When What You Look at Isn’t What You See
David and the Lion’s Den — Chapter 1
Painting, Pasta, and People —
I slouched on the old fashioned park bench and tried not to stare at the hooker. She sat across from me in the shade of a ragged potted palm, tearing tiny pieces off a deli sandwich and popping them in her mouth to avoid smearing the wax caked on her lips.
I nudged Hilda, but she just gave me one of her inscrutable looks. My attention snapped back to the New York Times as I scanned the classifieds for a miracle. You know: High paying position open for a recent college graduate with a worthless education and no skills. Apply now.
Yeah, right.
I flipped to the Arts section and snapped the paper fully open in an aggressive, confident lie. Then I peeked over the top.
Fishnet stockings disappeared under the hem of a short leather skirt. Its blood-dark hue matched six-inch stilettos. Her left foot, dangling from a leg crossed daintily over her right knee, described tiny circles in the air.
She coughed and l looked straight at her, not thinking, just in time to catch one eye closing, preposterously long fake eyelashes fluttering. Oh, my god. Did she really just wink at me?
“Heya, Sweet Thing,” she croaked in a husky contralto, flicking her cat-o-nine-tails at me. “You gonna read the business section?”
I shook my head as she extended a veiny hand all covered with lumps. Well, that explains the two inches of pancake on her face, I thought as I handed her part of my paper. She had to be 60 years old. At least.
“Don’t get the vapors, Cookie.” She buried her nose in the stock quotes. “Mama won’t bite. Not unless you can pay for it.” She sniffed once, and I flushed — thinking about my Salvation Army wardrobe and barber-school haircut.
“Carla, you be goot,” Hilda rasped from beside me in her cute, little-old-lady Austrian accent. “It isn’t nice to tease, Liebchen.”
“You know her?” I hissed out of the side of my mouth.
Hilda cackled. “Everybody knows Mistress Carla!” I’d found her laugh hideous when I first met her. Hilda’s voice was as warped and wracked by time as the rest of her. She was short and squat, bent over with arthritis, and pushed off center by a hump on her back. Scraggly yellowing hair topped off a face that hadn’t been young in 60 years.
I’d grown fond of her wrinkled old features since I’d started hanging out at the garden every day, and I didn’t even notice her voice anymore.
“Carla,” Hilda said, perhaps a little sternly, “I’d like you to meet my neighbor David. David, allow me to present Carla.”
Years of midwest, middle-class instinct propelled me to my feet. “Pleased to meet you.” She stood a second later and began pulling on a white glove. Good god, I thought, it went all the way up to her elbow! Not until she’d extended her hand — where had the whip gone? — did I notice how tall she was, well over six feet.
“Charmed,” she drawled, adam’s apple bobbing sharply as I grasped her gloved hand.
I slammed the door — again! — and winced. Running up four flights of stairs made me forget myself.
“That you, Bubie?” called Jill from the back of the apartment.
“No, it’s the West Side Strangler!”
“Oh, that’s too bad. Howie called a few minutes ago.”
“Cool! Really? What’s up?”
“You wanna work tonight?” she asked as she stepped into the living room. “Raphael called in sick.”
“Shit, yeah!” I enthused, thinking as much about the mounds of free pasta I could suck down as the crummy pay I’d get from a night busing tables.
“Give him a quick call before he finds somebody else.”
“You gonna be there too?” I asked, picking up the phone.
“It’s Thursday,” she shrugged.
That meant yes. Jill taught me a lot about the restaurant hustle. How to find work, how to keep the boss happy, what nights are hot tip nights, and most of all — never miss a Thursday. The bridge and tunnel crowd is light, see, but the restaurants are packed anyway. What with neighborhood regulars and business people treating clients, Thursday night means money. Sure, you can make a lot of cash on the weekend, but it’s a friggin zoo.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I wasn’t even a waiter yet. I was busing tables at Cucina della Fontana, this gaudy-cheap red-sauce joint on Bleecker St. in Greenwich Village, handing over most of my cash wages to crash on Jill’s couch. She found me in Washington Square Park one morning when we were both painting, but that’s another story.
Jill’s not beautiful, but guys are into her. She didn’t have any money then, but she always managed to look cool — and hot. She did the thrift shops better than I did. She stood there while I called Howie, just brushing her long, kind of amber colored hair, wearing a short, Japanese-print robe that hugged her wide hips and made her waist look smaller than it really was.
She was a thick, curvy woman back when waif thin was the fashion. But like I said, guys were into her even then.
Not that I was. Nope — aspiring young artist who moved to Manhattan after college and hung around the Village? You figure it out. Sometimes stereotypes are true.
So. I guess that’s the night it all started. We left together and caught the Seventh Avenue local down to Sheridan Square. I walked a lot, but Jill’s Number One Rule was Always be Early. Since our shift started at 4, we braved the sweltering subway platform together.
In London, Berlin, Paris, and Montreal, subway tunnels are cool, dark refuges from the afternoon heat. Of course, I didn’t know that then, so the contrast didn’t shock me. Walking down the short flight of concrete steps was like descending into a stifling oven, heavy air hot and urine soaked.
It was a relief to step into the air conditioned car. A necessary relief. Jill and I had to peel our white work shirts away from sweaty skin.
I pulled open the restaurant’s heavy oak door twenty minutes later.
“David! Jill! Hi, kids!” Howie ran up from behind the reservation booth and kissed us both like long-lost relatives, a huge grin splitting his ruddy, bearded face. That’s just Howie. He’s so damn happy-seeming all the time.
Back then I didn’t know how to tell the difference between Howie-real-happy and Howie-fake-happy. Sometimes I think I still don’t.
So, after he made a fuss over us, he started in on some ridiculous story about the Mafia fish guy showing up with missing teeth and two black eyes.
Howie’s got this way about him. When you’re with him, it’s like you’re the most important person in the world. He pays attention. He notices things. Then he distracts you with the world’s funniest stories. He won’t stop until you’re smiling.
He tended bar at Cucina on weekends — bartending is his calling in life — but he was the manager on weekdays.
“What happened to Raphael?” I asked him as we passed the walnut bar and headed down a set of ornate steps to the main dining room.
“Who knows? Some old broad was hitting on him last night. He’s probably shacked up with her.”
I glanced down at the baroque fountain (Cucina della Fontana, get it?) at the bottom of the steps and laughed.
Howie rolled his eyes. “No, I’m serious, dude.”
“God,” Jill snorted. “I swear that kid uses this place just to pick up tricks.”
Howie shrugged his shoulders. “Alonzo likes him, though, so I’m stuck with him.”
“You think he’s doing him?” I asked. Innocently.
“Alonzo? The fuck outta here!” Howie guffawed as we pushed our way into the kitchen. “Go ahead and clock in.”
Cool, we’d get an extra thirty minutes pay.
Jill sounded serious for a moment. “So, why won’t Alonzo fire the kid?”
Howie shot us a dark look, one I’d remember for years, but that meant nothing to me then. “They’re both Columbian, both related to Esteban one way or another.”
Wouldn’t you have thought that was weird? An Italian restaurant in the West Village owned by Columbians with a kitchen full of Mexicans and a wait staff of starving artists and actors?
Well, I thought it was weird, but it’s not. Jill set me straight on that.
What nobody set me straight on was Esteban, because nobody knew.
Next chapter!
You just read Chapter 1 of a character-driven mystery set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David, Jill, Hilda, Carla, and Howie just stepped onto a road that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen. Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.
