Life can still be good in pockets. On Tuesday night, between a couple of client meetings in Manhattan, on a lark, I ascended the dingy stairs to the second-floor Frankie and Johnnies restaurant on 45th Street. I occasionally lament the loss of the William Kennedy, even Henry James, restaurants of old Albany, which I fondly and still vividly remember from my earliest adult dining days in the early ‘60s. All male staffs of gray, combovered waiters with white napkins draped over their arms, frequently used to wipe their perpetually running, geriatric eyes and red noses, created a gilded atmosphere of a time most imprinted on my sense of humanity.
We shouldn’t forget that the Big Apple still encompasses almost everything, when you live elsewhere and think something is lost. The hostesses of those nearly bygone days, too, left an imprint, which I could most fondly reminisce, but will refrain. She greeted me and I knew I was home, for a sweet hour.
My waiter asked if I were going to a show. “Good,” he said after my reply, “Then you can relax and enjoy; I will take it slow.” I ordered a glass of American white and American red and leaned back perusing the room. There were your bad people and rich people, which you would expect; only one blemish of a reminder that it was 2008 (I had to look at a Newspaper, I wasn’t sure). I don’t know what you call the genre, but you see it a lot. A young man of maybe 5 feet and 10 inches, thin, with a touch of spike to his gelled hair, jabbing at his fellow diners for emphasis of his scintillating conversation of, “He goes, I go, like, like,” etc., with the bitten-off end of his bread stick. He acts a little like Mark on ‘Ugly Betty’, but seems too disconnected to be anything, including gay. The same genre of the young man you see skipping off the curb after his light has turned red so that he can indifferently hold up the snarled flow of traffic for a couple of seconds more while he text messages or talks on his mobile phone.
Then, I threw all intelligence and decency to the wind and ordered two fillets, rare, with an African lobster tail. The young man’s distraction faded and for a few moments I was at peace in the last bastion.