Hot town, summer in the city...

When the morning light hit just right and Schrafft's girls roamed the earth

By now, it’s a cliche to quote that well-worn Leonard Cohen phrase: “That’s how the light gets in” but the right light really does change everything.

“Manhattan Morning” by Sarah Pollack

I think of it these hot summer days when I sometimes get to work early (yes, I commute two days a week). Walking on the hot pavement, seeing the early delivery trucks (which will never waver because that’s how the milk gets in), I am thrown back to my high school days when I commuted early and often from the projects in the Bronx to a deli on Third Avenue between 67th and 68th Streets where I was a teenaged counterman. A 30-minute subway ride and I was in a vastly different world.

Walking from the No. 6 subway line to the Third Avenue Deli, the first thing I noticed every morning was the light. Just before 8 a.m., it was different than in the Bronx. Here, it was coming from the east, anointing the sidewalks of the Upper East Side. It hit the puddles from the night before in a different way. The shadows of pedestrians were different. The double-parked trucks looked different.

The city was awakening and bathed in the day’s new light. It made me feel fresh, ready for work. At the Schrafft’s Restaurant, across the way, I watched as the young waitresses reported for work. They felt the subtle excitement too, I could tell. At the 68th Street Playhouse, foreign film titles winked from the marquee as the red-haired matron took her place in the ticket booth.

I walked into the deli, nodded to Jack M., the boss, headed to the back room and tied an apron around my waist. We brought the food out from the refrigerated case in the back where the soda and beer faced the public. There were wooden floor boards everywhere so that it was easier to stand for the next eight hours. Jack M. was a Jewish father of two from Jewel Avenue in Queens. His wife and sometimes, his son and daughter worked alongside us in the deli.

Andrew, my best friend at the time, and I had found the posting to be deli workers at our Catholic high school—Cardinal Hayes—up in the Bronx. Why Jack advertised there, I never asked but he must of thought we Catholic school boys were good workers. And we were. We each worked there for about four years, at the end of high school and into college.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time but that deli and Jack’s family slowly changed me.
For one thing, it broke my picky eating habits. We made a ton of food in the deli’s utilitarian kitchen, more than you might imagine. Practically everything was made there. Before I knew what I was doing, I was making large trays of rice pudding, hulking roast beefs, giant turkeys, pastrami, corned beef and even chopped chicken livers.

It was a revelation and, because we could eat anything on our lunch hours, I began to try food I never would have purchased on my own. I tried the pastrami, the roast beef and the different combinations. I used condiments I thought I hated. Let me tell you, mayonnaise has its naysayers but it’s damned good (though not on pastrami!). I loved most of it except for that chopped chicken liver and tongue. Never developed a taste for those but I did discover the pleasures of a fresh bagel with cream cheese and nova, onion and tomato.

“Everything bagel with cream cheese”

And it wasn’t only the food. The customers and Jack and his family came from a much different social class than I was used to up in the Bronx.

These people had money and didn’t think twice about ordering anything they pleased. I tallied up their purchases in long columns of numbers on brown paper bags and did the math with a blunt pencil. They were dropping serious money (to me) on food they could have purchased anywhere else for much cheaper. But they didn’t care. It was all about the convenience. That’s one thing money buys.

And Jack’s son Lenny, the same age as we were, took a liking to me and Andrew. He invited us to go skiing with him and his girlfriend on some weekends. I said yes before I knew what skiing was. Of course, I had no equipment and wound up wearing jeans on the slopes. I didn’t know what I was doing but somehow, I learned how to ski.

And then Jack bought the teenaged Lenny a Triumph Spitfire. Wow! It was a car right out of the pages of Playboy Magazine. I couldn’t believe someone I knew actually had that car.

Lenny was casual about it, as well-off people are. He once asked me to move it to a different parking spot (I had just gotten my license even though my family did not have a car). I couldn’t do it because it had a manual transmission. But just being in that low slung car was something.

And then there were the customers. They lived in the inaccessible high rises around the deli and they were very different than my neighbors up in the Bronx. They were articulate and I listened to the way they spoke, and watched the way they squired around their wives and girlfriends, willowy and beautiful.

We even had a few celebrity clients. Familiar faces from TV shows and films, generous actors who were friendly to us, and even the rock star Alice Cooper, at the height of his fame. He was a gentleman and I pointedly remember him holding the door for an older woman. But the highlight of any day was the moment the Schrafft’s girls from across the street, decked out in their prim uniforms and Bambi legs, came in to flirt. I’m not sure they ever bought anything.

The deli exposed me to a different world and I wanted in. I began to hang out more in Manhattan and the Village, to see things just a little differently. It was the beginning of me leaving the Bronx behind.

And it all began with that light. That’s how the ideas get in.

[You can read more of this guy’s life in my memoir: “Leaving Story Avenue, my journey from the projects to the front page”]