#50 "A Question Isn't Answered" January 12, 2012

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Who knows how this one started?
Actually, I think I know. Tim and I were working together one night and once the rush and flow of customers had died down to a trickle of thirsty bar regulars, we sat down on Table 8 with a couple of dupe pads. This was one of them. It's the same old story. In fact, that is kind of how all of these drawings got their start. I mean, these drawings start at all kinds of different points within the restaurant; some at the bar, some in the kitchen, some at the waiter station, but their history starts at Table 8. When I first started working at the restaurant, I drew pictures on that table every night, only minus the dupe pads. Long before Tim had a job there, me and the other waiters and waitresses would sit down at Table 8 and drink a beer and order some food. Back then, the kitchen would actually cook us dinner at about 11 o'clock. We would all sit down and split some escargot or a bowl of mussels, and eat and drink until all of the customers were gone and it was time for us to clean up and go home. In those days though, we didn't even bus the table, but would leave all of our empty glasses for the poor fool who was working the lunch shift the following day. Can you believe that? It's incredible to even think about it. And these were the days when you could still smoke in the restaurants in New York, so you know there were cigarette butts in everything. The smell alone must have been something else the next day. But that kind of thing was not only allowed, it was accepted by the people who had to clean it up! Granted, I was that person every once and a while, as I worked lunch a lot more back in those days when I was just a youngster and low on the totem pole. It wasn't until years later that the boss cracked down on us ordering food late night and making a mess on Table 8 that we didn't clean up. If we made a mess now, it was to be cleaned up before we left. That's only fair when you think about it. In fact, the old way seems incredibly disrespectful to whoever had to work the next day. But, "that was the way it was," and that mantra has left so many things in the restaurant the same way for years, for good or ill. However, back in those heady days of seemingly unlimited free food and booze, while we were sitting around discussing the finer points of life, I would sit on Table 8 and doodle on the table cloth. Well, not on the actual cloth, we have paper that is placed over the cloths so that they last a little longer than just one night. I'm sure you've seen a similar setup in some restaurant somewhere along the way. So, I would sit there and draw picture after picture on the butcher paper that covered the entire table. Sometimes they were really great drawings and I wanted to take them home and sometimes they were just a bunch of crap thrown together complete with butter and wine stains. I wish I had kept a couple of them, but for the most part, they are all gone now. Lost among all of the other lost things from those days. I can't remember any of them now, and at the time I never thought they were worth keeping, even the good ones. I might have a couple of the good ones around here in my apartment, but they're either buried in some box somewhere or they were tossed in all of my moves since I started working at the restaurant. At any rate, once Tim and I started in on the Triple Dupes, the drawings on the table cloth paper continued to feel unimportant next to the Dupe Pad drawings that would eventually be displayed here and on Bookface. In a way, they were the genesis of this project since there was a sort of collaboration with everyone sitting at the table, whether they were actively participating in the drawing, doodling at their own seat, or simply spilling some sort of food product onto the paper. Everyone contributed. Flash forward a couple of years and Tim and I are sitting on Table 8 with a couple of Dupe Pads in front of us and we're stumped on what to draw. So, instead of drawing something, we just covered this one with random marks and lines until it was busy with them. Then, for the next couple of days we found all of these characters and images within the lines we had slashed down on that first night at Table 8. The random chaos of those lines turned into this drawing that you see above this rambling paragraph. All of the lines eventually turned into shapes that the brain can read as recognizable things that seem to go together to create some sort of story. And it all got started right there on Table 8. Julian always wanted to write a book entitled, "Table 8" and have all of the crazy stories that were told there compiled into one, neat, hard covered book. I'm sad that never happened because I feel like now, as with the drawings, those stories have gone and moved on to the next phase, lingering only in the air around an unassuming table in Greenwich Village.

#45 "Fever Dream" November 17, 2011. In Color!

