I see this face asking, “What have you done?” I wake up and smoke until dawn, and then I go to work.
All cooks and busboys hide from the owner when they eat. They chew, glancing behind the wall with just one eye, like a cat, to see if the boss is back. We waiters don’t; the few American NYU students who occasionally worked here fought for a daily meal and won it, plus a twenty-minute break in which to eat it. We sit at a table in the restaurant, not at the two special ones on the sidewalk, since they are always filled with people cruising. We sit at the table next to the bathroom, still a perfectly good table since Hilarious keeps the bathrooms very clean. We chat with patrons and pretend we are normal people who took a stroll and can totally afford a twelve-dollar salad for Caesars. We are equals for ten minutes, then we go back to work.
***
Rumpus original art by Nina Semczuk
