I squirt pancakes on the griddle and ask Zack to make fried chicken.
My dad hands me a whisk and says, “Mix in the curry and peanut butter really good. Am I done?”
Zack scans the checks and says, “Yeah, you can sit down.”
“Did you hear? Jasmine has never been to an amusement park. There are major upsides to growing up on an island,” my dad says, tucking his rag into his apron.
Me and Zack clear a path. The space we cook is narrower than the aisle of a bus.
“I want pictures. I want it of her face on the first ride. You can send the soup. Maybe put some spinach in the bowl,” my dad says, and heads for his chair.
It is a light-years day. The soup is my sister’s favorite thing on the menu. A menu that is thirty-five years long.
The buzzer rings. We have more to go, but it is late enough to just leave the steam table off. “Good day. Good checks,” Zack says.
He says this at the exact steam table moment every weekend.
He says it even if we have gotten in a screaming fight. If my dad has been belligerent and ornery, if I sat down on the floor and sobbed till my apron was soaking wet, if all the dishes went to the wrong tables, if the fridge broke, if he overcooked the brisket and the turkey.
My brother loves The Store. The good and the bad.
No matter what has happened, no matter if he insulted my dishes and secretly hoped my gravy would clump. No matter if he didn’t do my side of bacon. At the steam table point, when he says “Good day,” I love my brother.
My dad is in his chair talking to a woman he tried hard to kick out for bringing an outside coffee in. She threw it away and apologized. He has been talking to her for half an hour.
“Dad, I have kids’ chocolate chip pancakes,” I shout from the kitchen.
He doesn’t want to get up, and tells me that I need to make three baseball-size pancakes and then put a stick in each.
My dad warns that it might not work, he has not tried it yet.
Zack shakes his head.
I can’t find the sticks.
“So fucking stupid,” Zack says as he finds the sticks for me. The bag is unopened.
One time, Zack stopped talking. Not just hangover-level volume, which still has a few comments and baseball facts. This was mute. The only exchange unrelated to cooking was when he thought my dad had called for him, but then it turned out my dad had just said, “Exactly.”
“I fucking hate that word!” Zack screamed.
Be careful what you wish for. I cooked for as long as I could stand.
“Zack, are you mad at me?” I asked.
“No,” Zack said.
“Did Dad lay into you bad this morning?”
“No.”
“What the F is going on?”
“Nothing, let’s just cook.”
“Really?”
“Let’s just cook”? This is not what Zack believes in. I think I said, “Really, c’mon,” twenty times till he finally broke. “My kickball team captain was screwing another team’s captain. They stopped fucking and now neither will play. It is so fucked up.”
It took me a while to understand. There were rules about the number of girls per team. I don’t really understand still. But I understood that the kitchen without Zack was no fun. I told him, and just like that, the day turned. The items broke even between griddle and stove. Now and then my dad would pop in and join the line.
And when the steam table moment hit, Zack said, “Great cook, good checks,” and we bumped knuckles.
“We were wrong,” I say to Zack as I plate the kids’ pancakes and ring the bell.
They get a “Whoa” from Luke.
“How did they come out?” my father asks.
Zack pops out of the kitchen to check on the item.
He reports back: the kid is eating the pancakes just like a lollipop. Our dad is a genius.
BUCKETS OF GRAVY
The first time John Belushi came in to The Store, he ordered an egg sandwich.
John looked at the sandwich, raised his eyebrows, and took a huge bite, filling his cheeks like a chipmunk.
He went through every sort of emotion you could have while chewing. Then he spit the huge bite on the counter. “That’s fucking terrible,” he said, smiled, and watched my mom and dad fall in love with him.
He had a key to The Store just like half the block. Sometimes my dad would open in the morning and find John asleep in the rocking chair, a pack of Bounty towels acting as a pillow.
Famous at this point, John tried to take people from his regular life to help them out or just to have them around. He asked my dad to cater the set for his movie Neighbors that was filming on Staten Island.
My dad would wake up at 5:30 a.m., slicing cold cuts and making salads, but mostly he made melon balls. That was what they wanted. Honeydew, cantaloupe, watermelon, all placed in separate containers. He made gallons of them, and quickly became an expert, cutting the melons just so, ensuring there were no seeds in any balls.
Why did they want melon balls? My dad says they were all on coke. He says this like it is a simple equation. Two plus two equals four—cocaine plus Staten Island equals melon balls.
John told him to charge as much as his imagination could create for the catering, and then double it.
At the end of the first week, my dad got a check for $1,500. The raw materials (aka melons) couldn’t have cost more than a hundred dollars. My father had never made that much profit in his life. He was excited, and bragged about it to Bobby the Teamster.
Bobby the Teamster was John’s driver. Bobby’s father was a teamster chauffeur too. His brothers and uncles were all drivers as well. It was some sweet deal, but Bobby was a nice enough guy.
“You know that’s what I make every week, and all I do is sit in the limo and get stoned,” Bobby said. Which was true. He drove John to the set, and would then just do cocaine and eat melon balls for the rest of the day.
At first my dad felt like a sucker, but came to the realization that keeping score with money was meaningless. He had a lot more fun learning how to get balls with no seeds than Bobby had sitting on his ass in another planet.
On the first day of shooting Neighbors, the lead actress’s husband said he wouldn’t let her leave the hotel until he got $14,000 in cash.
John set up a time to drop off the money.
A man named Bill Superfoot was guarding John at the time. Not against other people, but against himself.
In the mornings when my dad would find John sleeping at The Store, it was bittersweet.
Sweet: John looked cute fast asleep hugging a pack of paper towels to his face.
Bitter: John was there because his wife, Judy, had locked him out of the apartment. And Judy had locked him out because John was using drugs.
When the time came to drop the $14,000 in cash, John went up to the hotel room with Superfoot.
They didn’t bring any money.
Superfoot “had a talk” with the husband. The actress went to the set. She was wonderful, the movie started on time.
The Armenian who sold The Store to my dad had run the place for sixty years.