That's all I remember

Times were hard, we all barely got by, no one owned an automobile, except perhaps someone's rich girlfriend, or a Persian student among us, with the Shah's treasury, or his own wealthy family in Tehran footing the bill, but we lived, and sometimes loved, drank beer, smoked the evil weed, and enjoyed what little we could enjoy amidst the ever present misery of the world.

Grantley Cummings was from Barbados. Macarthur Johnson was native born, as were Robert Smith and Mary. Howie Klein was from Connecticut as was his pal Manny. Both were Jewish, students at a nearby private university, whose parents were wealthy factory owners somewhere outside the state. Jan, the bartender, was Dutch, and Fritz, another bartender, Austrian.

Macarthur, Grantley, and Mary had been hired by Robert. I hired Howie and his pal. The first night that Howie worked, I was already off my shift, we hardly knew each other then, he sent me with the key to his apartment, and specific instructions, to get his stash hidden on a back shelf somewhere. I went there on foot, found it, brought it back, and, standing in the back alley, we lit up. No one had trusted me as much before or since.

All of it happened a long time ago in another city. The names above are real, or as real as I remember them. I suspect that Robert, Macarthur and Grantley are all dead by now, from AIDS. Others, I haven't seen since then, and I'm unlikely to ever see again.

There were others. There was Johnny Pacheco, a short, feisty Bolivian Indian with a Beatle haircut circa 1965, who had sneaked into the country, adopted the name of a famous Latin bandleader, and aggressively pursued the American Dream. Whenever someone shouted "La migra!", Johnny and his Bolivian pal Ruben, a hispanic man from the upper classes of La Paz, would both rush to the back door and stay in the alley until the danger passed. Sometimes the danger was real, other times, it was somebody's cruel joke.

There were Dan, who worked for me, and his girlfriend Lorraine, who didn't work there, but came back daily to pick up Dan. After they broke up, and Dan not altogether unhappy about it, the rest of us would tease him by playing the Johnny Nash record "I Can See Clearly Now" on the jukebox, singing along with it, and changing slightly the second line of the song, which in the original went "The rain is gone". The teasing wouldn't make Dan altogether happy.

Robert, Grantley and Mary worked the kitchen during the day. The rest of us worked the floor. Robert, whenever he accidentally dropped a hamburger patty on the floor, and had to pick it up, would exclaim: "Soul food!" Mary made cold sandwiches and salads. Robert teased Mary, and so did I. She took it in stride.

We had daily lunch menu specials, and Robert would decide what they were. I sent one of my guys to the kitchen after 10:30 to find out, so we could place our handwritten index cards on the tables. On Fridays, the special was always Robert's incomparable chili, customers came specially to order it. But, as a training by fire drill, I would send one of my new guys to the kitchen on Fridays at 10:30 to ask Robert what the special was. Robert's answer, invariably: "Shit on spindles, motherfucker!"

Jan the bartender once told Fritz, who was stocky, square faced, of Teutonic build and rather humourless, that he had a simian face. Fritz walked around proudly for a week until he learned the meaning of the word. Fritz once pulled out his wallet and showed me a photograph of his famous 20th century countryman he was proud of. Jan kept bragging about the blowjobs he was supposedly receiving from some regular women customers. The rest of us could only dream.

There were also Charles I. from New York City, who had been adopted into a family of aristocrats, and Jeff L., his Jewish friend and Shakesperean scholar from Missouri, whose father was a dentist at a military base there. Charles was a closeted homosexual, whose jealousy over Jeff's friendship, a straight, cost me that job sometime later. Jeff then helped me get my next job. A few years later I saw Charles on public television, conducting a fund raiser. Years later after that, I ran into Jeff who told me he thought Charles was dead of AIDS. I don't know where Jeff, my best friend from those days, is now.

It took a while before I learned that Robert, a tall handsome, somewhat shy, masculine, deep voiced black man, was a homosexual, as were Grantley and Macarthur. It was probably Macarthur, the most extroverted and crazy of the three, who opened it up. There was no going back. While Macarthur played it perfectly straight when customers were present, in their absence, he exploded, showed his humour, his true persona, his vulnerabilities. He and I, a straight arrow boy scout myself, were close friends for a time. Despite our opposite sexual tendencies, we could read each other's joy and pain perfectly. In the presumably sexless after life, I would rather meet Macarthur than anyone else I've known. Robert stayed cool, Grantley would catch on Macarthur's irrepressible spirit. Macarthur and Grantley, were during off hours transvestites, cross dressers, drag queens, probably Robert's lovers.

Robert looked very much like a black soul singer popular at the time. Macarthur told me the story how the three of them, Robert, with Grantley and himself in full drag, on Robert's each side, all of three them dressed to the nines, Robert wearing an outfit that was reminiscent of what the popular singer would wear, a long fur coat, gold chains, how they all entered the auditorium of an elegant concert venue, and received a standing ovation from the audience that thought it was greeting the popular singer himself accompanied by his female entourage.

Grantley, who was quite a tailor in his spare time, made me a winter fur coat out of some synthetic fabric, one that I still own. (Recall that he hailed from a tropical island.)

I still remember how Macarthur and I teased each other, in front of all the others, gathered for staff lunch down in the basement dining room after all the customers were gone at 2PM. We had improvised theatrical performances that lasted an hour or more each weekday, to the amusement of the entire staff and sometime their guests too. Oh, others well fully participating, but the two of us were the provocateurs, jokesters and a duo like the Laurel and Hardy pair. Even if our lives outside were gray and sometimes full of resignation and despair, we looked forward to those 2 o'clock daily performances. "Miss Thing" he would address me. Or "Miss Do". And, unfortunately, that's all of his banter I can remember now.