Po
Boy Views
By
Phil
LaMancusa
The
need to feed
Or
Tenement
Symphony
There’s
a place in New York City called Hudson Yards. It’s a new development described
as a monstrosity; I was raised two blocks from it, in the projects, five kids,
single mother and father figures through the years ( a story for another time).
The point: a two bedroom space at The Yard (it’s called) starts at $20,000.00 a
month; conversely, our rent was $50.00 a month and that translates to 400
months of our rent. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, how did this occur in my lifetime?
Back
then, rent wasn’t an easy nut to crack, even with the stipend sent to us by the
government, but we made due; kids got basic educations, wore clean clothes, hustled
for money as soon as able and/or ran the streets. We showed up for dinner
promptly at 5:30 every evening. Food was our currency and standing in our
community: if you ate good—things were alright. Were we happy? We fought each
other like tigers, we argued, bitched, cursed and picked on and were picked on
in our turns; but each night we gathered at the table and exhibited our best
manners, ate well prepared and served evening meals. Our best manners---or
else. Five-thirty--- or else.
My
mother cooked at least three hundred fifty dinners a year, the other times as a
treat we may have gone out for pizza, Chinese or Horn and Hardart automat (Google
it). I was always hungry although I never missed a meal growing up. A hunger of
the soul I’ve been told.
Mom
being German/Irish, my father being Sicilian and her third husband being Greek
made for some interesting meals; plus, the ladies in that building of 84
apartments on twenty-seventh street (who all seemed to know each other) were
constantly swapping recipes, gossip, advice and letting each other in on what
mischief eachother’s kids were up to. Food that’s now called ‘ethnic cuisine’ was
just called ‘dinner’.
Apartment
10F was five rooms that housed seven of us with an elevator that did and
sometimes didn’t operate. Riding in the elevator was an olfactory adventure, a
positive one if no one had used it for a urinal. You got a whiff of everybody’s
dinner being cooked from arroz con pollo to ham and cabbage, kasha varnishkes,
meatballs and spaghetti. In the morning there was enough coffee being brewed in
our building that you could get amped just breathing in; of course the same
could be said for the second hand smoke and cancer.
Kids
running and screaming, mothers yelling, fathers cursing and hormone fueled
teens preening in a perpetual ghetto ballet.
Busses, trucks, the Greek hotdog man, delis selling bagels and crullers;
the hurrying to work and school and the tango of shopping and procuring. The
amount of laundry alone was almost suffocating and the never-ending bills, the
interminable debts.
It
was not simply a matter of going to one store for dinner or food. There was a
fish market, butcher shop, green grocer, Jewish deli, Italian deli, bakery; the
boogie of daily shopping to put food on the table at precisely 5:30. Make no
mistake, we all had breakfast and lunches also and in the interim we had candy,
soft drinks, potato chips, I used to steal from the green grocer because I was
addicted to the sweet taste of a perfectly ripe tomato. There were penny
candies that we could afford by scavenging for soda bottles and redeeming the
deposits.
There
was a knish man who came around on Saturdays, an Italian sweet shop that sold
lemon ices, a delicatessen that made sandwiches from cold cuts that would save
the ends of salami, ham, cheese etc for any kid who asked for them. We bought
cups of coffee at stands before classes; waited for the ice cream man in the
afternoon caught in the transition from childhood into adolescence; took small
jobs for extra money and spent the earnings at lunch counters.
Mom made
side money as a waitress, Pop was a cook, that third husband ran a bar and
grill. I started work in food service at twelve and continued on for fifty
years; these days I have time on my hands so I’m looking to get back into a
kitchen. Feeding people is who I am.
Most
people aren’t aware of the inner workings of restaurants because most people
haven’t worked in one. Most people only see this: arrive, sit, order, get
served, eat, pay, tip, critique, leave. Badda bing badda boom. Workers are
invisible, bend to your will and few customers care where they come from and,
if anything, perhaps consider how simple their lives must be; you know, being
unskilled and all, perchance they’re working their way through college, getting
ready to get a real job; isn’t that sweet?
As
Janis Ian says “pity please the ones who serve, they only get what they
deserve”. Don’t envy the service worker, the work is hard, the environment is
tough and the pay is sh*t. Hours are long, schedules are erratic and the ‘my
way or the highway’ management style… par for the course. That waitress that
you fussed at might only get $2.15 an hour and a schedule that screws any semblance
of normalcy, so what. That dishwasher making minimum wage pulling his second
job shift to make ends meet, tough noogies. That cook that didn’t graduate from
high school but found a home on the range paying his bills with overtime sweat…and?
68,000 service workers in New Orleans are
keeping this city running, fed and watered. They aren’t paid well because what
they do is not considered a “real job” Where do we come from? I’ll tell you. Up
the street and light years away from Hudson Yards. Our need to eat and your need to be fed.
Truly, hungers of the souls.
