Anna's Corner
Short story | Memoir | 14 min read
A nightly ritual at a nearly empty Greek restaurant in Astoria becomes the narrator's truest community during a period of heavy drinking and personal drift. The hostess, the waitresses, and the cooks all orbit him as his only regular customer, offering a strange, tender surrogate family while his actual life in New York falls apart. What started as a habit becomes a portrait of self destruction disguised as routine, ending with the narrator's quiet departure from the city. Contains alcoholism, substance abuse. "Then you are an honorary Greek"
This isn't a story. It's more of a place. It's more of a time. It's more of something I used to do.
When I lived in Astoria, Queens, New York, I used to go a restaurant called Anna's Corner. It's closed now. I just looked it up on the internet and they said it's closed.
Some things matter to you, and maybe they mattered to other people who were there at the time, but then you all go your separate ways, and die, and the memory is lost like tears in rain.
Here's what Anna's Corner was to me.
First, it was the hostess, who could have been my mother. She was my mother's age. She kissed me and hugged me every time I walked through the doors. She came around the front of the hostess' station and hugged and kissed me the first day she met me! There were no customers at all—the place was completely empty. Astoria is a Greek neighborhood. The hostess had a Greek accent. She waved her arm and twirled her hand and she called to her little girl, a teenage waitress who was the only waitress—which makes sense since there was only one customer.
I look in the kitchen—there's a see-through window. Giant spits of meat—beef and lamb—and two cooks who are standing there joking with each other, snapping each other with towels, speaking in a language I don't understand..Greek?..is Greek a language people speak? These guys laugh and look me in the eye and they wave their arms at me too, as if they're inviting me into the kitchen.
"Hey! Come on, brother," they say.
But the hostess is introducing me to the waitress. And look, I don't remember their names, they don't remember my name, to them I'm just some guy who used to come in and eat mussels and drink Greek wine and help the waitress with her homework and smoke cigarettes I bummed from the other waitress I discovered they had and most of all, most of all, shot the shit with the hostess, who was probably the owner's wife, who treated me like she was my own kid, but in a country where your mother wouldn't be upset if you smoked cigarettes and drank wine and left forty-dollar tips for teenagers you had no intention to fuck.
Let's start with the waitress, the young one, the one I helped with her homework.
She let me choose my seat. So I sat in the very back corner of the dining room, one table over from the corner, actually, with my back against that most corner table.
When I look at the menu it's all Greek to me! So I just ask this young lady what the best thing is.
"Do you like mussels?"
"Never had 'em. I've had clams."
"No, no. This is nothing like clams."
"I'll have the mussels then."
"Alright," she says, takes my menu, and then she says, "Anything to drink?"
"Wine?"
"I bring you the list."
This delight of a person brings me an absolutely huge menu of wines, all listed in Greek. I'm looking over it.
"Do you have a chianti?"
"What is chianti?"
The hostess comes over. She's not the waitress' mother, but she protects her like one.
"Chianti is an Italian wine," she says for the benefit of her faux daughter.
The hostess takes the menu out of the waitress' hands and holds it where I can read it. You can tell this completely annoys the waitress—as it should.
I just order the most expensive one and try to pronounce it.
They both fall over themselves feeding me the syllables.
Once I've pronounced it sufficiently, once my mother and sister are satisfied that I am capable enough to at least say the name of the wine I am purporting to drink, the hostess leaves and the waitress waits a little too long, walking backward, holding the wine menu, bumping into a table, and smiling at me as she says she will have my food out soon and my wine out sooner.
There was only one time I went to Anna's corner when there was anybody in it but me. It was some Sunday afternoon and there must have been a wedding or a religious festival whose guests had completely packed the place—every table full but one. I could hardly squeeze between all the people and respectfully avoid the little kids who were running between tables, seeming to belong to every adult there. Anyone could talk to them, tell them to stop running, pinch their cheeks, stop them and examine their dresses. That day, the hostess was brisk, her only apology in her eyes that all these other people were here.
But that wasn't my Anna's Corner.