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Halfway through the evening, our host mysteriously disappeared only to reappear a couple minutes later holding one of the most unique pinata we had ever seen. He described the means in which he had obtained the pinata, a story that would seem outlandish even to us, but told in a way that made even the most skeptical of us believe. He was the kind of man who you meet and know that he had seen things that most people could hardly dream of. He was the man who had proven the unicorn existed and even cloned one out DNA he had obtained on a business trip to Tibet back in the 80's. He had made a couple billion dollars on the business of illegally cloning these animals for affluent families with daughters with princess complexes. His son rode the unnatural beasts in parades in various towns across the world, usually bringing the most eccentric and wildly colored ones for the utmost spectacle. Cloning wasn't the only enterprise we had been lightly lectured about that evening, although unicorns weren't the only animals wrestled out of samples of double helixed obscurity. Our host held the belief that dairy cows would produce more milk if their udders were in the front of the cow instead of in the rear. This way, the milk can be produced faster, and if his theory held sway, he was willing to genetically engineer these cows worldwide. The experiment was a failure so he only made one of these horrible bovine monstrosities. He named the animal "Onesie" and coddled her like one would a house cat or some other such domestic pet. One day his youngest son, who was a champion falconer accidently shot the poor cow, wounding, but not killing the brute. Instead, through some miracle of genetics, the wound inflicted enabled the cow to spit fire from it's posterior. Sadly, our host found this out while the beast was indoors and she set the curtains on fire, scalding one of the guests and sending them to the hospital. It was right around this time that Tobey Maguire showed up to the party. We were all happy to see that he was in the costume of the "Hitchhiker" from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the 1998 vehicle from Terry Gilliam. He was in a foul mood, but still entertained us, first by stripping completely nude and then defecating in our host's public toilet. Our host felt that having a toilet for all to see was some sort of art performance. He was of the school that every organic member of the planet defecates, so why should it be a private matter? Shouldn't it be celebrated like all other human achievements? Many of the guests disagreed with his eccentric tastes, but Tobey was a good sport about the whole thing, and saw it as something interesting to put on his resume. Meanwhile, one of the family dogs thought it prudent to make a cocktail of raspberry sorbet and Oxycodone. The poor devil had been blinded in one eye in a ghastly accident sometime in the past, and even his good eye was injured and he ended up having to wear a monocle. It wasn't a surprise to anyone present that the dog needed the Oxycodone to relieve some of the stress of being nearly blind in one eye and only having a hole in his head where the other eye should be. This dog was special though. Another one of the host's cloning experiments, the dog had thumbs, wore clothes and even had a small demon where his left hand should be. Our host was both modern and terribly old fashioned and he believed that left handed people were actually spawns of Satan Himself so he fashioned the demon hand in the most literal sense. The poor dog had to carry around the demon, who had a mind of his own and a cantankerous smoking habit that polluted the air and melted the sorbet. This would have upset the guests and the host as well, had it not created the river in which our boat had been moored. Unoccupied, our boat waited patiently for us as we listened to our host spin fantastic yarns, all of which we believed because we had no reason not to. After all, isn't it better to believe in the fantastic than to dismiss it? If something can be imagined, it can eventually be created. We simply had to wait for the technology to be invented.

