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By Root 677 0

wackier and wackier. When we finally opened, we were packed from the first minute. Orders flooded in over the phone and at the counter and at the tables. We were unprepared and understaffed, so the Italian contingent - including various visiting dignitaries, all with oddly anglicized names ('This is Mr Dee, Tony, and meet a friend, Mr Brown . . . This is Mr Lang'), all of them overweight, cigar-chomping middle-aged guys with bodyguards and 10,000-dollar watches - pitched in to help out with deliveries and at the counter. Guys I'd read about later in the papers as running construction in the outer boroughs, purported killers, made men, who lived in concrete piles on Staten Island and Long Beach and security-fenced estates in Jersey, carried brown paper bags of chicken sandwiches up three flights of stairs to Greenwich Village walk-up apartments to make deliveries; they slathered mayo and avocado slices on pita bread behind the counter, and bussed tables in the dining room. I have to say I liked them for that.

But when my boss, inexplicably, showed up one day and told me to fire everyone with a tattoo on my staff, I was faced with a dilemma. Every one of my cooks was festooned with prison tats: screaming skulls, Jesus on hypodermic crosses, bound in barbed wire, gang tats, flaming dice, swastikas, SS flashes, Born to Lose, Born Dead, Born to Raise Hell, Love Hate, Mom, portraits of the Madonna, wives, girlfriends, Ozzy Osbourne. I tried to put him off, explaining that we couldn't do without these guys, that the hardest-working, most indispensable guy we had - the guy who right now was loading trash cans with hundreds of marinating chicken parts in the cramped, stifling unrefrigerated cellar on his twenty-second consecutive double shift - he was a goddamn Sistine Chapel of skin art. And where am I going to find a convict without a tattoo? The Watergate burglars weren't, to my knowledge, available.

Things only got worse. He came in the next day, obsessing about gold chains and jewelry. My grill man had the usual ghetto adornments of the day. 'Where do you think that eggplantgot all that gold?!' he raved, spraying food and saliva as he talked. 'Selling drugs. That shit is poison! Mugging old ladies! I don't want that in my restaurant! Get him out!'

This was clearly impossible, and I sought counsel with one of the silent partners who, as my boss had become increasingly distracted and unpredictable, had grown noticeably less silent. He and his associates had started to attend management meetings.'You hear what he wants me to do?' I asked. The man just nodded and rolled his eyes, sympathetically, I thought.

'Do nothing', he said, and then, with truly dangerous intonation,added, 'Aspeta,' meaning 'Wait' in Italian.

I didn't like the sound of that at all. He smiled at me, and I couldn't help picturing my boss, slumped over a dashboard after one of those meetings in a car they were all so fond of. When things came to a head a few days later, my boss openly screaming in the middle of a crowded dining room that he wanted all the tattooed guys and gold chain-wearers 'Out! Now!' I told him to pay me what he owed - I was leaving for good. He refused. The silent partner came over, peeled off my pay and an extra hundred from a fat roll in his suit pocket, and gave me a warm smile as he bade me goodbye.

I don't know what happened to Billy's. It certainly never developed into a worldwide chain as my crazed boss had envisioned - or even a second store. The next time I was in the neighborhood, a picture framer occupied the space where the restaurant had been. What happened to the old man and his dreams of a poultry empire for his son? I can only guess.

I worked at a Mexican restaurant on upper Second Avenue for a while, one of those places on the frat-boy strip with the obligatory margarita snocone machine grinding away all night and vomit running ankle-deep in the gutters outside. The place was owned by a very aggressive rat population, fattened up and emboldened by the easily obtained stacks of avocados left to ripen outside the walk-in