The ‘80’s in the ‘80’s

N. West Moss

The Museum Cafe

Word Count 1266

In 1986, I was renting a studio apartment right across the street from The Dakota on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The building was named the Oliver Cromwell, a fancy place where Sigourney Weaver also lived in an apartment probably many times the size of my one room. But like New York City then and now, fancy and barbarous butted up against one another. One rainy midnight after a shift at the restaurant, I found our doorman in his fancy doorman attire, using an improvised spear to try to stab a rat that was circling the garbage bags on the stoop. 

I was a waitress at The Museum Café, a nice but nondescript restaurant on Columbus Avenue (a new hotspot then) across from the Museum of Natural History. Every day I walked past the rough brown stones that made up the Columbus Avenue side of the museum and every day I dreamt of living, not in my one-room studio, but in one of the museum’s turrets where Margaret Mead had supposedly been given an apartment and office decades earlier. 

I was twenty-two that year, and I wasn’t really anything yet but hormones and forward momentum. I had dropped out of college and gone off to St. Croix for a year. Now I was back and moving up the ladder in the restaurant world, beginning with this crappy place on Columbus where I was making good money. It was great being young in New York City with cash in my pocket, and working in a restaurant meant that I had a community of friends and casual romances in the waiters and bartenders who were my coworkers.  I remember a waitress of about forty staring at my face during a brunch shift saying, “Your skin is still so young,” and not knowing what she meant, and not imagining I would ever be forty. 

1986 was the year of two big New York events. The first was the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, a weekend-long extravaganza that took place way downtown, but we could stand out on Columbus and watch the fireworks nonetheless. We all loved the Statue of Liberty, and years later, when I was in New York City on 9/11, I was sure that the terrorists would drive a plane into her, because of how much she meant to me, to all of us. If they wanted to hurt New Yorkers, I thought, that was how one might do it. 

The other big event of the summer and fall that year was the lead-up to the Mets winning the World Series. I didn’t watch sports, didn’t know a thing about them, but the crew of customers who hung out at the bar of the Museum Café cared very much, as did some of my fellow waiters, and it seemed like the television over the bar was set that summer to a permanently playing baseball game, the enduring hope of the underdog pervading the entire city. 

I got held up at knife point at the restaurant one night that summer. It was busy, there was a wait-list and a crowd by the door. A  man, for no reason that I can recall, came up behind me and held a knife to my throat. I had been chewing Trident Blue (one of those dumb things that I felt was a kind of signature of mine at the time) which literally turned to sand in my mouth because of the flood of adrenaline that my body released. Later, I found his face in the voluminous books of mug shots at the precinct around the corner. The cops asked me over and over if I was sure it was him, and I said that I was. One of the cops was a regular at the bar and reported to me later that they’d caught him, and that I had been right. My mugger had escaped from Bellevue the day he’d held me up. 

There was a man named Ted who lived in the neighborhood and came in every night after work and sat at the bar. He was old, although probably younger than I am now, with a craggy face and white hair. I don’t know what he did for a living, but he looked like he was a fisherman or an elevator repair guy. He wasn’t fancy and didn’t have airs. He sat in the same spot at the bar every night, his baseball cap on, and drank between one and three Heinekens. Ted was friendly enough, without being needy, and when the dinner shift was in full swing, he was our friend. But as soon as it was time for us to shoo customers out the door, we’d turn the lights up so the place would look grungy and uninviting again, and we’d stop answering his questions with long answers. We’d run here and there, doing our cash reports, filling up the salt and pepper shakers for the morning crew, and making our plans to go somewhere for a drink after work, or to climb into bed with a friend, or just to make some middle-of-the-night Jiffy Pop and watch reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show until we got sleepy. 

The Mets won the World Series that year, and many years later I married a man who likes the Red Sox. While Red Sox fans and Mets fans share a dislike of the Yankees, that 1986 World Series had the Mets defeating the Red Sox, so my husband and I have discussed that summer many times, and marveled at how we viewed those games so differently and still ended up with one another.  

The Statue of Liberty still stands in the harbor, enormously vulnerable and defiant at the same time. The last time I saw her was years after 9/11 when I went to a memorial service out at Chelsea Piers, and there she was, the water of the Hudson River all dancing light around her feet. I hoped then (and still hope now) that she’d outlive every last person on the face of the earth.  

After a salmonella outbreak at the end of the summer of 1986, I was made an assistant manager of the restaurant, a job that was unremarkable and exhausting. I think it might have been the dead-end feeling of that job that made me decide to go back to college and leave the city behind. I opened up my own restaurant after college down in TriBeca, but that summer at the Museum Café -- well I think of that time fondly. It was a pause in the forward momentum of my life, a pause in which I lived a little bit, and enjoyed things like the World Series that, on my own, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to. I still think about Ted from time to time. I never knew him well, never learned his last name or where he lived exactly, but there’s something about the way these small acquaintances become threads in the fabric of our lives that I value. I knew this guy named Ted one summer. I held his seat at the bar for him. He was there when I was held up by knifepoint and my Trident Blue dissolved in my mouth from terror. That place is some other restaurant now, but I sometimes wish that I could sit at the end of that bar now with Ted, both of us the same age now, and watch a ball game with him. 

N. West has a memoir: Flesh and Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life out right now from Algonquin. In addition to her short story collection, she also has a middle grade novel forthcoming from Little, Brown.