Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [46]
Albany Park is also a place where America is celebrated, often in a rather self-conscious manner. Each Thanksgiving, Esche sets up a full turkey dinner in his backyard, as an offering to Abraham Lincoln. “In our culture,” Esche tells me, “you were brought up to pay respect to the king, so here we pay respect to Lincoln. He’s like one of our kings in Thailand who freed the slaves, King Rama V.” (In his restaurant, he displays a bust of Lincoln and a poster-size photo of this turn-of-the-century monarch.) Also, each spring Esche and his family—his wife, his wife’s sister, and his three children—drive four hours to Springfield to visit Lincoln’s tomb, where they kneel and offer thanks for what they have.
Down the street from Esche’s restaurant is Mataam Al-Mataam, which is Arabic for “Restaurant–Restaurant.” Open twenty-four hours, it’s owned by Kamel Botres, who emigrated from Iraq in 1979. Botres, who is Catholic, had worked as a clerk for a private oil company in his homeland. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and then again when Saddam Hussein was captured, local television reporters descended on Mataam Al-Mataam, seeking reactions to what had just occurred halfway around the globe. In the case of Saddam’s capture, many of the customers—they come from throughout the Middle East and North Africa (though the young waitresses are from Venezuela, Romania, and Pakistan)—told reporters that they didn’t believe it was actually him. And even those, like Botres, who didn’t have any doubts that the United States had the right man were subdued. “People felt a little sorry. It was their president. You’d feel that way if it was your president,” Botres said. “There was nothing to celebrate.” He smiles as he tells me this. “I am an American in my heart,” he told me. “I can think how I want.”
I mention all this by way of introduction, to Ramazan Celikoski, the owner of GT’s, a diner located half a mile west of Mataam Al-Mataam and the Thai Little Home Café, just down the street from the Bohemian National Cemetery, where Mayor Cermak is buried. GT’s is a rather compact place—eight stools at the counter and five booths along the wall—and is situated at the end of a small strip mall, which also houses a Laundromat, a liquor store, and a pizza parlor. In the diner’s plate-glass windows hang five signs, all in different fonts and colors, one of them handwritten, each at a different angle. BREAKFAST one advertises. 3 EGGS, HASH BROWNS AND TOAST. $2.75.
Celikoski (pronounced Chelikoski) was twenty years old in 1982 when he left Albania for the United States. His father, who had had a sheep farm in Albania and had fled after his own father, an anti-Communist, had mysteriously disappeared, had preceded Ramazan by twelve years and was working as a cook in a downtown restaurant when Celikoski arrived. For a year, the two shared a room in a hotel, and then Ramazan found an apartment in Albany Park. Like his father, he worked in a series of eating establishments, as a busboy at a fancy downtown restaurant and as a cook at the popular coffee shop Lou Mitchell’s. It was at his first job that coworkers began calling him John, which is what he goes by today. In the summer of 2003, he purchased GT’s (truthfully, all he had to do was pick up the two-thousand-dollar-a-month lease) from a hot-tempered man, who also happened to be Albanian; while the previous owner had been losing money, Celikoski thought with his more easygoing nature he could turn it around. Though he did break even in his fourth month, he has yet to make a profit, in part because here, in this out-of-the-way strip mall, Celikoski has, grousing along the way, unintentionally transformed GT’s into the equivalent of a domestic nongovernmental organization—an NGO.
Celikoski, who’s forty-two and of medium build, has deep-set eyes, dark, thick eyebrows, and a hawklike nose, all of which might conspire to give him a look of intensity were it not for his ever-present crooked grin, which seems to say, “What are you