Granted, it might not have seemed the best place to everyone. We didn’t use homemade mayonnaise—we used Hellman’s. Coffee was self-serve. My dad wore a sweatband rather than a white toque.
If a customer complained about the meal, my mom would take a big bite of the dish in front of them. Then report back, saying, “You’re crazy,” or “Ew, you’re right, that is disgusting.” Sometimes you would get handed a baby to hold while she took your order.
If you didn’t tip her, she would chase you down the block. No matter how busy we were. “That dick stiffed me,” she would say, and bolt out the door.
My mom loved chocolate truffles, especially the ones from Lilac’s on Christopher Street. My brother Danny would always buy them for her as a gift.
It was sweet, except Danny loved truffles, too. So did Zack. I think we all did. Because my mom’s truffles would disappear so fast. She tried to hide them, but they had to be refrigerated. At one point she started putting them in the freezer; that slowed us all down for maybe three minutes.
Shoes, the Grateful Dead, garage sales, road trips, drugs (pot and acid), the New York Knicks, local elections, Tina Turner—I could go on for days, my mom loved so many things.
Every time my dad cooked chicken fajitas, my mom would pick them up with the steam streaming behind her and yell “Yahoooooo!” as she skipped to the table. It was her favorite dish to serve.
Danny used to think it was an act. It was ridiculous, she was a one-woman fajita ticker-tape parade.
But now Danny thinks of Mom’s “Yahoooooo!” as true.
He thinks of it as endearing and a testament of how much Mom loved being a waitress, of how much my mom loved her Store.
She had sheets of gold star stickers. If everyone at a table cleaned their plate, my mom would put a star on their check and do a kind of dance when she brought the check to the table.
The item my dad hated most was Thai Steak Salad. At some point he had loved it. A second cook with long hair named Steve had told him about the dish.
In my dad’s version, everything was made to order. He didn’t have rice vermicelli, so he used angel hair pasta. He didn’t have a fryer, so he used the griddle to crisp the noodles.
It was a pain in the ass. He had to get the griddle super hot, put the angel hair down, and weight it. If the noodles didn’t get crisp the dish sucked. On an open flame he would roast three colors of peppers. While that was cooking he would chop cashews, make a marinade, and cut up lettuce. When the peppers were done, he skinned them, bits of black glittering the cutting board like a virus. Finally it was time to cook the steak.
When the dish came out, every customer that hadn’t ordered yet ordered it. My mom made a rule that you couldn’t copy what the person next to you was eating.
This rule was born because my dad would explode with anger at the thought of making another Thai Steak Salad.
Long hair Steve’s wife ran a company called MasturBakers. She created cakes sculpted into penises that had the words “Eat my cock” frosted on them. On the side, Tammy also made a few PG desserts. One was a chocolate peanut butter refrigerator pie with a graham cracker crust called Sigh Pie. Every week my dad would ride over on his motorcycle to pick one up for The Store.
My dad always hoped people didn’t order dessert. To him it was just a half hour extra that took up a table. He didn’t care about selling coffee and cake.
We always had bread pudding to get rid of the stale bread. For a while my dad made flan. I made pecan pie because it lasted for weeks. Come October, I made pumpkin pie because of the big Libby’s display and sale at the supermarket. My dad had a brief love affair with bootleg crepes made from flour tortillas. Somebody gave us a gift once—a special pan with half circles that made pancake balls called ?belskivers. “Order of apple skivies,” my mom would shout across the yellow-lit restaurant.
That was it for the desserts, except the Sigh Pie Tammy made. Every time my mom served that pie, she would slice off a little for herself. Sometimes she would cut a piece to sell, taste her little sliver, and say, “I don’t think this is fresh.” Then she would cut into the new pie, serve it, and proceed to eat the rest of the old one.
We never made money on the Sigh Pies.
A breed of people hear my last name, flash the opposite of a twinkle, and say they tried to go to The Store once. Then they will allude to the fact that my father is a psycho.
Most dishes at The Store could be got on a spice scale of one to ten.
Ten was murder. My dad took it as a penis contest, slicing scotch bonnets in a way that camouflaged what they were, so the customer couldn’t cheat and pick them out.
If you didn’t belong in The Store, you were kicked out. It was violent and happened as soon as someone wrong tried to put their foot in the door.
Not physically violent. My father never hit anyone. He didn’t need to. He could do more harm with one sentence than most people could do with a crowbar.
Wounds heal, but what my dad says will haunt you for the rest of your life.
The Store’s rules weren’t about being exclusive. They were about keeping the right balance.
My mom always had trouble with the balance. Her natural tendency was to say “yes.”
She would put too many items on a check. My father would explode and shout that it was too much food to eat. She would let a woman order coffee and toast. My father would explode and shout that wasn’t enough food for a check.
“Oh, Kenny,” she would say, and he would calm down.
We had a dishwasher named Terry who was skinny with a puppet face. My dad had hired him as a favor to a friend. It was a favor because Terry was mentally disabled.
My mom had worked with mentally disabled people when she first met my dad. She was a general counselor and speech therapist. It is what her degree from Hunter College was in. She loved the job. Then a change happened to the organization that she worked for. It began to get funding from New York State. Soon the organization was required to teach advanced math and reading. The state needed to show they were trying to make the patients normal.
But the patients weren’t normal. What the organization had been teaching was: how to ride the bus, say thank you, use the bathroom, and chew. The patients were not capable of multiplication. They became sad and frustrated. My mother quit and got an easy office job.
Terry would sit in the window and point his finger like a gun at strangers as they passed. He would imagine blowing them up. This was his favorite thing to do.
One day Terry is shooting people with his finger. A cop car comes zooming around the corner.
My dad calls over, “Ditch your gun, Terry. It’s the cops.” Terry put his gun in his left pocket, then his right, then he hid it under his apron. He couldn’t unflex his finger, he couldn’t get rid of the gun.