The fog is rolling in, the tide is high

In high school, we often occasioned our local diner, the Baldwin Coach Diner (colloquially the “Roach”). We’d go in large hordes, massive scores-deep gangs straggling in piled-up cars down the several walkable blocks from the school to the diner, after having rehearsed for something or other.

There were the same dilapidated faces on the waitstaff year after year after year. One particularly enticing waiter was a chubby middle-aged British fellow, heavy accent, matted blond hair. To perhaps an even greater extent than the the extent to which no one really should be working at a diner for years and years and years, this British guy really had no business at this sleepy mediocre Long Island diner.

Anyway, I’m already running away from the point. The point is that we tortured this man, due in no small part I think to his obviously imperial lineage. One day I was exploring the dessert options on the menu and had something like the following exchange:

ME: What’s in a ‘Napoleon’?

HE: [in his constant British accent] …a little bit of phyllo dough, a little bit of custard, a little bit of phyllo dough, custard [gesticulating the layers with two fingers on one hand] …

ME: Okay thanks, I’ll have a grilled cheese [or something like that].

Oh, the endless wit! Follies of youth! How we laughed and laughed at my table in a nefarious drove of five hundred thousand (give or take) pre- post- and currently pubescent high school music and theater nerds.

And so we kept this sad practice up for literally YEARS with this poor, poor motherfucker. It didn’t matter if we were at the diner in a swath—our characteristic massive band of four hundred rejects from a Clockwork Orange reenactment—or in smaller more intimate groups. We asked this man “What’s in a 'Napoleon’?” and let him give his sad humdrum answer before ordering some more savory cheese-based item. This went on with or without me, eventually, and as a result of members of the populace, with their disparate amounts of mettle, each trying their hand at asking this man about the obscure dessert, a few Napoleons even got ordered (they’re delicious).

Once, while I was away from the diner, I received a distressing call from my buddy Brad that this jig had all gone horribly wrong. He had forcibly cast our friend Claudette in the morally questionable role of Napoleonic Inquisitor, and on the phone I am told about a conversation that went, if memory serves, something not unlike this:

CLAUDETTE: What’s in a 'Napoleon’?

HE: Is this some kind of bloody fucking running joke? All of you come in here and bloody ask me what’s in a bloody Napoleon?

CLAUDETTE: [looking I imagine like a wounded deer]

HE: [with some reluctance, then gesticulating still] …little bit of phyllo dough, little bit of custard.

This had to be quite seriously 13 years ago.

I went back to the Baldwin Coach diner two nights ago, expecting the place to be full of new staffers peaceably unfamiliar with my antic-laden past and unfortunate history inside the place. Such an expectation was naturally ill-founded, and of course the same fucking British motherfucker is there gliding about on a frame much more svelte than it was when we left him to his own devices the odd decade and a half ago, or whatever.

I’m pretty sure he remembers me, but it’s unclear if he remembers that he was a mere prop in the twisted game of our adolescence. As it comes time to order, we engage in the following interaction:

ME: I’ll have a cup of coffee… and a Napoleon. [staring at him]

HE: [slightly nods, scribbles down the order, leaves]

I am chastised somewhat by my droog Joey for the vicelike pressure I exerted in my deadset stare at the waiter, waiting for his reaction. He brings me a Napoleon that is clearly two Napoleons uncut, a huge monstrous pastry that would be insane for anyone to try and eat in one sitting.

Then, as the meal is concluding, the waiter comes back and starts to talk in hurried Limey fits about how he “really wants to tell me about something” seeing as he’s “known me since I was 11.”

He then talks with me for about 15 minutes… about the Holocaust.

It’s all predicated on him trying to get me to read a Philip K. Dick novella called “The Man in the High Castle,” an extrapolation with Hitler in power in the eastern half of the American continent, I think. We exchange thoughts on Eichmann and his grisly fate. He cultivates a great interest in Heydrich, he explains, including a cheery note that “we killed him,” meaning the RAF or whatever. We trade pieces of commendation about the HBO film Conspiracy in which Heydrich is portrayed masterfully by Kenneth Branagh. I tell him of Lanzmann's Shoah, of which he had apparently not heard. We exchange philosophical glosses on the import of the Holocaust. (ME: “It was really the first modern thing to ever happen.” HE: “No, I think that’s precisely right.”) He scribbles down on his server’s pad the title of the Dick book and one other literature recommendation—a play written by a Jew (“only a Jew could get away with this,” he says) in which Eichmann is the central character; this brings the total number of books this man has ever recommended me or anyone I’ve ever known in my life to 2.

After he left, having almost entirely ignored the two friends I was dining with for the lengthy duration of our back-and-forth, Joey said something to me that seemed right, about how this British diner waiter and I both clearly remember each other well from 13 years ago, but how he thinks of me fondly and I look at him with worry and guilt for a long-running gag that by all accounts this man has no weighty recollection of whatsoever, or if he does it has at least been worked in an overall conception of me that is so much larger than the bloody fucking running joke that damn near defined our interactions with this person for so long.

On our way out the diner I wait for him to get done with another table, get him close to me, look him in the eye, and interact with him thusly:

ME: I know we’ve been really hard on you over the years.

HE: No, you haven’t.

@crxmes

Since it’s Black History Month, I’m making sure you folks know about Mike Pondsmith.

Mike designed, amongst other things, Cyberpunk 2020 and its wonderful spin-off Cybergeneration. He designed the critically-acclaimed Castle Falkenstein. A black man kicked off interest in two incredibly white-dominated genres in a white-dominated hobby is a remarkable achievement.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past