Oh What A Night
God bless Constantine “Taki” Iatropoulos. He was a mad bastard, but we loved him.
Taki had run a lot of eating establishments in his life, from a high-end establishment in New York that used to have people like Zoot Sims and Dean Martin as regular guests, to a Weenie Wagon on the streets of Champaign, Illinois.
Sometimes Sara and I bought hot dogs and polish sausages from him when we walked past, never suspecting that I would spend two and a half insane years working for him.
He opened his new restaurant in a “cursed” space. In six years, it had seen five restaurants come and go, sometimes for good reason. That didn’t deter Taki, though. Hanging the battered and worn painting that once belonged to Billie Holliday on his wall, hanging a whole bulb of garlic over one of the doorways (“it keeps away the evil eye”), and establishing that the whole joint was a smoking section, he set out to sell saganaki and 50 kinds of hamburgers, souvlaki and lemonade shake-ups, gyros and chocolate cake.
After about 3 years and some change, a crazy life and two or three packs a day caught up with him. Taki got cancer that spread quickly, through his kidneys and liver. If his doctor hadn’t been negligent, maybe they would have caught it sooner, but maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. After all, he eschewed all treatment, demanding that he’d rather die of cancer than spend years alive but suffering through chemotherapy and radiation on something that couldn’t be cured.
Saturday nights sucked. Mykonos was on the University of Illinois campus, and was open until 2am or until we stopped getting post-bar college student customers. There were a lot of them, and they were all drunk. Sometimes we had to point them to the side door that led outside, telling them that throwing up in the restaurant cost the same as a burger and fries.
We had enough seating for about 32 people, plus about three or four at the counter, and this night we were completely full. The air smelled like grease, cigarettes, and cheap beer, and we had people happily standing up while they waited to get their orders. Whatever I can say about Mykonos, that it had bad food is not one of them, even as divey as it was. Only using ground sirloin in our burgers and adding a “secret ingredient” were only two of our tricks.
Anyway, I was relatively lucky that night, because I wasn’t working with the waiter who smoked crack, and the cook who downed a pint of gin every night hadn’t had time to replenish his buzz in hours. Please understand that we usually ran the place with one cook and one waiter. Sure, sometimes two waiters, sometimes two cooks, but very rarely at the same time. It sucked extra that night, because Taki was off sleeping in his apartment a few blocks away.
I was running around like a fucking madman, refilling sodas, getting baklava, carrying five of those red plastic baskets at once, turning down the lights to fire up some saganaki, totaling up orders by hand because our register sucked. The usual.
One of the things that made all of this bearable is that we were allowed to joke with the customers, even do things that bordered on insulting-but only if they were complete asses. If nothing else, customers loved that.
If a guy ordered first, I’d offer that I was going to let the lady order first, but that’s fine, go ahead.
“Do I get a discount if I actually eat the burger that has Greek caviar on it?” a guy would ask. “Are you that big of a girl?” I’d reply.
On busy nights, when customers stared at their menus too long and finally asked what I recommended, I’d answer “Ordering,” and give ‘em a stare.
People compared our crew to the waiters at Ed Debevic’s in Chicago, a restaurant I only went to a few years after Mykonos closed.
So, back to batshit Saturday night. Sitting at the counter is Greg, one of the other waiters, off for the night and utterly hammered. One perk of Mykonos was that we could pretty much get free food whenever we wanted, so he was downing an extra-big hamburger and enough fries to choke a baby. Greg and I were getting along at this time, something that hadn’t happened at first. I remember that during his first month we almost got into two fist fights, but that eventually cooled off.
I’ve just finished taking an order back to the kitchen and have come back out to refill some sodas when a young lady walks over to the counter and politely asks me a question.
“Did those guys in the back corner pay?”
Fuck!
I get up on my knees on the counter and can see that there’s nothing on the table, my blue apron dangling across Greg’s basket of food.
“Oh, HELL NO!” I shout. “Greg!”
“Already on it!” he answers, grabbing the ticket book and pen. “GO!”
I tear out the side door and jump the steps down to the sidewalk. I see one bastard running north and one running south, both with almost a one block lead. No way am I catching them after 8 hours on my feet. Wait, I think. There were four of ‘em.