#43 "Two Twenty Two in the Garden of Eden" in Color October 26, 2011

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This one was posted right after my birthday in 2011. I must have been working on the coloring for a while because I know I wasn't working on it on my actual birthday. That was what I now call my "burger birthday." The night before, I had gone out and stayed out late with a couple buddies and my friend Andy Nauss ended up crashing at my house. The next morning we got up and were both in the mood for burgers. We went over to the Cafe Colette and each had a burger. Their burgers are incredibly underrated. In fact, they are the perfect breakfast burger; sweet, savory, and with the "special sauce," perfect! As you may or may not know, breakfast also doubles as lunch for me, so my next meal would be dinner. I went over to my friends house in Carroll Gardens and invited a bunch of people over for a cookout and birthday activities (drinking and smoking). We ended up getting burgers and grilling them out on the porch. I said something like, "funny, this is the second burger I've had today." and Tim looked at me and smiled a huge smile. The reason for his giant grin would become apparent all too soon. After everyone was fully noshed and setting in for the old food coma, out came the birthday cake, which was in the shape of a giant cheeseburger! My friends had gone out and gotten the cake without the knowledge of my breakfast choice, and had simply gotten the cheeseburger cake because of its absurdity. Obviously I loved it, but when everyone found out that I had only eaten burgers on that particular day, it became truly funny and poignant. I don't want you to think that I only eat burgers, although I do love them. At the Loup I have one about once a month, and sometimes actually crave a Cafe Loup burger. They are pretty darn good, some say the best burger in New York City. While high in the running (top twenty at least) I think best in NYC is a bit of a stretch. I think Best Burger on 13th Street is a better assessment. However, they are delicious. I can never eat a whole burger there anymore though. I will usually get one and cut it into quarters and share with whomever is working that night, doling out quarters. I can eat three quarters tops, and that's if no one really feels like sharing, but I find that half of the burger is more than sufficient to my needs.
I remember this picture taking a long time to color in. There is a lot of action happening and a lot of intricate little characters. The thing on the left I tried to keep the same color from the spilled bitters on the faces of the people growing out of the alien head. That also goes for the little "world dog" over on the right. They are different colors because we used two different kinds of bitters for those stains. This was when we were staining the dupe pads with bitters to add some color and also as a motivational tool. There's nothing like some randomness to help spurn creativity. You might have done that activity in your high school art class. The teacher would've asked you to draw completely random things, possibly without looking, then make you find some sort of shape in the randomness and turn it into something you can grasp. I remember liking that activity although now I think that most people will see what they always see, like in a Rorschach picture. I always draw faces, so I would probably will a face out of the chaos. Maybe not, sometimes when I look at the clouds I see monkeys on jet-skis and bears on the couch. I guess if I looked at any of these things today, I would see a cheeseburger. I bet you all a quarter that we will have burgers for staff meal tonight at the Cafe Loup.
I'll keep you updated.

#40 "Motivationally Speaking" July 31, 2011

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When I first started working at the Cafe Loup in February of 2002, one could still smoke in restaurants and bars in New York. We had a smoking section up front and you could smoke at the bar as well. Some of the bar tenders smoked behind the bar and we as waiters could smoke at the bar, right at the end closest to the Waiters Station. It's funny to think that at one time, you could be waiting on someone not two feet away and take a cigerette break right in front of them. They wouldn't even mind, and in more than one case, someone would need something, notice you were smoking and give a gesture indicating that whatever they needed could wait until you were done with your smoke break. When smoking was going to be banned, all the smokers were in an outrage. We thought that we were going to lose a ton of business at the Loup. People were talking about how it would never catch on, that the smokers would win, that the ban would be overturned and the smoking sections would stay. Well, the ban came and went and I think the only customer who we actually lost was Dany Levy. Lloyd would lament the loss as, "She was using me for my smoking section." Ten years later, one forgets that you could smoke in restaurants; it seems insane that you were ever aloud to in the first place. I am a smoker of many years. I quit in December, but even as a smoker, I have a hard time imaging that past reality. I think of all the people who complain about the music being loud and all kinds of other insane complaints and I can't believe that these people ever went out to eat while smoking was allowed in restaurants. I guess people didn't know any better at the time and so it was a given, and it was part of going out. That is really the only explanation I can think of. That, or they were the people who initiated the ban. I personally like that this happened. I remember going out to bars back then and waking up nauseous at the smell of my clothes and hair. Everything always smelled like stale ash, and I was one of the people who was contributing to the problem and loving it.
So here we are ten years later and one can still smoke at the Cafe Loup, but you have to know when. It's one of our awesome little secrets that when it is found out by a non-regular, is news so good, it's as if we told them they won the lottery. These people get so excited, they wax nostalgic about how smoking and drinking go hand in hand and that's the way the world should be. They talk whimsically of dividing the country into two states, smoking and non-smoking. They look off into the distance of the back bar and talk about the old days, the good old days and the nights they can't remember anymore. Granted, this is a very secret and hard to come by secret for the customers of the Cafe Loup. We, as employees, were never banned from smoking inside the Loup. We have always been able to smoke there, and as long as Lloyd continues to smoke, we will always be able to smoke there. We can't take our smoke breaks at the bar during service anymore... well, actually, we can and do just that at certain times of the day. We smoke inside during service, and the customers are never aware of it. It's at times like this that one really thinks about the secret lives of New Yorkers. So much happens behind the scenes of every place in New York, one can hardly comprehend it. Smoking is just the tip of the iceberg.