Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [48]
“Te gustan los tacos?” George asks.
“Mucho,” Celikoski replies.
“Que tipo de tacos?”
“Pollo y carne.”
“Bueno,” George tells Celikoski.
Another customer, Manuel Rodas, also from Guatemala, is at the other end of the counter. He’s listening in on the conversation. He tells me that not long ago, he’d arrived one morning after a few days of steady work, and ordered breakfast. He then realized he’d left his wallet at home. Celikoski told him not to worry. He could pay the next day, which he did. Celikoski interrupts. He thanks Rodas for recently fixing the store’s toilet handle, which had broken from so much usage. “He tried to pay me but I said no,” Rodas tells me. “So he gave me a free meal.”
A white man in a leather jacket walks into GT’s, seeking workers. He sits down at a booth and is quickly surrounded by ten men. He’s looking for someone with a truck, and so the men call out to George, who owns a small battered pickup. George is gone before I can get his last name.
I return a week later, on the Martin Luther King holiday. Celikoski had told me that a group of community organizers planned to hold a press conference at the diner to draw attention to the day laborers’ frustration at not having a permanent site. “You agreed to let them hold the press conference at your diner?” I had asked, somewhat incredulous given his previous rant. He shrugged. “It’s a slow day for business anyway,” he said. When I arrive, the place is packed, maybe thirty people, most of them simply milling around. As people order cups of coffee or hot chocolate, it becomes clear that Celikoski has no intention of taking their money. When he sees there are some children at the rally, he asks one parent how many of them there are. The father looks perplexed. He counts on his fingers. “Eight,” he says.
“I make eight egg sandwiches for them,” Celikoski insists. “On the house.”
At one point, I comment to Celikoski’s lone employee, a newly arrived young Albanian, that he’s going to give away the restaurant. The young man, as if to mimic his employer, shrugs. “He’s the boss,” he says. Celikoski later tells me that he doesn’t expect to turn a profit until the warm months when the business picks up and the day laborers find construction work and so are gone by early morning.
The next day, Celikoski is grumbling again. “Let me tell you something,” he says. “If America has a job for everybody, and these fifty, sixty people don’t, maybe they are lazy, maybe they don’t want to work. When I come to this country I find a job right away.” He then shows me a letter he’d received earlier that day from “concerned residents” (there were no names attached) asking shop owners in the mall to post NO TRESPASSING signs, and to file complaints with the police about the day laborers loitering in the strip mall’s parking lot. “Will you?” I ask Celikoski. He shakes his head. “I feel sorry,” he tells me. “Some of them are good.” He says that as a child in Albania he learned from his parents something called besa-bes, which, he tells me, means if someone comes to your home, you help them. “Winter,” he says, “it’s tough for everybody.”
Isn’t That the Corniche?
This is a short and yet emblematic tale about Chicago. At its center is a man who was so in love with his city’s architecture that he decided to find a way to have it captured on film for posterity. In the course of one year, he managed to accumulate more than half a million photographs, but in the end, few of them were of buildings, and even fewer have remained on display in the city itself, instead ending up in the unlikeliest places.
In 1963 Gary Comer,