I round the building to the sloped parking lot, where one of them is doing a jaunty little stagger down the incline. I run up behind him and shout as loud as I can.
“HEY! You feel like paying for your food?"
He spins around, quickly throwing one of the wax Pepsi cups we use behind him, as though this ninja technique has ruined my chances at nailing him.
“What food? Who are you?” he asks, his eyes barely able to focus.
“Okay, nice one. You almost fooled me. Now come on.”
I reach for him and he pushes me back.
“Who are you?” he asks again, “What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, I said you were clever. Get back inside.”
He goes to push me again, so I grab his upper arms and press my thumbs under his biceps, holding his arms at his side. He starts to struggle, but every time he pushes against me, my thumb digs deeper into nerves. As I pull him back to the restaurant, with him dragging his feet the whole way, I feel something at the end of one of his jacket sleeves banging up against my leg. Did this bastard take something from the restaurant?.
This thought pisses me off even more, so I take him to the back of the building and, holding him with one hand, open the door. I shove him repeatedly in the back to get him to the interior door of the restaurant. He tries a last break down the hall, but I grab his jacket. I jerk open the door to the restaurant and give him an extra hard push inside.
The whole place goes quiet. They all know this is a weirdass place-I mean, the owner sometimes sneaks people Ouzo, and they shake the lemonade over your head-but this is totally bizarre.
“NOW!” I scream at the runaway, “You wanna pay for your tab, and cover your buddies’ food too?”
Faces light up as they realize what’s going on.
“Do not,” says Greg, breaking the silence by addressing the whole restaurant, “skip out on your check at Mykonos, my friends.”
And with that, the room erupts into laughter and applause. The perp’s face goes red as I grin and push him up to the counter. Again the thing in his sleeve bangs against my leg.
“And another thing,” I ask, pointing at it, “what the hell’s in your sleeve? Did you steal something from us, too?”
His face goes tight with anger as he lifts his arm and pulls back his sleeve.
To reveal his goddamned hook hand.
“That’s what it is, asshole! Way to be sensitive!"
Greg puts his hand on the guy’s shoulder and smiles.
“Dude,” he grins, “you just skipped out on over twenty bucks worth of food. You don’t get ‘sensitive’ from us.”
Another round of cheers from the other tables, and I find the ticket for Cap’n Hook’s table.
“I don’t have any cash,” he says, showing me his empty wallet.
“I see a credit card,” I answer.
The Cap’n realizes the damn fool mistake he’s just made and hands it over, not realizing the even bigger mistake he’s just made.
That’s right. Now I have his name.
It isn’t until I run the transaction through the machine that the adrenaline starts to wear off a bit, and I realize that the guy could’ve ripped me a new one with his hook at any time. The thought is not pleasant, so I adjust the total to include a twenty percent tip.
He signs the receipt with his only hand and says, “Can I go now?”
“Yes, Joe Smith, you can go now.”
He backs up when I address him by name, a look of terror on his face.
“Don’t worry. No police this time. I just added a healthy tip.”
He just stands there until Greg says, “Dude, go before we change our minds.”
Smith tries to do his best manly, drunken swagger to the door as the other patrons boo and throw things at him. He turns and flips us all off, but as the door closes, Greg shouts “Now do it with your other hand!”
I pull five bucks from the tip jar and pass it to Greg.
“Thanks for the help.”
“No problem. Shit, free food, free entertainment, and five bucks. I’m glad I stopped in tonight. Oh, and hey,” he smiles, “when you were running his card, he had his double hook thing open and was holding onto the counter with it. He could have fucked you up with that.”
“Don’t remind me, man.”
Next morning-yeah, I had to open the next day, 10:30 am-I unlock the door and Taki is giving me a funny look.
“Hey, my friend," he says in his broken English, “you tell me something, tell me what this sign means, okay?”
Above the wall behind the register, I’d taped a hand-scrawled sign that read:
JOE SMITH and his friends ran out on their tab
JOE SMITH ran the slowest
JOE SMITH paid with a credit card.
