The Middle of the Night

By DANIEL STOLAR

The following is an excerpt from the story "Crossing Over," an intricate and heartbreaking exploration of the relationships between Jews and African-Americans.

Crossing Over

In 1981, when I was fourteen years old, my parents decided that I should change schools. "If you get in, you should go," my dad said about the new school, one of suburban St. Louis's most elite. My father was a lawyer and an aspiring politician and he used the word should often. Both of my parents were liberal democrats, Jews, whose own siblings gave them a hard time about living in the city. My parents had been members of a group of like-minded young professionals who had founded my grade school, the nearby New City School, during the early seventies, so they could send their kids there. The school's survival qualified it as a success, but during those early years, the liberal ideals that had inspired the school translated into academic laxity and my classmates and I had spent many of our school hours unaccounted for, searching for monsters in the cavernous basement of the turn-of-the-century building that had housed the original Mary Institute before standing abandoned for years. The final straw for my parents, though, came when three black kids with a switch blade stopped me at the corner of Union and Waterman on my way home from school. They took the transistor radio I carried everywhere to listen to sports, but they were my own age and I don't think they'd fully committed themselves to mugging me and when they asked if they could "test drive" my bike just as the traffic light changed, I was able to push off the curb and ride away. I was shaken–my hands literally trembling when I got home–and thrilled: I may have lost my little transistor radio, but I still had my bike. When I told my parents, though, I saw that there was something more at stake. They announced their decision at dinner the following evening, and though I couldn't have said exactly why at the time, I understood that by entering one of several daily carpools from our urban enclave of private streets out to Ladue, my parents would be, at least partially, admitting defeat. Each handled it differently. My father cleared the plates, then dried the table thoroughly with a dish towel and smoothed out the new school's application in front of me. My mother rolled her eyes and left the kitchen, the sink still piled high with dishes.

That was January. By the end of March I'd been accepted. I hated my new school. The kids were rich, preppy, already divided into well-defined cliques. Weekends, I plopped sullenly in front of the television or shot baskets by myself in our backyard. My father moved out the following fall, but my mother located the source of my misery and moral decay entirely in the world of suburban privilege that I carpooled to every morning. My mother, as I remember her from my adolescence, was an imposing figure–a thick and swarthy Jewish woman with pretty features and striking black hair and a proudly fiery temper. She was long on opinion and famously short on follow-through. It's easy to imagine what my parents saw in each other: with her passion, my dad's earnest attention to detail, and their shared liberal ideals, it must have seemed like there was nothing they couldn't accomplish. It is equally easy to imagine how sober and plodding he must have appeared to her when the world proved resistant. My mother railed against the open houses and teacher's conferences of my new school. "For Chrissakes, don't these women have anything better to do with their lives? Are your classmates' mothers all housewives?" What's more, she held it against my father; the fact that she could provide no better alternative for my education would not factor into her equation.

Work was what I needed, my mother declared. "Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty." In a typical burst of energy, she set out a schedule whereby I could work up to buying her car, an old Valiant, by my sixteenth birthday. And so, that winter, I started bussing tables on weekends at Bernard's Cafe on Euclid–private parties mostly, in order to keep me off the official pay roll until I was legal. Bernard was a short, fat, lascivious Frenchman, as charming in the front of the restaurant as he was dictatorial in the back, renowned for his loyalty and extravagance toward the people who made him money. He hired me as a favor to my mother and he paid me in cash depending on how much the restaurant took home and how he assessed my performance.

I came alive learning the different, intersecting worlds of that restaurant. The waiters were in their mid-twenties, mostly white, largely gay. They shuffled into work ragged and bleary eyed at 5:00 p.m., swirling enormous to-go cups of coffee and left after midnight primped and preened, smelling of after-shave and booze. They called each other "Mary" and they seemed to both exalt in and condescend to the terms of their employ. A surprising number of the late-night cafe-goers were waiters as well. They lingered at tables in "Siberia", the furthest cafe station, pulling chairs into the cafe's one aisle as their parties expanded. We changed their ashtrays religiously, served them shelf liquors for well prices, gave them free soups and coffees. They more than compensated with extravagant tips. These were high times in the early eighties in the Central West End–the closest thing St. Louis would ever have to a Greenwich Village–before AIDS cast a pall over us all, and Bernard's was one of the places to be.

