Pasta Mia
I like Italians. Honestly, we have to cut it out with alien-stereotyping among us European folks. Let’s stereotype, yes, but more like necking, waltzing, hooking up, you understand?
For example. I have a chip on the shoulder towards some of you, like I’m talking about you, beer bloc. But it’s only a chip, because we’re fam in the first place and it’s as families go. It wasn’t so when I was leaving my womb country, but that’s why one should leave them sometimes. This here though will be about Italians and I’m looking forward to putting it down, because I know we’ll all have a good time, and we’ll like each other even better after that.
After half a year as a busboy at the Plaza Hotel, I moved on to a full waiter job in West Village for Pasta Mia, an Italian mafia dive.
What followed was the best of my time in Manhattan. A speeding-ticket fast New York City life. After two years as a full waiter, I became so good that I worked only Friday and Saturday nights, and made enough dollar to rent a two-bedroom on St. Mark’s Place, dress sharp like Perry Ellis’ big shoulders and so, and go out and dance in Danceteria, the Saint, Studio 54 (reopened), Limelight, Palladium, the Tunnel, and also read, listen to and watch the stuff for my cultural side, a lot.
I liked watching Johnny Carson the best, because of what his Nebraska homeboy dialog was doing to my English. Still, what cracked me up the most was when Johnny’s predecessor on The Tonight Show, Steve Allen, hit the Manhattan streets during the hot presidential election weeks and queried folks: “One of our presidential candidates has just admitted that he’s an open heterosexual. Would you vote for such a candidate?” “Never! Never!” the then New Yorkers wholeheartedly shrugged. Those were the times.
I said Pasta Mia was a mafia restaurant, but I said it lightly. It sat on a Hudson bank taking in the scopic New Jersey sunsets and was started by a family and friends from the same Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. And as ethnic neighborhoods go, the kids grew up with other Italian kids who would later hitch up to the Mafia wagon, but the ties would remain and so the grassroots sentiment for the Mafia as the wiseguys didn’t do harm to their Italian neighbors. On the contrary, they kept the neighborhood clean of outside thugs and often put on fireworks on the 4th of July, and stuff.
So the Pasta Mia owners weren’t Mafia, but they were sympathetically forbearing about it, like a family about an uncle gone wayward, and the wiseguys would drop in for a birthday party, or to celebrate a deal, and we waiters knew right off who they were, first, because of discernible harshness about some of them. Some of it was strong, to the point of having to resist a gag, no kidding, the kind of a spasm you get in response to an odor of an unkempt body, though they were clean like the next guy. Of course, overall the Mafia was dying out, the invasive brown wave and its drug mob subsets with even lesser brains and greater ruthlessness, were stomping on them and their singular sub-Italian DNA, but that’s another story.
The other thing that made you know they were wiseguys was that they always paid cash, even the biggest tabs. And they did it in the windowless backroom which was our office, and there’d always be a lot of screaming and exasperating between them and our owners heard from behind the closed door, because the wiseguys were convinced that they were being overcharged. It was a recurring ritual and of course they were overcharged, because we waiters knew what we were getting out of the kitchen onto the tables, a lot of everything, way a lot, more than was necessary for twice that party. But it was altogether an Italian thing, they were coming in and they knew they’d be overcharged and they exasperated and they paid up, and they paid us waiters good money too.
We had our own audio system in the restaurant, of course, much good music on it, but no, Marco, the owner, he’d always put the singles into the most boring jukebox in Manhattan, with the worst 1980s music imaginable. “Undertheboardwalk… blongblongblong… blongblongblong…,” over and over, an evening after an evening, even today on hearing its first strokes I run. All this because some low-ranking wiseguy wanted to get into the “jukebox business,” so he bought this beat-up “machine,” placed it in our joint and showed up each Friday to pick up his “moneee.” And Marco didn’t want his feelings hurt, so just before we opened for business he’d flip open the cash register, pull out a wad of singles and feed, feed the forsaken jukebox to no end.
There was a mafia lawyer, a consigliere, an Italian, of course, and he’d often drop by on his own, because as a lawyer he did a lot of work in Manhattan. And he was heavy, very heavy, wide like a manta fish, he wouldn’t mind taking two seats at once, you could tell. And he’d clamp down, pick up the menu, put it down, pick it up, put it down, then you show up to get a drink order and tell him about specials, but he’d wave the specials off and say in a horribly, horribly overindulged long-suffering voice, “tell… him… to… surprise me.” Meaning tell the chef. And so you go into the kitchen, and everybody knows by now that Consigliere is in, you show up there without a pad in hand, so it’s clear what you’ll say, but the chef still hangs on the last wisps of hope and queries “What?” — craving for something tangible to hear. But you have no pity on him, you slam, “He said for you to surprise him!” And the chef moans, throws his hands down, freezes for ten seconds, opens the refrigerator’s one door wide, opens the refrigerator’s the other door wide, and starts meditating.
Once we had a birthday party for a Mafia captain, about 30 folks walked in. After 11 PM the restaurant closed and only they had fun. By 1 AM everybody was drunk, including the girlfriends. Then the captain stands up, he’ll give a speech. The party goes silent, he talks, talks, the drink in hand (gin and tonic with a wedge of lime, I served it), and while talking, he moves slightly to the right of his chair, and when finished he threw himself back onto the thing, but the chair wasn’t there, it was two feet to the side, because he moved while speaking, and he hit the floor flat, real flat, the feet up, the broken glass spilling, the ice cubes rattling, we waiters by the kitchen door were laughing our teeth out it was so funny. But no one, not one person in the party, had uttered a slightest giggle, not even smiled. That’s how them Mafia days was, folks.
The Italians are a phenomenal brood and have made a mark across a lot that counts, in their homeland, in America, and the rest. I’m just telling the story because it was funny, and the problem fades anyway, and we have to put an end to this alien-stereotyping among us European folks, like I said. We neck from now on and spin, like dance, okay?
This Italian aspiring model I met on West Broadway in SoHo. After just ten minutes, she shares what for her, she says, is the ultimate love song. A boy wails to a girl: “Io che qui sto morendo e tu che mangi il gelato!” And she then sings it to me. What a momento!
Ciao fab Italians now. Roll on crazy Euros wherever you make the world go ‘round the bend. Long live pasta, potatoes, grain, corn, wine, beer, vodka and scotch. We all, the wine, the beer and the vodka ones are one awesome pack. Thanks for the great tip.
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