Back
then, finishing up your shift didn’t mean the night was over, its was just the next phase.
It usually meant we were just heading to another restaurant, another bar, another neighborhood.
We’d find whatever bar was still open, or where we knew some friends would be, or we knew who was behind the bar, or where we knew there wouldn’t be mobs of people and we could drink, carry on and do whatever sorts of substances that were on our menu that night. We’d order a couple of beers, tear apart the servers we worked with just an hour before, the pain in the ass table we had. We decompressed while actually revving right back up.
By the time we finally headed home it was four, sometimes five in the morning. We were young, broke, tired, and somehow convinced that was exactly how life was supposed to work, and we were happy. We were killing it. We were proud, we worked hard and we were good at what we did.
I was living on the corner of Houston and Mott Street then, downtown around the corner from CBGB. I was cooking in one of the hottest places in New York City at that moment. I was cooking for everyone who was anyone in the city and I honestly thought I was untouchable.
One morning the city reminded me I wasn’t.
I came up the stairs from my downtown 6 train at Bleecker Street.
It had been another long night out…working..playing and heading home for rest.
Before I even knew someone was there—
Boom.
One punch.
Fuck.
Next thing I remember, I’m sitting on the subway steps, no one in sight, looking up at two guys. One had a knife. The other was already emptying my pockets.
I reached under my chin.
Blood.
Way more blood than I woul have expected from one punch. It was running down my neck and soaking my shirt.
They took my cash, my wallet, my chain.
Then they took my keys.
The money was gone. Fine, didn’t have much anyway.
The chain, the wallet? Whatever, I can replace them.
But my apartment was right across the street.
I could see the front door.
And they took my fucking keys.
The two guys didn’t run. They just walked away like they’d finished another day’s work.
I crossed the street with one hand and my shirt sleeve under my chin and stood in the lobby of my building.
Here’s the ridiculous part.
I didn’t know a single neighbor.
Restaurant hours don’t exactly make you the friendliest or most visible neighbor in an apartment building. I left when everyone else was home eating breakfast, or they were at work and I got back when they were sound asleep, or just getting up for work.
In most apartment building there is a set of buzzers in the lobby so someone in the apartments can buzz you through the front doors in the lobby and let in guests or deliveries.
Having no keys to get beyond the lobby, I started buzzing apartments.
Every one of them.
Eventually somebody buzzed me in.
I still don’t know who.
If you’re somehow reading this...
Thanks…. I think.
I was inside.
Then realized, without keys I still couldn’t get into my apartment.
I stood there for a minute.
It’s five o’clock in the fucking morning, in an area that doesn’t wake up for a while still.
What the fuck do I do now. I am bleeding pretty heavy from my chin, I am outside my apartment that I know is locked, bolted and double locked. My head is still buzzing a bit from the nights festivities (though a good sock to the chin can bring you back pretty quick).
My brilliant plan was to go to the roof, climb down the outside of the building and crawl through my own window.
Sounded reasonable at five in the morning.
I opened the roof door.
The alarm cracks through the quiet like a fucking banshee.
I remember thinking, “Fuck it, what am i gonna do now?”
So I climbed out onto the fire escape, making my way carefully down.
Halfway down a huge fucking dog jumps against a window I was passing—barking and growling, it would have torn me to shreds if it could get out the window. I am pretty sure I shit my pants, which would have just been par for that night, and was about 1.2 seconds from jumping off the fire escape four stories down.
I got myself together and I keep making my way down.
(How no one in building didn’t pull out a gun and just shoot me is beyond me, I would have).
I finally get to my window on the second floor.
Fuck, I had installed gates in my windows for just this occasion.
I was able to slide the window up, but the gates…the fucking gates.
Well, I gave them a good push, and boom, they were down. (I cook, I am not a home security installer!)
I climbed inside, my pullout bed was still open from that morning, and it opened to about two feet from the window. I sit on the end of the bed holding my chin and figured the night’s stupidity was finally over, I could breathe, clean up this gash under my chin and forget this happened, or at least until I had to get up for work again.
It wasn’t.
A minute later the police were right there, guns drawn, at my window and climbing in.
The roof alarm had brought them.
Or a neighbor calling, I never did find out what exactly happened.
They expected to find a burglar, or some kind of fucking maniac.
Instead they found me, a bleeding line cook trying to explain why he’d climbed down the outside of his own apartment building.
They took a look around, asked a few questions.
And just like that, they left.
I cleaned myself up, and called it a day.
Then I went to work.
Because that’s what you did.
Looking back now, the mugging isn’t what stays with me.
What stays with me is how this was just normal.
Nobody talked about burnout.
Nobody talked about “mental health days”
Nobody talked about slowing down.
You worked.
You drank. You abused yourself.
You slept when you could.
And you did it again.
If something happened along the way, you patched yourself up and came back for the next shift.
I’m not nostalgic for getting punched in the face.
I’m not nostalgic for bleeding on a subway staircase.
But I do miss that stubborn kid.
Though I guess he is still in me somewhere.
He never thought about quitting.
He never said “enough”, or tapped out.
No matter what happened the night before, he showed up for his next shift, tied on an apron, and got back on the line.
Maybe that’s why I still tell this story.
Not because I got mugged.
Because somewhere in that mess is the person who made me who I am.
Somewhere in that mess is the story of my life..
The good and the bad.
The successes and the failures.
And though maybe I am not proud of all of these stories, I have accepted them.
They made me who I am, and that I am proud of.