Don’t be a JOE SMITH
Love, the staff of Mykonos
“It’s a long story,” I tell him, and start counting the same drawer of cash I’d closed out the night before.
benjamin
Taki had run a lot of eating establishments in his life, from a high-end establishment in New York that used to have people like Zoot Sims and Dean Martin as regular guests, to a Weenie Wagon on the streets of Champaign, Illinois.
Sometimes Sara and I bought hot dogs and polish sausages from him when we walked past, never suspecting that I would spend two and a half insane years working for him.
He opened his new restaurant in a “cursed” space. In six years, it had seen five restaurants come and go, sometimes for good reason. That didn’t deter Taki, though. Hanging the battered and worn painting that once belonged to Billie Holliday on his wall, hanging a whole bulb of garlic over one of the doorways (“it keeps away the evil eye”), and establishing that the whole joint was a smoking section, he set out to sell saganaki and 50 kinds of hamburgers, souvlaki and lemonade shake-ups, gyros and chocolate cake.
After about 3 years and some change, a crazy life and two or three packs a day caught up with him. Taki got cancer that spread quickly, through his kidneys and liver. If his doctor hadn’t been negligent, maybe they would have caught it sooner, but maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. After all, he eschewed all treatment, demanding that he’d rather die of cancer than spend years alive but suffering through chemotherapy and radiation on something that couldn’t be cured.
Saturday nights sucked. Mykonos was on the University of Illinois campus, and was open until 2am or until we stopped getting post-bar college student customers. There were a lot of them, and they were all drunk. Sometimes we had to point them to the side door that led outside, telling them that throwing up in the restaurant cost the same as a burger and fries.
We had enough seating for about 32 people, plus about three or four at the counter, and this night we were completely full. The air smelled like grease, cigarettes, and cheap beer, and we had people happily standing up while they waited to get their orders. Whatever I can say about Mykonos, that it had bad food is not one of them, even as divey as it was. Only using ground sirloin in our burgers and adding a “secret ingredient” were only two of our tricks.
Anyway, I was relatively lucky that night, because I wasn’t working with the waiter who smoked crack, and the cook who downed a pint of gin every night hadn’t had time to replenish his buzz in hours. Please understand that we usually ran the place with one cook and one waiter. Sure, sometimes two waiters, sometimes two cooks, but very rarely at the same time. It sucked extra that night, because Taki was off sleeping in his apartment a few blocks away.
I was running around like a fucking madman, refilling sodas, getting baklava, carrying five of those red plastic baskets at once, turning down the lights to fire up some saganaki, totaling up orders by hand because our register sucked. The usual.
One of the things that made all of this bearable is that we were allowed to joke with the customers, even do things that bordered on insulting-but only if they were complete asses. If nothing else, customers loved that.
If a guy ordered first, I’d offer that I was going to let the lady order first, but that’s fine, go ahead.
“Do I get a discount if I actually eat the burger that has Greek caviar on it?” a guy would ask. “Are you that big of a girl?” I’d reply.
On busy nights, when customers stared at their menus too long and finally asked what I recommended, I’d answer “Ordering,” and give ‘em a stare.
People compared our crew to the waiters at Ed Debevic’s in Chicago, a restaurant I only went to a few years after Mykonos closed.
So, back to batshit Saturday night. Sitting at the counter is Greg, one of the other waiters, off for the night and utterly hammered. One perk of Mykonos was that we could pretty much get free food whenever we wanted, so he was downing an extra-big hamburger and enough fries to choke a baby. Greg and I were getting along at this time, something that hadn’t happened at first. I remember that during his first month we almost got into two fist fights, but that eventually cooled off.
I’ve just finished taking an order back to the kitchen and have come back out to refill some sodas when a young lady walks over to the counter and politely asks me a question.
“Did those guys in the back corner pay?”
Fuck!
I get up on my knees on the counter and can see that there’s nothing on the table, my blue apron dangling across Greg’s basket of food.
“Oh, HELL NO!” I shout. “Greg!”
“Already on it!” he answers, grabbing the ticket book and pen. “GO!”
I tear out the side door and jump the steps down to the sidewalk. I see one bastard running north and one running south, both with almost a one block lead. No way am I catching them after 8 hours on my feet. Wait, I think. There were four of ‘em.
