(Some strong language here)
The desk is thirty-three inches wide and seventy-two inches long. The desktop is two inches thick. Once there was a roll-top, which is missing, and the pigeonhole shelf across the back of the desk I removed to make room for my reference books. There are two pullout writing tables and seven drawers, the middle one of which I took out to make myself more comfortable when at my computer. On the desktop is a large oval piece of glass beneath which are photos of friends and family and some sayings by various writers. One of my favorites is this quote from French author Leon Bloy: “The only tragedy in life is not becoming a saint.” I happen to think life brings other tragedies, but if Bloy is correct, then I am living a life of tragedy.
The desk is thirty-three inches wide and seventy-two inches long. The desktop is two inches thick. Once there was a roll-top, which is missing, and the pigeonhole shelf across the back of the desk I removed to make room for my reference books. There are two pullout writing tables and seven drawers, the middle one of which I took out to make myself more comfortable when at my computer. On the desktop is a large oval piece of glass beneath which are photos of friends and family and some sayings by various writers. One of my favorites is this quote from French author Leon Bloy: “The only tragedy in life is not becoming a saint.” I happen to think life brings other tragedies, but if Bloy is correct, then I am living a life of tragedy.
Judging by its appearance, the desk has seen its own share of tragedies. I have owned it since 1982, and it was old even then. The veneered wood is rough and wrinkled, and darkened in places from spills and embedded dirt. The desk can be broken apart for the purposes of moving, but when the base didn’t fit through a door at the Palmer House, I had to saw it in half. A stack of six green and gold volumes of The World’s Great Events now supports those two amputated parts.
When I emigrated from the Palmer House to my first apartment in Montford, the living room was too small for this desk and I left it behind with the kitchen stove and dining room tables. Later, when I moved to the larger apartment on Cumberland, there was more room, and I returned to Waynesville to see if I could find my desk. Fortunately, the owner had kept it. He charged me a fifty dollar storage fee, a fee I resented a little as he was also a friend, but I was too happy to have my desk again to care very much.
My wife bought the desk as a gift for me in 1982 from a friend, John, who was a sculptor but who earned his living as a bartender. I came to know John when I joined him and the staff at the C&O, a five-star French restaurant located in an old railroad station in Charlottesville. The top floor of the restaurant offered seating for thirty, and there were two seatings every evening, one at 7:00 and one at 9:00. On the first floor were a bar and a kitchen so small that whenever one of the chefs, Stuart, who had briefly played basketball at the University of Virginia, would open the oven door and bend to look inside, the entire kitchen traffic would come to a halt.
Two men operated the C&O at that time. Phillip, a young attorney, kept the books, and Sandy, who owned the Daedalus Bookshop several blocks away, managed the staff and acted as maître de. Sandy was notorious for snagging women from their husbands and dates in the bar and for smoking pot, once exhaling and blowing an enormous cloud of reefer over some people he was greeting.
The staff was just as eccentric. Many wanted to be artists and writers, and I remember a fine poet named Jason and a cook named Steve, who painted in the style of Jackson Pollock. The bar served a variety of drinks, and the wine was top-drawer, but the only beer available was Heineken. In the kitchen the staff kept Heineken in a large, plastic, orange-colored pitcher, ostensibly for cooking but in reality for drinking. As long as we were working, we were allowed to take swigs from this pitcher. On the spice shelf there was a bottle of thyme. Beside it was a bottle labeled High Thyme, the pot Sandy smoked in the alleyway beside the restaurant.
In my lifetime I have worked some physically demanding jobs, but this was the toughest. I arrived at four in the afternoon, and if I took no breaks, I would finish around one in the morning. Some of my work included washing the kitchen’s pots and pans, prepping the Boston lettuce for the evening’s salads, and hauling out the garbage. By the time Kris would pick me up—she was working the evening shift at the university’s hospital—I would be sweating and stinking of food, grease, and wine.
Now, in addition to prepping salads and washing pots and pans, I was the kitchen’s ladder runner. This was my official title. I was hired as a ladder-runner and suspect this position is unique.
Here’s how it worked. The owners had cut a hole into the second floor that opened in a large closet next to the dining room. To place their customers’ orders with the chef, the waiters would come into the closet, shout “Ordering!” into the hole, and then throw down wadded up papers on which they had written their orders, which the ladder-runner would read aloud to the chef and then spike on a nail in the wall.
Ascending from the kitchen through this hole into the closet was a nine-foot ladder. To get the food from the kitchen to the dining area was the job of the ladder runner. I would run up the ladder holding hot plates and bowls and put them on the closet floor, where the waiters would scoop them up and run to the dining room. I ran up and down this ladder dozens of times every night.
Conflicts between the kitchen crew and the wait staff in any restaurant come with the territory. In this case, Stuart and one of the waiters, Peter, despised each other. When Peter would place his order, Stuart would frequently tell me, “Go tell that son of a bitch to get his fucking hors d’oeuvres orders down here before his fucking main dishes.” So I would trot up the ladder, poke my upper body through the hole, and say, “Peter, Stuart asked me to remind you to get your hors d’oeuvres orders down before the main dishes.” “I’m doing my fucking best,” Peter would snarl. “So tell that stupid bastard to go to hell.” And I would trot back down the ladder and say, “Stuart, Peter says he’ll try to do better.”
That was a job where I learned diplomacy. It’s also the place where I met John and eventually acquired my desk.
We’ll come back to John, but let me give a closing word on the desk. I have spent a good part of my life at this desk. Since living alone, I have eaten meals at this desk, viewed movies here on my computer, and with my feet propped on the desk fallen asleep either reading or watching some television sit-com. When the desk was still in John’s studio in Charlottesville, I even used it as a bed for napping.
But mostly what I do at this desk is write.
It’s the place where the words come to me.