Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,67

Kahlua and so many empty Budweiser cans. They are stealing your liquor and drinking it out back.” At this, I actually scraped my chair back several inches from the table, which maybe he perceived as my shock at the profoundly upsetting nature of the news he had dutifully disclosed to me. But Prune didn’t yet have a liquor license, and wouldn’t get one for six more months, and when we did get one finally I wouldn’t be stocking Budweiser in a can or Kahlua either, so the sudden backing up of the chair was more about concern for my own safety when I realized I was alone in my restaurant sitting across the table from this man who had just introduced himself as one of my landlords for the next twenty years, or however long my lease was.

The next time I saw Arlindo was on the sidewalk, in front of the restaurant again, this time in a muscle tee and with his head wrapped in a big bandage like when you dress up for Halloween as a hospital patient and wrap toilet paper around your head a few times. He had just returned from the emergency room to get some stitches because that day, while painting his apartment, he climbed up the ladder to paint the ceiling but had misjudged how far he was from the ceiling fan and got brained by one of the blades, stopping it dead in its tracks with his own head.

The co-op lets him plant flowers out front and out back of the building and pick out the color of paint for the door trim and other “responsibilities” and they give him the title of something like vice-maintenance manager, which makes him, in fact, an officer of the building. The only weird thing about the title is that it is not, we’ve discovered, an act of charity on the part of the co-op; they are in earnest with this assistant to the vice-maintenance manager office, which I guess, says all it needs to about the business upstairs.

We’ve been tenants in the building here longer than the past two co-op “presidents.” They’ve been very sincere, earnest people but I don’t think they have been particularly qualified for their endeavors. There was one president, a sort of self-styled “ambassador,” a guy who seemed to feel his diplomacy skills were such that he could broker peace between nations. He used to walk into Prune in the middle of the crush of Sunday brunch somehow genuinely expecting to take care of a little co-op business—an electric bill, a conversation about the boiler—and stand there stupidly in the middle of the fray, expectantly.

Sunday brunch is like the Indy 500 of services at Prune. There is a roaring thunderous stampede every forty minutes as hordes of hungry, angry, mag-wheeled, tricked-out customers line up at the door, scrape the chairs back, take their seats, blow through their steak and eggs. The line is two-full seatings long at nine-thirty even though we don’t open the doors until ten. They are waiting for the go flag. Some have physically harmed the hostess as they sprint to get a table. I once worked the host shift on a Sunday brunch at thirty-eight weeks pregnant—and even my huge belly, my chronic shortness of breath, and my clear proprietary aura (you can just tell when I am in the room that I am not an employee; I exude ownership) even that did not stop the stampede that is Sunday brunch.

We do a little over two hundred covers on a Sunday in five hours with only thirty seats, if that tells you anything. We hardly have the space on the tiny dining room floor to accommodate the crush of bodies, the trays full of Bloody Marys and beer backs going to every table, the large plates of eggs, potatoes, toast, and bacon sailing through the room—everything at brunch goes on a large and heavy plate to accommodate all the things a brunch special requires: fat, protein, starch, double starch. You can’t fit eggs Benedict with a potato roesti and a side of coiled lamb sausage on a small delicate plate. The staff are like professional drivers, taking the turns on two wheels, screeching around the room getting the tables turned, the bloodies shaken, the eggs delivered, and then the bus tubs hauled back to the kitchen. The hosts program loud, rocking music to keep the pace what it needs to be, music that is otherwise forbidden at dinner