He has a thin little voice, worn-down shoes, and holey jeans. He and Zhigulin, another boy photographer who lives downstairs, used to have the lousy habit of comforting themselves by loudly cussing out famous photographers: "Hiro? Shit. Avedon? An old hack…" The names flashed by. Zelensky and Zhigulin knew how to make masterpieces, but for some reason they didn't do it. Now they've piped down a bit.
At present Sasha Zelensky is waiting for his mummy, whom he dearly loves, to arrive from Moscow. The wild mood he was in a while ago, when Zhigulin said to me, "Mark my words, he's bound to hang himself" – he wouldn't let anyone in and sat locked in the eternal semidarkness of his ragged studio (all there was about him of the photographer was the studio) – that mood has passed. Soon his mummy will arrive, and perhaps mustachioed Sasha with the evil eye (there is something equine about his eye, always rolled back at you with such suspicion, he's always suspicious, Zelensky is) will force his mummy to work, while he himself devises his next project, a design for a ring, a project that he will carry around and propose to the jewelry stores. From time to time Zelensky comes to me – to a man who has done a great deal of tailoring in his life to earn his bread and butter – with the request that I make a designer shirt of his own design, which he painstakingly conceals. I tell him to buy the fabric and bring his design, I'll make it for him immediately. This has been dragging on for two years now, and he will never buy the material or bring the design because there is but one name for all his unfinished schemes – madness. Not the kind where people rattle the bars, yell, and spatter spittle. No, the quiet, apologetic, thin-voiced madness where they try to print color photographs, they conceive designs for rings or invent solar batteries or suddenly decide to devote themselves seriously to classical music. Man has no peace in this world. He is harassed on all sides and forced to make money. Why money? So that seedy down-at-heel Zelensky can turn into handsome Zelensky in a Rolls-Royce, with a beautiful smiling fair lady beside him. All beggars dream of fair ladies. I have already had my fair lady.
I am a busboy
Early March found me working at the Old Bourbon Steakhouse in the Hilton Hotel. The Hilton was an easy walk from the Winslow, two blocks west and one street down.
I came to the Hilton through the influence of a Crimean Tatar named Gaydar, who had been a porter at the Hilton for ten years, one of the family; otherwise they wouldn't have taken me. I must confess I committed a crime: I started at the Hilton several days after going on welfare. I wanted to try it a while and then choose. Once when extremely young I had studied at a special school for waiters, but only briefly; I had no proper education in waitering. I had gone to the school purely by chance.
I had never dreamed that necessity and chance would force me to turn again to this profession. But here I was at the Old Bourbon – a large red room with two balconies and no windows, absolutely no windows, as I presently discovered – working as a busboy. The young Armenian woman who signed me up in the Hilton personnel office said that if I'd had even a mediocre knowledge of the language they would have taken me as a waiter, not a busboy. I lost money by not knowing the language.
The Hilton had a staff of two thousand. The huge hotel worked like a gigantic conveyor belt, never stopping for even a minute. Our restaurant worked at the same pace. The first customers would appear by seven in the morning, mainly snappy, gray-haired, middle-aged men who had arrived from the provinces for a trade convention. They hurried to eat their breakfasts and get down to business. I remember that now and then we all wore cardboard signs pinned to the lapels of our red uniform jackets, such as: WELCOME, PULP AND PAPER CONVENTION! THE HILTON STAFF GREETS YOU AND INVITES YOU TO THE TRADITIONAL BITE OF THE RED APPLE. MY NAME IS EDWARD.
If it wasn't pulp and paper, it was some other equally glorious convention. The gentlemen from the provinces had their way paid at the hotel; they all carried identical cards on which the waiter filled in the total for their food and drink.
The gentlemen did not tarry long at the tables. Business was waiting, and after they had bolted down the expensive and in my view none too tasty wares of our kitchen, they lit out for their meetings. The mad rush began at seven, as I have said, and was over for me at three o'clock.
I was subdued and broken then. I could not stop thinking about what had happened to me. Elena's betrayal, her leaving me – the last six months had been a quick slide into tragedy. So I did not feel very good when I got up at half-past five, put a turtleneck sweater on my naked body, then a gray suit, and a scarf at my neck… walked the six minutes to the hotel, went down the steps… saw a sign that faded with every day, HAVE A NICE DAY AT THE HILTON, as the smell of garbage hit me in the face… took the elevator up to my restaurant… greeted the Cuban and Greek cooks. I greeted these people from the bottom of my heart, they appealed to me. The entire kitchen and all our busboys, waiters, dishwashers, cleaning women were aliens, not Americans, metecos. Their lives were not very settled, their faces were not stonily calm like those of our customers, who controlled the great affairs of pulp and paper in all quarters of America. Many of them – for example, those who took from me the tubs of dirty dishes that I lugged out from the dining room – got even less money than I did. Since I was still caught up in the atmosphere of my tragedy, I felt these people from the kitchen were my comrades in misfortune. And so they were, of course.
Well, every morning I walked through the kitchen, took a little table on casters, covered the top with a white tablecloth and the two lower shelves with red napkins. On the napkins I placed some special long, deep little bowls for butter, sometimes a few forks and knives or a stack of cups and saucers, in case the two waiters I served should lack dishes. On top, on the white tablecloth, I usually placed four imitation-silver pitchers, having first filled them with ice cubes and water, and a big bowl of butter pats, which I took from the refrigerator and sprinkled with fresh fine ice. On a second such cart I put several empty tubs, also of imitation silver, which I would use all day to lug dirty dishes to the kitchen. Then I went to the board, which indicated the busboys' stations for each day of the week. We changed places so that no one would have a constant advantage, since the customers, for some reason, were more eager to sit in certain spots in the restaurant, and even the manager or the headwaiter, who seated them, often could not keep them from it. Having looked to see which tables I was serving today, I rolled my carts into the dining room and stationed them in the proper place, usually in such a way that they did not strike the customer's eye. And then, as I have said, the mad rush began…
The customers appeared. I ran over and greeted them even before the waiter, filled their glasses with ice water, and put butter on their table. At lunch I was also supposed to dash each time to the warming oven – it was located between the kitchen and dining room, in a passageway – take out a hot loaf of bread, slice it, and bring it to the customers, covering it with a napkin to keep it from getting cold. Imagine you have fifteen tables, and you're also supposed to remove the dirty dishes – pronto – change the tablecloths, see that your customers have coffee, butter, and water, and set the table after changing the cloth, lay out silver and napkins. The sweat never dried on my brow; not for nothing did I get my tips. Far from it.
At first, however, I was glad for all that running around. In the beginning it distracted me from thoughts of Elena. Especially at first, when I knew nothing, when I was learning, our restaurant seemed interesting to me. Only occasionally, as I ran frantically with the dirty dishes, almost skidding on the turns, would I recall with anguish that my wife had left for a world much more beautiful than mine, that she was smoking, drinking, and fucking, going to parties well-dressed and fragrant every night, that those making love with her were our customers, their world had stolen Elena away from me. It wasn't all that simple, of course, but they, our slicked-down, smoothed-out American customers, our gentlemen – America forgive me, but they had swiped, ripped off, forcibly taken from me my dearest possession, my little Russian maiden.