change, something new comes along, people move on.
Bars attract a motley crowd, that’s for sure—some of them behind the bar, some with their belly up to it. A night without an “incident” was rare. A woman claimed her fur coat had been stolen but no one on the staff could remember her arriving in one. A bouncer pummeled a customer for being unruly. The customer claimed he wasn’t unruly, just a little frisky. An intoxicated sports star grabbed a woman’s breasts “just for fun.” The woman didn’t get the joke. Two young women vomited all over the ladies’ room before passing out in the muck. A waiter wrote in his own tip on a customer’s credit card charge. The customer didn’t like that. Another waiter tried to get out the back door with a live lobster in his shirt—a risky move, to say the least—but the manager caught him before the lobster did. A regular bar patron, a generally calm fellow, ripped the men’s urinal off the wall because he was having a “bad night.”
But the standout of my ten o’clock calls came one Saturday night when the floor manager, Bob Walker, told me that the coat-check girl had gone after one of the cooks with a knife in the middle of the busy dinner service. The fight had started in the kitchen and ended up in the basement with Bob, a bartender, and a waiter struggling to pull the women apart. Apparently the white female cook, in a dispute over the staff bathroom, called the African-American coat-check girl a racial epithet, and the fight was on. Fortunately, the patrons remained unaware of it. Half my job, I sometimes thought, was keeping the lid on so diners could enjoy a meal without somebody chasing through the place with knife in hand or lobster at chest.
In all my years in journalism I had seen some tense newsroom arguments but nobody had ever pulled a knife. Bob said the coat-check girl planned to file an equal-opportunity complaint against Nathans.“You’ll probably want to talk to her,” he said. “Maybe try to talk her out of it.”
This was exactly the kind of mess in which I was loath to get involved. I had no expertise, no training in how to handle staff fights, particularly of a racial nature and potentially involving liability. Professionally I didn’t shirk from confrontations, but dodging tear gas covering a story was better than this.
“Please call Doug and ask him to handle it,” I said.
“I did call him,” Bob replied. “He said that since you’re the owner it’s your responsibility.”
I fell back on my pillow and sighed.
I DEALT WITH the stress by getting away from it. One way was to hop the train to New York, check into a good hotel—on expense account, thank God!—and lose myself in meetings with celebrities or book publicists on behalf of
Larry King Live
. In New York I could pretend life was as it had been. The city bolstered my battered ego. The people I knew there, friends and professional contacts, saw me as a successful TV producer, as a go-getter, a winner. Even with that welcome lift, on the train home, somewhere between Wilmington and Baltimore, the gloom would descend as I went from top of the world back to tax fraud defendant and owner of a very troubled saloon. I liked feeling like a winner. I didn’t like feeling like a loser.
The gloom would also bring troubling thoughts about my dear dead husband. I’d left the stage of shock but was still in denial. Howard couldn’t be this bad guy, could he? He wasn’t the kind of person who would leave his wife and young son holding the bag, would he? If he was this bad guy, how did I not see it? The rolling countryside speeding by the train windows had no answers. No one did.
S OMETIMES N ATHANS HAD its perks, though. I would often invite Martha to dinner. She was becoming a close friend. We would sit in my favorite booth, number 26, and try to cheer each other up. From the moment she’d first learned of the mess Howard had left me, she’d been dismayed. She didn’t go
Bars attract a motley crowd, that’s for sure—some of them behind the bar, some with their belly up to it. A night without an “incident” was rare. A woman claimed her fur coat had been stolen but no one on the staff could remember her arriving in one. A bouncer pummeled a customer for being unruly. The customer claimed he wasn’t unruly, just a little frisky. An intoxicated sports star grabbed a woman’s breasts “just for fun.” The woman didn’t get the joke. Two young women vomited all over the ladies’ room before passing out in the muck. A waiter wrote in his own tip on a customer’s credit card charge. The customer didn’t like that. Another waiter tried to get out the back door with a live lobster in his shirt—a risky move, to say the least—but the manager caught him before the lobster did. A regular bar patron, a generally calm fellow, ripped the men’s urinal off the wall because he was having a “bad night.”
But the standout of my ten o’clock calls came one Saturday night when the floor manager, Bob Walker, told me that the coat-check girl had gone after one of the cooks with a knife in the middle of the busy dinner service. The fight had started in the kitchen and ended up in the basement with Bob, a bartender, and a waiter struggling to pull the women apart. Apparently the white female cook, in a dispute over the staff bathroom, called the African-American coat-check girl a racial epithet, and the fight was on. Fortunately, the patrons remained unaware of it. Half my job, I sometimes thought, was keeping the lid on so diners could enjoy a meal without somebody chasing through the place with knife in hand or lobster at chest.
In all my years in journalism I had seen some tense newsroom arguments but nobody had ever pulled a knife. Bob said the coat-check girl planned to file an equal-opportunity complaint against Nathans.“You’ll probably want to talk to her,” he said. “Maybe try to talk her out of it.”
This was exactly the kind of mess in which I was loath to get involved. I had no expertise, no training in how to handle staff fights, particularly of a racial nature and potentially involving liability. Professionally I didn’t shirk from confrontations, but dodging tear gas covering a story was better than this.
“Please call Doug and ask him to handle it,” I said.
“I did call him,” Bob replied. “He said that since you’re the owner it’s your responsibility.”
I fell back on my pillow and sighed.
I DEALT WITH the stress by getting away from it. One way was to hop the train to New York, check into a good hotel—on expense account, thank God!—and lose myself in meetings with celebrities or book publicists on behalf of
Larry King Live
. In New York I could pretend life was as it had been. The city bolstered my battered ego. The people I knew there, friends and professional contacts, saw me as a successful TV producer, as a go-getter, a winner. Even with that welcome lift, on the train home, somewhere between Wilmington and Baltimore, the gloom would descend as I went from top of the world back to tax fraud defendant and owner of a very troubled saloon. I liked feeling like a winner. I didn’t like feeling like a loser.
The gloom would also bring troubling thoughts about my dear dead husband. I’d left the stage of shock but was still in denial. Howard couldn’t be this bad guy, could he? He wasn’t the kind of person who would leave his wife and young son holding the bag, would he? If he was this bad guy, how did I not see it? The rolling countryside speeding by the train windows had no answers. No one did.
S OMETIMES N ATHANS HAD its perks, though. I would often invite Martha to dinner. She was becoming a close friend. We would sit in my favorite booth, number 26, and try to cheer each other up. From the moment she’d first learned of the mess Howard had left me, she’d been dismayed. She didn’t go
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