My Anna's corner was the Anna's Corner of Monday and Tuesday nights, getting off the train at the last stop in Queens: Astoria. I lived with my sister and her friend and it was cramped and I spent most of my time at restaurants. And I drank.
Oh, I drank.
I drank to forget that my days were drab, days doing web programming at a design shop in Union Square owned by a psychopath and his buddy and I'm pretty sure the buddy's Bulldog was part owner because I mean we had a goddamn dog in the office every single day I worked in that place. When we went out as a team, we'd drink at bars or bowl and everyone would get way too drunk except this one girl who was new to the office and she would get so drunk that she would invite home whoever she happened to be facing at the moment. In all-hands meetings in the hip glass-walled conference room, I would occasionally make an exceptionally imaginative and logically correct suggestion about the direction of our products and I would get back blank stares off eight web programmers five years younger than me and the only person who would get my ideas was not the CEO, not his buddy, not the buddy's Bulldog, but a smart programmer named Loren who was twenty years older than me. So yeah I drank.
At Anna's I drank Greek wine exclusively. I mean, you're in a Greek restaurant in a very Greek neighborhood being served and hosted and cooked for by Greek people, you're gonna have the Greek wine. Even though I didn't know what the names meant, I developed a favorite. My waitress brought it to me automatically after a while. She learned that I would drink the whole bottle, and she would sometimes pour my next glass for me if she saw mine was empty. I call her my waitress not out of some sick sense of consumeristic ownership (you sick fucks) but because she was my only waitress and I was her only customer, so we belonged to each other in a way.
There was another waitress, older, perhaps a few years older than me. I saw her on the weekends, when summer came around and I sat outside on one of the four tables they had set out in front of Anna's Corner.
This waitress would size me up, as I ate my giant bowl of smoked mussels, dipping my bread in the flavored oil in the bottom of the bowl, and as I used the tiny mussel fork in conjunction with the regular-sized dinner fork to dissect my shells, eat the meat, and discard the open, empty shells perfectly into the bowl that she brought for me—and periodically replaced with a clean one—I never made a mistake, I never dropped a shell no matter how drunk I got.
When she took her break, she took it right next to my table and she smoked a cigarette.
I asked her if I could bum one.
And me and this older waitress—who were close enough in age to be in danger of fucking—shared a cigarette and talked about pretty much nothing. What she did. What I did. Where she came from, exactly, in Greece, how long she had been here, her relationship to the owner, whether we liked our jobs, and she would tell me, plainly, that Anna's Corner had the best smoked mussels in the world.
"Why is that?"
"Because of the sauce," she said, pointing at my bowl with her cigarette. "The way you do that, the way you dip your bread in the oil, that is the way we do it back home. That is the right way. Who taught you to do this?"
"No one."
"Then you are an honorary Greek."
We smiled and smoked the rest of our cigarettes.
We looked at each other.
She thought: I'm not that much older than you.
And I thought: She's not that much older than me.
Then my waitress would come running out to separate us with her math textbook. She was taking Algebra I and I was her tutor.
We grew into a routine at Anna's Corner, with me as their one patron and a hostess, a waitress or two, two cooks, and the owner on payroll. I tried to spend as much money as I could to keep the place going. It was my favorite place in Astoria, besides my bed, which wasn't even my bed—it was my sister's bed which I slept in with her, platonically, because I couldn't afford to rent my own apartment because..one, I had bad credit..and two, I spent all my money at Anna's Corner.
I ordered the same thing every night, mussels and my favorite wine, until they ran out of my favorite wine and my answer to Which wine would you like? was always Surprise me. My waitress surprised me through their entire wine catalogue and I learned a lot about Greek wines.
She sat next to me with her textbooks open, and we expanded our curriculum from Algebra I to English Literature to American History to Biology and then at some point we were studying Algebra II together and I was wondering if it was time for me to leave—not just Anna's Corner, but New York.
The hostess offered to pay me for tutoring her niece.
I laughed. I declined.
