Cold War Days

The first job I ever got fired from was waiting tables at the Plankboard Inn in Jersey City Heights, late winter, 1985. George in the kitchen losing his cool every time we brought back a plate for a refire or left one dying on the pass-through. He’d throw pots at us, sometimes still burner-hot, flecked with pasta fagioli or stracciatella. I couldn’t get far after clock-out; I only lived across the street. A railroad flat with a west-facing view from the kitchenette, the only good thing about it besides the rent. I loved drawing the pollution sunsets that spread across Hudson-Union-Essex like frozen atomic bombs. A Secaucus sun chemical-pink as the cherry center in the tartufos I stole from the walk-in. They cost George a lot, those domed desserts, imposing in their protective sleeves. Siloed out on the fire escape, since the apartment freezer was broken. My squares and snacks for weeks, sliced into pretty wedges. I got sick from so many, but every afterward felt like a scouring of sorts, a chance at a new me who wasn’t so terrified living 800 miles from home with no life plan.

It wasn’t as if there was nothing else to eat. Head waitress Josie made sure George fed us dinner while we pooled and divvied up tips after shifts. Overcooked chicken parm, underdressed escarole salad. She was a mother hen in her way, but also impossible to gauge. One minute, an evil eye when we forgot to wipe down the oil-and-vinegars. The next, all smoky laughter and a wink that lowered the temperature. Then, her face in George’s, the two of them at it like despots on the brink, managing to keep an inch of separation between them, lest any physical contact assure their mutual destruction. Every night I collapsed on my futon, surrounded by my sunsets papering the popcorn walls, telling myself to quit, but I wouldn’t. I had to tough this out. Besides, the tips were too good.  

Once after a shift, I cold-compressed a tartufo onto a small burn from one of George’s thrown pots, imagining it an exercise in daring. The ice cream bombe volatile in my hand, chocolate shell decoupling, cherry core unstable. Me like Spock in Wrath of Khan, or a Red Dawn Wolverine, neutralizing the weapons of madmen and evil empires. Folly and glory. It felt like relief for as long as the cold lasted. Pretending the impossible when a life plan was meaningless, really. When everything could be gone any second.

I dreamt a lot about Mom then. Inevitable fallout, I figured. Like the care packages she sent. Bunker stuff I never touched. Empty sustenance for end-times. And her unread letters that were surely meant to guilt me into coming back to Illinois, remind me I wasn’t skilled or smart or brave enough to be on my own yet, that artist was a poor life plan in such a world as this. In one dream, I saw a remnant of myself still at home. My body in pale outline on my bedspread, vaporized there at the last dropped words of our last fight. The door kept closed, bedroom sealed off, as if contaminated for enough half-lives to outlast us.

On a Saturday in March, a fluke heatwave turned my tartufo cache into dripping pools on the fire escape. Of course, the dinner rush that night all wanted them, but they had to be 86’d for low stock. Josie figured things out and snitched on me. No surprise, really. As I left the Plankboard, George threw fistfuls of hospitality mints at my back. Josie just gave me a teary pffff. Such small drama, I told myself. But it was hard to look across the street after that. No détente, no more tartufos. Sometime later, I tore open a care package and made a Duncan Hines devil’s food cake with vanilla frosting. I scarfed it like a last meal in the empty kitchenette as I gazed out the window, the nubs of my Faber-Castells taunting, the sweet sludge of meltdown on the wrought iron, tail lights on the Pulaski Skyway like a broken warning system, a whole country westward burning, and a scar on my arm, already turning pale.