I round the building to the sloped parking lot, where one of them is doing a jaunty little stagger down the incline. I run up behind him and shout as loud as I can.
“HEY! You feel like paying for your food?"
He spins around, quickly throwing one of the wax Pepsi cups we use behind him, as though this ninja technique has ruined my chances at nailing him.
“What food? Who are you?” he asks, his eyes barely able to focus.
“Okay, nice one. You almost fooled me. Now come on.”
I reach for him and he pushes me back.
“Who are you?” he asks again, “What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, I said you were clever. Get back inside.”
He goes to push me again, so I grab his upper arms and press my thumbs under his biceps, holding his arms at his side. He starts to struggle, but every time he pushes against me, my thumb digs deeper into nerves. As I pull him back to the restaurant, with him dragging his feet the whole way, I feel something at the end of one of his jacket sleeves banging up against my leg. Did this bastard take something from the restaurant?.
This thought pisses me off even more, so I take him to the back of the building and, holding him with one hand, open the door. I shove him repeatedly in the back to get him to the interior door of the restaurant. He tries a last break down the hall, but I grab his jacket. I jerk open the door to the restaurant and give him an extra hard push inside.
The whole place goes quiet. They all know this is a weirdass place-I mean, the owner sometimes sneaks people Ouzo, and they shake the lemonade over your head-but this is totally bizarre.
“NOW!” I scream at the runaway, “You wanna pay for your tab, and cover your buddies’ food too?”
Faces light up as they realize what’s going on.
“Do not,” says Greg, breaking the silence by addressing the whole restaurant, “skip out on your check at Mykonos, my friends.”
And with that, the room erupts into laughter and applause. The perp’s face goes red as I grin and push him up to the counter. Again the thing in his sleeve bangs against my leg.
“And another thing,” I ask, pointing at it, “what the hell’s in your sleeve? Did you steal something from us, too?”
His face goes tight with anger as he lifts his arm and pulls back his sleeve.
To reveal his goddamned hook hand.
“That’s what it is, asshole! Way to be sensitive!"
Greg puts his hand on the guy’s shoulder and smiles.
“Dude,” he grins, “you just skipped out on over twenty bucks worth of food. You don’t get ‘sensitive’ from us.”
Another round of cheers from the other tables, and I find the ticket for Cap’n Hook’s table.
“I don’t have any cash,” he says, showing me his empty wallet.
“I see a credit card,” I answer.
The Cap’n realizes the damn fool mistake he’s just made and hands it over, not realizing the even bigger mistake he’s just made.
That’s right. Now I have his name.
It isn’t until I run the transaction through the machine that the adrenaline starts to wear off a bit, and I realize that the guy could’ve ripped me a new one with his hook at any time. The thought is not pleasant, so I adjust the total to include a twenty percent tip.
He signs the receipt with his only hand and says, “Can I go now?”
“Yes, Joe Smith, you can go now.”
He backs up when I address him by name, a look of terror on his face.
“Don’t worry. No police this time. I just added a healthy tip.”
He just stands there until Greg says, “Dude, go before we change our minds.”
Smith tries to do his best manly, drunken swagger to the door as the other patrons boo and throw things at him. He turns and flips us all off, but as the door closes, Greg shouts “Now do it with your other hand!”
I pull five bucks from the tip jar and pass it to Greg.
“Thanks for the help.”
“No problem. Shit, free food, free entertainment, and five bucks. I’m glad I stopped in tonight. Oh, and hey,” he smiles, “when you were running his card, he had his double hook thing open and was holding onto the counter with it. He could have fucked you up with that.”
“Don’t remind me, man.”
Next morning-yeah, I had to open the next day, 10:30 am-I unlock the door and Taki is giving me a funny look.
“Hey, my friend," he says in his broken English, “you tell me something, tell me what this sign means, okay?”
Above the wall behind the register, I’d taped a hand-scrawled sign that read:
JOE SMITH and his friends ran out on their tab
JOE SMITH ran the slowest
JOE SMITH paid with a credit card.
Don’t be a JOE SMITH
Love, the staff of Mykonos
“It’s a long story,” I tell him, and start counting the same drawer of cash I’d closed out the night before.
benjamin