The hostess kissed me on the mouth and I really wondered if it was time for me to go.
Someone must have told my waitress to leave me alone with the tutoring because she stopped bringing her books to the table. I wanted to tell the hostess it was ok, but I wasn't going to beg to tutor her niece, and I figured whether anyone else thought so or not, me getting all intimate over Algebra II with a sixteen year old wasn't the best idea.
I brought in my laptop. I wrote. Well, I attempted to write. All I ended up doing was reformatting all my plays and sending an archive to my ex-girlfriend over email, calling it my "Will of Plays"—I wanted someone to have a copy of my still insignificant plays in case I died. I had some fantasy that after I died my ex-girlfriend would mount productions for the best of them and even though my life on Earth had been meaningless at least I'd be famous after I was dead. That was my greatest hope for myself at the time. Sometimes I dip into that now. But now my idea of self-worth is more about the beauty I can experience than the impact I can make. I figure if I can sit on a beach and smell the surf, that's a meaningful life. Whether I write anything special isn't really wrapped up in it. I'm a graphomaniac—I'm just crazy about writing for its own sake. If I was stranded on a desert island with a typewriter I would still write—and I'd stand and read to the waves—it's just something I like to do.
My bowl of mussels and a bottle of wine turned into a bowl of mussels and a bottle of wine, then typing ideas for future plays on my laptop, then another bowl of mussels and another bottle of wine.
I bought my own cigarettes.
I started to see what different worlds me and my waitress were from. Even if she were eighteen, we wouldn't be fucking. She had a whole world of Greek culture and with that came certain rules about how romance and marriage proceeded. Rules that were broken, yes, but I remembered that one day when Anna's Corner was full. It was a wedding party. I had as little to do with that world as a snail has to do with a semi truck. People in that world had families, money, houses, tons of relatives who lived in a one-mile radius. Also they weren't crazy. I didn't know my mental diagnoses at that time, but I knew I was never going to get married, have kids, hold a job, or—yeah, that's basically it—I was never gonna live a normal life. I had never envisioned it. I knew, deep down, that that life was impossible for me. I didn't quite know why yet.
In fact, looking back, my motherly hostess knew it. The slightly older waitress knew it. It was in the look in her eyes, when she saw me switch from one bottle a night to two; when she heard me talk a mile a minute about everything that interested me more than everything I was doing every day at that gimp-ass graphic design firm. In a few weeks, I would tell off my so-called supervisor, the owner of the company, his buddy, his buddy's Bulldog, and get on a plane for New Orleans, where I would get stupid drunk in the French Quarter listening to some of the best jazz I've heard in my life, then move out west, living homeless in Arizona for months, resisting real work, seeing how long I could make it as a dishwasher, one of my many fuck yous I've given to corporate America (they hardly felt the pebbles I tossed at their battleships) and, yeah, my life would degrade into more corporate prostitution, working illegal jobs and taking my good cut of that government fraud money, drinking every night. Some people say they went out and had a couple of gin and tonics. When I went out I started with some gin and tonics—six to be exact—and I went from there. But those six..those six..those were just to get me started.
People like my waitress, people from Anna's corner, they didn't do crystal meth, hanging out at their drug dealer's house for days on end, not showing up to their jobs. I mean they have a tight-knit family, someone would notice. Someone would be upset. Someone would take them to the hospital and put them in rehab. That wasn't our family. No one would dare suggest that I had a drug problem—we were all way too polite for anything like that. Your life was your life, and even our parents would never intervene in their own kids' rapid self-destruction.
Maybe that's kinda what I liked about Anna's Corner. From the minute I walked in the door, the hostess was kissing me and asking me about my day. She knew that idiot tech job was no good for me and she told me to find something different. She knew living with my sister forever was no good and she told me to get my own apartment. Even my waitress would take my second bottle of wine away if she saw I was too drunk to type: too many presses of the delete key.
And she'd cork it.
And she'd put a piece of tape around it with my name.
She'd hand it to the cooks to find a shelf for in the kitchen.
And she'd have it ready for me the next day.