There was another, equally vibrant, equally textured world behind the scenes, in what we called the "back" of the restaurant. It was a world made up of the line and prep cooks, the dishwashers and the other busboys, all of whom were black.

I did not fit neatly into any of these categories. I was white, clean-cut, probably visibly lonely, not particularly handsome, younger than everybody else. I was almost certainly headed for college, and after a few early scares, I was pretty sure that I was straight. (I was only fifteen and there was no shortage of men in those days who delighted in the idea of new initiate; looking back, it would have been far more insulting if they hadn't.) Bussing tables is a skill like any other, and some people are good at it and some aren't, and the easiest way to fit into a restaurant is to be good at your job. Nearly every shift I heard someone pronounce what I came to think of as the mantra of restaurant work: "What goes around comes around." It was an adage that could be applied to good deeds as well as bad, and in this cash world, it had literal significance. I learned to turn a table in one approach, to unobtrusively rush a table that had split a pasta and to milk a table that had ordered wine. And the good waiters noticed and requested me and tipped me more.

The cafe's tiny corner kitchen was manned every night but Sunday by a 6'6" black man named Reginald. He was deep-voiced, matter-of-fact, humorless when we got busy. He didn't have the flair of some of the dining-room cooks, but he manned that tiny corner grill with a fierce efficiency. If we wanted to "pretty up" our plates before we took them out, that was our job, Reginald said, pointing a greasy spatula at the dish towels and garnishes. Unlike all the other restaurant cooks I've ever known, Reginald never yelled. Nor did he take part in the back and forth shit-talking that was the norm in that back half of the restaurant. Most importantly to me, though, Reginald let it be known that he liked me–because unlike a lot of the "jaw-flappers", as he called them, who manned that kitchen, I did my job and when I talked about the Cardinals, I knew what I was talking about. It was one of my secret pleasures watching a new waiter mouth off to Reginald and then get slowly, incrementally broken in. Between the tiny prep area and the line, on the shelf below the microwave, was a beat-up silver radio tuned either to the Cardinals or to Magic 108, St. Louis's largest black radio station. If we weren't too busy, I stood on the one grimy step in front of the radio where I could keep an eye on the cafe floor through the window of the swinging door, and I talked to Reginald.

At the end of the night, the different worlds congregated at different places in the restaurant. Reginald broke down the cafe kitchen, carrying enormous piles of metal containers, pots and pans back to the dining room dishroom with his long loping strides. There was a different radio in this back area, further removed from the customers and turned up almost painfully loud in order to be heard over the hiss of the dishwasher. It was always tuned to Z100, St. Louis's other black radio station, which I can only describe by saying that it was even blacker than Magic 108. That room was loud, hot, moist, and even on the stickiest St. Louis summer nights, the open door to the alley was prime real estate. The bartender brought back a tray of Budweiser bottles and left them on top of the dish rack. No one had told me directly, but I knew that on the cafe or dining room floor where the waiters cavorted, there was no way for me, at fifteen, to drink. But back here, it went without saying that I had worked hard, so I got a beer. Breaking down the two cafe bus stations I found reasons to linger by the back dishroom with the black guys who loitered there–the dishwashers and cooks and other busboys. I learned to copy their accents and adopt their slang. They called me "B", curling their lips to give the syllable a hard guttural wallop: "Whassup B." They never called me Billy. Often they called me what they called themselves: "Dawg" or "Nigga".

By the time I turned sixteen, my mother had forgotten entirely about our deal for the car. She kept her promise, though, when I reminded her and she made a point of signing over the title for $500. It was a dented '75 four-door Valiant, mustard-colored, a clunky, indestructible tank of a car. It hissed and shook for thirty seconds after I turned it off and I had to add oil every time I bought gas. But nothing could have convinced me to trade that car–my car–for the new convertible rabbits that were showing up every week in my high school's parking lot as my classmates turned sixteen.

It wasn't unusual for my high school classmates to come into Bernard's with their families for Sunday brunch. These were kids who would barely recognize me in the hall, and they tried to maintain that same air of oblivious superiority. But I knew they watched me moving assuredly from table to table, handling cash and booze, disappearing behind the swinging door to the kitchen from where the bass was barely audible–all while they sat in their Sunday best between Mommy and Daddy. We still might not talk, but I could feel the difference when I passed them in the halls on Monday.